Eight things I don’t like about Bolivia

I was asked this question by one of Tonio’s friends in the context of whether I would consider living here (which I certainly would, having done more or less that for three months). Here is what I came up with. The Spanish version was obviously considerably more concise and diplomatic.

At some point when I get near a decent internet connection I will post several hundred photos of something I liked very much about Bolivia (Uyuni) to balance things out a bit.

Music – My feelings on this one have changed a lot since I came to Cochabamba, where I had some of the best nights out of my trip so far. It’s amazing how a random little city in Bolivia can end up succeeding where larger cities in Perú and Colombia, in my opinion, so spectacularly failed.

That said, once you’ve lived in London, there are always certain things you will pine for musically that you are absolutely not going to find here. Live music by bands I’ve heard of. Big clubs full of people on pills. Any kind of electronic music you want on almost any night of the week. 3-day festivals that you camp at, full of any kind of electronic music you want and people on pills. Record shops. You know I could go on.

Rudeness – By international standards countries don’t get much more polite and friendly than Ireland and the UK [1] so my standards here have admittedly been set high. Against those high standards, I find a lot of Bolivians, a lot of the time, to be pig-ignorant cunts. In their personal lives, once you get to know them, they can obviously be wonderfully friendly but I am talking more about their idea of customer service, more specifically the absolute lack of it.

I’m not talking about the “Hi, I’m Rodrigo, I’ll be your waiter this evening” bullshit, which I wouldn’t wish upon any country. I’m talking about the simple idea that perhaps it’s wise to be courteous to someone who is considering spending some of their money in your establishment, or is in the process of doing so. A recurring example for me has been the pleasure and amusement that shopkeepers take in telling you they don’t stock something. No “Would you believe we sold the last one yesterday?”, no “Try Johnny across the road”, no “Sorry about that now”. Here, politeness is a value-added service that seems to be in the process of being introduced on a trial basis in certain establishments. If you want politeness with your meal, you can go to a fancy restaurant and pay for it. If you want politeness with, say, your attempt to buy circuit breakers, well tough shit.

Unfortunately for the ignorant majority, due to the fact that politeness costs nothing, someone will eventually come along and provide it as standard and that person will probably be a foreigner. Free market economics, George.

Some more general observations on the way Bolivians conduct themselves: they don’t mind staring at you (they fucking love staring at me), blocking your way, cutting in front of you in what is clearly a queue (they do have the concept) and will rarely say please or thank you for any reason. The kind of encounter that could put you in a bad mood for the rest of the day in Ireland, you can count on having on a daily basis here. The only part of their rudeness I’m prepared to attribute to “cultural differences” and therefore excuse them for is the personal space thing. You don’t get much, and because there’s more of me, it seems reasonable that on occasions I should get even less than most people.

The whole gringo thing – This is connected to rudeness, really, since where I come from it’d be considered somewhat rude to openly treat someone differently due to them not being from round these parts. Not in Bolivia, where defining people by their ethnicity is not even slightly taboo for most. If I was black or Asian I imagine I would be much worse off as there are very few of either compared to other South American countries.

My feelings on this one have also changed since coming to Cochabamba, where the only place I’ve heard the G-word was when I was addressed as such by Tonio’s 2-year-old niece before she learnt my actual name. I have generally received one of the best welcomes of my trip so far and feel my whiteness and foreignness are less of an issue than they have been in some places. That said, even if the people you have personal dealings with mostly treat you as one of their own, there would always be enough encounters with strangers to make you feel like a novelty. I’m not the kind of person who enjoys being a novelty. [2]

Technology – In Bolivia, across the board, you pay more and get less in comparison to Europe. Some things may appear to be cheaper than Europe but upon examination, they usually turn out to be cheaper because they are of a lower quality than anything you’d ever buy in Europe. It wouldn’t be so bad if the problem was simply that things cost more but many things are not available at all. Bolivia is a country relatively untouched by free trade and technology is one area where it really shows.

Broadband is shit and expensive, though neither much shitter nor more expensive than rural Ireland. Mobile phone coverage is unpredictable – there are three networks but none covers anywhere near the entire country, not even routes between major cities. See boring footnote [3].

And as for the electrical wiring, wow. I’ve seen things that would actually keep me awake at night if I had to live with them. Before coming here I removed or replaced a load of 1950s to 1970s electrical wiring in our sheds at home because I was worried about a cow electrocuting itself. Those sheds, as they were before I changed anything, were wired to a higher standard than most houses I’ve seen here. As they are currently, they’re of a higher standard than any house I’ve seen in South America. I could, and I’m afraid at some point I probably will, say more about this.

Meat-centricity and dirt – I’m lumping these two together because of all the things that are a bit dirty in Bolivia, it’s the meat hygiene that I find especially sick-making. The markets are full of raw chickens piled high with flies buzzing around them – I’ve seen these fall out of crates onto the ground and be picked up and put back in the crate. Walking around the market there’s often a nauseating smell of bits of a chicken that shouldn’t be eaten being fried in an open pan, or the smell of watery raw meat juice that the stallholders tip out on the ground, where it festers in the sun.

I have never seen a place with as high a ratio of fried chicken restaurants to black people as here. An alien from another planet visiting Bolivia would think that Chickenism, rather than Catholicism, was the dominant religion. Obviously nobody’s forcing me to eat chicken but I would liken it to how if you’re not a Mormon, then living in Salt Lake City surrounded by Mormon bullshit might get to you after a while.

