Wherever you go, There you are.

Feral Rabbit Stew

2011-08-22T14:14:00.000-06:00

*If you are squeamish, do not read this, do not look at the pictures.

Last week Johnny and I attempted to go backpacking, but ended up car camping at Bagby due to some confusion about what was up with the trail being blocked. That reduction in adventure levels, however, has been successfully rejuvenated with the advent of feral beach rabbit hunting as a viable activity.

It took us approximately three hours to drive from Portland to Cannon Beach. Holy cow. We arrived with the midday heat at Johnny's family's beach cabin and explored the neighborhood, keeping an eye out for bunnies.

Lots of folks know about the feral beach bunnies, but I don't remember being aware of them before. When we told my brother about our plan to go out and bag one, he of course responded that he'd hunted them in the past. He also said that a lot of them are pretty unhealthy and to keep an eye out for internal parasites.

We practiced using the slingshot for a little while, shooting at rocks out on the beach. My aim needs work, Johnny's does too, but he hit the rocks twice and was close every other time while my shots kept ending up no closer than a foot or two from the target.

We avoided drawing a lot of attention to ourselves, two kids with a wrist rocket and pockets full of hand-picked gravel. Picked blackberries to pass the time, waiting for people to pass us by. We weren't sure how the residents felt about bunnies, though we did see live traps set in one yard, and a kid spraying water with a hose at rabbits in the garden.

All in all we saw probably eight to ten rabbits in that neighborhood. I heard accounts from Johnny and others of seeing way more than that in the past, but considering we were there in the middle of one of the hotter summer days it makes sense that a lot of the population was hiding out somewhere in the shade.

The first rabbit Johnny shot at was sitting on a lawn in front of an empty cabin, alternately snoozing and grazing. A miss made it hop a few feet forward, a glancing shot to the nose stunned it, and a shot in the flank sent it running for cover behind the cabin, where Johnny couldn't follow. He shot at one of a pair of rabbits across the street there, too, missed, then another (or one of the two, that had run that way?) back on the other side of the street in front of another house. We corralled it into a corner and Johnny shot it in the side of the head from just seven or eight feet away.

Actually killing it was stressful. It was Johnny's rabbit, he shot it, I just watched. The shot shocked it and it twisted around on the ground, then took off in a daze. Johnny stalked it, grabbed it by the back of the neck, and it went out with blows to the head with a metal water bottle. It took too long.

The main purpose of this hunt was education. Meat and fur were secondary. We thanked the rabbit for giving us all these things, that we may know we are capable of killing for ourselves. In a culture of grocery stores and restaurants I believe it is extremely important.

People who read this might be a little shocked that I would do this, kill something and eat it, but if you eat meat at all you are responsible for the death of an animal. Letting someone else kill it distances but does not remove you from the act. Anyone who has experienced the good feeling of harvesting food from a forest or your own garden should understand the impulse to hunt an animal for the same reasons, and I do not think there is such a big difference between killing a plant and killing an animal, except for your own emotional response.

I do think that it is important that while I work on my slingshot aim I should also research quicker ways to kill the stunned animal.

When I was around six years old my family got chickens and my mom enlisted my help in butchering the meat birds. Later we started trapping and butchering invasive starlings out of the backyard, and made starling pot pies. I used to be pretty squeamish, but now I really appreciate my upbringing.

When Johnny and I laid out the rabbit on a board in the yard of the cabin, we enlisted my mom's help in butchering it. I called her and she gave us step-by-step instructions on skinning and gutting. Thank you, Mom! I love you.

Cutting the skin away from the feet.

Removing the skin like a sock, over the head.


We must look like that on the inside, too. That is another thing	this rabbit teaches us.


Healthy.

Hide stuffed with dry grass to keep it from getting stinky while it waits.

We brought the meat and fur back to my brother's house in Portland where I'm staying for a while. We were welcomed into this house, ducks and chickens in the backyard, hides and skulls and bones tucked into rafters and displayed on the mantle. One of my heroes standing right there at the gate to the yard, all these rewilding characters hanging out in my viscinity... holy cow. My life is AWESOME.

Johnny is awesome, too. I'm sure all sorts of adventures are out there waiting for us...

Sunday morning we borrowed my brother's pressure cooker and we put together a stew to take to my sister's house for the monthly installment of Sunday Brunch. A success! Potatoes, bell peppers, garlic, onions, and nice tender wild-caught rabbit that Johnny killed and butchered with his own hands, with help from his friends and family, and shared with those same people.

I found this article this morning, after my own experience with urban hunting. Very interesting. Much better written than my blog post here. And very exciting! This is a world I enjoy living in, and here I am, nineteen years old, ready to soak up the rest of my life.

Dramatic thoughts

2011-06-28T22:08:00.001-06:00

I spend a lot of time floating around in my head, poking at the past and peering into the future. I get the feeling most people do. I've always liked to wonder at how things went, how things came to be this way. How did I get here and how could it have gone otherwise?

When I remember things, my memories are lucid, not flat images but select pieces of a complete experience.

I learned in the past couple of years from various incidences that it is easier to leave than to be left. I left Guatemala, but here, more than a month since my last night there, I find my chest hurts to think about the place too much, as it hurt to think about leaving while I was still there.

I remember that sometimes in Guatemala I was homesick. Now here I am, Guatemalasick.

At the same time I am afraid to go back, indefinitely, because my family is here and I cannot live in both places. I have to decide where I love more.

Uncle Tom's Cabin: Day 1

2011-06-05T22:49:00.000-06:00

Weird. Weird. Weird. But here I am.

Currently in southern Oregon, out in the relative boonies at my uncle's house. Today he and his girlfriend took me up to Table Rock. We went from green patch to green patch on top of the mesa hunting down invasive star thistle, watching the rain go down in the valley, and listening to thunder while it stayed dry and relatively warm up where we were.

Grackling Tragedy

2011-05-13T14:10:00.000-06:00

A grackle made her nest a few weeks ago in the largest banana tree in my backyard.

The three household hounds took to destroying the baby banana trees, ticking off the landlord.

A man showed up one morning and attached ropes between the big banana tree and the wall, and placed boards around the base.

The grackle nest fell out.

The dogs went to inspect the fallen nest.

I went to inspect what the dogs were inspecting, and found three baby birds; one deceased, two still kicking.

Ack.

I'm in no position to care for little gracklings right now, much as I want to.

I called my dad, who advised me to pick up the nest, put the surviving babies back in it, and put the nest back in the tree.

I can't reach the crook of the banana tree...

So I put it in the branches of another tree next to the banana tree.

I don't really expect them to survive... but there's not much I can do.

Home stretch

2011-05-02T12:03:00.001-06:00

May. The month I leave Guatemala and head back to Oregon.

I'm scared, depressed, and anxious. Of course I want to see my friends and family, but Guatemala has been home for nearly a year. I know it's going to hurt to break off all the little green tendrils I've grown out and started wrapping around this place.

I know how to live here. My responsibilities are short-term. I've never lived on my own in the US. I have to make long-term decisions. Crap.

There's a pomegranate tree in my backyard here. I don't think the fruit will be ripe before I leave.

Wasn't it Persephone who ate a pomegranate and couldn't leave?

The Mad Stirfry List

2011-04-23T12:43:00.000-06:00

I love making a mad stirfry. Here is the ultimate list, to be perfected over time:

For the sauce:

soy sauce or a substitute
white pepper
honey
lime juice
water
curry powder
black pepper
chile Coban
Maya-Ik hot sauce
other form of picante
chicken or beef stock/bullion/consomme

Proteinacious material:

tofu
thinly sliced beef, chicken, pork, squirrel, whatever. Bits of some mammal or bird.
a coupla eggs

Once the wok is warm:

garlic
ginger

Vegetable matter:

broccoli
carrot
green beans
red or green bell pepper
green onion/shallots
water chestnuts
baby corn or corn off the cob

Fungi:

button mushrooms (or whatever they call them these days. Criminies?)
sliced up portobellos

Extras:

walnuts
cashews
pine nuts
bean sprouts

**Fruitz:

pineapple slices
apple bits

Things I haven't tried but sound like they might be good:

dandelion greens
fiddleheads
guisquil
beets
sweet shelled peas (I tried mature shelled peas... mistake.)
fennel
snow peas
wild mushrooms
a dash of coconut milk, or bits of coconut
artichoke hearts

To be served beside/upon:

white rice
brown rice
Thai rice noodles
mung bean noodles
**spaghetti squash spaghetti
your face

* Shellfish are not included in this list because I might die if I eat them.
** Disclaimer: these items have also not yet been attempted.

Tree of... I forget what.

2011-04-22T14:27:00.001-06:00

I've been asked twice by kids I've gone to school with over the age of fourteen what language is spoken in England.

I've had arguments with people over whether or not hens without the company of a rooster will produce eggs containing a chicken embryo.

Now I am coming to the realization that not everybody understands the relationship between a flower and a fruit.

I don't know if someone directly told me how things worked when I was little, or if I just payed attention.

With the second two, it bugs me the most when I talk to people who like to think of themselves as "connected with nature", but don't get those two pretty simple ideas. Like it's never occurred to them.

I'm thinking it's probably not their fault, just the crazy state of things.

And it makes me wonder, even if I understand some of these things, people miss so much. What am I missing? What has no one told me? What have I not noticed?

Back in Business

2011-04-17T15:20:00.001-06:00

People who blog every day or every week or every time something exciting happens make me feel guilty about how unreliably I post. Fortunately I think the number of people who read my blog even at peak production is negligible and any guilt I feel actually stems from a sinful pride of how awesome my life regularly is.

Not to say I haven't had embarrassing moments, awkward moments, moments of frustration and depression. I've had 'em. But the "everything else" makes up for it 176 cents on the dollar, at least. Oftentimes more. I'm doing good. And, for now, I'm back in business.

Since the collision with the sea turtle way back in November, stuff has happened. Anyone who knows me well enough to read my blog I think also knows what I've been up to since, but just for, like, posterity:

My family came down to Guatemala to visit me in December. We did stuff.

After they left, I moved off the beach and returned to the mountains, to Ciudad Vieja, near Antigua.

I moved in with a roommate into a real house and started doing volunteer work at Valhalla Experimental Station, a macadamia nut farm. It's awesome. I do stuff. Like paint and garden and pick up nuts.

I took up cooking again, since I have a kitchen, and have since made some favorites: mad stir fries and a lovely roast chicken, as well as sapote bread.

In March a friend from up North, Canada, came to hang out in Guatemala with me. Plans were scattered all over the place, but we did manage to visit Hannah in Xela for a week and get a school house painted back at the beach.

I got giardia! And got rid of it.

I got a job working at a bar and restaurant in Antigua! I have zero experience and the learning curve is intense. But, I think, worth it. I'm making about ninety cents an hour. :D

I still work at the macadamia farm, too.

7 1/2 Dozen

2010-12-01T14:07:00.002-06:00

Trent the Peace Corps Surfer’s cell phone was shot for a while, so in order to discuss the coconut bread we are having made for the kids’ activities of the Festival de la Tortuga I had to actually go hunt him down in the next village over.

I got out onto the hard sand where the tide had just left it, took off my flip-flops, and sprinted off down the beach, headed slightly to the right of where the sun had set a couple of hours before. The moon wasn’t up yet; the stars were bright, but I couldn’t see much. I held my single-LED keychain light in my hand as I ran, ready to turn it on if I came across anything other than flat sand and sea.

I’m actually rather afraid of the dark… functionally afraid, so I’ll still do things like run a kilometer down the beach at night. It’s mostly just the zombies and sea monsters that scare me.

That morning when I had gone out to count turtle tracks there was what I perceived to be a massive ray washed up dead on the beach right in front of the village. Like eight feet across. Actually more like three feet. But it was big! And dead. But still scary. I wouldn’t get close to it, on principle.

Later, someone in the village skinned it.

Anyway, that morning and the morning before I hadn’t counted any nesting turtle tracks. Apparently they found mala onda in the full moon.

So there I was, running down the beach in the dark, paranoid about sea zombies, fingers gripping my LED light, when I saw that I was coming up on a shadow. Some newly arrived driftwood, I thought. Prepared to jump it. I pressed on my light to judge the distance but instead of a log I lit up a smooth-shelled creature with bright white skin holding together its head and fins as it crawled awkwardly up the beach. Just for that split second, it scared the crap out of me.

Then I switched into turtle mode, put my light out, and crouched. Mama turtle had stopped crawling. I was sure she was going to turn around and head right back into the sea, as frightened by me as I was by her. But she started swishing her fins again, leaving that unicycle-with-a-tractor-tire line of tracks and when she had gone another several feet I drew a circle in the sand behind her to claim her as mine.

It took her a while to find a good spot up at the top of the beach to put her eggs. I sat on a log a few feet away to wait. She kicked sand around while I twisted my neck back and forth keeping an eye out for zombie parlameros.

She finished digging her nest and settled in to lay. The last time I’d found a turtle on the beach at night I’d been with a local friend, who had dug a hole down behind the turtle, a tunnel into the bottom of the nest, to begin taking out the eggs as they were layed. I wasn’t sure if that’s how I was supposed to do it, but I was eager to get out of the dark and the tunnel seemed like a faster way to go. As it turns out, that’s how it’s done generally anyway, by parlameros and turtle volunteers alike.

