only one page.

i finally picked up the pieces

2008-08-01T18:11:00.000-07:00

of a facebook account i had started ages ago and never checked. it's a national obsession for a reason, i suppose, and has proved to be a good way of remembering the faces and names of fun people i've met on this trip.

of course i've found people that i thought i would never see again-- girls i drank schnapps with in a german hotel room when i was fifteen, a friend from arizona who shared his dried fish snacks and studied parapsychology with me so we could catch the ghosts we imagined in our houses.

but i was surprised to be contacted by one fred cutty, a person whose last name i never even knew but who managed to find me after almost 6 years...

i was in brazil. the '03 world social forum was over and i wasn't sure where to go next. i sat in the park with my backpack, eating my third 20 cent ice cream cone of the day, and two boys parked themselves on the bench next to me. their names were freddy ("fredge") and raul, local kids who had attended the forum for a lark. we chatted about the forum; they spoke portuguese and i spoke spanish and it somehow didn't even register that they were different languages.

they asked me what i was doing next, blah blah... "oh, stay with us!" they said. i thought about it. go home with two brazilian guys that live alone? hmmm... oh jana, they're 17. it will be fine. i went.

raul was cute, dark hair flopping in his eyes; relatives in california meant that his english was pretty good. he wanted to practice. freddy was quiet, taller. he spoke little english, which meant that raul's larger personality and louder mouth got most of the airtime. i cooked food for them, happy to use a kitchen after months of traveling. they talked about girls, ate like teenage boys.

i could tell they were excited to have a strange blond woman in the house. i wondered how they lived alone so young. "oh, my mom owns this place but she doesn't live here," said fred. "she comes here like once a year." they put me up in a bedroom off the hall. it had a dresser in it, not much else. a real bed was delicious. i slept in for the first time in months.

the boys had summer jobs. i spent the days wandering around porto alegre, finding bookstores and bars and eating lots of 20 cent ice creams. in the evenings we'd smoke pot, cook, laugh. fred showed me family pictures; i wondered again how his mother could leave him alone like this. we talked about home. he taught me the word "saudade," the most beautiful word for a weary traveler. "it is, you know, when you think of the beauty of your family, when you are sad and happy at the same time?" the dictionary translates it as "nostalgia," but what freddy was talking about doesn't have the association with antiquity, with heirlooms and childhood. saudade is like homesickness, but in a good way-- the way that it's so damn nice to miss somebody you love, because it proves to you just how much you need them in your life.

i was used to waking up alone in their house. my eyes opened when the door creaked open. someone is here. a dark shadow came in, pulled open drawers, pulled things out haphazardly, looking for-- jewels? money?
oh shit oh shit oh shit. someone's broken in, i'm alone in a brazilian apartment. oh shit. the shape pulled clothes out of drawers, threw them on the floor. i stayed absolutely still. maybe he won't see me. the light flicked on as the shape turned around...
she screamed. i sat up, pulling the sheet around my almost-nakedness. she started to talk excitedly in portuguese. oh my god, it's fred's MOM.
i began to explain myself in spanish. her face was confused as she tried to put together the pieces-- a naked bald girl speaking spanish with an american accent is sleeping in her BED?
of course, i was just as confused, and the details became obvious in flashes: this is his mom's BEDROOM, oh my god, she probably comes here all the TIME, they just wanted me to think they were COOL and had their own apartment...

"are you freddy's girlfriend?" she asked. "are you sleeping with my son?"
"oh, no, no, no..." i stammered. trying to explain myself. i was mortified. freddy, you're dead, i thought.
she gathered her things and left, apparently deciding i was harmless and not worth the time to figure out.

freddy and raul laughed til they cried when they heard my story.

tenho saudade, y'all. i'm almost home.

for now, yoga

2008-07-31T11:16:00.000-07:00

has me in its exhausting and exhilarating grip.

i'm reading hafiz and zen stories and for the first time ever i can pay attention to them.

Ever since Happiness heard your name

It has been running through the streets

Trying to find you.

And several times in the last week,

God Himself has even come to my door-

Asking me for your address!

Once I said,

"God,

I thought You knew everything.

Why are You asking me

Where Your lovers live?"

And the Beloved replied,

Indeed, Hafiz, I do know Everything –

But it is fun playing dumb once in a while.

And I love intimate chat

And the warmth of your heart's fire.

hafiz is so brilliant and such a goof.

"uh, excuse me,"

2008-07-25T17:01:00.000-07:00

i stammered weakly. "do you, uh, have a bathroom? i think i'm going to be sick."

"i don't have water," she shrugged. "i know you're not used to it, but you can be sick in the ditch. it's the costa rican way."

sigh. i was trying to avoid the ditch. a pale, stumbling gringa is spectacle enough without the added show of puking yellow bile between her knees ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD. i made it to the ditch and became a spectacle. dammit.

i was just trying to return this book. i'd been throwing up since four a.m. and the book that was supposed to last me all day was spent. i stumbled into the shop of the kind-of-nice lady and promptly fainted. groan. okay, this is not going well. i've walked five blocks, i can't make it home this way, this lady is supremely unconcerned with me DYING on her floor. i crawled to a chair. nope. on the floor again, head between my knees. better. much better.

drip. drip. drip. yikes. am i sweating that much? i looked at the drops rolling off my nose, at my pants darkening from wetness at my knees, thighs. gotta get out of here. my head was buzzing with confusion. my eyes couldn't focus.

