People like to celebrate here… a lot. There are always small parades going down random streets on random days, it is a normal thing here. But this last Saturday was an especially big celebration, called the Universities Festival – which is exactly what it sounds like, all the Universities in Oruro come together to put on a big festival for the town, and everyone comes out to watch, dance and drink… but especially more of the latter. Even though Oruro is a small town, there are A LOT of universities here, and they all came out to parade on the streets. Their costumes are colorful, flamboyant, and in many cases – heavy! Some of the male costumes weigh anywhere from 50 to 70 pounds, which they dance in during the sweltering heat, often uphill, for hours. Which is why almost all the male dancers have teams of people running drinks to them during the march, and why all of them have big wads of coca leaves on one side of their mouths. It wasn’t uncommon to see a few of the dancers looking pretty rundown and trailing behind the others, and I even saw some cases where some of the men had passed out and had to be carried off. Anyway, the parade went on all day, from morning til’ 4am, and all day there were onlookers getting their drink on. My family warned me there would be a lot of drunk people out that night, and they were right! There was a lot of stumbling, women crying, and in the afternoon the next day – a good deal of passed-out people sleeping in the streets.
I took tons of pictures of the parades all day, so check them out:










My abuela was insistent that I get "cholitas," so I obliged. Cholitas are what they call the girls here who wear more traditional clothing (large colorful skirts and a brimmed top hat). Of course the outfits are alot more colorful during festival time.



On the subject of drinking, teenagers here have found a low-cost way of getting drunk: rubbing alcohol. Yup, my abuela sells small bottles of rubbing alcohol in her store, and they’re most often bought up several bottles at a time by teenagers who don’t appear to have any large gashes on their bodies in need of disinfecting. They buy them with soda and drink up. Also popular amongst the teens here: bandaids on noses. At first I thought it was to protect their noses from the sun, or maybe to help heal a sunburn, but no. Boys wear bandaids on their noses here to get girls. It’s a fashion thing and girls seem to go for it. Maybe I’ve gotten too old, but this is one fad I just don’t understand.

Like I was saying in the beginning, people like to celebrate here, even at work. My cousin Adrian works at a furniture store, and invited me to come by after work on Friday. What I found when I arrived was a case of beer and a fire-pit being started up inside of the store. The last Friday of the month, stores here burn-up good luck charms in a fire and fill up their stores with smoke. It is supposed to bring good fortune and profit to your business in the next month. Oh, and of course lots of drinking is a part of the ceremony as well ;) 12 large bottles of beer were split between four of us, and after “cheers-ing” we would pour beer on the floor and drink up. I was doing fine, until I found out that we had to repeat the whole ceremony again in their other store, and another case of beer was brought out. I quit after the first store though, like a good boy… and also because I couldn’t handle all that beer!




Here is a cool mural I found painted above a garage door. I would pass it a lot in a taxi as I go to help out in the kid’s gym, and finally I set out on foot to find it. After getting lost for a while I finally found it, and was able to get a good pic of it by having my cousin sit on my shoulders with the camera. It is a painting of the devil; this is what the devil is depicted as in Oruro. And the train underneath it symbolizes how Oruro was the first in the country with a train. …Wouldn’t this make a cool tattoo?? Yes it would… on my arm.