I´ve been on the computer a lot lately (obviously), on FB, checking email, reading the news, etc. becuase I really do have a lot of free time down here. Plus, practically every place in this small mountain town has wi-fi. I´m super glad I brought my iPhone with me becuase in the past, I´ve never thought to do it. I´m even kicking myself a little for not bringing my laptop, as I have a TON of great pics that I look forward to uploading when I get home. So, if my updating is annoying you, feel free to ¨hide¨ me, but if you´re still interested in reading my updates (obviously, if you´ve gotten this far you are), thanks for joining me once again :)
For those of you who are wondering what´s been going on with the orphanage, I want to give you a few more details about what exactly transpired that has lead to the most recent, major event, which is the water situation. On Saturday, after I blogged, I went out with Lourdes and she helped me navigate some of the ¨clothing stores¨ here in Copan. Basically, if you´re looking for clothes here, you have two options. Option one is to buy the ¨name brand¨ clothes for a bit more money. In reality, you´re getting rip-off designer clothes (Abercrombie shirts do NOT go for $10 anywhere that I know of), or you can hit up the stores where Goodwill clothes go to die. We picked through a vast assortment of clothes trying to find stuff that we thought would fit the kids. We hit a couple of stores for several bags of clothes, socks and underwear (about $150 worth, so you know that was a lot) and then she came with me up to the orphanage (in all her life, she had never been). When we got there, the place was crowded with foreigners (missionaries), who had come with bags full of stuffed animals, Beanie Babies, etc. The kids and adults were crowded inside blowing bubbles, holding kids, etc., so we decided to wait outside in the Tuk Tuk for them to leave. After a few minutes, some of the kids came out to see me and you could tell that the missionaries were curious as to who I was and what I was doing. I got out and asked one of the guys where he was from, what he was doing, etc., and he told me that they were from Tennessee on a trip with their church. He went on to tell me that they had brought a general contractor with them, so I immediately asked if he could give me an indication as to what was going on with their water system (or lack thereof). While we were outside talking, a few other guys came over and introduced themselves, all about my age and all extremely friendly. Then, a couple of minutes later, one of the girls from inside came out to tell me that ¨the director¨was coming because she wanted to meet me. I had mixed feelings about this, but knew that at some point, I´d have to make contact in order to do something better for the place.
She came about 15 minutes later and began our conversation by telling me how grateful she was for the help. She told me that she´s really struggling and doesn´t have the $$ to suppiort the kids and that feeding all of them is really expensive for her. She told me about her 14-year-old son who died a number of years ago, falling off a mountain, and how after, she founded the orphanage. I still can´t say I have full trust in her, after all, it´s hard to when you´ve heard so many bad things, but I have to say that she struck me as a genuine woman. I may never know, but at least I walked away feeling better about the situation. We went outside and all had a good look at their water reservoir outside and she began explaining to me what was wrong with it. She told me that years ago, she had a pump, but that it had blown out and she couldn´t afford to fix it. You see, all houses down here have reservoirs in the ground, but getting that water into your house and into the tanks is another situation completely. As it stood, there was no way to get the water from the ground into the tanks that sit on the roof of the second floor. Once you can get water to them, gravity does the rest. So, as she was explaining all of this to me, and I was trying to translate to Eric, another guy, Luis, comes over and explains that he lives in a nearby city (but he´s working with the church on their trip), speaks Spanish (obviously) and has an uncle who works at the church here in town and does this kind of work. I passed the convo off to him so that he could get some more specifics, and a few minutes later, we knew exactly what needed to be done.
This morning, I went to meet Luis and Eric at the local hardware store. We looked at pumps, then went back to the church to meet his uncle. From there, Eric diagrammed a plan and the uncle and I were on our way up to the orphanage for him to check it out. His buddy came up as well, and we inspected the place for a while, with them talking back and forth and me trying as best as I could to understand a foreign subject in a foreign language...lol
The uncle (Jose, I think) and I went back to the store and for the next hour or so, he and his buddy put together a list of everything we needed. We opted to trade up for the delux pump so that we could be a little more certain it would have enough pressure to get the water all the way up to the two tanks. With parts, everything came to about $275 and they´re going to charge us about another $200 for labor (two to three days worth of work). They´re also going to build a new box to house the main water valve (it was buried in dirt/sewage) and also are going to build a new ¨door¨to cover the ridiculously dangerous reservoir that sits directly in front of the front door. After buying the supplies, they were off to begin their work. I´m going to head up tomorrow with some more groceries and check in on them. I´m kind of holding my breath until Wednesday, when the job is supposed to be done. I´ll let you all know what I find out when the time comes!