"here's your book," the lady said not-so-nicely. i took it and somehow, somehow stumbled out of there. i started saying a mantra, something along the lines of "home is close." the world spun at every step. i fell up the stairs and into my rented (thankfully single) room. good thing i am prepared and had a lined bucket waiting patiently.

i knew what was happening. everyone in granada had this virus, including jose luis and the baby, and i had been congratulating myself for two days on making it back to costa rica before the dreaded thing hit. now that it had, of course, i was seriously regretting leaving a comfortable family atmosphere for the backpacker trail and seen-it-all clerks. home is not close, jana. home is not close.

i feel fine now, mom. i did the right thing and stayed in bed for two days and ate only saltines and flat soda, two things you can find in abundance here.

the book was not that good, but perhaps it was the, uh, lack of focus. i switched to dickens and that helped me sleep, i guess.

this happened to me

2008-07-23T12:16:00.000-07:00

last time i was traveling for a while. i'm starting to become overly distracted by the mechanics of language, of roots real or imagined*, and variations on the theme. the folks i've met here have given me a lot of material. i've taken to running into internet cafes to look up hawaiian slang (blake), gaelic spelling (niamh), and dutch regional variations (wouter). i've learned a lot of interesting tidbits, have been left with increasing number of questions (why o why o why does gaelic have so many vowel sounds spelled entirely with consonants?), and have become unable to communicate. sigh.

reading isn't even fun anymore. books have become like blueprints, and i focus only on the details. i'll read a whole book through and write down a bunch of words with funny roots, or things i can't translate into spanish, and forget the entire plot (menos mal, with the last few).

last time i was in this mood i started obsessively anagramming and writing palindromes. funny thing-- i checked myspace the other day for the first time in ages and found a message from a death-metal lover who wrote: "dear jana, i am glad you liked my palindrome so much you used it on your page! i am very flattered. i have written lots more if you would like to use them."

i was grumpy. english language palindromes are a finite set that increases very slowly with the creation of new words (ha. imagine using "serial monogamy" or "flash mob" in a palindrome.) you start in the middle, you work with words that don't have impossible combinations in the center... a palindrome artist should not accuse others of plagiarism because they, too, discovered that evil backwards is live.

in words, drown i.

i'll probably have to pay him royalties now.

*is "ruminate" connected to "ruminant"? is ruminating really chewing something over like a cow chewing its cud? the answer is yes, the question spurred by the hundreds of droop-eared, jowly cows that do seem to be philosophizing quietly.

how am i supposed

2008-07-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

to eat this, i wondered, holding the bag gingerly. the plastic sack was lined with wet banana leaves and the stew inside was HOT. i began to pull apart the thick chunks of yuca, blowing on my fingers. yum.

i could barely move with everyone pressed close all around me, 100,000 or more wearing red and black, holding flags of the same color. the atmosphere was like the fourth of july, people milling around happily. kids were riding the ferris wheel and startling at the noise from fireworks that were underwhelming in bright afternoon sun. vendors pushed their way through the crowd, selling deep-fried tacos, plantain chips, sour, fresh cheese, tart lychee-like mamones, long flat strips of dulce de leche, sour mango with salt and lime, corn roasted until it was dry and chewy and could be pulled off the cob a few kernels at a time. others sold plastic bags of coca-cola and water, bright purple cactus fruit pithaya, brownish sludgy corn-and-chocolate pinolillo, bubbly chicha, and plastic bottles of guaro, the local firewater. still others hawked bracelets, bandanas, t-shirts, wide-brimmed hats, flags, patches, stickers-- all in combinations of red, black, and woodland camouflage. most of these last bore the calm silhouette of augusto sandino or, sometimes, the face of che guevara.

i kept an eye on oliver and fernando, who didn´t go far. the atmosphere was calm, but oliver had told me to bring nothing i couldn´t stand to lose. we each had a few pesos stowed in a sock or a wristband and didn´t carry cameras or backpacks. we watched as a little boy paused in front of us for a moment to riffle through the contents of a wallet, throwing family photographs, identifications, shopping lists on the ground. he kept the nicaraguan ID card and left the rest to the mud and a million feet.

there were a few americans. some were barefoot, wearing che gear, looking lost. a group of young women played with nicaraguan kids under the trees. a few young men drank and laughed, talking loudly in english.

the speeches began. it´s difficult to hear spanish through a microphone from a distance, but hugo chavez spoke at length. "the genie is out of the bottle in latin america," he said, "and no one can put him back in." he spoke about leftist presidents being elected all over central and south america and asked that washington and london respect the soveriegnty and rights of the people.

we left as it was getting dark. the atmosphere, though still one of celebration, had become a little more political and a lot more drunk.

i got on the bus and headed to the back. i found a spot to brace myself by a couple with a squalling infant. the frustrated father shoved the baby into my arms. "here, hold him." the child had bright blue eyes. "i´ll give him to you." he said, seeing my surprise. "go on, take him. he´s a gift," he joked. the baby kept screaming until i gave him back to his mother.

i have two choices,

2008-07-19T10:18:00.000-07:00

go to the volcano island and climb a large mountain, or go to managua and celebrate the anniversary of the sandinista victory.

the mountain can wait a little longer. i´m wearing neutral black.

for those that speak spanish,

2008-07-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

a little poem. written by oscar in the margin of his math test:

no lo lea profesora mari
mi amor
te quiero
te voy a decir una cosa mari
tus ojos son un lucero
que alumbra a mi basurero

ayi ba la otracosa....

it trails off.
oh MAN.
he´s 10.
hee hee.

edited to say no, he´s 11. but still.

ha. victory

2008-07-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

is mine. thanks, rainstorm. church folks can´t light gunpowder in a downpour.

after two solid days

2008-07-16T10:32:00.000-07:00

i think it's just about time for the church across the street to stop lighting concrete-pipe mortars full of gunpowder every thirty seconds.

i'm not kidding. it starts at five in the morning on the other side of the wall. it's a testament to my sleeping ability (or my life in oakland) that it doesn't wake me up. yesterday and the day before it was pretty regular, first a really loud blast, then a slightly quieter one. today, they're going all out already, and it's only 6:30.

they stole

2008-07-15T05:28:00.000-07:00

my shoes. right under my nose, too. i turned my back only for a few seconds. it was my only pair. now i have just the flip-flops. good thing i did the hike earlier that day. dang.

