Skedaddle Prattle

Mixed metaphors

2011-08-31T12:05:00.001-05:00

Behind the ping of raindrops on corrugated ceilings, over the rumble of the Pacific -- the heavy surf breaking over the jagged boulders scarring the beaches at Las Peñitas, the asthmatic wheeze of water sucked back to sea -- the perceptible sizzle made me grimace, my body tensing the way one does anticipating impact, being struck. Like incandescent gashes suddenly torn into the night, electrical surges lurched across the black, horizontally, branching out and crookedly out, like NCAA tournament brackets from a Parkinson's afflicted hand unfurling in reverse, the spiderwebbing of cracking glass radiating away from the point of origin; then, extinguished, ocean and heavens remarried in darkness, the only remnants the etherial singes on unblinking irises.

Alone on the unlit street, power in Las Peñitas having gone out some time ago, I decided my life was worth more than seven dollars, approximately what I'd budgeted for a going away feast of pescado frito, tostones, y arroz, accompanied by either a cold Toña or Coca-Cola, the latter to this day concocted with real sugar in Central America. With beach spread to my left and nothing in the way of trees or houses for several hundred meters, I moved from a walking to jogging lightning rod.

Back in my beachfront hostel, the same one that advertised "Horse Ridding" as an activity coordinated for visitors -- and someone must have taken them up on it; I saw nary a horse in my two days at the beach -- I reclined under a thatched roof and scarfed down the package of ten Oreos in my pocket, admiring the most violent display of lightning I've ever seen.

The sky was ablaze. It was like sitting inside a tent that light could hardly penetrate as an army of Samurai warred on the outside, frequent and errant sword strokes tearing gashes into the walls, unpredictably scattering across the canvas blinding streaks of light that were, inexplicably, cloaked anew in an instant. In the moments between sharp flashes a dull glow would pulse on all sides, like the night sky of a city under siege, a city in flames, observed from a distance, evidence that beyond, behind clouds and obstacles, the storm raged.

The next day I was back in León, wandering the city one last time, in the evening catching a microbus to Managua, then a cab to the airport. The cabby and I chatted the whole fifteen minute trip, which cost me under five dollars after tip, and he gave me his phone number -- another friend the next time I'm in Nicaragua.

At the airport, going through security, I inexplicably thought back to the bottle of Smirnoff Ice someone had left in my hostel room in León. "What a waste," I thought, "How hilarious it would have been to hide the twelve ounce and thus not carry-on legal bottle in my carry-on, and then explode with a 'You got iiiiiiiicceedd, bbiiiiiiiiiiiiiittcchh' when bag-screening security personnel uncovered it in my bag."

I wonder if they play that game in Nicaragua. I wonder if Nicaraguan airport security personal are allowed to have a sense of humor. I wonder if sometime I'll get so intoxicated pre-flight that I'll think it's a good idea to ice airport security. I hope so.

Delta Air Lines plays an instructional safety video before flights, during which passengers are advised that "most seat cushions can be used as flotation devices." One would presume that Delta knows which particular seat cushions are floatable and which aren't, considering that all distinct cushion types -- headrests, seat backs, seat bottoms, etc -- should be constructed according to identical, type-particular specifications. Yet, the company chooses ambiguity, promising survivors extra post-crash insanity -- amidst flames and wreckage and scattered limbs and torsos, screams and wails -- a mad and savage scramble to figure out which fucking seat cushions will keep your legless torso afloat until rescuers arrive.

More likely than anything, Delta knows, should your plane crash into the ocean, nobody is going to survive. So it really doesn't matter.

Toward the end of my trip, after my Spanish had edged out of rusty unpracticedness, I was asked, by native speakers who had known me for several days, once if I was Spanish, another time whether I was Argentine or Spanish. And there was no asterisk, nothing about me being latino but retarded. Which felt nice, complimentary without being an intended compliment, and it almost made me forgot an encounter weeks earlier in Masaya, when I was getting back into the groove of español 24/7; I'd unintentionally indicated to two chatty and obviously gay teenagers, after having clarified I was a connoisseur of titties, a fiend for the latina, that I would consider joining them in a romp of the homosexual style. "Pero no sos gay, verdad?"

Indeed not.

So now I'm back in the States, with a trip booked to Guatemala just after Thanksgiving, a little mission work.

That mission: to educate a few café-colored, Católicas Chapinas about the advantages and pleasures of contraception, a pocketful of Trojans and a healthy libido my teaching aids.

The top Latin American travel accessory: white girls.

2011-08-21T20:30:00.001-05:00

If we've talked business, money gettin' schemes, anytime in the last year, I've probably mentioned my interest in robbery: bank and tourist. Minutes after arriving in León, sipping an average and overpriced, at thirty Córdobas, mojito at Bigfoot's hostel front bar, chatting to a German girl who'd just recounted the story of how she'd found herself in the hostel's dorm for the last month, a story that began with her being robbed, I found myself prefacing my monologue: "You know, I probably shouldn't be saying this in a hostel, especially a hostel swimming with irresponsible travelers who've yet to experience any significant setback."

I outlined why I hate working. Because I'm lazy. And that I like working with kids, especially chavalitos in Latin America. And that volunteer work gives me a boner. Because this variety of altruistic endeavour, at least in Latin America, seems to attract, almost exclusively, women; and these typically European or Australian or Canadian, sometimes Brazilian or Argentinean or Chilean women, let me assure you, are inarguably ones, one representing an affirmative vote on the binary scale, you would or you wouldn't. And they're the best kind of ones -- ones even before you've taken them out to the Peruvian disco, even before you begin the usual debaucherous descent toward flirting with the toothless Chicklet vendor on your lonely stumble home; they're ones before you begin slamming the free drinks purchased by ticket currency distributed indisciminately outside, on disco row, where a gaggle of hype men hoping to entice white people, but especially gringas, into any of many indistinguishable bars push multicolored confetti into your chest, your pocket, your hand; some of the slips will fall into the recesses of your pocket to be fished out, wrinkled and faded, some weeks later, by the local woman doing your laundry. If that slip of paper could talk, it would chuckle, reminding you why you love volunteering in Perú, surrounded by tons of ones: because every time you go out there's the chance someone else might do what you can't -- because even your expansive moral spectrum has boundaries -- and slip a roofie in a white girl's drink, and you might be around to benefit. There's your boner. Or potential boner.

But I digress. To my enraptured German audience of one, I spilled the beans. "What I think would be a great idea, something that would allow me to travel and volunteer and not exert too much effort, would be robbing tourists. Digital cameras, wallets, laptops, all those valuables that travelers have a bad habit of leaving around, in the open, while they shower or sleep or take day trips." She didn't seem particularly amused, but that's probably because she's German, who aren't allowed to laugh as punishment for their history. I turned and talked to a Swiss kid who was checking in. The German girl left at some point.

The next morning I awoke to the Swiss kid, who happened to bunk in the bed over mine, tearing the sheets off his bed, dumping his bags out, belly to the floor searching under the bed. "Somebody stole my wallet," he said. "It was in these shorts last night," shorts that fell off the bed sometime in the night, maybe scattering their contents on the floor. I did the usual frowning, overturning of things, then went back to sleep, hoping the German girl, who was two beds over, wasn't witnessing this.

That night, or maybe it was the next, I ate some good pizza. The first good pizza I've had in Latin America. I went out to the underpopulated beaches at las Peñitas, forty five minutes on the hottest, most cramped chicken bus I've ever had the misfortune of riding; after the seats and aisles were completely, one hundred percent overflowing with sweaty flesh smushed against sweaty flesh, the fare-collecter holding a rail, hanging halfway out the front door, seven gringos, replete with backpacks, showed up. People must've sucked in their guts, or maybe they shoved children under seats, because the gringos made it on. Sitting on the right side of the bus, there was a wall of people, standing, the length of the aisle, making it perfectly impossible for me to observe anything except bellies to my left. All the way to the front of the bus, and down the stairs, were people standing, preventing me from seeing anything out of the windshield. My field of vision was a rectangular tunnel: all seatbacks and heads to the front of the bus, a human wall to my left, windows to my right, mercifully open. The warm water washed away the sweat and grime, and a couple of cute Caleñas I met, after they waved and yelled at the gringo punishing his calves with a soft-sand run, the older of whom is studying medicine in León, made me forget the grueling ride to arrive.

Last night I met Justin, a cool kid originally from Greensboro, who'd studied at UNCC and the University of Michigan, with whom I share a love of alcohol and Latina complexions, and we ended up on a six hour binge -- beer then tequila then more beer then a lot of rum then more beer, some driving -- with a random group of Nicaraguan men we shared a table with at the crowded BárBaro. I woke up to a cleaning lady telling me it was time for check out, and was I planning to stay another night? I wasn't, but I didn't really have a choice. Still in León.

With word of good pizza spreading fast, I joined a few nice British girls from the hostel while they ate. Dinner was unceremoniously interrupted by a heavily intoxicated, well dressed Nicaraguan gentleman, with a nice collection of shiny gold teeth; I'd noticed him standing behind our table, admiring the white skin of my companions, and my Buenas, apparently, was an invitation to sit down. He knocked over one of the girl's drinks, didn't seem too perturbed, and wiped up the spill with his elbow. Within a minute or two he'd picked up the glass and started drinking what was left. He never reached for the pizza, but I tried to move it out of arm's length. His English was indecipherable, mostly gibberish, but he was proficient in drinking lingo: "You give me beer. Yes!" He was stroking the girls arms regularly, shaking hands with everyone, repeatedly, every time he thought he'd mastered another phrase in English, which was often. "I am English!" He'd cock his head and coo at the girls, "Amor. Entendés? Jooo are wuv." He told us he was driving himself.

I went to the bathroom, which I thought would be his cue to whip out his cock, after the girls assured me they'd be fine. When I came back, he was gone, and I'd missed the best part: the stagger slash lean-in for kisses-that-never-materialized when he said goodbye, shaking hands with the girls, his head just hovering in the vicinity of their faces.

Waiting for the dinner check a car stopped in the street, far from the intersection, far from the stop sign, in front of the window in which we were sitting. A different Nicaraguan man just staring and smiling. Then he waved. After thirty seconds or so, he made his way to the stop sign, and then off.

White girls.

Choridedos and Vení, cagame! Muriendo de risa en Estelí

2011-08-19T14:32:00.008-05:00

I finally pried myself away from Masaya, hitching a ride to the bus station at the back of the Mercado Municipal from Marbel's dad, loaded up with gifts from the family -- trinkets and snacks for the road, zapote and a heavy portion of moist sopa borracha, a traditional spice cake bathed in a sugar-sweetened aguardiente. Off to Estelí.

The drive to northern Nicaragua is refreshing, driving through verdant mountains, distant volcanoes framed against the sky, the air noticably cooler. Arriving in Estelí I thought I'd check out my old digs, Hospedaje El Chepito. There was a new TV in the corridor around which the rooms are arranged. Inside the rooms, the walls had been redone, extended all the way to the ceiling, buffering sleepers from the snores and proclivities of their neighbors. The concrete floors had also been tiled.

On the other hand, huespedes now gathered in front of the TV, watching at full volume until some hour long after I'd gone to bed. There was also an impressive cockroach infestation; when I brushed against one of my shoes the next morning, two cockroaches scuttled from their dark refuge under its sole. The shared toilet was also sans seat, yet someone had bricked the lay-up, smearing a portion of the extra-wide rim with waste (it was cleaned, mostly, by the next morning). My bed was covered in some sort of crumb, and there was no sheet with which to cover myself, so I was forced to rise at various points of the night to layer myself against the cool. A long sleeve shirt, first. Later, socks.

I changed hostels the next morning, spent a night in a dorm at a backpacker-populated joint, remembered that, for the sake of undisturbed sleep, I prefer to have my own room, and moved to Hostal Santa María the next morning. More cheaply rented rooms in a nice family home than a true hostel, it was a gem: clean, cheap, a nice family and a desayuno típico included in the price.

My days in Estelí were spent walking familiar streets; sitting on the curb, sipping cans of Toña with Eddy and Santiago; chatting with Isamara. Not sweating. More than anything else, I spent afternoons with Luz Marina, relaxing on benches in the shaded parque infantil, chatting for hours, laughing frequently como retardados. We're a silly pair, from two separate worlds. Her favorite food is gallo pinto. She lives in one of the barrios somewhere far across the panamericana, somewhere I've yet to visit. She doesn't like to walk there after dark, and she needs to help her mother prepare dinner, so the descent of the sun whispers for us, hasta mañana. Her mom toils, sunup to sundown, and earns less than US$100 monthly, and on afternoons that she plays the lottery, at a dollar per ticket, accompaniment for the gallo pinto becomes a longshot. Her father, with arthritic knees, is barely able to work. A brother contributes some, and gifts Luz Marina a few pesitos when he can. A cousin in the US wires money, when he can; infrequently, recently, as he'd been saddled with expensive personal medical bills. She can't afford the medical attention she might need. She hasn't gone out to enjoy the city's nightlife since I last took her out, over two years ago. She's as good a friend as I have.

We walked out of the city to La Casita, went out to lunches at restaurants she had only glanced at before. Mostly, we laughed, and smiled, and enjoyed.

Yesterday afternoon we said goodbye, I caught a cab from my hostal to Cotran Sur and, a bus change later, stepped down in León, drips of sweat from the tip of my nose discoloring the dust at my feet. If I were sleeping in a leak-free coffin equipped with an industrial air conditioner, it might not be enough.

Staying in what's truly a backpacker hostel, at least fifty beds, the bar area is a whirlwind of English-speaking, Spanish-butchering Europeans and a bilingual staff; loud packs of travelers cackle drunkenly from every corner. I'm suddenly at a loss for how to communicate. I drink a liter at the bar, aware of the path of each individual drop of sweat sliding and stopping and sliding again down my back.

But the city is beautiful, the architecture impressive. And every new destination promises new culinary experiences, like the repocheta asada, a corn tortilla, estilo nicaragüense, folded, filled with cheese, and grilled, served hot with pickled onions and a cabbage salad. To combat the heat, a raspado -- quite simply, shaved ice swimming in condensed milk, or whichever other syrup of your choice. Whether the ice is frozen agua pura, and whether the haggard iceman has washed his hands anytime, ever, before scraping the block, then molding the shavings into a packed dome in your bowl, are questions one can't really consider, especially with a size large not even rounding fifty cents. And the blackish flecks caught in the cloyingly sweet, light-brown stew, well, I'm just hoping that was cinnamon crusted under his fingernails.

A Gringo Again

2011-08-17T12:24:00.021-05:00

I kept sweating out visits at sixty cents an hour at a random Cyber (internet without café) in Masaya, Nicaragua, returning daily with aspirations of composing a few paragraphs that'd charm jealousy out of air-conditioned offices back home. It's took me three days to arrive at this period. I guess twelve Córdobas for an hour in a computer-equipped sauna isn't bad.

(I struggled to the end of that paragraph sometime last week, and now I can't figure out how to type a semicolon, so I'll just state the obvious, but, first, a moment to lament being also unable to locate the colon. And I just adjusted the keyboard, now reset to the United States configuration; victory. Also, I've since relocated from muggy Masaya to Estelí, in the cooler north. Now, to that belated sentiment hinted at toward the beginning of this loquacious, meandering parenthetical: I've been headbutting, for over a year, I guess, the last time I was regularly updating this blog, against some creativity-stifling, word-suppressing monolith that dwarfs any structure of this world. Las palabras no me quieren salir.)

I thought it'd be easy to share some stories from my travels; it's been anything but. Maybe it's because the only English I've spoken in the last ten days, with the exception of a beer-and-beach native-language binge with a couple of USA coeds nearing the end of summer internships in Nicaragua, has been of the take-a-breath-between-each-monosyllabic-word variety. The sort of thing that catapults into perspective the patience of your Spanish-speaking friends. I'm sure I'm of the confidence-exceeding-competence variety of gringo, confidence intact thanks to my many friends never stating the obvious, unlike the Colombian who once declared he'd mistaken me for a Colombian, but retarded.

On the other hand, he mistook me for a Colombian, which is some small victory, surely.

To the specifics. My flight landed in Managua sometime after midnight, the wee hours of Saturday, August 7. I'd told myself before the seventeen day trip it was okay to splurge. There was no reason to cling to the professional backpacker's survivalist mentality that, at it's worst, legitimized two entire afternoons of comparison shopping in Panama City, pitting against each other every shoe vendor in a half-mile stretch, all for an ultimate savings of somewhere between two and three dollars. Splurging 2011 meant a ten dollar reservation in a fan-cooled dorm room in tropical Managua. Eight human bodies and a non-oscillating fan. If only my idea of splurging capped out somewhere closer to thirteen dollars, the magic price at which air-conditioning became available, the cleaning lady might not have been able to read my mattress, a sweaty canvas into which was saturated, pending evaporation, the form of gringo sleeping.

I entertained the notion of spending a day in Managua, but the allure of surprising the friends I'd ventured to Nicaragua to see, unannounced, because I have no idea how to contact the vast majority of them, was too great to delay. I hopped on a microbus to nearby Masaya, where there was no relief from the heat. I booked a room without ventilation, but with a fan I could dedicate to my body. At no point during the next seven days, which were approximately five days more than I'd planned to spend in Masaya, was I not sweating, or sticky from having sweated. My bathroom was an unventilated closet. Even after a cold shower I'd be sweating before having toweled off.

And so we've arrived where I began: how can I coax a bit of jealousy out of you, back home in the US, when we're experiencing the same sultry heat, but I'm doing it without air conditioning, and very often without fans?

Having booked my Masaya hostel, I began retracing the steps I remembered having carried me to the house of some friends, los Huete. I navigated the barrio, the rare gringo, until I arrived at the alleyway entrance that leads into the family's living space, a collection of structures, housing various relatives, nestled between and built upon the two concrete structures sandwiching the property. The house is composed of several rooms, a patchwork of wooden planks and aluminum and cement that retains heat on hot days. Which means every day. Outside the door is a small patio space where people, weather permitting, can congregate around a small table, throw a few chairs and stools onto the dirt and pray for a breeze. Between the patio and the outhouse and the separate shower closet, the latter two of which are set a few meters back, at the end of the property (and between which, the first night and a six-pack deep, I was unable to distinguish, aiming my watery stream inside a bucket-rim, faintly visible in the ambient lighting, that, embarrassingly, turned out not to be a toilet), sits, shaded by corrugated aluminum, the multifunctional, multisectional concrete sink common to Latin America -- a deep central basin that collects water from the faucet atop the metal piping rising from the dirt; floating in the water is a wide and shallow plastic bucket, like a doggie-bowl, for ladling water into either of the side compartments; to one side, a shallow ridged section for washing clothes and hands, brushing teeth; the other side deeper, segregated for washing dishes. The family has aspirations for structural improvements, though barring a sudden change of fortune, employment, that's a longterm goal; for now they crack jokes about the three little pigs, if only you could have seen what they had before the wolf tore through.

As with many of the friends I've made in Latin America, there seems to be no correlation between financial means and generosity, the former frequently limited, the latter typically boundless. The reverberations of laughter and chatter keep the corrugated ceiling busy even on the driest of days, echoes a welcoming breeze singing down the alley, out to the street. They have family and friends; fresh food and a culinary creativity to accompany ingredients of tropical amplitude; and a home to keep themselves dry and warm, simple but perfectly functional. At no point were there discussions of flatscreen TVs.

And so I stood beside a line of clothes strung to dry and smiled, projecting a quick buenas tardes down the alleyway; an improvised door groaned and a head popped out. Immediately, it was like I'd never left, there was no two-year disappearance. Inviting me to delicious homemade meals, preparing diverse Nicaraguan dishes -- indio viejo; sopa borracha -- solely because we'd identified a litany I'd never tried. Filling my palms with ripe, exotic fruits -- zapote; nispero; nancite (encurtido); others with names that escape me. Bringing me icy glasses of tiste, other traditional beverages.

Erick and Marbel escorted me above Masaya to the fortress Coyotepe one scorching afternoon -- the only day Eric might see off work in the foreseeable future -- where we scaled stone walls to enjoy three hundred sixty degree views and a sweat-stalling breeze. At night, Eric would whip me around town on the back of his motorcycle, dodging traffic and pedestrians to pick up a case of Toña, a bottle of Flor de Caña, some Ranchitos to snack on; our last night, my despida, swerving to pick up a case of Toña after we'd polished off a liter of Flor de Caña, etiqueta negra. (Zooming through town, down barely lit, potholed streets, hurtling through intersections with little more than a few shrill shrieks of the horn, a perfunctory tapping of the brakes, protected by nothing more than a buzz and the invincibility of youth, I was reminded that, if one has to die young, being chucked from a motorcycle isn't a bad way to go. Assuming it's a quick, clean death, of course.)

I don't know if saying I love that family is too strong a sentiment.

Equally responsible for my many days extended stay in Masaya were los Castro, a family who I'd befriended in Masaya's Mercado Municipal a few years back, having frequented their comedor for the finest and fullest plates of desayuno nicaragüense. When I walked back into the baking diner, I was greeted at once by a chorus of Pa-trick! Ya vino! and a strangling wall of stagnant heat, insulated by concrete and aluminum, stoked by various burning stovetops and fires and human bodies. It's so hot, the only reason you worry about how long the fried chicken has been sitting out is that all the juice might have cooked out since it was snatched from the pan. That first day I was presented a plate of Baho, my favorite Nicaraguan specialty, and refused to let me pay.

I visited Everth -- who has now expanded business from the comedor, selling used shoes, used clothes, and, in two separate stalls, used toys, "a diez la pieza" -- and his family daily, his beautiful daughters Evelinda and Macy, voseando with Everth and the girls, reverting to the somewhat less comfortable Usted with the rest. He'd lead me around the market in his free moments, inquiring if I'd tried every of myriad variety of fruit, picking up pounds for pennies, bags bulging with jocote, mamón, zapote, and others unnameable.

One evening we went out for the Latin American version of pizza, which almost always, almost impossibly, leaves me craving even the fifty-cent pizzas untouched at Food Lions back home. We went out for pupusas salvadoreñas (elaboradas con ingredientes nicaragüenses) another evening, and the waitress seemed impressed that I, flaunting those few weeks in El Salvador, asked for loroco. I invited the family to the shores of la Laguna de Apoyo, where I stripped to my Dickies and jumped in, while the family, unsure swimmers, watched from the shore; we ordered platters of fried fish, a few liters of Toña, and otherwise laughed away an evening.

Best of all was the goodbye asado at Everth's mom's house, where also reside various relatives, all who I consider friends; especially the precious Anita, who'd blather to me about any topic, flashing the semi-toothy smile of adolescence at every frequent fit of laughter. Everth and the family got a kick out of watching me, initially, struggle to cut the slabs of beef into long chains; then came the grating of various vegetables, onions, chilis, celery, garlic; finally all was bathed in olive oil, a hailstorm of salt, and mixed by hand, a mouthwatering aroma expelling from the mixing cauldron. There was corn to be grilled. We chopped, finely, tomatoes, onions, and cilantro, squeezed fresh lime, and covered in perfect avocado, chimol. Rice on the side. A fresh salsa made from chilis, onion, and tomato, bien picante. Everth stoked the charcoal fire and arranged long strips of beef across the grill, cobs of corn in a circle, ringing the sizzling meat. When I saw my plate, the chimol served inside a leaf of iceberg lettuce, browned strips of beef atop a pile a rice, two hot tortillas on a dish aside, plenty of picante, two charred cobs of corn, I went into a photo shooting frenzy. In the juryrigged lighting, the dim light, cast from the single overhanging bulb, further shadowed by objects hanging from the ceiling, made it somewhat more difficult to shoot without flash, as much as I was trembling in anticipation.

The food exceeded my lofty expectations. Como decimos: Barriga llena, corazón contento.

When peering down into the recesses of a smoking volcanic crater barely warrants a mention, you know you've had a good vacation (though, to be fair, pretty much anything short of a violently erupting volcano is going to pale in comparison to Guatemala's Volcán Pacaya, having melted the soles of my shoes toeing lava). Visiting friends on a daily basis, conversing always in a second language, struggling to stay hydrated, paying for, maybe, half your meals, the rest enjoyed en casa, homemade, disregarding sage advice and eating unpeeled fruit, bathed in tapwater and massaged by unwashed hands, hands having just handled raw meat, drunkenly chugging tapwater and breakfasting on liquados made with powdered milk and tapwater, enjoying streetfood; amistades and immersion, this is life.

The Gawkish Return of Karma Killer

2011-05-25T22:59:00.002-05:00

It's been nearly a year since I propped the laptop on my crotch with the intention of authoring anything longer than a pornographic search query, and it's unlikely anyone was less entertained for it. In fact, I can only conjecture positive repercussions. I've probably delayed the onset of carpal tunnel. My groin no longer bears the characteristic charring of overheated, antique laptop. I've avoided thousands upon thousands of opportunities to incriminate myself.

I'll wake up in a few hours, throw on the shirt, tie, and pants combo selected before bed, and show up at the office an hour late -- at earliest. I'll log into Facebook, refresh my news feed for whatever number of hours remains in the day, and get ghost the second the office's fastest clock slides to five o'clock. The only thing stifling my urge to strangle myself with the cord running keyboard-to-hard drive is the conversion of my direct deposits into units of pupusa. (I figure another forty to fifty years of Microsoft Office Suite-enabled deception -- spreadsheets always a quick click away, NY Times' articles copied-and-pasted as Outlook draft emails -- and I'll be able to employ a live-in pupusera. You've gotta have dreams.)

Having been home over a year now, I must admit I love the United States. I love the comforts, the cleanliness. I love not having to stuff wadded bills into the lint-crowded recesses of various pockets to combat the dexterous fingers of pickpockets every time I step onto public transit -- which in my city is, unfortunately, infrequent. I celebrate every condom expended without theatrical and fabricated professions of love or commitment. I drink to and with girls on birth control, and I sleep soundly when they pick up their scattered garments and kiss me goodnight in the doorway. And if I down five too many many-times-hopped-high-gravity pints and pass out facefirst on pavement, at least nobody will subsequently scold me for "practically inviting" organ theft -- even as our overzealous legal system exacts an equally debilitating toll.

And yet I'm signed up for every. single. iteration of airfare price alert for flights into any Central American capital from airports within a one thousand miles radius of my residence. I can recite monthly rainfall averages for an array of cities I plan to revisit. Plus I'm significantly cockier than ever before, and armed with eighteen months of Latin American travel expertise: backpacker chicks > local chicks. Technically, that's not sex tourism, so you can still charm grandma and the parents hiring you to babysit with that same noble smile.

The Where Can We Put Patrick? Debate (or Dictate PBA's Future)

2010-04-24T11:06:00.000-05:00

Sadly, though the everyday scenes of toiletback gore in hostel bathrooms indicate many mochileros are having as much trouble coping, I've exhausted all my endurance for the brutality being waged in my belly. What I'm carrying, harboring, isn't temporary. This is full fledged fuckin' possession. I've been owned.

There is no longer debate. If the Bolivian-Japanese stomach coalitation can't cure me -- chances they can even diagnose me correctly approximately equivalent to those of Barry taking Usain Bolt in the 100m, or of me ever asking Barry to sing me a lullaby, or anything resembling a song, anything that requires even the most elementary ability to carry a tune -- I'll be home within a few weeks, as soon as I can figure out how to navigate the thirty plus hour bus stretch from La Paz to Lima without embarrasing myself, without soiling my reputation. Gross. Something of a psychic, I can see myself poppin' bottles of bowel-cloggers and refraining from eating for several days. Which is the worst sounding proposition I've ever encountered, but circumstantially practical. I reread that sentence and a whimpery dammmn just mustered itself over my lips before disintegrating into inaudible particles of despair. (Update: I'll be touching down at CLT late on May 3.)

Once back in the States, where I'll remain for the rest of 2010, at least (before jumping back into travel, presumably picking back up in South America), the big question is where? What follows is a not necessarily closed list of locations to which I'm considering temporarily relocating, corresponding pluses and minuses, and an open invitation to any and all to help influence my decision. Sell yuh city, suckas.

Raleigh, North Carolina

Pros: My most frequently visited city, for the residence of a number of great boozing buddies, the best Detroit style coneys outside of MI, and Lilly's Pizza. The 'Canes. Chapel Hill is nearby and, in general, Raleigh is a young city. Multiple tailgating opportunities every Saturday in the fall. Oh, let's just say it, college girls! Southern Belles! Now shower me with "Predator!"
Cons: Reliable public transit? Job opportunities?

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Pros: Friends in and around the area, bars and restaurants all walkable. It's the better weather Ann Arbor. And a surplus of college and just-outta-college girls. Good pickup basketball. Maybe I can score Duke tickets in the fall?
Cons: The nauseating sea of baby blue. No current job prospects.

The Charlotte Metropolitan area, North Carolina

Pros: This is my home. I represent D-town, don't get it twisted. My main folk, aka tha 'rents, and a group of, to repeat the word, beloved core relatives live in the immediate area. I have countless friends in the area, and I know which bars have pint specials when, which grungy venues have the best shows, and when my friends in One Another are rocking out. The restaurant scene is strong. The weather is bearable in the summer, mild in the winter, even affording us the occasional cute dusting of snow, and the spring and fall are heavenly. I also have connections I can exploit for jobs. Importantly, there's a large Latin population with whom I can mantain my Spanish.
Cons: Public transit exists, so I've heard. I've lived in the area practically my entire life.

Asheville, North Carolina

Pros: Cool vibe, cool people (including some friends), really it's like a little Denver, CO. More important than the people, there's the Highland Brewery. 'Nuff said.
Cons: No job prospects to speak of, and does public transport exist?

Chucktown, South Carolina

Pros: College girls...at the beach. Jeeeeeeeeeesus christo! Shrimp 'n' grits. A number of close friends who might even be able to offer a room.
Cons: No job prospects. And how good's the public transport?

Miami, Florida

Pros: We might as well be talking Latin America. Cuban food. The weather, the beaches. Public transport. One of my main homegirls lives there, and probably other friends as well.
Cons: Dexter copycats and an expensive city.

ATL and NoLa

Pros: Both are dirty south, Ludacris and Li'l Boosie (well, in Baton Rouge. Wait, he's in prison for the next 4 years). Soul food. Multicultural areas. Boobies for beads!
Cons: Hot and sticky. Public transit and job prospects?

Austin, Texas

Pros: A college town, young population, etc.
Cons: I don't know anything else about Austin, certainly nothing job related.

Washington, D.C.

Pros: An awesome city, with public transport, friends, and my main homie, Li'l Brodus. Generally a place I'd love to live. I hear there's a train that runs to NYC? Either way, there's Jet Blue. I'd say it's about time I make good on those promises to visit NYC. Ovechkin. Lots of Latin folk, too.
Cons: Lack of job hookups and $$$!