Ben
Monday, July 25, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
An amazing morning
I was going to try to cram all of what´s happened this AM into a FB status update, but to do so, I´d have to omit too many details. So, I decided to go back to the blog to share. This morning was another prime example of the random, crazy kind of crap that you can stumble across when you visit countries off the beaten path...
So last night, a few of us went out and met up with a girl named Erin, who brought along her friend Jose, a 23-year-old bird expert from Spain. I won´t bother to get into how at about half-way through the evening, we switched into Spanish mode and how I´ve come to the realization that I finally have the confidence to launch into pretty much any story I want to tell in Spanish, and can do so with relative success. This first week of Spanish classes has given me more confidence than the last two years combined, but this is not the point of today´s blog, so I´ll shut-up now on that end...
Anyway, we hung out last night over drinks and he shared that the next day (today), he was going to be helping release five sheltered macaws (relatively endangered here) into the Mayan Ruins/park to live with, and begin breeding with, the native macaws that already live there. I also had the option to go to a coffee plantation, but at the last minute, decided to head to the ruins to watch the event. Plus, we heard that the vice president was going to be making an appearance, so that in itself was worth the trip!
After getting there, we chatted with Jose for a bit and then waited around with everyone else for the actual ceremony and the arrival of the VP. After about an hour, we noticed the heavily-armed military/police guys show up and knew that this person was getting close. A few minutes later, I´m standing there talking to Erin and we notice a very nicely dressed woman surrounded by people. She asks me, ¨Do you think that SHE´S the VP?¨ I responded that I wasn´t sure how progressive the Honduran government was, but that she definitely looked official and ¨vice presedential¨enough to fit the bill. Sure enough, it was her. She gathered with a number of officials, dignified guests, etc. for the presentation and about 15 minutes later, they opened the doors to the enclosure to let the birds out. They didn´t move at first, but after about two minutes, they all took off together as the crowd oohed and ahhed. I had gotten tired of waiting, so had put down my camera just as they began to take off. I quickly fired up the movie feature of the camera just in time to catch them taking off from the enclosure. It was a really cool thing to watch, and the crowd went wild! Apparently, this project had been in the making for years, so the final release was really a pretty big deal.
As if that wasn´t cool enough, afterwards, the VP (now identified as Maria Antonieta de Bogran: http://www.laprensa.hn/especiales/multimedia/Toma/ministros/bogran.html) started going around posing for pictures with the mucky-mucks which allowed me to get some good shots. After a few minutes, I worked my way close enough over to her and also the courage to shake her hand. I said to her, ¨Hi, I´m nobody special, just an American, but I wanted to shake your hand and tell you how much I love your country. It´s a pleasure to meet you.¨ I was nervous as hell, but I got the handshake while my two friends snapped pictures of me! Following in suit, they then each took a picture. It was really cool, and she was incredibly cordial and happy to oblige my request. If I had thought about it, I would have had them take a picture with my camera, but it was so spontaneous that I didn´t think about it. However, they have the pictures and I´ll have them in a week or so when they´re back at home and can email them to me. It was funny, because when I was taking a picture for the girls, my hand was totally shaking. I later told them I felt like a sixth grader asking a girl to dance with me. Smooth? No. Did I get the picture and handshake? Hell yes!
From there, we spent the next hour touring the ruins themselves, which were obviously spectacular. It was....wait for it...an amazing morning. :)
Friday, July 8, 2011
Rotting corpses
Got your attention with that, huh? Sorry to disappoint, but there were no actual rotting corpses or I´d probably be back on the plane for home looking for a good psychologist. This is simply a quick story about my hotel room, and a lesson why I shouldn´t have said how great my hotel room was before actually staying an entire night...
