11/9: La Paz, Bolivia: Bowler Hats, Witches' Market & Clock of the South!

After enjoying breakfast on the hotel rooftop overlooking La Paz, we walked to the address given for Museo de Arte Contemporaneo only to find it had relocated to Plaza Murillo where we were late the previous afternoon. 

What a shame that was as the 19th century mansion had stained glass panels designed by Gustave Eiffel who was best known for the world-famous Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. There was also supposed to have been an entire Che Guevara room with one piece made entirely of dominoes.

A statue of Christopher Columbus was in a commanding position on a major thoroughfare.

So instead we walked over to Plaza San Pedro as we were joining a walking tour of La Paz there a little later, our first walking tour since the one in Quito so long ago. 

We were headed to Iglesia Indigena de San Francisco on the park’s corner when I got a call from our NY-based elder daughter, Nina, who was en route to her bridal shower in San Francisco. We had a lovely chat so I wasn’t as sad as I had been to miss such a fun event in her life. 

The Indigenous Church was founded in 1549 and finished at the end of the 18th century after the siege of La Paz by Tupac Katari. It had baroque and neoclassical touches. 

The infamous San Pedro Prison on the plaza corner had once been a monastery before becoming a military fort and then a prison. Intended for 400 inmates, it had 2,500 when we were there in November, 2017, with only a dozen guards patrolling the perimeter. The prison was effectively a city within a city, according to Danny. Prison delegates are in charge of each area. The prisoners must pay for everything once inside, including their clothes, food, etc. 

Three of the prison’s eight sectors were considered wealthy; they had a hot tub, cable TV, king beds, i.e. whatever money could buy! They had creative ways to make money: opening up a restaurant, barber shop and even a drug factory inside! They’d been known to hide ‘sugar’ in diapers and then throw them over the wall. Courtesy of the red brick hotel seen below on the corner, they had wifi on their computers so they could arrange pick up of the ‘sugar’ by family members or associates. Families including children lived inside the prison. Danny stressed San Pedro was not the norm for Bolivian prisons!

Danny halfway joked that there were traffic lights in La Paz but not everyone knew what they were for. i.e. we needed to exercise caution when crossing streets!

As we walked past the Rodriguez Street Market, Danny revealed that though locals go to supermarkets to buy imported goods, they prefer the street markets where they develop relationships over time with the ‘market ladies.’ The ladies are known as‘ caseras’ or ‘my special lady.’ Danny warned the single guys on the tour not to use the word casera when they meet a special someone in a bar as it only refers to market ladies! 

Caseras will sort out the best products for their best customers. If a customer appears sad, the casera will insist that the person sit down and talk to her so the customer feels better when she leaves. There is no bargaining in grocery stores but that is expected in the markets. Locals known to use the phrase Yappa, casera? which means ‘May I please have a little more (i.e. for free)?’

There are three thousand varieties of potatoes in the country. The city used to be known as Potato Head! Potatoes, which can be dried for twenty to thirty years, are often mixed with peanut sauce, omelets or a spicy sauce unlike most of South America.  

The women wear long skirts so they can hide the sexiest part of their bodies, i.e. their calves! Having long braids means a woman has wisdom. The colorful pompoms keep the braids together.

I was glad Danny touched on the interesting bowler hats commonly worn by Bolivian women. In the 1920s, there was a big group of bowler-wearing British men building the country’s railways. A mistake arose in the order of hats from Italy so the British told Bolivian women the hats fit perfectly on their heads (even if they look rather precarious and about to fall off in a strong gust of wind!) and they were the latest style. 

With that bit of blarney or marketing, lots of bowler hats were sold to Bolivian women who have worn them ever since. If the hat is worn on either side of the head, it means she is single; if worn at the front, she is married.

One of the places I had been looking forward to seeing in La Paz was its famous Witches’ Market. Danny explained that most of the items are gifts for Pachamama or Mother Earth, a figure we’d heard about first in Colombia and then in each country all the way south to Bolivia. The market was a functional market and not just for tourists to gawk at. Locals needed to hire a witch doctor to properly use the items.

A witch doctor, according to Danny, was someone born with a special mark or had been struck by lightning and had come back to life. Llama fetuses were part of a witch doctor’s routine to please Pachamama but Danny stressed that they had all died naturally as llamas were considered respected animals.

What was on sale wasn't witchcraft as depicted in horror films but herbal and folk remedies, plus a few more unorthodox ingredients, intended to pacify the various spirits of the Aymara world.

One of the most bizarre tales Danny told us about was homeless people or drug addicts are enticed, when drunk, to enter high buildings when they’re being built and are then tossed ALIVE into a concrete pit. 

Construction workers believe in this ‘practice’ to please Pachamama so they won’t die in construction accidents. This sordid exercise still occurs as evidenced by bodies found when buildings are demolished. Danny warned drunk gringos and gringas are worth twice as much in La Paz to Pachamama!

After listening to Danny’s engrossing tales for a good while, we wandered over to Plaza San Francisco where we’d been yesterday after arriving in the capital from Puno, Peru. There was a huge police presence in the square that day compared to none the day before.