Pros: Not sure, but people tell me it's crazy, as in awesome. Plus there's the public transit system, and I do have at least a few friends left in the city. Oh, and pizza. Even if a slice costs as much as an entire pie back home. But maybe Latin American street eats can ease the pain? NYC is playground hoops. Two pro hockey teams!
Cons: Expensive as a muhfucka. Cold winters. And, again, no particular job prospects.

Boston, MA

Pros: A cool city, people with cool accents, and clam chowder. I've got some good friends in the city,too. Plus amazing, Canasta-expert relatives (that I potentially exploit for work?) living not far away. And lotttttttttts of college girls. Some that'll be into the NE brand of hardcore. And maybe hockey. And if not, I'll be befriending drug dealers selling GH--, er, wait...
Cons: The winter and cost of living.

Ann Arbor, Michigan:

Pros: The quintessential college city, walkable (and runnable), with house parties and cheap beer specials and myriad restaurants (noteably the selection of superlative middle eastern food, for the concentration of middle easterners in the area, and coneys!). The outdoor basketball courts by the CCRB fill up in the late afternoon, and decent pickup soccer is never a problem. Then there's the proximity to Kalamazoo's Bell's Brewery, which means plenty of fresh Two Hearted. And the summer is divine, especially over a few pints. Plus I have beloved relatives living nearby, and boy do they know how to have a good time (and eat)!
Cons: The winter. See, I think snow is cute for a few days. Plus I have no particular job prospects, and am unsure if I have any friends left in the city. Lastly, an angry practically-midget ex-friend threatened in late 2008 to smash a bottle over my head on sight for stealing, no, temporarily borrowing his girlfriend. Whoops.
A newly occuring pro: I'm not sure the Little Iranian can reach my head, and I'm offering neither stool nor knee nor boost of any variety. Plus his girlfriend might still be around...

Chicago, IL

Pros: Reliable, urine-scented public transit. A playground basketball tradition. Pizza. Friends from Northwestern and back home. I wouldn't have to go anywhere for Lollapalooza. Maybe I could make friends with Twista. And if not, a strong punk rock tradition.
Cons: Expensive. And, again, that daunting lack of job prospects. And Candyman.

Aspen, Colorado

Pros: Beautiful town, mountains, and a situation in which I'll no longer have an excuse to try skiing. Plus, one of my best friends lives there, and maybe a kickass cousin as well, if she herself doesn't relocate. I've even been promised job help, and I hear the young folk in town keep the party lively. And, as I'm already accustomed to running at altitude against breathtaking backdrops...
Cons: Expensive, and maybe a bit isolated? How far's Denver? Can I get Bell's Two Hearted on tap?

Portlands, Oregon and Maine

Pros: I don't think it'll be a problem getting Bell's, or any other delicious beer, on tap. An impressive variety of excellent restaurants. Friends in one, a favorite cousin in another. Seafood! Euthanasia? The Latin population in Oregon is said to be growing.
Cons: Hippies. Just kidding! But, seriously, is a shower that painful? 'Cause I kinda dig deodorized alternative chicks. Not sure about job prospects in either. Are they expensive? How's public transit? How will I practice my Spanish in Maine?

Seattle, Washington

Pros: Friends in the city, iuncluding at least one great friend (who has mentioned she'll help me with finding a job). The music scene, the restaurant scene. Don't know much else.
Cons: Public transport? Is it expensive? Where's the sun? Are there Latin folk?

San Francisco, California

Pros: I liked it when I visited, long ago, and I have a number of friends in the city. Seafood! Good beer. Public transport. Spanish to be spoken.
Cons: Expennnn$ive. No job prospects to speak of.

That's it, now convince me.

Pieces of the Devil's Pie

2010-04-23T09:41:00.002-05:00

Currently restricted from bus travel by my pet belly Satan, who amuses himself by belching bedlam out my anus at his bidding, I'm determined to indulge every food whim until I make it home to first world medicine. Greasy street food forked over by dirt-encrusted fingernails? Fuck it, looks delicious, can't make me any worse.

So, hypothetically, if you've just run into the first open business your Emergency Shitscan could locate, a university in this instance, sweat beaded on your forehead, stammering while doing some sort of retarded ballet and fidgeting with your waistline, "Preferiría que no tuviera que preguntar, pero ¿donde está el puto baño?, and have newly emerged after having spattered carnage, what do you do? Do you a) relax and catch a cab back to your hostel, to avoid walking and jostling your bowel-bomb, or b) continue mixing disaster, breakfast visions of salteñas picantes dancing in your twisted, reality-ignorant daydreams?

I'd choose B. So I chose B. Only, on the way to the salteñería, I was distracted, as always, by pastries beckoning from a glass storefront. I entered, telling myself, scolding myself, "Solamente pan blanco, hijueputa. Acuérdate, huevón, comidas blandas para tu estómago delicado." Too late I noticed the case full of brown-tipped-meringue-topped crusts, an index finger instinctively sneaking for the one-hundred Bolivianos folded and refolded to Chicle-size stuffed into my jean's unrobbable mini-pocket. Emergency funds. Pie de Limón porn strutting it's perfect meringue peaks, hiding the sensual layer of limón deep inside. Full sized pies, medium sized pies, and little bite sized cuties. Resistance was futile.

"¿Cuánto sale el pie grande? Y el mediano?"

"A vientecinco y quince." she replied, pointing, quoting prices that would buy you a slice or two at any normal pastry shop or restaurant.

"Déme un grande, porfa," I stammered, hardly believing I was going to walk out with an entire fresh-made lime pie for less than $4. I watched her decoratively and protectively wrap the pie, treating it more delicately than I'd treat my own infant, treatment entirely unexpected in this little cubby of a pastelería -- this locale with its grubby, gray-cement-walled, graffiti-tagged announcement outside. There was no just throwing this masterpiece pastry into a plastic bag, sticky meringue clutching at the sides, peaks distorting and detaching as the bag bulged and swayed during the walk. She handed me a heavy Styrofoam plate -- expertly wrapped with a protective bubble over the meringue -- and I smiled, the invisible layer beneath, where all the measure and weight of a good lime pie resides, reassuring me. No over-crusting. No inflation of meringue. No skimping involved. No bullshit, straight Pie.

Tonight was the first time I'd eaten an entire nine inch pie. And after a meal. It was a rich challenge, one that has left me worthless, headachy and slightly nauseous, but the flood of dopamine is reward aplenty. Most people understand how overindulgence in a certain type of alcohol can a spawn long-lasting taste aversion. I might've accomplished the food equivalent. (That theory was dispelled the next afternoon, when I caved to my adicción al azúcar, trekking the mile to La Paz's Pastelería Emmanuel to pick up another luscious pie de limón.)

Blame South American tummy critters for the previously-unimaginable-though-now-fully-realized upping of scatalogical content on this pooey blog

2010-04-20T12:28:00.007-05:00

Anna and I left Cusco, Peru on a good night. It was pouring rain, but my tummy wasn't murmuring, no threat of leakage, ensured further by a bagful of avocado-spread, intestine-clogging ciabatta. We chatted, debated eating a potato discovered wedged between our seat cushions, drifted, awoke in Puno, and disembarked in Copacabana, Bolivia, but not before I'd purchased the $135 Bolivian travel visa required of all Great Satan residing gringos.

In Copacabana we chance encountered every person we'd met in the last few months, ferrying to La Isla del Sol, a food-limited otherwise paraíso in Bolivia's section of Lago Titicaca, with our three Dutchies and an amigo Paisa. We stayed a night in the South, perched high above the port's rickety docks, staring at distant, snowcapped Andes stabbing upward from that placid, horizon-seeking blue. Two nights on the island's north side followed, days spent burning shades that Crayola's crayons would be jealous of splayed on white sand beaches, those snow capped cloudseekers visible yet unfathomable. We ate sandwiches, french fries, rice and trout, cookies, beer, and wine. Being the only food available on the island. Taking advantage of my chance pairing with intelligent (and beautiful) card-fiending drinkers, I promised everyone they'd be enamored of Basket, er, Canasta, being the greatest card game ever, and for geographical context, Latin-originated. They learned, we played. And played. And played. On the island, off the island, we played. In hotel rooms swilling boxed wine. In restaurants and cafes, playing around plates, between bites. Playing cards became a pocket essential. (I'll refrain from mentioning Spit, a series of slaughters inflicted upon me by Anna, though always with that loving smile...that same smile that used to get little brothers snuck.)

It's much clearer now that all international entrance forms should update their intent section, namely including 'Terrorism' under the "Objeto de Viaje" header. Which might catch some dimmer terrorists, but would mostly just be funny. As it is, I've been terrorizing whichever part of Bolivia happens to be within a three meter waft radius of my buttblaster, on those rare occasions I have the confidence to squeeze out a screamer. With the bubbly stomach, there's much more teeth-gritting-anal-clenching than pause-to-pretend-to-admire-architecture-while-performing-subtle-leg-and-cheek manipulation. I'm a budget traveler. Laundry is not a prime priority.

Yesterday I headed out early, fresh liquidy sewage sloshing in two plastic, screwtop canisters in my backpack, heading toward a collaboration Bolivian-Japanese Gastrointestinal hospital in La Paz, once and likely still considered the premier hospital in Bolivia. (Though second ranked is a corner-posted, incense-burning witchdoctor, La Famosa Curandera Exorcista Mama Cholita. Oh, well.) Firstly, I'm becoming far too practiced defecating into receptacles. Skill building, I know, but not really résumé worthy. So It's too early, I'm hauling feces, paranoid of leaks, when I feel two droplets of water splatter atop my head. I glance up and catch a skullsounding blow a centimeter below my right eyeball, smack on the orbital bone. Rocky debris from a highrise construction site without any safety-zone detour for pedestrians. Sporting a rising welt, the precursor of a nice black eye, I trudged onward.

Then I make it to the hospital, and after initial confusion am made aware I can't just give my stool samples to the laboratory. I have to have a receipt indicating I've paid for certain tests. But, after I've tracked her down amidst the hubbub of a third world hospital, the doctor from the day before can't tell me what tests I need, exactly, only that I need to buy ficha, which is to say an appointment with any doctor on-duty. Too bad this is hours after the opening 6am rush, and there are no spots available before afternoon. So I'm pinballing between ventanillas, glasswindowed stations, accosting anyone wearing a medical uniform, opening conversation with a shocking, exasperated announcement, "Hola, ¡tengo heces en la bolsa!" You feel like a man strapped with explosives, "Listen, motherfucker, I've got poo in my bag." Terrorism, even if it wasn't my intention upon entering the country.

(Putting me in an even more poo-flinging mood was the hassling I took this morning from the laboratory staff, when I returned outside of the 8-9am window to submit a followup sample. I tried to explain that even though I'm extra-regular at the moment, I still lack the ability to defecate upon command. If I exercised such bowel mastery many more offending parties would've found their doorsteps and floors soiled during my revenge-plotting-filled youth. Tomorrow I'm waking early to punch myself in the stomach during jumping jacks, since I was forced to promise an on-time delivery.)

La Paz is daunting, vibrant and bustling, sounds and scents alternately beckon and repulse. The density of the cement-and-aluminum constructed city center blocks -- quite literally blocks, gapless, gray monoliths that maze inward through side-by-side shop entrances -- radiates out and up the encircling cliffs, humanity improbably clinging to sheer rockfaces as if planebound structures were simply lifted and pegged, like Legos or tacks, suicide or accidental death available through anyone's front door. It's a city in which to splurge, high-class dining and services going for pocketchange, those monedas jangling against your thigh plenty to purchase a reprieve from the chestheaving block-to-block ascents.

I stroll snatching up cheap eats, salteñas and empanadas, pasteles and pyes, obscenely engorged chorizos dripping mayonnaise, grease and sauteed veggies, always dribbling some crema or salsa in Vampiric fashion, my few-day-old stubble trapping crumbs, light doughy flakes fanning out from my chin across the chest of my t-shirt, occasionally coughing sweet powdery clouds when I indulge in an over-sized, overpowered chomp. (None of which matters to me because, well, to put it politely, Bolivia is not threatening to win many Miss Universe Pageants.) Since I can't find any correlation between an artery abusing diet and stomach violence -- and as I've been warned against indulging further in arbitrary antibiotic assaults against my intestinal invaders I'll assume I can also ignore the accompanying dietary restrictions -- I'm going to enjoy my time off the toilet.

This and that

2010-04-06T18:01:00.000-05:00

Relatively smooth sailing here in Cusco, Peru, my stormy stomach acids simmering significantly until they bubbled back today, thanks either to:

a) my inglorious late night return to street food -- two bun-sandwiched, paper thin, fifty-cent meat patties, stacked with french fries and probably contaminated "¿ensalada?", "Si, por favor (stack my burgers with tasteless, nutritionally-vacant iceberg lettuce, either unwashed or washed in contaminated water, thus the classic lose-lose proposition),

b) or my (Blue) Devil-fueled return to gettin'-my-guzzle-on, celebrating Duke's presence and later victory in the National Championship game with the alcoholic circuit, vino blanco to unas chelitas heladitas to Johnny Walker on the rocks and a Pisco Sour nightcap. Today I've popped and plopped a kaleidoscope of consistencies. Which I'm sure you were dying to know.

I've stayed busy acquiescing to cravings, devouring ice cream (topped with crushed, mint-filled chocolate cookie sandwiches, twelve cookies per half-later, which is to say the usual daily serving) and cakes and pies, pretending I know what it's like to be pregnant and eat whatever you want, whenever you want. I suspect sets of meanspirited ladies will soon be wishing upon me the passing of a walnut-sized kidney stone, to authenticate the experience.

And then there are those small-appetited creatures, humans they may be, that assume my entrance to the room, hefting a bowl overflowing with a full liter of frozen dairy dessert, four packages of smashed chocomint cookies in my hoodie pocket ready to be rained atop, is an invitation to scamper for spoons. There's a reason there's only one spoon -- mine -- stabbed into my daily heaven mound. This bowl, your daily caloric allowance, is my weight maintenance. My precious calories!

While I gorge myself, dumbed by dopamine, I can enjoy, with clarity, unless muffled by cookie-crunch, the comments escaping my volunteering colleagues.

"Did you make your own meat?" (Rosa) (The context is lost, but I swear it was funny.)
"We (Britian) have the highest pregnancy rate in all of Europe." (Laura) "Wait, higher than the U.S.?" (Hallie)
"I just want my bloody clothes." (A terribly confused British friend -- and closet murderer? Anyway, Wrong, you just wanna get rid of, burn or bathe in acid, dispose of utterly and completely, that DNA-stained evidence.)

As to killing calories, I've had the good fortune to befriend quality Peruvian hoopers, some even approaching normal human stature! (although not so tall to preclude requests that I man the post). I played against a family of troll-statured, goblin-faced Peruvians, their features the hideously contorted messes of wax-statues in a Saharan heatwave, who literally could have walked into the shooting of Troll II and never been noticed. Though, for all they've been deprived by wicked deities, they've been bestowed fundamental basketball prowess and work ethic. After I flagrantly and intentionally fouled one, I looked down and patted, petted his mop of black hair, cooing "Lo siento" like a maniac. I forgot he was probably forty.

And now an abrupt transition to the Latin American inability to make change, even for small bills. Even at a grocery chain like Mega, a barcode-scanning operation. So when the register comes up veinte centimos de un sol short, were talking like six cents here, instead of bothering another cashier for the change, my cashier starts eyeing her station, taking stock of what small value items she might be able to offer me. "¿Té?" she asks, pointing to paper-pouches of Manzanilla Tea spilling out of an opened box. Probably her personal stash. "¿Fósforos?" she suggests, shrugging her shoulders while indicating a stray box of matches. I started to laugh. Really? "Dame los fósforos," I replied, shaking my head. The story of the matches in my pocket, which'll be convenient if I start getting those urges to commit arson again.

The upside of doing nothing else...more words, more frequently.

2010-03-26T16:38:00.000-06:00

How many consecutive hours can hippie mochileros strum out identical acoustic insults to (my) good taste on their guitars? That cheap rum must imbue them with special appreciation powers, because I'm chocking back vomit mixed with fantasies of spearing eyeballs with the jagged splinters from that very guitar smashed over hippie heads.

With frustration on the brain and the weekend's free-drink-and-panty-chasing club-bounce scheduled for tonight, looks like it's another round of feigned interest and repetitive sidestepping, enduring mindnumbing and eardeafening, salsa-saturated hours between three-minute invitations-to-grind, aka hip-hop. I, as a proudly grinding estadounidense, admit I neither understand nor care to understand the European practice of dancing solo. Gimme someone spittin' fire over a heavy bassline and a chunky backside to ride up against and I'll show you some rhythm.

While my head swivels high over the height-challenged Peruvian crowd, ostensibly scouring for a pretty thing to decorate my dormbed, I'm imagining myself transported back inside the grimy scribble-and-sticker tagged walls of Charlotte's The Milestone, a bunch of hoodied-up punk rock hooligans swimming through the standing clouds of cigarette smoke, everyone a PBR tallboy in hand, cute alternative chicks lounging around, all black eyeliner and bullsized nose-rings. We're three hundred ears still ringing from the last set, a palpable buzz for the next act, the first thumped kickdrum to rattle our chests, the first crashing cymbal, the initial peal of guitar-in-tuning, any and all will ignite the stampede for stagefront position. And, since this is my fantasy, I'm waiting for my fantasy headlining friends, One Another.

Afterward we're gonna hit a houseparty, a filthy-mouthed crew littering a residence with beer and bodily fluids to a death metal and laughter soundtrack, brutal, barbed insults that only best friends can toss and tolerate cutting through the cacophony. Finally, once bodies are strewn unconscious across the apartment, somebody's gonna step around the scattered cards and toppled bottles and lurch towards their car, making an inadvisable, cop-dodging run to Waffle House, waking up the next morning both hungover and with hell brewing in their belly, courtesy to that triple order of hash browns, all-the-way. This is where I come from, and that's what I'm missing a few months deep in fucked-stomach-dictated paralyzation. Those friends. Those scenes. Those $2.50 pint nights with fifty microbrews available on tap, at least eight hop-heavy IPA's. While we're in the bar, conversing boisterously over beers with the proper measure of head, stashed in the car is this week's anti-air-freshener, styrofoam-boxed leftovers seeping fumes into the upholstery, international dinner scents -- Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador, Thailand, Lebanon, Italy, Colombia, Peru, Greece, Serbia or good ol' southern Soul Food, maybe a few slices of a meat-and-veggie littered pie; plus, if I dined within fifteen miles of Central Avenue, the obligatory monolithic slab of dessert from Landmark Diner's should-be-world-famous dessert case -- that'll follow me around until overpowered by next weekend's selection.

The unhealthy triumvirate and other impertinent blurbs

2010-03-25T13:50:00.000-06:00

As if the diagnosis of Salmonella and amoebas wasn't overwhelming enough, the results of the four-day cultured stool sample also revealed I'm teeming with semi-drug-resistant E. coli. On a related note, I'm becoming way too practiced pooping into cups.

The upside of intestinal insanity's dietary restrictions might be pan con miel de abejas. Proof that the simplest things in life can spread a smile across my scruffy lowerskull, the morning bagful of ciabatta dipped and bathed in gooey golden plastic-jarred goodness never fails to lure me from my alpaca cocoon.

Bearing similarities to Bolivia's altitude-aided thrashing of Argentina in World Cup Qualifying, yesterday Cusco's high-elevation (3,400m) wind humiliated me 4-1 in a hardly competitive one-on-one futbol faceoff. I'd package all my depleted energies between hyperventilated gasps -- I had walked all four blocks to the court -- into fierce taps, nudging the ball toward the far goal, collapsing into a wheezing heap as breezes would breathe the ball back past me, rolling it to my left or right and down the concrete cancha, over crack-sprouted weed-tufts, at a pace similar to that at which most mother's push their toddlers, while I hacked and coughed dangling, chin-decorating lengths of cottonmouthed phlegm through spittle-flecked lips, spiritually and physically devastated, reduced to an easily overcome obstacle in the wind's triumph.

Medical Mysteries

2010-03-23T11:55:00.010-06:00

There's a storm of speculation swirling through my cranium, in that I'm currently playing host to armies of tummy tormentors and it's universally known that exposure to germy kids, as teachers galaxy-wide will attest, is a surefire gateway to sickness. Especially when the kids are third-world dwellers, and their dirty exploring digits tend to gravitate toward your face, squeezing your cheeks, pulling at the lips you've sealed tight to thwart the introduction of microscopic nastiness (thereby rendering impossible oral denunciations). It's probable I leave school everyday with billions of crawling bits of promised torture and medical expenses smeared around my mouth, every chapped liplick inviting inside a few hundred million invaders.

That's conventional thinking. But what if I've actually eaten a Peruvian child, whole. What if there's a chusqui sucio clambering about my guts. It's not so farfetched. You couldn't have possibly eaten a child, you say. Have you ever seen Peruvian children? I counter. Every time I tread a pile of dogshit on the street, I fear I've trampled a Peruvian kid. Almost every time a vendor accosts me near the market, hollering something about finger puppets for un solcito, I scour her palmed and finger-riding wares to verify no terrified children are mixed in with the cloth imitations. No, you've probably never seen one, not unless you've rested your head on the sidewalk, one eye level with the concrete -- ¿hormiga o amiga? -- or regularly examine surfaces with a magnifying glass.

So maybe there was a niñito mixed in with the bunch of bananas I bought the other afternoon, or maybe one fell into the vat of leche at the school. Maybe, exhausted after a run, hands on my knees and breathing like a vacuum, I accidentally sucked up a pedestrian pequeñito passing between my feet. I don't wanna abort the bastard, I just want him outta my belly. So I should just do everything they advise pregnant mothers not to do, right?

Regardless, there was very little real threat...

2010-03-22T11:48:00.000-06:00

There's something about booze that makes me, well, fucking stupid. So here I am a week and some ago, walking home alone from the tragos gratis circuit around Cusco's Plaza de Armas. It's 2am and I'm walking the deserted stretch back to my hostel, approaching two not-particularly-hoodlum-looking Peruvian youths traipsing my direction afoot. Really, I'm just thinking about sandwiches. A juicy thank you hamburger to offer the belly demons I'm happy have quieted themselves for the night, allowing me to drink and grind without anal-clenching.

I'm meandering through daydream, the sizzling grease hopping and dancing upon the pan, a sexy Cusqueña behind the grill ready to flip my burger, her short apron pegged midchest upon cold-activated -- when I'm startled from food porn by a two-handed thrust to the chest. I stagger back, the alcohol advising me I can easily conquer these two normal-sized Peruvians, which is to say half-sized humans: "¿Cómo?"

"Dános dos soles."

I shrug my shoulders and try to walk through the human roadblock again, again detained by a push. Well, I can just walk around the block, I think, though while the brain is occupied by thinking, the mouth begins to spout. "Ay, hijueputa, chúpame la verga, huevón."

The feet begin retracing their path down the block, I turn my back to the kids and my elevated blood alcohol content succeeds in raising a middle finger over each shoulder, while my mouth continues to spout obscenities. The strange intoxication of adrenaline mixed with pleasure, pleasure that my Spanish is sufficiently proficient to fluently insult.

I end up at the corner and the two punks walk by. We're still jawing at each other, my stares and stabs stalking them up the block. Someone says something about go back to your country. I invent something offensive generalization about Peruvians. The more eager of the two stops and faces me, raising both arms wide and putting palms to heaven. I do the same and continue practicing Tourette's, never one to let things die when my heart's beating booze. Everything's a competition with me.

He begins to walk toward me, his friend lingering on the far corner, arms akimbo. We're face to face, sharing breaths between strings of abuse, unblinking. Then I'm laughing at him. Then he's slapping me, but gently. Not enough to trigger my violence. I don't see the friend approach, not that his presence changes my tune. But I respond to the screwdriver he reveals tucked into his waistline, raising both hands, palms forward, "Ya no hay problema. No tengo ningún problema con Uds."

"Andate, huevón."

I walk home quickly, hand jammed into my pocket, fingers caressing cold metal casing, the pen that, until now, has only been considered an implement to scribble notes.

Like they say, traveling teaches you to adapt.

The ugly side of third world travel

2010-03-21T10:24:00.001-06:00

When the message materialized on my Facebook wall, "tell me an adventure... i want to live vicariously through you... :)," I figured it was time to demythicize the pure-heaven factor the cubicle-bound suburban-toiler adheres to the quit-your-job-to-continent-hop-until-the-cash-quits-you travel addiction. Granted, if sanitary standards in the third world approached those of the squeaky clean USA, or if I had any willpower to resist hygienically dubious, corner-vended streetmeats or papas rellenas scooped from a basket and bequeathed via waste-caked, wart-gnarled hands, I'd probably not be approaching a fully-fingered hand's-worth of months of intestinal dystopia. Or, in the doctor's words, "Where and what have you been eating?"

So, if you wanna live vicariously through me, the only exercise you'll be enjoying is toilet-tag, the sprint between bed and bathroom, an experience where any venture outside of the 100m I can make it in time anal-blast radius is opportunity for your intestinal partnership in discomfort, asshole-dwellers Salmonella and amoebas, to surprise you with a 10-second countdown, leaving you bug-eyed and swivel-headed, which business is getting invaded this time? and, fuck, please tell me I've got some toilet paper in my back pocket! Then there's the drastically restricted diet, and don't forget that diarrhea drastically reduces your (maybe self-ascribed) sexiness, so careful when you answer the question, ¿Cómo estás?

Draped in chiquitos

2010-03-15T21:30:00.002-06:00

Hoy kicked off my third and (for now) final week volunteering with Aldea Yanapay, a Cusco, Peru organization that operates an after-school program for seventy-some-odd Cuzqueñitos, beautiful and affectionate children arriving from predominantly impoverished families, many further afflicted by abuse, addiction, anything from the litany of crushing conditions I've been privileged never to encounter; conditions which, between the mind-boggling statistics (i.e. 75% of Peruvian women are subject to some form of physical or psychological abuse; estimations that over 40% of Peruvians live below the poverty line; etc.) and the tangible squalor radiating away from every city's scattered and gated enclaves of cash, we can conclude are disturbingly common conditions.

Working with mis chusquitos, whose smiling faces illuminate my weekdays from 3-7pm, is nothing short of a challenge, a welcome test of patience and flexibility after the numbness of eternal saturday, the alternate reality through which I've floated since...

Ah, mis corazoncitos, who for my bronzed complexion and relative giantism must mistake me for a cheerful, bipedal tree, their constant charging and climbing adorning my limbs with adolescents, scissored legs around my back securing una chiquita to my torso, gleeful shrieks and gap-toothed giggles bobbing at my face as I tickle her sides.

Presentando la colección Verano Peruaño 2010, diseñando por PBA: Draped in chiquitos.

During class I can generally repel their charges, though sometimes their sneak leap-and-clamber street assaults have me ready to turn-out my pockets until I discern their squeals and featherweight, the peck at my cheek. ¡Hola, Profe!

During school various classes are intended to busy the kids from 3-7, math and art, games and study hall, later an hour or so with one's respective, age-determined "family" to plan and prepare a presentation for the week's-end show, though childhood's as-easily-inflamed-as-acetone excitability coupled with attention spans shorter tha-- wait, what were we talking about? transform this objective into struggle-of-the-day. But it's a welcome struggle, an exercise in adaptation and creativity, how can I sustain their interest while working within educational parameters? It's exhausting. It's rewarding. It's my new addiction.

Of tantamount importance is the quality of the organization's contributors; from the direction to the volunteers, Aldea Yanapay is brimming with eager and inspirational, genuinely hilarious (after-hours rum-swilling, rumba-fiending) souls (soulless me excluded, obviously), unconditionally-loving role models as positive as -- dammit, I was so close to achieving the rare, nay, mythical, "clean post" -- Magic's HIV.

Chapter Two: We've got a new shirt slogan here.

2010-03-14T11:47:00.000-06:00

I'd flirted with zzzs for the last few hours but never settled any deeper into dream than the average person does driving home from the bar at 3am (get a taxi), a little nod here and there with a quick and unpleasant recovery, thanks to giggles and shrieks and such emanating from the $3 orgy-pad in our sound-conducive hostel.

So when the girls were finally booted I sighed and began melting into the mattress until CRACK! smashed the door into the wall, anew shaking lead-based flecks from the painted concrete, shuddering flakes across the carpet like wall dandruff. My eyelids craaaaaaaankily garage-doored upward, exposing my looming tomato-headed amigo, his brain-container sagging so far toward his chest that it appeared his torso had gobbled his neck, his inebriated T-Rex shortarming adding a comical effect to his personage. He gurgled something, pinballed between beds and the wall and ended up seated on the queen, facing me, left arm stabilizing his woozily leaning mass against my travel pack. "Oh, jesus, don't throw up," began it's loop through my cranium. Chase's chin would slowly droop into his ribcage, he'd begin a Gumby-topple to one side, then he'd shake his head, mumble something, gaze around the room in senseless stupor, and then rise, his heavy, tilted head providing the momentum to carry him back out of the room.

This routine was repeated at least ten times over the next hour, with several highlights, the most hilarious being several sudden crumples onto the concrete patio outside our room, followed by several minutes of Peter Griffinesque, knee-hugging, monotone moaning. There was also the glossolalia-heavy tirades directed at the night watchman, and, once his shift had ended, at Sunday-morning sweetheart Milagros ("Whaaaarsh yooooour - *bleeeeeeeaaaaach* - naaaaame?" "Wha'on'cha talk a'me?"), profanity-laced abuses that eventually urged me out of bed, ready to scold.

I encountered a googly-eyed maniac chomping down an apple. "Chase, calm down."

"Whah? 'M no' dun' anythin'. Wh'on't sh'talk a'me? FUCK!"

"Dude, she doesn't speak English. You're hammered and being a fucking asshole. Please, shut the fuck up and get in bed!"

"What? How'uh fuck can'u calmyan asshole. You wur sleep intha street laznight!"

Touché.

So he continued to stalk Milagros as effectively as any shadow, a Silly Putty-postured bumbler occasionally swigging from the half-liter of warm beer he'd discovered stashed in the corner of our bedroom -- as Chase'd inform me later, prior to the warm Pilsen, he'd already drained a bottle of liquor he'd pilfered from the community fridge -- occasionally veering from her side to yet again have his attempts to pump "Still Dre" through the hostel's sub-woofer equipped computer thwarted. The first round of retard-karaoke had been sufficient torture for all the hotel's inhabitants, regardless of any language barriers.