So I decided to splurge a bit when I checked in, paying the extra eight dollars for a room with air-conditioning (going from 17 a night to 25). While I still firmly believe that this was a good investement, maybe the hotel´s ¨bargain¨ status needs to be looked at again by the authors of Lonely Planet.
Sensing that this is a pretty sketchy town at night, I opted to stay in, write my blog and watch some TV before trying to again catch up on a lack of sleep. I watched some wonderful Seinfeld episodes (all in English, with Spanish subtitles...so there was SOME learning going on). You know the ones where Kramer and Frank Costanza dad make the ¨manziere¨ and the other where George invests in the jumping shoes and where they meet Jimmy, the guy who refers to himself in the third-person? Yup, classics. Anyway, I shut it down around 8 PM, and slept until about maybe 1 AM before having to get up and turn off the AC, which was literally freezing me alive. One hour later, I awoke to the NASTIEST smell you could imagine. It smelled like a combination of filthy, stinking BO from the smelliest of bums joined with what I´d imagine rotting corpses smell like. I absolutely couldn´t believe it. I actually had to get out of bed to check the room and under the bed to make sure there wasn´t a body! Finding no bodies, I got back into bed and fell asleep until 3:30, whereby I awoke to...wait for it...a rooster!! This guy was crowing pretty much every five seconds, almost perfectly timed. Fantastic, huh? But really, it wasn´t the crowing that surprised me, it was the time involved. I thought roosters didn´t crow until daybreak? I take solace in the fact that perhaps these were death-cries, as perhaps the rooster knew its time was coming. After all, how long can any chicken last in a country like this? So at that point, I had two choices: keep listening to the rooster or turn back on the icy death machine. Realizing that I´d never be able to sleep listening to Foghorn Leghorn, I opted for the latter, snuggled up into my one paper-thin sheet, and shivered\slept for the next few hours. Thankfully, this was my only night here. Between that ridiculousness and the massive amounts of cigarette smoke billowing into my room from down below, I don´t think I could do it again. I´m happy to be out of here in a couple of hours and off to the beach. I don´t expect it to be any cooler there, probably even hotter, but at least there´s a body of water to cool off in.
Ciao!
El Gringo Grande
So I decided to splurge a bit when I checked in, paying the extra eight dollars for a room with air-conditioning (going from 17 a night to 25). While I still firmly believe that this was a good investement, maybe the hotel´s ¨bargain¨ status needs to be looked at again by the authors of Lonely Planet.
Sensing that this is a pretty sketchy town at night, I opted to stay in, write my blog and watch some TV before trying to again catch up on a lack of sleep. I watched some wonderful Seinfeld episodes (all in English, with Spanish subtitles...so there was SOME learning going on). You know the ones where Kramer and Frank Costanza dad make the ¨manziere¨ and the other where George invests in the jumping shoes and where they meet Jimmy, the guy who refers to himself in the third-person? Yup, classics. Anyway, I shut it down around 8 PM, and slept until about maybe 1 AM before having to get up and turn off the AC, which was literally freezing me alive. One hour later, I awoke to the NASTIEST smell you could imagine. It smelled like a combination of filthy, stinking BO from the smelliest of bums joined with what I´d imagine rotting corpses smell like. I absolutely couldn´t believe it. I actually had to get out of bed to check the room and under the bed to make sure there wasn´t a body! Finding no bodies, I got back into bed and fell asleep until 3:30, whereby I awoke to...wait for it...a rooster!! This guy was crowing pretty much every five seconds, almost perfectly timed. Fantastic, huh? But really, it wasn´t the crowing that surprised me, it was the time involved. I thought roosters didn´t crow until daybreak? I take solace in the fact that perhaps these were death-cries, as perhaps the rooster knew its time was coming. After all, how long can any chicken last in a country like this? So at that point, I had two choices: keep listening to the rooster or turn back on the icy death machine. Realizing that I´d never be able to sleep listening to Foghorn Leghorn, I opted for the latter, snuggled up into my one paper-thin sheet, and shivered\slept for the next few hours. Thankfully, this was my only night here. Between that ridiculousness and the massive amounts of cigarette smoke billowing into my room from down below, I don´t think I could do it again. I´m happy to be out of here in a couple of hours and off to the beach. I don´t expect it to be any cooler there, probably even hotter, but at least there´s a body of water to cool off in.
