Exercise 9 Anthony Fernandez

When You Stand By Christ

                When most people think of traveling to an exotic place somewhere in the world, usually they are thinking of the beaches of Hawaii or the fashion malls of Paris. For me, I instead went to a country that is perhaps not as well-known as it could be, but it still is good: Bolivia. Located in South America on the southern edge of Brazil, Bolivia is where my father’s side of the family lives. For my Spring Break, we visited them in the city of Cochabamba. It was during this visit that we decided to visit on of the city’s most notable and famous landmarks: The Christ Statue.

                It was an interesting trip for a couple of reasons. For starters, when most people think of a Christ Statue, they think of the on in Brazil. While that one is probably more famous since it looks out over Rio de Janeiro, one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, it is actually smaller than the statue that we visited in Bolivia. This makes being in its presence all the more rewarding and exciting to go visit it. It makes you feel, if only a little, like you are in the presence of the Lord.

                Another interesting thing was getting up to see it. Needless to say, crime in Cochabamba, or Bolivia in general, was fairly prolific. With that said, there were really only two ways to get up or down from the Christ Statue: stairs or a ski lift type machine in which you sit in a large bubble with windows and ride it to the upper part of the mountain. Obviously it would be cheaper to take the stairs to get up and down, but it is also just too high to be about to walk up and down that mountain without keeling over dead from exhaustion. That in mind, we decided that we would all rid the lift up to the top together and on the way back down.

Look at me. I'm one with the Lord!

                When we actually reached the top and were enjoying the view, we noticed that there were signs everywhere warning that if you took the stairs to get down there was a very good chance that you would get robbed. Initially, we were just brushing off this detail as a friendly warning that you just accept and move on with. However, the more we thought about it and how bad it would be to get robbed, we finally decided to just spend the extra money and rid the lift back down together.

                Once we had that matter figured out, we proceeded to go up to the statue itself, which was even bigger up close that I thought it would be. It was there that I had my dad this picture of me. We took other pictures while we were there, but this was the picture I took as I captured myself mimicking the look of the statue. This way, I would never forget that I was there at the statue with my family.

                Sadly, the visit was not as fun as it could have been. The biggest disappointment was that we couldn’t get inside the statue. You see, there are stairways within the statue that visitors can go through and look out various holes strategically placed in the statue so that you can look out at an increasingly greater height and really enjoy the view. Unfortunately, they only allow such activity on weekends and it was on a Wednesday that we were doing all this. So still had a great view, just not a view from the statue itself.

                Despite this little hindrance, we were still about to just have a peaceful time high up looking out over the city. My father greatly enjoyed it because it was his time to point to various places all over the city saying that that was where he used to live, go to school, place on the soccer team, and so on. The view was something he had already seen many times as a kid, but not it was his time to share that same view with his family and it was a good view.

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