While I sat and waited, some 4-wheelers blazed by, stopped at my turtle’s tracks, saw the circle, and continued on. I felt like a real parlamera. Hell yes!!

I wish I weren’t afraid of the dark. I can force myself to relax for a few moments and just feel the starlight and the sea air and the sand, but then the paranoia seeps back into my mind. I can’t help it. Perhaps I just need more practice.

What I experienced despite the fear, however, was awesome. The turtle, Olive Ridley, parlama, large and heavy, breathing deep every time she dropped two eggs at a time into the nest. I kept my arm down in the tunnel behind the nest and could both hear her breathing and feel the soft ping-pong ball eggs thud against the floor of the nest. I got covered in sand. I got oozed on.

I have learned that Guatemala sand and mama turtle ooze are glorious things, even when felt through a fear of the dark.

The moon finally came up orange and big, and the parlama mama put her last couple of eggs, sighed, and started filling in the nest again.

I felt bad that the nest was empty. Her ping-pong eggs were all already up on top of the sand next to me in a pile. While she laid she had sort of been turning around and she could have seen the pile of her eggs, not where she had put them. I felt bad about that until I realized she probably had no idea what a turtle egg looked like.

Even if she could smell that something was not quite going as planned, she finished filling the hole while I collected the eggs into the front of my T-shirt. I would like to thank Threadless.com. My fear of the night did not fade with the dark even as the moon rose, and I regret not staying to watch her return to the ocean. I was too scared. I put on my sandals, said thank you, held the eggs close to me and continued 200 meters down the beach to the trail that leads off to where Trent lives, with the promise of electric lights.

We put the eggs into a worn clear plastic bag, about seven and a half dozen. High fives. Snickers bars. We walked back to El Rosario, where I went and grabbed the hatchery key from my house and Trent checked out the beach towards La Barra to see if other turtles were coming up.

We buried the eggs in two nests of 39 and 50 eggs, the obscure numbers due to a minor miscount and poor math skills between the two of us.

Upon finishing up reburying a nest:

“Did you say the magic word?”

“There’s a magic word?”

“Yes: Nascan tortuguitas!”

“…That’s two words.”

The last four nests in the hatchery were found by us; Trent found one right in front of his house a few nights before. That’s pretty cool. And we released some babies that had just hatched while we were there burying the nest I’d found.

At some point I remarked that I had not woken up that morning thinking I was on a collision course with a sea turtle.

It certainly doesn't feel like November.

2010-11-16T17:17:00.000-06:00

I’m getting a little anxious for my family to show up, already! I take the early bus to Antigua to meet up with my dad in fourteen days. Two more weeks. I haven’t seen anyone from my tribe for five months.

I don’t really get homesick, not here at the beach anyway, where I have turtle eggs to bury, English lesson plans to put together, and a puppy to keep an eye on. That isn’t to say home is never on my mind. Memories of the stretches of road that I know well, especially the places where I learned to drive, the smells and sounds of my sister’s Portland apartment when it is full of good food and happy people and grouchy cats every Third Sunday Brunch, and the doors in my house, starting with the front door. How cool, Oregon chipi chipi, light rain, feels; different from even the Antigua chipi chipi. These images and accompanying sensations flicker through my mind occasionally and my heart strains to remain in the present.

El Murcielago, The Bat

2010-11-14T12:59:00.000-06:00

This morning I was walking on the beach with my chucho puppy. We do this every morning. Some mornings we head out too late and the sand is already too hot to walk on without sandals, caites, and I have to dump burning sand out of my flip-flops every few steps and carry the puppy on my shoulder. Where the waves have been most recently the sand is cool, but my job is to count the places where nesting sea turtles have come up and write down the location information with a GPS and the tracks don't show anymore where the tide has washed it away. So we walk on the hot sand, at least in one direction.

This morning, like most mornings, we came across a few interesting washed-up dead things. Heading West, the long leg of the crawl count, the guts of some large animal were cooking on the sand. The puppy chased away the big beautiful black-headed vultures who were expressing interest in the guts, but was not herself impressed.

Heading back from the eastern leg of the count Luna, that is the puppy's name, stopped ahead of me to sniff at a curled-up fuzzy dead creature - a bat.

I don't remember really seeing a bat up so close before, even a dead one. In fact I think the only bats I've really gotten adequate looks at are the smaller-than-mice cave bats in the Oregon Caves and the gigantic flying foxes I saw in the botanical gardens in Sydney, Australia when I was nine.

I peeled the dead bat's wings away from its furry body and took a look at its fingers and single claw and the membrane stretched between. Its hind paws were curled up, looking like flexible rat's paws. On its nose was a little pink rhino horn. I wanted to identify the species, but apparently bats make up a huge percentage of the mammal population in Guatemala and I don't know where to start.

Jaime told me a few weeks ago that there are vampire bats here. I didn't believe him until some other people told me the same thing. I don't know where I thought vampire bats lived, but I didn't think it was Central America, I don't know why not. Jaime says that sometimes you sleep with your foot pressed against your mosquito net and in the night you wake up and it feels like there's sugar between your toes, and in the morning you see you've been bitten.

I also get peed on by bats on a pretty regular basis. Right through my net onto my face, usually right when I was about to fall asleep. Spritz. Otherwise I like to watch them flit around under the thatch and wish them luck taking out all those damn zancudos. Mosquitoes I dislike and DEET I hate.

I came home from the crawl count and was offered papaya.
There's a new bus on the route that goes all the way to La Barra that is orange and they call it La Papaya.

Small fishing community seeks English teacher, comes up with inexperienced 18-year-old

2010-10-16T13:43:00.000-06:00

(Who just had to look up whether it's spelled and pronounced "inexperienced" or "unexperienced"...)

The demand for English lessons around here is high and the supply of English speakers with time on their hands is low. So when I showed up, incompetent as I may be, I was immediately signed on as the new English teacher in the village.

I am terrified and uncertain of my teaching capabilities, but also excited and eager to see what we can accomplish or I wouldn't have said alright, sure. I'll be teaching adults - fishermen, mostly, since this is a fishing village, but they would like to learn English and get jobs in nearby tourist-infested Monterrico.

I have a pretty clean slate to work with. Around town I receive the occasional "hello!", "how are you?", and "good morning!" (regardless of the time of day), but no one seems to know much more past that.

Last night I helped Sara the schoolteacher finish the homework she was given by her university English course, for which she travels to another town (rather far away, not sure how far) on Saturdays. Her homework is to fill out sections at a time of her workbook.

The workbook is awful. For starters, it is completely irrelevant to her life: Every single section relies heavily on the assumption that the student has lived in an American-style city his or her entire life and therefore knows the names and locations of bus stations, convenience stores, and restaurants. Sara has lived in small fishing communities all her life, where everything comes from one or two stores run out of someone's house, and if you want to go somewhere else you sit down and wait for the chicken bus to come by. She can make things up to fill in the spaces, but the lesson is wasted. Also, the setup just sucks. Even I couldn't figure out what the book was trying to ask her to do some of the time, which is not acceptable. I'm not dumb, and the instructions were in English (Sort of complicated, confusing English at that).

The level of the lessons she was working on were much higher than her actual proficiency level, which gives me further evidence that that textbook sucks and hasn't taught her a thing. Of course, I have always sort of hated textbooks and workbooks. They are tedious and just make me grumpy, which is not a good mood to try and learn in.

Furthermore, the people here in El Rosario aren't looking to learn how to write in English, they want to speak English. So I refuse to teach English as if I were working from the confines of a public school system somewhere in the US. I'm living in a sand-floor thatched-roof hut on the southern coast of Guatemala, Man! I can teach as I see fit. I'm in charge.

First-hand personal experience (redundant?) with learning Spanish reveals that I essentially did not learn Spanish in a classroom. When I got off the plane in Panama in February of 2009, I knew some basic vocabulary, some grasp of present tense, and your basic "hola, me llamo Ana." It took me more or less four months to pick the language up on my own, by listening and interacting, shy as I was, with real Spanish-speakers. I have memories of the moment I learned specific words and phrases "in the field", as it were, and those are some pretty awesome moments. I still experience them occasionally, as my current level of Spanish is enough to have a good conversation and a good time but still far from perfecto.

So, with what I have seen and experienced in mind, I first turn to the "Where Are Your Keys?" project. I think I stumbled across it quite a while back, a year or two maybe, while stalking around the internet investigating my brother's life on the internet, which sounds creepy, but really, google my brother's name and he's practically famous. Somewhere in the mix was this "language fluency game", and now it's come back to me as my best idea for a means, or at least a supplement, to teach English down here.

Introduction to WAYK from Willem Larsen on Vimeo.

My first obstacle is the fact that I am barely able to post blogs from here, with my dinky little Tigo plug-in modem. It only gets reception where my Tigo phone does, and I only have... 3 bars right now. It took an hour to load the above video, and the necessary tutorial videos available on the website run long - the basic overview is an hour and twenty minutes. I am incapable of loading that from here - I can't leave my laptop out on the beach for three days. I need internetz.

So I hope to go into Monterrico this afternoon, or tomorrow, or Monday, or whenever to seek out fast wi-fi. If I have to spend a night there, I will. I am determined. I need to learn the game, test it out and teach it to Trent, practice it, and then get on the whole teaching classes thing. I imagine more than a few people are going to be a little dubious of my methods, so hopefully I can make sense of the game and present it well and make some progress!

There's my plan.

If anyone reading this has any tips, ideas, stories, etc., to help me out, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you! This feels like a very big endeavor, and I intend to do my best despite lack of any training whatsoever.

Wah.

First Day Luck

2010-10-12T16:52:00.002-06:00

New & Improved - with pictures!

I am finally in El Rosario, a very small fishing villages located in a string of very small fishing villages along the southern Pacific coast of Guatemala. The closest Google Earth-able town is Monterrico or perhaps Hawaii. Monterrico is a small, fairly touristy beach town and Hawaii is where most of the sea turtle people go to volunteer.

My shuttle to Monterrico picked me up at my doorstep in Antigua at 8:30 and I chatted a little with some other travelers (from Houston, Michigan, and the UK) who were also headed to the coast, though only for a few days. The heat increased substantially along the way. The coast is hot.

The shuttle driver dropped me off with my embarrassing amount of stuff on a street at the edge of town where the micro bus to the pueblos comes by. I waited for about two hours, sitting under a ficus tree at the edge of a field teeming with dragonflies across from Tienda La Esperanza and a smaller hardware store.

And now I’m here! I made it! I meant to be here a month ago or more, but now I am here and the adventure has already begun. I only hope that my internet is strong enough to post this stuff; if you want to see pictures, please submit your prayers to the Tigo modem gods.

This morning I got up at 6:00 and waited for Trent, the Peace Corps volunteer from Iowa (if I remember correctly) who has been living here for the past 7 months and has about a year and a half still to go. He is thinking of purchasing a horse.

He and Benjamin and I headed out to check on the turtle hatchery (tortugario). Benjamin is a local kid who has been helping out and now working in the turtle hatchery since he was quite young. I live with his family here. He is also a fisherman.

When we arrived at the tortugario we found two nests had hatched and some of the nestlings had escaped the wire nets, so we couldn’t count exactly how many had hatched from each nest. Trent was surprised, he had never seen so many baby turtles at a time. We scooped them up several at a time and plopped them into a bucket, carried them to about 10 feet from the farthest-reaching wave and set them down, facing the sea. We stood and watched until they had all disappeared into the surf. Fifty-four olive ridley sea turtlings.

Benjamin left Trent and I, and we continued on down the beach to perform crawl counts: counting the visible turtle tracks from the night before. Trent told me that the turtles had been coming up at low tide, which made it hard to find tracks the next morning after high tide had washed most of the evidence away.

We did find one set of tracks. Trent pointed them out to me: they look like a unicycle with a tractor tire came up out of the ocean. We were following the tracks with our eyes as they crossed the beach, and when we reached the end we realized the owner of the tracks was still around.

Trent’s immediate assumption was that the turtle was sick - they rarely come up to lay eggs during the day, and it was at least 8:00 by that time. She also wasn’t moving at first. We sat behind her so as not to scare her and watched her for a while, then she started swishing her fins around and tilting her whole body side to side, resembling some sort of dancing mushroom.

Trent wasn’t sure if she had laid eggs, would lay eggs, or was simply confused. After about 20 minutes she packed up and left, with some difficulty.

Trent and I started digging up the area she had been sitting on. He couldn’t identify a definite hole by poking the sand with a stick to feel where it’s been loosened, so we dug all over. When nothing turned up, we assumed she hadn’t laid any eggs after all, filled everything back in, and continued on the end of the beach.

We went up to the hot, sandy road and headed back, stopping for a few minutes at a home where a man named Chepe happened to be (He is actually my neighbor). Chepe is an expert ‘parlamero’ - turtle egg finder. He listened to our story and accompanied us back to where we had encountered the parlama.

