Take it Easy
The rest of yesterday in Potosi was basically spent taking it easy. We all needed it. It was nice to just drink tea, take naps, read books, surf the internet and do NOTHING. Of course we did go back to our favorite bathroom errr..café and then we partook in some traditional Bolivian music and ate traditional Bolivian food at a local restaurant for dinner. The instruments used here, besides regular guitars, are several different lengths of pan flutes and fifes, and an instrument called a charango, which looks like a small guitar with 5 sets of double strings (that’s 10 strings for all you non-mathematically incline friends of mine!). If you pull out your old Paul Simon CDs and play the song El Condor Pasa, you can hear the sounds of these different instruments. Apparently Simon spent a good deal of time in the Andes during the 60s and incorporated the native sounds into his latest album, similar to his African sounds on his Graceland album.
The owner of the restaurant adopted our table as the lively crew and before the end of the night, he had us all dancing and singing, with Mark and Aaron wearing conquistador hats and playing (badly) some panpipes. Potosi was turning out to be a fun town, and it was a shame we had to leave it. However, Sucre was our next stop, and this was another stop on our trip that I had been anticipating.
Tags: Bolivia, Explosive, Mine, Potosi, Tag Index
jessicab
March 21st, 2006 at 7:47 pm
Nice Blog! You don’t know me, but I found it via BootsnAll and was interested in reading about Bolivia.
Thanks!
Travis
April 29th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Jamie Pressly
I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read.