Captain's log: Stardate 24041.6
I've got lots to talk about again. As ever it's quiet for ages and then everything happens at once.
The 12th April is the day of the children here in Bolivia. I like to imagine that some kids got together at some point and were grumbling about how unfair it is that there's a mothers day, a fathers day, a womens day, a mens day etc... but no kids day. So they got together in a large angry mob and marched out to block roads all over the country, in the typically Bolivian way. While that is probably not the case, it does amuse me a fair bit to think about it.
Anyway for the day of the children Performing Life had 3 shows scheduled. One for TV in the morning. Another in a school near our centre in Alto Buena Vista also in the morning, and the last in a family water park in the evening. I was scheduled to do both the one in the school and the one in the family park. So the day starts at about 0600 as we tried to get out of bed in order to make it on time. Which we just about managed. Unfortunately nobody else did, as is reasonably typical here. Side Note: When you actually mean the time you say to meet, you can say the phrase "hora Ingles" ie. "English time", as opposed to "hora Boliviano" which is whenever you get around to it, usually about an hour late. So we get there and there's nobody else around. Eventually three of the four kids meant to be performing turn up although one of them says they aren't doing it anymore, just because. We then realise that the silk we need is locked in our other centre and the new circus instructor that has the only key hasn't turned up yet. Eventually we get all the people and equipment to the school and head in to set up.
At that point we get mobbed by a billion small kids shouting: "Hola payasos!", ie. "Hi clowns". which was amusing, but irritating when we are trying to rig up a bunch of aerial equipment. At this point our circus director shows up after having finished the other morning show, with a bunch of other kids who weren't scheduled to perform. This meant that all of Amy's hard work in sorting out an act list, and music went to waste as everything was just improvised last minute anyway. Which is usually how these things go.
The show went pretty well in the end, we had a couple of the local kids doing stuff which was great, and a couple of the more advanced kids from our other older centre doing stuff too. Amy did a trapeze routine, and I did some ball juggling, contact ball, and hat manipulation too. While wearing my incredibly shiny leggings (Amy doesn't like them for some reason. Probably that she has no fashion sense). One of the most interesting things that happens is when a bunch of the girls started spinning fire poi a giant stack of balloons which were tied just behind where they were spinning started to pop. Presumably because they got sprayed with hot fuel. I'd like to use this in a future performance at some point, as it was quite dramatic.
So after that, we dropped all the equipment and put it all back where it came from. Amy stayed in that centre to teach the afternoon class, while I went home for lunch and to work out where the evening show was.
For the evening show we set up the "high tension" (read as: tension? what's that?) cable between two trees. We had two ladders this time, and a plan, so it was much easier than the first time. There's not much to say about that show, it went well, and other than setting up the aerial cable, and dropping it again, I had nothing really to do. There was a large turn out and everyone seemed happy. The truck driver we wanted to hire to take stuff back to the office wasn't answering so we just piled two ladders a bunch of speakers, unicycles and clubs and everything else, not to mention 4 people into a taxi.
It was the birthday of one of the other volunteers Naia, so we met up with her and went for food that took forever (about 3 hours) and then karaoke. So we didn't actually get home until about 0130.
That was Tuesday. Wednesday morning I got up at 0700 to get ready to go to work, after my shower, breakfast and coffee I found out that there was a civil strike, and that there were no trufis (and probably taxis) that day. IE. no public transport, so no way to get to work. So we had that day off which was great, except I was already too wired off my coffee to actually sleep more, which is what I could have done with the most. Oh well.
Then that Friday a bunch of us had first aid classes between 0800 - 1200 and 1500 - 1900. Which was relatively fun, but understandably complicated being it was entirely in Spanish. We learned that one of the signals of amputation is that the part is missing, there are more, but personally I'm not sure if you really need to check if the affected area looks pale or not, nor that there is bleeding. The part is missing should be enough.
That night we went out to Karaoke in a closed club, that one of our number knew the owner, and so we just hung out there. Although we ordered a litre of rum between 8 of us, and not everybody was drinking. It was pretty fun, my Spanish is starting to get to the stage where I can actually have conversations with people, even in a loud club when I'm a bit drunk so that's nice.