the night opened

2008-07-13T09:43:00.000-07:00

at a house party. oliver's friend raul was having a birthday and i was allowed to come as the only other gringo who would leave oliver alone to work his magic with the nicaraguan girls. i've seen him out with a different one each night, each one ninety pounds of makeup- and soap-opera- obsessed beauty. i ribbed him about it a bit on the way over and he said, with some force, "i am not here to hang out with europeans."

fair enough. i tried my best, down south, not to hang out with them either. but hearing him joke about their behavior was adding to a little nagging question i've been thinking about for years.

the party was rather dull, which surprised me. there was very little dancing, a lot of sitting around at rented tables. cow tongue was served. oliver couldn't eat any more when i remarked that eating it felt exactly like it would feel if you just bit right through your own tongue. we shared a bottle of rum under the table with a couple other friends and decided to split when it was gone.

we ended up at cafe nuit, a bar that hosted maybe 60 or 70 percent foreigners. there we found sheila, adan, and gilbert, three nicas that oliver had worked with at the english school. i could see that sheila was right up oliver's alley: mascara lashes out to HERE, painted-on white jeans, silver jewelry twinkling and tinkling... adan and gilbert wanted to practice english, which was fine with me. "how do you say this... amanecer?"

"dawn."
"DOWN."
"dawn."
"down. we will see the DOWN tonight!"

we had a couple beers and then i extricated myself from an awkward conversation with a guy who had stayed at the hotel in montezuma. for some ungodly reason he wanted to tell me that nicaraguan girls were hotter than costa rican girls. i'm not sure why he wanted to share this with a stranger who'd served him breakfast once. a blonde couple at a nearby table took about 50 pictures of us having this interaction. i tugged at my skirt and clinked my beer with his. "okay, ciao."

the next bar was called inuit-kayak. i'm not making this up. it seemed an appropriate name for the culture clash i was feeling. it was way out at the end of the road by the lake; sheila saw adan's cousin and he gave us a lift. when we got out, i walked ahead with her as she tripped daintily on her six inch heels. the cousin took my arm over bumps in the road and talked loudly at me about how nice his car was. he was able to talk over everyone even with halting english. please don't touch me.

we sat, filled glasses. oliver and sheila were deep in conversation. he was drunk now, and couldn't take his eyes off her lips, her neckline. the cousin was hissing into his ear, "isn't she hot?"

i'd had a few by then. wasn't long before adan, gilbert, and i were deep in a discussion of translation and second languages. my spanish is good, great even-- five years later i can still pass as a native argentine or a spaniard if i feel like a laugh. i express myself well, even eloquently sometimes... but something is always lacking.

so i'm trying to understand what that is. i'm always a little bewildered when people i know get married to people who speak a different first language, because i've never been able to feel like i was communicating closely enough to fall in love with a person asi. there's no line between culture and language, either, so it's impossible to say whether i'm just not interpreting my thoughts well or if there's no cultural context for what i say.

to their credit, gilbert and adan not only put up with my spanish ramblings but had a lot to say about the paradox of second languages. i laughed about how sometimes there are terrible movies that become extremely popular outside the u.s. i used to think people from other countries had a higher tolerance for stupidity in entertainment, or needed their jokes to be more obvious, or whatever, but i think the truth is that when something is translated, it effectively becomes a different film or book. maybe these bad movies are actually great in other languages. they laughed and said that they love movies translated in mexico, but movies translated in spain or argentina are dry and boring.

it might be that the whole theory is invalid because doesn't every single person have their own interpretation of language? but still. the question of love, of deep or even shallow understanding of feelings, that's what throws me. i'm a verbal learner, a verbal communicator. i write and i read and i talk and listen to get nearly all of my information; being with a person who couldn't meet me halfway in that respect, well, as of yet that has never worked for me.

oliver's hand had found sheila's under the table, though the cousin was monopolizing the conversation. her eyes had gone rather blurry as well. i was reminded of oliver's terse "i'm not here to hang out with europeans."

a european approached. german, or possibly dutch. he knew sheila. he called her "woman." "hey woman, why you don't come with me?" she giggled nervously and shot oliver a look: get me out of this. he brushed the man off.

adan showed me the poetry he had written using the notepad function on his cell phone. i was struck by how agreeable they both were. neither had asked me if i was married, had a boyfriend, had kids. neither of them had told me that i was beautiful, neither had pressed me to drink more or tried to touch me. neither had sucked their teeth or whistled at me or any other woman. maybe they're gay.

it was five in the morning. gilbert and adan had already gone. i told them i would come to the english school. as we headed to the parking lot, the cousin insisted that we come in his car. "no, we'll take a cab."
"no, you're coming with me. get in the car."
"oliver, he's trashed and he's being kind of a jerk..." i trailed off. the cousin was dragging sheila by the left hand, oliver ambled along holding her right. we were obviously getting into this car. sigh.

we got into the car. as the cousin opened one door for me, sheila and oliver kissed against the other. he turned the key. nothing. again. nothing. once more. nothing. "sheila, diles que se vayan en taxi," he hissed, speaking in spanish for the first time, fondling her knee.

we understood and got out, trying to laugh it off. "vamos todos en taxi ahora. venga." but he had seriously lost face and was angry. he checked under the hood-- his battery had been stolen. sheila looked longingly at oliver. the cousin grabbed her and jerked her, hard, into the car. "diles que se vayan. tu te quedas conmigo."

oliver went to grab a taxi. sheila's door was still open, one foot out. she wanted to come in the cab with us. i would never leave a girlfriend in that situation in the states. i went back over. "sheila, come with us. you have to go back to town anyway to get a new battery. we'll pay for the taxi."

she looked at me, her eyes uncertain from alcohol and indecision. oliver, from behind me-- "he's her cousin. it'll be okay." she got out.
"he's not her cousin, he's the other guy's cousin, right?" she nodded.
"do you feel safe?"
no, she admitted. but she wouldn't come with us. there was nothing i could do. "i can't leave him alone," she whispered.

the sun had risen. oliver and i got in the taxi by ourselves. we stayed awake playing guitar until the tamale man made his delivery. tamales are good at 7:30 in the morning.

