Alaxpacha

Is the name of the group that I watched last night at the Municipal Theater of La Paz. Right now there's a political campaign to move congress and the president's office to Sucre. A pacheño (person from La Paz) told me that one reason is to bring more jobs of Sucre. But he also said that people from Sucre are often called locos because the country's largest mental institution is in Sucre. Apparently there's also an east/west rivalry in Bolivia (jaja, reminds me of gansta rap) where the two groups, cambas and cayas dislike each other. For example, if a person from Santa Cruz were to come to a disco in La Paz there would probably be a fight. The more important part is that the different regions, besides their rivalries, are continuing to develop their different music dance styles (for example chacarrera in Tarija). This reminds me, my favorite dance here is not the cueca, but the diablada. And one of my favorite andean songs is Señora Chichera (video).

Well, back to Alaxpacha. One of the music video dvds that I bought at the sunday market has their videos so I'm excited about finding a dvd player back in Chile.

In other news, I can't find Bolivian violins in La Paz. They would be located in Tarija or Santa Cruz (the part of Bolivia I didn't visit). They're interesting because one is three stringed with alternating tuning and the other is just a hollow stick with a bridge and pegs. I've found a bunch of wind instruments, though. Don't know how I'm going to travel with so many instruments.

BTW, I leave for Peru tomorrow morning at 8:00. Its a 12 hour trip to Cuzco so hopefully everything goes well and I'll be back online sometime Wednesday.

Tonight I'm going to travel back up to El Alto to interview another wind instrument artisan. Today I interviewed Señor Walata, which was more of a chat about the topless beaches of Barcelona than about the instruments because he too has traveled to Barcelona.