He started out by poking around with a stick, but we had dug up and disturbed most of the sand anyway. He inspected the area and poked a few times more at an area slightly above where we had been digging and he put his stick down and started digging himself. And lo, a nest of turtle eggs!

The nest was apparently on the larger side. We carried the eggs back in a t-shirt. It was settled that Chepe would receive 50% of what the eggs would be worth on the market, and we took all of the eggs to the hatchery to be reburied.

When we arrived at the hatchery, 6 more baby turtles had hatched and were trying desperately to escape their wire net. Two other nests look like they will hatch soon: the sand on top is caving in. We buried the nest in four different holes - about 130 eggs in all!

So today was an excellent first day. Trent and Benjamin told me I must be ‘pura suerte’, because that sort of thing doesn’t happen most of the time. Hopefully I can keep it happening…

Remember that you can donate about $20 and purchase another whole nest to pack into the hatchery! Talk to my parents about it, or send me an email, or whatever.

A sunny day in Antigua

2010-10-09T13:39:00.005-06:00

This morning our host dad let us sleep in until 9:00, which really just made me wake up every half an hour after about 6:00, thinking I was missing something. The day is beautiful, though, so about 10:30 my two Dutch housemates and I wandered up to Cerro de la Cruz, a hill with a great view looking south over Antigua, towards the volcano.Whenever Cerro de la Cruz is mentioned in conversation, people tend to warn you that they've heard that it is extremely dangerous and you are sure to be robbed if you go without a police escort. This used to be true, perhaps, but now there are cops sitting around up there all day and the hill is a popular place for joggers, people with dogs, and youths who want to make out in the shade. It seems equally popular for foreigners, Antigueños (Guatemalans & expats), and folks visiting Antigua from the capital.And here is some proof that I was there:Go take a look at more pictures from today in my 3rd Guatemala album on Facebook. :)

Antigua is sticky

2010-10-08T13:27:00.009-06:00

Contradictory to my last post (which was... over a month ago) I am still in Antigua. The closest I've come to moving out was this morning, but it is now 1:30 and I'm still sitting on my old balcony at César's. I did my best to pack up last night, but I'm not a great packer (I lack some organizational skillz, which may have had some impact on my inability to get out of this town) and I would have still had some problems to work out before my 5:30 bus this morning.

This is the conejito I doodled in my host father's album of people who have stayed in his house over the last decade.

I was going to take a directo chicken bus to Monterrico, then hope it was one of the buses that continue on to the little pueblos down the beach. I had not quite figured out how I was going to effectively haul my two duffel bags, rucksack, purse and hiking boots all the way across town in the dark (Thanks to my handy-dandy iCalendar sun application subscription, I know that there wasn't going to be any light until almost 6:00 this morning) and then hassle with the driver and ayudante about getting the big bags up onto the roof. I had not gotten that far, logistically.

Then I turned my alarm off in my sleep and didn't wake up until less than thirty minutes before my bus was going to take off, anyway. So I'm still here.

Actually oversleeping was not my only problem. This week, similar to last week and perhaps the week before that, have been strange and/or hectic.

Last Thursday when I was in Guatemala City with Hannah and her dad I made my first attempt at getting my 90-day basic visa renewed (they call it a "tourist" visa. Bah!) but was turned away because the offices close at 4:30 and although I arrived around 3:30, I stood around looking lost for at least 45 minutes and got cut in line by sneaky old people multiple times, and then when I finally climbed up to the 4th floor to pay my fine for overstaying my initial visa by about a week, they were sliding the windows shut and told me to come back in the morning.

So I caught a chicken bus into the city Friday afternoon, got off at Miraflores Mall (Huge. Insanely posh and shiny. Crappy food court) and from there took a Green Cab to the offices of El Departamento de Migracion out in Zona 4. The cab driver gave me his phone number to be able to call him and get picked up again if the visa process didn't take too long, but I was running up and down stairs, getting photocopies made, and standing in line for over an hour and when I stepped back out of the building I just hopped into one of the slightly sketchier white taxis that was idling hopefully in the street.

White taxis are sometimes cheaper because they don't have a meter running while you're sitting in traffic, but you have to settle on a price before you get in or they'll probably try to rip you off. This one was good, I paid only Q40, whereas the Green Cab was about Q50.

I'm not entirely clear on why the Guatemalan government had to hang on to my passport for the weekend after I'd paid my Q120 renewal fee and Q110 illegal residency fine, but I was told to come back the following Monday afternoon to pick it up. I ended up returning yesterday afternoon, Thursday.

Last Saturday I was going to go hang out with Hannah and her dad here in Antigua, only to wake up that morning with a debilitating stomach bug. I did not get out of bed for two and a half days... fun fun. Then I got a cold. I am getting over the cold but the reason I am not in El Rosario at the beach right now is because I woke up this morning and realized that my In the bathroom/Outside the bathroom ratio was still out of whack and that seven days has been too long to expect this to just blow over while I'm living in a coastal village where the houses have sand floors and the shower is a bucket... and the toilet flushes very, very slowly.

So this morning I woke up again at 7:00, had breakfast with my host father and my two Dutch housemates who were surprised to see me since I had already said goodbye to them last night, then made my way to a local little Aprofam Clinic and got myself checked out by a doctor there. He agreed that seven days was way too long, I should have gone to a clinic the third day I was still feeling sick. He prescribed an antibiotic for amoebas called Tinidazol along with some pills filled with "the spores of Bacillus Clausii" called Enterogermina, to reflorify my estomago. I'm to take a total of four pills of the antibiotic, one every 12 hours, and two doses of the bacterial spores every day in between the antibiotics and for a few days afterwards.

He also directed me to a diagnostics clinic located a few blocks down the street where I am to take a poop test and then report back on Monday. So I'm still stuck in Antigua until... who the heck knows. I hate to be very specific anymore. Someday, preferably early next week.

Anyway, about yesterday's trip into Guatemala City to pick up my passport: I had to go twice. I was so cotton-headed and disgruntled by my illnesses that I realized after 45 minutes on the bus into the city that I had left the receipts for my visa back in my room. When I got to Miraflores Mall I called a friend and asked if those receipts were necessary, which he told me they probably were, then went and found some disappointing Chinese food in the food court. Usually food court Chinese food is so good! What the heck.

I was so grumpy I bought Q1 of ambiguous fruit-shaped candy, disregarding my allergies. I was already sick anyway. I should have bought Skittles, ambiguous fruit-shaped candy sort of sucks. I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be gum or not.

So I left the gigantic shiny mall, walked down the highway, crossed the road on one of the fun footbridges, and caught a bus going back to Antigua. The ayudante was advertising the bus from about 200 meters in front of it, which I thought was sort of weird, and when I indicated that I wanted to get on the bus but could not see it he told me it was "down there, because there are police here"... Mmkay. I'm wondering if there's actually some sort of law against packing the buses as tightly as they do?

I made it back to Antigua around 1:00, hustled over to my house, grabbed my receipts off my bedside table, donned a sweater despite the heat of the day and booked it on back to where I catch buses into Guate. Then I sat in a chicken bus for another hour, got into a Green Cab that happened to be driven by the same guy I'd had the last time, made it to the immigration office, signed some stuff, got my passport, hopped back into my trusty Green Cab which took me to the bus stop, and got on a bus back home. Holy cow. Long day.

Yesterday evening I went to a few used & new bookstores around town and picked up my reading stock for the next few months: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, Dinosaur in a Haystack by Stephen Jay Gould, The Living by Annie Dillard, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson even though I have it on Audiobook, I wanted a hard copy. I also dawdled over and finally gave in to buying a brand new (and therefore expensive) bird book, Birds of Mexico and Central America from Princeton (like the school) Illustrated Checklists, by Ber Van Perlo.

And now it is 2:30 and I am going to go pick up my laundry.

Last week in Antigua... as far as I know.

2010-09-05T16:46:00.002-06:00

I definitely enjoy the Antigua life. It's not "real Guatemala", but it has its own special charms. For one thing, it's gorgeous.

Okay. I would write more but my laptop is dying and my housemate Jeen is not shutting up. And we have nachos, which are very distracting...

Simplifying

2010-09-01T16:50:00.002-06:00

I am going to go live on the Pacific coast, in two fishing villages that have sea turtle hatcheries. I have about a week and a half left here in Antigua.
This is an email I sent to my brother yesterday:

I'm going to live in a tiny fishing village near the El Salvadorian border! YOU WOULD LOVE IT HERE. I want you to come here. This morning I buried sea turtle eggs in the little hatchery. It's beautiful, lots of birds and lizards and other critters (mice in the kitchen... might get myself a cat) and they cook over a fire and we wash our hands in a pila, which is like a sink without running water, and it's just awesome and for you it would be like a big laboratory of fun!
Yesterday to get from El Rosario, another little village on the beach, down here to La Barrona, I went with Leon who is an English guy living and volunteering in La Barrona, and we had to hike along the beach and through muddy crab-filled forests and I saw a crested lizard that got up and ran on two legs and we had to wait and wave at the fisherman from across rivers for an hour just to get a lancha (little boat) to take us across and then we would stumble, mud-covered, into a little village and then we took a bus for a while and then we had to avoid getting ripped off and take another lancha to another village, and we got into the mangroves and that's where we are now, coastal jungle with lots of mangrove networks. It's very very hot, i got sunburned yesterday (six hour trek) for the first time in years and now I am craving salt like crazy. You would love the markets here, walking along the street. Here actually right now being La Colonia, a larger more inland town practically right on the El Salvadorian border (We probably crossed and uncrossed the border on the way here) and we had to take a chicken bus, a lancha, and another tiny bus to get here. Here I am using the internet and this is where the market is, it's a pretty nice little town, and I really think you would like it.

--

I am now very sunburned on my shoulders, but... worth it!

Chronologically Inconsistent Account of my Weekend

2010-08-23T17:38:00.002-06:00

I stayed on another night in Xela because I couldn't work out getting home and everyone wanted me to stay, so I caught a bus off the street this morning around 8:05. I expected to get into Antigua before 1:00, but as it turned out it took another three hours. The bus got sort of lost and sort of trapped up on some very rural mountain roads when a bus broke down on a narrow strip (well, the whole way was narrow) and we had to creep by after thinking about it for half an hour, leaning precariously over a cliff as we passed. Then of course we had to pass everyone who had gotten stuck going the other way, so I was essentially terror-filled for about an hour and a half. Then the traffic is always terrible in Chimaltenango.

Xela was really fun, I actually quite like that city. It's safer, friendlier, and just better than Guate City - also, it's a big city but it's the kind of big city that doesn't have any skyscrapers. The streets are all super narrow and stone tile, it's like old Europe or something. Xela is also better than Antigua - there are tourists and tourist cafes and such, but they're SO much less pretentious and/or dorky than the tourists in Antigua. Xela is a real, friendly, fun and 100% Guatemalan city. It is a bit cold.

We were going to go to a party on Friday evening shortly after I arrived, but I climbed approximately 3,000 feet in approximately 3.5 hours, and half an hour after I arrived in Xela, I got a headache and nausea and later collapsed half-dead on Hannah's bed. Needless to say I stayed back Friday night, and I still had a headache the next day when we and a Danish girl went to the mall/local pacas (like little home-owned Goodwills) and had lunch and stuff. I was fine that evening, though, and we went out salsa dancing with several other people, which was very fun. Before that we also went to go watch a movie at the Blue Angel, this little cafe where you can also pay Q10 to pick a movie and watch it in one of two living rooms with big TVs. Couldn't pull that off in the US, but it's awesome. We watched 3:10 to Yuma, which I loved!

Yesterday we climbed a hill for a view of the city, then hung out the rest of the day with a Russian girl, a Guatemalan guy, a hilarious Mexican guy, and a Spanish guy who resembles a pirate. It was fantastic! We all watched another movie and had dinner at the Blue Angel; Babel. Interesting, intense movie.

So this morning I got up and then followed Hannah to her school up a hill, then kept walking with my stuff and had to ask three different people where to find a bus to Guate (They pass through Chimaltenango on their way, and there I connect to Antigua). I waited a while on the sidewalk, watched stores opening up, then a someone pointed out an mislabeled bus to Guate (happens sometimes - they take a different route than it says on their front), luckily they also yell the name of wherever they're headed.
I was sort of surprised to see another obviously not-Guatemalan guy on the bus, but I had to sit far behind him the whole way and we never spoke until he decided to get off in Chimal, too. When the bus was stopped in the mountains, he stood up and got out of the bus with a bunch of other people, and I thought he was about seven feet tall. As it turns out he's only 6'6". He didn't know Antigua at all, so I showed him to the Black Cat hostel when we arrived and then we went to a very belated lunch at the Rainbow Cafe. He's from Holland, traveling around between his studies of medicine. Meeting people in other countries is awesome.

Sooo I'm probably just going to copy & paste this onto my blog. I didn't take my laptop or camera to Xela since I took chicken buses (well, apparently Camioneta or Canastera are more politically correct terms for the public buses...), in fact I took very little, just some stuff in my little army surplus rucksack. I also mostly emptied my wallet, stowing money in my socks and stuff, which was good because I got it stolen when I was getting off the bus in Chimal on my way up on Friday. It was entirely my fault, could have been prevented, I was being dumb (put it in the front flap of my purse, my purse was at my back, etc.) and I even felt it being stolen but at the time it did not occur to me what was happening. All they got was about $5 and a photocopy of my ID, plus my old recycled materials wallet, so... I just need a new wallet and better judgment.

