La Cucaracha

Confused and disoriented, I stirred and woke up at 4:45 in the morning in the total darkness of my bedroom. Why was I awake? Then I felt it again, something on my leg...something heavy enough to wake me up. I kicked my leg frantically and, heart-pounding, lunged for the lamp next to my bed. At first I didn´t see anything, but when I crept forward to look on the floor at the foot of my bed, I beheld my (latest) assailant: a cockroach that puts those NYC beasts to shame. At least 2 inches long, it was lying on its back doing that gross thing bugs-that-should-not-be do when they get thrown into an unnatural position -- frantically waving its legs and antennae around, trying to turn over. I was horrified. I put on my sandals, gave it a stomp, then kicked the thing out of my room (its mass forced me to kick it around four times before I got it out the door). There was another, littler cucaracha in my room (it was on my right leg, not the left like the hive queen), which I similarly and summarily dispatched. Unsurprisingly, it took me 45 minutes or so to fall back asleep and I was totally paranoid about sleeping with my mouth open. I´ve since obtained a mosquito coil, which is essentially bug-unfriendly incense.

School on Monday was relatively uneventful until the afternoon when it suddenly started to POUR. It rained torrentially for the next 18 hours or so. I guess this is a monsoon or a tropical storm or something, I thought. We had plans to meet up with Luke at our new study spot (that Cafe with the garden) but when Ryan and I started to make our way there (shrouded in garbage bags, umbrellas, and raincoats), we were thwarted by a RIVER where one of the streets we needed to cross used to be. I´m sorry to say that, for fear of destroying our cameras in the rain, we couldn´t photograph the craziness. Hopefully, it´ll happen again and we´ll be better prepared. In any case, meeting wasn´t happening so we went home and studied for the rest of the night. We met our newest housemate (replacing the two Jesus girls), Miguel, when we got back. Totally nice guy from San Francisco (Inner Sunset!!) who likes L'Avenida Taqueria and is funny (he lost his passport on his first day). Looking forward to getting to know him better. Chris and Aja were back from Coban (they had a great time, which included getting nibbled on by Central American fish while swimming). It was good to have them back.

Tuesday was uneventful basically. I went to school and learned the past tense (this means I can no longer say¨"Nah, I live in the now" whenever anyone corrects my tense use). Oh, another thing is that the rain had washed out all water in Antigua so we couldn´t shower or anything, which wouldn´t have been too big a deal if we had showered on Monday. We all met up afterwards to study but that didn´t really happen much. We went home for dinner then met up again at Cafe 2000 (big screen) to watch 21 Grams, a feel-good flick.

Today, Wednesday, the water came back online and we cleansed ourselves gloriously. Ryan and I spent the morning (along with our teachers and some other student-teacher pairs from our school) in San Antonio Aguas Calientes, a nearby pueblo (village) with a very large indigenous Mayan population.
We visited a Mayan home where we were given Pepian, a local dish that´s basically super delicious chicken stew. It was really fun and interesting to watch them prepare the stew and homemade tortillas. The lady who did most of the cooking couldn´t have been younger than seventy-five, but she had this really incredible face. I have pictures of her and some movies of her making tortillas. I watched her a lot.

They taught us about Mayan weaving and crafts and there was also a reenactment of a traditional Mayan marriage in which Ryan played the groom. It was hilarious. They even had a little baby doll to show how Mayan women hold their kids (fancy papoose action). Many pictures and movies were taken of the ceremony. With apologies to Lexi, behold Ryan's big fat mayan marriage (in order from costuming, through marriage, to proud fatherhood):












It was an interesting time in an interesting place. Here's Ryan and me with our hostess and a picture from the town.



We came home and I played Spanish scrabble with my teacher. Out of modesty, I won´t reveal the extent to which I slaughtered her. In fairness, I was allowed to use the dictionary so it´s not a true victory. Unfortunately, I didn´t really feel like it was much of a learning experience so tomorrow´s gonna be work-heavy. Tonight´s a study night.

