montezuma

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.