Its been a long time since I´ve written anything here, funny how settling in one place (Cochabamba) makes things seem more banal and less worth writing about. Getting stoned and watching The Yellow Submarine seems much more exciting just because it happened in a brand new city, La Paz. Which was an amazing city, I will really have to come back and get to know it better than I did staying in a grigo punk rock crash pad apartment for 3 nights and wandering around the city a bit.

Never was able to get my visa extended without traveling great distances and paying large sums of money, which doesnt seem worth it right now. It worked out though, after 3 months I was ready to leave, hard as it was. I loved the work I was doing; the more I got to know the kids I was working with the more I liked them. I had made some good friends, and really liked the city itself. I even met lovely lady (a Smith college graduate by coincidence) in my last week there, who I would have loved to get to know better (and hopefully will some day). But I had realized something during these 6 months of traveling: I really love circus; acro and juggling especially, and that means that I need to be somewhere where there are people far better than me to learn from. Cochabamba is not that place.


Luckily, in Cochabamba I had met Carlos, a teacher and performer from La Tarumba in Lima. La Tarumba is a circus school with over 25 years of experience, and judging by photos, videos, and seeing Carlos´stunning corde lisse act and taking his trapeze workshop, very high quality. And, get this: their 3 year professional program is free. Unheard of! I don´t know if i´m ready to live in Lima for 3 years, and besides, they're next class doesnt start until 2011. So i´m hoping i´ll be able to work something out to do a residency or something, for maybe a year. Not sure how flexible they are yet. But I´m pretty excited about La Tarumba.


So that´s why, after a few days in La Paz, I blew straight past the "can´t miss" tourist spots at Lago Titicaca, Cuzco, Machu Pichu, and came straight to Lima. I can always go back. I´m going to stay here in Lima for about a month to get to know the city and the school, spend another few weeks hiking the Cordillera Blanca, then head back to the states. I'll visit as many of y'all as I can in a couple months, replenish the bank account, then see about coming back to South America...