Photo Update

2010-08-10T16:59:00.005-06:00

I love ants. Maybe you already know that. But the wire there is a clothesline... there are now stray ants in my underwear and socks. I mostly feel bad for killing them by taking them away from their highway, but it also just kind of sucks to discover ants in your pants, you know?

Here is one of the zillions of pillbugs that live here in Antigua. This is one of the few that doesn't live in the bathroom.

Strawberries!

And some pretty unidentified flowers.

Raccoon Kidnappage and Wounded Spiders

2010-08-04T16:06:00.006-06:00

Here is a picture of Candy, the dog who orchestrated the attack on my room. She and two others went upstairs and into my room while I was gone, peed on my bed and stole my beloved FAO Schwartz plush raccoon puppet and kidnapped him to downstairs, dragging him through dog poop and mud and puddles:

And here is a picture of, what, a CAMEL SPIDER?? IN MY ROOM LAST NIGHT??? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Bob, the 7-Legged Terror (Now deceased, death by flipflop):

Sweet dreams, folks.

PS: I would just like to add that I killed the spider reluctantly and with a pang in my chest. I try not to make it a habit of killing critters I'm not going to eat, as most of you know.

2010-08-02T13:28:00.003-06:00

I've moved to Antigua!

Right now I'm in an internet cafe on my laptop. It's right around the corner and down the street from where I'm living, which is pretty sweet, although not surprising because it is, after all, Antigua.

Actually, pretty much everything in Antigua is around the corner and down the street. Antigua is, like, one or two square miles.

I appear to be living in a large building that houses several residents, whatever students pass through, and a home furnishings store. There is only one other student living there right now, a German girl who's been touring Latin America and is now here to take some Spanish classes, though at a different school than the one I'm at.

Our rooms are up some narrow concrete stairs to the second floor. We share the world's second smallest full bathroom (The first smallest is probably on a boat somewhere), where the sink is almost in the shower and the toilet is almost underneath the sink. It's pretty adorable. My room is also pretty small, but the bed is pretty big and the sheets fit, so that's nice. It definitely isn't as moldy as my old room, but I have to wait for those allergies to wear off before I know for sure how allergic I am to these living arrangements. I can leave the door open pretty much all the time, so that helps a lot, although mosquitoes seem to be a bit of a problem. I need to buy some toxic chemicals, stat.
I arrived here yesterday around 10:00 AM, got settled into my room, then wandered around town in search of food and entertainment. I couldn't find Cafe Rainbow, because I suck at reading maps, but I think I walked by it so I'll probably be able to find it eventually. I ended up at Cafe La Condesa, which had only one thing on the menu I could eat (Salad with orange slices and toasted macadamia nuts) which kind of sucks, but the salad was delicious. It just didn't fill me up very much, so I ended up buying a bag of sliced mango and 6 tortillas off the street and sat in Central Park (Plaza Mayor) and ate that while listening to the Peruvian music being played.

I came back to my room later, read for a few hours, used up way too many phone minutes talking to my Mom, and then headed back out around 6:15 to find dinner. I missed Cafe Rainbow again, and went first to a grocery store and bought snacks, and then got drawn into La Peña, a nice but pretty inexpensive gringo-owned restaurant. I had a delicious chicken-pineapple shish-kebob dinner, listening to more live Peruvian music and intermittently chatting with a kid from the US, my age, staying in Antigua to study Spanish before going to college in the Fall.

I made it back home in the dark, thrilled to be in a town where I felt safe at all hours of the day or night - there are always friendly-looking people on the street, lights on in restaurants, etc. Yay! I am so glad to be out of Guate city.

It started pouring rain halfway back to my house, so I booked it, made it back slightly damp, read for a while, and went to sleep.

I woke up around 1:00 AM to the sound of someone typing on a keyboard... in my ceiling... it took me a while to recognize the sound as rodentia. Awesome. At least they don't seem to be actually in my room (Only pill bugs, flies, and mosquitoes there!) and not in my snack stash. Hopefully it stays that way.

This morning I woke up at 6:40, got ready to go, had breakfast with the other student and the owner of the house, and a little before 8:00 I walked the 500 yards to my school, which happens to be in the renovated ruins of an old convent.

I met my teacher, Leticia, and began my 3 1/2 hours of classes + 1/2-hour break. I can see already that the next approximately 7 weeks are going to be intense, and if I'm not a spectacular Spanish speaker by the end I must have gotten run over by a tuktuk before I could finish.

That didn't really make any sense... but I'm actually sort of tired. I'll probably be in here pretty often, since I have every afternoon to myself. I think I'm going to to go the plaza now and buy me some tortillas and/or mango.

A Lovely Weekend in Antigua

2010-07-26T09:29:00.012-06:00

Friday night, as planned, Hannah and I cooked my mom's suggested recipe of camp-style ground beef-and-vegetables-over-rice.

'Twas delicious! :)

Saturday afternoon Hannah and I caught a ride with our landlord's son, Guicho, to Antigua, where we stayed the night. We stopped at the Spanish language school where our landlord's daughter, Ana, is the administrative director and where I will be starting classes next Monday. It's in the renovated building of an ancient convent, classes will be outside on a rooftop patio under a trellis of bougainvillea (I finally learned how to spell that!) with an amazing view of the surrounding colonial town and mountains.

Hannah and I rented a room for the night in the building that Ana rents a room in. The room we had actually happened to be the one that another field coordinator, Kristen, lived in for three months and just moved out of recently. The building is really beautiful and old (300 years or so?).

After we dropped off our stuff, we were released upon the town! Which was great. We don't get much wandering around time in Guatemala City, so it was really relaxing and fun to be able to explore a little on our own, with no responsibilities for the rest of the day. We went to Fernando's Kaffee, looked into some shops, then had a nice dinner at El Sabor del Tiempo, an Italian restaurant where Hannah ordered a Greek cheeseburger (whatever that means) and I ordered braised rabbit, which we enjoyed even when the electricity went out. What's better than a candlelit dinner? A surprise candlelit dinner!

After dinner we went back to our room and grabbed some rainjackets. We met up with Kristen and got to see her cute little apartment she rents. The three of us walked to Café No Sé, a really cool little place with lots of foreigners. We hung out there until late, met some other people living in Antigua, ate lots of free popcorn, and generally had a good time.

Sunday morning Hannah and I were awoken around 7:00 by the sound of not-so-distant marching bands. When we got up later and went outside, we found a parade consisting of half a dozen marching bands taking turns playing, stretching down several blocks of street. We narrowly missed getting impaled by a trombone as we walked past.

Our breakfast spot Sunday morning (a nice, slow, 10:00 AM sort of breakfast) was Café Rainbow, which might be my new favorite spot in Antigua. It's a restaurant, bar, and bookstore, with lots of live music and lectures and fun stuff like that. Very much a tourist-and-expat joint, mostly things in English, but we still got to speak Spanish to the waitress. I love Guatemalan típico ("typical") breakfasts (and I'm not allergic to them, generally) which consist of beans, rice, a couple of eggs, and some tortillas. Some places add plátanos, this place had a small salad, and some local white cheese (which I pawn off on someone else). Hannah got some sort of breakfasty sandwich. I'd love to go back for lunch or dinner sometime, maybe catch some live music.

After breakfast we wandered around some more, looked into more shops, braved the gauntlet that is every touristy local crafts market, and enjoyed the beautiful, if hot, day.

We got tacos for lunch at Tacontento. At some point we ended up in the main square and got interviewed by a Guatemalan woman taking a test for her English class. She was definitely a beginner, but it was fun and made us feel good about our Spanish skills.

So, we headed back to Guatemala City Sunday evening. We bought some more ground beef (actually, the package doesn't say "beef" on it anywhere, so we're really just assuming it's beef) since we didn't have much food left in the fridge, but we didn't even get into our rooms before we decided to try calling Pollo Campero ("Country Chicken") and ordering home delivery! I worked through the ordering process over the phone, even though it's hard for me to understand Spanish when it's not in person, and we were all set to get our dinner sent to us.

We realized shortly after we had ordered that we had no electricity and wouldn't have been able to cook anyway. We worried about our ground beef in our dinky little refrigerator and raced the sun to eat our dinner when it arrived less than half an hour later (by motorcycle!). Pollo Campero is delicious. Better by far than Pollo Brujo ("Wizard Chicken").

The rest of the evening we got around with flashlights. We entertained ourselves with podcasts and tried not to think about the unusually high numbers of dead cockroaches lying around outside and the three large spiders Hannah spotted crawling out of our kitchen ceiling.We didn't have electricity until later that night when we had just fallen asleep, when suddenly all of the lights turned on again at once and we had to get up and turn them all off.

This is our last week in Guatemala City! This Sunday Hannah's headed up to Xela and I'm headed back to Antigua to take Spanish classes for a month or two. We're both really excited and ready for this next chapter in our adventure!

Mold and Moving

2010-07-23T13:11:00.004-06:00

This morning Hannah discovered much to her dismay (and mine) that she has been unwittingly cultivating a flaky white mold all over her fabric toiletries bag. The bag has been hanging from a nail (the same nail that occasionally holds bananas) against the wall right by our front door for a few weeks now. You'd think that the fresh air (well, smoggy city air) would keep the mold down right in that area, but no. Hannah took some bleach cleaner to the moldy bits this morning, we'll see if that keeps it under control.

We really are having a serious mold problem in our hostel rooms. The picture to the left is of our kitchen ceiling. All of the wood surfaces have little moldlets sprouting. I have always been allergic to mold, among other things, so when we're at our hostel I'm sick all the time, and only slightly less sick if I'm taking allergy meds (Loratadine/Claritin) every day. I'm having difficulty breathing, sneezing all the time, and sometimes my eyes are so itchy I feel like being overly dramatic about it all. Even Hannah, who has no history of any allergies at all, is experiencing some snuffliness and general allergy symptoms, which is crazy.

I really appreciate the inexpensive quality of our current living arrangements - this is the cheapest apartment I will ever live in. However, I also hope that it is the moldiest by far. These are the worst allergies I have ever experienced, and I can't escape them.

...Until next Sunday!

August 1st Hannah and I are both packing up and moving out to take Spanish lessons in other cities. Hannah is moving to Xela, and I am off to Antigua.

I'll be living with a host family, getting three meals a day (my food allergies are already all worked out with the family, I've been told) except on Sundays. Monday through Friday I'll walk down the street to Academia Colonial, where I will take four hours of one-on-one immersion Spanish language classes. That's 20 hours a week.

I'm really looking forward to taking the classes, because I know that my Spanish skillz will improve a lot with some structured lessons. I plan on taking the classes for about 7 weeks, but that time frame is pretty flexible. Hannah and I will be far apart for up to two months, which will be really weird. And I won't be able to cook my own meals, which might be problematic, but hopefully it'll work out. The administrative director of the Academia Colonial happens to be the daughter of Hannah and I's current landlord, and that whole family is incredibly nice and helpful, so I'm pretty confident.

Hannah and I just returned from grocery shopping. Tonight's dinner will consist of ground beef, onion, green beans, tomatoes, corn, and whatever spices we've bought in the last few weeks. I think we have garlic (fresh and powdered), oregano, cumin, and basil. We'll see how it turns out.

I won't be in the office until Monday, so I most likely won't be online until then. I'll post an update next week! See you later :)

Fun with Tortillas, Lentils, and Sausage

2010-07-22T09:35:00.002-06:00

Yesterday afternoon Hannah and I's neighbor/hostel caretaker came over and taught us how to make tortillas from Maseca flour. As it turns out, you pretty much just mix the flour with water until it reaches a pretty basic baking consistency, then roll some into a ball, smack it into a flat round pancake, and put it onto a hot surface such as our lovely frying pan. Then you watch it and flip it when it starts to burn and it's done when it's not squishy anymore. Voila! Tortillas. We'll be old pros by next week.
Also yesterday I wrote down two different recipes for lentil soup. I sort of combined them to make a simplified lentil & sausage soup over rice that turned out delicious. Also fantastic, we bought the necessary ingredients for the equivalent of less than sixteen US dollars. We're having it for lunch and dinner today, and probably lunch again tomorrow because I made so much.
Thanks to my sister for the idea of cooking lentils and sausage! The only tough thing about it was that the sausage we've been buying is really hard to tell when it's cooked through, because it remains pink even when cooked. It's either pink and raw, a subtly different pink and cooked, or burnt. Any tips?

Holy Frijole, Batman!

2010-07-20T10:32:00.025-06:00

Sorry the pictures are all in silly places on this post, I'm too lazy to fix their positions. Enjoy anyway!

Hannah and I have been up in Coban all week, and we just got back into Guate City yesterday morning after spending the night in Antigua with our group of Michiganders (or Michiganians, no one is sure).

