Yes, City of Sloth. Not this Sloth, who owns a permanent throne in my heart, and in the area of my brain that controls dental hygiene, a different kinda sloth. Marinate on that one for a bit. Sin embargo, Santa Cruz, almost in the center of Bolivia, was as idle as they come. Idle in a good kinda way though, reminiscent of a hot, dusty, windswept sunny day where this fantasy finds you sitting on a porch sipping scotch (or whatever posion you happened to have picked) until the rapture. In the city of Santa Cruz, there was one beautiful, marble laiden plaza with ample seating and just enough shade, where I spent most of my time reading, writing, or just all around people watching. Somehow Santa Cruz has amassed a stunning population of female lookers, again I meant lookers with an L. Curved to perfection, graduates of strutting school, they were the most beautiful women I have seen in a Bolivian city to date.

My cultural expenditures included a zoo visit that was made remarkable by the sight of one zoo worker who had to wheel barrow around nearly 150lbs of pure cow shank. It looked like he was fresh off the screen of some quentin tarrentino film of gormasic proportion...truly, it was a very queer and grisly site. In retrospect, there seems to be a trend of raw, large, and bleeding sections of viscera in my South American experience. The zoo must have had around 8 big cats, 4 of them being my idolized jaguars. I have a special connection with jaguars. I used to honestly want to be one. My innitials spell J.A.G. I used to work on my "cat" skills by walking around really quitely, trying to sneak up on people. I dont know how I feel about telling everyone this. Yet immediate family will verify. Anywho, Mr. Zoo Keeper would just heave in an entire leg/rib section (minus hide) for the animals to dine upon, and it was really entertaining.

This wasnt the sparkling gem of the zoo however, because nothing would top my wild sloth sightings. The Sloth, El Perisozo, my new favorite animal. This animal drips with pure delight. At first impression, they are obviously popular for their behavior which comes the closest in the animal kingdom to a bonafied pot head aspiring to be a rasta but stuck at retarded hippy status. While pondering the sophisticated question of why this animal is so cool, I came to realize that there is something so much more pleasing about them, something much easier. They just chill out. They are the kings of cool, the sultans of smooth. If they were to drink juice, their selection would clearly be mellow yellow. Their name in Spanish, Perisozo, actually means lazy. A slow turtle, missing a leg, afflicted by a debilitating turtle disease, would probably beat a sloth in a (claw?) race. But they just chill and accept the world as it is, in the face of global warming, of human obesity, the mystery of sasquatch. Thats what I love about them, their non aggressive, hangin out in a tree house all day, leaf eating attitudes.

My last day in the plaza I witnessed a full on sloth rescue. Yeah, that plaza also had free living sloths in its trees. The rescue was unsuccessful, and unnecessary, as Mr. Sloth chose on the side of his instincts and stay in the tree on that windy day. I think it was the intention of the sloth rescuers to relocate the lazy one back to the zoo, a supposedly safer place for him to dwell. Apparently the plaza was a dangerous place for them to parooze. I did hear stories of them, while crawling across the gray tiles of the plaza in transit between trees, getting booted like soccer balls by pedestrians who simply failed to see them. They moved so slow and slothy, and their grey fur would cause them to blend right into the grey tile, that it would result in them getting regularly blasted by Bolivian boot. ¡GENTE ABREN SUS OJOS! I have more sloth stories, like meeting a girl who was in fact about to recieve a sloth tattoo the very next day, but I am tired of writing the word sloth as I am sure you are all tired of reading it. Check in soon for the next entry which will dive into the crazy, sometimes unbecoming hair (above the neck) styles and grooming practices of professional travelers. Until then, Peace, Paz, and Shalom. Joey Bolivia is out.