Lucas in... Baja?

What an exciting day! 24 hours ago I was sitting at Little Chihuahua with Matthew Cline and Katherine Bliss telling San Francisco adios for 2.5 months. 20 hours ago I was at the airport, checking my over-stuffed bag of clothing, and odd summer supplies (alarm clock, flashlight, batteries!). 15 hours ago I was landing in Mexico City. And 8 hours ago I landed in... La Paz, Baja California, Mexico!

We were aiming, of course, for La Paz, Bolivia, but it didn't quite work out that way! Some warning signs that maybe we should have noticed before actually landing and deplaning in the completely wrong country:

1. We boarded our flight to La Paz (note, they always only said "La Paz" without the conditional "Bolivia" after) and noticed that we were flying on a TINY plane. The type of plane that maybe wouldn't quite make it all the way to Bolivia... But the seats were comfy and we had just flown a Red Eye to Mexico City, so nobody was questioning it. 
2. The flight attendant (in Spanish) said that our flight would be 1 hour and 15 minutes... but I figured I had heard her wrong since my Spanish isn't amazing and thought nothing of our tiny plane and tiny flight time.
3. As we were descending into La Paz, I noticed A LOT of water surrounding us. Like significantly more water than the only large body of water near Bolivia, Lake Titicaca, could ever produce. Hmmmmmm... Bolivia is land locked and yet we are landing in an airport surrounded by water...
4. We land. There are... cacti everywhere? And desert? This looks like Texas? 
5. Manuela goes to put on her boots (which she has taken off during the flight) and the man next to her jokes that she won't need her boots at the beach... 

Well, shit. We most certainly landed in La Paz, Baja California, Mexico. Not La Paz, Bolivia. Once we realized this, we all proceeded to look around in astonishment as we entered the tiniest airport in the entire world. After about six hours of trying to contact people in both the States and Bolivia via my American iPhone in a wi-fi less airport we got it figured out! The amazing coordinator of our program at USF Andrea pulled everything together for us and we are now flying out of La Paz tomorrow night on a 5-part journey to Bolivia that will take us a solid 29 hours. BUT we are not dead, have not been decapitated in the drug war, and no one has had to start popping their amodium yet... so I consider this a success.