Things generally being a bit shit – I have to give them credit for the highly unexpected and creative ways in which things here turn out to be shit. Every time you buy something you have to carefully examine it, trying to preempt the many possible ways it could turn out to be shit. Also, because barely anywhere issues receipts, you generally can’t return anything even if it does turn out to be shit.

With that in mind, your milk is going to be UHT and it is going to come in a plastic bag. Your chocolate probably isn’t going to have milk in it. Your cheese [4] is going to be the quality of the nastiest cheese in the shop in Ireland, but the price of almost the best. Your jam might not have actual fruit in it. Your wine probably couldn’t be legally sold as wine in the European Union. Your rum may have alcohol listed as an ingredient rather than occurring naturally as the product of fermentation. Your copper wire is probably going to have a percentage of aluminium in it. Your DVDs are going to be copied, and of the kind of quality I’d previously only seen in cinema adverts about the dangers of buying copied DVDs. Your clothes are going to look like what could be purchased from the shops towards the Tottenham Court Road end of Oxford Street, as you start to notice a decline in quality and lots of Asians with Craig David beards.

You wouldn’t think it but it really wears you down after a while, all this.

Urban planning and environmental matters: Coming here has really made me realise how things like London’s tree-lined boulevards and royal parks don’t just happen naturally. The parks here, when there are some, look like a small section of the city someone hasn’t got around to building anything on yet. The centrepiece of your average Bolivian park will not be a giant, granite memorial to her majesty’s faithful dead, but a small, painted, pre-cast concrete dolphin in what looks like it ought to be a fountain, but doesn’t actually contain water.

Every town seems to have a “river” that has either been corralled into a narrow concrete conduit, or is a small trickle of what looks like cartoon toxic waste, winding its way through a much wider dry river bed that is strewn with litter. I haven’t been to the house of anybody who’s got a garden – everyone has a concrete patio.

Even the rich areas like the Zona Sur of La Paz are simply estates of expensive houses of various jarring and mostly gaudy architectural styles with ugly brick walls and barbed wire fences separating them. No residents-only parks or swimming pools. If you want to see what happens when everyone’s responsible for their own patch and nobody takes much of an interest in the bits in between, come to Bolivia.

Finally, I literally don’t want to know what they do with their refuse which is going to be full of cans, glass and other things they will be paying a great price for in years to come, such as used batteries. Unfortunately like most poor countries, they have more important things to worry about than the environment. Most of what nature has created in Bolivia is stunning. Most of what human effort has created – from the 20th century onwards at least – looks like shit.

Pubs - As mentioned previously, I would normally play down my love of drinking so as not to reinforce an unwelcome stereotype but in Bolivia, Ireland is so unknown that there is no stereotype to reinforce. Therefore I have found myself on quite a few occasions singing the praises of sitting in a pub and getting hammered as a form of entertainment in its own right. Tullamore, a town of around 12,000 people has 15 pubs that I can think of off the top of my head, probably a lot more in total. If Cochabamba or La Paz has a single establishment that I would recognise as a pub (as opposed to a restaurant that serves alcohol – some of which are admittedly very good – or an off-licence with some plastic patio furniture), I have yet to find it. They have millions of dark, pokey little shops and chicken restaurants. You’d think they could manage one or two dark, pokey little pubs.

On the way back from Uyuni, I stayed in Oruro for a couple of nights with an aunt of Tonio’s and much more extended family. One day the aunt asked if I liked beer. “He loves it”, Tonio replied on my behalf. As luck would have it, one of Tonio’s uncles loved beer too. He was brought in to discuss the matter with me. He asked if I might like to drink some beer right then; I said I certainly would. We went out and bought a crate of it, returned to the house and proceeded to discuss our hobby in the same way one might discuss stamp-collecting or paragliding if you were fond of those things and you happened across a fellow enthusiast. Lots of people here drink but the majority – uncle Hugo being an exception – don’t really get drinking.

[1] You could argue that the tans specialise more in the politeness and we specialise more in the friendliness

[2] As Cool Vinny’s friend and former co-worker Lubos once said: “In Czech Republic, I am normal guy. In Ireland, I am stand-up comedian”.

[3] Although all the networks support GPRS and in some places EDGE, it doesn’t work very well due to relying on free timeslots on the cell, of which there usually aren’t many during the daytime. Here they build massive towers (however do they get the planning permission?) covering wider areas. It is also expensive, 4Bs per MB. They have also taken a few creative design decisions with regard to international access codes (nobody told them what the “+” symbol is for so every network chose their own, making all the numbers I’ve stored in my phone useless), SMS interchange (I could send messages to Crystalfox but nobody else in Ireland I’ve tried, including people on the same network as him, and now I can no longer send messages to him either),outbound roaming agreements (none) and codes for accessing services such as voicemail (999, in my case). A lot of this applies to most of South America. For Comcel in Colombia, the international access code was 00444, making the code for Britain 0044444. Good to know there’s somewhere in the world I could potentially combine my loves of telecommunications and mind-altering drugs.

[4] I am referring to any variety of cheese other than the native Bolivian ones, of which there are several and which are more reasonably priced. Interestingly though, they all are round in shape, all white in colour, all soft to medium in texture and all (to my palate) laced with salt. If they were actually importing cheddar, edam, gouda etc. I could understand why they would be expensive but they’re not, they’re producing their own, not very good Bolivian slant on those varieties using Bolivian milk. So the Bolivian cheese is fine and I do buy it but if you want to make a cheese and pickle sandwich or have something to put on top of your shepherd’s pie, it won’t quite cut it. By the way my mother told me on the phone that they’re currently losing €2k a month, just in case any of you in Europe feel like upping your own cheese consumption a bit.

~ by esquilax on 10 October 2009.