Where the Action Is

Last night the office hosted a karaoke contest among its female employees. It rented out an entire disco club and the employees from throughout the city gathered there at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night.

It wasn’t too far from my house. We drove down San Martin avenue in Equipetrol, which is the hang out place for upper class youth. I had known this, and seen it. But never had I seen so many people gathered as I did late on Saturday night.

The street was lined with SUVs and trucks parked on either side of the street. A steady stream of vehicles moved slowly down the street, checking out the scene, deciding where it might be worth it to stop.

Many vehicles had large stereo systems installed in the back. Young women in tight, low-cut tank tops and high heels and muscular young men sat on the hoods, in the trunks, or rested against the sides. Jewelry, make-up and colorful clothing glittered under the streetlamps. Some couples embraced, or French-kissed, in public. Some danced. Most held a bottle of beer.

Among these crowds of privileged youth walked an Indian woman, her braided hair covered with a hat, a colorful striped cloth tying a bundle to her back. It was such a contrast between the traditional Indian woman and the carefree modern youth, such as could be seen in any cosmopolitan city. Other lower-income entrepreneurs roam the crowds, selling snacks, drinks, and cigarettes.

The karaoke concert was nicely organized, and for a work function, was a fun way to spend an evening. We listened to quite a bit of mediocre singing, as well as a few people with talent. It was scheduled to begin at 11. My colleague, Maria, is very timely, especially for Bolivia. We arrived by 10:30 and the place was virtually empty. It started a little after 11:30.

Today I decided to join in the custom of eating Sunday lunch out. I walked through an area where I thought I could find some restaurants. Almost everything, except the supermarket, a few kiosks, and some restaurants, is closed on Sundays and the streets were almost deserted. But I quickly realized how to find a place to eat – look for large numbers of SUVs concentrated in one area.

This signal led me to several options. I ended up choosing a steakhouse, where they advertised the best meat in the world (and Oscar, my Spanish teacher, told me they had especially good meat, backing up their claim). It was an attractive, classy restaurant, packed to the rafters, the staff buzzing professionally around, the owner (who looked Argentinean) monitoring the action.

Their specialty was grilled meat, which was served with a plate of green salad, rice, French fries, fried yucca, bread, spiced mayonnaise and salsa. I’d guess the average patron spends about $8 there, which is definitely higher end. Yet every table was full. I looked around at the patrons, the comfortable, middle and upper class families, enjoying their nice meal while their “employee” had the day off. Such families exist everywhere. But what is remarkable here is that there are so many of them. And that these differences in lifestyle seem to be taken as a matter of course (although, not by the President, Evo Morales).

In Kyrgyzstan I felt it much easier to integrate into various aspects of society. I lived in an apartment with normal people – students as well as families and professionals – across the street from a brothel. Sometimes I ate at the upper end restaurants. Other times I went to little holes in the wall. And it didn’t really make a difference either way. I walked, biked, took the buses and taxis, and was fine however I chose to travel.

Here, because of the differences in income, and because of the safety threat, I feel much more of the need to segregate myself with the middle and upper classes. I live in a condo with 24 hour security, when I need a car I order a taxi by phone that picks me up by name, and I even hired an “employee” to clean and cook a few times a week. The best I do at integration is taking the bus to work in the morning. But it’s dangerous to walk, it’s dangerous to take a taxi off the street, and it’s dangerous to stroll into unknown neighborhoods carrying anything of value.

This I find unfortunate. As much as I like the weather and people, I don’t like the segregation of the population and the inability to move freely.

This week I spoke to a Bosnian/German colleague here, who is interested in working in Colombia. I asked whether she was concerned about the security situation there and she told me she liked the people a lot.

“Yes, you have to be careful and you have to go from place to place in a car, but it’s not so bad once you get used to it.”

I guess if you are OK with moving from one sheltered space to another, it’s true, it is OK. You can work, go to the gym, go shopping, visit your friends, and take vacations, all in safe, upper-end places. But for someone who wants to move and breathe and interact with one’s surroundings, to have a symbiotic relationship, it’s hard to consider it living.