Some observations because I worry that these pages have been numbingly exposition-heavy. I saw a Mayan shoe-shiner in a Harvard Business School shirt. That was awesome. There are always tons of teenagers making out here...they´re everywhere. It´s funny to watch because the guys are really obviously pressuring the girls who are almost universally not into it. It fuels much humor on the part of me and my comrades. I´ve also been thinking a lot about language (oooh...deep) and the rules associated with it. The idea of regular and irregular verbs strikes me as pretty obviously manufactured. All these grammatical and syntactical exceptions make it clear that language is something that just sort of develops organically on its own. The rules by which languages are taught to non-native speakers were kind of forced on top of them in the best way the grammarians could. It´s not that the rules don´t make sense; it´s that they´re clearly secondary to the language itself, and that becomes clearer and clearer as one improves and begins to master all the exceptions. It really is a case of the exceptions being the rule, I think. I don´t know. It´s interesting. We have two roosters in our house. Yay, bird flu. In closing, here is a haiku that Ryan and I composed in honor of the amazing volcano Agua and our desire to climb it:


Giant volcano
Oh! How we yearn to mount thee
Agua makes us wet

Adios.

Novelty-Induced Defecation (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cipro)

Sorry for the long hiatus. As you may have gathered from the title of this post, I have been slightly out of sorts for the past few days. Allow me to explain...

Ryan, Luke, Aileen, and I met up as intended to watch City of God on Friday night. Ryan and I were a little early so we sat in a cafe for a while, during which I was suddenly and unavoidably stricken (for the first of many times) with a certain not-to-be-named necessity involving the bathroom and a lot of grunting (hint: it wasn't vomit). Steeling myself against my infirmity, we went to Cafe 2000 to watch the movie, which was great (as it always is) and particularly fun to see in a latin city (because I'm cheesy). After the movie, we headed toward this other bar to meet up with some friends of Aileen's whom she'd met through a housemate of hers. They turned out to be 16 years old, which was weird but kind of funny. Anyway, we ended up at this place that was pretty much the definition of Me-Unfriendly: super hot, too loud to talk, extremely crowded (a fact exacerbated by my enormous, completely uncool backpack), and dedicated to salsa dancing. I lasted about 3 minutes before the bar's awfulness and my hyperbaric abdomen succeeded in overcoming my resolve not to be a dork. I went home and hung out in the bathroom for a while, read some, and went to sleep. At this point, I put myself on Immodium as I was trying to be a responsible pharmaceutical consumer who doesn't abuse antibiotics.

The next day we went to El Mercado and looked around for a bit but it was raining and eventually we answered the siren song of the Argentina vs. Mexico game. We went to Los Arcos Reds (the place with the drink specials) to watch the game. It was packed with locals and completely raucous and awesome. I celebrated goals by defecating.

After the game, we went home for dinner. Afterwards I just stayed home to...do my thing. At this point, I commenced treating myself with Cipro. I curled up and went to bed hoping I'd feel better in the morning. And I did!

The next day, Sunday, I sauntered into Parque Central with a (adjectival pun excised) grin on my face doing my little I-don't-have-to-spray-diarrhea-right-now dance (oops, I gave it away) as I approached Luke, Ryan, and Aileen. Only as I drew near did I notice that Aileen was bent over the back of her bench vomiting her brains out into a bush (by the way, the 60 year old local guy sitting next to her on the bench glanced back at the vomiting and completely ignored it. I'd have been out of there. It was nuts. Trust me). After she was done, she smiled and said she felt a lot better and that she'd be totally down to eat Campero fried chicken for lunch. She's a funny girl.

Campero was tasty. They've got the fast food joint down: playroom with slide and ball pit, colorful yet bland interior, etc...but they have table service! Pretty weird. Anyway, it was fun to eat fast food with Guatemalans in their Sunday best and I was loving life and Cipro. We hung around for the rest of the day studying (gasp!) at this cool little cafe with a pretty garden courtyard. We ate a relatively fancy dinner (like 15 bucks) and turned in for the night (6:45 a.m. wake-up´s a bitch).

That was the weekend. It was significantly tamer than the week had been -- a fact I blame on my temporary addiction to uncomfortable bar toilets and the fetal position. I went to bed that night looking forward to the week and believing that now, with my stomach bug kicked, I was safe and sound...