We left last Saturday with an experienced field coordinator, Collin, and while he left on Wednesday morning (and normally, we would have as well) we stayed on with the group right up until yesterday morning when we gave approximately 25 goodbye hugs outside the airport.

The week (well, about ten days) was definitely an adventure, filled with fun and laughs as well as some more stressful moments. I should have taken notes (Hannah did, I think, so you should check out her blog), because I know I've forgotten some events, but here's a not-necessarily-chronologically correct record of what we were up to in Coban, Guatemala:

Saturday morning (The 11th, I believe) Hannah and I met Collin at the airport and we waited a couple of hours for our incoming build team to arrive from Michigan. 26 in total, Hannah and I admit to getting pretty attached to them over the next week or so.

The group arrived right as the three of us were scarfing down a Pollo Campero lunch (It's a good thing the one item on the menu I can eat happens to be delicious) and then we all left for Antigua, which is a little more than an hour away from the city depending on traffic.

We reached our hotel for the night, Hermano Pedro, which is a very lovely hotel. I dig the open air halls and stuff. Lots of plant matter, makes me happy.

We wandered around a little bit then, and Hannah and I ended up at Fernando's, a very nice little cafe. I got an all-fruit smoothie of pineapple and, uh... strawberry, I think, and Hannah accidentally ordered an espresso, which surprised her a little when they brought it to her. Now she knows what an espresso is.

We also hunted down the Cashew Man, who seems to be always wandering around Antigua peddling various nuts, and if you mosey around town long enough you're bound to come across him. It's 20 Quetzales for a small baggie of yummy cashews, which comes out to about $2.60. Worth it! We LOVE cashews. omg.

For dinner that night all 29 of us walked down the street to Tacotento, a nice chain restaurant with good but sort of small food. The menu is all in what I'm sure would be a cute themed dialect (reminds me of Panamanian Spanish) if we were totally fluent but as is just made ordering sort of confusing. But we got through it, had some good tacos, the group had a lot of fun despite the frustration of trying to figure out who ordered what as it came out of the kitchen.

Sunday morning we had a buffet breakfast at Hermano Pedro's and then climbed into one coaster and one micro bus for the long drive to Coban. Something like 7 hours, I'm not sure. It went pretty well, though, the scenery was interesting and I had my iPod whenever I needed some change of noise. Gypsy orchestras and Gnarls Barkley make everything more epic.

Sunday was the day of the World Cup, and while I am not really into it, Hannah is and so were several other people in the group. We stopped for lunch around the beginning of the game. I should have ordered Kak Ik, but instead I just ordered rice and beans. A lot of the group had trouble getting what they wanted for lunch, which turned out to be a common theme for the week. We had to leave before the game ended and so we listened to the unintelligible radio broadcast instead. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL...

As we approached Coban, I started seeing tree ferns! I love tree ferns! No one else here seems to share my enthusiasm for them. Oh well.
By the way, I'm still looking for a good guide book to Guatemalan plants. How can I be plant girl if all the plants I know are thousands of miles away?

We reached Coban that afternoon and booked into our hotel, Alcazar de Doña Victoria, which was historically a convent and is now a hotel filled with mildly creepy wooden statues of saints. Hannah and I couldn't figure out how to work the lock on our upstairs room, so we climbed through the knee-height window a few times.

That night Hannah and I gave a joint general work site safety speech to the group at dinner and only missed a few minor points. I don't remember if the welcome ceremony was that day or not... it must have been. Anyway, at some point two of the three Guatemalan families receiving our help on their Habitat houses as well as two of the masons came and joined us and everyone was introduced and it was only a little awkward. One of the families was missing due to illness in the family and we would not be building for them, another family had been found and we would be helping them instead.

Sorry, my writing skills are going downhill. This is a lot to write. Anyway...

The first work day, Monday, I took one of the three buses to a site with a third of the Michigan team. Collin and Hannah each went to the other two sites. I didn't take any pictures that day.

Did I mention that Sunday night I woke up in the middle of the night very sick? Sickest I've ever been that I can remember. Ack.

I wasn't feeling very well on Monday, and the next day I felt terrible again and stayed at the hotel. Hannah went with my group since the group she had been with on Monday had one fluent Spanish speaker and a few others with good skills, and we figured they could take care of themselves.

I snoozed and felt sorry for myself and called my mom and then when I was feeling a bit better around eleven I walked down the road to a local little medical clinic. I waited for a while as there were other patients in front of me and then saw the doctor for a consultation (costing as much as a small bag of cashews - 20 Quetzales) and he asked me lots of questions and listened to my stomach with a stethoscope and stuff and then wrote me two prescriptions: one for Perenterol, which is like yogurt in a pill, and another for an antibiotic starting with T or X or something that I never filled out. I did fill out the Perenterol that evening at Farmacia Batres off the main square and got 6 pills to take every 12 hours and that seems to have done the trick.

All of the Lutherans were very concerned about me that evening, when most of us (I think some other peeps were feeling a little green around the gills at that point, too) trooped down to a little indoor-ish soccer field. More than half the build team plus two Guatemalan masons played a great game. The rest of us, including myself, watched from above and took pictures until it got too dark (Hannah has the pics I took with her camera).

The next day I went back to work on a different site than the one I had gone to; Collin left Wednesday morning, which is normal for the field coordinators, but Hannah and I opted to remain for the full experience.

I went to a site in Carcha, about 15 minutes away from Coban. The father of the family there has relatives in Chicago and visits them and took English in school and so spoke English about as well as I speak Spanish. The masons at that site all spoke a Mayan dialect with some Spanish words thrown in.

That night the team had reservations at a nice restaurant in Coban called La Casa D'Acuna. It was lots of fun and really good food; I had a sort of a cooked salad with chicken and macadamia nuts and olives and onions on it. A lot of the group ordered pizza.

The next day we left the work sites an hour early to take a tour of a coffee plantation a block down from where we'd had dinner the night before. It was pouring rain and we were all still in our dirty work clothes. The plantation is gorgeous, hard to believe that the town is right on the other side of the wall because suddenly you can see for miles and it's very green, especially with the rain. I tasted some ripe coffee beans off the bush - sweet, fibrous.

Friday was the last work day. By then I had very tan arms and very sore muscles. We ate dinner again that night at La Casa D'Acuna because the group had enjoyed it so much and the hotel meals were getting a little boring.

It was pouring rain again on the way there and I, lacking any sort of protection from the rain, arrived soaked through.

I had another salad. Twas delicious, and several people commented on my bravery. I figured the restaurant was nice enough to get away with eating the uncooked salad, and it was.

On the way back it wasn't raining so hard and a group member had lent me a poncho, but the road was flooded in one place and we had to go around the block and then walk along the narrow, unreliable sidewalk for a while and hop across a wooden plank to get back onto the road when we could.

When we got back to the hotel, I enjoyed the tortilla I had sequestered in my sweater. I have taken to hoarding food, particularly tortillas, in case there's nothing I can eat at my next meal. So far I have had food every time I didn't really need it and had nothing when the hotel forgot to make me lunch on Saturday. Luckily I was with a group of generous people.

Saturday we went to Semuc Champey. The road there was an hour and a half of tight turns and half an hour of very rough unpaved road, also with tight turns. Our tour started, unexpectedly, at some caves. The caves were beautiful and epic but also frighteningly dangerous and very hot. The group contained 100% good sports, though, and we made it back alive.

We had lunch at Semuc at the trailhead, and Hannah and I ended up purchasing some ill-fitting swimsuits because we decided we really wanted to go swimming.

This is a spider devouring a fly:

Part of the group took the hike up to the lookout, where they saw a fantastic view and a monkey. Hannah and I and the rest of the group walked down to the river, which consists in that area of a huge rapids going into an underground tunnel (Like the Rogue River in Oregon, but way bigger) and a series of something like 30 pools going overland downhill, terraced and perfect for swimming and jumping. It was a lot of fun, and definitely worth it after all.

We drove back, even more exhausted, that evening, had dinner, and slept hard, though our laundry was still missing. Did I mention that? The hotel lost our laundry. Mine turned up the morning we were leaving, and Hannah's was found a day later and will be returned to her via another Habitat group staying in the same place in Coban.

Sunday morning we left Coban, drove hours and hours, got a flat tire on the way there, got back to Antigua, wandered around town a little, shopped, and then went to Santo Domingo for dinner.

Santo Domingo is the nicest restaurant I have ever been to in my life. Holy cow. This is an appetizer:

I had the Guatemalan Dish, which was three pieces of delicious beef, some rice and beans and platanos. I ate all of it before I realized I should have taken a picture.

Yesterday morning Hannah and I rode in one of the two buses taking the group back to the airport in Guatemala City. We said goodbye to all of them there at the drop-off point. We made sure to get everyone's facebook info and such. We miss them already! :( It's impossible to spend ten days with a group of such great individuals without growing a little attached.

We then went back to our hostel and gathered up all of our dirty laundry, which fit into a duffel bag and two backpacks. Our landlord's wife picked us up and took us to their nice apartment, where we laid around and watched TV and used the internet for several hours while waiting for our clothes to be done. They took us back to the hostel afterwards, and we walked to Paiz (grocery store) to buy food. We tried to get a taxi to pick us up when we were done shopping, but the line was busy and even a woman selling candy at a little kiosk who happened to be related to a taxi driver couldn't get us a taxi, so we walked all the way back with our heavy groceries. I guess it's really only about ten blocks or so, but it's stressful to walk in this city.

Last night we cooked up my speech & debate coach's recipe, Rice and Beans for Lazies, which turned out delicious and we're having it again for dinner tonight. Yay for leftovers!

Our landlord is letting us borrow his little DVD player and some DVDs, so if we can get that hooked up we should have enough evening entertainment to last us the rest of the week.

Now Hannah and I are in the Habitat office, and I have been working on this blog post for hours. I think I'm going to have lunch now (we're going down the street to get Pupusas) and then I'll come back and add the photos. Phew.

Here you go! <3

Mysterious Fruit and Panajachel with Irish People

2010-07-08T14:16:00.011-06:00

*UPDATE: This fruit seems to be a passion fruit!

Above is the mysterious fruit I purchased in the supermarket the other day (the same place and day I got those freak bananas!) I thought it was labeled "Asian pear" but Hannah tells me I was reading the wrong label, so while we knew it was definitely not an Asian pear anyway, it also was not mislabeled, I'm just a dork. Anyway, if any of you know what it is, do tell! It was yummy.

Right here is some proof that Hannah is capable of cooking! She's been helping me out with cooking meals and I abandoned her for the past few days while I was in Panajachel with a team and she was stuck in the city and had to fend for herself. Sounds like she did pretty well, though, and it's not like we're cooking anything fancy but, you know, it's food.

So, on Monday peeps in the office told me I was leaving the next day with a field coordinator to meet a build team from Ireland who were supposed to have come in a day or two earlier but had gotten stuck in Spain and then had to spend the night on the marble floors of the Mexico City Airport.
We picked them up in the morning on Tuesday and they were all in good humor, excited to be in Guatemala, ready to head out. They use words like "thanky" and "bloke", and my personal favorite, "wee".
Their accents can be pretty hard to understand, at first it was harder to understand than Spanish. One man had a particularly strong accent (he also speaks Gaelic, apparently, but I think that's unrelated). Anyway, I had a great time with them and in Panajachel. Panajachel is a big tourist spot as it's right by a lake.
Here are some pictures from the work site I was at:

Here is a familiar plant I found at the work site in Panajachel: Plantain! Not the banana kind, the... other kind. I hadn't seen it elsewhere in Guatemala, but here is a somewhat trampled specimen.

And here is a picture taken from the lakefront in Panajachel:

Mutant Banana from Planet Guate

2010-07-05T14:19:00.003-06:00

Just purchased from the supermarket for my lunch: Siamese Twin Bananas!

Some Pics from the weekend

2010-07-05T11:37:00.005-06:00

Here is our dinner being cooked:

We just bought a new pan today at the grocery store to replace the crusty scratched up dented one we were using.
Here is our completed first home-cooked meal:

That's canned mixed vegetables, chicken, potatoes, and an orange.

To Rabinal and back again (very long post)

2010-07-01T12:38:00.000-06:00

*UPDATE: Did I mention that Hannah and I had a run-in with a tarantula in our room in Antigua? Yeah. Hannah hyperventilated while I caught it in a Pollo Campero paper drink cup and took it outside. We were both extremely jumpy for the next several hours.

Hello again! It's been several days since I had access to my laptop since I left it in the Habitat office for safekeeping while Hannah and I were off on our first build team excursions. Let's see what I can remember from the past week:

We spent Friday in the office getting orientations on Habitat work.

We met some other Habitat workers.

My allergies were really bad, but they're getting better as I get better at finding food to eat. The thing is, traditional Guatemalan food (i.e., beans, rice, corn tortillas, meat, fruit, the occasional vegetable) is almost entirely edible to me, but a lot of places serve wheat/milk/sugar-filled American food. But I am getting better, I'll be fine. I have a lot of supermarkets to choose from.

On Saturday Hannah and I were dropped off at the Oakland Mall, which is ENORMOUS. We wandered around and glanced into high-end American and European stores. Everything is high-tech and shiny. Overwhelmed, we had lunch in the food court and watched a World Cup match.

