Bolivia Exchange #1

 Hola a todos

My first full day in Cochabamba has passed and I'm feeling great. At this point I have met and socialized with my exchange family a ton and it's been terrific . The plane we used to actually get into Bolivia is very similar to the planes we used to fly into Aniak with; 2 rows of 2 seats, cramped, and small overhead bins, but I can't complaint, whatever gets me to where I need to be is alright. When I landed I was immediately greeted by Daniela my exchange mother and Carlos my exchange father who immediately were great people. After getting back to their house and having the unique parts of Bolivia explained to me and having settled into my room I met their son (sorry bro if your reading this I don't know how to spell your name, so you're "their son" for the time being) and hung out, using his playstation until going to a horror movie with 3 of his friends. After that we just had a good time wandering around the mall area for hours. 

My main challenges so far, at-least language wise has been separating the sou


nds in words. Comparatively to English, Spanish speakers communicate very quickly and a whole sentence is blending into a couple words for me.  I've been perfectly fine with asking for locations things and more basic sentences. I think it's just a matter of time before my ears/brain start to register the change in words every time. Besides that the main thing I could work on is verbs and adjectives, I have quite a few but not enough for me to say every sentence I want to all the time.

I could add far more to this first post, like my experience with the 26 hours of being at airports and flying,  and the week I spent in homer waiting for my Visa to arrive and seeing a lot of friends, but its already late at night and I have a couple other small tasks I need to finish. If it's possible for me to edit this post I'll just write all of that at the bottom and signal it is an edit. If not I will just post it with my blog tomorrow.

Adios 

Edits

The flights - 

Anchorage-Seattle, not terrible, was a bit cramped but that's about it. 6 hours 

Seattle-LA, great, the plane wasn't full and I had 3 seats to myself. 6 hours 

LA-Lima, pretty good I slept a lot because it was 11 hours, I also had 2 seats to myself and watched some movies on the screen on the seat. 11 hours 

Lima-Santa Cruz, not fun, I had a window seat which isn't great for people at my height while the rest of my flights were the aisle. Besides that I didn't have a screen to watch movies with and I bought internet for messaging, which was better than the rest of my flights where I had no internet. 6 hours 

Santa Cruz-Cochabamba, very similar to the flights Ive had to aniak, was neutral about it. 1 Hour

By the way all I had to eat for the flights and airports were 2 McDonalds sausage sandwiches and a croissant. No mucho 

The Airports - 

Seattle, pretty good I was there for 2 hours and had some McDonalds for breakfast and my gates were very close. 2 hours 

La, not bad but I had to walk for 20 minutes to find my gate and I didn't have much time after using the bathroom. 1.5 hours

lima, I don't want to say terrible, but I had around 4 hours here and it took 1.5 hours to get out of customs/security and get my bags, then it took 1.5 hour to get to my bags checked in and then 20 minutes to go back through security and by that point I had 15 minutes before the gate was starting to board. The wort part was carrying 2 heavy bags and my backpack around alone. 4 hours 

Santa Cruz, not fun, not fun at all. so for my first hour I waited to get of security which was much harder than Lima but the bag pickup was easy. after I eventually made it to the actual walking area but I had to sit around for 3 hours waiting to check in bags before I went to my gate. I paid a guy 25 bucks which is insane knowing now how much a dollar can get you in Bolivia. he made sure my bags weren't stolen and in a locked are (left baggage or something?) for only like 15 minutes at the most when I grabbed drinks from Starbucks and after a hours later I grabbed the croissant at a cafe. afterwards I was able to get up to the upper area where I could wait for my flight to arrive, I tried ordering pizza but got confused and went to another place for a hamburger which I couldn't even eat because it was horrible (this is not the fault of Bolivia, airport food in general is never good). 6 hours

and am I missing everyone? yes yes, Im going to post the rest of my explanation though for that in my second blog which I was writing before editing this because I assume the majority of people who have already read this will not come back to it. 

Adios Again

Edit 2 - fixed a grammar error