This is Bolivia and Paraguay. It is hard to see, but Asunción is on the bottom of the map. This is a map from Brazil, so Asunción is written as Assunção, and Paraguay is written as Paraguai. You can see Santa Cruz on the east of Bolivia and then La Paz on the west. As you can see, the distance between these cities is not great. The flights are only an hour or so. But driving takes over 10 hours and sometimes longer because of underdeveloped roads and a few other things.
I arrived late at night into Santa Cruz. A lot of South American countries require Americans to get visas because they want to get back at the United States for making these countries' citizens get visas in order to come to the U.S. And they always make them the same price as what a visa to the U.S. would cost. I think it is ridiculous, but that is probably what they're saying! I tried to get this visa done in Rio de Janeiro, but they wouldn't let me. After almost an hour, I got through the line and they got the visa put into my passport. I went to find my bag, but it was not there. I went to ask a representative of the airline why my bag was not there. When he found out that I was only making a connection there, he took me to the ticket counter and called some guy on his walkie talkie.
This guy came up and told me that the airline was providing a hotel for me because of the layover. I was happy to hear it because I was planning on just staying in the airport until my flight left. But I was also a little skeptical because it just seemed too nice. And once I started talking to this guy, things seemed really weird. We were talking in Spanish at first, but he insisted on speaking English because he said it would never get better unless he practiced. I was fine with that and he proceeded to fill out the form in order to get me into a hotel.
He started to ask me the basic questions, such as my name and age and so forth. After a few of these, he started to ask some really weird questions. The one that stuck out the most was "Do you want to live forever?" I couldn't believe that he asked me that. What a bizarre question! I thought maybe he had been listening to Alphaville or something. P.S. this song might be the best worst song of all time. Same for the music video. The lead singer looks like a younger version of my brother-in-law Mark, aka Cry Boy. When my sister dumped him in high school, he sat in our house and cried, which gave him a name that he has never lived down. I'm glad things worked out for them.
I told him that I was planning on living forever. He asked me briefly about what religion I belonged to and I talked about it with him for a second. Then he took me out to get a cab. The conversation with him had been so weird that I wondered if I was stepping into a drug deal or something. Maybe his live forever question was some kind of code. And then a free cab ride on top of everything just seemed too weird! But I felt like everything would be fine, so I went with it. Oh, and he told me it was a 5 star hotel. I said to myself that I would be the judge of that.
The cab driver took me to the hotel. By the time we got there, it was probably around 1 am. It was nice of them to do all that, but it was kind of useless to get a hotel for 4 hours or so. But I was not complaining. My room was pretty nice. There was a front room with two small beds, a couch, and a small kitchen, and then a bedroom. The only weird thing was this really small iguana that was dead. That was gross.
I'm getting ready for bed in the bedroom when I hear a noise. Someone was trying to open my door! And he was whistling. It seemed a little bit weird that someone trying to break in would be making a lot of noise. I figured that he was just at the wrong room, but it was so bizarre. I went to the kitchen and looked out the window. I couldn't see anyone, but I was a little weirded out. I put the couch in front of the door, which may seem kind of silly but I was really uneasy about all of the weird things going on. I did that once too in Nashville, TN when I went to visit Vanderbilt Law School. The dead bolt wouldn't work on the door, and I had looked out the window a few minutes before only to see a dude across the parking lot looking right at me! Anyway, maybe it's baseless fear, but I like to keep it safe. I went to bed eventually, but did not get much sleep because I had to wake up early to get back to the airport. Other than this person trying to open my door, nothing bad happened and I made it back to the airport.
The flight was fine. The only weird thing was this guy who was whistling on plane. It caught my attention because I had heard a guy the night before whistling outside of my room! It was really annoying in the plane, and eventually someone made a really loud "Shhhh!" at him. Didn't stop him. Luckily it was on the descent and we were getting out of there. I finally made it to La Paz, the world's highest capital city. 12,000 feet! Things were a little crazy up until this point, with the hotel situation and all, but nothing like the next 24 hours. I will tell you all about it in the next post.
2 comments:
What happened to your bag?
I think this will be answered in my next post.
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