Even Mennonites get a Big Mac attack

In the spirit of this blog being a repository of odd things that we come across here in Santa Cruz de La Sierra, here's a new one:
Yesterday was the second time in four or so months that I felt the need for a fast food fix, so I popped into the city's only Burger King.The first thing I saw was a table of four Mennonite men -- sunburnt skin, blond hair peeking from under straw hats, pressed blue overalls -- digging into four Whoppers.
The site of Mennonites walking around Santa Cruz was a bit jarring when we got here, but we quickly got used to that. There is a devout community from Germany and Canada that settled outside the city and farms soy and sunflowers and they often come in to buy food and supplies in local markets. Women are usually covered in bonnets and long dresses. Men almost infallably wear the overalls and straw hats.
But something about catching Orthodox adherents of a sect that encourages its members' separation from mainstream society in the very symbol of mainstream society made me laugh.

Another insidious U.S. export

A few months back I was alarmed to see a conga line of blindfolded executives outside my glass door.
In a trust game, participants in the Hay Group retreat were blindly making their way across the putting green using Teamwork and Synergy. My guess is they were "thinking outside the box" and Continuously Improving (tm) and using Total Quality Management (tm) too. I could smell the proactivity.
Not even the rutted roads of Santa Cruz, the high Andes, the vast rain forest or the Gran Chaco could deter the culty corporate training that has brainwashed legions of MBAs across the globe into thinking that productivity and creativity can be coaxed out by PowerPoint (tm) and buffet brunch.
A symptom of how pervasive this epidemic has become is the propensity of multi-day seminars here, like the two I participated in back in La Paz. The goal of organizers seems to be to take an interesting subject and invite "experts" to discuss it in the most theoretical and abstract way in marathon sessions until the subject is no loner interesting.
By the time I took the podium in La Paz -- two days deep into a seminar about responsible journalism -- not even a reincarnated Simon Bolivar could have roused my audience. PowerPoint is hypnotic. Pretty colors, flashing pictures, wipers. Zzzzz.

Invasion of Floricienta and Fans

Los Tajibos, our hotel/apartment complex, was invaded by an army of little girls dressed in pink and orange and striped stockings this weekend. They were hoping to get a glimpse of Floricienta, the tv/music/dance star from Argentina in town to perform to 20,000 screaming fans at the soccer stadium and, as you can see in the photos, giving hotel staff a good workout.
To compare Floricienta to Britney or Hillary Duff or another female American pop star would underestimate her influence. Her fans form a cult whose adherents must wear clashing fluorescent colors and odd newsboy hats, who buy up newspapers whenever they include a free color poster and convince their parents to let them stake out her hotel early into the morning with the hope of catching a glimpse (she snuck out a side door without notice, but co-stars graciously signed autographs all morning Sunday.)
The scene reminded me of one of my more shameful reporting assignments: To stake out the apartment of the lover and beneficiary of former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey. Me and 40 or so odd reporters from other media, all with equally uncreative editors, were forced to spend some 36 hours in the FRONT entrance of Golan Cipel's apartment building.
Editors didn't want to hear that the high-rise building had several fire escapes, a garage and a few back doors that likely provided escape to the bugger soon after he made news. Or that if he did decide to leave his apartment through the front door, he probably wouldn't have said, "Well, alright: Since you guys have been stalking me for three days, I'll throw you a bone and give you each an exclusive interview."
So like teenage pop fans, we waited in the rain and cold, under umbrellas, in front of the building off Eighth Avenue for 36 hours straight. It wasn't until he appeared on television in Israel that we were given a license to go home.