It was quite miraculous, witnessing the alcohol-induced deterioration of a human being at 8am, yet fearful when surfaced the rage, a windmilling, air-punching, sudden onset violence straight from 28 Days Later. He'd storm into the room, ranting mindlessly that nobody would let him do what he wanted! and why wouldn't she talk to him? The indiscriminate screaming and punching pulled me upright in bed, with both hands readying my comforter to smother the beast should need be. Chase picked up a plastic sheet of 50-caliber stomach pills and pushed one through the foilback, popped it into his mouth and began to masticate. He managed an impressive, senses-delayed ten seconds before his eyes crossed and he began thrashing towards the bathroom, white-specks flying his lips, the tortured howls escaping with the powder-shower reminiscent of the primal pains of a full-grown human suddenly freed from lifelong captivity below some pervert's staircase. He spent a few minutes in the bathroom spitting and gagging and growling, emerging stamping toward his bed, where he lifted his large travel backpack from the floor, proceeding to shake all its contents onto the floor.

And I'll never forget what happened next, when Chase jammed the empty bag over his head, pulling it down over his shoulders and arms, and then proceeded to perform what would equate to a shriek-accompanied standing seizure, a human-imitation of starved pitbulls in a bag, fighting over a steak. When the bag came off Chase set about the room, retrieving and jamming all of his possessions into his 60L cloth cavern, emptying the bedside table of everything including the lamp, which I somehow convinced him to return to it's place amidst shards of newly-broken glass.

I watched in utter disbelief as Chase hefted the pack onto his back, strapping the smaller daypack to his chest. "Fuuuuuuuck you! Nobody let's me have any fun! I hate this place. I hate it!!!" he shrieked, sprinting toward the door. But our door is actually two small wooden doors that open inward, latching in the middle. Thus, while attempting to squeeze out of the single, inwardly-opened door, his bulging bags caught on the doorframe and the immobile door, producing a few hysterical and maniacal seconds of sprinting in place, his legs churning and arms pumping through pained shouts, "Let me go, Pleeeeeeeease, LET ME GO!" before his determined wiggling sent him lurching into the patio, from where he sprinted to the hostel door, threw it open and flew into the street, famous last words freezing me in disbelief, "Fuck you! Fuck everybody! 'M'goin' to Bolivia!"

Despite the obvious instability of the gringo sprinting through the streets, screaming "TAXI! TAXI! Take me to Bolivia!", I guess Peruvian nuevos soles are scarcer than I'd realized, as the first taxi on the scene pulled to a stop and calmly loaded up the liquor-bomb, whose passenger seat wailing reverberated even after the taxi had disappeared around the corner, the taxi driver presumably deducing from the baggage and torrent of BOLIVIAs that la terminal terrestre was the desired point-of-departure.

Chase disappeared, without paying his bills, at 8:30am one Sunday morning. Twenty-five hours later I received an email detailing a drunken emergence from blackout at 4:30pm, on a bus somewhere between Cusco and Lima, where after being calmed by the bus attendants Chase accepted his fate and crashed back into unconsciousness. He even managed to arrive with all his bags.

Thank god I have Chase to make me look like less of a problem drinker.

(As some of my fellow Cusco volunteers have suggested, with a picture of Chase's face plastered between the quotes, "Fuck you! Fuck everybody! I'm goin' to Bolivia!" would make a fantastic shirt.)

Chapter One: Look what the dog dragged in.

2010-03-09T12:10:00.000-06:00

I stripped down to my boxers and snuggled under the blankets, turning onto my side and cocooning myself from the cold Cuzco night, one foam earplug already wedged and expanding, the other being rolled between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand -- that arm exposed from armpit down, over the covers -- preparing for insertion. My right fist, knuckles set against my mandible, supported my head; the elbow burrowed in the mattress elevating my body from waist up as I followed Chase ambling about, Pilsen Callao pumping through his veins, huffing out fume-tinged last gasps to inspire my resurrection.

“Alright, dude,” he surrendered, then stepped through the door.

“Hope you find some cuties.” I called toward his back. “And bring me one back too, if you do,” I added with a sly smile and a snicker.

He turned around with a face that implied everything in a wink and closed the door. I laid back, reached over my head with one arm to pull the unplugged ear upward, stretching the canal to facilitate the introduction of a spongy sound barrier. Then I killed the lights and melted into sueno.

I startled awake as the unstopped door crashed into the wall. Chase staggered in, mashing on the lights to illuminate a puffy face so universally beet-colored it might've passed for a bad sunburn, if the spike of liquor didn't so permeate the air, his motions, and his words. Neither the scratches on my watchface nor my blurry vision distorted the time, 5:38am.

"Eh, aaaaaaahhh, I gotcha un," he burped and giggled mysteriously, with strange satisfaction throwing a thumb over his shoulder just as two rather-hooker-looking women made an entry that would certainly not be mistaken for gliding. “Your friend is crazy,” I heard in heavily accented Spanish. I was praying these were hideous aftereffects of the Chinese dinner until one touched me, Chase and the other falling onto the queen-sized bed, buried in each other's mouths, scavenger hunting for tonsils. He came up for air and instructed with a glance, “You fuck her,” before returning to tongue-drilling. Skin -- or more specifically rolls of flesh falling-over and bunching-up around a bra – jiggled into view as Chase wrestled the dress.

My appointed girl kept looming and blabbering, but all I understood was a disc-skipping refrain of “STD. STD!”

“Nah, Chase. Hey. Fuck, Chase! Dude, not in here, please. And I’m not sleeping with this girl. Who is she?”

“What, man? You told me to bring you one! Just fuck her.”

“No.”

After a few dozen identical volleys, he proclaimed my loss and declared a threesome. But my hand hovered over the light-switch, stifling the impending orgy.

What ensued was a prolonged battle between a drunk-and-obviously-undiscriminating penis and a tired, sober and disgusted gringo too well-informed about bricheras and their penchant for slipping out with pocketfuls of swindled loot. Over the course of which voices were raised, the word “putas” slipped from my lips, and my outright refusal to tag my willing-without-a-single-encounter sextoy was used for ammo to blast me with a limited-English refrain of “You are gay,” and “I hope you have cancer in your penis.” There was a momentary intermission when an Argentinean friend also stumbled in, drawn to the commotion and female voices, and for a few moments occupied the mouth of my verbally-abusive appointed-pussy. But then it was more of the same.

“Pat, man, what the Fuck?!” Chase would scream. “Why’re you cockblocking me?”

“Have you ever had a threesome? Then why’re you fucking ruining my chance!?”

“Fuck, Pat, just turn off the lights. Yeah, turn ‘em off.”

Or flipping my suggestion back on me, “Pat, leave. Leave! Go get another room.”

Thirty minutes of logic later Chase angrily agreed to take the girls upstairs, when it became apparent my stubbornness wasn’t subsiding -- allowing me to unglue my eyes from my valuables. There followed a few hours of relative peace, though peals of laughter and reprimanding knocks at their door from the night watchman kept me from falling asleep. At some point the girls were expelled from the hotel, though not until after they’d entertained themselves, barricading themselves in their room, ignoring both Chase’s and the watchman’s appeals to open up.

Then somewhere around 7:30am it got interesting.

De vez en cuando...

2010-03-09T09:50:00.000-06:00

Every once in a while you feel the impetus to write, and every once in a while that every once in a while is a 4am post-clubbing session, when the ringing in your ears is so pronounced that it's like Daddy Yankee followed you home from the club -- like a pesky Cusco coke dealer -- and is playing a concert directly in your ear canal. So if those filth-grayed, months-"recycled" earplugs can't drown out the sound, pump a little high-volume Elliot Smith through your earbuds and see what slivers of sensibility can stab through your volume-and-alcohol stifled senses.

I've lost track of time through my various regimens of anti-belly-buddy medications, and doubtless I've nuked everything good and bad, from natural intestinal flora to parasitic invaders, that once resided in my guts. I think I might feel a bit better than I did a month ago, but that might be due to my recently unwavering commitment to a perpetually above-legal B.A.C. And the bruises running down the right side of my body -- knee, hip, shoulder, and eye -- are reminders that my friend found me crumpled on the side of the road at 2:30am -- somewhere along the four block path between my Cusco hostel and the debauchery-mecca Plaza de Armas, sometime after following the first prolonged potent-beverage binge with an unadvisable corner rum-swilling session with four or five questionable Cuzqueños -- where for an undetermined number of hours unconsciousness had transformed me into a personalized form of third-world "urban sprawl," emerging somehow unrobbed, unraped, and undead. (And, yes, mom, dad, friends and relatives, I'm every bit as appalled and relieved as you.) Google helped me identify high altitude as the sneaky accomplice to excess, so tonight I stuck to beer and a few cocktails. Which is why I can pound out coherent sentences approaching sunrise.

That my friend, literally moments after bemoaning my disappearance to his taxista, happened to spot my splayed form and scream "STOP!", and then devote a healthy 10 minutes to wrangling my gibberish-gabbing corpse into the cab, then later into the hostel and into my bed, well, it's been suggested I should buy the chap a beer. But for reasons I'll delve into shortly, that might not be the most prudent suggestion.

Nuking my belly-buddy

2010-02-21T11:56:00.000-06:00

Last night's post-supper gulp of gooey, neon Pepto-Bismol led to a startling realization: these post-meal, 15ml shots will be my daily dietary highlight as long as I'm mired in this parasitic, tummy-pet genocide.

Shit.

Doctors are contradicting each other, one saying fill my page of prescriptions, another declaring this one solo medication will suffice, and at a fraction of the price. One advising I can eat only this and that, the other suggesting his counterpart is delusional and hyper-protective. I just get mad at my murmuring stomach and start punching it with closed fists -- something I've secretly done for years while running, cursing with innocence-corrupting ferocity any cramp that dare pinch my side. Neurotic would be the word. Therapy might be the solution.

My belly-buddy, or at least he who has been detected, is but a protozoa, Blastocystis hominis. Sometimes I like to imagine all my sincerity and reflective powers reside in my intestines, which is why I haven't written anything with any emotional resonance in many a month, if not longer. But I can tell by my blog's three visitors-per-week average that the world is enamored by regular reports of my eating binges and stool consistency.

Let's hope volunteering, my looming change of agenda, has rehumanizing, reinvigorating side-effects. In the meantime: do people ever start cutting out of pure, intense boredom, just to bleed some color into their lives? I...am....soooooooooooooooo bored.

The cheerful beckoning of stool sampling (Stool Sampler is officially my new DJ name)

2010-02-13T13:39:00.000-06:00

It's difficult not to be petrified when you read words about parasites "making Swiss cheese" out of your organs, even if aforementioned ominous wording comes courtesy of promotional materials for an unapproved product manufactured in some guys garage, whose floods of advertising are likely quarantined in your email's Spam folder.

I'm convinced my intestinal ravager is gaining strength with every carb-heavy pile of lomo saltado, every liter of ice cream and quarter pay de limón, every ají-painted plateful of cow's heart and stomach. Now that I think about it, I can feel the little buggers burrowing through my body, nibbling craters through all my major and essential organs, and working in shifts to scatter cysts from my liver to brain.

Looks like I better pad the wallet for the doc's inevitable impuesto gringo.

Watered-down drive-bys on the rise.

2010-02-12T16:31:00.001-06:00

Chances are you don't know me, not really. Not the hairtrigger temper hanging behind the smile, infamous for not unprovoked but certainly unmerited instances of spitting and slapping and headbutting and otherwise abhorrent behavior directed against friends and family.

I'm running toward Arequipa's Parque Selva Alegra when the occupants of a passing taxi expel an unidentified liquid that spatters my t-shirt. The laughter emanating as the car slows to the stop sign wells my reason-and-consequence-blinding rage, a phenomenon of a violence and uncontrollability to shame anything portrayed in 28 Days Later. A viscous retort is conjured from the back of my throat and I begin to duck to window-level, ready to Hulk it out with this car of four, when chance has it I actually glance at my shirt, noting the dispersion and consistency of can-fired shaving cream. I play it off like a graceful stumble and continue pounding pavement.

It's only then I recall the characteristics of Carnaval-time in Arequipa, principally that presence in the streets is acquiescence to walking-target status for the water balloon- and pistol-toting youths prowling afoot and scouting passenger-side. I can't help but chuckle as I halfheartedly try to sidestep the shrieking and beaming chiquitas chasing me through Alto Selva Alegre with their spilling buckets and bulging balloons and water bottles. And my laughter trails the the hazard-flashing hooptie -- that already doused my stationary, stretching self as it pulled into the gas station a few hundred meters back -- that slows down to 6:30/mile pace so a cute Arequipeña can soak me close-range with a high-powered stream, then smile and wave without leaving her number.

Tomorrow, promises César, one of the owners of my Arequipa residence, La Posada Del Parque, we'll camp out on the third story patio and rain havoc upon unsuspecting pedestrians below.

Defining Zombification

2010-02-12T11:08:00.000-06:00

Somehow I never noticed my short morning jaunt to Arequipa's Mercado San Camilo, my ritual Pie & Papaya Quest, is literally lined with belly-bulging prostitutes sporting far-from-form-flattering Skittle-colored Spandex. "Ay, cariño!" Sultry faces, but no licking of the lips, a minor personal disappointment. "Uy, Papacito!" drawls one unconvincingly, as she extends an arm in my direction, so unenthusiastically that I'm unsure whether she's doing rotator-cuff rehabilitation or trying to grab a handful of my t-shirt. Still, it's all the attention I'm lacking from gringo-magnet bricheras, thanks to my caramel complexion and decent handle on español.

Perusing the superlative travel blogs of a few Evanston universitarias, recently befriended over pocket-change cajitas de vino chileno, has at least momentarily reawakened the synapses between my inner-author and fingertips. Ah, the familiar crunch of the keyboard, the furious and familiar pulse of the backspace, the conflict between my diminishing command of the English language and orthography. And still it's a facade. I've nothing to say. Nothing to contribute.

Maybe volunteering is the answer, a month-long respite from the monotony of perpetual Saturday. Zombification (n) 1. the framing of days around three meals, the height of mental stimulation waffling over which pastries will pave one's path to late-onset diabetes.

"I really think salsa's a bit like rape."

2010-02-11T10:24:00.004-06:00

There's nothing like waking up hungover, slinking out of the hostel in search of market-vended, resaca-stifling morning pastries and empanadas, and catching a 10am proposition from a corner-lurking hooker, either working a double or monopolizing on the bust-a-quickie-on-the-way-to-work crowd: "Vamos al hotel?" As they (should) say, the early puta gets the worm.

The last few weeks of my life have been perfectly, utterly unproductive, governed by nothing more than pastry and chifa cravings, and the drug-resistant bacterial menace raging in my intestines. Which, I suppose, is a diagnosis better than pet belly worms, if less cute.

So I've compiled another impressive collection of pirated DVDs, worn all the tack off my $4 rubber basketball, and, immobilized by flojera -- not even Maya's likening of salsa dancing to rape has prodded this latent predator into prowling the discotecas -- made friends with the many cycling through my Lima and Arequipa, Peru hostels, accumulating amistades to house and entertain and guide me from Santiago to Buenos Aires.

Time to go scrub the cake and wine residue from my teeth. And see what a pocketful of jangling Peruvian soles might procure on the corner.

The War and Drugs and Amazonian Bugs (in my belly)

2010-01-26T00:00:00.002-06:00

Lima is a pretty rad place, and not only because it's named after a bean.

Or maybe that's the other way around. Factually, it is. Fuck you joke ruining Wikipedia.

Man, a puff of haziness no more profound than a that's a finger in my ass-gasp-of-surprise really puddles my honeypot of a head. I...don't want...can't...do...anything. Even the usual nerdutainment challenge of trying to correct a Blogger-flagged, red-underlined misspell just gets copied-and-pasted into Dictionary.com. It was something eggregious like entreprunureal.

Maybe not Locked Up Abroad roulette like walking a sack of weed from Belize into Guatemala, but still a fun round of Will You Please Empty My Wallet, Señor Policia?, I put in a good four hours of Lima driving a few weeks back, with a copy of an expired NC driver's license. Lima rush-hour, crunch-time driving. Ton-weight bumper cars at 80km/hr. Lanes are suggestions. Stoplights yearlong Christmas decorations. And right in the middle of dodging weaving microbuses crammed with at least 15 certain dead, my 17-year-old hermanita Celeste gets through on-air to a major Lima radio station. I can hear her coming out of the speakers. Then there's a phone on my face, and I'm jabbering in English and Spanish across Lima, back to myself. I should be getting laid for this. I'm definitely not. No, motherfuckers, I'm not Chilean. I'm not Argentinean. Just a dark-featured Gringo who happens to spit a lil' castellano. I'll tack on a blond wig and baby powder this Greek-featured face if it turns you on. I'd let you layer my eyeballs with lead-based-watercolors if Skinemax and stripclubs didn't exist.

But, shit, dude, leaning on that horn like every shrill burst is juicing up some glowing throbbing video game bar you have hovering somewhere in the upper corner of your lifescreen is fuuuuuuuuuuuuuun. Like doing your part in the war against overpopulation plowing indiscriminately through crosswalks. Laying down speedbumps to control all the maniacs chasing you with their blaring horns. Run The Gauntlet with pedestrians challenging your bumper instead of head-seeking strikes-from-the-laces.

Do you think considering staying in Lima an extra three weeks -- close to an NCAAairing Sports Bar -- just to guarantee I don't miss this year's first Duke-UNC contest is extreme? (Seriously, I'm impaired. I actually just clicked search on Dictionary.com because I couldn't figure out what was wrong with Extreem.) Oh, as to that question. Of course the answer is NO, all you pussy non-real-fans.

You don't support this post if you don't support weed. And I don't even really smoke, but that backpacker peer pressure to enhance the flavor of the liter of Lúcuma ice cream -- clenched between your thighs, cold condensation relief from the Lima sauna soaking your Dickies shorts -- is hard to resist.

...

Damn. I just did a reread. Probably shouldn't have wasted my "you don't support this if you don't support weed" plea to get paid by High Times.

Marrrrrrrrriiica!

2010-01-20T16:16:00.051-06:00

The man seated beside me smalls like a full platter of Anntony's Caribbean Chicken, loaded heavy with calypso rice and collard greens and a half chicken in Anntony's signature sauce. And while I appreciate him transporting me home for a few moments, I really hope he doesn't read English. I'm really glad I haven't indulged in any cactus-derived hallucinogens, or this might've gotten really awkward. I really hope we stop for food soon...

I'm a few hours deep into another 22 hour bus marathon, this time the return trip from Cuzco to Lima, again assured a night sans sueño, playing pendulum in my seat as we whip around mountain passes. There's really no reason to be in Peru any longer, doing laps on the dispersed friend circuit. But, boy, do I have great Peruvian friends. Not to mention a tackless $4 basketball worn gripless on gnarly Peruvian pavement, slowly deflating in a friend's Lima closet, and one can endure only so many And1 highlight reels on the iPod Touch before antsiness has him ghost-dribbling pedestrians down crowded city calles. Have you ever heard of a bus running a 20+ hour route without a bathroom? Neither had I.

Fuck.

Among other repeat ruins, I explored Machu Picchu for the second time, accompanying mi querida Caleña Kely and newly-forged parce Francisco from Trujillo to Cuzco, now back to Lima, happily playing tour-guide to Cali-come-to-me. Man, I'm gonna miss mis parceros. All that Cali slang. That sing-song speech. "Ay, parrrrrcee, qué chimba!"

Ringed binders really bother me. So I'm left-handed and writing from the back forward, flipping my notebook at each page turn.

Monday's 4am ascent to Machu Picchu in steady rain revealed that my rain-jacket isn't impermeable. In fact, it's much closer to 100% permeable. Temporarily resistant like a single-ply napkin to a juicy tongue's thrust. (A confusing analogy pulled from the high-school lunch table.) By the time we arrived at the cloud-enshrouded Hauyna Picchu, I quivered to the rhythm of hypothermal-onset. There were three hours sheltered in the entranceway of the plush Machu Picchu Sanctuary resort, crouched and shivering over a spread-poncho picnic of white bread, canned tuna, and bruised fruit, three disheveled figures being reprimanded by the hotel staff for playing homeless on the steps as we tried to take advantage of the heat emanating from the hotel doors opened by the nonbackpacking crowd.

Figuring I'd already done Machu Picchu, and on a perfect November day with my brother and Franco-Peruvian friend Blanca, I procured a large, impermeable garbage bag a good six hours late -- from a worker whose perverted fashion sense prompted him to ask me which color I preferred -- and started hiking back down toward Aguas Calientes and una ducha recaliente. But a few hundred meters later I reversed path, unable to pass up the opportunity to stuff my memory card with hundreds more identical photos. And this time obscured by clouds and mist! But the sun graced us with it's presence at last, and now I have more great photos with more great friends, and at least 50 photos and 6 minutes of video of heavy llama fornication.

I probably should be dead of some cold-and-wet provoked complication. Instead, I just have to pee while I set legs jammed into Francisco's back, lamenting the extinction of my trail mix.

Upping my creeper status

2010-01-08T11:14:00.001-06:00

Seven weeks of fantasy life stateside revived my travel bug, which is not a reference to the hosts of travel bugs thriving in my gut. My gracious ex-boss rehired me as a part-time contractor, my relaxed office hours enabling me to booze with friends most nights of the week, then bumble into my cubicle at an hour by which the head-fog had subsided. My paychecks enabled me to pay all my bar-tabs, procure a few new toys (like the mochilero-essential 64gb iPod Touch), and left me enough leftover change I was uncharacteristically unconcered I might've tipped fifty-Bell's-Two-Hearted-Ale-bucks on a $20 tab. To an in-no-way deserving waitress. Which is to say not only was she far from exemplary at her job, she wasn't even cute.

I feasted frequently, my checklist of foods to eat back home mostly satisfied, fifteen newly added pounds of hip-swelling flavor pocket reserves accompanying me back to the lands of ever-crowing city roosters and taxi-kidnappings. (Keep in mind, the chunkification of Patrick merely transforms him from gaunt to lean.)

I find myself unable to purge or even suppress thoughts of and longings for that which I've just fled again -- my back-friendly pallet on my parents' hardwood floor; throat massaging microbrews with the "pint pounders" and rounds of shots with my friends from the trenches and vicinity; bleeding beets and the procession of vegetables that color mom's home-cooked comforts; the company of family from chilly Kakalak to snow-consumed Michigan; a beautiful young woman -- as if memories and desires can no more easily be flushed than my starch-stuffed bowels.

Lima is growing on me again, the intimidating metropolis, behemoth no less, that actually offers more than the dense, guidebook-imbued foreboding. It also doesn't hurt one's perception to depart sub-zero, sun-deficient days and disembark in full summer swing. The women are as brown -- if not browner -- and as beautiful as ever, and intoxicated with Vitamin D I almost violated the camper-counselor code of conduct -- which is what happens when girls become women and you're in a land where age differences are more readily and legally disregarded.

Hey, look at this cute, light-skinned girl. Waving at me, no less. Wait, why is she asking me about Davidson Soccer Camp in perfect English. You used to call me PB&J, eh? And you're from Chapel Hill? Oh, shit.

"Wait, you're Austyn, aren't you?"

And so I've reencountered one of my favorite ex-campers, from one of my best groups ever, a continent away, after never having encountered anew in North Carolina. Now we need to have a beer, just so I can up my creeper status a bit by saying I've had a beer with a camper.

The Hangover

2009-12-28T13:31:00.002-06:00

Time in NC has become synonymous with dreary headfunk, the vise-like constriction of mind and motivation that a few six-packs too many of Bell's Two Hearted Ales tends to enforce indisciminately. Those high gravity calories coupled with reckless feasting are slowly returning my Latin American-wandering lost poundage, little pockets of stored dessert puffing just above hip level. My probably parasitic intestinal condition -- contracted from that high-class, apparently highly infested batch of ceviche -- is thriving, mind over matter failing miserably. And I'm in a cubicle again, thanks to my old boss hiring me back for the year-end crunch. (So you know, that thanks is sincere.)

I've turned twenty-six and used that newfound maturity to charm younger ladies. (Well, that and the fact that I can legally buy beer. They aren't so impressed that I'm old enough to vote.) My hair remains untouched, uncombed, unless I throw on a creeper's combover. I find myself mumbling phrases in Spanish, mostly the filler word "pues" and sexually explicit commands, and dreaming latino on occasion, though I've avoided dumping any just-swiped toilet paper in the garbage can.

This vacation-within-a-vacation has provided ample opportunity to spend time with my family and friends, the world's only flock of folks fun enough to divorce me from Dad's in-house cinema, digital cable's assortment of boobies On Demand (in HD)! In between social beer-bouts I struggle to whittle my mammoth collection of digital media down to 64 measly gigabytes of entertainment for the next year -- considering all the kids I let play with my gadgets, respect for preserved innocence is keeping my iPod Touch porn-free.

The same ol' P.

Make 'em say Ugggghhhhh

2009-12-12T23:50:00.000-06:00

Probably a lot of things have happened since I last settled into an internet cafe to inform my tiny -- sounds better to say exclusive -- universe of readers. Hello again.

My final month in Peru found me switching back to checklist-traveler mode, ever-weary from an excess of night-bus cityhopping and Cuzco barhopping. Kibblets joined my great friend Blanca and me in Cuzco to complete an international supertrio of awesomeness. In 10 days we visited Machu Picchu and El Lago de Titicaca, nightstalked Cuzco's party strips exploiting our gringoness for pocketfuls of slips redeemable for "tragos gratis." We admired terrain and architecture. I passed on my addiction to Lomo Saltado. Images and moments were branded into memory.

A traditionally-dressed middle-aged woman statued in the middle of a busy park, her colorful, ankle-length cloth-wrap nearly kissing the concrete, her punishable-in-public crime camouflaged by the section of sidewalk still darkened from a recent washing.
A young girl defecating in a shallow gutter just outside a market entrance, a gutter that separates two ever-busy lanes of foot-traffic.
Geometrically-challenged travelers on long-distance buses straining to stuff impossibly large packages and boxes and bags into already-overstuffed, to-the-eye obviously too-tiny spaces.
The Juliaca, Peru mecca of cultured citizens: Licoreria Marihuana
A lomo saltado dinner with a sides of "Why can't I look away?" and "This is a little uncomfortable," thanks to the mother in a family with whom Kerry and I were sharing a table at our packed-to-capacity Chifa joint. "Hey, that's a big plate of Lomo. And, whoa, one huge fuckin' titty." Um, gross.

Especially memorable were a few actual meals. First at the gringo-infrequented Cuzco eatery La Chamba, where hunks of animal that h'or d'oeuvre the portions you'd confront in any 60oz Texas Steakhouse Challenge run for less than $5. The lechon, a juicy, fully-chicharróned baby pig accompanied by two papas del horno and one humita, was a portion that could feed two of me. In other words, you and your extended family. My blood-grease content hovered at triple-bypass for a few days after devouring my deliciously butchered piglet, thanks to slabs of fat as thick as thumbs that I couldn't leave on the plate. Departing I a glance into the kitchen turned into a gaze, arrested by the pink and white kaleidoscope of muscle and fat. Half-animal slabs were hung from hooks or spread across surfaces under the glistening blades of diligently hacking women.

I returned to Arequipa para despedirme a mis amigos. And Blanca's family treated me to an essential traditional meal I'd theretofore avoided, Cuy. Guinea pig. Pet. There's nothing like sitting down at a table and finding a dehaired pet stretched across your plate, oven-crisped legs in rigor mortis, long-teeth frozen in "Oh, shit. They just snapped my neck!" paralysis. And all I thought at every nibble: Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm. Picking bits of meat and tendon from my teeth hours later, I couldn't stop thinking, "I've never liked pets. But maybe I wouldn't mind porking up a few fat dogs or cats..."

Lima was fun again, spending my days with Cuzco-encountered friends Lizabel y Karla. We ate chifa and perfectly-sculpted pay de limón, and consumed a season of Grey's Anatomy.

Yeah, I know.

Now I've been home for a few weeks. Thanksgiving brought me home a month earlier than I'd originally planned, and now I'm billions of brain-cells nearer to constant gape-faced drooling. As if Bell's Two Hearted Ale isn't self-murder motivation on its own, I hang with a crew of alcoholics. Though I can't say chancing upon a Facebook message I'd mailed the late-night prior in a blackout haze wasn't hilarious reward enough to help me overlook the pulsing, pincushion's-worth of inner-skull needles and juicy stomach that characterized yesterday's 24 hours of hangover.

Well, let's say 12 -- it was probably noon before I sobered up.

(And you want photos, eh? Then click here.)

Booger bombs and other details you don't wanna read.

2009-11-01T19:17:00.006-06:00

Here in the Internet I just unglued a tumor-sized, sneeze-launched boogerbomb from my wrist. All of a sudden I'm being overwhelmed by oxygen.

Fast forward all the gooey, meaty meal details, pastries and rocoto relleno and queso helado, Halloween in Arequipa was quite the spectacle. Masses, costumed and not, overwhelmed roadways for kilometers radiating from city center by 5pm, ambling families passing thousands of logjammed taxis like Flash past the Blob. Nightfall transformed central Arequipa's streets into the practically inpenetrable liquor-numbed and unhurried human traffic jam that so excites pickpockets. Hanging out with the excellent crew of international and Arequipeño friends I've had the good fortune to amass, the rhyme and reason of alcoholic consumption was dictated not by any health-preserving riddles but what next found it's way into greedy fingers. Four hours of sleep was all the prospect of Sunday morning adobo afforded pitiful Pat, but that ruddy-broth-engulfed pork chop, with its boiled onions and hot peppers and pancito to soak up any spoon-escaping juice with its appetizing toplayer oil-spill sheen, was all glory, all the way to and through the messy, stomach-infuriating aftermath. (And walking through the more-than-usual urine-crusted streets this sunbaked morning, I realized that I'll have to rub all my future hardcopy photos in urine to impart them the "essence" of Latin America, for something more accurately approximating that full-sensory experience.)

Today was the important Latin celebration Día de los Muertos, which fills Latin cemetaries with thousands paying respects to those deceased, celebrating spirits with spirits, song, dance and picnics. Thousands of graves freshly cleaned, decorated with flowers and wreaths, the rampant jubilation, the myriad colors. The public intoxication. All unforgettable. (Though, as an afterthought, you should probably never visit a cemetary, much less on Day of the Dead, with a goth couple. For the gloomy and black-fishnetted, expressionless photoshoots in front of acceptably dreary graves and tombs never lose their novelty.)

Gotta stop writing and find a bathroom. So this entry doesn't really flow.

2009-10-29T19:43:00.009-06:00

I'm still doing my best Jabba the Hut impersonation in Arequipa, feeling almost guilty for my utter lack of productivity, camped in front of the TV with a kilo of fruit and bag of pastries, while indigenous cleaning ladies teeter past, yanked side-to-side by sloshing buckets and vacuum cleaners, mops and brooms wedged in armpit crevices, short ladies smashed smushed further groundward by shoulder stacked linens; while rag-clothed chicle-vending kids swirl around me, mumbling pleas to fund a dinner of bread rolls or rice with downcast eyes, while I whistle the tune of post-rocoto relleno satiation, a sack of pastries swinging from fingertips. This accumulation of guilt demands that I bury myself in cakes and ceviches and platos tipicos Arequipeños, like queso helado, a thick and velvety custardish ice cream, and the aforementioned rocoto relleno, a steak, raisin and olive stuffed, cheese-covered red pepper accompanied by pastel de papa, cheesy potatoes.

