27/5/09 We didn't do much apart from catch our local flight from Santa Cruz to Sucre, meet up with the new people in our hotel and relax for the rest of the afternoon, before all going out for dinner in the evening. The new people were Wai Ling (Canada), Ann-Louise, Charlotte and Anthony (all Brits), and Tanya (Australia.) For dinner I had a traditional Bolivian dish made up of dried, shredded and fried meat, 'Bolivian white corn', two pieces of white cheese and a boiled egg; the corn, which was like sweetcorn but much bigger and whiter, was a bit bland and I was given too much of it, but the rest was lovely. For pudding I had another Bolivian dish, a chocolate pudding made of quinoa, a type of grain grown in the Andes. It's a cross between rice and couscous, and the texture was a bit spongey. This was also really good.

28/5/09 Again, we didn't do much today. Dave and I had a lie in, and then looked round the main square and went on the internet. In the evening we went to a restaurant with most of the others. We saw llama steak on the menu, so nearly everybody ordered it. It was a bit chewy, but was very juicy and tasted really meaty! I had quinoa as my side dish; it tasted quite nutty, but I don't know if it's like that normally or whether they just cooked it with a nut oil. It also came with some small pieces of broccoli and cauliflower, which I was a little surprised at because I didn't know they grew those in Bolivia. While we ate, a local band played outside. I think they were just rehearsing, because they didn't have any audience outside watching and it didn't seem like they were aware of our presence at all. They had huge traditional bass drums slung over their shoulders, and whilst they beat the drum with one hand, some of them also played panpipes with the other.

29/5/09 Today was a very busy day. In the morning, after a bit of a lie in, we took our dirty clothes down to a laundry nearby and left them there ready to be picked up again at 3. I went to the post office and posted some postcards, and then we walked to a hill which has a monastery on top and a fabulous lookout point over most of Sucre. We both really liked Sucre because it's very historical; the architecture is Spanish colonial and is mixed in with beautiful white churches, the streets are narrow, and some are cobbled as well. Sucre is historically the Bolivian capital, (although La Paz is bigger and has all the present governmental and other important buildings, and has taken over all the unofficial capital rights), yet the atmosphere is relaxed and the historical buildings are preserved very well, and although the street our hotel was on is quite touristy, on the whole the city didn't seem as completely taken up with tourism as Paraty is. Unfortunately the monastery was closed at the time we were there, but the plaza next to it was nice and the view over the city was impressive.
We looked into some shops on the way back down, looking for some presents and souvenirs, but then decided to leave it until we got to La Paz, because we had heard La Paz is practically made up of markets and is cheaper into the bargain.
After a slightly strange lunch of a plain baguette each and some chocolate wafers, bought from a supermarket for peanuts and eaten in the main square, I looked round the big, historic cathedral and the museum attached. The cathedral is only free to get into on Sundays, because it's a museum in itself. It was beautiful, containing lots of shrines, carving, decoration and wooden confession boxes, and you can see photos of it on our blog. The museum attached was interesting - as well as sacred objects like old religious paintings and silver objects like crosses and plates, it had some documents leading back to the early 18th century, and models of saints in boxes. I got told off by the woman in charge for trying to take a photo of a big shrine in a room next to the main cathedral, but was told that I could take photos next door in the actual cathedral - odd.
When I got out, we walked round the square to the main museum (I've forgotten the name of it now.) We had read that if we only went to one museum in Sucre it should be this, so I was eager to have a look inside. The ground floor was all about Bolivia pre- and post- 19th century revolution, the heroes of it etc. (Simon Bolivar being the most important), and also had a room with lots of portraits of the past Bolivian presidents in. There were two more floors with other exhibitions in, according to the map of the museum, but we found the stairways blocked off, so we left.
In the evening nearly all the group watched a film about the silver mines in Potosi, at the cafe we'd had dinner at on our first night. It was a documentary about a 14 year old boy who works there, the jobs he has to do there, and about the miners' beliefs and lifestyle in general. We were due to visit there the next day, so the film was very useful in giving us insight into their way of life. After it ended we had dinner there, and I had one of the best beef steaks I've ever had in my life, with a lovely creamy sauce, juicy vegetables, and baked potatoes which arrived in a lake of cream and with some herbs on top. Not quite what I'd been expecting, but I've always wanted to try a baked potato with cream, and it was delicious, so I didn't mind!