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