My friend Manuel and I toured El Cañon de Colca, deeper than the Grand Canyon but mostly impressive for the giant Condors that soar up from the depths, enjoying the whole catered-to, high-class-tourist routine, all the while rabidly snapping hundreds of ultimately indistinguishable photos of deep crevices and climbing peaks.

Betrayed by overconfidence in my time- and non-use- deteriorated handle, I misdribbled the first $4 basketball I'd bought off a bridge into traffic before I'd ever had a chance to use it, this while crossing-over a ghost with all my tongue-wagging, shoulder-swiveling-swagger. Ball #2 is sticking closer and crushing all international ballers who challenge the gringo to games of 1v1. But chunks of rubber sole are tearing off my worn running shoes, so impending is a broken ankle or reliance on jump shots, in which case gracias por my gringo gigantism.

Yesterday I was called "respetuoso" by a cute Arequipeña I've been hanging out with the last few days. Obviously I'm doing something wrong. Though that gentleman will probably disappear tonight, Halloween, ushered into "borrar cinta" by tragos of Pisco and liters of watery lager.

Bringing Back the Devil.

Blah blah blah

2009-10-23T14:52:00.004-05:00

It's become progressively more difficult to summon both the motivation and coherent and clever sentences to fill this journal. I imagine my boredom has sucked any previously existing entertainment value from my words as surely and thoroughly as my daily cake-train absorbs all the liquid in my guts.

This blog has devolved into a showcase of dessert-exploits. Yesterday I managed to squeeze in dessert after every meal. Each of the three, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. How fucking exciting. How cultural I've become, my view of Latin America two to three layers of bread and icing.

Trujillo boasts an impressive parks-per-square-kilometer ratio, plus it's inexpensive with good ceviche. Lima is one of the world's mega-metropolises that crawls out and over everything, from valley bottom to mountain top, like the God's of City Construction haphazardly flung fistfuls of city-sprouting gel from the heavens and let it splatter and sprout. Um, intelligent design? The tour of la Iglesia de San Francisco was the most fun I've ever had in church, the art and architecture and ancient library all spellbinding, but the thousands upon thousands of human bones held in the dreary catacombs beneath made the lasting impression: Circles of skulls stacked upon spiraling arrangements of femurs. You know you're on a good tour when you see a human skeleton and the guide says nonchalantely, over the group's oohing and ahhhing, "No es nada impresionanate. Vamos a ver muchos más huesos."

Arequipa is nice, and I've had the good fortune to make some American friends who love beer, burgers, and Appalachian accents. The homestay I was so anticipating proved underwhelming, and the "problem" with the cable -- HBO and Cinemax disppearing into fuzz both evenings of my stay despite crystal clear reception during the day -- suggested I might've settled with a family a godloaf too wholesome. When I presented to the family father my plan to leave the house for city center, he was alarmed by my choice of lodging, protesting my prospective residence on a street overrun by "prostitutas, delincuentes, y, Dios mío, ¡homosexuales!"

Thereby unwittingly solidifying my selection.

Contrary to popular belief, maybe desire, ceviche hasn't killed me...yet.

2009-09-30T18:57:00.007-05:00

Presumably talent and motivation -- or, concerning the latter, at least being able to fake it and pound out paragraphs regularly -- are prerequisites for any writing career. How unfortunate for me.

So I can look back on this trip when my memory is as withered as my wheelchair-bound body, so I can try to distract my gathered grandchildren from the overwhelming scent of old sunk into all the furniture, emanating from my decaying corpse on wheels, it's prudent I document, let's say outline, the last few weeks of my life.

Laughing with Ryan. A lot. Stopping her a few times on every city block in every outing of city exploration to investigate this and that pastelería and panadería. Spotting and snapping grainy photos of the ever-elusive Indigenous Leprechaun. Drinking watery half-liter-and-larger latin lagers. Fantasizing about American microbrews. Eating ceviche. Appreciating las delanteras poderosas flaunted by latinas and, particularly, latina manequins.

The trip from Baños to Cuenca, Peru was memorable in the I-can't-believe-we-made-it sort of way. Indigenous Ecuatorianos decided they wanted to "strike," selecting some inequality from the litany. So they had, what appeared to everyone trying to travel that day -- and 90% of transport companies that traverse the middle and main artery of the country simply ceased to run that day, a worker's holiday too -- a huge indigenous street-blocking party. Spilling boulders out of the mountains across the roads. Piling truckloads of rocky debris, entire trees, and other assorted obstacles across highways up and down the corridor. Cold nights at elevation gave way to town-attended bonfires, giddy families dragging dead trees and shrubs past our detained bus, little kids rolling tires twice their size, feeding everything into frenzied fires that devoured those trees like twigs, just kindling. After a four hour delay we were able to pass, though the motivated men of the bus had to disembark at least once every 800m for the next ten miles to clear accumulations of debris strewn over the road. My lack of motivation has already been documented. But really I was more overcome by intellectuality than idleness, busy dissecting the evening's film, the Mexican "classic" Perros de Dios, which included lots of maniacal supplication toward the heavens and two scenes of badass if inexplicable throat disassembly by hand. Even still, I can't recommend it.

Cuenca was pretty boring, Loja was better, mostly because there was a lady who sold delicious choclo which, upon being ordered, she would arbitrarily assign a price between $0.70 and $1. A questionable business practice summarily forgotten as globs of mayonaise-bonded-cheese were painted up and down the sides of the cob. Pretty university girls also populate the city, and the running was good.

After a few quick weeks in Ecuador we crossed into Peru, pausing a night in Piura, which merits mention only for a heavily-iced, three-layer chocolate cake hacked into and served in ogre satiating-sized wedges. Ryan and I managed to secure cheap, clean lodgings in Máncora, a dusty beachfront outpost somewhere across the desert. We even managed to procure the owner's DVD player, from which point I ventured into the sun only to run and eat, the daily routine of fruit followed by ceviche followed by the delicious beef-and-french-fry stirfry lomo saltado, topped off by American-stereotype-confirming cake raids at the nextdoor pastry spot. Ryan left and I laughed a lot less, tried to remember how to speak Spanish, then distracted myself with another DVD marathon and half-cake's worth of individual slices.

Back to Piura for a night. Continuing to Chiclayo would've been more sensible, but I needed more layer cake. The next morning, lugging two hunks in my stomach and another in a box, I moved to Chiclayo. More dust, desert and dessert. I checked out the Bruning Museum in nearby Lambeyeque, and ate lomo saltado on some street corner; I caught Steph Curry impressing on cable, and ate an apple pie for dessert. There is no word missing in the previous sentence.

Here I sit in Trujillo, the greenest city in the Peruvian dust, notable for its abundance of well-maintained public parks and bored and cheery cerdos -- whoops, police -- quick to taxi a wandering tourist about the city. My juicy stomach is no match for the impulse to gorge, giant cakes and skewers of anticuchos (corazón de res)...fuck it, it's lemon merengue time.

Putting things where they don't belong

2009-09-22T19:05:00.005-05:00

It took prearranged plans to pry me from caluroso Cali, but vecina Ryan's arrival propelled me from the heat-and-pastry induced laze that tied me to Cali for a full thirty five days. Thirty five memorable days. Memorable even for the hamster-brained like me because I need remember only a handful of variations of the same day, a few different time-fillers wedged between the papaya wakeup and the arepa, aborrajado y aguardiente nightcap.

I circled the city clasping hands and kissing cheeks, sneaking final groping handfuls of stacked streetside mannequins, promising the salsa rhythms permeating and pulsing the streets I'll return to conquer the confusion of my feet. Bags packed, Ryan and I moved to Salento, a pueblito nestled in Colombia's rolling eje cafetero (coffee zone). Besides hiking through El Valle de Cocora, snapping hundreds of ultimately identical looking shots of the mighty waxpalms (palma de cera), highland palms that grow sixty meters high, giraffed-versions of their beachland cousins, Salento was good for, well, sleeping. Going to bed early. And learning. So frequently alternating Spanish and English with our Swiss friend Michelle if often took me a sentence or two to register the tongue of the moment, I mistook "Pamela Anderson tiene hepatitis" for "Pamela Anderson has hippo-titties." In fact, both are true.

Toward Ecuador we passed through Popayán, La Ciudad Blanca, where defying Southern-bred expectations we encountered nary a Confederate flag, though the imported Budweiser was curious. An overnight bus to the border at Ipiales landed us at one of the world's most architecturally distinct churches, El Santuario de Las Lajas, built into a mountain wall buried between cliffs, atop a bridge constructed above a gorge-bottom river.

Quito was our first stop in Ecuador, a high-elevation metropolis longer than wide running between and halfway up bordering mountains. The old city's colonial charm distracts from the third-world seediness, but you're never more than a urine-stenched alley away from bootleg DVDs and dim and dingy, nameless kitchens fronted by tables stacked with ubiquitous silver pots and cualdrons, an accumulation from behind which a woman busily fanning flies squawks indecipherable advertisements at every passerby. One afternoon we ascended to a 4000m high mirador via tourist-priced cable car, dressed in beachwear, appearing every bit unprepared gringos on a casual country-hopping jaunt fighting gusting winds and shivering bodies to steady our cameras amongst wool-layer mummified Ecuatorianos. (Recalling scenarios to insulate from reality, namely youth soccer games played on rainy winter days, spawned this gem of a qoute: "It really sucks getting hit in the balls by a face. Or, wait, it really sucks getting hit in the face by a ball. I guess the other one doesn't really suck at all!") We visited the ecuator sans sunscreen, because in Latin America skin cancer is less expensive than sunscreen, which is to say the price per squirt means treatment is less expensive than a lifetime of prevention.

At our family-run hostel I drank 1.5L of murky tapwater based on assurances of citywide purification according to one son. The next time I neared the tap his mom caught me and cocked her head, disbelieving I couldn't solve the riddle of the giant container of purified water at the kitchen door. I think the son wanted to ensure we'd choose the more expensive private bath option...

Quitting Quito we came to Quilotoa, where we'd have to endure 4000m conditions for the length of our stay. So two or three planned nights quickly became a wind-whipped one, Ryan and I reasoning the views from any point on the crater rim above La Laguna de Quilotoa would be as arresting as those at any other point, thus precluding the need for any rim-traversing escapade. So we came to Baños, a clean and tamed touristic fantasyland, a sparkling unreality like Guatemala's Antigua. Surrounded by volcanos, lush green mountains spilling waterfalls, outskirts of the Amazon a bikeride away, it's an immediately pleasing gringo magnet that reminds you shortly why you needed to escape.

When life gives you ham...throw it at Shane Hopkins

2009-09-07T14:05:00.008-05:00

The last week has been one of those blissful vacuums of time that would drive the accomplishment-minded, like the terminally-disease-stricken, to despair; my week wasted either sweating over the stove in the shared hostel slice-of-a-kitchen, sized and ventilated like a coffin, or splayed across cushions absorbed in pirated DVDs, disproving the popular pothead rumination that a body left undisturbed on a sofa for sufficient time will interweave fibers, creating the ultimate creature of comfort, curiously neglected in Greek mythology: PillowBoy. Well entrenched in a lazy routine, I've eaten two arepas con queso and two cheese-overloaded aborrajados, sometimes with a side of frijoles, for five nights and running. My belly and tastebuds concur that there's no way to tire of plantains and cheese, nor arepas slathered in more oiliness than Spring Breaking sorority sluts from midwestern universities. (However, if you're not entirely fluent in Spanish, for safety's sake you should avoid all baby blather in the kitchen. It creates a rather awkward first impression when you confuse, for example, the words "conocer" and "cocinar" when talking to the latina mother of an adorable infant: "¿Cuando vayas a traer la nena otra vez? ¡Me gustaría cocinarla mejor!")

Cali seems to me a rather progressive city, with myriad thriving alternative communities. The most surprising, considering the Latin reputation for machismo, is the wide-open gay community. (But if you meet a gay guy who informs you his last name's "Mora," try to consider your words a bit more carefully than I did, asking with a giggle, "¿Cómo la fruta?" And remember guys: falling for a lesbian -- no matter that she's in all other aspects your dream girl realized -- is essentially, well, cockblocking yourself.) Hostel-mates Chris, Mike, Blanca, Leidy and I encountered a confluence of counter-cultures at an alcohol, drug, and manic electronic music fueled, rented-house rave -- Trashy Party -- put on by several Caleño friends. Chris turned into a walking highlight, screaming "MIKE!" up and down the streets; talking to Danielle, "mi amiga hormiga," before a savage turn in demeanor or drunken forgetfulness ended in her being squashed; answering the question-threat, "Has anyone ever cut your hair when you've been asleep?", with "No, I take my shoes off."; and providing the Koreanness necessary to prompt a random passerby to say, mid-stride and without context, "Chang." At which point, as much for the confused look on Chris' face as the comment itself -- which turns out to be much tamer, reportedly, than the strings of "Chinese" gibberish unleashed by teenage Paisas at the sight of Chris -- we melted into hysterics.

Colombians, well-versed in futból, play the first sane form of basketball I've encountered in Latin America. It helps that Colombians grow to full-size, with proportionate limbs as well, but they also play with a patience that avoids the video-game quality of, say, Guatemalan hoops. Gone is the head-down sprinting toward the arbitrarily-located, invisible-to-gringo-launch-pads that manage to convert Central American concrete courts into minefields, tiny explosions underfoot constantly launching the man with the ball into the air. Present is control -- something I might lose if people keep calling fouls for boxing out.

How nothing can manifest itself in tantas palabras.

2009-08-28T15:04:00.005-05:00

Colombian kindness is something of an extreme -- which is why, lost in the smiles and invitations of best-friends-at-first-words, I keep wondering if I've encountered the Latino Jeffrey Dahmer.

Take, for example, the following conversation:

Them: "Hey, wanna come to our farm today?"

After glancing over my shoulder, "Are you talking to me? Hi, I'm Patrick."

I did follow one stranger from center city Cali to his home, somewhat impressed by his connections in education, mostly blinded by optimism thanks to the pounds of pastries I was lugging down la quinta, thus paralyzed by an inability to invent a good excuse. Exiting the night through his front door, I had to toe my way through an unlit room to descend into black nothingness, all the while waiting for the ax blow that would send me crumpling into the pre-dug grave at the foot of the stairs. As it were, we sipped limonada with his kids. (I might've liked ice cream, but anyone not named Escobar encounters a lose-lose delimma: Ron con pasas or educating the kids? Educating in hopes the tots might achieve a status making $6 pints a dinner table reality, of course.)

No word exists to describe the utter tranquility and felicity I feel here in Cali, Colombia, but I'll try two: Pastries; Boobs. And my three mile plus walks across the city to my newly favorited panadería, QuintaPan, are amply rewarding in both, even if my traffic-jammed digestive tract has been cramping the blissful dream. Do you think pregnancy is more like constipation or the other way around? (Either way, I've never been happier I'll never have to deal with pregnancy.)

There are yet a few sights to see in Cali, but occasionally launched by sugar-high into checklist traveler mode, I've knocked off landmarks and gorgeous city lookouts La Loma de La Cruz and La Iglesia de San Antonio, as well as La Estatua de Sebastián de Belalcázar. I attended a Colombian death metal show with a hostel friend and a bottle of aguardiente -- what pleasure reacquainting myself with unkempt facial growth, pummeling double bass and the half-tickler, half-bestower-of-blindness nature of longhair whipped 360°! (I awoke the next morning and discovered my neck was still celebrating: woohoo, whiplash!) As for lessons in maintaining perspective, call it anti-penny-pinching, it's definitely worth the extra US$0.20/kg for a higher quality papaya.

The generosity lavished upon me by the hostel-running folks, Jessicas #1 y #2, and, especially, the unparalleled Kelly and company is -- given my highly-negative karmic balance accumulated over countless years of squashing bugs; spreading early-morning-hate by unleashing acid-farts in the Geo, windows rolled-up, to discourage innocent neighbors from ever again requesting a ride to school, depriving me of precious seconds of sleep; terrorizing mi hermanito every time he threatened to beat me in video games, chess, sport...administering beatings even for the out-of-his-control, say if mom served him a slightly larger cut of meat or a greener sprig of broccoli -- quite undeserved. And yet here I am, being indulged in Colombia, sipping icy cerveza and blowing potent puffables in UniValle, la U, spitting Spanglish with Kelly. There's nowhere I'd rather be. How greatly do I esteem these friends? For an early morning wake-up to bike with Kelly to the tranquil, refreshing Rio Cali I hesitated not a second to skip what, I promise, would have been my first trip to a whorehouse -- and Colombian hookers are like the slot machines of your fantasies: beautifully crafted, requiring minimal input for guaranteed Jackpots.

So there's life, brought to you on my ganked-but-recovered tank of an iBook G3. "¡La perdiste!" I heard, spinning around to see two Colombians fleeing down the block with my 7-year-old "Beefy Butt Muffin", which they'd snatched off a hostel-front table while I was turned and distracted by conversation. Arms akimbo, through clenched teeth I forced a few obscenities as they disappeared around the corner, the wick of shock burning out as I Usain Bolted from standstill to roadrunner, my sandals clapping across pavement, through traffic, for a five block pursuit that ended when, after enough rage-saturated "¡Hijueputas!" and "¡Ayudame!"s, pedestrians began to take notice and approach. The panic prompted in the dumbass ladrones who ran towards crowded streets culminated in the tossing of my iBook onto cement -- a crash that actually restored regular function in the popout DVD tray.

Well, time to pound pavement again, Señora Sweet Tooth's calling for the QuintaPan pastry reup; eating pastries out the ass...if, well, currently not out the ass.

Since I'm already going to hell...

2009-08-19T11:29:00.012-05:00

Spanishdict.comming "raquitica" I discovered a Colombian friend was describing her appearance in a Facebook photo as "rickety". A solid minute into cackling in my otherwise empty hostel dormitory, I realized I couldn't actually recall rickets specifics. Thank Al ~~God~~ Gore for the internet!

There's really no way to feel good about yourself Google Imaging "rickets". Let's just make the generalization that querying Google Images for the diseased and disabled -- while already engaged in stomach-clenching laughter -- reflects a serious deficit of soul and compassion. (After reviewing the previous sentence, I'm pretty sure the timing of that laughter is insignificant. You're a monster regardless.)

And when the Google Image search results unleash a gleeful gush of tears while you rock back and forth on your bed like a capsized turtle, legs hugged to your chest, congratulations, you've accomplished indescribable despicability.

But, c'mon, let's be honest. Not laughing? How?
My path to hell has been paved by "curved bones" and "big, lumpy joints".

Leaving Cali has proved impossible. The inability to rouse myself long before hostel Check Out has preserved my aversion to productivity. Gorging on weighty fruits for breakfast. Running or hiking a bit, then embellishing the jockstrap fragrance leaking from my 10-bed dorm, decorating bedposts with my sweat-soaked clothes.
Lil Boosie keeps me mean muggin' on treks toward downtown and Panadería Quinta con Quinta, and every day at dusk a different arepa-plastered griddle coaxes pesos from my pockets. Occasionally arepas de choclo, sliced, pancake-yellow sweetcorn discs sandwiching rectangular blocks of white cheese. More often, the over-buttered bliss of your typical arepa con queso, the melty-cheese midsection stretching from hand to your chomping mandible with more elastic resiliency than any Peter Parker production. For a splurge, the mighty arepa con todo: looking like a giant Chick-Fil-A or Bojangles biscuit, bleeding Salsa de Aji instead of Texas Pete, layers of oil-penetrated napkins and tinfoil wrapping prevent fillings from spilling, buttery-yellowed dough discs enveloping bulging meats and cheese, a chicharrón, pollo, y res protein orgy.

Tuesday, at least, I contorted my gringo frame to mount a mini-bike for a great if knee-ravaging afternoon ride through Cali to countryside and El Río Pance, where Kelly, Paola and company introduced me to chicha de maíz and refreshingly cool waters. Sans sunscreen and subjected to UV-Index 10 rated rays, my cheeks just pinkened. Phase 1 of Conversion completed. Phase 2: Accent.

But if girls have stopped noticing me for my browness, homeless guys prove keener. And as general policy, regardless if you indulged or declined his requests for change, it's probably never a good idea to lend a homeless guy your iPod; if you're lucky -- and if sufficiently crunk off Boosie you're foolish enough to call bluff on his violent threats: "¿Conoce la guerrilla? Estoy con ellos. Yo mato a gente." -- all you'll have to do is trade him your arroz con leche to get it back.

Though choosing death might've hurt less.

Cali: Where sleeping makes you feel like a sellout

2009-08-17T15:32:00.011-05:00

The Cali Routine: Party through the night, wake up sometime the next afternoon, track down a rice & bean heavy plate to eat, sleep again, wake up for a feast of arepas...otra vez, sigue la rumba.

Cali is the proclaimed Salsa capital of Colombia, a city renowned for spicy women and raging nightlife -- and, I can confirm, afternoonlife as well. My unconscious knack for arriving in cities at the beginning of major festivals landed me in Cali at the opening night of the XIII Festival de Música Petronio Álvarez 2009. Thus the Cali routine.

During the festival, which ran Wednesday, August 12 through Sunday the 16th, nights began at the Plaza de Toros. Nightly displays of coastal culture -- music and dance spiced by ubiquitous unmarked plastic bottles of licores típicos y guaro vended throughout the venue and circulating through the crowd -- enveloped everyone, the entire mass of humanity pressed into stadium seating afoot, gyrating, swaying, and screaming, but with the natural latin rhythm that escaped transmission to the gringo. (Probably some karmic reverberation for all those centuries spent conquering and enslaving and brutalizing...) Always afterward we attended the alleybound, 'til-dawn after-parties -- el remate -- lugging and chugging various spirits and pre-rolled puffables to barely navigable center-city alleys packed by encircling swarms fluidly grooving, cheering, and chanting to handpatted drumbeats.

Kelly, awesome as she is, hasn't expressed the slightest annoyance at being enlisted as my guía turistica, cheerily walking me through the city; introducing me to slews of friends; taking me to both the nameless housefront areparía and the late-night panadería -- Quinta con Quinta, serving an assortment of gooey sweets and pan pizza -- that have sparked my latest foodie obsessions; helping me take down bottles and bottles of intoxicants; bearing my indiscriminate, inescapable butchering of the art of dance.

After a few more days in Cali -- hopefully waking at hours that, should my filled-pastry breakfasts ooze as much motivational energy as they do arequipe, I can at least entertain notions of productivity that might transcend my daily, loyal-customer-motivated cross-city walk to procure pastries and buttery, griddle-hot arepas rellenas con queso -- I'll need to hit another spot as quiet as Manizales (photos L & R), the tranquil, gringo-free mountain city that facilitated my 'tween-Medellín-and-Cali recovery: four peaceful days enjoying good running and reading, better fresh fruits, and the first attempt at watching Colombian cinema sin subtítulos ("Rosario Tijeras").

But, hell, I'm still in Cali. And I smell thick discs of maiz cooking on some streetside griddle, all buttery brown tanlines with cheese dripping down from the clamshell cuts that open the world of arepas sencillas to arepas-whatever-the-fuck-you-can-stuff-in-here. Maybe I'll order a fat-bursting, toothpick-speared choricito on the side, the perfect compliment to the grease-sponge plátano relleno con queso, an entire lengthwise-split plantain gapfilled with melted cheese -- en Cali conocido como aborrajado -- with which I'll be lubricating my intestines. Call it compromising with the digestive tract in the absence of frijoles.

I live for the funk, I die for the funk

2009-08-07T12:56:00.017-05:00

Showers are highly recommended for humans equipped with unparalyzed hands and arms, all travelers included, your hippie-factor not being a factor. Because, yes, I find it highly offensive when we rub shoulders and, bam, suddenly showering me smells like I've neglected the hygiene of an entire half of my body for a month, such that I'm washing the sleeve of an otherwise clean shirt at 3am in the hostel sink. While pretty damn drunk on guaro.

Seriously, how do you neglect such simple practices as bathing, deodorizing and clothes washing to the extent that the lightest contact with you transfers stink? There's a reason every time you step toward me I keep backing away. The stench emanating from your body forms a stink force-field that wards off humans as effectively as a poison-tipped sword. Your scent: puro campesino. But you're not an impoverished latino laboring 18 hours a day in sun-smothered fields to provide the bare minimum for your family. You're on an extended vacation. You have the time and resources to shower. And apply soap. Daily.

Hot water showering is one of the activities I indulged in during my stay in Medellín. La Feria de las Flores continued with various expositions and concerts and processions daily, including the highlight flower parade, in which everyone from just-walking children to just-walking ancianos bore huge and elaborate wood-mounted flower arrangements on their weight-bowed backs, walking miles and miles over hot concrete through the gauntlet of thousands upon thousands of drinking, whistling revelers. A half-gallon of aguardiente made its way into our hands too many times, thanks to a group of underage Colombianos excited by the sight of gringos. How did we know they were excited? The giggle-infused shrieks, "¡Miren, gringos!" Five or six separate groups of Colombians throughout the day requested photos of the gringos, sometimes posing themselves in the picture.

Likewise, a few days ago, running shirtless through El Poblado, a tiny kid spotted me and diverted his attention from the ice cream man. (And you know diverting the attention of any four-year-old from the ice cream man requires something equally incredible as would have been required to divert the attention of Michael Jackson from, well, that same four-year-old.) Kid cocked his head at me, pointed, and started yelling for his distracted dad, "¡Mira, MIRA!" Now to transfer that reaction to of-age women.

During my 9 days in Medellín some friends and I caught a Medellín vs. Nacional futbol match, which was quite the rowdy spectacle. The profanity laced songs and choruses -- many of which suggested various sexual favors team Nacional could perform upon the Medellín crowd -- rarely paused, the whole Medellín section of the stadium constantly jumping, waving flags and banners and pumping their fists, hurtling invectives without discrimination, be it a maricón Nacional or hijo de puta hometown player who misdribbled or held the ball too long.

A daytrip to Sante Fe de Antioquia proved an unforgettable excursion too, another beautiful Colombian colonial town, this one located a few hours bus-ride outside of Medellín. The main draw is the historic Puente de Occidente (right), a wooden suspension bridge and one of the first constructed in South America. Of course we ended up stepping down from the bus kilometers before town, in front of an entirely normal bridge (left...still set against beautiful scenery, eh?) that both a bus employee and a local insisted was the monument we'd come to see, instead of just admitting they weren't sure. AKA Classic Latin American style. (Paul has coined as the new default evasive response, "My father's name is Daniel.") But for that mishap we met and chatted up two cheery, gun-toting military teens, one of whom is also performs as a clown for children. (Can you guess which one?)

Somewhere in there was crammed a noteworthy pastry binge. Astounded by the variety and quality of cheap pastries available at the neighborhood Exito, a Colombian Wal-Mart, I at one point consumed consecutively dinner and breakfast of puro pastel. (As has been noted by many traveling friends, I'm weird. Especially in my singular-in-focus food binges. Beans or peanut butter & banana sandwiches for days on end. My daily vitamin-cramming sessions, consuming pounds of mangos or sapotes, sometimes a whole pineapple, in one session. Chugging liters of milk every few days.)

A simple man with simple tastes, I guess.

More from SANTA FE DE ANTIOQUIA:

More from LA FERIA DE LAS FLORES:
(Clockwise from top left: An outlet in the sidewalk, beside a wall, defining random; many plantains stoking my hunger for tajadas con carne molida; a man arranging and painting a many-times oversized flower display for the Pilsen beer company; normal police for a flower parade)

God in the Building

2009-08-04T02:43:00.012-05:00

Medellín, "la ciudad de la eterna primavera," is probably what would happen if I were God and commanded with designing the proverbial 'heaven on earth'. Second to Playboy, the valley-bound metropolis has the most beautiful women per capita in the world. And maybe with a higher occurrence of plastic surgery. I can't even confirm that the women here have faces.

With the great luck that has kept me from accumulating felonies and prison terms, I arrived in Medellín at the beginning of La Feria de las Flores, an annual festival that envelops the city, drawing paisanos and foreigners alike for the week-plus duration (of officially or unofficially guaro- and cervecería-sponsored events). Take, for instance, the many-thousands-horses procession, highlighted by drunk men hootin' and hollerin' and staggering into the paths of trotting, frothing behemoths, risking trampling for photos beside mega-busted morena Barbies.

Plush barrio El Poblado, where I'm staying, and the nearby Zona Rosa party district are clean and manicured, frequented by the primped and silicon-pumped and their money-breathing, highest-bidder escorts. A quick Metro jaunt can carry you through city center, past highrises, shopping centers and expansive parks; over grungier avenues teeming with pedestrians navigating the maze of "¿Que busca, amor?"-screaming street-vendors and outlet-hawks; to packed and stacked city sectors where ramshackle configurations of junkyard materials pass for homes.

Besides meeting Kelly, a beautiful and oh-so-fun girl from Cali -- the sole reason I'm not leasing an apartment in Medellín...yet -- and kickin' it with Paul and the chévere crew of chicks and dudes inhabiting our 80-bed hostel, my days have mostly been defined by peanut butter, banana & raisin sandwich breakfasts; bandeja paisa lunches; bean-binge dinners; beer, rum, and guaro hazed nights.

But I've learned to dance electronica -- Maybe you'll sneer, "What's there to learn?" But you've never seen me dance -- and spit Colombian slang thanks to the Kelly and the Cali click, with whom I also hit Medellín sites Pueblita Paisa, a great city mirador, and Parque de Los Pies Descalzos.

Paul and I bussed to La Piedra de Peñol -- a 200m tall black rock oddity exploding skyward amidst an otherwise low-sitting, verdant expanse, the boulder some monstrous deity skipped so expertly across the oceans it hopped to land and lodged on contact. Arresting views of lush greenery dissected by winding blue slivers of lake await atop, after a 649 concrete stair ascent toward the heavens.

(Upon returning to our hostel and awaking my computer from sleep, I found ilovecocks.com prominently displayed in the Safari browser, courtesy of my hooker-loving British friends Craig and Danny, who, after my recent club confusion, have taken to interpreting my every comment as a homosexual Fruedian slip. Though sometimes, as when giving Paul instructions on drinking milk from a plastic bag -- "Just put it in your mouth, then squeeze it or suck it or something." -- I make it waaaay to easy.)

¡Ay parce, que chimba Medellín! Pues, ya me voy a aproximarme a Cali, ¡y con razon!