i seriously believe

2008-07-12T12:16:00.001-07:00

that these kids' defense against stomach bugs and parasites has to be the gastrically drastic amounts of coca-cola that they pour into themselves. i mean, that stuff can clean toilets, right? i bet it's just scouring out their little digestive tracts and killing whatever malicious things live in there. i don't drink coca-cola. i'm considering drinking something a little less intense, like my mosquito repellent, to avoid the parasites that seem to have found purchase in my friends.

there are two sets of gringo kids staying here right now. emma and caleb arrived yesterday with their mom and her friend. they're smart, careful kids who threw themselves into whitewashing and sweeping with the rest of the chavalos. they go to bilingual school and are humble about their significant spanish ability. they've renamed themselves mariposa and tigre for the duration of their stay. nayiba keeps calling the little boy león. they get trounced when they play baseball.

hunter and sophia were left here for seven weeks with their 19-year-old nanny while mom returned to the states. they're supposed to be learning spanish but hunter's learned barely enough to beg for soda and ice cream and sophia insists that her spanish teacher paint her toenails. they're pale and spoiled and spend all their time indoors complaining about the lack of television. it's hard to blame them for being brats. the nanny spends all her time chatting with her boyfriend on the internet and merely looks up to tell them not to eat local fruit. i guess sophia was sick for a long time with some stomach bug. she's so incredibly quiet. better than hunter, i suppose, who spends all his spare time crying about something. it's funny how alien they are to the local kids, who just stare at hunter when he cries. they have no clue what this child could have to cry about.

the kids here have all lived on the street or in the tin-and-cardboard houses out near the school. most have lost relatives, brothers, sisters, parents. many of the older ones (and some of the little ones) were pega (glue) addicts and all of them have survived for a time collecting recyclables and begging on the street to survive. by comparison, getting whacked in the head with an inflatable guitar (the cause of hunter's latest fit) is, well, a non-issue.

beisból

2008-07-12T06:06:00.000-07:00

was a blast. we brought the kiddos for the semifinals, managua vs. granada. one kid per gringo. "voy a ser tu mami por ahora..." the kids cheered wildly when the tiburones scored and booed the managua indios when they struck us out. two little nicas sat between the three english girls, patiently explaining the game in spanish and spanglish.

i just cared about the food. instead of a hot dog, we ate frito, plates of fried green plantain covered in cabbage salad and roasted chicken. each plate was 30 córdobas, about a dollar and a half. it was such a relief after the a's game i went to right before leaving oakland, where a beer is $8, a hot dog, $6. i could live here, i really could.

the house is in a jumble right now because the founder comes tomorrow. i'm interested to meet the fellow who filled this place with books on the radical new left, american socialism, the community of scholars, black mountain, et cetera. i was reading a book a day in montezuma; here it's closer to two or three a day and i toss and turn at night dreaming of weathermen, a chained and gagged bobby seale, a little park in berkeley. i have to say it's a welcome change from oprah's book club.

i always seem to have

2008-07-10T08:47:00.001-07:00

a routine. class begins at eight for the chavalitos. they work on reading, riting and rithmetic, sprawled in a circle on the big tiled porch of the casa. each one has their wrinkled notebook, their leaky pen, their varying attention span. i've begun to understand how those teachers at the school teach without materials. little jose ramon is maybe seven, nayiba is six, ismara eight, pedro, luis manuel, luis francisco, luis bodaya, and oscar are all eleven. i spent this morning teaching oscar long division, putting problem after problem in his notebook and encouraging him to draw the answer. at one point i had him stand up and we laid the problems out on scraps of paper on the floor. we walked over them-- number to the left goes into number on the right, then up to put the answer, down to subtract, over, up, then down to bring the next number, back up, over, down, and done! we turned a math problem into a dance and then into a picture, then into a skill. he still tends to want to multiply the numbers, but we'll get it.

i work with nayiba and jose ramon on their letters. they copy over and over, Sa Se Si So Su. Ta Te Ti To Tu. Va Ve Vi Vo Vu. they get bored quickly, and when we review, i point at T and they answer eagerly at the same time, "F!" "L!" sigh. today i read them pinocchio instead, letting them pick out all the As, Bs, Cs, page by page.

yesterday we started painting a mural over at the school. fifteen kids came to watch the gringo circus and tell us they could do better. ha.

then, huddled in a corner, a little furry sack of bones. a former dog, this little bundle-- it died at our feet as we painted, covered in flies. i couldn't watch.

blue ribbon

2008-07-08T14:38:00.000-07:00

was the name of the color we painted the school today. it was the blue you'd expect, with a name like that, the blue of plastic detergent buckets, old station wagons, superman's bodysuit. ironically, we were painting over a mural left by a group of high school students from san francisco, who came with heart but no plan, apparently. the result was a mess of sloppily painted names circling a picture of the golden gate bridge. i sound heartless, but even this tiny school in the poorest outskirts of granada wanted it gone. so we painted over it, one blue ribbon brush stroke at a time.

i painted with oliver, adrian and blake. adrian and blake are students at the casa xalteva, a language school where a friend of mine named jose luis is director and spanish instructor. oliver was a student and is now, a year later, kind of a volunteer/employee/hanger-on. it's a non-profit and they do trips around granada and run programs for the gaggle of kids that hang out there all day. i'm looking over at oliver right now, simply covered in children pulling on him, begging for a game of catch, a piggy back ride, a pillow fight.

this place makes its money on spanish classes for travelers. people come for a week at a time and can opt to take trips and dance classes in addition to the spanish. there are eight instructors, young and energetic. "thank goodness you're here!" they laughed. "you can tell us what everyone is saying about us in english!"

i borrowed a bike today, a 75-pound green schwinn that would be the envy of any san francisco hipster, and rode it out to the school, over a rutted little camino that stretched into a neighborhood of tin covered shacks, hogs and goats and skin-and-bones horses sharing space with trickles of sewage and barefoot kids. we painted the school with four little boys looking over our shoulders, ringing the school bell through the broken window.

i looked inside the school and found bare, clean classrooms. thirty desks and a white board, a few handwritten posters.

