At the Copa... Copacabana....

Finally a good enough connection to post again... this time featuring the sleepy, little town of Copacabana, Bolivia, right on the shore of Lake Titicaca. Well...it's almost always a sleepy town... except of course for the festival week right before we got there. And you could tell! Two days later, it was totally different: neat, clean, and a bit quiet... very nice and still quite a few tourists. It was hard to find actually Bolivian foods on the menu... but it was easy to find full English breakfast, espresso, lasagna, and pizza. The only local food I tried (outside of the popcorn-like snacks in the market) was the trucha... I think that it's trout... and it was very tasty! :)

Our hotel was up the hill a bit and we had a wonderful view of the lake and all it's little paddleboats. A~ so wanted to sail one, but the water was a bit choppy and it was quite chilly. Although it was chilly, it's also quite sunny... and all of us had to get hats to protect ourselves from the sun. Just wish I got mine before the major sunburn on my face!

The lake is absolutely beautiful... and when you are looking at it you can't see the other side at all... looks just like an ocean, with a sandy shore to boot. We climbed up the hill behind the hotel to Calvario, where they have the stations of the cross on your way up to the top of the cliff... a little scary and very exhausting. We made it up right at sunset... and it was quite beautiful! Ironically there are vendors at the top selling trinkets... and I thought my commute was bad?!

Many of the city streets are on the hilly side to say the least... Some are paved with cobblestones or pavers, but many are dirt roads. Here's a photo of the steps at the bottom of the road coming from the hotel. Lots of pedestrians with these roads!

The cathedral was gorgeous, but no pics allowed inside. It's massive and the sidewalk outside has beautiful patterns in it using different shades and sizes of stones. The cathedral is famous for the Virgin of Copacabana which was created by one of the last living indigenous persons. She is the Virgin morena or the dark virgin. For the festival they had a replica outside so that people could stop and take pictures and such with it. I took the cathedral's museum tour where they have many medieval works of art, gifts given to the cathedral, and dresses for the Virgin morena... they have enough handmade, embroiderd gowns to last until the 2040's already.