Scrambled Boobs

2009-07-31T22:20:00.006-05:00

Flipping through the channels on our hostel-room TV one swampy Santa Marta night, I scanned past a blurred and fuzzed premium channel -- something digital cable had erased from my memory -- and was immediately transported back home and back in time...

I remember watching scrambled Skinemax many late nights at my parent's home, a blanket up to my waist even in summer, ready to claim fever, volume down and remote always aimed, prepared to punch the previous channel button if any house-creak even resembled a footstep. Scrambled softcore's adolescent lesson is discovering that disembodied breasts bouncing in one squiggle-distorted sector of the screen -- while a bored and moaning, green-and-yellow tinged head bobs in the opposite lower corner, tangled arms wrapping around one side of the screen to the other -- retain all their arousing appeal. The moral is that boobs trump weirdness -- and Colombia is silly for silicone -- so don't be ashamed for coveting that borderline circus-worthy creature crouched at the bar.

(And teens, to save you many nervous nights worrying about your still-womb-bound "brother": I'm pretty sure it's impossible that a stray smear or greasy glob of semen, shot onto the keyboard or glued to the remote control, might, through a freak chain-of-contact, impregnate someone in your immediate family.)

Sex Spam Highlights
Title: Make your love stick as hard as you want it to be.
Text: Best oil for pork motor

Title: Your pork pistol won't fail.

Dulling the Senses: The Dangers of Aguardiente and Amiableness

2009-07-31T20:22:00.009-05:00

I woke up at 2:30pm in my dorm bed with a new number scribbled in my little black pocket notepad, a cute heart appending the information. A business card for the hotel slid out from between the pages. All the markings of success.

My head ached the way it would if I'd decided to play stag with oncoming traffic. And who knows for sure? The string of beers had been repeatedly interrupted and enlivened by bottles passed from strangers hands, rum and aguardiente. A screwdriver poured by some cute Colombianas in a local park was, in my sloppy fervor, mistaken for a large shot and downed in a gulp.

Another image began to coagulate. A cute waitress at Blue, me flailing and failing, speaking Spanish spliced gibberish. Then the Peruvian fashion designer. Wearing a scarf. A nice guy. Man, it was awesome he wanted to buy me beers. Guess we grabbed a cab back to his hotel, where we posted up near the lobby bar for another round.

Hold up.

Fashion designer. Scarf. Getting me drunk. Who was it that appended their name and number with a heart?

Oh. Shit.

It took two sober seconds for the obvious -- that which hours before was obscured behind cans and bottles -- to become clear. Paul was delighted to learn I'd ended up across Medellín, drunk and solo, within an elevator's ride of quite the uncomfortable situation. Engage Mission Impossible: convincing all the pretty girls who observed my exit from the club and cab-dash with scarfed male accompaniment that it was an innocent misunderstanding.

Beanboy

2009-07-30T19:42:00.007-05:00

So there I was, at the top of the stairs tucked around the corner in the closet-sized nook from which opens one dorm room. In that vacant, wood-floored cubby sits one empty desk; and one mini-chair, the type you'd pose an oversize doll on. If you're into that sort of thing.

I was squatted in the chair, my ass spilling over the palm-sized seat, my computer and my mammoth tub of beans sitting chest high atop the desk, my spoon awkwardly poised, lifted over my shoulder, for the plunge. Goliath in a dollhouse. A guy walked around the corner toward his dorm door and I, with the picture of myself in my head -- that crazy hostel kid hanging out by himself, in some lonely corner crouched on children's play accessories -- started snickering audibly. That was the second time I'd started laughing unprompted -- that maniacal building laugh that billows upon it's own stupidity -- since I'd accompanied a couple of hostel mates outside the property gates to huddle and indulge while tempting blackmail or imprisonment by passing policía.

Which brings us to the first time I randomly erupted, in the kitchen moving antisocially amongst a group of stir-frying girls. Must've looked pretty crazy again, a guy pacing silently for a few minutes, Lil Boosie bumpin' through the headphones, suddenly in hysterics. Hauling around enough beans to feed most Central American villages, I suddenly appreciated how comical it must be for the people who witness me buying and preparing beans for myself, one half-kilo at a time. For the multiple girls who've said, "I hope you're not sleeping in my dorm." For the girl who told me, "You've got gorgeous beans." For anyone who sees me ladling from one of my fridge-stacked Tupperwares bulging with a lumpy brown, sausage links, beans and cheese cubes pressing through the soupiness against the walls. For anyone who has encountered me hunched over a bucket, spoon in hand, a recurring image the last few days.

And for many days to come.

The Sweat Saga Continues

2009-07-28T19:15:00.004-05:00

After the sleep-deprived overnight bus between Bucaramanga and Santa Marta, Colombia – loading the iPod with Season 4 of The Wire proved a sage decision – Paul, Chris and I stepped into a northern-coastal oven. Besides the browner skin and brutal humidity, not much had changed. The food was still fried, bland, beanless. Street-vended tropical fruits still imbued trash-littered streets with vibrancy.

We booked passable cement cells for $8000 Colombian Pesos per night, scarfed nature’s multicolor bounty -- fibers catching between our teeth as sticky nectar stained our chins – while sifting sand between our toes, and wasted the remainder of the day soaking sun in nearby Taganga, reminding ourselves that, no, we weren’t melting like the Wicked Witch of the West, just sweating. At nightfall we wasted a wise-spender’s day’s worth of meal money on a beachfront tourist trap that sucked the flavor from our fish as successfully as the bejeweling of Kelly Tripuka and Kurt Rambis would have the Cash Money or No Limit Records rosters.

We split for the pristine Parque Tayrona the next morning, hiking through jungle to boulder-bounded white sand beaches, shading ourselves and tempting “Guess what kills more people than sharks each year!” statistics beneath overhanging palms. The water was refreshing, perfect except for the tendency of salt-water to give sweating hikers crotch rash. A night in a hammock near the beach sounded more satisfyingly poetic than it proved in practice, but neither animal nor hippie raided my humidity-dampened stock of pre-prepared peanut butter & banana sandwiches.

Two full days of sweating and trudging through that nationally protected paradise later, we returned to Santa Marta, where I finally encountered worthy seafood, devouring a delicious Cazuela de Mariscos – a meaty shellfish stew simmering in a creamy milky sauce. Word had it Cartagena is for admirers of womanly perfection what, um, The Gold Club is for admirers of womanly perfection – which is to say well-primped and probably prosthetically enhanced -- and as we were a few beers deep and plans for the next day hadn’t developed past sweating, we made some frat-boy toasts – grunts and such -- and decided to dip.

The next morning, four hours of cushioned-seated, air-conditioned freedom from humidity southward, we descended into Cartagena, admiring the various shades of brown and ample vastness of booty bouncing betwixt all that colonial architecture all those misprioritizing gawkers were ooohhing and aaahhhing about. Misguided as they are, Cartagena is beautiful, understandably the crown of Colombian tourism, rife with shady parks and ornate churches, fortresses, the defensively walled-in old-town lined with attention-arresting colonial masterpieces – all thick columns, street-overhanging porches and wood-slatted windows -- single city blocks splashed with a rainbow’s worth of color.

It’s hard to be anything but low-key in Cartagena, where I’ve spent as much time in as out of the shower, sweating through clean clothes as if beer marathons were physically grueling. Sandwich-artistry is a new hobby, stuffing thick fresh-baked baguettes with market-fresh tomatoes and avocados, sautéed onions and fatty chorizitos, rectangular slabs of queso blanco hacked from the block, a pinch of salt and drizzles of hot sauce for spice.

After expressing an irrationality-inflated affinity for frijoles to the cleaning staff, passions propelled by the virtual absence of beans from my oft-ordered Colombian platters, I was christened El Gringo Frijolito and instructed to stock specific supplies from the corner store: “Compremos una cebolla, unos tomates, frijoles rojos y un Maggi.” The produce attendant was quite amused when I inquired, after long scanning the crates of vegetables, “Cual es el Maggi.” The bean-scooper was quite impressed I wanted “un medio kilo de frijoles rojos.” And my janitorial staff, cooking-aid amigas laughed heartily about the digestive repercussions of my desire to “llenarme de frijoles y nada mas.” I just smiled and got my bean on, Chef Frijolito.

"It was so funny it wasn't even embarrassing."

2009-07-18T09:46:00.001-05:00

Guatemala wrapped up without any more cougar attacks, the only drama being the chicken bus pick-pocketing of Jackson by a hamburger-crazed Chapin – a detail discerned post-robbery, when the bank statement reflected no further damage than a $6 Big Mac binge at McDonalds. Maybe other institutions, with their superior standards of security, were more perceptive; presuming that some shabbily dressed Guatemalteca probably didn’t have an ATM card. And probably wasn’t named Jackson Whetsel.

Those minimal losses little more than nuisance, San Pedro La Laguna experienced a Gringo exchange, Jackson replacing Patrick at the language school and in las calles, quickly a hit with all my knee-high friends and their families, a new white behemoth to maul at every appearance. My last days I spent circulating through San Pedro, despidiendo a mis amigos. Jackson and I were invited to several delicious meals with Josefa’s beautiful family, whose humble doll-house kitchen could barely contain our human-sized figures. We accompanied Josefa and crew to Las Cristalinas as well, a beautiful and contaminated swimming spot somewhere between San Juan y San Pablo La Laguna.

And then, after thirty consecutive hours in airports or aboard planes, after enduring multiple bag searches and questions sessions by US Customs – I got off easy compared to my highly suspect, traditionally dressed Guatemalan doll, who was aggressively squeezed and molested by overzealous agents – I landed in Charlotte, whisked away by my parents, accompanied by my grandma, toward a gluttonous satiating of nine-months building cravings. Big-ass delicious pizzas and pitchers of Bell’s Two Hearted Ale (from Revolution Pizza & Ale House in Noda). Forearm-sized cuts of pineapple coconut cake at Landmark Diner. (And good ol’ Southern charm: a gentleman’s club billboard either crude or homicidal: “Come meat our dancers.”)

My three weeks back in the States were a blur. I lost days in front of the bigscreen courtesy of On-Demand programming and Redbox, hours of zombie-ism broken only by scent-triggered staggers to the kitchen, to discover which delicious dinner from my pages-long list of “foods that make my lust for Heidi Klum seem normal” my angelic mother had prepared that night: Chicken enchiladas; Spinach quiche; Shish kabobs; Spinach salad; Roasted root vegetables; More spinach salad; Cobblers; Carrot cake…

There was a fantastic weekend in DC with lil’ bro, piping latin tunes through his plush digs, slaughtering brain cells at the DC-area Beer, Bourbon, & BBQ Festival. Then off to the latest of our beloved, tri-annual family reunions, this year on NY’s Lake George -- another weeklong family party of sporting (shuffleboard, beach volleyball, basketball, soccer, etc.); cards (an entire meeting hall dominated by our family, more groups of fours and sixes circled around tables than a kindergarten class, playing psychological warfare with each and every discard, card counting and contorted faces defining another famous Canasta marathon); and consumption (liquors and mixers smuggled in by the handle, ice horded in trashcans, the solo cups of family young and old kept brimming as we once again flirted with ejection from an “alcohol free” family center -- and I couldn’t have been conspicuous if I’d tried, my entire wardrobe soaked in and reeking of the liter of Guatemalan firewater that had exploded in my checked bag during the flight.)

A week back in NC -- divided between bars, my left-side-of-the-couch spot in front of the TV, and the kitchen -- closed out my vacation within a vacation. The debaucherous 4th of July was extended a few days and celebrated in Raleigh with Kibbs, Russell and Bruce, with special guest appearances by Saul, Shane, Dave, Mike Janes and lots of random girls (whose numbers may or may not be programmed in my mom’s cell phone).

And so I -- sleep deprived after consecutive nights of cervezas and reminiscing about Central America, desde la comida hasta el incredible baile tipico de la Garifuna, la punta; after several weeks of postponing even the most cursory South American planning – materialized in sprawling Bogotá, Colombia with a hostel reservation somewhere in La Candelaria, a hip but grimy section of the city dotted with universities, museums, cafes and bars, teeming by day and unsafe to walk at night. I spent six nights in Destino Nómado, a fine hostel in a less-mugged area, telling myself every night that the next day was the day I’d do the planning necessary to divorce myself from the city. But the draw of bandeja paisa (the traditional Colombian variety platter), arepas (fried cornmeal discs stuffed with cheese and/or meats), and obleas (Frisbee-sized wafer-discs sandwiching generous slathers of dulce de leche, various fruit jellies, etc); the steady diet of watery beer and aguardiente as prescribed by dorm-encountered friends Paul and Raul; plus my boundless laziness kept me captive.

But, for travelers, sometimes laziness breeds opportunity. I was in Bogotá to play futsal against locals. Around to stretch a 30th-floor clubbing session until after-sunrise, in a posh discoteca where coke was snorted as liberally as air despite the omnipresent security. I was available to play tejo, the traditional, alcohol- and shit-talking powered Colombian drinking game involving cases of beer, refills of cases of beer, and tossing metal weights down an alley toward an upward slanted clay-pit, with a metal ring in the middle, on the rim of which are placed small bags of gunpowder – when the weight smashes a pouch against the metal rim, there’s a LOUD and visible explosion, lots of clinking and rejoicing.

I walked the city with Paul and Raul, observing extremes of poverty and wealth – sheet metal- and tarp-walled homes in the shadows of highrises and luxury condos; horse drawn carts behind BMWs. From atop a skyscraper we marveled as the endless city crawled over the surrounding mountains into infinity, gawking at the public-transit-only highway lanes, clogged for miles with exhaust-spewing buses bumper to bumper, packed as tightly and inching as uniformly as trains.

Finally the route out of Bogotá materialized, though not without calamity. After Paul, Alex and I accidentally boarded a bus going away from el terminal de autobuses, we climbed mountainside slums into the far south of the city – where Raul, Colombian himself, had previously mentioned is the place “even Colombians don’t go. Maybe they’ll find the pieces of your body.” Our route terminated in a black-bus filled parking lot, the silence outside that property suggesting the days decapitations had already been performed. After asking at least five people – from idling bus drivers to tiptoeing locals shocked to learn that gringos, like themselves, are born with bodies assembled – we ascertained that at a nearby corner buses passed heading toward the terminal, where we arrived with, not in, bags.

Paul and I arrived in quiet, colonial Villa de Leiva at night, creeping into town in a chorus of incessantly blaring horns and sky-illuminating explosions, accidentally absorbed into a procession as townfolk with blankets draped over their shoulders, slipped over their heads through a single center-cut hole, sauntered past sipping Colombian lagers. For a few days every July -- as happens in every Latin town at some specified point during the year -- Villa de Leiva is transformed into a party, it’s massive central square turned into a maze of vendors, a bullfighting ring constructed, outsiders converging for a few days of dance-and-alcohol saturated revelry. The distant throb of reggaeton became my lullaby.

A daytrip to Santa Sofia for six hours of high-octane hiking was about the only accomplishment during that few day stay, before we departed for Bucaramanga. Where the only notable accomplishment -- beyond practicing my mango peeling and platáno y yuca frying techniques -- has been the daytrip to El Cañon de Chichamocha, a dramatic gorge gutting the Colombian highlands.

And I can’t imagine the sun-baked coast will cull more activity from this hammock-bound loafer.

The Beginning of the End...and still no Coconut Cake.

2009-06-07T15:04:00.009-05:00

Las Ruinas de Copán, Honduras, a World Heritage Site where reside well-preserved remnants of Mayan civilization, temples and giant stone stelae carved with the precision of DNA, is cool. Yeah, I'm not really a Ruins-head. But still cool.

The highlight of the trip from Copán Ruinas to Antigua, Guatemala -- where I was to meet my boy J-Whet -- was a pair of bars somewhere over the Guatemalan border: Bars El Mujeriego, numbers 1 and 2. Which literally translates to "Bar The Womanizer". Classy stuff.

Antigua was a trip. Reunited with J-Whet, my longtime partner in hoopin', Wire-watchin', tree-blowin' and appreciation of the English language, the smile couldn't have been smacked off my face. Though one of those sexy girls strutting around probably should have tried, the way I'd stop on a dime and swivel, following those hips while they walked away, smiling over their shoulder every few steps.

Yes, my game is on right now. And it's so not game. Just gotta drop an "Hola" and stare. Not gonna work in the states. Hell, maybe the game's in my hole-ridden, mud-stained Asics. Maybe little strands of charm are caught in the stubbly beard I'm sporting. Maybe Guatemalans have a healthy appreciation of Kriss Kross, 'cause I'm so de moda in my pit-stained t-shirt flipped inside out. Or maybe it's just that Jackson and I are two Americans walking the streets armed with dos metros, smiles and swag.

And for this I keep defying the rainy season odds, accumulating more kisses than mosquito bites, more at risk for the Human Influenza than malaria. There's the usual clubbing, which usually ends up in sloppy displays on the dancefloor. And then there's the over-40 set, who seem to have a vulture-to-vulnerable attraction to Pat.

Take, for instance, Bethy the street vendor, serving churrascos at the Antigua bus station. Rocking a mustache and a bevy of kids. Jackson and I dined at her stand our first night, lingering at her stand through the meal, beers, and half a liter of Quezalteca Especial, my favorite firewater. Bethy doesn't mind drinking on the job. So Jackson and I promised to return the next day, and upon arrival, already deep into the Quezalteca, I was greeted with a photo. Un recuerdo. Bethy abandoned the stand to buy us a bottle of XL Rum, dragging me along, hand in hand. People in the grocery store kept smiling in our direction, like I was just some visiting John with questionable tastes.

Bethy insisted I take her number. That I take her out to dance. (Luckily I'd already made a date with a married girl.) Eventually Jackson and I managed to pry ourselves away, but Bethy yelled something at a friend about being back in twenty minutes and again left the stand totally unattended, escorting us back toward the hostel. We made it a few blocks and Bethy indicated she'd reached the end. She pulled me halfway down a city block and proceeded to profess love and things of that nature. I sensed she hadn't showered in a while. All of a sudden -- though I pretty much knew this was inevitable -- she enveloped me like a boa and performed her best Species impression, trying lick my lungs. I had to strain to push her face out of mine. When I rounded the corner to find Jackson, a Guatemalan named Carlos laughed loudly and asked, "Did you get it?"

Now I'm back in San Pedro La Laguna, where Jackson is staying with my old homestay family, getting to know all my friends across town, and preparing to study Spanish for several months at my old school. Ah, and trying to figure out a way to get a new bank card or transfer money to a San Pedro bank, thanks to a bus-prowling ladrona who jacked his wallet and ATM card and proceeded to do exactly what I'd do with a stolen card: do some fine dining, Big Macs and fries at McDonalds to the tune of $6. Minimal damage but a hassle nonetheless.

Seeing all my old San Pedrona folk -- mis hermanitos y primos and still more matured women with kids who keep hinting at marriage -- is the perfect ending to this trip. Yesterday Jackson and I ate lunch and then went to the slightly contaminated beach Las Cristalinas with Clarita, Josefa and fam. Amazing people. Amazing Friends. Man, I'm gonna miss this place.

My brain's in your booty.

2009-06-03T15:11:00.004-05:00

OK, who's hiding the chili dog? I didn't see anyone board the bus with a foil-wrapped wiener, but my mouth is watering. Hmmm, the scent strengthens when I lean back in my luxurious leather seat, trying to reposition myself in whatever manner will keep my legs from crashing into the next seatback and minimize the poking of metal under my ass. Ah, nothing like riding a US school bus, still with original seating, as an adult. But the scent. Nobody is munching anything except mangos and tajadas. And there's only one guy sitting --- oh, God. There's no chili dog. It's just campesino. One of those it's either really delicious food or pure human filth moments of confusion, reinforcing that my traveling learned lapses in hygiene are relavitely minor. Puro campesino. Coming to a chicken bus near you.

In the last weeks I've bounced between Santa Rosa de Copán and Copán Ruinas, Honduras, relishing all that which I'll soon be lacking: Baleadas, enchiladas and my newest addiction, tajadas con carne molida o pollo frito; dirtbike treks bumping and jerking and teetering up a down rutted mountain paths and forest-traversing firebreaks; sitting riverside, cliff diving, feasting on wild growing exotic fruits "sanitized" in water that could be teeming with runoff and Hepatitis; "helping" teach English classes at a local university, thanks to daily invites from my new Honduran-American friend Mario, which essentially meant swelling the address book with the real phone numbers of stunning, college-aged, English-studying morenas...oh, yes, and a job offer has followed; above all, social norms that say I can gaze and drool after anything that saunters or struts down the sidewalk. Despite the lust contorting my face as I pause and turn, thumb and forefinger massaging my chin, my head bouncing side to side as I follow that booty down the street, that I've so far refrained from excessively lewd cat-calls qualifies me as a gentleman. I fear my neighbors and the police back home won't be quite so compassionate when I'm admiring their high school-aged daughters. (Can I say that, like my newfound predilections for flagrant horn-honking and pissing in DUDE-there's-people-milling-around public, it's just something I learned in Central America? Will the neighbors appreciate that excuse when I'm making my court-mandated door-to-door introductions?)

Travel Fact

2009-05-30T14:29:00.003-05:00

Shampoo: I've used less than two ounces of shampoo in the last 8+ months, having yet to empty the 2oz FAA-approved Head & Shoulders bottle I brought to Mexico. Soap usually suffices, and my hair's still soft for the girlies.

Ode to Baleadas

2009-05-29T17:49:00.005-05:00

Ay, baleadas. The Honduran national street food. Pick a city and, breakfast to latenight, whenever the craving strikes, you'll find busy assembly-line stands lining the streets. Meet the cast. The all important tortillera, stretching dough wide and thin, tossing it on the comal. She attends the comal, tossing readied tortillas into baskets nearer the women working the frying pans, who, in between stirring the beans, eggs, and meats, snags orders from the hungry masses hovering around. Then you pay the guy who hangs out, inhales the wonderful scents, and collects money. I want that job.

Fat, hand tossed flour tortillas, smeared with an oil-rich refried bean paste, then loaded with your choice of colorful decorations. Scrambled eggs. Crumbled cheese. Avocado spooned from its flesh. Curls of red onions or chimol. Juicy strips of tender beef freshly speared from the oil bath if you're feeling carnivorous. Maybe an extra tortilla, browned with bulging air pockets, hot off the comal. All for no more than L$25 fully decked out. Now my five day binge of nothing but baleadas and the occasional bagged mango doesn't sound so mad, huh?

Not only that, but my favorite baleada outpost in La Ceiba offered this greasy, to my knowledge nameless variation. The flour tortilla was tossed, then dumped into boiling oily depths to brown and balloon, until it looked like the crust of a Personal Deep Dish Pizza. Then it was treated like a baleada, save the folding, loaded with toppings. Like a big, brown and garnished edible sponge of cooking oil. Wonderful.

Currently I'm on a Tajadas con Carne Molida binge. Mountains of fried plantain chips, covered in a sauce of potato bits, sauce, and ground beef. 'Nuff said, no?

I like big butts

2009-05-29T17:08:00.004-05:00

After five blissful days of bouncing butts and street-vended baleadas -- that comida tipica comprising, quite literally, the full extent of my diet besides the occasional bolsita de mango maduro con sal y vinagre -- I decided a change of venue might restore sleep and vitamins to my life.

I bussed from hot and hectic La Ceiba to the-phrase-snail's-pace-would-imply-things-actually-move-here pueblito Gracias (a Dios), Lempira, Honduras. The hotel attendant asked me if I'd visited the old Spanish fortress overlooking the town. I replied yes. "Usted ha hecho todo. Ya conoce Gracias," she said with a laugh, before resuming staring at the wall. I hadn't even sliced my first morning's breakfast, two ripe sapotes.

And yet I stayed another day varying the diet -- tacos y enchiladas, horchata y fresco de Guanabana for lunch; pinchos de cerdo con repollo, tortillas, y papas (boiled in, I believe, oil; not fried) for dinner. And the nightly pint of ice cream and the availability of delicious banana sodas, i.e. Tropical, bred one delicious float. I shot some hoops during the day, smiled at girls, and met a girl working in the market who must've had one of those third world marraige-at-first-sight-of-white moments.

Even with nothing to do but sweat and chitchat with townfolk, it was difficult deciding to leave. Good food + slow pace = great place. I was sitting in my hotel lobby, having technically vacated my room by the appropriate hour, pondering staying another night. A friendly thirty to fortyish mother even offered me a room in her house, gratis. She was so nice. We met, she dropped the Usted form for Tu, and then decided sharing her Skittles by hand didn't suffice, shocking me when she leaned in and tongue fed me candy and saliva. I left town.

And good thing too, because if I'd stayed I'd probably never have seen the rugged, reeking campesino board the bus proudly sporting his clean, cute Motorcycle Slut hat.

Next I hit Santa Rosa de Copán, a rather untouristed city that -- like Gracias, Ceiba and, I think, every city in Honduras -- is dominated by dudes keeping the hair gel industry thriving during these difficult times and female examples of genetic perfection. Honduras and El Salvador, save the coasts, are off the tourist map. Probably because guys are worried about getting caught oogling a gangbanger's girlfriend. And with more salvatruchas and dieciochos and latinas-whose-DNA-you'd-want-to-sample per capita cruising the calles than in any other Central American countries, that's thinking prudently.

I feel like dying

2009-05-22T18:42:00.003-05:00

The way Tegucigalpa climbs and crowds from the valleys to the peaks -- crooked wooden planks strung with plastic sheeting fluttering in the wind like flags of poverty, the rusted red of tin roofing cutting swaths between foliage, as bunched as Brazil's infamous favelas -- looks entirely improbable.

It's the type of extreme density that makes more sense in a plane-bound metropolis, hardly so here where steep slopes jut so suddenly and sharply, houses affixed precariously to precipices as if secured by tacks, where it looks like The Hulk raged under the land, trying to punch his way out.

But Teguc was just a blip in a long day busing from Estelí, Nicaragua to Siguatepeque, Honduras, a nondescript city where I passed the night on the way to La Ceiba. La Ceiba is a grungy northern port city on the Caribbean coast, where the population is a diverse brown and black, Latino and Garífuna respectively, and panhandlers can pester you in Spanish or English. Ceiba is Honduras' party capital, where beer flows freely and girls six-to-sixty, fit to flab, can bust out the Punta, the traditional ass-physics-defying Garífuna dance. The Garífuna celebration of God's generous endowment of rump. Awaiting me in Ceiba was La Feria Isidra y Carnaval de la Amistad en La Ceiba, a wildly popular annual festival that hops barrios nightly, culminating tomorrow with the city center Carnaval.

Nightly Ceibeñas and the visitors packing out every hotel stream to the designated barrio, where beer tents and busied aproned women waving skewers and spatulas prod and flip smoking slabs of carne and chorizo on oil-bathed grills line every street, funneling the hordes doing their best to spill as little beer as possible in the storming swirls of humanity swarming and sidestepping their way between any of the various stages scattered across the barrio's intersections. One advancing army -- los rockeros -- hellbent upon seeing someone reproduce amusingly accented Metallica classics. The opposing flow, more agile, avoiding collisions with grace and shimmying hips, gravitates toward thumping basslines, reggae and reggaeton, where smooth-moving masses of dark brown and blacked skinned Ceibeñas groove, sweat glistening, in clothed and standing simulations of sex. I join the white-teed, twisted 59fifty-capped admirers along the edges. Rhythm and booty. My dry eyes alert me I'm not blinking. If I turn around, I can enjoy professional, scantily clad dancers doing 360° revolutions, thrusting their midsections in and out, opposite the movement of their cocked arms. Air sex. Then they're back to back(side)-to-crowd, when preposterously sumptuous posteriors flap faster than Hummingbird's wings.

If there's a good place in the world at this moment to risk contracting HIN1, malaria, or AIDS, it's probably La Ceiba -- for the feria-driven influx of Central Americans, the Caribbean coast location, and proximity to San Pedro Sula, respectively.

Accordingly. La Ceiba: almost dying and going to heaven.

Got that WMD

2009-05-10T12:33:00.007-05:00

There's nothing that lifts the spirits faster than spying a chubby faced tot behind the dash of a Power Wheel, cutting circles around Estelí's Parque Central's centrally located gazebo. The fact that families pay money to have their kids scoot around in Power Wheels, often escorted by the surly, chain-smoking entrepreneurs, is fun in itself. More fun, however, is the chubby-face factor. Funnier than fat, sausagy fingers -- "chorizitos" -- are kids with faces that look like they're filled full of pus, like a giant wasp swooped down and stung them smack on the cheek.

My most recent resolution is to avoid killing any more goats. Yesterday while running toward Managua on the Pan-American, I startled some goats grazing roadside. The pack of goats proceeded to run uphill, and I continued on for another twenty meters, reaching the halfway point of my run, at which point I doubled back. At which point I noticed the goats sprinting back downhill, chased by three barking dogs. As the goats exploded out from the bottom of the gravel driveway, one of the smaller goaties neglected to look both ways before crossing the street and got smacked by a pickup. He was in the middle of the road, looking quite stunned at the new shapes his body and bones had taken, as I continued on...

Lastly, the true test of a man's passion for his mango is the number of half-inch to inch-long yellowish, fibrous strands snagged and dangling from his front twelve when he drops that mangled, much gnawed upon pit.

Coke Floats for Redemption

2009-05-09T12:35:00.003-05:00

I've been spending my last few weeks bouncing between Masaya and Estelí, Nicaragua -- in the former invading the humble but cozy dirt-floored homes and kitchens -- spaces your hanging clothes would find suffocating -- of my adopted families; in the latter, trying to work my charm so I can flirt with creating my own (i.e. striving to arrive at that delightful point where it'll be necessary to pray that prolonged exposure to heat doesn't proliferate undetectable lesions in sheer rubber prophylactics).

Masaya, besides being a treeless incinerator, is the home of some of my best Central American friends. I breakfast in Everth + fam's market comedor, then spend my afternoons lounging with Marbel + company, gobbling up homemade comida tipica -- i.e. torta de pescado: dried, deep fried fish -- gulping down tistes and chichas. I drank ant-and-dirt-specked sap scooped directly from a machete-hacked tree trunk, the so-sweet chicha. The Powerade bottle refilled with milky white Chicha that I'm lugging around will have to wait the fifteen or so days it takes for heavy fermentation to soften the sweetness. ¡Sabrosisima!

Everth, wife and child escorted me to Catarina, a chilly pueblo 8km outside of Masaya, set on the crater rim overlooking la Laguna de Apoyo, deservedly known for its mirador. They then proceeded to treat me to a tipica platter costing half the month's rent for their concrete enclosed patch of dirt.

How do I repay the kindness heaped upon me, the undeserving karmic abyss disguised by a nice smile? By introducing the world to Coke Floats.