At 7:00 pm Saturday evening Luis dropped us off at the airport to meet up with Lauren and Kristen, two Habitat field coordinators, and wait with them for several flights to come in containing Habitat build teams from the US. Hannah and I waved Habitat signs as our groups trickled out of the airport, dazed and confused.

Hannah went with Kristen and I went with Lauren and their respective build teams.
My group went to Hotel Aeropuerto to spend the night. The next morning we took two private buses (my group contained 17 people, plus Lauren and I) approximately four hours away through valleys and over mountains on windy roads to the town of Rabinal.

My build team happened to be from Seattle, with a few people from Portland, which was great. I even got to chat with some of them about this year's Northwest Folklife Festival! My team was also led by an older woman with a lot of Habitat experience. She used to be a clown, apparently, so today (they are still in Rabinal) I am missing a carnival put on my her and the other team members. The team is varied in age, a few 14-16-year-olds, some middle-aged parents, and some grandparents. I love hearing all their stories, they are a great team and I plan on attending the goodbye dinner in Antigua this Saturday.

My beloved G9 camera seems to be shorting out somewhere between the lense and the screen, so I can see photos after they're taken in the preview, but I can't see what I'm pointing the camera at or how focused it is or anything :( I do have a viewfinder, but it's not very accurate. Help!

The road to Rabinal was ridiculously scenic, mountains and deserts and forests (Pine trees! Pine trees!) with lots of brahma cows, horses, mules, donkeys, black-headed vultures, and dogs, all in varying degrees of health.

Lauren and I stayed with the team in Rabinal from Saturday until Wednesday morning.
We all had Breakfasts at 6:00 am and Dinner around 6 or 7 pm every day at a restaurant called Angello's, and the restaurant spoiled us by bringing us hot lunches (chicken, rice and beans, tortillas, mangoes, and limeade) to the work sites every day (Apparently most build teams usually receive only crappy white-bread-and-some-jelly sandwiches for lunch) by motorcycle.

On Saturday evening at dinner we all gathered together for a welcoming ceremony with the team and the two families were were going to be building with/for. It was a little awkward but we had lots of eager Spanish-speakers and semi-speakers among us so apparently it went much better than it often does.

I went to both work sites, one on Monday and the other on Tuesday.

The first work site was about a kilometer away, so we walked. It was way out at the edge of town, and all day we were avoiding being run over by brahma bull-drawn wooden carts (EPIC!!!) hauling sand from the river into town to be sold. There were also a lot of little floppy-eared gray pigs, mules also drawing carts containing people and materials (Sometimes reeds, sometimes firewood), horses carrying people around town, and dogs.

I have divided dogs here into several categories: recognizable breed, mostly recognizable mixed breed, totally unrecognizable, Yellow Dog. I like the Yellow Dogs.
Some dogs here are pets, many are guard dogs, and way too many are starving, beaten strays. Not many cats.

People on bicycles and motorcycles also passed by a lot (we were on an unpaved, muddy road) as well as a few tuk-tuks, little three-wheeled golf cart things used as taxis.

At this work site I also saw a small tarantula (caught in a jar by some kids) and a rattle snake (being caught in a sack by adults, to be killed and used as medicine).

The second work site I went to on Tuesday was slightly less than a kilometer away in the opposite direction. Tuesday was much hotter than the day before, and I pinkified slightly but today it has just turned to tan.
There were a bunch of ducks at this site, all busy eating fallen mangoes and stalking flies like cats... except they're ducks, so it was hilarious.
There were also a lot of really crazy bugs on the trees at this site, I saw two very large well-camouflaged spiders that hardly moved all day and dozens of black-and-yellow ladybug-like beetles in various stages of their life cycle.

Some team members took to calling me Plant Girl. It's that obvious, apparently. Unfortunately, I know little to nothing about Guatemalan plants, so while I speculate much I have very little actual information and if anybody has a good book to recommend to me, please do so!

I worked hard at both sites, if I do say so myself, and I got really good at whipping out 20-foot-long rebar towers. I have the blisters to prove it.

Wednesday was Lauren's 25th birthday and the evening before our team surprised her with cake and ice cream, and in the morning, fireworks.
Last night Hannah and I stayed at another Habitat worker's very nice place in Antigua, and we had dinner and then went to a bar with a really great Cuban salsa band.

Right now, I'm back in the Habitat office in Guatemala City, utilizing the internet while I have nothing in particular to do.

I'm alive! We made it!

2010-06-24T11:11:00.001-06:00

Yesterday morning Hannah and I took off out of PDX, on our way to Houston, Texas. Then an elderly gentleman fainted and appeared to be having a stroke, so our plane was turned around and we landed again in Portland. An hour later we were up in the air again, and four hours later we landed in Texas and had to book it across the airport to reach our gate in time, which we did, barely.
Three hours after that we landed in Guatemala, exhausted/excited. The owner of the hostel rooms we are renting and his adult son picked us up outside the airport, gave us a quick tour of the area and repeated several times the location of our apartment. They are very friendly and helpful.
Last night was a little rough. The hostel is right under the flightpath of huge jets into the airport, and we are only a few blocks away, so the planes are RIGHT OVERHEAD. The first time one roared over, Hannah and I both woke up startled. We woke up the next seven or eight times, too, but slightly less startled. Good thing we brought enough earplugs to choke a horse. I mean, if a horse would eat an earplug.
This morning our alarms went off at 7:30 but we snoozed until at least 8. I got up and took a shower with the amazing, if sporadic, hot water! We do need to purchase some toilet paper, however.
The hostel owner drove us the six blocks to the Habitat office at 9:00, showing us how we would be able to walk there on our own. It's sunny with some clouds here, 70s as far as heat, and large parts of the city seem to smell like food.
Hannah and I were introduced to everybody in the office. We got online as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Then we were hungry and we were accompanied to a nearby supermarket to find breakfast.
I'm going to be allergic to Guatemala until I figure out where to find food I can eat: for breakfast I had dry corn flakes and some peach juice, both of which contained sugar and the former contained some form of wheat. Oh well. I brought lots of allergy meds, and they are also readily available here. I won't die, I just won't be able to breathe so well for a while.
Now we're back at the office, bloggin' away. Here's Hannah's side of the story: You should check it out!

On the Road Again!!

2010-06-22T19:58:00.001-06:00

My flight to Guatemala starts tomorrow morning.

This blog will be where I post photos and stories of my best friend and I's new adventure: She and I will be living together, renting an apartment (Actually, some hotel rooms) for one year while we work for Habitat for Humanity/Global Village.

She is in charge of this blog, which will also have news of our time in Guatemala.

Hurrah! ^_^

Today's Discoveries 2: INPUT

2010-05-11T22:35:00.001-06:00

What I do instead of homework:

E-Primitive: The comments are perhaps worth more than the original post.

Animism.

God is not a noun in native America.
God is a verb.

Jason Godesky: This person does interesting things.

Dialogues Between Western and Indigenous Scientists.

Inedia: odd shit.

and

Language attrition.

Today's Discoveries

2010-05-01T15:17:00.000-06:00

This morning I've been waiting for my friend to pick me up so we can go get ready for tonight's Senior Prom, passing time by doing what I often end up doing; wandering around the internet.

Holy shit!

- Insurance companies own billions in fast food stock!

- Agent Orange!

- Monsanto: The evil company that feeds you!

Anyway... Prom will be fun. My group is awesome, so we're kind of more excited about dinner (Sushi!!) and playing Bear in the Woods (form of tag) in the middle of the night after the dance than we are about the actual dance part.

Work Hard, and we'll buy you a nice coffin with your own money when the time comes.

2010-04-21T15:24:00.000-06:00

I believe that hard work can do good things for the person working hard. It can do good things for the hard worker's family, community, and other things in the person's environment. I feel pretty safe in saying that the actions represented by the term "hard work" can work towards good results. But hard work does not automatically imply good things, good defined as beneficial to the person, community, and environment.

After all, I bet the nazis worked pretty damn hard on their project.

Last September the entire student body of my high school was called into the gym for an assembly on this year's new "P.O.W.E.R" program, an acronym-based motivational plan put together by the school administrators or somebody. I really don't think the posters, t-shirts, teams, and assemblies reminding us of this program have done much. I mean, I was never entirely clear on what the administration hoped to achieve in the first place.
Anyway, it bugged me when I noticed that all of the depictions of "Success" involved men... in suits. Wtf?

On that note, I have homework to do. Har har har. I'll blawg more later, possibly about school.

The Hermit Crab Ditches Another Shell

2010-04-20T21:01:00.000-06:00

I felt pretty damn depressed today. I really did. I have never felt that depressed I don't think, ever. I think really I've felt down since January, when I went to the beach with some friends and clambered over the hills of sand and down to the water and back up cliffs. After that trip, I got depressed, and since then I've read some and thought some and it's just gotten worse and worse. Why? Because I live in a house. I live in a house in a neighborhood in a town. I have no way of entirely avoiding horrible carcinogenic materials. I feel compelled to check my email a lot. Other people essentially force me to attend mass-education factories. I eat food out of boxes.

And it depresses me.

And it depresses everyone else, too. If not their souls, then their bodies. Yeah, bodies get depressed.

I told my speech & debate coach that I'm not going to the state tournament this weekend. I'm giving up my spot in the event. She didn't fight me, but I feel pretty guilty and bad about it. I hate to let people down, and I know I did that by saying I just can't go.

But, I do not think I will regret it. At least not the part about not competing; I will probably regret the letting-my-coach-down part for at least a while. But this Saturday, I turn 18. I hope to attend my old school's Haru Matsuri festival in the morning for a while, then go to a concert put on by another town's environmental club.

When I got home after breaking the news to my coach, I checked my email (yeah... yeah, I know) and was happy to find an email from my uncle. He sent me an essay by Dmitry Orlov, someone I had never heard of before. Here is the essay.

I believe that I will get through this. Belief can be an unreliable thing, but what isn't, really?

Another interesting thingy I ran across today: James Cameron (creator of the movie Avatar) goes to the Amazon.

Yeah, I run barefoot. I'm cool.

2010-04-09T23:48:00.000-06:00

In fact, I'm amazing! Or at least my body is.... But, in truth, I have discovered another important thing for myself to share: I was born to run barefoot. And then, more broadly, we were all born to run barefoot.

Now, hey, I ran track. I own fancy schmancy shoes. Professionals have to wear shoes, or they'd hurt themselves!

Right?

I think not!

If humans are animals (which they are) and other animals do not wear shoes (or, really, any clothes at all, although other-than-humans are better at sticking to their own natural habitat where whatever fur they have is perfect) and other animals run (I've seen it happen!), we humans don't need shoes! Whoa! Locura!

I've done a little research, and found that there are many communities, gathering online and off, of people who run sans shoesies. A lot of them are into barefoot racing and barefoot marathons, which I'm not ready for or even particularly interested in these days, but their words are clear: barefoot is the way to go.

I've been running with my buddy for the last month or so, never even thinking of leaving the house without my running shoes up until this last week, when I took them off before we hit the trail at the local park. I've been pretty happy with running at the park for starters, since the uneven ground and general forested atmosphere make me feel more like I'm running for fun and adventure and less like a rodent in a hamster wheel (although I'm sure hamster wheels have their merits... when you are a caged rodent).

When I run barefoot, I strike the ground with the ball of my foot. I can feel the ground: more specifically, I feel what the ground is composed of. This is important. Yes. And as I move forward the shock of impact goes unfelt in my legs and I ease my foot down, my heel barely brushing the ground. Then I spring back up, and KAPOW! I like that word.

I have learned that I am, in fact, contrary to popular belief, running correctly. My body is put together in such a way that sensitive nerves on the bottom of my feet, the bit between the ball and the heel, make ground-slapping gaits painful for a reason: I am not meant to run that way. The balls of my feet, however, are perfectly adapted to hit the ground and spring me forward. And sure, I have to look at where I'm running so I don't step on anything sharp, but guess what? Callouses aren't ugly in my book, and eye/foot coordination ain't a bad thing to develop.

Running barefoot I do not tire as I do running shod. Barefoot, I feel a connection with my running space. Without shoes, I am a runner. I truly run. I feel like a deer.

I recommend ditching your shoes next time you feel like running. You may find that you feel more like running once you try it barefoot! I don't know! But it's fantastic. Don't step on broken glass. Befriend the ground you're galloping across.

Welcome to the Future

2010-04-08T22:11:00.001-06:00

Here again I blog. I've had a blog for many years. I've blogged a lot of bullspit. I haven't been very interesting. I do not intend to become any more interesting.

But my thoughts help me only so much, caught up inside my head: I like to at least pretend that other people will read these things.

An hour or so ago I finished reading a book: Rewild or Die, by Urban Scout. I know about the book since my brother knows the author, and I have always idolized my brother, so I caught on.

Various things have become clear(er) to me in the past few days...

1. civilization owns me.

2. my parents unwittingly raised me to be attracted by the idea of rewilding.

3. i could do anything.

