Second Day in Potosi

Hello all! Picking back up where we left off... on the morning of our second day in Potosi we headed to one of its convents, the convent of Saint Teresa, and took a two-hour guided tour of the part of the convent that had been turned into a museum. We saw models of the nuns' rooms showing how they slept with one blanket on the bare wooden boards of their bed (the temperature at night being below freezing), how they prayed on the brick floor of their room in the wee hours of the morning, and how they held group prayers with the other nuns seven times a day with the earliest one being at four in the morning. They would spend most of their day in embroidery, cooking, baking, and prayer. The examples of their hand-made embroidery were unbelievable! I came away impressed at what nuns can accomplish with their hands, and wondering at the hard life they led. You see, we learned that back then in that culture, there was a custom that if a wealthy family had three daughters, the first would marry a wealthy man, the second would become a nun, and the third would stay home and take care of her parents.

A view of the convent's courtyard.

After that, we searched for a place to eat lunch, and ended up finding just what we wanted, some llama meat. Fun fact: Llama meat has little fat compared to other red meats. And it's really delicious!

Llama meat is in the top left of the picture! Yum!

Our last activity of the day was riding from Potosi to the town of Uyuni, where we would start a three-day tour of the world's largest salt flat and some of Bolivia's lovely lakes and volcanoes. It was me and my brothers' first time riding in a flota! As some of you might remember, a flota is a huge bus designed to take people to different regions of Bolivia. It took four long hours to arrive at Uyuni. Once there, we ate a very un-Bolivian dinner of pizza, and settled into our hotel, eagerly awaiting  next day's adventure.

Adios for now!