Santa Cruz, BO - Second Full Day

We slept in Sunday, day two, until about 9:30, but the rest of the family was up earlier, and we met them at the buffet breakfast. The weather was very different today, with a lot of rain in the morning, very windy, and cold, and this is how it would be for the rest of the day but mostly with clouds instead of rain. I am very happy that I got out to the pool yesterday while it was hot and sunny. It is Spring here in Santa Cruz, so this rainy windy weather may be what is in store for the week. After breakfast full of delicious food and very interesting conversation about life in Bolivia and the social and political issues here, I came down to sit in the WiFi area between the restaurant and the pool so that I could do some work on my blog software. Mom and Vanessa took a taxi to the 7 Streets area to do some shopping, and Vee and Chris hung out in the room. Vee came down and recruited me for a walk around the hotel and surrounding areas. So we grabbed the camera, and went exploring. It turns out that this place is a lot bigger then any of us expected. We found the tennis court, putting green, driving range, bird sanctuary, and a whole other beautiful building with numerous huge ballrooms where they were being prepared for wedding parties later on, and many other smaller conference and meeting rooms. We found another bar in the main building, and a business center with Internet computers, etc. And best of all, we found the spa with wet and dry saunas and whirlpool, racquetball court with walleyball net hookups, a converted squash/racquetball court, ping pong table and exercise room with a full spread of universal and free weights, cardio, tv, etc. We asked the guys in the spa how we could get racquets, balls, etc. and found out that the ping pong stuff and exercise room was free, but the walleyball, racquetball and squash courts were 10 dollars per hour, so for today, we decided to stick with ping pong. Chris and Vee played first while I got in a little workout, then Vee and I played while Chris worked out, and finally Chris and I played. It was a lot of fun, and very competitive. Tomorrow we plan to come back with Mom and Vanessa and play some walley in addition to the ping pong. After playing around, we walked outside the hotel to see what lies beyond these walls. There were huge water puddles in the streets from the rain the night before so we had to be careful where we walked since the cars passing through the puddles probably would not be too concerned about giving us a drive-by shower. During our walk, we saw that there were a lot of dance clubs, restaurants and even some higher end retail stores in the area. Of course this is mixed amongst some incomplete housing development, and other not so nice commercial establishments. It’s difficult to describe. It’s not that the area is bad or good. It’s just different. In me, it induces sadness. Perhaps it was partially a result of the grey cold sky, and the wind. But after talking with Vee about my impressions, I learned that it had the same effect on her too, and probably even more so since she has memories of her times in Santa Cruz from the mid to late 1990’s when things in Bolivia were generally better. I did not take any pictures of the area, but maybe I will later on in the week. There were a few large buildings that looked to be really nice hotels, all beautifully landscaped. During our walk, since I must have “American Sucker” painted on my forehead, a homeless guy apparently hailing originally from the U.K., wished me a hearty and cynical “welcome to this mother-*^#% country”, and then came to ask me for money to cover the cost of a bottle of milk he wanted to go buy…not booze…not cigarettes…not drugs…just milk. Right. I gave him the 4 or 5 bolivian coins in my pocket, due to his persistence and seemingly very coherent and intelligent-sounding speech in mixed English and fluent Spanish about how he came from a very wealthy family and that he chose to leave it all behind to live on the streets and that once he was a beautiful man with lots of women and now at 46 he looked like an ugly old man and so on. He probably would have continued on all day had we not walked away after 5 minutes or so of this. I bid him good luck, and he wished us God’s blessings. So after covering most of the immediate area around the hotel, we went back to the rooms where I did some reading and some napping while the others had time to get caught up. After a while, we took a taxi to the Hyper-Market for some munchies and loaded up on water, beer, juice, fruits and lots of sweet cookies and other snacks. When we got back to the hotel, we put on the U.S. Open Men’s final between Agassi and Federer, which went four sets before Federer finally won. Vee made avocado sandwiches with the gigantic, almost-cantaloupe-sized avocadoes, and later on, we ordered room service, with Vee and I sharing a club sandwich while it was hamburgers for the rest of the family. Despite having a range, cabinets, a fridge, etc., there are NO utensils, plates, pots or pans, so we thought it would be good to have some silverware, and kept the knives, forks and spoons from room service and put the remaining things back on the tray and out in the hallway to be picked up. After the match, I did some more reading and promptly fell asleep.