VALORES A PRACTICAR: Amor Respeto Paciencia Responsabilidad.

i'd like the challenge of that classroom. clean slate. how to teach with nothing but creativity and words. it must be so hard, for the kids and the teachers.

oliver is now reading "in cold blood" to the pile of kids. they're listening raptly.

casa xalteva

"adivina que..."

2008-07-07T20:24:00.000-07:00

means "guess what?" in spanish and, guess what, little kids use it all the time here too. on the liberia bus while i sat in the aisle, little blas sang me a song. he´s five and wants to be a singer. i asked him what kind of music he would sing: "all kinds,¨" he answered breezily.

soon he had parked himself in the aisle ext to me and was asking me questions. "adivina una cosa. adivina adonde vamos nosotros." "i want you to guess, to guess where we´re going."

he heard me speak english and obligingly spoke all of the english he knew: "ello" "vai-vai" and the numbers up to twelve.

"adivina que está en el mar más profundo de los estados unidos." "guess what´s in the deepest ocean in the united states."
"fish."
"tiburones! hay que nadar en la orilla solamente." "sharks! you have to swim just on the edge."

"adivina que es mi animal favorito." "guess what my favorite animal is."
"snake."
"no! murciélago!" "no! bat!"
"why?"
"porque no nos ataca a nosotros! comen semillas, y frutas, e insectos." "because they don´t attack us! they eat seeds, and fruit, and bugs."

"adivina que es mi animal favorito en toda la historia del mundo." "guess what is my favorite animal in all the history of the world."
"dog."
"no! está rayado de blanco." "no! it´s striped all white."
"tiger."
"tiburón tigre." "tiger shark."

"adivina que es mi animal favorito de aqui hasta el sol." "guess what is my favorite animal from here to the sun."
"spider."
"no. es la más grande en el mundo. la ballena azul! es la más grande, sabe usted?" "no. it´s the biggest in the world. the blue whale! it´s the biggest, did you know, maám?"

i taught him to play twenty questions. it seemed right up his alley.

p.s.
another sound byte, from the internet cafe:

"hold on dude. i totally fell in love with this girl in guatemala and i gotta write her back. how do you spell `permanent´?"
"p-e-r-m-e-n-e-n-t."
"sweet."

if i can keep one skill

2008-07-07T20:01:00.000-07:00

for the rest of my life, let me hang on to the ability to fall asleep on a dime, wherever and whenever...

today i took a half-hour bus from montezuma to paquera, then an hour ferry from paquera to puntarenas, a 40 minute bus from puntarenas to la cruce de barranca, then waited two hours for a bus to liberia, then stood for three hours on that bus, waited two more hours in the rain for the bus to peñas blancas, two hours standing on that bus, got off, walked through the border crossing, caught a 40 minute school bus to rivas, walked a mile or so to the highway, caught a little pickup truck going to nandaime, rode in the back for an hour until my hair became one giant blond dreadlock, got off, hired a taxi to granada. it was, obviously, not the most straightforward way to get to granada. but i really didn´t want to go all the way back to san josé to catch the direct bus. would have added 5 hours to the trip anyway.

today, i slept standing up on a bus, supporting my eye socket with the heel of my hand and bracing my elbow on the back of the seat next to me with the other hand.

i slept sitting crosslegged in a foot-wide bus aisle, elbows on my knees, head in both hands like mourning.

i slept facing the side of the bus, hanging from the luggage rack above with both hands, head supported in the crook of one arm.

i slept with my cheek on the tailgate of a little white nissan, hands providing a little shock absorption.

i went in and out of sleep in the back of a taxi as flo rida, shakira, rihanna scratched in and out of the radio and my headlamp blinked slowly in my pack.

my dreams today were all bumpy and muddled.

bom-cu-PRA cu-PRA ta-bom-TAK-ta-ti-ki-TAK-TAK.

2008-07-05T13:49:00.000-07:00

bom-cu-PRA cu-PRA ta-bom-TAK-ta-ti-ki-TAK-TAK.

así van las clases. that's the guaguancó.

i don't want to forget these rhythms. i've always considered myself kind of devoid of rhythm. i love making music, but it's usually of the sappy-girl-song ilk, the kind without a defined beat. i can't dance because i think too hard about the rhythm, get tense, and don't have fun. thanks but no thanks to the person who gave me THAT complex, you know who you are. grin.

but this, this is a different thing.

i get up early, swim in the ocean for an hour or so. it's usually nice in the morning, after raining itself out at night. the weather here is split in fairly even thirds-- about one third sunny, one third cloudy, one third rainy. except for standing in full sun, they all feel pretty much the same--warm and wet. the rain is coming down with a vengeance right now... it's funny to think i was so sweaty for the first few days, now i love it, my skin loves it. the ocean is warmer than the rain, and warmer than the river that feeds it. it feels great to stand in the ocean while it's raining, the lightning as bright and constant as a fall of welding sparks.

after i swim i sneak into the yoga studio. it's an open air shelter with a wood floor, and only occupied during the daily 6pm class. they leave the mats out. no one has kicked me out yet. the howler monkeys sound like demons and disrupt my practice.

i open up the window at 8, make coffee, make gallo pinto, mixed beans and rice. breakfast is always gallo pinto, sometimes with eggs, sometimes with thick sour cream, sometimes with a wedge of salty, fresh cheese. i make a big vat of it to sell later. the beans are always cooking, simmering in huge pots with onion, garlic, and meat, usually smoked pig skin. this morning it was some kind of tentacled thing, probably squid. the finished meal tasted like the ocean.

i read while the coffee brews. i have read one book a day since i came here, and have unfortunately picked several oprah-type books in a row. so here i am in a tropical paradise, reading about incest in turn-of-the-century ireland or illegitimate pregnancy in WWII jamaica or dramatic racial discrimination in mid-century atlanta. i get it, oprah. it's tough to be a woman.

