Jenn finds her Spanish lacking trying to explain Halloween. She also discovers the joys of Bolivian line dancing.
Tortuga Travels: Week Two: Sucre, Bolivia
Sucre, Bolivia
It takes a lot to get me out of bed on a Sunday morning, but the anticipation of a new hotel had us up and fleeing by 8 a.m. We were soon oohing and aahing over our new courtyard room at the Grand Hotel, home for the next two weeks at the exorbitant price of $7 a night. Dizzy with our opulent surroundings, we set out to find a suitable celebratory meal.
We stumbled upon a huge tent-filled plaza where hundreds of families were seated at folding tables eating the traditional meal mondango in honor of the coming Dia de Los Muertes. The mondango plate held boiled potatoes, chunks of pork in a thick salty sauce, and kernels of maize in melted cheese.
Dia de Los Muertes was celebrated throughout Bolivia during the whole week. It is the time when deceased relatives cross over into the world of the living. Families set out tables with photos, candles, special breads, cookies and drinks. They prepare the favorite meals of the deceased to welcome them. On November 1st everyone goes to the cemetery to deliver flowers and prayers. Thousands of people crowded the landscaped walkways of the Sucre cemetery, many carrying ladders to reach the upper levels of monument walls.
Halloween isn’t celebrated in Bolivia, but our language school hosted a Halloween party for its students. The holiday is apparently familiar but slightly unclear to Bolivians, as all the girls came dressed as witches and all the boys as monsters. There was one mummy, who we thought was a roll of toilet paper (most surprising since we hadn’t seen many of these in Sucre at all). We tried to explain that in the U.S. people dress not only as other things – animals, celebrities, Q-tips – but also that our friends in particular frequently choose to dress as abstract concepts: the world financial crisis, the two party system, the Staten Island Fairy. Our Spanish fell painfully short.
After about 20 minutes of a 30 second Michael Jackson Thriller loop, the dancing began. In Bolivian style all dancing happens in 2 lines – not so much WITH a partner as FACING a partner. This provides a convenient forum for a person you don’t know to either:
(a) watch you as you awkwardly dance to unfamiliar rhythms,
(b) pointlessly attempt a shouted conversation over the music, or
(c) make inappropriate advances toward you from which you can not retreat.
With my beginning Spanish and the blaring noise, a typical conversation was essentially:
Carlos/Jose/Luis: habla espanol?
Me: yo estoy apprendamo.
C/J/L: de donde eres?
Me: QUE?
C/J/L: DE DONDE ERES?
me: JENNIFER!
With most of my peers consequently thinking I was a little slow, I ended up dancing with a guy who wooed me by mouthing the lyrics (e.g. “sexy, sexy, sen-suuu-aaaall”) and incorporating fake hair-combing motions into his elaborate movements.
I’d had as much fun as I could handle by 10 o’clock.
As we sipped coffee the next day we wondered, what’s with this line dancing thing? What do they do at clubs? Dance in a big winding line?
As luck would have it we were promptly invited to a going away party of a complete stranger at a local discotheque, complete with black and white checkerboard floor, multiple disco balls, mirror posts and swirl painted walls. The club was empty at first, so we had the floor to ourselves to enjoy such classics as La Vida Loca (in Spanish) and a Britney medley, interspersed with Latin pop and traditional Bolivian music – for which we all held hands and danced in a circle like a Latin/house hora.
Nothing makes an NSYNC/Shakira mix go down easier than large volumes of alcohol, and conveniently the menu was divided into “coctail man” – Cuba Libre, vodka, etc – and “coctail lady” – Pina Colada, juice, soda and most curiously, Primavera.
After a few cervezas it seemed only normal that, in fact, a long double line of dancers had formed under the flashing lights, and Juan was shouting “DE DONDE ERES?” at me between spins.
Oh, and I got hit by a motorcycle and someone tried to mug me. But you can hardly remember that kind of thing in Bolivia.