Saturday was hell. Firstly I was hung over, secondly it was very hot, thirdly we had more first aid training in the afternoon. Hearing that if a bone is completely snapped, the patient might get the feeling it was going to fall off definitely did not help with the hangover. At the end we had a test in Spanish, which because I'd not paid much attention to the Spanish words, and only worked out the translations for everything, was quite difficult. I ended up drawing lots of diagrams which was quite fun. We'll find out if we passed or not, at some indeterminate point, however I don't care that much, since it's the knowledge that matters.
That night we went out for the birthday of another volunteer Maartje. However I didn't last that long before deciding to go home and sleep. Unfortunately upon arriving home, I found the family here were having a party, and everyone was trashed. So I got sucked into that, which was pretty funny and included lines such as: "You're like a brother to me, and you say that fernet (horrible bolivian drink) is ugly (how Bolivians say they don't like something)", at one point I went to go to the toilet, but both the son and the mother stopped me and told me there was a toilet outside. I explained it was in use, to which the mother responded: "don't worry, I'll remove them". So that was relatively amusing and I still got a decent nights sleep, and was only half hung over the next day.
Then on Monday we go into the office to be informed that there is another show that evening, which I got press-ganged into setting up. So I again arrive exactly on time, call them and find they are 20 minutes away. Half an hour later, I go for coffee and return at this point they are an hour late. I call again, and find that actually the whole thing was postponed until Wednesday. So that was fun. Other than that, this week went as normal, lots of silks, and some juggling.
This weekend Amy and a few others went to Toro Toro (see previous blog post), I decided to stay to actually rest a bit and try to get a bunch of stuff done.
On the Saturday, I went to the hacklab for the first time, despite wanting to since I arrived here. I chatted with some people and met a guy I've been trying to meet up with to talk about the electronics stuff I want to do with the kids. So that was a success, and I'll probably return when I can.
After that I went to a party at a friends house and hung out there for about 6 hours before heading home and watching the first nine episodes of an anime that Naia recommended to me: Aldnoah zero. It's pretty awesome.
Today the family made Pique Macho which is a mix of salad, chips (To those Americans that are reading this and don't know words, that's chips, not fries), and various types of meat, with a few chillies thrown in for good measure. It's really tasty, but often expensive and so I haven't tried it too many time. I then made 2.5KG of flap jack, which nobody here seems to know what it is.
I've watched all 148 episodes of Hunter X Hunter again, and it's still really good. If you've not seen it and like anime, I recommend you check it out. I'm still working through The martian in Spanish, it's still hard, but I think I'm getting quicker and having to look up less words.
Other than that I've been doing a bunch of work on my FPGA development kit, teaching myself verilog with the goal of designing my own computer architecture, implementing a micro processor with said architecture, writing an assembler for it, possibly porting GCC to compile to it, and then writing an OS or porting linux to run on it. Overly ambitious but a good goal to work towards. You'll be sure to hear more as I progress.
I may also have found up to three pieces of free lance work this last week, which is exciting, but we'll have to see whether they pan out. One is updating a website, a bit boring but easy. Another is turning a schematic into a PCB layout for an EKG, which is a lot more exciting but a bit scary, because if I do it wrong, I waste somebody else's money. The last is writing some software for a custom PCB, this however appears to be someone's college work, so I've said I'll help by teaching and explaining stuff, but I won't just do it for them. So there's potential to ear a bit of money next month, although we'll see what people are willing to pay.
Next visa stuff. So we got our accreditations back and sent off our passports to La Paz to actually get the visa put in. They should have been back on Monday or Tuesday last week. They're now due back tomorrow (monday). We've also been told that the visa is only up until the 21st August. However we should be able to send the passports off again in August for free, to get that extended until February next year. We shall see.
Finally, we may go to Chile for a week at the end of this coming week. However that depends on if we have passports by then or not, and whether we decide to go. If we do go, I'll let you all know, and post some stories when we're back.