i spend the afternoons on my own, accompanied by all three hostel dogs, who race ahead, hopefully clearing out all the ticks and snakes. sometimes i hang out with other travelers, climbing waterfalls and hillsides, surfing (it's fun), catching the brilliant purple-and-red-crabs called tajalines from their holes in the woods, trying to climb coconut trees (it's not fun), trying to find the capuchins with the babies that come by occasionally. they lick their lips and point to their stomachs, asking for mangoes and almonds.

in the evenings i hit miguel up for drum lessons. if he's not off his nut, he'll teach me. he is a really patient teacher. josué and i dance salsa barefoot in the dirt. i tried to dance with the dominican guy but he chewed his gum too loud and kept yelling at me to relax. i got tense and didn't have fun. i play cards with folks who are staying at the hotel, mostly nederlanders and americans, lots of english girls, the occasional italian.

bom-cu-PRA cu-PRA ta-bom-TAK-ta-ti-ki-TAK-TAK.

ta-cu-PRA cu-PRA.

2008-07-03T13:33:00.000-07:00

ta-cu-PRA cu-PRA.
ta-cu-PRA cu-PRA.
ta-cu-PRA cu-PRA.

this is one rhythm of the itótele, the medium sized drum of the batá, a set of three drums sacred to the orishas. the itótele is the father drum; there are also iyá, the mother drum, the biggest, and okónkolo, the baby.

the batá are played together. it´s hard for me to keep a rhythm with the other two.

tum-ta-TAK-ta-TAK-ta-BOM-BOM.

2008-07-02T18:46:00.000-07:00

tum-ta-TAK-ta-TAK-ta-BOM-BOM.
tum-ta-TAK-ta-TAK-ta-BOM-BOM.
tum-ta-TAK-ta-TAK-ta-BOM-BOM.

i'm learning the tumbao. it's the basic salsa rhythm. i play it on my knees and on the wall and on the table and on the congas. then you add:

TAK-TAK-TAK ta-TAK.
TAK-TAK-TAK ta-TAK.

or you can add:

TAK-TAK ta-ta-ta.
TAK-TAK ta-ta-ta.

miguel likes to tell me that if i want to "play the cuban" i have to open my legs more around the drum. one quirk of spanish is that the same verb, tocar, means both to touch and to play (an instrument). so he's also telling me that i need to open my legs more if i want to learn to touch a cuban. there's no end to the dirty jokes. i try to catch him early in the day, before the hangover's worn off and he's still in a thoughtful mood. he's really an excellent musician-- it's weird to watch his hands, which are always so slack and uncoordinated looking, kick ass on a conga or the bongos.

"think in 6, play in 4," he says. or was it "think in 4, play in 6?"

okay.

last night miguel and oki

2008-07-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

got into it again. miguel weighs about 90 pounds because he subsists on air and alcohol and spends all day in the hammock watching italian sitcoms. he gets excited at around 9 or so every night as he reaches the crossroads of a waning hangover and a good drunk. oki is a large man, always shirtless, huge black beard and dirty dreads lending him the appearance of a filthy pirate. he writes "epic science fiction," a copy of which is supposedly in existence. i can't imagine. he usually crashes in one of the little lanchas on the beach, although there was a memorable moment when he was found passed out in a chair, bottle of unidentified hooch between his legs, a whole sandwich, minus a bite, held gently in his limp hand, and the single bite falling from his lips. the picture was complete when a little dog came over and started eating the sandwich. he was in san jose to see the doctor recently and was told that he basically has no liver left.

i'm really not sure how two men can be so drunk so continuously, but whatever. last night oki stumbled through and they started hollering at each other about who had the first revolution, cuba or costa rica. they both slur so badly when this gets started that i only pick out words, but it's mostly just a string of name calling. it got good and het up until they were both yelling at the top of their lungs and more italian was coming out of miguel's mouth than anything else.

people gather there most nights to play music. there are a lot of really nice drums and a guitar and other things, and there was a pretty big crowd there to witness all of it. to their credit, everyone just kind of kept playing music while this tornado was spinning around them (thanks blake, for keeping the beat throughout while we all died laughing).

anyway, miguel was yelling about how oki was a descendant of fulgencio bautista when one of the americans cracked open a beer. he went over and saw that it was one of the two local beers, a cerveza imperial. that started him off and he started tearing into the americans about being "imperialists," telling oki to get himself an imperial beer, and pointing out his fridge full of (the other local) pilsen beer. it was wild. at one point i heard him say to a group of gringos, "you've done nothing for the world. at least the terrorists have done something!" andy was sitting off to the side, laughing quietly to himself. "i laugh when i hear something new," he confessed. "i hear all this shit so continuously."

it can get mean, turn on other people. i guess he's been known to freak out and throw everyone out of the hotel. "giving oki a bath" is a common theme-- i've seen miguel spray him with windex and douse him with water. one thing they like to do is a three-act play-- "oki wrote the screenplay!" says miguel-- which is called "guantanamo tres" and involves miguel dressing up first as a peasant, with a big straw hat, and then as a terrorist, draped in a turban with a giant toy bazooka. it always goes wrong in the second act-- "oki, you hijo de puta, you said the wrong thing again, imperialist de mierda. vaffanculo"-- and they never make it to the third act. "oki still has to write the third act."

they're best friends, i guess.

"es un abuso, es," said the old ethiopian rasta hanging out one afternoon as he saw me laughing at their antics. "you're looking at a couple of hombres enfermos."

"seria un abuso si no fueran tan hijos de puta cuando les da la gana," i said.

"son cuarenta bolsas,"

2008-06-30T11:22:00.000-07:00

she said, as she handed me a stack of green plastic.