Ciao!
El Gringo Grande
Thursday, July 7, 2011
The aguila has landed...
Hey everyone! As promised, the blog is back, and this summer, I´m going to try and do a better job than I did although last year. However, for anyone who remembers, I´m probably going to have a hard time ever one-upping the ¨Mr. Poo Hands¨post...lol
So anyway, here I am in San Pedro Sula, AKA the hottest, most humid town in the entire Universe. Doing the math, I´ve only been down in S.A. for about 36 hours, but they´ve already been pretty entertaining, as trips down to third-world countries usually are!
I´ll start with the obvious (since I already put it on FB like seventy times), which was the fact that by taking advantage of my wonderful friend EB´s ¨Friends & Family¨ status on American Airlines, I was able to fly down here for a whopping $125 dollars on first class. It really just doesn´t get much better than that. Thanks again, EEEBZ! :)
I got into San Salvador early yesterday morning, and due to the fact that the flight attendant on seemed intent on stuffing me with food and drink, I was exhausted. I probably only slept for two hours that night, so after landing, I had one objective and that was to get a hotel so I could nap. However, after driving through the city and realizing that San Salvador, like so many other Central American capitals before it, is just a congested, smoggy mess, I needed to get out ASAP. I made a spontaneous decision and went straight to the bus station and reserved my ticket to Honduras for early the next morning. Probably not the BEST idea I´ve ever had (and I´ve had, and will probably always continue to have, lots of bad ideas), but I´ll get back to that in a minute...
After booking my ticket, I found my hotel nearby and went to sleep for six hours. I awoke at about 4 PM, and feeling guilty (like I wasn´t even giving the capital, much less the entire country a chance), I went downstairs and naively asked the woman where I should go. She mentioned something that sounded good, so I went with her advice and headed out, looking for bus 42B. I went to the first ¨parada¨ I could find (bus stop) and waited for a while. While this was not a good use of time for me (since I found out later I was at the wrong stop), it did turn out to be a delightful mistake for the busloads of Salvadorans who got to gawk at me, and especially for the load of teenagers that got to mock me and yell various things at me. I did hear one kid say something about ¨tonto¨, which basically means ¨stupid.¨ Lucky they don´t go to TCK...lol
I waited there for about 30 minutes, actually kind of enjoying the attention, before the lady from the hotel came walking down the street and kindly guided me to the correct stop. I got on and headed about one mile up the way in super congested traffic to what turned out to be a mall. Feeling highly disappointed, and frankly ashamed of myself for being at a mall and being so quick to accept some pretty bad sight-seeing advice, I immediately decided to head back. ¨Since I feel like I know where I´m going, and since there´s a stupid amount of traffic, I think I´ll go ahead and walk¨is something like what went through my head...so I went with it. This is where things got a little ridiculous. As I walked back on busy streets, into traffic, with no sidewalks and exhaust from the one trillion buses spewing into my face, I thought that perhaps this wasn´t the best idea. I laughed to myself as I thought about how stupid I looked and my mind took me back to my childhood. As a kid, I remember playing ¨a game¨with my mom, whereby I would lay down in the back seat of our beloved ¨Hondy¨(a maroon ´84 Honda Civic that my bastard brother-in-law callously wrecked in MA some years ago...give him shit, again, Kelly) while my mom would attempt to ¨get us lost.¨ After maybe 10 minutes, I´d get up and then try to guide us back home. It was a hell of a fun time, and maybe my memory deceives me, but I thought I was pretty good at it. Well, it turns out that apparently that game has had a negative effect on me as I´m pretty much the most spatially-challenged person you could ever meet. Why I think I can, within a couple of hours of arriving, navigate a city of a million plus people I´ll never know. I´ve done this a million times before, but my inability to ¨give up¨or ask for directions keeps this phenomenon going. I guess in some ways it´s a challenge for me, but it´s funny because when I´m doing it, it´s anything but fun. However, I know I can always give up and jump in a cab, so the game continues. Thanks, mom, for trying. Turns out your son is just a little special in some respects, but you probably already knew that...
