After Spanish class today, I went for a walk in a part of the city I hadn't visited so far. My first stop was Parque Bolívar, a park that seems to have been created to appear French.The entrance gate certainly reminds me of a certain building in Paris:
To make the appearance complete, there is a small but not quite exact copy of the Eiffel tower a little further inside the park. My guidebook says that the copy was designed and constructed by the same Mr. Eiffel who was responsible for the original tower.
On the other side of the park, there is Sucre's old train station. A short time after the privatization of the Bolivian train company, trains stopped arriving in Sucre - not enough passengers for the journey to Potosí (because it can be done quicker in a bus). Today, the train station houses a part of the judiciary. Only a rusty old locomotive remains in the back yard to bear witness to the station's former glory.
In the evening, I passed by the Basilica San Francisco and noticed that the gates were open. From what I've seen, churches in Bolivia are closed most of the time (for fear of theft, apparently), so now whenever I see an open church I take a quick look inside.
The church was quite dark inside - the complete opposite to Sucre's cathedral. A strange thing was that the church has a big window on one side, through which you can see right into the courtyard of the building next door - which happens to be the military museum.
To make the appearance complete, there is a small but not quite exact copy of the Eiffel tower a little further inside the park. My guidebook says that the copy was designed and constructed by the same Mr. Eiffel who was responsible for the original tower.
On the other side of the park, there is Sucre's old train station. A short time after the privatization of the Bolivian train company, trains stopped arriving in Sucre - not enough passengers for the journey to Potosí (because it can be done quicker in a bus). Today, the train station houses a part of the judiciary. Only a rusty old locomotive remains in the back yard to bear witness to the station's former glory.
In the evening, I passed by the Basilica San Francisco and noticed that the gates were open. From what I've seen, churches in Bolivia are closed most of the time (for fear of theft, apparently), so now whenever I see an open church I take a quick look inside.
The church was quite dark inside - the complete opposite to Sucre's cathedral. A strange thing was that the church has a big window on one side, through which you can see right into the courtyard of the building next door - which happens to be the military museum.