In the previous post, I wondered about the effigies or mannequins on the plaza’s lampposts. Danny informed us that they indicated local ‘justice’ would be meted out if people were caught robbing, etc and no police were present. It sounded like the Wild West, Bolivian style!

For some time, we’d been hearing fireworks. Danny said the police presence here in the square was needed to react to nearby university protests in case they moved to this part of the city. With so many victims of mass shootings commenting in the news that gunshots sounded like fireworks, that is what immediately came to my mind, too. 

Danny said the Iglesia San Francisco had been built in the 1500s in what had then been the indigenous part of the city so the Franciscan friars could catholicize the indigenous people. The church style was baroque mestizo. 

As part of the church’s indigenous iconography, Danny pointed out the man eating coca leaves, the woman giving birth to a flower, i.e. representing Pachamama. Though eighty percent of the population identify as Catholic, only twenty percent attend Mass.

It appeared that Spiderman was running down the building across the square!

Near the square was the enclosed Mercado Lanza, which Danny said would be a perfect place for people to get a fruit shake or something else.

Danny encouraged those buying fruit smoothies to use the Yappa, casera? phrase after drinking some of their treats to get their drink topped up for free. It worked!

As we headed to Plaza Murillo where we had stopped briefly yesterday, Danny said demonstrations normally occur three times a week in La Paz but they are always planned ahead. Police presence is always strong in La Paz when demonstrations occur because they can turn violent easily and migrate to the city’s main plaza, Plaza Murillo. If there’s any danger of that, barricades are put up so the perimeters to the plaza and its Cathedral below are closed. We hoped that there’d be no chance of that today so our walking tour could proceed in peace. The square was named in honor of Murillo who had fought against the Spanish and was revered by Bolivians.

Danny commented it took 150 years to finish the Cathedral. Once the country knew the pope was coming, work was completed in just three months!

The current president, Evo Morales, was the country’s first indigenous leader. He has changed the Constitution and flag to represent 36 indigenous groups in the country. The country's rainbow flag, shown below, was not for gay pride as Danny said the country was not that progressive yet.  

Morales changed the clock on the facade of the plaza's Congress building so its hands turned left and the numbers were inverted to go from one to 12 anti-clockwise. Dubbed the ‘clock of the south,’ the change had been made to 'get Bolivians to treasure their heritage and show them that they could question established norms and think creatively.'

General Villamil, a former president, was a good friend of the poor which antagonized the city’s rich people. They captured him in the palace, beat him and then dragged him around the plaza before hanging him from the lamppost in the square.

Danny informed us that that it’s compulsory for everyone to vote in Bolivia. If people don’t they are barred from performing bank transactions, buying plane tickets, etc. Morales has done lots of good for the country in Danny’s opinion. Laws against discrimination have made positive changes; Chollitas, 'maids of the middle classes' who were routinely stereotyped and discriminated against, could now go to university and work in business and TV, something unheard of not long ago; lots of hospitals have been built in the countryside; childhood mortality rate is way down since women have received money for additional food from the fourth month of pregnancy through the child’s second birthday.

When several people in the large tour group began asking political questions of Danny as we were sitting in Plaza Murillo in front of the President's Palace while lots of police were milling about, he said we needed to talk about sensitive issues elsewhere. That was why we all ended up in a nearby bar where Danny and his colleague, Denise, could talk freely about living in Bolivia.

It was interesting to learn that children are given new shoes at the end of the year if they have good attendance as students used to drop out of school when they had no shoes. Morales, the president, built the teleferico or cable car to connect all areas of the massive city. He bought back state companies sold by the previous US-born Bolivian president. 

However, when a president is in power, he will often do anything to remain in power. Danny felt that, like Trump, he often has no mouth filter.  Morales says lots of funny stuff that he then has to apologize for. He commented that people will turn gay if they eat so much chicken because chicken had so many female hormones and there was basically a chicken restaurant on every corner. The president tried to tax women who didn't have children in an incentive to increase the country's population. As you can imagine, there was a great hue and cry and Morales had to apologize and rescind his plan.

The president was running for a third term even though it was illegal in the country's constitution. Morales disagreed saying when he was president before, Bolivia had been a republic but he changed it to the Plurinational State of Bolivia in 2009, which meant in his mind, he could run for president again. 

One member of the group asked about the consequences of talking publicly against the president. Danny said the country was pretty much a dictatorship as its social media and media in general is controlled by the government and that some outspoken members of the press had been killed.

Though the basic walking tour ended then, Danny said he was then going to lead an extended tour we could join right away that would include visiting Mi Teleferico, the La Paz Cemetery, Mercado Negro or Black Market and a WWE-sanctioned Chollitas Wrestling Match to top it all off. We were in as those were all sights and activities we had hoped to see and watch while in La Paz!

Next post: More of exciting La Paz still to discover!

Posted on February 25th, 2018, from Brooklyn, New York while celebrating our daughter Nina's marriage to the love of her life, Will Whelan!