25 Jan 5
La Paz, Bolivia

The night before I was sup­posed to leave I’m hav­ing a hard time sleep­ing — some­thing to do with my hav­ing slept for so many hours when I was get­ting over the very last of my sick­ness. On TV there wasn’t a lot, BUT, there was a fash­ion show. I’d seen a few other fash­ion shows dur­ing my time in La Paz, and in Latin Amer­ica. It’s appar­ently some­thing they take very seri­ously. This one wasn’t a lot dif­fer­ent, other than the fact it was on pub­lic TV in La Paz., which is some­thing like pub­lic access TV in Spokane or Yakima. It was very, very funny, and well, it was late, and there wasn’t any­thing else on, so I watched. And laughed.

It had a very Zoolan­der feel to it. The mod­els, if you could call them that, were all over the board. At this time, I hadn’t been to Brazil yet, so some were look­ing pretty good. There was a wide range of women, and they all looked like they were about to throw up because of nerves. I did luck into the swim­suit por­tion of the show, which is really the only part of a run­way mod­el­ing worth look­ing at. I don’t know the order, but they had the pret­ti­est girls last. First you had the nor­mal look­ing girls come out, one by one, some pretty and some not, all look­ing like they would rather be some­where else. Then as you got fur­ther into the bat­ting order, things started get­ting inter­est­ing. One of the early girls had a very big swim­suit on — sort of an Amish num­ber. A lit­tle later, one had way too much cel­lulite for some­one so young, or for some­one on a stage. Even­tu­ally one woman took it up a notch by going with a thong bikini (Dar­ing!!) In an even more dar­ing move the next girl came out with a thong bikini AND oil. Very blue steel. It made me laugh, it made me cheer, and I finally went to sleep.

The other dis­turb­ing thing on TV in La Paz was the num­ber of dead peo­ple. I’ve never really seen a dead per­son on TV before, and here I prob­a­bly saw one every two nights. And it wasn’t the cov­ered dead peo­ple, with a clean white blan­ket and maybe feet stick­ing out. Nope — it was dead peo­ple with bul­let holes and blood and star­ing eyes. Very unpleasant.