I remember that when I was a little kid (as opposed to the big kid I am currently, of course) on a few occasions I would be running around the playground at my dandy Montessori School and pick up a piece of bark dust off the ground and ponder it briefly. I do not remember my specific thought process, but I then chased around my friends and asked them if they wondered what the tree had looked like, the tree that this piece came from. I thought of it sort of as being like the Shard from the Dark Crystal.

No one else seemed to care. Dramatic!

So I gave up. For a long time. I was weird on my own time, alone, and only slightly less weird in public. I pretended I was a tiger when I was uncomfortable with other people and burst into tears when I realized I would never actually be a not-human.

I wrote some very depressing, mildly creepy poetry.

I talked about myself a lot... oh, wait, I still do!

Anyway, you know what? People exist out there who think like me. I think like other people. And that makes all the difference.

I could go to college for three or four years, become a graphic designer, work hard and make money and do things with money.

Or I could go live in centroamerica for a while, live somewhere that is not here, come back, find some work, and find a community. Find a place to share. Find things to learn, find things to create, find good things.

I will not wait to gather the funds to flee from what there is. I would rather live a penniless life of grief and joy than a life of working to purchase illusions.

Friday's Exchangie Trip to Casco Viejo

2009-06-14T09:19:00.000-06:00

Casco Viejo!

We went on a tour of La Presidencia, basically the White House of Panama. It was awesome. I took way more pictures than this, don't worry. :) The random egret (garza in Spanish) is sort of a symbol of the presidency and so there are a bunch of them running around this first floor of the building.

Second floor.

I am being strangled and Marthe is being squished. Thanks, Jingi. Everyone else has a good representation of their usual expression. :) lol. Good times.

Pictures I could have taken and uploaded 4 months ago but didn't

2009-06-11T08:41:00.000-06:00

The Gamboa Post Office. I've never been inside because it's never open when I wander by.

A tug boat or something, on the Canal.

Here you have the Panama Canal and a fence and the Panama Railroad. Yay!

This is the only way to get into Gamboa: A one-way bridge shared with the railroad. Whenever you want to enter or leave Gamboa you have to wait for the light to turn, and often people disobey the lights and somebody has to back all the way off the bridge again. The bridge crosses where the Chagres River meets the Panama Canal.

The Railroad and the Canal and the jungle and a big metal thingy that I assume has something to do with the railroad. Idk. The other side has some lights on it.

I know what you're thinking: 'Wow! An exotic, unknown fruit!' but actually I bet you've eaten it a lot: It's a cashew! In Spanish, the fruit is called 'marañon' and the nut part is called the 'pepitos'.

Mango trees are everywhere here, all ridiculously full. And delicious.

A woodpecker: 'carpintero'.

Fast Approaching

2009-06-07T17:21:00.000-06:00

I've been in Panama for a few weeks over four months, and I leave in 32 days. That's just four more weekends before I'm back in Mac. Crazy! And it's difficult to say how I feel about that. I love it here in Panama, and I definitely plan on coming back, hopefully repeatedly and for more extended periods of time. I want to master Spanish. And I have made friends here, who I will miss terribly when I get home, just as much as I am right now missing my friends back in Oregon. I have changed a bit since February. Definitely. Like, my hair is way longer and I'm ridiculously tan. I also have at least one foot standing in another language, I can fry plantain bananas, I have seen crazy wild bugs, woken up to the sound of howler monkeys, bought strange fruit from street vendors, chatted for hours on MSN Messenger in Spanish, lived within walking distance of a big-deal landmark (Panama Canal), worn a ridiculous school uniform, learned to salsa dance, seen a lot of stray dogs, caught an enormous toad in a plastic bag, been fascinated by ant highways, discovered that cashew nuts come from a tree called 'marañon', pulled mangoes right off the tree with a long pole, picked up crazy shells off the beach, explored a centuries-old fort and been freaked out by a tailless whip scorpion, and, um, lots of other exciting stuff! Holy cow! And I still have another month. :) I wouldn't trade this experience for anything.

I will be happy to be home next month, though. I miss you guys!

Gripe Porcina!

2009-05-30T15:59:00.000-06:00

Swine Flu: If you were wondering, yes, people do freak out about it here. They have been since about the middle of May, when people starting showing up in surgical masks to walk around Albrook Mall. This picture is of a poster that my class made, about the symptoms and stuff of A H1N1. I colored all the little pictures that my friend Max drew.

Another school project was this video of making an electroscope for physics class a week or two ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nMjGwC9C3c

And some more random photos:

GIANT freaking spider in the jail cells under the fort at Portobelo.
The common black vulture, chillin at the fort.An Indian fishing boat out at Portobelo.
A pretty moth that was actually quite small, hanging out on the refrigerator one evening.Not a Golden Frog, but a frog nonetheless.

Whoa!

2009-05-28T16:47:00.000-06:00

Hey! I just thought I should let people know that I am, in fact, alive, though I might be murdered my mosquitoes any moment as I am sitting outside, stealing Wi-Fi from a neighbor's house by sitting on the sidewalk with my laptop. Eating walnuts. Yup.

Iguana of the Day

2009-05-04T14:59:00.000-06:00

That's right: when I do my homework I can see iguanas out one window and baby birds out another, and I heard lots of ridiculously loud thunder.

Three Days Old

2009-05-04T14:55:00.000-06:00

They're still pretty floppy and strange, and today they are squirmier.

OK, here are the baby birds!

2009-05-02T11:07:00.001-06:00

The internet finally woke up and here are the baby birds. I think there are three of them... there were three tiny speckled blue eggs in there just yesterday. I didn't look very closely because the mother bird was, understandably, freaking out and I didn't want to hang around more than necessary to snap a picture, which explains the total lack of framing. :) They're pretty cute for being so ugly, right?

April twenty-seventh: dogs and flowers.

2009-04-27T17:11:00.000-06:00

Casco Viejo

2009-04-15T11:03:00.000-06:00

The Square or whatever. Lots of beautiful buildings, lots of crumbly buildings with trees growing out of the walls. Lots of balconies that we declined to walk under due to iffy support beams or complete lack thereof.

My brother's friend, overlooking the Bahia (tide out) from the top of an old building being restored.

An obelisk... with a rooster... I have no idea what that is supposed to represent.

Wikipedia sez: "The city was founded on August 15, 1519. Within years of its founding, the city became a launching point for the exploration and conquest of Peru and a transit point for gold and silver headed towards Spain. In 1671, the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan, with the help of a band of 1400 men, attacked and looted the city, which was subsequently destroyed by fire. The ruins of the old city still remain and are a popular tourist attraction known as Panamá la Vieja (Old Panama). It was rebuilt in 1673 in a new location approximately 5 miles (8.0 km) southwest of the orignal city. This location is now known as the Casco Viejo (Old Quarter) of the city."

Since the public school I was going to start at this week is on strike (apparently this is a common problem around here) I've had this week off, entirely to myself as pretty much everyone else in the house is off at work or their own functioning school. Yesterday I took the bus into the city on my own and met up with one of my brother's friends who happens to live in Panama, a botanist; http://anthrome.wordpress.com/ and we wandered around the old quarter of Panama City for a couple of hours, including going to the Museo del Canal Interoceanico de Panama (Panama Canal Museum). It was very hot and humid, and I think I've made up for the lack of sunlight I may have suffered from growing up in Oregon.

The Critters Here

2009-04-14T08:51:00.000-06:00

This iguana was spotted outside a window in the house, moseying slowly down a tree. There are a lot of iguanas here, usually I see them sunning themselves on sidewalks in the morning.
I also see coatimundis, gatosolos in Spanish, trotting alongside the road into the city.

And, guess what! I saw a sloth! We were driving down the highway and I thought to myself, "That stick by the side of the road looks funny... oh god, it has a face." I hope it changed its mind about trying to cross the highway...

A bus ride around Panama

2009-04-05T14:56:00.000-06:00

Pass through towns and suburbs.

All the buses are painted like this.Fruit!bottles hanging from a tree...

Aww, pericos!

2009-04-02T17:09:00.000-06:00

Some colorful visitors to our birdfeeder one morning.

It rained. I would know.

2009-03-30T17:01:00.000-06:00

So, as we approach a wetter season in Panama, I think I will need to start hauling my rain jacket around with me, such as to school. I got soaked today waiting for a taxi to pick us up to take us to the bus terminal, but none of 'em wanted us so we ran back across the street to the school and waited half an hour for the rain to slow to a sort of drizzly mist. Seriously, though: it rained hard. Big drops. And it's hot.

Flowers for you

2009-03-28T21:35:00.000-06:00

just a random photo I took of some flowers in a sort of shrub that thinks it is a tree.

Apparently people DO get colds in Panama

2009-03-26T18:09:00.000-06:00

I would know: I have a fine example of a headcold going on right now. I've been sneezy for a week, but I assumed that it was allergies, either from the flowers that are starting to appear on the trees or from the rye bread that I've been eating for lunch at school on sandwiches. I am sort of happy to know that it is not the bread, but I'm really not a fan of this sinuses-squeezing-themselves-out-my-nose feeling, or the throat inlaid with sandstone. At least I have the comfort that half of my class at school has the same symptoms and that so far none of them have died yet.

Speaking of classes, I am learning some HTML in one of 'em. I just sit behind my friend and make suggestions on what to name our webpage and stuff, I don't actually take the class officially.

Buuut I wanna try it out sometime.

Look, Ma, I'm an ad for Converse!

2009-03-22T19:49:00.000-06:00

My host sis and I went to a music fest (which was as much a Movistar, Coca-Cola, Balboa (beer), and Converse fest as anything else) last weekend (I know, I'm slow with the updates). It was pretty fun, actually. Apparently I saw lots of big names perform, but I didn't know them... like... Aleks Syntek. Hooray!

You must slap your butt as you walk

2009-03-21T13:33:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure what else this sign could possibly mean.

Monkey Pics from Summit Zoo & update

2009-03-18T19:59:00.000-06:00

The white-faced capuchins expected to be fed crackers... or brains... either one.
I was a little shocked by the zoo, it definitely isn't what I'm used to seeing! Besides the jaguar and harpy eagle, the exhibits are in varying states of disrepair and have an overall old look to them, just like most of the city. It was all native animals, and basically looks like they dropped cages down around parts of the existing jungle and called it good. The grounds are mostly a walk through the jungle, with lots of beautiful trees and plants all around.
Back to the monkeys... a man started to hit his mostly empty soda bottle against the wire, freaking out the monkeys, but when ice flew out and into the exhibit they grabbed it up ad coveted it and rubbed it in their hands like it was gold.

I started school on Monday! Hurray, I have friends! :D Technically I'm just following my host sister around until my public school starts next month, I don't even have a uniform and I'm not being graded. It's a private Oxford School and most of the classes are in English, some of the teachers don't even speak Spanish (and some of them don't speak English). I am taking a Spanish-learning class with another boy who doesn't speak Spanish who moved here with his family from Florida in January. So far it's all review, and I know that my Spanish is improving, because I can actually form a sentence or two without thinking super hard, and I understand more than half of what is said in normal conversation. Yaaaay...

Summit Zoo

2009-03-14T13:07:00.000-06:00

I went with my host sister to the Summit Zoo, which is a short drive down the road from where I live. It's definitely not the sort of zoo I'm used to; it's very rundown and sort of makeshift. There were two exhibits, however, that obviously got all the funding; those of the jaguar and the harpy eagle.what's a zoo without a good pavo real or two?

AUGH my internet is being stupid, so i'll try to upload the pictures of the monkeys and such later!

orientation of the month - photos! finally!

2009-03-14T12:17:00.000-06:00

there were five or six stray dogs, mostly pretty cute, who were frequent visitors to our cabins because we're all suckers and gave them food.
chickens drinking water from the drainage pipe coming from the cabins we stayed in.
some fellow exchangies on the beach. represented in this picture: thailand, austria, and iceland.

sorry it took so long, guys. i got back, like... a week and a half ago. :)

Orientation

2009-03-02T20:38:00.000-06:00

I have to get up early tomorrow morning to get to the bus terminal to head back to the beach to go to my exchange program's orientation of the month. It will be for three days, and I'll update when I get back, or, if I have internet there, you may hear from me sooner. :)

Bird of the Day

2009-02-28T14:57:00.000-06:00

This is a Blue Crowned Motmot. I took this picture earlier this afternoon, through the window. Aparrently he is a fan of bananas and just hanging out in trees. His tail is "raqueted" or something like that... i forget the term. but yeah. He's pretty. Sorry the picture is a little poor-quality. :)
More artsy pics; click on them to see them bigger, i think:

making kissy-chirpy noises

2009-02-22T19:32:00.000-06:00

GECKO!!! I finally got a picture of one. There were two of them, but one skedaddled while I went inside to get my camera. They were making kissy-chirpy noises to each other, which I had been hearing all evening, but hadn't known the source. I'm sitting with my laptop on the back porch of the beach house right now, it's dark out but there are still people in the pool and sitting on other back porches at other beach houses here. There are still those two geckos on the wall, I can see them from here. I like geckos, and geckos that make noises are pretty awesome.

