La Paz's cemetery high above the city center is like a co-op city for dead people... Rows upon rows of apartment buildings for the remains, each little apartment fronted by a little shrine with a glass door and keyhole so families can come and decorate with flowers, cake, fruit, and other more permanent trinkets. Wandering around yesterday after buying bus tickets to Sorata in the neighborhood, I realized how different our cultural ideas of life and death are... and how easily Bolivians have come to remix the catholicism of Spanish colonialism and their local indigenous traditions, creating this crazy cemetery that's distinctly theirs, beautiful and strange.PS: Compare more photos of La Paz's cemetery on my flickr page to these from the the Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires!
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