Exploring La Paz

It was about 11 when we left the hostel to do some exploring of the town, we walked into the centre for a look round the witches market, this is a couple of streets in town where you can buy lots of strange herbs, voodoo dolls, talismans and even a dried llama foetus! (which apparently brings good luck if buried under your porch) After this we looked around a few clothes shops for a hoody for myself and a skirt/dress for Mae but unfortunately as usual what we want to buy is not in fashion at the moment so nowhere had anything suitable, I did however find a new t-shirt which we thought was suitable for dancing and I decided to buy that. Since it was now lunch time we thought we'd try one of the places listed in the guide book where we bought a 3 course meal for $1 each!! We then went back to the electronics street and bought an Ipod after having checked that the prices were reasonable. On the way there we walked through Bathroom street, sports street, textiles street (my mum would be in heaven!) and finally bike street. We arrived at the shop to find that they had no card machine, so we had to go to the bank down the street where, since the cash dispenser didn't work with my card we had to go into the bank and wait around for the lady to be free. (of course there is no possibility that any of the other 10 people who were doing nothing could help!!) and when we were eventually served the process was so long winded that it was almost 5 by the time we actually got the Ipod. We then walked back along fruit street, turned right onto cake street where we bought a slice of cake each for $0.60 and walked slightly further to find party dress street, Mae then spent the next hour or so looking round all the small shops to find something suitable but unfortunately like the current fashion in the UK these dresses are not designed for you to move in them!! Once she had finished we collected our laundry and headed back to the hostel for a rest before dancing. Tonight we were going to try a club called Traffic for salsa and when we arrived the doorman informed us there would be salsa later but they were currently playing latin pop songs!! At about 11:20 the music started to improve a little and we started dancing, despite the DJ's best efforts with his awful mixing skills!! In fact the DJ decided to 'improve' the songs by making them skip, pausing them or inserting bits of other songs which was extremely annoying!! Not once during the night did he look up to see what people were dancing to, so he managed to clear the dancefloor on several occasions by playing something no one wanted to listen to!! We have found the standard of Djing among the latinos in South America to be particularly low as they clearly don't understand that other people are supposed to enjoy the music as well!! We danced until about 2 when the music degenerated into Merengue and Reggaton at which point we decided to call it a night and get a taxi back to the hostel. We then looked up places to dance for the next few months of our travels before heading to bed.