Day 39:

This morning I actually planned to do something productive, so I got up, had breakfast.....and then took a good hour to pack my bag. It's nigh on impossible to efficiently pack a rucksack without the ability to stuff, and I have completely lost that skill, I'm hoping it gets better over time, but we'll see.
So by half 10 I had successfully crammed all my s*** in, and I set off for the Asur indigenous museum, I haven't actually been to a lot of museums on this trip, which is very unlike me, and so it felt good to cram one in. The museum showcases traditional Bolivian culture, it has nine rooms, showcasing Bolivian textiles; which are so intricately woven, women make patterns with the warp, and men with the weft, showcasing a variety of scenes ranging from traditional farming culture to the Andean underworld. You weren't allowed to take pictures so as not to damage the colours of the fabric, but they were honestly the best handmade textiles I had ever seen. I would've bought some but they were all really expensive (because one shawl takes about a month to make) and I couldn't afford it :(
Another room showcases Bolivian dancing, there are people called monkeys whose role is to jump on people's backs and turn the dance into chaos, butterflies who have huge fabric wings on their backs, and bands who play drums or pan pipes. There was even a room containing serif acts found from an excavation of a Tiawanaku tomb (and old pre-Incan culture) which contained examples of the square hats they used to wear, tools they used, aswell as skulls from the people buried there.
After the museum Sammie and I wandered up to La recollecta, which is a really beautiful plaza with a view of all of sucre. There were some markets there where I bought some socks for my brother and an old map of South America for my dad (which I lost two days later, must've fallen out my bag on a bus, that or somebody nicked it)
We chilled there for about half an hour, I wish I'd brought a book with me to read because it was a really tranquil place, such a nice change from the crazy hubbub of La Paz.
Next we walked to the General Cemetery, which all though it sounds like a creepy place to visit, was actually quite lovely. I got some Maracuya, lemon and Granzido ice cream on the way, which was a great decision on my part, 3 scoops for the equivalent of £2.
All around the walls of the cemetery are graves, built into the walls in rows about 6 high, with thousands and thousands of columns going all the way round. In the middle part of the cemetery were family tombs, all decorated with different statues, and there were different sections for Jews, children, Musicians, Fellows of a University. What was really endearing was that every single grave had flowers placed in it, some were decaying flowers, but it showed that every person there had someone who cared enough to keep their grave adorned.
The saddest ones were the child graves, each had the birth and death date, showing how some of them didn't even last a day. Whilst the adult graves contained mainly just flowers, these ones were filled with toys that were never played with. One had happy birthday balloons on it, and the date suggests that the child was still born