Santa Cruz

After a 15 hours nighttrip on a regular bus (the ones with a bed were sold out) I arrived in Santa Cruz.
The microbus brought me to a place I didn't want to go to, so I had to walk to the main plaza. The nicest I have ever seen. High and big trees give shadow to all the pedestrians that hang out there during the day. People are playing chess all day. The Residencial Bolivar is a nice oasis compared with the noisy street. Since there was an european week going on in the institute of "alliance francaises" and the "Goethe institute" a lot of countries were represented by their most famous food (prepared by locals with local ingredients). Switzerland had a acceptable "raclette", Germany some nice "schwaebische spaezle", Irland an conventional "fondue" and Italy a surprising "toastbread with nutella". I paid a visit to the local zoo. Local people spilled out on a sunny sunday afternoon and acted stranger than the animals inside the cage. They were throwing candys, icecream, plasticbags and similar stuff at the animals to interupted their obvious boredom. Cages were to small and sometimes not even hermetically sealed. Monkeys were on top of the birdcages and I seemed to be the only one who was bothered by that fact.

Simon and a friend of his from back home caught up with me and we did what english people do, if their on vacation. After only one beer in a posh bar with glaswalls I managed to walk pretty fast in to one of these walls - embaracing myself in front of all the people. Over a week later I still felt some pain in my upper lip. Afterwards we drank some "kohlberg" wine on top of their hostel and crashed.