"oh," i said. "le devuelvo las que sobran."

i didn't think we'd need 40 bags. there were only four of us that were definitely going, a pack of gringos so disgusted by the piles of plastic trash on the beaches near town that we'd decided to grab some garbage bags and spend a couple of hours making a little dent. the trash comes from all over costa rica and lands on this beach on the inside of the very tip of the nicoya peninsula. hurricane alma, that passed over nicaragua and costa rica a month ago, exacerbated the situation and the beaches are covered in a colorful mosaic of the world's refuse.

the owner of the sano banano ("healthy banana," hee) restaurant was excited when we told her we were doing a cleanup and promised us bags and the use of her truck to take it out. aaron, from b.c., olga, from spain and living in juneau, blake, from hawaii, and myself walked to the beach at noon.

thousands of broken flip-flops, no two alike. doll heads, coke bottles, syringes, several hundred combs. razor handles. toys. motor oil containers, pesticide sprayers, one perfect plastic diver. the grand majority was just trozos de plastico, jagged scraps of unidentifiable plastic that were so mixed in with beach debris that just sucking up the entire contents of the beach would have made more sense.

in the northern pacific, where the currents meet, is an island of floating plastic twice the size of texas. it just spins there, growing slowly.

along the way a few locals stopped to help. a few more, actually, gave us strange looks bordering on hostile. weird. we were three quarters of the way down the beach when three swimsuited americans walked by. "i was just talking about this!" crowed the man. "we were talking about organizing a cleanup next week. do you have extra bags?"

seven strong now, the cleaning and conversation ebbed and flowed. two of the newcomers, ethan and danielle, were students at the audubon expedition institute, an environmental education grad program at lesley university whose students spend four semesters living out of a bus, spending each semester in a different area of the u.s. and learning about ecological and regional education. blake teaches music, art and spanish at the voyager school, a public k-8 charter in kailua. teacher talk poured out of everyone and i was struck again by how cool energetic young educators are.

we took 40 bags of trash off of that beach. after 5 hours of bending, carrying those 50-pound sacks up to the road was ridiculously hard. i put the bags on my head to keep my back straight.

one ton of trash. it was the best day yet. and i never want to buy anything plastic again.

my new coworkers

2008-06-27T16:40:00.000-07:00

are the cast of a sitcom.

andy, who goes by "fifiu" here (fifiu! being the sound of a little whistle, like to call a dog) told me that as a ten year old kid in LA he was the center of attention at a family reunion when he announced his three life goals: never to get married, to make $100,000 a year at least once, and retire at 35. his family laughed. "live a little, kid. enjoy your childhood." on his 35th birthday he remembered that reunion and evaluated his life. not married-- check. $100,000 a year? more than that, almost continously since beginning work. check. he retired from cingular wireless and came to costa rica on a whim with no spanish and no plan. he fell into this hippie hostel the day the completed a new room. they asked him what to name it and he didn't know any spanish so he tried to get out of being on the spot by calling the dog. they named the room fifiu! and he lived in it for a year. he's been here five years. he writes a lot, long theories influenced by pounds of marijuana, and talks very seriously about the beauty of having no goals. he seems quite happy. his hair is long, but he shaves his face. i find this odd.

reyna is from nicaragua. she is anywhere from 17 to 25 and about four and a half feet tall. she eats everything in sight, trying desperately to get fat so her parents will let her stay here. every time she goes home, she says, her uncle says that costa rica makes her skinny and ugly. she's afraid that he will keep her home next time-- he made her quit her university classes in computer science because the first semester was intensive english (to be able to read the computer science texts) and he had sent her to school for computation, not english! i'm teaching her english when i remember to.

johnny (pronounced yonny) used to be the chief of police. he must be ignoring fifiu's illegal status. he has five kids "with three different women." i must have put on a shocked face because he rushed to assure me that his father had "had 8 women" and only married his mother at 55, after 30 years together. "of the ones that i know, there are 35 of us," he said. i didn't understand for a moment.
"wait, 35 kids? brothers and sisters?!" he shrugged. "as far as i know."
johnny has 34 siblings. 34. he also, unsurprisingly, has a passel of grandchildren. one of his daughters was married at 15 to a 30 year old man. he said he has hope for the last one, a beautiful 13-year-old who comes by all the time with her flea-ridden little pup, making eyes at all the abercrombie-clad college boys. hope he's got a good plan for her.

i won't be here much longer. lastima.

well,

2008-06-25T19:48:00.000-07:00

that didn't take long. i'm working here until i decide to leave. my job consists of reading or playing the guitar for a few hours in the morning, waiting for guests to show up. sometimes i have to pour a cup of coffee or make change for someone. for this work i get to eat, sleep, shower, and wash my clothes for free... it works for me, i work for them.

a couple of nights ago i made a fire on the beach with some other travelers i'd met in the hostel. i was talking to a guy in the center of town, a youngish costa rican guy traveling with some others, making hemp jewelry and generally fitting the stereotype of young jewelry sellers all over the world. i invited him and his buddy to join us at the fire later. he showed with his friend, they sat, we chatted. whatever.

last night he shows up at the hostel and after hanging out for a while, playing the drums, he asked me to tell him what i thought of him. i shrugged and made some stuff up-- you like music, you like to tell jokes, you have a big family? i didn't really understand the context. "y quieres saber mi opinion de ti?" he asked me. "um, sure," i said.

he lit into me. "you are the typical united states girl, full of shit, that wants to learn spanish. you invited me to your fire the other night, you didn't give me a drink, you sat down next to my friend instead of next to me. your friends didn't talk to me at all. i spent some time in new york and i know that you all think us latinos are poor suckers, without money or anything. we're not exotic, we're just pieces of garbage."

i'm not good at brushing things off. in hindsight this conversation was hasty and mean but it still made me feel really sick to my stomach in the moment, as he continued to call me silly and racist and whatever else came to mind.

it made me remember some experiences in chile. party etiquette, first off. everyone has a drink, everyone has someone to talk to, and you are responsible for the happiness of those you invite. on that front, i DID screw up.

mostly folks in chile didn't bother me about bush or racism. but i do remember teachers and students asking me tricky questions about american history or policy ("who was kennedy's secretary of state?") and then laughing and calling me stupid, "you don't even know your OWN history!"

