Some things...

...that I have seen or experienced here in La Paz so far:

• People selling Florida and New York lottery tickets on the street (are you serious?)
• A movie theater that might get cleaned once at the end of each day (can you say sticky floor?)
• Bottled Starbucks drinks in the grocery store (So Starbucks IS here after all…)
• Police walking around with rifles in hand
• Lots of $2 meals
• Rain pretty much everyday (it usually only rains for a short amount of time though, but it rains most afternoons)
• Guys delivering pizzas on motorcycles
• Taxis running red lights (Because it just doesn’t matter and there are really no police stopping people and giving them tickets…and there are certainly none of those clever photo enforcement intersections like we have in the good old US of A)
• Not one single person wearing a seatbelt (I am serious…not one)
• Someone putting ketchup on their pizza (What??!???)
• More coffee and tea in the last two weeks than all of last year combined
• 12 – 3 each day is lunch. It is a time when you do not expect to do much. Most stores close and people either go home and eat with their families or eat out.
• No air conditioning or heat in homes.
• You don’t put toilet paper in the toilet here, you put it in the waste basket (I think you understand)
• Brushing my teeth with bottled water everyday
• Shaving with cold water
• I have not met anyone from the US yet (I am hiding well but I know that they are going to find me)
• Laughing more than I can remember laughing in some time
• Many people looking at me like I am from another planet
• Many people loving me like I am part of their own family

And that’s just in the first two weeks…