Oh, whats in a parade?

The celebration of the formation of a country is a beautiful and important date to commemorate. This is something that makes sense to me. Cities too, large or small, often take joy in the official date of their creation and often hold parades, picnics, or other jovial activities for people to participate in. I would, however, like to get the number of the person who decided that Cochabamba gets the special privilege of celebrating its birthday for..uh 3 days??

Now, i may seem a bit Scrooge-like in this statement at first, so i will be sure to explain the verb ¨celebrate¨ for anyone who would like to understand its meaning here in the land of Bo-town. This last Friday was the official birthday of the incredible city i´ve been living in for 3.5 months. Since Bolivians like to get a head start on partying though, they made sure to get up bright and early on Thursday morning to begin the festivities. I was not aware before that morning that everyone else in the city was as fond of my street as I am, because they gave Heather and I the immense blessing of starting the parade on our street. 8am rolled around and the deafening crash of bass drums and rows and rows of brass instruments being played with all possible force threw me out of my bed and running around my apartment dazed and fearful we were in the middle of the 3rd World War. Our floors and walls were rumbling with passionate repetitions of OH, When The Saints Come Marching In and the like.

Now, parades make sense, however 16 hour parades do not make sense, and by 6 hours into our 150th repetition of the same songs i was grabbing my things and running out of my room for my life and sanity.Needless to say, by the time i met up with Stephanie and Casey in the afternoon i was in a better mood, pacified a bit after a beer in a bar out of earshot of the parade. We met up at Dali´s, a restaurant where Heather my roommate works, and we ate and drank into the evening when we were planning on meeting up with our friend Pepe, who we met in the salar with his family when Steph had to go and wound herself.

On our way to meet up with Pepe and his friend Reynaldo, Steph, Casey and I had to stop for a delicious and overwhelming plate of Pique machu. We ran into a Colombian artisan, Andres, who just wouldn't leave us alone and I was glad for him to get the hint to leave after he kept trying to spout bullshit south American economics at us for a half hour. Boring! I´ve discovered that in my experience South American men, when trying to impress me start making up crap percentiles. Every time! ¨25 percent of all people...¨, ¨The colombian peso is 50,000 to an American Dollar¨ WHATEVER!! Unfortunately i lose my patience everytime and start rolling my eyes and second guessing everything they say until they excuse themselves.

We met up with Pepe and Reynaldo finally, went to the huge annual concert in the stadium, and when we were bored with our poor seats and the cold after an hour, left to move on to a favorite club, La Tirana (translation; the female tyrant!?). We drank the local beer, sang, danced and waved cochabamba flags around until 3am among tons of other young cochabambinos. It was a great ending to a day i had started out disliking greatly.