In the name of research!

"I may not be there yet, but I am closer than I was yesterday." - Author Unknown

This past week I have started doing a lot of research about my project topic of Mercosur and the Bolivian integration into the Latin American market. On Tuesday afternoon I visited the Library of Congress and looked through the old editions of Bolivian newspapers to get an idea about the political implications of Mercosur. The majority of newspaper articles were about the war in Iraq and the collapse of the Soviet Union. On Wednesday morning, instead of our regular class, we went up to El Alto to visit the factory that manufactures traditional and modern medicine. The factory is pretty small but manufactures many medicines for Bolivia. A fact that surprised me was that the factory is owned by one family, instead of being a corporation of shareholders. That afternoon I went to the Ministry of Economics and Finance to look for more information. Apparently, the library for the ministry is nowhere near the actual ministry; I had to walk around for two hours and ask multiple police officers to find it. Eventually, a random guy on the street asked me what I was looking for and pointed me in the right direction. On Thursday we went back up to El Alto again to visit the Radio "Pachamama." A group of bloggers told us about the challenges of blogging in Aymara, an indigenous language. We also participated in the radio shows as the visiting speakers. Speaking in Spanish is a lot more difficult on the radio. I think I forgot how to conjugate most of the verb tenses. On Friday we were finally done with classes for the week; we went to Coroico on a weekend trip.