School's In

I haven't written for a while because I have been waiting on my trip to Puno, Peru to give you the whole story on school. Yes, I have been accepted to my masters program and classes started last weekend. I have class Thursdays and Fridays from 8:30-5:30 more or less with about a 2 hour break for lunch. Saturday mornings I also go from 8:30-12:30ish. I don't give exact times, because there are no exact times in Bolivia, even in a masters level university program. I surprised me when the second student to arrive (after me) was 30 minutes late the first day of class, and we got started about 15 minutes after that. The other two days were also 30 minutes late in starting. I guess that will be something to get used to. It is hard to judge when to leave the house in the morning with a cross-town trip during morning rush hour and not knowing if we are going to start on time or not.
Each weekend we are covering a different topic, each of which will be more of a round-table seminar style with plenty of field work thrown in. There are 12 students right now, 2 Mexicans being the only other foreigners, and about half of them with a background in agronomy or ecology. The rest of us are a mix of all different stuff, which I hope will bring some diversity of thought and experience to the table.
So why was I in Puno, Peru this weekend? It was to go get a student visa. Here they recently changed the law so that a person in the country with a tourist visa cannot apply for another visa while inside the country. Immigration here and a immigration lawyer I talked to said I had to leave the country, go to the nearest Bolivian consulate, and if I present my official documents from the school they will give me a "Determined Objective" visa, which gives me 30 days to get my student visa process rolling. So, I left Saturday night on a trip to Peru. To make a long story short, the consul would not give me a visa. He claims the visa I wanted has to be for work, not study, and the only place I could get a student visa was in my own country. So at 4am last night, 53 hours and 1400kms later, I arrived back home without what I needed. So now we are working on a way for me to get a work contract from someone so I can go back again and get the visa. Right now I don't care what kind of visa it is, as long as I can stay. I think things will work out, just not as conviniently as planned. Lord willing.