“A la esquina por favor!” – and immediately the bus comes to a sudden halt: the passenger dangling off of the bus briskly steps onto the street as an influx of new passengers flood the micro. As I was venturing through the narrow streets experiencing travel like a true Cochabambino, I felt like a child whose face was plastered to the window of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory…if only it had a window…

The 3v micro is the cheapest bus you can take in all of Cochabamba, which means that my roommate Chelsea and I got a 2 ½ hour tour of the city for 1 Boliviano each – or about 14 cents. We drive by Plaza Colon, home to two of Cochabamba’s most popular snack shops – Globos and Dumbo’s (and yes, Dumbo’s logo is an elephant with abnormally large ears…). We drive by the Plaza de 14 de septiembre, which is a one of Cochabamba’s markets: a labyrinth of little stalls selling everything from cloth purses to electronic equipment to tasty sweets. We see fountains in city squares, cholas selling juice of every type of tropical fruit, infants wrapped up in hand-woven, vividly colorful blankets on the backs of their mothers, children hopping on the micro to sell fresh caramel treats or popcorn made from kernels that are 5 times bigger than those back home, stalls with hundreds of stuffed animals hanging from makeshift tarp ceilings, fruits stacked to look like little edible Eiffel Towers, shoes of every style, shape and size, and tiny frying pans making papas fritas (French fries), plantanos (plantains), and frying dozens of other types of meat. We get stuck in deadlock traffic for 17 minutes, we pass by pharmacies with bags of diapers hanging from their shop’s overhang, stalls of hundreds of bedazzled cell-phone covers, school notebooks, and apparel that looks like it’s from the movie Flashdance or Girls Just Want to Have Fun, hundreds of Taquina logos (a natively brewed beer), fresh empanadas, pastries and cakes embellished with colorful frosting and toppings looking like creations made by all the Food Network cake decorators together, fresh vegetables – smaller than our ridiculously large American counterparts, but are without a doubt significantly more flavorful and juicy, and this was only in the first 45 minutes!

My senses were challenged to multitask in ways that I could have never foreseen, and I had quickly forgotten that the initial intention of taking the micro was to eventually return to our humble abode. After an hour on this carousel around the city, my face and camera lens still stuck to the window by my seat, I turn to find that a small child had magically materialized onto my lap. In my attempts to catch everything we drove by, I failed to realize that the micro was now packed fuller than a suitcase you need to jump on to close. A man and his toddler had just gotten on the micro. The old lady who was sitting next to me took it upon herself to find this toddler a place to call home for this bus ride and ended up choosing my lap as her solution. So I was holding this stranger’s plump little child, wearing this soft wool hat, carrying a small bag of freshly popped popcorn, pointing out the window saying “Yola! Yola!” every couple seconds. When we had gotten on, we asked the bus driver if it goes to the stadium, and he responded that the bus goes “everywhere!” Well…it certainly did.

Suddenly, the bus started to empty out and finally stopped in this abandoned, dirt parking lot. The route was over – but we were still on the bus. Okay…so what now? After clarifying yet again that we had wanted to go to the stadium, the driver motioned to another bus that was about to leave into the city. As we were heading back into the city, the route didn’t overlap with anything we had driven by the first time. It drove through La Cancha: the biggest market in South America – this was yet another test of my senses. I counted 22 different smells just within a span of about 2 minutes! After many more twisty roads and one-way cobble stone streets, we finally reached the stadium, from where we could walk back home – but were now equipped with a significantly greater understanding and appreciation for the city and people of Cochabamba.

I had the unbelievable pleasure of getting onto a micro headed in the completely opposite direction: how lucky…