Barbecue's Revenge

2009-04-30T20:26:00.004-05:00

With the end of humanity now in sight, courtesy rebellious barbeque, I hope women will start throwing themselves at me. And less in the 28 Days Later we-wanna-share-the-plague-and-pain type of throwing oneself as the let's-get-it-on-in-these-last-moments type of forwardness.

Yesterday in Managua, on one of the many inner-city bus rides I took between Mercado Huembes, Plaza Inter, and Mercado Oriental, a girl near me vomited violently several times. Later a guy, without first assessing the floor, plopped down in the seat, his black boots swimming in the white sea of clam chowder -- of a chunkiness to which Campbell's aspires. I was gonna warn him but I felt like I needed a laugh. Mostly because riding city buses in Central American capitals, supposedly, is the russian roulette for muggings, so everybody is constantly mad-dogging everyone else, brandishing bags of mangos as if they were bricks, making sure the thorns of those dozen roses are prominently displayed.

Anyway, I figure I witnessed the introduction of barbecue's revenge to Nicaragua, and being on a packed, vomit-sloshing US school bus has probably ensured my quick demise. I'll be dead next week. So be it. So far, though rather quickly, said virus has only manifested itself as brutal purgings of the bowels -- which are making me suddenly thrilled horrible karaoke is blaring from the bar next door. Every time I fall upon the toilet seat is sounds like the Gremlin who squeezed into my anus is being skewered.

At least, before I die, I've rediscovered the joy of tipping. Which is to say rewarding good service when it isn't an obligation. I typically eat street food or in grungy market comedores, or I'm buying fruit by the bagful. Minimal service eating where tipping is unheard of. But yesterday morning, at a random comedor stuck in a dirt-floored, covered space between the long onion and watermelon galleries in Masaya's public market, I was spurred to generosity.

Of course the breakfast I wanted didn't correspond to any of the dozen covered pots of various meats and vegetables and concoctions atop the woodfire stove. I rattled off a short list of what would satisfy my cravings: gallo pinto, queso, y maduro. I was assured my demands would be met and was pointed to the plastic table with the rice and bean residue-soiled tablecloth. The ladies went to work.

After ten minutes appeared a heavenly platter of greasy gallo pinto, maduros y queso frito, mas la mitad de un aguacate, dos huevos fritos y un cafécito. The family chatted me up, Everth, the father of two-year-old cutie Belinda, had his daughter walk over and kiss me on the cheek, and proceeded to bill me C$30. Which is to say there was absolutely zero concern I was being given a gringo-weighted bill. Which is to say, in several emergency situations, I have literally considered wiping my ass with larger quantities of money. So I dropped a Pedro Joaquín Chamorro. BAM. Fifty Córdobas.

It's an incredible feeling to stuff yourself on a made-to-order feast, all in gracious company, then, in a place where tipping doesn't happen, dtop 66% of the bill, all this and walk out only US$2.50 lighter. Though, now that I think about it, my intestinal perturbance might have something to do with the family's use of avocados as the tool with which to soften and flatten raw steaks.

To top off a nice dining day I visited my first Nicaraguan taco stand. Nico tacos are like taquitos, rolled tortillas filled with spiced, shredded meat, served with cabbage salad. I had two chicken tacos, pulled fresh from the simmering oil-vat. They were intensely flavorful, all that crispy fattiness balanced by a pineapple sweetness, hot peppery bite, and juicy meat.

Today I breakfasted again in the market, treated to the same fresh feast at whatever hour I arrived (frickin' McDonalds, and all you have to do is reheat some frozen shit!). Afterward I chatted for hours with Everth, and carried his daughter around the market while he purchased a variety of fruits I'd never tried, so I could eat again. The guayabana with its incredibly sweet white flesh; nisporo, with its sapote but smaller, juicier imitation; hocote, simple and sweet. Tomorrow I've been promised anona, a red-skinned, sweeter take on the guayabana.

When I returned to my hotel, the owner delivered a note my good friend Marbel had left in my absence. I hadn't seen her since she suddenly stopped appearing for work at the quesillo stand, at which point I stopped eating quesillos. I called her up, her husband scooted over on the mini-moto and scooped me, and I spent the afternoon eating homemade baho and chocobananos in the humble family home. I got to hang out with Marbel's awesome kids, mom and sister, share laughs and compliments over old photo albums, and then share the majority of my 1800+ photos on the viewing screen of my digital camera -- many from parts of Nicaragua they'd theretofore, well, only seen in pictures.

And I was reminded again of one of the trillion reasons I'll regret dying soon, without having the pleasure of returning to NC for an eastern style BBQ-sandwich: People making you feel at home far, far from home. Good ol' southern hospitality.

If they catch fire, toss 'em in the lake.

2009-04-28T20:36:00.002-05:00

Today I went to La Laguna de Apoyo, a crater lake near Masaya, Nicaragua. It was picturesque, just like Lonely Planet had promised. Yay! I hiked down to the water, touched the water, decided it would be nice to swim in, decided then that I'd prefer not to be wet, took a few pictures, then hiked back up to the crater rim, at which point I was dripping sweat, my khaki pants soaked through, and I decided a swim would be nice. Apoyo is at the wrong end of the journey.

This advisory, taped to my hotel room's wall, might be more interesting:

DO NOT USE the fan as clothes dryer. could overheat and cause fire. Think about their safety.

I guess clothes and/or fans, I'm still a bit confused, are something of sacred commodities around here...

Precious Metals

2009-04-28T20:00:00.005-05:00

It would have already been obvious to the casual observer that I think Marbel is way fuckin' cool. How many married women of the non-cheating, non-friend's-moms varieties do you see me hanging around?

But it's obvious, you say, Marbel of Masaya sells superlative quesillos, thus commanding dominion over your stomach, to which your heart and brain are but accessory organs. Moreover, there's plenty of other pretty providers of sustenance for whom your adoration is not contingent upon personality or marital status.

Yes, granted, I reply. But you know I'm only patient enough to muster one half hour of active listening, all that nodding to feign listening allows you to survey all those luscious curves. Thus, I posit, Marbel had long ago -- hours upon hours of conversation the first time I passed through Masaya -- passed this crusty misanthropes tests of cool.

And then at dinner last night, if I wasn't already regretting that her husband was proving a genuinely excellent dude (thus constructing something of a moral speedbump on my usually flat path to justifying "accidents" like a lawnmower walking its way into bed), Marbel asked if I liked Metallica, pointing out a poster on the wall behind me. After I finished mashing with a fork prong the bug that had just crawled out of my no-so-fresh by-the-slice pizza, I responded in the affirmative. I expected the squashed face response, mocking devil horns and head banging. (I've been hanging out with too many superchristians, I think.) I added hasty comments about la musica being "muy pesada, muy fuerte," to excuse her forthcoming dismissal of my preferred tuneage.

"!Me fascina Metallica¡" she blurted with eyes wide. "¿Conoces la canción 'One'? Es bien bonita." She proceeded to further decimate my expectations (and urge me toward the nearest John Deere dealer) rattling off favorite bands and songs: Pantera, "Walk"; Iron Maiden, "Fear of the Dark"; Megadeath; Slayer; Sepultura; etc.

All of which are bands that would appreciate any diabolical plans I conjure.

The Fritangera and the Cañon

2009-04-26T16:42:00.004-05:00

The Cañon de Somoto is a cool excursion. The kilometers-long rift runs through mountainous northern Nicaragua, the cool waters of the Rio Coco running through the slit below the cliffs. The Cañon offers a lazy afternoon floating in inflatable rafts (pulled by Nicaraguan men for a few bucks) or swimming in the refreshingly cool waters (which, unfortunately, requires your own exertion). It's way better if you're accompanied by your Nica-kissy-cuddly of indeterminate age. I'm still almost sure she's 19. Since she's pure morena and I'm pure gringo, we've been endowed the superpower of restoring everyone who sees us to infancy. Which means they forget it's impolite to stare. And stare. Since Luz Marina is older than 14, it's a given that people assume we're married, and our canyon guides inquired such.

Keeping cake close to my heart.

2009-04-22T18:49:00.003-05:00

So I keep doing this thing where I eat an ungodly amount of cake, feel near-comatose as my pulse plods, veins running thick with icing, and promise myself I'm not going to ever do that again as I sink into sleep with a bready-brick in my stomach. Every next day, enchanted by twenty-five Córdoba cuts of fantastic layer cake that would leave Fat Bastard begging for a doggie bag, slices that standing side-by-side would dwarf Shaq's shoes, my willpower crumbles and I end up tempting shoulder dislocation hauling another hunk the twelve blocks home. And the repostería also makes giant donuts -- at least the size of the rims on my old Geo Prism -- that it smothers in a thick yellow cream dotted with raisins. These donuts somehow weigh even more than the cake, as if the secret ingredient is some undiscovered ultra-dense baking element from planet pastry.

What else? Well, all this flirting with diabetes usually takes place after my nightly bout of Thanksgiving-style gluttony. A recently discovered frintanga that completely hides its dinnerware beneath mounds of gallo pinto, cabbage salad, and whatever so-cheap-as-to-be-practically-free side item(s) I've elected to eat that night; side items that are essentially a fingernail's worth of something, say a mixture of chicken and rice, deep fried until it's fist sized. Or bigger.

That C$5 enchiladas are delicious deep-fried pockets filled with said rice and chicken. They look exactly like, though are probably less healthy than the "fruit" pies/turnovers you can buy at any Seven/Eleven, the empanada-looking crapsnacks that are stacked on shelves in either the traditional waxypaper bag or the more modern cardboard box. Regardless of the style of packaging, you'll recognize these treats for the huge grease stains soaking through the outside.

Dad, you can postpone that dentist appointment. I think we shoud go ahead and preemptively book be in for the gamut of major heart surgeries.

Cocksucking in Public

2009-04-20T16:07:00.005-05:00

Few things are as surreal(ly arresting) as a two-year-old dressed in a princess' flowing white stroking the sticky, blood-saturated nape of a maimed gallo cradled, lovingly, against the chest of her father. Her white dress already spattered with splotches of deep red for her proximity to the ring of violence. Her sister, pigtails spilling over her Winnie the Pooh backpack, sports speckles of sangre on the backside of her hand, catching flecks flying from the frenzy below while she grips the top rung of the ring.

Los Gallos De Oro was the scene of my first pelea de gallos. Cockfight. Cross from Central Estelí into the rougher barrios across the Pan American. Don't flash your camera. Walk down some dirt streets and follow the squawking. Hand twenty Córdobas to the bruisers posted at the door and step inside. On the left are wife-beater donning men crowding card tables, fists clinching crumpled Córdobas, a bottle or smoke in the other. Next the bar and fritanga, doing quick service distributing cervezas y enchiladas.

A scale with a dangling horn-shaped depository, constricting enough that a gallo slid inside can't fidget and disrupt it's weighing. Further back -- past the long urinal whose curtain cover can't contain the rank odor of stale piss; past the walls of crates stacked ceiling high, from which emanate clucking and such -- the ring. Very professional. A 20' X 15' egg shaped pen, constructed of heavy wooden posts and sturdy chain link fencing. A swinging door opens at one end, decorated with a Victoria beer poster. Plenty of long, fluorescent bulbs hang overhead, illuminating the pit.

Man swarm in the ring, encircling other men equipping each gallo with devastating weaponry, some jagged, bladed impaling piece affixed to one leg. The doctors of death carry leather wallets that unzip; unfolded, both inside flaps are fitted with a range of these puncturing attachments, carefully arranged and fitted in foam like drill bits. One is removed, fiddled with, replaced and another selected. A precise science of death.

All around there's hootin' and hollerin', bills changing hands. The gallos, one leg each fitted with implements of death, hit the ground, testing their new, improved leg. Once again they're swooped into the air, introduced to each other by the arms of their trainers, necking aggressively but pecking nothing but air.

The pen empties but for a few, and one of the remaining jingles his bell. The gallos are loosed, neck feathers fanning. They posture around on tiptoes then WHOOSH, the gallos merge into a blur of fury, feathers flying out, men inside the ring and out jostling for position, views constantly obscured as the in-ring judges circle, crouch and stand. Half the crowd is shouting, some joking and sipping Toña as bits of bloodied dirt decorate their clothing. There's a pause, a moment of distinction, then the gallos recombine, a fluttering, jumping mess.

Really, when one considers the way gallos battle, it's a pretty fucking cool way to fight. Always trying to kick your opponent in the face. I like that idea. Though I'd hope somebody aiming his boot at my brain wouldn't be intent on puncturing my jugular with a well-placed flash of a militarized ankle. There's the interactive spectating, dodging scattering bullets of blood. And education. The math in gambling. Even better, practicing probabilities calculating percentage changes a trainer contracts Salmonella, for the questionable hygiene in the preferred method of cleaning and refreshing a battered gallo between rounds -- sucking and licking their heads, spitting out the residue. There's nothing stranger than seeing a bloodied cocks head with those crazy, what-the-fuck's-going-on-Tyler-Hansbrough eyes completely disappear inside a human mouth.

There's also nothing so brutal as witnessing true to-the-death. When one gallo can neither stand nor flap its wings, only tilt its beak to try to deflect blows raining down. Then the head starts to bob, pecks to the top of its skull bouncing its chin off the bloodied dirt below. Eventually the head sags to the dirt, falling to the side.

Then the fritangera fires up the grill.

Dad, looking for supplemental income?

2009-04-19T17:22:00.000-05:00

Chase and I sipped Flor de Caña (Cuatro años, de Oro) with soda water for a few hours at the hotel, gaps in our conversation filled with moans and yelps from the five rooms recently occupied by couples without luggage (see post below), before we walked to Estelí's Casino Las Vegas. We found a table and enjoyed a Toña, then Chase disappeared behind the door labeled baños. He came back from the bathroom and said there was a long line of beautiful Nicas waiting for their bathroom.

For some reason I was suddenly reminded of the time(s) some years ago I convinced the gullible and ripe to be disgusted that my family was filty rich, thanks to my dad's pioneering use of advancing technology. My dad, the Toiletcam mogul, broadcasting unsuspecting privates through cyberspace from heavily trafficked public restrooms he had infiltrated worldwide.

(To be clear, my dad -- while quite internet savvy and posted in front of a monitor more than most -- would never condone such activities or invasions of privacy, and is in all interpretations an honest, upstanding, moral and ethical citizen. His son, on the other hand, lives in that gray area.)

Auto Hotel Chepito

2009-04-19T17:11:00.000-05:00

"¿Cuanto cuesta la noche?" inquired the female voice outside Hospedaje Chepito's doorway.

"Setenta por una, cien por dos," replied Yorlenis. Again.

Conferring whispers hissed outside, an intermission long enough that I had time to wonder what period of stay the voice had intended the first time it had asked prices. The door swung outward and a woman and man passed inside. I was concerned about what had happened to their luggage. Maybe they had been robbed too, the barrios aren't safe at night. At least he managed to defend his bike, I thought.

Chepito's rooms are situated along one long corridor, a line for hanging laundry running the center. You can hear people breathe through the walls.

Soon we heard panting and screaming. It didn't sound like they were reenacting the robbery I assumed had relieved them of all their belongings. Maybe there were ghosts because soon the two exited the room and the hotel, bike in tow.

At least for more couples stopped by late at night, all absent luggage. Soon the moans and groans and exultations emanated from their walls too. Yesterday morning, even at 7am, anyone sleeping "late" awoke to a woman receiving some sort of punishment she seemed to enjoy.

And somewhere in Estelí there's a skinny Nicaraguan on his bike, scooting around looking for a hooker to adorn his handlebars. As I'd say, Peddling for P...well, you play with alliteration.

Time for a Baho movement! (Nilbog)

2009-04-16T20:39:00.009-05:00

Fresh off a banana-leaf-lined-hushpuppy-style-serving-basket heaped feast of Baho -- all that long-boiled to disintegration-soft spiced yuca, plantain, and tomato, hiding skewer-length hunks of fatty beef, topped with cabbage salad and a tomato and onion chili -- and coconut cake, it's time to relive a few weeks of, well, nothing.

My time in Estelí can be summed up in a few sentences. Situps (which make the bed creak loudly, convincing my neighbors through the unclosed-at-the-top walls, I'm sure, that I'm involved in another vigorous bout of morning masturbation), pushups and a run when I awake. Daily breakfast (gallo pinto, huevos y platanos maduros fritos, con crema, queso, y un cafecito) for C$25 at Super Las Segovias. Returning to Hospedaje Chepito to deposit a Frosty in the freshly-cleaned men's toilet closet (the consistency may or may not be related to my decision to save a few bucks by drinking tapwater). Internet. Short spanish study. Stroll to the public market to buy bags of tomatoes, mangos, or a melon, and every other day a liter of milk; the daily lunch rotation, for vitamins, you know? Maybe sip rum and play cards with the cool folks I met in the Hospedaje, Ryan and Sarah. More likely, flirt with the 19-year-old fritangera I'm currently half-linked with, which rewards me in more ways than just extra gallo pinto. Like Spanish practice. Or the semi-date to La Casita that cost a whopping $4 including cab fare, food and drinks. For dinner, always fritanga hopping -- though I finally tired of the nightly greasebath and took a break for as long as it took me to go through a jumbo bag of wheat bread's worth of peanut butter and banana sandwiches (a few meals).

Estelí being a world renowned hotbed of fabricas de puros -- the expansive tobacco farms expanding from the cityish center filling the twentysome factories with plenty of strong smelling harvests for their highly regarded products -- I toured a cigar factory. A week later my eyes are still watering from entering some of the rooms (barely) filled with tobacco. But I did smoke a fat stogie that was one of the "throw-outs". Not that I'd be able to appreciate the difference.

Semana Santa encompassed my week in Estelí, though it was much quieter than expected. There were a few processions of candle-bearing devotees leading crucified Christs through the streets, and a big church night or two, but I witnessed none of the alcohol-fueled fury I grew so accustomed to during Guatemalan ferias. More than anything, Semana Santa appeared a weeklong excuse to avoid work. With less teenage girls selling bootleg whatevers on the main drag, I had nobody to excite with a smile and "adios", so I adopted an adorable 9-year-old Nicaraguan, Milagros, as my honorary little sister. Her family was, in typical Central American fashion, exceedingly sweet, and because I was chatty and, especially, because I made quick friends with Milagros and her older brother and sister, Joseph and Karin -- lots of half-understood conversation, fistbumps and handslaps -- I was fed freshmade gallo pinto and bread, and then gifted a pair of fOakley's on my way out. Yep, I miss my little sister.

Finally, edging slightly closer to bored after a week of doing nothing, I hopped a bus to Matagalpa, another of the larger northern cities. It's much more city-looking than Estelí, with more of a packed urban grid than Estelí's one forever-long packed street, with Matagalpa's barrios spreading out of the center and climbing the surrounding mountains. I met a cute Nicaraguan lawyer who spoke some English, though her constant refrain of "Yeah" and headnodding whether I was telling a story or asking a question undermined her claims of understanding. Every breakfast I ate in one market comedor, where the handmade tortillas were the best I've had in Nicaragua, and the younger server-cook took advantage of the gringo presence to learn essential phrases in English, perfect for attracting extra clientele (i.e. "I hate you"; "You are fat"; "You are an idiot"; "You are boring"; "You are a hypocrite"; and "Eggs.") Daily for dinner I ate a few feet worth of fresh baked pan sencillo layered with honey and peanut butter (leftover from the Estelí binge), and four to five bananas sliced lengthwise.

And I enjoyed the fuck outta the tiny TV I splurged for, those $7.50/night nights. I was mezmerized by all sorts of terrible movies and softcore porn on Cinemax later at night. And I got to watch Troll II, one of the best worst B-horror-movies of all-time. And, get this, not just once. As soon as it ended on one channel, it started on another. Got my fill of Goblins, I did. Went to an organic coffee farm, Selva Negra, further up the mountains too, but that was rather uneventful. The brakeless, breakneck, hitchhiked truckbed mountain descent was exhilerating however. Matagalpa was also noteworthy for the mobile hot dog carts in the park, similar to those ringing parks across Nicaragua, plastered with painted icons who, previously, had managed to hide their hot dog addictions from the public. Spider Man swinging through, snaring a hot dog in his web. There's Winnie the Pooh hoisting a giant hot dog over his head, like some sort of trophy. Winnie's pork friend, Piglet, is noticably absent...or maybe not so absent.

After admiring the hot dog carts, especially the ones decorated by the inexplicable Nike checks, for a few days, I decided to take the watch-me-do-nothing show on the road. Next stop, Jinotega. A beautifully set valley city encircled by peaking mountains, significantly smaller than Estelí or Matagalpa, its Nicas exhibiting that same natural northern beauty. For people that must have something to do, there is a steep ascent to a peaktop cross posted hundreds of meters over the town, above the cemetary, certainly an essential mirador as the skies streak orange and pink and cloudy wisps slide from sight. (A 50/50 combination of sprinting and panting the upward struggle is recommended for those who wish to enhance the reward of Hotel Mendoza's Baho.)

The Managua Family and Philosophy on Animal Fighting

2009-04-05T11:31:00.005-05:00

They might well have been a family as claimed. In retrospect, they had all the makings of a cult.

I'd smiled at Elizabeth a number of times during our 24-hour TicaBus transit from Panama City to Managua, Nicaragua; when we'd cross paths disembarked for yet another border crossing, or crashing down the aisle toward the busback bathroom -- solamente para orinar. It wasn't until the TicaBus station in Managua that we exchanged words, and a ten minute conversation in which I revealed I was undecided as to my next destination ushered an invitation to spend the night in Elizabeth's household of fluctauting family, minimum fifteen.

I was going to say no, and I really intended to do so, but delirious and motivationally sapped after twenty-four mostly sleepless hours, I was overwhelmed by the enthusiastic arrival of her escort party: mom, a sister and brother. Mom shuffled up and -- her head swiveling between me and Elizabeth like a speed-addled gore freak trapped between two concurrent crashes -- and implored nobody in particular, "Y es cristiano él?" Harm rarely results from lying, so I answered with an affimative nod.

They flashed judgment blinding smiles and grabbed at my hands and luggage like geriatrics grappling for a basket of free Viagra samples. We crammed into their Toyota model Hot Wheel and belched and bucked our way across town, Christian music blaring at an unbearable volume all the way.

Their house turned out to be a number of rooms attached to the family's church, where a sermon was in progress. The living quarters had one well air conditioned room into which everyone around crammed themselves, rocking in chairs, leaning against walls, splayed across the floor or atop the bed. Christian music pulsed at a decibel level that made conversation impossible and almost drove me to accept the existence of a deity merely for someone to supplicate for miraculous intervention. The hand of God twisting the volume knob. People came and went and sang for the glory of god. It was asked if I was baptized. Shortly thereafter it was declared I would accompany the family to a rural retreat the following week, Semana Santa. Everyone squeeled with glee at the prospect of baptizing me. I excused myself to the bucket shower, which might well have been holy water, and contemplated drowning myself...but I can't execute a handstand for long, so dunking my head in the bucket would've resulted in me toppling over onto the hard tile, suffering some debilitating injury that would have imprisoned me in these eager Christian hands for much, much longer. A combination of frustration and cranium-rattling from the bumping bass vibrated free a river of tears that ran so thick I could've passed on the shower if it weren't for the sticky salty skin feeling I'd have been left with.

Day turned into night and the godspeak raged on, tainting my gallo pinto and pollo frito. I'd informed the family, to the disappointment, that I'd be leaving for Estelí for a bout of womanizing the next morning. "Pero, por supuesto voy a regresar para la Semana Santa. Quiero que pase un sin fin de tiempo con Ustedes."

Once I arrived in Estelí I took the coward's route, sending a thank you email that outlined how, suddenly, circumstances had changed and that Semana Santa reunion, regrettably, would be impossible.

Now I'm back home, Hospedaje Chepito in Estelí, Nicaragua. The girls are still the sexiest I've encountered and liberal with their eyelash-batting and smile-flashing. I've reestablished my nightly fritanga routine, a sagging plate of gallo pinto, cabbage salad, tortilla and chili with a carnivore-pleasing portion of marinated pollo o cerdo. I caught a Estelí vs. Granada baseball game yesterday, and am hoping to experience another national pastime, cockfighting, within the week. Now, animal fighting seems cruel and heartless and morally vacuous until you consider what it really is: just like Gummi Bears battling in your fingers, the loser banished to your mouth, animal fighting is just two pieces of meat competing for the honor of feeding you, titillating your tastebuds, first.

Empathizing with T-Pain

2009-04-02T18:23:00.003-06:00

Maybe it was for my newly purchased, much haggled over black-on-black Puma Fuegos. Maybe for the sleek suave Gap khakis Jackson had gifted me from his overstuffed travelsack that afternoon. Or maybe it's just because we're talking about Colombian and Panamanian putas, who thought they'd found my transmission, the lever to throw me into a crazy, wallet-emptying spasm. Either way, distracted by the browned bosoms swelling near eye level, one pair at each peripheral, I didn't notice the hands gravitating toward my crotch, nor did I visibly react when the strippers' each took their tug at my inseam. I smiled goofily and apologized for not being a walking stiffy of a 15-year-old. "Son increibles bonitas," I assured them again. "Es porque he tomado demasiado," I offered, hoping to convince them I wasn't a fluttering mariposa.

They shook their heads and walked off, joining their already sidelined, grumbling vagina-vending friends across the bar, disgusted that the gringos (who actually comprised the entire crowd in the club this lively Monday evening) were actually thrifty backpackers content to simply take in the scenery -- bouncing boobs and superior ass-jiggling -- with their cold Balboas. Shit, whether it's mountains or putas, Central America provides me plenty of landscapes rife with mountains and valleys.

I think it's a sign that some decency survives behind my eyes -- performing Superman see-through inspections on every passing female -- that I, initially, took to averting my gaze whenever one of these stripping beauties of indeterminate age would take to humping the floor or acquainting tongue with tit while staring me down, wielding the force of nudity to try to pry into my wallet. Or maybe it's just that I don't want to encourage additional harrasment for pricier private-room attention to my privates, well aware that cheapskate me rolled into this stripclub with just enough crumpled Washingtons to snag a cab back to the hostel.

Actually, that's about all that restrained me from breaking a once long ago -- and certainly not at that moment sex-deprived -- promise to myself: that I'd never patronize a puta. The pancake browned Panamanian goddess whose gyrations left us gapmouthed and drooling is still, days later, jabbing at my mind with those six-inch glass heels of regret.

La ciudad de Panamà, otherwise, is this. (Drug funded?) Highrises cut an impressive skyline along the water, but corrugated rust-stained roofing and color splashed brick and block edifices, or dreary monolithic projects festooned with colorful lines of clothing strung up to dry above the floor-cluttering garbage on every balcony, are the real city. Miles away, the canal slices through, an engineering marvel that underwhelmed because my imagination feasted upon an utter lack of nautical knowledge. Around every first world corner thrives the world I've come to love: streetfood; nameless cafeterias that serve plate-bending portions for less than $2; shifty eyes searching tourists too casual with their camera or purse; stale urine the streetlong incense; loud, loud, constantly DJ-interrupted music booming from every car and household and grocery store; people dodging through traffic; the cacophony of compulsive honking, so common throughout Central America that the sound of a horn literally signifies nothing.

Into the Valley

2009-03-27T10:29:00.005-06:00

On the way from Boquete to El Valle, two mountian-bound Panamanian retreats for big spenders from the City or imported from abroad, we spent a day dehydrating in David, charmed for the first time in Panamá by real grit and bustle and knockoff goods, cantinas and the omnipresent odor of piss and drunks hurtling invectives in flailing attempts at English. Truly cheap eats too, platters of rice and beans and that-gristly-carne-that-you-really-have-to-work-to-gnash-into-swallowable-bites for under $2. David, a transportation hub and Panamá's second largest city at some one hundred thousand and a handful inhabitants, has a beatiful, modern parque central centered around a fountain, well-lit at night and with benches aplenty for necking couples. Car dealerships and American food chains dot the city's outskirts, more evidence of the money that surrounds in the nearby highlands.

At the David bus station, Calvin decided just before the ticket counter to make his escape, heading back to Costa Rica for surf or a French girl or, in an ideal world, both. We exchanged quick hugs and professions of brotherly love and then Jackson and I disappeared, via a Panamá City bus, toward a split in the Pan-American highway where we were to be deposited roadside. After too few hours of air-conditioned bliss, we were hailed by the aisle-stalking bus attendant, "¡El Valle!" Off the bus, we ambled across the highway to the paint-peeling concrete shelter where various people awaited transport. A microbus passed but we were denied entry, large bags and all, as as many as possible of the waiting crowd jammed into the already overcrowded microbus, two men hanging entirely out of the bus, hands gripping the luggage rack bars running the length of the roof, feet jostling for position in the two foot doorway. Only twenty something kilometers of mountain road to go, sure to be driven in typical blind-corner-cutting, limits-of-engine-endurance-testing fashion. So Jackson and I stepped back to wait again, rejoining the small crowd of remaining Panamanians who hadn't even stepped toward the speeding death rocket -- a ticket to hell where severe overcrowding makes even the trip toward demise uncomfortable.

Before a microbus with empty seats materialized and, though we'd soon picked up enough people that seats were crammed with four butts each, with up to three men crouching near the exit, we were always able to shut the door. So, by Central American standards, hardly crowded. And then we arrived in El Valle, which is a town situated inside of a volcanic crater. A town surrounded, three hundred sixty degrees around, by forest-covered thousand meter mountains. At sunset, or when clouds and the bright sun casts shadows, it's especially intoxicating. Throw in a few $0.50 Balboa's sipped on any grocery store's front steps -- yes, the cashiers offer to pop the top off your bottle immediately upon purchase, though the police are liable to confront you upon sight and inform you it's illegal to drink in public...confusing, I know -- and, well, it's a slow, easy life. Gazing at gorgeous scenery, running down winding, forested lanes spotted with gated properties every few hundred meters, flowers in full bloom. Bikes are the preferred mode of transportation in town, and there's usually a traffic jam of them pitched on the ground, leaning on kickstands or against a column in front of every grocery store's front doors.

Jackson and I read almost all day long, pausing every few hundred pages to walk to our adopted eatery, a cheap comida a la vista establishment (Cafe Bambú), to run, or grab a Balboa or three, sometimes a pint of Estrella Azul ice cream. We watch NCAA basketball in an out of place sports bar, where, with the exception of an exceptionally flirty and touchy gay millionaire -- he liked to slap hands and squeeze shoulders after his every agonizing attempt at karaoke -- and a motivational speaker -- who name-dropped and quoted his bank account on a by-sentence basis -- we were the only customers for two straight nights.

Yes, life is slow. So slow that this morning, while I waited for Jackson outside of the local panaderia-cum-internet cafe, ignoring the two dogs circling my legs, I suddenly felt a stream of warm liquid splashing down my calf. One of the dogs had taken position behind me, lifted his back leg, and claimed me as his bitch.