On the way back, and after succesfully finding my hotel, I decided to venture on in search of a pupusa (which is the El Salvadoran version of the quesadilla). I had heard the pupusarias were on literally EVERY street corner, but I´ll be damned if I couldn´t find one. As I wandered through the ¨Zona Rosa¨ (in every Central American country, it´s basically the part of the city where the more upscale bars and restaurants converge) in search of said pupusa, I realized that again I was failing and this time, just had to laugh. Seriously, who else but me wouldn´t be able to find one after being told they are EVERYWHERE? In the process, I passed by a bar not once, not twice, but three times before turning back and deciding that a dinner of beer would have to suffice. I was in there asking the girl behind the bar why I couldn´t find one when suddenly this guy appears on my right and joins the conversation. Now, I could really drag this on, but since I already do a pretty good job of being wordy, I´ll cut to the chase. He was a really nice guy and spoke impeccable English (which was a nice break even though I had only been speaking Spanish for less than half a day). He told me all about their culture, answered all my questions, etc. and was just an all-around good dude. A few minutes later, another guy who was there on work from Costa Rica joined into the convo and a few beers later, we decided to go out for some more drinks. I asked the first guy, Roberto, how long he was planning on staying out and he told me until the bars closed at 2 PM. It was then I realized that the 6:30 AM bus might be an issue...
Roberto told me that we´d be going to some ¨Bohemian bars.¨ Now, I don´t know that I´ve ever been to such a place, although I´ve heard of them. He explained that it was the type of place that attracted poets, artists, and people like Robert. Why, you ask? Because besides being a freelance graphic designer, Robert is a freaking tarot card reader. Seriously. Not being one to miss out on an opportunity to get my first ever reading, I asked him if he´d oblige me. And wouldn´t you know, he had them right in his fanny pack? Awesome! He had me shuffle them for a while, and then laid them all out and proceeded to tell me the ¨story¨of my reading, and I have to say, it was fascinating. Robert was a patient guy, allowing me to butt in and elaborate and make connections to just about everything he had to say about my life story. I think in the end, I did more talking than he did. But can you blame me? How often does a conversation completely revolve around you? It really was a cool experience, and in that moment, I felt like everything had happened for a reason. I won´t get in to all the nitty-gritty about what he had to say (I´ll save that for some night at the Abbey Trappist), but I will say that a lot of it rang true, so don´t be surprised if some night I bust out my own set of tarot cards and attempt to give you my own reading!
Everything was going great until our other friend took off and old Roberto started getting a little tipsy. Some of his ¨mannerisms¨were starting to become a bit more apparent, and quickly it became obvious that perhaps Robert wanted to be more than just my friend. I knew that the the night needed to end relatively quickly, as I hate to be the one to break people´s hearts, but fortunately it was getting late and my legit excuse to get back to the hotel was heeded. I told him that I´d try to give him a call the next day (I think Robert, in his mind, had some image of us going on some sort of couple´s retreat to the beach the next day), but instead of calling him back, I went ahead and got on the bus and went, oh, maybe like 400 miles away. Sorry, Robert! It´s not you, it´s me...lol
And that takes me to today. The bus ride was about seven hours in all and was pretty mellow. The bus itself was super swanky and this time, the driver, unlike pretty much every driver I´ve ever had before, DIDN´T have a death wish and DIDN´T want to take everyone with him to a firey death. That was a nice change of pace. I got in today around 2 PM, found a pretty cool hotel (thanks, Lonely Planet guidebook!) and again got myself pretty lost as I tried to find a Tex-Mex restaurant they had recommended. Totally worth the hour-plus it took me to find it. Oh, and I think that in this city of 700,000, I´m the ONLY gringo. I guess that´s not an entirely bad thing, as I´ve been stared down by most women, and even called ¨sexy¨ on more than one occasion, but I guess when you consider that Lonely Planet says San Pedro Sula has the reputation for being the AIDS capital of Central America, the compliments just aren´t as flattering.