Orientation

My Spanish teacher, Oscar, didn’t have time to prepare my lesson for this morning, having stayed up too late for the comedy club performance. So rather than reschedule the lesson, we decided to have a mobile lesson.

He started out by showing me the Montsenor, the café district, where locals like to go out for a couple of coffee. We stopped by an Italian café for a morning drink and pastry. While there, I saw a Mennonite man walk by, dressed in dark navy, neat overalls and a straw hat.

Oscar told me there are Mennonites here from the United States, Mexico, Germany and Canada. I asked about their relations with the local population.

“They used to be very closed and kept themselves separate,” he said. “They couldn’t marry Bolivians. But now there are two types. The conservatives continue as before. The revelados can marry Bolivians. They still maintain the clothing, but the spouse doesn’t have to.”

He also told me about some Japanese colonies near Santa Cruz, where almost the entire population is Japanese. His sister married one of these Japanese men. I’d like to visit one of the villages, as a Japanese world in the middle of Bolivia sounds pretty surreal to me.

We drove around town and Oscar helped me to orient myself a bit more. Santa Cruz is divided into rings. Ring 2 wraps around the center, ring three around ring two, and so on. Each ring is divided into different neighborhoods.

He told me that my neighborhood is called Equipetrol, which is known as a wealthy area. It was the first wealthy barrio in Santa Cruz. Now it’s known as a popular street hangout for young people. On Thursday through Saturday nights, they park trucks along the road and drink beer, blasting music from oversized speakers. It’s the kind of low-cost, 1980s, means of meeting other young people that I saw around the Minneapolis lakes growing up.

We drove across the Pirai river, which separates las Colinas del Urubo, the very wealthiest part of Santa Cruz, from the rest of town. Brown water flowed only through a very narrow part of the wide, brown bed. Oscar said that from December to February, it rained daily and the river was swollen. But now they are expecting a drought to follow and the water has largely dried up.

From the bridge, we could see the fancy white homes with red tiles of Urubo. I asked who lived there and Oscar said mostly owners or employees of petroleum and gas companies, cattle owners and large farmers.

We saw some residents biking on quality mountain bikes and a group of young people driving an open-air 4-wheel vehicle, for the fun of it.

“There are very large class differences here,” Oscar said. “We have both very rich and very poor.”

As we drove down the streets lined by the large-leaved chapeo tree and mango trees, Oscar pointed out to me a few of his favorite restaurants. Then we stopped by the zoo. The zoo has quite a good collection of tropical birds – 150 species and almost 1000 birds. Though the conditions for many are very side – small, square wire cages.

The macaws – the endangered blue-throated macaw, and the rainbow colored scarlet macaw, among others – screeched around us. Their sound couldn’t be contained in the little cages. They needed the vast expanse of a dense jungle to call across and to drown their desperate sounds.

I had to remember that while Santa Cruz is a sunny, plains town, we are actually quite close to the Amazon. Some of the animals were saw were purely fantastic, as though they’d come from a unique world of their own.

The quiet, black and white toucans, with huge, bright yellow beaks, tinged with red, were so perfectly groomed as to appear fake. The harpy eagle looked like a combination of an owl and an eagle, with huge claws of spun golden-brown threads. The Andean Condor was a larger than life-size bird in the vulture family. And my favorite of all was the sloth, a freaky looking creature with a small head, a runted tail, and long arms with strong, curved claws. It looks like a very primitive ape, or an ancient antecedent to the human. Due to its snail’s pace of movement, it was allowed to roam freely on the zoo grounds. Watching this creature move, one slow stretch at a time, disgusting and beautiful and captivating all at once, was the most fascinating thing I’ve seen in Santa Cruz so far.

In the evening, we ate at one of the nicest restaurants in Santa Cruz, el Candelabro. A combination French-sushi-piano bar place, we ate on finely covered tables by candlelight. This was a place where one could feast on gazpacho, grilled seafood, and chocolate cheesecake, the entrees served under platters that resembled medieval caps of armor. A group of waiters gathered around the table to reveal the entrees to the diners all at once, so there could be a collective exhale of awe. Again, not a scene I expected to encounter in Bolivia.