80% of costa rica's coastal property is owned by foreigners. americans have turned various communities into retirement villas, where you can get starbucks and mcdonald's from english speaking cashiers and hotels proudly proclaim "no tic@s on staff here!" i imagine that a lot of people feel pushed out of their own door by the flood of rich foreigners, who experience the hawaii-like climate with the central american prices and feel that the next logical step is to buy a retirement home.

there's never anything to say when someone lights into you like that. "that's not true" is impotent. "you're a jerk" doesn't help. i left, eyes smarting. i was angry. it took a while to calm down.

they weren't

2008-06-23T13:42:00.000-07:00

pulling my leg about the toad. "don't touch it, it is killer."

i jumped off three rocks yesterday. the first one was about 8 feet high and gave me pause. the second was 12 feet or so and scared me to death. the third was maybe 40 feet. i am proud of myself. but i still have water in my ears.

montezuma

2008-06-21T09:46:00.000-07:00

is without revenge, for the moment. i feel a bit more on my feet, my spanish sounds less tense, and i've remembered how to function paying for things in the thousands. i came here because it was one of three places i remembered from my trip here at sixteen-- what was i, so suffused with hormones and eye-rolling that i paid zero attention to anything else? probably.

it's a full-on tourist paradise but less crowded than the major surf beaches. things are expensive but i get some stuff from the grocery and survive on fruit juice for the most part. the water doesn't seem to be a problem.

this place has gems. the libreria topsy (??) is a little bookshop run by a couple of rabid english book-eaters and a little canadian dyke who seems to have just landed there. they guard their english volumes carefully and run a book rental service, $2 and a desposit to rent a book til you finish it. i checked out a canadian book (grin.). i got a four-dollar credit for tom wolfe's a man in full, far more than it was worth to me. that man is so racist. it's amazing that his books have the cachet they do, and he just gets away with his white-suited weirdness.

miguel/michele runs the libre universidad de montezuma, or montezuma free university, where he'll trade you a bedroom for doing some kind of art project. one bedroom has been turned into a concrete cave, complete with stalactites and a giant dead tree mounted in the middle, by one enterprisin tourist who took the challenge to heart. michele is an itinerate drunk with a stringy gray mullet and watery blue eyes. half sicilian and half cuban, he spends each and every day drumming, drinking, and mumbling in four languages. i got my bedroom for a surname, a dollar, a song, and a trip to the grocery store to buy him unfiltered camels; he saw my last name and started gesticulating wildly in italian. when i explained that i neither spoke italian nor knew a thing about sicily, his response was to gift me with a large, heavy yellow book in the language. sigh.

i was surprised last night when, on the terraza, a toad the size of a canteloupe hopped into a dish on the floor and began eating some weird mash. apparently this toad comes every night and the dogs leave it alone. her name is mafalda, not for the argentine comic strip, but "because that is her name."

spent the night in true vacation fashion-- bonfire, full moon, guitar, drunkenness. my commuting calluses are falling off my hands. i have one mosquito bite and probably a DEET-related neurological condition. you can't have your cake and DEET it too.

we shall see tonight if they were pulling my leg about the toad.

day two

2008-06-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

was a travel day. two chicken buses and a ferry. not bad, all told.

lucia and ty, 10 and 7, were finishing their year here with mom and dad. lucia was precocious, in that way that means, "talkative and a little snotty." very cute. we shared green mango and salt on the bus as she sighed an american sigh about how the park folk at manuel antonio wouldn't give them the resident price because they were white. "i mean, they wouldn't believe that we were costa rican," she moaned. hee. she told me she missed snow. i sympathized.

travel is in the details. like the detail of what steals your food when you're having a picnic or eating on a patio. i spent the morning feeding sugar packets to some kind of crested paradise bird. i am the most terrible tourist ever, i know. but i mean, geez. doing this, i met ain, a 40-something woman from argentina who had left her four kids in buenos aires and moved to puerto viejo with her boyfriend to start some kind of chinese medicine "project." she talked my ear off about reiki and lost love (the boyfriend is still in puerto viejo, because, "the energy here, it's just so intense, you know?") and then said she was on her way back. i said, "well, at least you'll be able to see your kids!" she shrugged. "eh, lo que sea."

what does the day hold? perhaps a waterfall? no kayaks here on the peninsula, sorry. time to kick back and be a hippie.

i might add

2008-06-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

that these may be infrequent or non-existent depending on the actual access to internet. this is an unnecessary addition.

the trip begins

2008-06-19T08:59:00.000-07:00

as it almost always begins, with the Ugly American. jennifer and vanessa got a little too drunk on the plane and embarrassed even their meathead boyfriends with their antics.

"i am so pissed OFF at this lady in front of me right now," vanessa whined. "and i mean, of course she´s speaking SPANISH and i can´t tell her to move her ASS and let me off the FUCKING plane."

jennifer laughed, swaying in her seat. "i KNOW. dammit, this is stupid. i am, like, IRATE right now." their matching platinum blonde pigtails bobbed as their short-shorts rode further up their tan butts.

"is this backpack made for a three-year-old?" asked one of the meatheads as he struggled to wear a tiny pink bag.

"just shut UP and CARRY it," giggled one of them. "i´m too hot and IRATE to worry about it."

enough about them. i´m in a hostel in san jose right now called hostal pangaea. it´s a funky party hostel in a nice neighborhood, but all i´ve done so far is sleep. it was a long trip, involving two city layovers, a night in north hollywood, a new friend, and the new backscatter machine at the LA airport. brand name? rapiscan. i´m sure the company heard "RAP-i-scan" but it´s not a far stretch to "RAPE-i-scan" when you see the handily posted image of exactly how much of your naughty bits can be seen by the TSA when you walk through there. a lot of them, that´s all i need to say.

i´m off. did i mention that i managed to get myself sunburned before i even got here?

--pura vida!