So, there you go, proof that there are animals here that I actually manage to snap pictures of before they disappear. :)

Loaderingering

2009-02-22T17:20:00.000-06:00

I usually put up arty, photoshopped-up pictures onto my DeviantART website, but that is taking extraordinarily long to load these days, so I will just upload those pictures here, a few at a time... enjoy, and please leave comments!
This is Peter, my host sister's dog. He's pretty cute.
This is the dryer.

Again with the extreme heat

2009-02-21T12:34:00.000-06:00

So, we're back at the beach house. It's hot. I think that Carnival started yesterday or today, there was a lot of traffic on the way here and lots of loud music playing and people wearing strange hats and spraying each other with hoses. I'll try to upload more pictures later today or something, I know blogs are boring when they're just writing. :P

mmm... liver.

2009-02-19T19:23:00.000-06:00

Yeah, not so much. Liver tastes way too much like straightup cow.

It took forever to take the bus into the city this afternoon, so my host sister and I saw a different movie than we had intended. I was looking forward to seeing "El Curioso Caso de Benjamin Button" for the third time (no, really, I kind of love that movie) but we were late and instead went to see "Simplemente, No Te Quieres"... but then we had to leave before it ended (which I hate doing) to take a taxi to where my host mom works (the hospital, she is an obstetrician) and go home. Then we had dinner: Rice = delicious fantastic, liver = igh....

oh ticks, how i hate thee

2009-02-17T23:46:00.000-06:00

I have the lifeless bodies of at least ten ticks on my nightstand, squished by my deadly tick-killing weapon: bottle of nail polish. it's one in the morning here. I think that my host sister's giant stuffed dog is the main nest, but she refuses to remove it from her room, even from her bed... ticks. everywhere. in my room, in my bed. WHY?????

UPDATE: I killed around 20 ticks last night, and I keep finding more, mostly on my host sister's bed. We found a bunch living inside of her blanket and giant stuffed dog, so we removed those items from the room... ugh. I hate ticks. What purpose do they serve, anyway? No one eats them in large quantities, they must be useless parasites. aaauuuugggghhhhh.This is a tick on my bed. This is not cool.

Where the wild things are

2009-02-16T18:47:00.000-06:00

The above is a picture of what Soberania National Park looks like... this is one block from my house.
Did I mention that I went to a discotheque and learned to salsa dance? Heck yes.

Internet: I have it.

2009-02-16T14:02:00.000-06:00

I'm currently connected to internet right here in Gamboa! I discovered it last night, and although it blips out sometimes and is a fairly weak signal, it's working alright. We shall see.
Anyway. Here are some examples of the birds I've been seeing around here; these aren't my pictures because when I see these birds they are moving way too fast/I don't have my camera with me:The above are 'lesser kiskadees'. They flit around in pairs of groups of three or four and sometimes just sit on the ground, zoned out. They're goofy.
This is a blue-gray tanager. They're all over the place, like sparrows but more colorful. :) I think I have one picture of one up on my Flickr account, but it's not a very good shot.
Obviously, this is not a bird. But they are all over the place: it's an agouti. They're cat-sized rodents and they're adorable. People don't seem to hate them or anything, I don't think they do much damage or anything. But they wander through the yard and sniff around until one of the dogs chases them away. They're extremely fast and even Bimbo, our big black lab, has never caught one. In Spanish they are called neques.
I don't know what kind of bird this is, but they fly over Panama Bay and other bodies of water all the time.
And, of course, I've been seeing and hearing these little mini-toucans.
I think we're going to go rollerblading now (even though it just poured down raining??) so I'll talk to you guys later. :)

ta-da!!!!

2009-02-13T18:57:00.001-06:00

leafcutters at work, originally uploaded by [pickley]goodness.

this is the picture i wanted to upload! hurray for fast internet at friend's houses!

no me gusta hormigas en mi cama, gracias.

2009-02-11T17:51:00.000-06:00

Hi, guys. I'm still alive, even though ants moved into my bed last night and I had to fight them off for almost an hour before I could go to sleep. I don't know what they were after, but several hundred met their doom. For a kid who used to start fights with kids who stepped on ants, I killed a lot of ants last night. They're the teeny tiny biting kind, and, what can I say, they were not welcome in my bed.
I just waited an hour for one single photograph to upload onto here to show you guys, but it hasn't gotten anywhere, so I'm afraid you will have to imagine a large green leaf being cut up by long-legged red leafcutter ants on the sidewalk when I went on a walk earlier today. Sigh.

apparently the coast is hot

2009-02-08T10:41:00.000-06:00

It is so hot today. I just woke up about half an hour ago on the top bunk in a room in my host family's beach house we drove to yesterday. The ceiling fan above me looked a little like it was going to fly off its base it was moving so fast, and another fan was roaring on the floor, but I am still so hot... soooooo hot. I don't knowo what the temperature is, it is just "really freaking hot".

I lament my lack of bloggage the last several days. I just haven't had access to the computer... my host family uses it a lot, and it seems like every time I've gotten a hold of it recently, someone has asked to use it before my email has even gotten a chance to load.

Soooo yeah. I had more to say, but since it is so hot, my brain is sort of melting and I don't remember what all I was going to talk about except for tortillas, which I love. Here, tortillas fit in the palm of your hand and are about a quarter to half an inch thick. They come frozen, uncooked, in packages and when they are cooked they are delightfully crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside... and delicious.

Also, people here put mayonnaise on EVERYTHING. I tend to decline...

the casa

2009-02-04T18:25:00.001-06:00

the casa, originally uploaded by [pickley]goodness.

this is where I live, by the way.
don't forget to read the post from today that is below this, too!
hasta luego, peeps.

I saw toucans!

2009-02-04T18:04:00.000-06:00

mwahahaha. toucans. I saw them having a squawk-off in the trees down the street. They're the small kind... I don't know the actual name. But they were pretty cute. Tamila and I were watching her brother and his friend play soccer.
Earlier today Tamila and I took the bus into town to the Albrook Mall, the largest mall in Latin America or something like that. We shopped, then watched that new movie with Adam Sandler about bedtime stories, but dubbed in Spanish so I really only got the gist of the movie, and then we shopped some more. I am so hungry right now. They eat dinner late here.
I think I can feel my Spanish improving, a few words or phrases a day. Of course, I've only been here, like, three days, so my host sister still gives me funny looks when I try to say anything more than three words long.
I didn't take any pictures today, but if you haven't already you should go see what I uploaded to Flickr yesterday: http://www.flickr.com/photos/littlesister4/

I am officially "here"!

2009-02-03T08:34:00.000-06:00

I am now an exchange student living with a real host family and everything! Wi-Fi does not work here in Gamboa, so my laptop has been demoted to photo storage and stuff like that. However, my wonderful host family has at least two laptops with internet so the only thing that will change is how easy it is for me to upload photographs; I will have to do some crazy transferring around between the 'tops. Also, laptop keyboards are a bit different here, as you might imagine, and I keep pressing buttons that I expect to be something different than what ends up on the page... it is taking me a while to write this...

I will upload pictures of the house and neighborhood and RAINFOREST that I am living in as soon as I am not lazy enough. Birds sing here all day, especially around four and five pm. Right now it is morning and I hear what must be ten different kinds of birds calling to each other. On a walk last night we saw some parrots (lorros) flying and squawking to each other. There are also ñekes or however you spell that all over the place; cat-sized rodents! They are adorable and my host family's dog Sarita loves to chase 'em. Sarita (Sara) is a black lab and so is Bimbo. Peter is a smaller brown and white spaniel of some sort. All friendly well-behaved dogs.

My favorite thing so far as far as animals, though, is the ants!!!! Ormigas, i think, in Spanish. The ants here CARRY THINGS and actually MAKE PATHS through the jungle.
Here, using the nice sidewalk is not really done, and the curb is for the ants. Seriously. Imagine seeing a thousand tiny pieces of leaves and flowers walking along the curb and then on closer inspection see the little red ants carrying 'em. It's crazy!

The house is a few blocks from the Panama Canal and the intersecting Chagres River, Chagres being an indigenous word for crocodile.

I'll come back with pictures later, I promise :)

tourism is fun

2009-01-31T22:49:00.000-06:00

It's very late here and my roommates are both asleep, so I'll make this quick and mostly pictures. Today we went to a touristy spot just to chill out, it was great, hanging out with a bunch of exchange students all in the same boat as far as language.
hammocks in the backyard.
ants carrying stuff!!!
gigantic dead rotting moth stuck to a tree...

the backyard. hellz yes.

we also went to the bay but like i said my roommates are trying to sleep with my bright laptop light shining in their faces... so go to the following for more pics:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/littlesister4/ for normal photos

and www.forevergreen.deviantart.com for artsiness!

<3

Exchange Students + Photobooth =

2009-01-30T22:39:00.000-06:00

yeah.

I AM IN PANAMA OMG

2009-01-30T18:43:00.001-06:00

Here I am!
Heck yes.
So this morning me and the two other girls heading to Panama said goodbye to the other AFS USA kids and got ready to board our plane. We sat around for a long time, constantly worrying we'd missed some important information, and located another AFS kid, Gisli. Gisli is from Iceland and he, too, was on his way to Panama and we talked with him for a long time. He's very tall, very blond, very blue-eyed.
The plane ride was long (well, like two and a half hours) and hot and uncomfortable, as usual.
Then we arrived.
Immigracion is SUPER confusing when you don't speak that much espanol and the lady at the desk is trying to break down the words for you and you're like "umm... estudiante... seis ... months... um... hablo solo un poquito de espanol! Gracias!" but I made it... Apparently we all have to go back there on Monday to get our actual Visas to stay here. After Monday we'll get to go to our host families and start the real deal, I guess.

We're staying in an old house with new facilities, in some other girls' room. There is a large television in our room that we are currently watching "SuperNanny" on... in English. Hellz yeah.

So far, Panama is beautiful. I love it, in all its humidity. I think it smells like PopRocks, but the other two girls just give me funny looks when I say that. I dunno.

We saw some crazy critter when we went for a quick walk up the street:
We think that it might be a paca (conejo pintado), but we don't really know.

So: I am alive, I'm in Panama, it's hot, it's amazing, it smells like Poprocks.

peace, mates. :)

More pictures up on: http://www.flickr.com/photos/littlesister4/

Here I Am In Florida

2009-01-28T20:53:00.001-06:00

Apparently it is freezing and raining back home, but home is thousands of miles away right now, and here in Miami it is 80 degrees and humid. Mom and I arrived yesterday morning and went to the Miami Metrozoo.

We wandered around the zoo until our sleep-deprived bodies couldn't take it anymore.
Today we drove to the Keys and experienced the joy of seeing tiny brown lizards running around everywhere. We ate lunch at a restaurant called Snappers, at the request of my aunt.

I don't know how often I'll be online once I actually get to Panama, but I promise I'll keep you few brave souls who read this updated.

Toe the Line

2009-01-15T00:10:00.000-06:00

Twelve days to take-off and the drama is growing: My exchange program is fighting for my attention while School, Speech & Debate, and Boys warm up in the opposite corner.

I only hope I make it out alive.

Get Set...

2008-12-28T16:01:00.001-06:00

River blindness! Typhoid! Dengue! Botflies! Oh my!

Oh crap.

Going to Panama means going to a tropical country with lots of crazy exotic parasites and stuff.
This morning I woke up an hour early so I could swallow the last of my four typhoid oral vaccine pills. I have yet to get the hang of swallowing pills; dude, I buy chewable multivitamins. They taste terrible like sweet powdery sour apples (I guess "berry" was the flavor they were going for), but better than the taste you get when you try to chew pills most people just swallow; damn, vitamin C is sour!

Anyway, my dad took me to the county health department a week or two ago and the nice but geographically-challenged RN gave me a shot in each arm; the left got yellow fever and the right got Hep A, which apparently I had missed out on last time I got shots. I was up-to-date on tetanus and stuff, so... yay.

Of course, malaria is big in the rural areas of Panama, and though my host family lives in Panama City (or Gamboa... which is near Panama City... but then again, everything in Panama is near Panama City) but there is currently no vaccine for malaria. If I head off to rural Panama for, say, a camping trip, I have to (gasp) take "anti-malarial" pills a few days in advance and every few days for several weeks. Great.

Anyway, I also got info on my host family! Two parents and an 18-year-old daughter. I wrote them a letter (I didn't get their email address) and I hope it gets there safely... if not, well, they won't know how bad my Spanish is until I get there in... 24 days!

On your marks...

2008-12-08T18:47:00.000-06:00

In two months, I will be in Panama. Sometime this month, I get to find out who my host family will be, where I will live, what school I will go to. SWEET!!!

Anyway, this blog will be all about my six months spent in Panama as an exchange student from Oregon, USA. If you're reading this, you probably know me and I told you to come to this site, because I thought it would be easier (and more fun, and less painful) to create a blog than to send out mass emails. I may post pictures, ponder life, tell of my experiences, and hope that you guys will leave comments! ^_^

Right now, I have no idea what my life will be like in two months. Winter formal is this weekend, Christmas is like two or three weeks away, annnd... for now, I'm still focused on my life in Oregon. But soon.... so soon...