surpise visit

It has been a little while since i have written anything, mainly because much hasn´t been going on. Well a little bit has been happening. The military came in and took over our city two days ago. My boss told me to go home and stay in the house. I am thinking oh shit, what is going on. I found out that they are doing a house to house search. They finally get to my house later that evening and i am thinking of pretending I am not there. But i figure I haven´t done anything wrong so i open the door. Wrong move. They push through and start asking me questions about why somebody from the United States is living here. I try to explain but they are going through all my stuff. My landlady tells them to leave me alone, But they are literally trashing the place. They don´t find my money thankfully, But then they finally leave with the help of my landlady and we then clean up my place. Actually none of this is true. I really have not been doin much. I just wanted to keep this suspensful and interesting.
Really I have been playing soccer with my office, we are in a tournament with all the other government offices. Tonight we play in the final and i was told if we win tonight we win the tournament. Guess what the prize is. A case of beer. 2nd place is half a case, and third is a special prize which i´m sure is one beer to split between 8 people. And last night i ended up scoring 2 goals which was pretty awesome to do. Considering I am playing against all latinos and I am the only Gringo playing. But anyway I have also brought some southern culture down here. I am teaching a local lady how to cook BBQ. We are going to try and build a smoker out of old propane tanks and then she is going to sell the meat. I´ve been downloading recipes for her to use and found some remakable web sites on smoking. I think i might do the same thing when i come back and try to have some side work. but A special CONGRATULATIONS out to Lindsay in SC for the healthy birth of her wonderful new baby boy. But talk to ya´ll later, chow

happy July 4th

WooHoo!! Happy July 4th. I was thinking that day that there are probably only 5o people in all of Bolivia partying. It was really cool. We would tell the Bolivians what we were doing and everyone wished us felicidades. So it was pretty awesome. Four of us went to Argentina to buy meat. They are famous for there cows. The meat was oh so good. We ended up buying approximately 14 pounds of steak, 4 pounds of sausage, and 3 chickens. We had a feast. We brought the frisbee and of course i bought some fireworks, which we didn´t shoot off till 2 a.m. The only problem we had was that we bought a 3 foot tall rocket and placed it in the ground. Well we put it in too far and the thing didn´t lift off. Have you ever seen one of those huge motars explode on the ground? well it shot red sparks all over us and the shockwave was powerful enough to set off the car alarms around the area. We of course took off running. But then we remembered that we were in Bolivia and that kind of thing doesn´t matter.
But anyway, The picture here is of me cooking our fish for dinner that we caught. I´ve gotten pretty good and whirling the hook over my had and then letting go. I can pretty much cast it as far as anyone with a pole. But we are going again this weekend. It´s probably my favorite time every week when we go fishing.
So i noticed the other day while i was walking down the street at how weird it was that it was July 4th. We relate so many of our holidays with the seasons and the weather. Imagine a really cold July 4th where you have thick jackets on. Or Christmas at 110 degrees. Where you want be using the coat or blanket you just got for another 6 months. No one here would ever think of a white Christmas. The leaves are falling down here and you can just feel fall setting in and winter coming. I never realized how much association we have with different parts of the year with the weather. Well love you all and hope everyone had a wonderful and safe fourth and nobody lost an eye from a bottle rocket. We all know it is very possible.