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