Alright, that´ll do it for now. I´m off tomorrow to make the final three-hour leg to La Ceiba, the port town that´ll take me to Roatan on Sunday morning for a one-week stay on an island paradise, learning to scuba dive and driving my poor neurotic brain to the brink of insanity as I swim with sharks and have vivid images of them thrashing me to pieces. Good thing I brought my Xanax...
Adios!
El Gringo Grande
So anyway, here I am in San Pedro Sula, AKA the hottest, most humid town in the entire Universe. Doing the math, I´ve only been down in S.A. for about 36 hours, but they´ve already been pretty entertaining, as trips down to third-world countries usually are!
I´ll start with the obvious (since I already put it on FB like seventy times), which was the fact that by taking advantage of my wonderful friend EB´s ¨Friends & Family¨ status on American Airlines, I was able to fly down here for a whopping $125 dollars on first class. It really just doesn´t get much better than that. Thanks again, EEEBZ! :)
I got into San Salvador early yesterday morning, and due to the fact that the flight attendant on seemed intent on stuffing me with food and drink, I was exhausted. I probably only slept for two hours that night, so after landing, I had one objective and that was to get a hotel so I could nap. However, after driving through the city and realizing that San Salvador, like so many other Central American capitals before it, is just a congested, smoggy mess, I needed to get out ASAP. I made a spontaneous decision and went straight to the bus station and reserved my ticket to Honduras for early the next morning. Probably not the BEST idea I´ve ever had (and I´ve had, and will probably always continue to have, lots of bad ideas), but I´ll get back to that in a minute...
After booking my ticket, I found my hotel nearby and went to sleep for six hours. I awoke at about 4 PM, and feeling guilty (like I wasn´t even giving the capital, much less the entire country a chance), I went downstairs and naively asked the woman where I should go. She mentioned something that sounded good, so I went with her advice and headed out, looking for bus 42B. I went to the first ¨parada¨ I could find (bus stop) and waited for a while. While this was not a good use of time for me (since I found out later I was at the wrong stop), it did turn out to be a delightful mistake for the busloads of Salvadorans who got to gawk at me, and especially for the load of teenagers that got to mock me and yell various things at me. I did hear one kid say something about ¨tonto¨, which basically means ¨stupid.¨ Lucky they don´t go to TCK...lol
I waited there for about 30 minutes, actually kind of enjoying the attention, before the lady from the hotel came walking down the street and kindly guided me to the correct stop. I got on and headed about one mile up the way in super congested traffic to what turned out to be a mall. Feeling highly disappointed, and frankly ashamed of myself for being at a mall and being so quick to accept some pretty bad sight-seeing advice, I immediately decided to head back. ¨Since I feel like I know where I´m going, and since there´s a stupid amount of traffic, I think I´ll go ahead and walk¨is something like what went through my head...so I went with it. This is where things got a little ridiculous. As I walked back on busy streets, into traffic, with no sidewalks and exhaust from the one trillion buses spewing into my face, I thought that perhaps this wasn´t the best idea. I laughed to myself as I thought about how stupid I looked and my mind took me back to my childhood. As a kid, I remember playing ¨a game¨with my mom, whereby I would lay down in the back seat of our beloved ¨Hondy¨(a maroon ´84 Honda Civic that my bastard brother-in-law callously wrecked in MA some years ago...give him shit, again, Kelly) while my mom would attempt to ¨get us lost.¨ After maybe 10 minutes, I´d get up and then try to guide us back home. It was a hell of a fun time, and maybe my memory deceives me, but I thought I was pretty good at it. Well, it turns out that apparently that game has had a negative effect on me as I´m pretty much the most spatially-challenged person you could ever meet. Why I think I can, within a couple of hours of arriving, navigate a city of a million plus people I´ll never know. I´ve done this a million times before, but my inability to ¨give up¨or ask for directions keeps this phenomenon going. I guess in some ways it´s a challenge for me, but it´s funny because when I´m doing it, it´s anything but fun. However, I know I can always give up and jump in a cab, so the game continues. Thanks, mom, for trying. Turns out your son is just a little special in some respects, but you probably already knew that...
