Welcome to June - winter in Cochabamba, Bolivia.  We still have "summer temperatures" during the day, as high as 76 degrees, but during the nights it gets down to 48.  Without heat in the apartment, that is downright chilly.  We are now in the dry season, but even so everything is still green.  I hear we won't get any rain until October or November.  By then I suppose a lot of our green will have turned to brown as it does in California during the summer.  At any rate, I'll keep you posted.

This will be a short blog because I don't have anything terribly exciting to tell you - just a few random photographs and notes about life down here.  Next Monday we (all the temple missionaries) are going on a paseo (an excursion) to a place that is three hours away by bus.  I can't remember the name of the area nor all the reasons we are going there except that I do know they have a zoo we will be visiting and I'm not sure what else.  So expect new sights next week.

Meanwhile, here are some of the beautiful and/or interesting realities of living in Cochabamba.

First, a beautiful orange flower that to me looks like a relative of the flowering jasmine we have in California.  I truly wish I could bring this flower home with me and plant it somewhere around our house but I don't think our neighbors would want it overgrowing the fence between our houses, and our only other fence is home to our blackberries so that wouldn't work either.  Anyway, isn't it gorgeous?  A lady sweeping the sidewalk outside the home told us ALL these flowers are from just one plant inside the wall!

Second, a good view of one of the buses so common in the city.  Bus #3 - the one we catch here by the temple to go anywhere downtown - doesn't look anywhere near this exotic.  I have never ridden in one of these, but they certainly catch my eye.

Third, Farron and I were walking the 1/2 mile or so to the grocery store and saw this lady ahead of us.  Well, more accurately, we saw this enormous load of "something" ahead of us and could barely tell there was a person under it.  We almost ran to catch up and finally got close enough to see it was a native woman with her son and, to our relief, the bags are full of empty bottles (so they're not as heavy as I first feared.)  She is a recycler - and no, I don't know where she finds the bottles.  Her son is carrying one that wouldn't fit or they found later, I guess.

Lastly, I don't think I've mentioned that we are dealing "controlled substances" (is that the right phrase?)  Down here you can't buy baking soda as such, nor can you buy Clorox without signing for it.  Both are used in some kind of drug-making process (our son Jordan could probably tell us what kind but I keep forgetting to ask him), so if you want soda for baking, you go to the pharmacy and buy it in little tiny packets like this. 

If you want Clorox for your laundry, you have to sign for it at the grocery store and they record your name and identification number (the better to find and arrest you, I suppose).  Who'd have thought?

Okay, that's all for today.  More (and more interesting, I hope) next week.  Vayan con Dios . . .