This one might offend the parents

2009-03-22T09:20:00.006-06:00

Strolling Boquete's streets in the brisk evening chill -- hoodies up, each with one hand stuffed in a pocket, the stiff, exposed five fingers wrapped around another in a series of Ron Abuelo, ginger and Cokes -- our conversation took a sharp mountain turn toward the hypothetical: "Alright, so the first person to put it in her butt gets $20 from the other two." (Take a deep breath. Count to 10. Do you really think we're turning anal-intrusion into a competition?)

After a moment of contemplation I continued, "But no lies. You can't claim butt-breaching if it didn't happen, OK?"

Calvin, midstride, lowered his glass, "Pat, of course. I mean, we're all gentlemen."

A handful of plodding steps reverberated in the lifeless street as we considered the claim before laughter plenty raucous to scatter circling ghosts and lurking mice swallowed the calm.

There. That moment is an accurate encapsulation of how Calvin, Jackson, and I have passed the days since reuniting in San Jose: laughing to the point of tears, enjoying ridiculous circumstances or inventing nonsense -- usually in the form of streetshouted R&B or (predominantly) inappropriate catchphrases coined and then converted to website form, i.e. Justlookinforahole.com, Tryintogetmybeanon.com, etc. -- around bottles of rum.

Another source of amusement: According to a Boquete-dwelling expat who may or may not be on the lam from US law enforcement and, regardless, fulfills every requirement for "dirty old man" (On marriage: "Two twenty-year-old bitches are better than one forty-year-old"; On hobbies: "If you wanna freebase coke once a year, that's no problem. Just don't start smoking crack."), our central park-fronting hostel is a constantly surveilled front for a drug-dealing operation. That Pancho, our hyper-agitated, speedspeaking host, is a surefire crackhead, and that his wife is a listless downer of downers who townspeople call "The Zombie". All of which supports the suspicions Jackson raised immediately after our first encounter, a manic Boquete everything-you-could-possibly-ever-want-to-do-around-here session in which Pancho decimated with pen swoops and swipes and illegible writing, in the excited spazzy manner of a kindergartner fueled by Pixy Sticks (or, hell, just crack cocaine), an initially unmarked map that emerged appearing poorly executed abstract art.

And last night, when a scattered-looking Pancho burst into the kitchen crowded with dining travelers and asked me if I could go ahead and pay for the day. "Por supuesto," I replied, handing him a $10 bill. "Te voy a trear tu cambio en veinte minutos," sputtered Pancho, who summarily scurried out the door and down the street, either seeking change somewhere that didn't include any of the many open businesses within feet of our hostel or going to score $8.50 worth of straight rock.

Observation Station

2009-03-21T10:27:00.003-06:00

Many Central American habitations, constructed with slanted corrugated metal roofing that doesn't contact or close the walls seperating rooms, invite you to share experiences with your neighbors. Like flatulence and sex. It's tempting to press one's perversity onto those victim-of-circumstance (aka construction) neighbors, aiming questions at the walltop gaps between rooms: "Hey, I'm having trouble hearing. Could you be a little louder?" Or, "Hey, can I watch?"
There are more chickens clucking across Central America than blades of grass bowing, or leaves blowing, in the breeze. As such, it was only a matter of time before I decoded chicken behavior. Have you ever watched chickens walk? The way their heads jab forward and jerk back with every step? Like a bully in your face trying to get you to flinch, over and over and over. Chickens, armless and Napoleon-complexed, might well be walking around spitting serious attitude, each and every bucking headsnap corresponding to harmless threats sparking in their soon-to-be-snapped-off skulls, strings of taunting WHAT!? WHAT!? WHAT!?s, STEP STEP STEPs, or BRING IT BRING IT BRING ITs.

Then there's the post-transcribing realization that all of these cute obersavations are a lot funnier in the moment, under the influence. Ahh, well...

Chronicles of the sandmen

2009-03-21T09:41:00.009-06:00

Costa Rican and Panamanian costs have driven Calvin, JL and I into the kitchen, where surplus bags of dry (or Lizano-flavored refried) beans and white rice and whatever fresh flourishes we compile at the market meld into Lizano-heavy gallo pinto, accompanied by requisite bricks of crumbly, salty queso blanco, surfboard-cut lengths of platanos maduros, and tortillas. If you look closely, you might glimpse half a yellow-green beauty of an aguacate tucked between the plate-obscuring piles, puddles of yellowish liquid-fat pooled in the valleys between foods indicating our newfound fondness for frying and liberal interpretation of "splashes" of cooking oil. "Um, dude, how many cups are in a splash?"

For breakfast variation and vitamin-recovery; sometimes you'll catch me halving cantaloupes to hollow with a spoon, or hefting a bag of tree-ripened mangos whose peels have captured the swirl of tropical sunsets.

La Fortuna's Discoteca Volcán Look, two years later, again treated me to some dance floor tongue-twisting, this round courtesy a thirty-one-year-old Tica with a decade-erasing smile. Besides the transmission risk of herpes and mono, all harmless fun. Seeking surf and sweat, we made our way to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast, where balmy beachfronts and grimy drug-runners hosted us for three nights, though our superlative hostel, Los Sueños, afforded us all the comforts of home. Palm trees and sea breezes (carrying that potent, ever-wafting Caribbean scent), tumblers sweating concoctions of local firewater and cola. All at ease.

We crossed into Panama at the quiet Caribbean border post, boating to Spring Break 2009! in Bocas del Toro. Bocas is another tourist haven, at the moment brimming with Spring Breaking universitarios from across the US. So we partied, shook off hangovers to watch the first day of NCAA Tournament action, and made our way back to the mainland, where reasonable pricing still hovers far above that of the Central American heartland (Guatemala to Nicaragua) I miss more with every hemorrhaged dollar. But Boquete's ever-cool mountain climate, the verdant coffee- and produce-rich slopes, I prefer to sand and sweating in the shade.

Who's got the juice?

2009-03-12T16:55:00.005-06:00

La Fortuna, Costa Rica, what with the nearby lava-spouting Volcàn Arenal and natural hot springs galore, is a tourist orgy. Just like most of Costa Rica, I reckon. Costa Rica´s landscape is as stunningly diverse and verdant as I remember from my 2007, latent-travel-bug-awakening visit, but with my new education from having crossed Central America, Costa Rica feels like an unwalled zoo. Chintzy souvenir shops spot towns' main strips. Scurrying backpackers with rabid tour-hawkers at their heels outnumber locals. Every sign is in English. The bastardizing of Costa Rica, and I'm contributing.

I'm not so conflicted. And if I am, I drink. Jackson, Calvin and I went through a bottle of Ron Abuelo and a 12-pack last night before we met Jugo -- who may actually have been named Hugo, but at that point subtleties in pronunciation were lost. We wandered to a bar, drank some more, all the while babbling and slurring in Spanish, then went back to Juice's apartment for ice-crystally Imperial pint-cans to ensure morning hangovers.

This afternoon we were treated to a stew of platanos, yuca and chicken's feet; claws and all simmered for hours and served over rice. According to Wikipedia, "The majority of the edible meat on the feet consist of skin and tendons, without much muscle." Yep, that's about right. Basically you insert a grayish, wrinkly claw-tipped digit into your mouth and suck and gnaw at anything soft, the edible portions that dislodge from bone with the consistency of that rubbery toplayer that forms over old puddings and jellos.

Calvin on slovenly travelers somehow missing Central America's toilet-side waste-soiled-paper repositories: "Um, that's like airballing a slamdunk."

2009-03-10T07:08:00.009-06:00

So, after six months in Wildlife-blessed Central America, of course at my first stop in Costa Rica -- some cheap roadside lunch counter off the highway -- my attention is directed toward a monkey swinging through the trees. This trip's first damn monkey.

Crossing the border from Nicaragua into Costa Rica was something of a hassle for having violated my 90-day tourist visa, having to run between various offices to make photocopies of my passport, another to pay the fine, and then finally back to the actual immigration office. But I made it across to Costa Rica, where police stopped our bus four times to check passengers passports, thus stretching the purported four and one half hour trip from the border to San Jose an extra two hours.

San Jose is decidedly first world. American fast food chains and clean streets, an absence of visible poverty. Stoplights. Stoplights that are obeyed.

The mercado central is filled with lighted, clean-, wooden-tabled comedores missing only the framed placard: "Sanitation Score: 101". This is not the developing world. Where's the grime and bustle, the questionable eateries? The market carnicerias aren't adorned with hanging pigs heads or hacked up cows' hindquarters, flies feverishly abuzz in the heat and stink; but glassfaced, refrigerated display cases, cuts neatly placed in labeled trays.

But Costa Rica is one of the world's most popular destinations for sex tourism. Hookers stalk the corners near our hostel, approaching the cars that creep by, shoppers absorbed in their side view mirrors, deciding whether to speed off or pause on the curb.

After five months, I'm reunited with Jackson, and we're joined by Calvin, who just flew in from Charlotte, NC. Given our propensity for breaking into random harmonized song without the slightest provocation, we're considering presenting ourselves as a renowned American R&B trio in order to land club gigs and impress Ticas. To maintain masculinity in the smooth face of our R&B, we fart and cuss a lot.

Sippin' on some oil

2009-03-08T22:00:00.007-06:00

If, as my health-conscious cousin and Nicaragua's Minister of Health maintain, it's catastrophic to one's health to drink cooking oils like water; if my daily frequenting of liberally-greasing fritangas -- purveyors of platters of slick gallo pinto; shiny, slippery meats; and coaster-sized bricks of fried cheese; all contributing to the yellowish puddles pooling on the food-cleared plates that I sop up with bits of tortilla -- is half as bad as I imagine, then I'll suffer seismic cardiac arrest before I ever make it back stateside. Because streetside grills don't advertise nutrition information, how many cups of cooking oil were used to coat that single, perfectly browned platano maduro, I don't obsess over the calorie or fat or vitamin contents like I do when neatly printed labels are available.

Oh, that two-pound mass of banana leaf-wrapped, pork-stuffed Nacatamal that oozed more oil than the Exxon Valdez? Where at the end of the meal it looked like I'd traveled back in time and been forced into some horrid massaging of jheri curl? Yep, delicious.

My sense of nutrition has returned to its most primal. Like caveman. Make me happy. Mmmm...meat. Carbohydrates. Sugar. More meat. I buy a bag of presliced mango or papaya or a mandarin every once in a while to stave off scurvy, a liter of ice cream or milk to keep my bones from disintegrating. Today I even took a break from fritanga, dining lunch and dinner on the Nicaragüense weekend-specialty Baho. Massive banana leaf-lined cauldrons meld flavors while fist-sized hunks of plantain (in the peel), yuca, and beef simmer in a bath of tomato, onion, and spices. Succulent beef emerges with the toughness of pudding.

At night, the fat lady on the trash and trash-juice littered outskirts of the market is the only person for blocks, perched upon steps in a dark corner, two crazed-looking men babbling behind her. In the act of searching for the signal flames of a fritanga I accidentally stumble upon her. "Hay baho todavía?" I ask. She nods as she pulls back the cloth that, during the boiling midday, shields her steaming treasure from the omnipresent flies. Her bare hand disappears to the elbow as she plucks chunks from the steamy depths that she piles upon the two giant banana leaves palmed in her other hand. The pile rises. "De cuarenta peso?" she inquires, her hand momentarily suspended, poised. "Bueno," I nod, excited to see what the five Cord increase from lunch buys me. The pile rises higher. Cabbage salad from another bucket is heaped atop, the banana leaves are folded over, a plastic bag slipped over and we trade: forty Córdobas for warm dinner to walk. My shoulder starts to ache after a few blocks, and the "stew" is so thick I can eat it with my hands at a table in the park. Passing Nicas don't give me a second glance, so I assume I'm following standard eating protocol. Neither time I order Baho am I offered a utensil or a napkin, nor do I see signs of either.

By chicken bus to Costa Rica tomorrow, but not before a cholesterol-coated breakfast of rice, beans, fried cheese, eggs and tortillas at the Granada market comedor El Maná.

The only kind of movie you can walk into late and still enjoy is porn.

2009-03-07T13:33:00.015-06:00

Cousin Jamie and I bussed down from León-- connecting in Managua where I enjoyed another grease feast near the Mercado Roberto Huembes at my favorite fritanga -- to Rivas, transferring to the volcano-bookended Isla de Ometepe via a ferry that careened back and forth to the point we could see our terrified expressions reflected, distorted even more grotesquely, in the choppy waters. Sometime between the broken down bus that carried us to Altagracia, the several gigantic fish and plantain feasts near the Finca Magdalena in Balgue, and the twelve-hour ferry debacle that wasted an entire day of our lives before stranding us on the island for another night, Jamie suggested: "If we get bored we should rape people." (OK, so I'm actually the crude creature who twisted the suggestion that we "rate" people into aforementioned perversion. Despite spending two weeks with her corrupting cousin, Jamie remains a thoughtful, tactful, entirely respectable human.) Not much else happens on Ometepe unless one is motivated to climb a volcano. I was content to read and walk off the finca in search of better, cheaper meals. And groan about the beds, tarps spread and secured tautly between planks of wood; Jamie informed me these torture contraptions aren't called the "worst fucking sleeping idea ever", but rather cots.

Jamie departed Granada -- the vibrant and gorgeous city that marries the grittiness and bustle of León with the grand colonial architecture of Antigua, Guatemala, all bathed in buckets of bright paint -- this morning after our two-week co-exploration of Nicaragua. Sharing rooms and sometimes even double beds, I've only been able to touch my private parts in the company of shared toilets and waste baskets overflowing with soiled, unflushable tissue paper. And could one even revive their shriveled and wilted baby carrot -- would you roll it between the thumb and index finger? -- cold showers are just too damn cold for an enjoyable crotch yank.

Suddenly with private time and I've booked myself into another cheap, cold water-spigoted hostel dormitory. What the hell? Distracted by the prospects of being able to watch Duke and UNC square off this afternoon, I suppose.

If Arcangel the musician is Arcangel the X-Man, Professor X has lost control of his mutants. And they've gone really soft.

2009-03-02T18:29:00.006-06:00

I'm finding myself slowly seduced by Latin R&B and reggaeton, spinning romantic tunes in my cranium while I amble down the streets, the kind of admission that would normally leave my lips only as a teary confession while I toed the cliff's edge. Because the flight of my self-esteem is eased by an inability to understand the spanish lyrics -- which must be as abysmal as those of every hourly-repeated teen-devoured TRL hit on America's every Kiss FM -- I haven't sunken to smash-the-mirror-and-saw-off-my-head depths.

Yet.

Shit, it isn't even an option in a lot of these budget hostels.

But climbing all these mountains and volcanos presents an awfully easy solution.

¿Que nota, maje?

2009-02-22T19:33:00.009-06:00

Too relaxed to take advantage of plentiful free time fit for a seventy-two hour, visa-resetting border hop to Costa Rica, my flirtations have expanded to visa violations. From my directory of (potential girl)friends collected in Estelí, to Marvil and Juan of quesillo-serving fame on the fringe of Masaya's parque central, to the neighborhood kids and couchsurfing.com saints hosting my cousin Jamie and I in Ocotal; from the streetside fritangas feeding my current protein-binge with bicep-building platters of gallo pinto, plantains, cabbage salad, tortillas, and, of course, meat meat meat that cost, at the stomach-and-wallet-elasticity-testing-extreme of $2.50 to cups of arroz con leche for a quarter, a bottle of Flor de Caña and a Pepsi at a discoteca for $6, cantaloupes for US$0.50 to $1, I've managed to lose myself in Nicaragua as fully as I have in this sentence.

With León-based trekking outfit-cum-social aid organization Quetzaltrekkers, Jamie and I passed the last few nights camped on a secluded beach on Nicaragua's most northwestern point, hiking Volcán Cosiguina yesterday in the heavy coastal heat and eating a delicious, bloodbath of ceviche that consisted of diced tomato, onion, and a fresh clam smashed and pried open and then hacked into chunks, all tossed and "cooked" in lime juice, still swimming in beet-colored blood. It was fun. Despite the easy hike I'm exhausted. And stoked for running water and showers and fritangas and beds; and ground littered with shattered liters of Toña and concrete-napping bolos instead of sandal-piercing, nail-length thorns.

And girls.

True, the boasts of northern Nicaragua's male population that it's women are the country's finest are Steph Curry precise -- Estelí, Ocotal, and Matagalpa are places where the karmic-consequence for the minds (uncontrollable) perversions at every passing Nica is heat that leaves you with embarrasing pitstains. But hating on the rest of the wide world of Nica's would be like saying I only date SI Swimsuit models.

Lastly: Usman: Rickey Hendson inducted into 2009 hall of fame

¡Viva Sir Rickey! (If you're confused about the inclusion of this ever important update, don't fret.)

"En la selva urbana...,"

2009-02-19T10:00:00.008-06:00

...Eddy's words lingered in the air as he glanced at me with that sly smile, "haces lo que quieres." Somehow, of course, Chase, Eddy, and I were discussing (the lack of) Central American laws regulating what we in the US would call "sex with a minor", debating the merits and karmic deductions associated with the crime that suddenly is not a crime. First, let's be clear: we're not perverts. Also, none of us are George Clooney-suave, so the leap from a pocket notebook scribbled full of telephone numbers to bed is a Grand Canyon-sized chasm (that, sadly, no amount of consolation crotch-pumping can power one across).

Estelí, Nicaragua, where I've been stalled for three days, is a medium-sized city with a several kilometer main strip lined with tiendas hawking pirated DVDs and knockoff shoes (i.e. "Four stripes" -- Abidas). Prices are cheap and the people are charming (with the exception of the religious fanatic who kept insisting God would castrate me -- replete with snipping motions with his fingers while his hand hovered over his crotch -- for coveting women and my use of the internet, which he'd never used because it's full of "sex", ), so that there's little to do is hardly a fault. I'm content stalking the streets with robotic singlemindedness (I'm missing only the ring-and-drawstring centerback), armed with brief phrases to float at every passing female not carrying a kid -- "Hola" and "Adios" -- looking over my shoulder to see if they're looking over their shoulders we pass. That I have another NC-bred admirer of Morenas with whom to charm Nicaragüensas silly with good ol' Southern gentlemanliness, blooming blush across even the most perfectly browned faces, is enough icing to make up for all the cake I'm not eating...Because 1/2 liters of delicious Eskimo® ice cream cost US$1.25. (I did encounter, however, a reposteria that sells excess cake icing in 8oz cups for a quarter. I know it's disgusting that I'm struggling to surpress the impulse to return.)

¡Viva Obama!

2009-02-19T09:27:00.004-06:00

OK, so this has absolutely nothing to do with travel or anything really, but it's hilarious. For all I know, everyone may have already heard these clips, but I'm a bit disconnected from the world, you know?

(Thanks for the link, bro. Classic stuff.)

Some words...followed by an idea for discount cribs

2009-02-17T18:23:00.004-06:00

Kickin' it in Comayagua with my new friend Eric was a great time. A kindrid spirit (aka closet fatty) in pastry pursuits without weight gain, he's showed me around Comayagua while we walked between ice cream shops and reposterías. The only way my time in Comayagua would be improved would be if I could say I'd accidentally dropped an -a from my friend's name.

Comayagua is another mountain-encircled gem, with 60,000 citizens big enough for big city luxuries like malls, expansive markets, and gangs. But it's also small enough that you recognize people day-to-day and daytime danger is minimal, maybe nonexistant. And while there's a definite lack of street food vendors, the inner-market comedores are cheap and delicious while retaining sufficient mystery as to the sanitation of preparation. Plus Honduran enchiladas (perhaps my favorite food in the world) and baleadas cost mere pocket change at almost any restaurant. Yep, it's kinda like heaven.

My favorite image from Comayagua is a lady on the sidewalk, perched beneath a sun-shielding umbrella, crouched amongst a collection of squeeze-bottle chilis and ceramic dishes filled with salt, cutting and bagging chunks of fruit to sell, her infant child scuttling about at her back, clawing at the bars of his blanket-bottomed crib: the stolen grocery cart in which mom transports her entire operation.

The problems with conscience

2009-02-17T18:11:00.004-06:00

A conscience is exactly the kind of handicap that can interfere with many professions and pastimes. Gang member for example. Like when a Peace Corps volunteer related the story of a friend riding a San Salvador city bus when a heavily-tatted, shaved-headed banger snuggled up and proceeded in English:

"See these tats?"

"Yep."

"Know what they mean?"

"Yep."

"Now you're gonna empty your pockets without making a scene."

"Yep."

Five dollars changed hands but, with a stretch of road remaining, and both parties in jolly moods for the opportunity to chitchat in English, conversation ensued.

"So, where're you from?"

"The US."

"What're you doin' here," snarled Mr. Salvatrucha.

"Umm...volunteering, trying to help the people..."

In the long pause the sneer evaporated. "Oh."

At the next stop, when the aisle flooded again with people vending snacks from fruits to cookies to ice cream cones for "una cora" Mr. MS-13 whipped out the $5 and procured snacks to share with his victim.

Isn't MS-13 kinda cute?

(If you're esily disgusted, now's a good time to move to the next post)

Likewise, a conscience makes you a pathetic sex tourist, concerned with the two things sexcessful booty bangers never consider: broken hearts and broken condoms.

Mom and dad, really, would it have been so hard to neglect us as young'uns, fostering an upbringing morally bankrupt?

My Valentine

2009-02-14T17:44:00.000-06:00

Why is she asking me for a regalo? "Si," I stammer, "Uh, voy a dejar un regalo cuando salga." Patricia and her friend laugh, trade fives and a fist bump, and one of them squeals, "¡Un bebe!" I'm watching the faces of Patricia's 10-year-old kids, but nothing registers, no disgust disrupts their smiles toward me. "Somos amigos," I insist again, having already turned town a request to be Patricia's boyfriend, nevermind that we've talked for a total of ten minutes in our lives and that I'll be leaving Comayagua within days. To say nothing of the fact that Patricia is thirty, has kids at least ten years old, and is shaped like a cream puff. That she has no education, sells tortillas and bags of green mango chunks spiced with chili and salt for a living, and is openly propositioning me for sex in front of her kids.

She says she'll be my girlfriend even if I leave tomorrow. I have her phone number.

We're sitting on the curb and she keeps brushing my thighs with her fingertips, which is actually less comfortable than when she stands and starts gyrating her gelatinous jiggler at the level of my face, rotating like the food carousels she's obviously raided one...million times too many. I swallow a terrible prediction for her adorable daughter's fate, but stop myself from washing it down with another sip of water, sipping being a nervous tic, when I recall Patricia's lips sharing the bottles rim.

(Later, instead of spending an extra seven Lempira (US$0.40) on another refillable bottle, I'll rinse my bottle with a substance that advises swallowers to contact the nearest undertaker upon ingestion, as backpackers will momentarily forgetting that I'm not stricken with the poverty I so regularly observe.)

Ahh, shit, on the other hand, in Patricia I could've had a Valentine's date for the first time.

Sometimes I don't want to be bothered with titles

2009-02-14T13:34:00.006-06:00

The more agreeable temperatures in Alegria's altitude allowed me to retain fluids, quickly shifting my urine's color from desert sunset orange to clear. With that healthy boost I returned to running, resuming the calf-and-quad killing hill training that has characterized my every run in El Salvador. And when I say hill training, I mean that in the most literal sense. Hill training. A single hill. As in I'm way up in the mountains, so running means flying down then climbing back up. Like 22 minutes straight up. By the end casual observers think I'm running in place. Jabba the Hut slithered by yesterday and looked like a comet in comparison. (What he's doing in El Salvador I'm not sure. I was too out of breath to inquire. Or care.)

From Alegría it was time to investigate Perquin, an old FMLN stronghold near the Honduran border, an area afflicted by ghastly military attrocities during the civil war. It's another tiny blip on the map, nestled high up in the mountains...blah, blah...but with an interesting Museo de la Revolución. (I didn't make the hike to El Mozote, a nearby village that was the site of a wartime massacre, but I plan to trek it with an ex-guerilla guide when I return.)

Perquin is notable for a few other things. We hung out with Peace Corps. volunteers gathered to translate for a group of kindly geriatrics working for Eyecare, enjoying free pie, beer, and wine for our whiteness, thus the assumed association with people affecting the lives of more people than pupusa vendors. We also discovered that not a single person in Perquin -- not even the tourist police or tourist information office -- understands the bus schedule. After waiting for two hours for a bus that, quite simply, never came, someone casually advised, "A veces, cuando el bus esta corriendo tarde, lo no viene aquí.."

Oh.

So we ended up stuck in Perquin for another night, which was far from a tragedy; rather, another "last chance" for pupusas, a circumstance, I'm convinced, was willed by Lord Pupusa so I could stumble and gorge myself upon pupusas de res. With at least four other pupusa variations rumored to be smacked out nightly in remote corners of the country, I'll be back to hunt before long. But first I have to zip to Costa Rica for a few hours to reset my CA-4 (Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras) Visa for another 90 days.

Yesterday morning the bus to Marcala, Honduras decided to show, so we endured what I imagine feels like a four hour earthquake while crammed inside a tight metal closet as we traversed the 50km stretch from Perquin, El Salvador to Marcala, Honduras on a fully-packed chicken bus. The unpaved mountain pass cost a bit more than usual, perhaps, but I attribute that to the fact that the bus driver has to buy a new bus after every trip. The border crossing was the only interruption in the trip, a stampless excuse for border officials to extract an unofficial cash sum from any passing foreigners. Technically, all CA-4 border crossings are free. But on Friday the 13th it cost $3. Hardly worth disputing and feeding the Central American legacy of disappeareds.

In Marcala lunch was devoured and another country's tasteless Pilsener was chugged for a pocket change $2.75. Then I connected to La Paz, told Emma I'd terrorize her cute, single friends in Chile, and ended up in Comayagua. Fresh of the bus and girl-travel-partner free, I was basking in the well-kempt beauty of Honduran city babes. Trying to find a hotel I fell into conversation with a mango-vending 30-year-old with a litter of kids, whose husband has bounced sometime in the last year, and she insisted I take her number within a few sentences of revealing that information. If the kids call me "Dad" the next time we cross paths I might have to cut short my stay in Comayagua, which, regardless, is but a short stopover for baleadas and enchiladas hondureñas on the sprint to reset my Visa.

Show me your pupusa

2009-02-10T14:25:00.007-06:00

Chasin' the pupusa again like every gooey bite holds the potential to elucidate secrets of the universe, all I want is a solution to Suchitoto's paralyzing heat. Even standing in the shade my sweatfalls feed the puddle spreading at my feet faster than I can replenish essential fluids. But even dehydration-induced deliria can't distract from the sole purpose in making Suchitoto a late addition to the El Salvador travel itinerary: pupusas de arroz. The rice flavor and more durable construction, how they tend to fragment instead of fold, make these whitish-brown, meat-, bean- and/or cheese-filled discs entirely distinct from their maíz-made cousins.

And how are they? Well, I spent three days in Suchitoto's hellish heat, where sweating is as much excitement and the most vigorous activity you'll see during the sunlight hours. (Though the mix of guys and girls gyrating in partner with their own images in the mirror-walled discoteca makes for amusing nightlife.) As the sun retires, carts and comals and jugs of curtidos, squeeze bottles of salsas and short benches around little wooden tables dot the streets and central square, firing up $0.25 pupusas for all passerbys.

Suchitoto is a silent town of culinary highlights on the beautiful Lago de Suchitlán. Besides being a pupusa-fiend's must-visit, the paletas artesanales (handmade popsicles) are a revelation, especially in the desert heat: the paletas are thick, creamy treats made from everything from sapote to oreo to moraqueso (blackberry cheesecake) to canela. Simply the finest, most refreshing treats I've ever licked.

With Emma, my rum-powered Irish partner in hangover lazyness and food-tourism -- which means our between-meal gaps consist of hours of conversation concerning the next meal, or recollections of other foods we've eaten around the world (and Emma is quite well traveled) -- I've accomplished little during the handful of blissful days since we departed Juayúa. (I remain alone, however, in my passion for "sex tourism," Emma having quickly deduced that strolling, curve-flaunting Central American women are just as responsible for the drool dribblets discoloring the front of my t-shirts as any pupusa mamá.)

Yesterday we finally mustered the energy to mount a bus toward cooler mountainous climes, settling for a few nights in quaint Alegría. It's yet another charming Salvadorean town where the citizens remain unjaded by tourists -- but where we were taken advantage of for the first time in El Salvador, being charged $7.25 each for the type of plato del día (plus licuado) you can find in any Salvadorean market stand or bus terminal for less than $2.50 per plate. Needless to say, I wasn't served the entire cow, plus pound of rice, wagon of tortillas, and garden of vegetables I'd paid for. The only way such a meager meal would cost $7.25 in any comedor is if a $5 bill was served on the side (maybe substituted for a single tortilla).

Living in Juayúa is akin to abusing my digestive tract

2009-02-01T08:50:00.008-06:00

Having chicken bussed across crater-littered Central American highways for nearly five months, I'm relatively unchanged. A shade browner, the giant squeeze bottle of sunscreen I lugged from the states the same back-straining deadweight in my pack; and armed with a Spanish language vocabulary sufficient to keep myself fed, sheltered, and swarmed by quickly obsessive females. The kind who begin battering you with lunacy after a week, "¡Eres mi amor!", every time you scurry to the bathroom to relieve the intestinal pressure wrought by ingested parasites a chorus of sobbed "¡Te extraño mucho!"s breaks out in the next room. (To be fair, that might be a simple defense mechanism to drown out the offensive sounds rumbling, tumbling from your gut, invading the apartment through wafer-thin walls.) Those unstable sirens who, mere hours after your first encounter, are comfortable crying in your presence; gushing over your (perceived) sincerity and their luck in stumbling upon the one-in-one-hundred exception to the cruel male rule; singing you love songs in front of the bubbling fountain in central park.

On the other hand, as long as I can suppress comments to the effect of, "Wow, you're really pretty...ummm, insane," I'll at least get a lot of Spanish conversational practice. The cash I save on these free lessons will go a long way in the red light districts across the region.

As it is, I was going to leave Juayúa this morning, but a round of fountain-front tunes and tears convinced me to stay another day. My stomach is sputtering too -- making any rough bus ride a dangerous proposition -- due to any combination of digestive tract abusing factors:

Since arriving Thursday night eating twenty-four full-sized peanut butter, banana & honey sandwiches (including 20 over the course of 5 consecutive meals, between meal snacks constituted by grease-dripping pupusas and chocolate cake) on combinations of white, wheat, and french breads.
Taking local advice and drinking tap water.
My Salvadoran Super Bowl bonanza, substituting a many-pound stack of pupusas from Pupuseria Esmerelda for the usual plates of burgers, nachos, and beer -- downing tres papusas revueltas, an additional one each stuffed with a single ingredient: flor de ayote, pollo, y queso, and something absurd called a Papusa Loca, essentially a maíz-frisbee stuffed with every papusa-loading option (including papelillo, the lone ingredient I'd neglected to involve in the rest of my gluttonous papusa order).