On the way back, and after succesfully finding my hotel, I decided to venture on in search of a pupusa (which is the El Salvadoran version of the quesadilla). I had heard the pupusarias were on literally EVERY street corner, but I´ll be damned if I couldn´t find one. As I wandered through the ¨Zona Rosa¨ (in every Central American country, it´s basically the part of the city where the more upscale bars and restaurants converge) in search of said pupusa, I realized that again I was failing and this time, just had to laugh. Seriously, who else but me wouldn´t be able to find one after being told they are EVERYWHERE? In the process, I passed by a bar not once, not twice, but three times before turning back and deciding that a dinner of beer would have to suffice. I was in there asking the girl behind the bar why I couldn´t find one when suddenly this guy appears on my right and joins the conversation. Now, I could really drag this on, but since I already do a pretty good job of being wordy, I´ll cut to the chase. He was a really nice guy and spoke impeccable English (which was a nice break even though I had only been speaking Spanish for less than half a day). He told me all about their culture, answered all my questions, etc. and was just an all-around good dude. A few minutes later, another guy who was there on work from Costa Rica joined into the convo and a few beers later, we decided to go out for some more drinks. I asked the first guy, Roberto, how long he was planning on staying out and he told me until the bars closed at 2 PM. It was then I realized that the 6:30 AM bus might be an issue...
Roberto told me that we´d be going to some ¨Bohemian bars.¨ Now, I don´t know that I´ve ever been to such a place, although I´ve heard of them. He explained that it was the type of place that attracted poets, artists, and people like Robert. Why, you ask? Because besides being a freelance graphic designer, Robert is a freaking tarot card reader. Seriously. Not being one to miss out on an opportunity to get my first ever reading, I asked him if he´d oblige me. And wouldn´t you know, he had them right in his fanny pack? Awesome! He had me shuffle them for a while, and then laid them all out and proceeded to tell me the ¨story¨of my reading, and I have to say, it was fascinating. Robert was a patient guy, allowing me to butt in and elaborate and make connections to just about everything he had to say about my life story. I think in the end, I did more talking than he did. But can you blame me? How often does a conversation completely revolve around you? It really was a cool experience, and in that moment, I felt like everything had happened for a reason. I won´t get in to all the nitty-gritty about what he had to say (I´ll save that for some night at the Abbey Trappist), but I will say that a lot of it rang true, so don´t be surprised if some night I bust out my own set of tarot cards and attempt to give you my own reading!
Everything was going great until our other friend took off and old Roberto started getting a little tipsy. Some of his ¨mannerisms¨were starting to become a bit more apparent, and quickly it became obvious that perhaps Robert wanted to be more than just my friend. I knew that the the night needed to end relatively quickly, as I hate to be the one to break people´s hearts, but fortunately it was getting late and my legit excuse to get back to the hotel was heeded. I told him that I´d try to give him a call the next day (I think Robert, in his mind, had some image of us going on some sort of couple´s retreat to the beach the next day), but instead of calling him back, I went ahead and got on the bus and went, oh, maybe like 400 miles away. Sorry, Robert! It´s not you, it´s me...lol
And that takes me to today. The bus ride was about seven hours in all and was pretty mellow. The bus itself was super swanky and this time, the driver, unlike pretty much every driver I´ve ever had before, DIDN´T have a death wish and DIDN´T want to take everyone with him to a firey death. That was a nice change of pace. I got in today around 2 PM, found a pretty cool hotel (thanks, Lonely Planet guidebook!) and again got myself pretty lost as I tried to find a Tex-Mex restaurant they had recommended. Totally worth the hour-plus it took me to find it. Oh, and I think that in this city of 700,000, I´m the ONLY gringo. I guess that´s not an entirely bad thing, as I´ve been stared down by most women, and even called ¨sexy¨ on more than one occasion, but I guess when you consider that Lonely Planet says San Pedro Sula has the reputation for being the AIDS capital of Central America, the compliments just aren´t as flattering.
Alright, that´ll do it for now. I´m off tomorrow to make the final three-hour leg to La Ceiba, the port town that´ll take me to Roatan on Sunday morning for a one-week stay on an island paradise, learning to scuba dive and driving my poor neurotic brain to the brink of insanity as I swim with sharks and have vivid images of them thrashing me to pieces. Good thing I brought my Xanax...
Adios!
El Gringo Grande
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