a Paz reminds me of San Francisco -- you're either going uphill or downhill, and everything looks like it could topple at any minute. The streets are always crowded with vendors and businessmen and students -- most of them friendly and not white -- but on my first day alone in the city, I walk outside at 10am, and the streets of La Paz are deserted.
"What's happening?" I ask the hotel manager as he unlocks the door to let me out.
"It's nothing," he says. He lies. He lied about the fresh coffee too. That shit was instant.
Two police officers walk up the steep, cobbled street with their hands behind their back. "Good morning," one says. "Where are you going?"
"A hotel," I say, looking around at all the padlocked storefronts.
"You just came from a hotel," he says, smirking.
"It's too expensive. The other hotel is cheaper."
"Okay, you can go. But when you get there, you can't leave again. No one's allowed to walk on the streets today. We're conducting a census."
A census.
Over a million people stay home, shut down their work, evacuate the streets ... for a census?
Now, you or I might ask: What's wrong with a thick envelope in the mail? What's wrong with a few solicitous phone calls? But of course, you are I aren't Bolivian. Apparently this is rote stuff for them, so rote that nobody bothered to mention it. So I head to the other, cheaper hotel, which turns out to be a total disaster -- freezing cold with a box of wheezing springs for a bed -- and stay there all day, wrapped up in all the warm clothes I have.
That's my story. It's not much, but it'll have to do.