Or, who knows, maybe when Barry and I were splashing around in Pacific at Playa El Tunco, laughing as we slapped water towards each others faces, "Hepatitis, hepatitis," I caught a few contaminated droplets.

The friend who was replaced by by pastries.

2009-01-29T22:09:00.009-06:00

My attempts to keep Barry in Central America, questions designed to stimulate a simple missed flight or a fabricated kidnapping -- "So you're really flying home Friday? Soccer season doesn't start until the fall, right?" -- failed to germinate. "So, yeah, how are your girlfriend's pupusas?" garnered, at least, a barely perceptible clinch of the tummy. We split in San Salvador's Terminal de Occidente this morning, sharing first a late breakfast: casamiento, carne, y tortillas, all swimming, of course, in vinegary platebound puddles of curtido heaped from the gallon-sized plastic containers enlivening every table, long since emptied of their original contents and stripped of their corresponding labellings, murky ecosystems swimming with vegetables and chiles and germs from every grubby hand that shares every jug's half-submerged community ladle. And, for my beverage, the 10:30am beer.

Without Barry's banter about fantasy novels and time travel I'll be filling my time with pastries. I'm back in Juayúa, where Pasteleria Anthony's creativity in shaping sugary dough into new shapes to be filled with creams, then glazed, iced, and or sprinkled with coconut flakes continues to confound my waking promises to eat healthily. This afternoon I was only "taking a look." Then my finger uncurled like a puppet aroused, indicating an on-all-sides white-iced cube of (to be discovered after that first rewarding chomp) yellow cake, sprinkled with coconut cakes, topped with a fluff-fence of light cream encircling a strawberry swimming in a swampthick pool of chocolate.

"¿Quieres otro?" mocked the pastry queen behind her glass case. Mouthwatering activated by a remote controller shaped bar with a white chocolate face and a caramel-color packed body, indicating another I stammered, "¿Que vale?"

"Cincuenta centavos mas." And so, sold by caramel, I walked out of Pasteleria Anthony's a dollar poorer but richer in saturated fats, simple sugars and Spanish practice. Seated on a bench surrounding the central park fountain, eyed by jealous kids still attended by health-monitoring mothers, I extracted the pastries from my bag. The cakeish cube was delicious, but tonguetip inspection of the caramel bar revealed complexities, layers of sugary goodness, I hadn't before detected. The white chocolate top was drizzled with meandering creeks of caramel, the density of the bar comprised of delicate sheets of baklava-thin pastry dough enveloping a wealth of dulce de leche, so much that globs dripped out the sides and back like an overloaded hamburger with each and every bite.

Hours later, offended by lumbering gringo-blimps oozing human skinglaze from their pores, I bought two loaves of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a bag of bananas. The purchase satisfied the demands of the the first dream I have remembered in weeks, and -- if I can pace myself with four peanut butter and banana sandwiches every meal, as was accomplished at dinner tonight -- I might be able to stuff my stomach into pastry submission until I venture back into pastry-poorer regions.

The Bartman Cometh, and we get it Pupusa Poppin'

2009-01-27T12:35:00.017-06:00

I finally dislodged my lazy ass from San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, my backside, I'm sure, still imprinted with routine, bearing the faint interlaced piecrust pattern of cushy hammock straps. My departure was a forty-eight hour whirlwind of house-hopping, issuing heartfelt goodbyes through chainlink fences and seated around comals burning dekerneled corncobs, promising I'd revisit my surrogate families...sometime. As I passed out photos I'd had printed from my digital camera, I was overwhelmed by reciprocal generosity, collecting a variety of handsewn items: a belt paved by stretches of majestic blues and a rainbow colored handbag adorned with a tiny wooden figurine of a Mayan woman in traditional dress; most touching of all was a plastic bagful of well-past-well-worn schoolbooks, broken spined and sans covers, loose pages rearranged haphazardly, accompanied by a stuffed ladybug and a photo in a frame crudely fashioned from a clear plate of hard plastic, tape and a bit of cardboard bent into a stand, all tied together with a red ribbon and two flowers with wire stems, shyly imparted by my recently befriended neighbor Rosita. Mildred gave me, in addition to a pile of handwritten cards collected in my final weeks, a fluffy stuffed puppy wearing a red heart inscribed with the word LOVE around its neck, and the puppy's paw-squeeze activated tune wavers lazily for a battery fading after who-knows-how-long-on-the-shelf-at-who-knows-what-tienda.

All the beauty of my departure created a karmic imbalance that was reset when I stepped off the bus in Antigua. As my eyes scanned parque central, the grand architecture and spewing fountain impressive as ever, I noticed a man, filthy, his head lolling about, sitting on outlying steps. His faded and tattered pants were spattered with, presumably, urine. On second glance I noticed his penis resting in his lap, jumping into action every few moments with as it was flicked or wagged, like some oddity peeking from its unzippered cave. That mental illness and public intoxication are ignored in Central America is distressing but, to be sure, the wealth of crazed men stumbling about -- singing and shouting incoherently, urinating and exposing themselves without regard to audience or location, rooting through garbage cans with no intention other than transplanting waste onto the surrounding concrete -- make the region a more entertaining place.

Barry showed up shortly, and we proceeded to waste several days in Antigua, Guatemala stalking the streets, ushered into every panaderia and pasteleria and grocery store by my addiction to pastries and cakes, especially those iced and or filled with creams and jellies and frostings. We sucked down a liter of Quezalteca Especial over two nights, amd I ate two to three market-cheap sapotes every day to fill the spaces of time (and the cavernous void of nutrition) between meals defined by saturated fats and simple sugars, or by grease and cheese dripping, salsa-mountain buried pupusas purchased for spare change at the food stalls surrounding the bus station. Submitting to the power of the pupusa, we finally embarked toward the pupusa heartland, El Salvador.

Minds clogged by cheesy pupusas, we nearly handed away our identities at the border between Guatemala and El Salvador, each extending our passports to the decidedly unofficial "officials" clamoring outside the bus' door. But as the images of the pupusa orgy to come began to flicker -- at the sight of our passports being hustled away to some location and with some intention obscured by Spanish, by guys dressed in torn t-shirts -- we simultaneously recovered our senses and snatched back our lives; more importantly our tickets to pupusa heaven.

Hotel Livingston in Santa Ana, El Salvador was our first sweaty stop, one of the first times in my life I haven't bemoaned a lack of hot water showers. We proceeded to pass two days just as we had in Antigua: exercise defined by the miles of cracked concrete walked to various foodstands and the heavy-lifting of pastries filled with thick custards, usually called leche. Genuinely concerned by my inability to refuse cakes and doughnuts (and packages of coconut-cream filled, coconut-flake covered Dinkis) following my departure from cream-and-icing starved San Pedro, I googled diabetes to determine if I could, in fact, overwhelm my system with sugar and induce disease. It seems, assuming I don't forsake exercise entirely and puff up, soft to the touch like any of my favorite pastries, I'll be safe. The halfmoon shaped, blackbean filled pancakes of Pan de Elote, which we devoured hot from the griddle daily in the central park, I have less guilt about eating.

At the end of each day spent sweating toward pastries, the sugar rush and inevitable crash crushing all ambitions but those of appetites unsatiated by white breads and simple sugars, we crawled the ghosttown-come-sunset toward pupusa stands or, on the second night and accompanied by (fellow Davidsonian, friend and current El Salvadoran Peace Corps volunteer) Jim Hooper, toward a local bar. (MS-13 never materialized, but a pirate and a maybe prostitute and a general excess of alcohol dispelled us from that bar rather suddenly.)

Moving southward through Central America, the women grow progressively more tantalizing while remaining completely impervious to accurate-age-determination -- is she 15 or 30? In Juayua, a charming, touristy mountain village on the Ruta de las Flores, where Jim, Barry, and I relocated for it's famed every-weekend food festival, we admired a couple of cute Salvadoran girls who seated themselves across from us while we sipped beers in the central park soon after dusk. We guessed their ages to be no more than 16, but captivated by their beauty and the giggles they unleashed every time we made eye contact, emboldened by a few beers and the fact that hitting on (even severely) underage girls was nothing that would phase the heavily armed police patrolling around the square, Barry and Jim's urgings were entirely sufficient. I approached the duo and ascertained that the first beauty was, indeed, fifteen. But the second, the more stunning of the two, claimed to be twenty, even after confronted with my barrage of stern "No te creo"s. As it was, I found myself a supermodel of a date for the political party sponsored town dance that evening, and shared two hours on a dancefloor, a head taller than anyone else, boring my partner with the same semi-hip-swiveling motion.

And so, Jimbo, Barry, and I passed the time: feasting at the foodstands for the weekend, spending two to five dollars for plates brimming with mouthwatering, generously portioned delicacies: fried yucca and chorizo to rabbit and shrimp, always with a side of thick tortillas. Hiking to a series of impressive waterfalls a few kilometers from town, where many locals were picnicking and swimming, eating too much ice cream and too many pastries, and passing the nights drinking around the town's central fountain. It was vacation, pure and simple, and quite clear that my life could not be better...unless my gorgeous dance partner, Ingrid, emails me, volunteering to nurture my Spanish language development. That is, assuming, my scribbled email address was even legible...

Jim had to return to work and Barry and I have relocated to the stretch of surf spots spanning the Pacific coast. A few chicken bus changes led us to Bus 80, departing La Libertad for Playa El Tunco. The handful of Bus 80s running the coastal route are the usual chicken buses, but ours had been outfitted with a bassy speaker system that showered unwitting El Salvadorans with uncensored American rap, a deluge of odes celebrating the nomenclature of genitalia and the juicy details of romantic strip club encounters. Or maybe the words had been slightly altered for regional appropriateness: "Pupusa poppin' on a handstand."

El Tunco is a quiet beach with a few hostels filled with surfers, a few restaurants, cheap beers, and enchanting sunsets. Walking the road for twenty five minutes we can eat for half the price, and with the all-important option of pupusas, so we trek a few times daily to the dilapitated stands and in-house eateries at the next beach, sharing hours of postmeal conversation seated in the carport/dining area of our favorite mom-and-pop operation.

My vacation within a vacation continues, and I'm completely infatuated with El Salvador, mesmerized by, in this particular order: it's women; their pupusas; and the delightful citizens always quick to converse with a pasty foreigner butchering their language.

Life's a Zoo

2009-01-11T16:34:00.005-06:00

In the midst of a coconut cake drought, galletas have reasserted themselves in my post-dinner dessert marches. Emperador® cream sandwiches -- vanilla cookies and filling; chocolate cookies and filling; and a corporate ode to diversity, combination flavor -- are nearly irresistable. But I've been hooked by Panaderia Peter Pan's footlong surfboard sugar cookies, a steal at Q$1 each.

I do feel something of a traitor, however, even tempting taste-buds at any Panaderia not named Panificadora Mana, home (literally) to my friend and dedicated purveyor of pan and pastel, Olga. Olga, who gifted me free pastel frio on my birthday. Who was slightly offended when I didn't appear to compart and feast with her family on Noche Buena. And who Friday night set a stool in front of her counter -- amidst metal prong-bearing breadshoppers plucking and placing pan from the glass display cases into their plastic baskets -- brewed me coffee, handed me the cellphone when her illegal daughter called from ATL, and fed me pastel and galleta while we chatted away an hour, eventually declining any sort of payment when I stood to exit.

I woke up early Saturday for a microbus-shuttled daytrip to Guate's zoo, chaperoning with Corazòn Maya's maestras a group of precious niñas involved in the school's outreach project. The project, spearheaded by schoolhead Marta, funded in part by a percentage from every extranjero's school tuition, but mostly by saintly Canadian Beth, assists twenty truly impoverished Pedronan families. The Mayan girls, who would otherwise be toiling spanking out tortillas or handwashing clothes, sitting on the curb with a basket of manderins, are provided occasional organized excursions, game-filled weekly gatherings and English instruction at Corazón Maya, and helping funds for life's staples: edibles (arroz, frijoles, y maíz) and (as the project's eminent contribution) public education.

The girls are adorable, loving and playful, so much it's easy to forget they're saddled with struggle daily, that every Quetzal their mothers imparted them for snacks represents a portion less of some essential at home. Many of these homes, some of which I've toured, are crude constructions of concrete and corrugated tin roofing; others gap-riddled, walled by vertically-arranged wooden slats. Uneven dirt floors aren't uncommon, sheen hanging cloths or sections of sheet metal for doors separate the family upon family crammed inside one or two small rooms -- littered, spaceless enclosures without the luxury of distinction between bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen -- from the biting, windy winter nights. Mattresses on the floor are fire hazards bumping the chimneyless comal, which chokes the air before every meal, a sheet of plastic hanging around a bucket feet away designating the bathroom. Agua pura, a few dollars every five gallons, is an unaffordable step up the sanitation scale.

A trip out of San Pedro is a world's-away jaunt for the girls; for whom, unaccustomed to travel, the ruthlessly winding road, obstacle-littered roads to the city are the recipe for motion sickness. Whipping around turns approaching 180º, the girls one-by-one began reenacting that unforgettable scene from "Stand By Me", the backseat retches and putrid odors wafting from the plastic bags the girls donned like oversized SARS-masks catalyzing a chain reaction. The girl beside me succumbed, twice belching projectile showers before someone handed her a cute, pink sack big enough for a bakery cookie. For me, the soundtrack of the trip was the crinkling of plastic bags and the soft plop, slosh and slop accompanying every subsequent purging, plus the chorus of laughter erupting every time another girl dropped a freshly-filled vomit-bomb out the window.

By the time we arrived at the zoo, health had been restored. We entered a train of kids and adults toting backpacks and shoulderbags, starving for stomachs recently emptied or yet empty. Sitting down on shaded benches, sirvilletas concealing cylindrical towers of tortillas and plastic containers of cold beef, fish, and chicken materialized beside every girl. With dirty hands we feasted, and I never thought twice snagging hunks of for-who-knows-how-long-unrefigerated-meat to enliven my tortillas (which just happened to be the delicious black bean-filled variety!).

In the manic following hours the girls, fascinated by photography, took advantage of my inability to refuse their smiling faces, effectively keeping my camera out of my hands. Sure, fingerprints smudged the lens by the time I got it back and, because every girl was certain her photo of this or that animal from the exact same angle and with the exact same (lack of) zoom would be award winning, I had at least five identical shots of every exhibit. But the girls were also invaluable accomplices in the difficult quest to shoot cameraphobic Mildred, whose sixth-sense for covert-photo-detection is at full height when I'm fingering the trigger.

After the zoo, once each girl had removed any visible jewelry, we herded the girls into Guate's Constitutional Plaza, zona una's plaza central, where we enjoyed ice cream on the central fountain's steps among the milling vendors, visitors, and petty criminals, soon afterward enveloped in a white mass of marching thousands chanting for peace.

Here I am, in a foreign land, accumulating kids like Ghengis Khan, but without the fun in bed. Though, in the context of modern times, without the child support as well...

Observational humor

2009-01-11T16:10:00.003-06:00

The first time I saw Nico he was working the sideline near one of the benches during an official San Pedro La Laguna basketball game. Because he was gesticulating wildly and regularly facing the seated players -- presumably imparting the illogical tactics that circus-ize Guatemalan men's basketball, maybe assuring his center that, if he started his sprint from the other baseline, a layup launched from behind the three point line was entirely possible -- I assumed the goofy middleaged man wearing the "Senioritis: Not just a phase, it's a lifestyle" shirt was a coach. As it turns out he was probably just stupid drunk, politely tolerated by everyone in his vicinity. Every subsequent encounter with Nico has elicited a chuckle, his neverwashed Senioritis shirt greeting me moments before his harsh liquor cologne and slurred inquiries for a Quetzal.

A few days ago I spotted a family on motorcycle, the usual three, four, or five helmetless passengers jammed onto a two-seater, people sitting sideways, on laps, clutched to chests. The surprise being dad, the driver, was wearing a Glassjaw shirt, the unmistakeable print, a solitary, lowercased "g" dominating the front. Still, nothing beats the crude apparel spotted by my friend Adam, donned by a homeward-trudging Chapìn after a day's work in the field: "I'm here about the blowjob." Because the wearer was Guatemalan, there's a staggering probability that shirt has attended church service. Which is amusing like the symmetrically-placed Playboy Bunny stickers I encountered adorning glass-doored cabinetry in the house of a Christ-crazed, porn-denouncing grandmother.

Matters of Taste

2009-01-08T15:30:00.008-06:00

The yolky yellow center of a properly fried egg sunny side up is like an otherwordly portal, a humpy, fluid-filled gelatinous jiggler with an outer film strong enough to require effort to penetrate. At Friday's breakfast -- fried eggs and tortillas made from maìz negro, what we call "blue corn" -- I watched (with a tingle of apprehension) Melani's probing, ketchup-dabbed fingertip attempting to breach the exterior skin and spill the runny yellow soul over her plate. And in the process maybe, just maybe, accidentally unleashing dimension-jumping supervillians. But the sunny hump just bulged this way and that, each poke and prod distorting the dome, seamlessly reshaping the yellow mound until the pressure alleviated and the yolk melted back into a perfect dome. It was strangely exciting, and at least the second time this trip I've anticipated the sudden manifestation of General Trag...or worse.

And recently, accompanying our broccoli fried in egg (another simple but delicious creation from the kitchens of shoppers bound to local markets, not Wal-Marts), what did we sip for dinner? According to four-year-old Mariori, mugs full of Tè de Maricón, a declaration that sprayed hot Tè de Pericón out many nostrils.

Emperador® galletas, all varieties, reign supreme. Not only do they best all cream sandwich cookie competitors in taste, but in price as well, and the second listed ingredient in Azùcar. As in Pure Cane Sugar. Good luck finding packaged products made with sugar stateside.

And last night I dined upon a Middle-Eastern tasting delicacy, another unforgettable creation from the limited pantry: fried patties mixing beef, egg, herbs (including mint), and chopped vegetables (including, at least, onion and tomato). A fried and spiced super burger. Incredibly flavorful. Thus Mama Meli's name for the creation is something of a letdown: "Torta de Carne." That's right, "meat sandwich." As in slap a patty between tortillas and dig in! I guess sublimity defies naming.

Pavement is an awesome band. And an awesome place for drunks to rest their faces.

2009-01-03T15:29:00.005-06:00

I've officially held down a girlfriend for longer than ever before. That wasn't supposed to make me sound like a rapist. I even brought her home to meet mom -- my Guatemalan host mom, that is -- who was quick to allude to marriage (and a promised lifetime of tortillas is, to be honest, enticing). Sorry Real Mom and Dad; someday you, too, will have an opportunity to create the same awkwardness.

After reprising World War Whatever at every opportunity for the last week, San Pedro seems to be returning to normal. Who knows, maybe the town just ran out of fireworks; either way, the barking of feral packs has returned as my nightly sleep soundtrack. Families are filtering back to the city, packing buses every hour. Meat will soon again be a mealtime rarity, the festive chilera replaced by simpler green chili and cilantro concoctions. Dessert disappeared with the final crumbs of panes de zanahoria y banano and pay de piña. Midnight tamale feasts have been relegated to late-night craving-stoking memory.

Without my friends Adam and Ricardo, who departed just short of el Año Nuevo, I passed the year's end marathon of reveling admiring drunks zombie-shuffling through the streets or, in my favorite position, facedown on concrete, fresh piss straining their pants and darkening the dusty cobblestones crotch-level, discoloration streaming down-gradient.

In love with Chilera

2008-12-30T16:14:00.006-06:00

The tastiest preperation in all the lands is Chilera. It's a type of vegetable-chunk-heavy salsa prepared in vinegar, and I've enjoyed it in Belize (topping stewed chicken, rice & beans) and Guatemala (topping everything on my plate), and I'm comforted by the knowledge it's available at least as far south as Costa Rica, maybe further. I know for a fact a mountain of Chilera is the ideal condiment for Salvadoran papusas.

Take chunks of chili peppers, onions, green beans, cauliflower, and anything else you might want, soak it in vinegar (and probably a number of other spices) and presto, the best tasting condiment in the world. In fact, I often eat it alone when I've cleaned my plate, bulging inside a fresh tortilla.

(Image stolen from this blog, with a recipe!)

How to Clean Everything (out of your intestines by introducing worms)

2008-12-29T14:41:00.005-06:00

This morning at my Spanish School I scooped a fallen orange from the grass, shoving it in my pocket for an after-lunch snack. >The fruit's exterior was almost flawless, a few hints of green at the gnarled pole where the orange disconnected from its tree swirled into the predominant orange hue. A sticky mist sprayed as my fingernails penetrated through and peeled back the skin, fat orange droplets spattering on the concrete beneath my feet. My fingers detected a soft spot on one side of my prize, so I halved the orange and first devoured, section by section, the unblemished portion.

Delighted, with sticky juice-tracks meandering from the corners of my mouth down my chin, as always concerned by the perceived lack of vitamins in my diet, I chomped into the half deemed less appealing. My foray into the rotted area proved fruitful, but a quick examination of the newly tooth-torn cavity in the hunk hemorrhaging juice into my palm revealed a teeming mass of squirmy white worms, with little black freckles for faces, burrowing throughout. Immediately I emptied the contents of my mouth into my hand, but whether I'd first swallowed or anything had wriggled down my throat are mysteries I'm attempting not to ponder.

This is a regular Slither scenario...without the comedy.

I can't believe I'm writing this: There's a good chance I might have ingested any number of maggots or whatever kind of goddamnfuckingawful worm colonizes oranges. I'm left convinced nothing is sufficiently offensive to make me throw up, the probability to having swallowed worms insufficient even to induce nausea. And because the trade secrets of bulimiacs yet confound me, I can do nothing but wait to see what interesting illness arises or parasitic invasion manifests in my digestive tract.

Guess I'll be watching the toilet to see if it turns into a fishbowl.

Student-Teacher Conduct

2008-12-27T21:11:00.003-06:00

Haunted by a lingering American lingering perspective, it's cien por ciento awesome crushing on my spanish teacher. Now of age, the chase retains a deliciously illicit feel without the impending prison term and pervert reputation that I'm convinced deterred various vixen teachers from succumbing to my schoolboy charms. (And I'm not referencing their miraculous supression of the urge to lean down and pluck with their lips Lucky's stray, spoon-diving made-sticky-by-milk-saturation marshmallows and grainy stars that adorned my face and clothes each morning.)

Christmas Eve, Noche Buena in Guatemala, I accompanied Mildred to her Evangelical Church, unaware earplugs are a requisite accessory. I staggered out two hours later, shellshocked, and deafened after an aural assault perpetrated by a handful of musicians flailing without regard to time or rhythm -- as if names were drawn and instruments assigned as the congregation arrived. I think I understand why so many people in the audience were crying.

But the churchgoers were exceedingly friendly, anxious to greet me, and the kid-carried tunes were cute and hilarious, the youngest performers standing at ankle's-height, picking their noses and yawning, contorting their bodies and faces, oblivious to their on-stage responsibilities.

Afterward I passed time juggling homecalls, stuffing three dinners into three hours, concluding with the traditional midnight tamale feast with my suddenly swollen host family, Melida having returned from la ciudad with extended family in tow. When the clock struck midnight I occupied high ground, overlooking San Pedro with an unobscured view of the other pueblos across and around Lago de Atitlàn. Armageddon was gorgeous, rockets launching from every alleyway and rooftop citywide, exploding rainbows of color casting shimmering sprinkles across the water, like the Mayan Gods were skipping rocks with giant, luminescent Skittles. Belts of firecrackers machine-gunned incessantly, which coupled with the heavier booms thundering down built a wall of war so uniform the cacaphony coalesced into it's own form of screaming silence.

By three AM the town was quiet again, the streets littered with exploded confetti and blackened sparklers, a breath of sulfer hanging in the air, the odd drunk veering through the alleyways, mumbling to himself as he lurched from wall-to-wall, confounding stoop-sitting couples with unintelligible gestures and monologues. One special drunk, who moved with the fluidity of an animation missing 90% of its frames, alternated between dancing with lampposts, arguing with an unoccupied car, and patrolling the strip of cobblestone in front of Mildred's home, admonishing us with a finger to his lips and whispers.

Christmas Day was low key, almost like any other day but gathered with family. A town-attended convite in the central cancha de basquetbol lasted the afternoon, throngs of Pedranos ringing the court, licking ice cream cones purchased from the many vendors pushing three-wheeled wooden iceboxes, wheelbarrows fashioned into coolers, the jingling belss signaling rushes of open palms stretched up and out every parent's pockets. Lines of dancers costumed as random stars of American cinema and world history (including two of the Nutty Professor, one Batman and one Catwoman) dipped and swiveled through choreographed routines, and every fifteen minutes another drunk would stumble into the middle, a mess of incoordination weaving about until the police could escort him away.

Bkicjs (I was trying to type something else and missed the keys. This title seems somehow more appropriate.)

2008-12-23T19:43:00.004-06:00

Fine as wine, I'm aged a quarter century. To celebrate, I've buzzed my hair back to 1/4 inch, paying an outrageous Q$25 (US$3.50) for the 5-minute shearing, but at least I'm free of the fledgling mullet that always sprouts as my hair grows thicker and longer, the only consistency as my headtop shrub blooms with cowlicks and curls.

Transportion in San Pedro has improved significantly since I arrived in October, steady construction transforming the rainy season's rocky-river-roads to level cement pathways. With the road running in front of Mama Meli's house recently reopened, the town has inherited unexpected gifts: Free Speedbum(p)s! Specifically, the unconscious alcoholics, splayed across the road just down the hill from the church, in front of El Rinconcito.

Last Friday Ricardo and I trekked the lakeshore, skirting water, scaling rocks and mounds of tide-deposited basura, working around obstacles from crops to cows, on the way to San Marcos La Laguna. We strayed from the road after warnings from numerous Chapins that we, tall, pasty extranjeros, are walking targets for the machete-wielding ladrones in less foreigner-friendly San Pablo La Laguna.

Closer to San Marcos, the lakeside is suddenly peppered with massive estates resting a half football-field's length back from the shore in perfectly maintained, flower-, tree- and fountain-filled yards. These foreigner spectacles are offensive, flaunting wealth greater than neighboring townships possess collectively, and these private residences have hogged the beachfront, rendering Atitlàn almost inaccessible to actual Atitlànians.

Worst of all, the white invaders are hippies of the fruitiest sort. San Marcos is a town populated by dreadlocked backpackers practicing every sort of "art" and "technique" except basic hygiene. Alternative practices run the gamut of "seriously, you're an idiot" from spirituality-on-superhippy-steroids yoga to ESP. We chatted up a space cadet couple who were renting a room in their lakeside castle a kilometer shy of San Marcos, interrupting their -- and this is not a joke -- "Cranial Mayan Massage" session when we appeared. "We practice alternative sciences," they droned. "I do a little mind reading," informed the woman, amongst a litany of other "sciences" I can't remember for the vomit and laughter I was struggling to surpress. We agreed to wait fifteen minutes for the "cranial massage" to end so the guy could accompany us to town, but for all their practiced powers the pair was unable to detect our deception. The moment the resumed chanting and rubbing we dipped, impervious to the "ancient energy fields" running directly from the mountain through the property into the lake, tractor beams to filthy rich foreign loonies.

We caught the last daily lancha back to San Pedro, and I hummed Death By Stereo's "Hippie Holocaust" as we skipped across the choppy waters. After dinner Ricardo and I enjoyed a light cocktail of mota and rum, then embarked on an entirely stereotypical mota-affected evening. Our every lazy movement was dictated by munchies, intentions frequently derailed by hysterical fits of laughter, as we proceeded to patrol back-and-forth the town central strip, zombie-stalking snacks, making laps to re-up the moment we'd licked the last crumbs or flecks of icing from our hands. In between we were accosted by an unusually hilarious array of english-butchering drunks and a guy -- who may not have been especially poor -- who asked for (and received) bites of our food. How I wish I'd been eating carrots instead of coconut cake...

A mean Patìn

2008-12-17T13:47:00.003-06:00

I almost killed a precious child on Saturday. I was standing on Mildred's doorstep when I rocked back into the street, taking a small step down and catching just enough of a sprinting doll's toe with my heel. She entered a flight parallel with the ground, challenging Guatemalan Olympic long-jump records before she skidded across stones on her forearms and face. I felt awful, especially because I'm useless at comforting kids in Spanish. A teen sitting on a moto who'd witnessed the collision transpire grinned at me.

Sunday's lunch was typical San Pedronian fare called Patìn. A hunk of flank steak marinated and cooked in a tomato salsa with lime juice was served beside a multiple avocados-worth sized mound of perfectly mashed and seasoned guacamole. Tortillas and tomalitos served hot from the comal were provided as modes of plate-to-mouth transport for mountains of the lumpy green, onion-studded condiment-turned-side. Patìn is pushing rellenitos for el mejor comida tipica.

Completing a delicious day, I spanked out my first few tortillas, several using less common but more durable (and thus more resistant to beginners' blunders) blue corn masa. For dessert, school-and-housemate Ricardo baked a killer, cumpleaños commemorating strawberry-peach cobbler. The suspense: will my birthday strike unexpectedly again?

Change

2008-12-15T13:49:00.003-06:00

Why is making change in Guatemala so difficult? I've handed business as little as Q$10 for a Q$3 or Q$5 purchase and put them in panic mode, some daughter summarily summoned from the next room to skamper across town begging other businesses to break my bill. Q$10, mind you, is less than US$1.50. No less than half the time, San Pedro La Laguna's bank is unable to change any bills, suggesting people holding the essentially-unspendable-unless-you-want-to-buy-the-whole-store Q$50 and Q$100 denominations spit out by the ATM "try again later." The stories I've heard about severe cash shortages sweeping Guatemala in years past were, I believe, not exaggerated.

Saturday I was lucky to find a tienda that could change Q$50, picking up four packages of then ungobbled galletas for Q$8.50. Chiky-brand variations cobertura de fresa, de vainilla, and the new Chiky Blak, galletas con sabor y cobertura de chocolate, were all tasty and standard, but the star of my in-room cookie fest was Arcoiris. Each of the eight cookies had a square butter cookie base, topped with four colored mini-marshmallow humps, alternated so as to be diagonally consistent punk and white, edges slightly melted together to form a unified marshmallow mound. Not only were the marshmallow puffs topped with coconut flakes and colorful sugary specks, but inside the foil package was a fast food condiment squeezepack filled with chemical-red fresa-flavored goo, to be smeared or dotted atop the cookies. A perfect interactive cookie experience for those wowed by processed sugars. A dream come true.

At night, speaking of dreams, I dreamed about moonpies.