So, Brielle

My sister brings up a good point in her comment on the last entry, about the spider. I had totally forgotten about it, even though it was a monumental discovery at the time. Back when my bedroom was shaped like a cell at Guantanamo, I had the foot of my bed wedged up against the slant of the ceiling. I was in my early teens, I think, and taking a nap (although I don't think I took many naps then but. Whatever.) I woke because of a strange sensation, and as I opened my eyes, I noticed something clinging to the ceiling over my bed. It was a gifuckinggantic spider the size of small dinner plate (not a 16" pizza, you hyperbolator), black and brown striped, and moving at a pretty good clip toward exactly where my feet were. I tried to scream but nothing came out. The best I could manage was to roll off the side of the bed. I hit the rug and took off for the door and downstairs. I coughed out my story to my dad, who suggested we go back up to check it out, but I refused until I was properly equipped with the same bee-keeper helmet and face net that I would later use to protect me during my turtle job from clouds of mosquitos so thick you wouldn't believe me if I described them honestly. So, clad as I was in bee veil and sweatpants tucked into my socks, we burst back through my bedroom door. Me, I was fully expecting to tumble into a Shelob-sized web. Dad, I think, was a bit more incredulous. And what did we find on the other side of that door? We found Soccer, the cat. Licking her lips. I don't have to tell you what that means. It means she had just eaten something. Soccer had single-handedly dispatched this spider, head, legs and all, like a furry little superhero. She didn't leave a single hairy appendage, so naturally, nobody believed me. But Soccer and I know the truth of that one.
Another bed story- once I was lying in bed, when all of a sudden, I realized I was completely paralyzed. I couldn't move, I couldn't yell, I couldn't even breath. As far as I know, my heart wasn't beating. I tried to scream, over and over, for maybe 10 seconds, but no matter how hard I tried, exactly nothing happened. I didn't move even a millimeter, even though my brain was sending a jackhammer scream signal to my lungs and larynx. Once I realized that wasn't working, I started to freak out that I hadn't had a breath in a while. It was at that point that this sense of complete calm came over me. I don't know if it was from being a swimmer and being used to no air or what, but I just relaxed and tried to think. I figured out that if I could move anything, then I would be released and would be able to move everything. I picked what I thought would be the easiest thing to move- the end of my pinky finger- and concentrated on wiggling it, ever so slightly. I didn't force it, or scream the command, like I had been doing with the lungs. Just tried to move it a tiny little bit. I concentrated my will, but gently. All of a sudden, it twitched. The distal phalanx of my 5th digit twitched a tiny bit, but that was the key. It spread up my arm and on and across my entire body, releasing everything from paralysis. I gasped in a breath and then another and another and was so happy. And I really was awake the whole time.
Years later, my friend Dave brought up a story like this that had happened to him. He had told his dad about it, and apparently it is common in Chinese folklore (Dave is Chinese). The myth is that if you are trying to fall asleep, or have just woken up, and you have your arms folded across your chest, sometimes the Angel of Death will pay you a brief visit to remind you of your mortality. He comes and sits on your chest, pinning your arms down and making it so you can't move. Turns out, there is a whole bunch of medical literature on the phenomenon, which is known as hypnopompic paralysis, and has to do with the chemical paralysis that your brain initiates so it can pretend it's using the body during dreams without actually causing any movement. If you wake up just before or after dreaming, you can get stuck in the paralysis which is supposed to switch off when we are awake. Which explains most of my experience, except that I hope the brain doesn't chemically paralyze the diaphram while dreaming. So, this has to get added to the list of weirdest things.
How long are blogs going to persist? Are my great-grandkids going to google me and find this and discover what a potty-mouth I had? Google is definitely around for another 80 yrs, right?

Mo

We just got wired for wireless internet at our house, an occasion so joyous as to warrant a new posting. We've been borrowing from the neighbors since 2004, so in that spirit I am leaving our network unprotected as a means of returning the karmic favor. Please don't steal my credit card numbers (that goes especially for the dude next door who woke us up our first night sleeping in our new house, while my parents slumbered peacefully in the guest bedroom, by screaming over and over, "YOU'RE A FUCKING WHORE, YOU FUCKING WHORE!" and is apparently faking having cancer according to a subsequent conversation overheard, without much effort, a week or so later).
What I wanted to talk about was this amazing show we saw last night. We went to Andrew and Anne's Half Way to Derby Party last weekend (or, as Adam heard it, Half-Witted Derby Party), and they have a friend Davy from Ann Arbor who is an amazing dude. He founded a magazine called Found, where people send in stuff they've found blowing down the street that happens to be interesting. If it doesn't sound absolutely hilarious, poignant, touching and creative, then I haven't explained it well and you have to check it out for yourself: www.foundmagazine.com. Turns out, Davy was doing a show in Lexington last night (already been through Boston- was at the Burren in Sept), and Andrew and Anne invited us to check it out. Davy had teamed up with another guy, Frank- who was inspired in part by Davy's zine to come up with his own community art effort, Post Secret (www.postsecret.com -again, check it out)- to do this tour together. Post Secret is this dude Frank who asked people to send him their anonymous secrets on postcards. It can be a bit more intense and serious, although pretty funny too at times. We went last night, and it was mind-bogglingly awesome. I laughed til I cried, I sat and thought about life, I pondered, I fell more in love with Mariam- all that stuff. The format was kooky and kind of bush-league. Davy and Frank read their stuff, interspersed with Davy's brother Peter playing songs based on some of the Found stuff, interspersed with a tug of war contest and inflatable basketball tournament, while they all got slowly wasted onstage with a mix of liquor, beer and some florescent blue Alize. Davy is my new hero, right up there next to Ira Glass, who, it turns out, he actually works for. Davy is a radio personality, and has done 5 episodes of This American Life! He even sells a CD with all his TAL's on it, which I listened to tonight, and they are amazing (I bought $40 worth of schwag at the show). TAL has been kinda boring lately, with lots of old recycled shows, but all 5 of these Davy shows were unbelievably good and made me tear up and everything, and remember back to the best TAL's like the one with Alex, the homeschooled teenage Russian adventure junky. So I've been a bit inspired. I wanted to post the weirdest, most bizarre things that have happened to me, and invite all y'all to do the same, and we'll see if it gets on a roll. This is how Davy got started.
Part of what started this kick is that the weirdest event of my life occurred just a few weeks ago. Maybe it won't sound like a lot, but despite its simplicity, this event is the closest I've come to the paranormal. Shane and I decided to have a bit of a man-date -- to go biking at Capital View Park in Frankfort. We'd been there once before, the day after a going-away party for our friend Eddy, who was leaving for Alabama (Mississippi?) a few days after I arrived here. Anyway, on that occasion, I was eager to show off my mountain biking skills and my new bike, which was completely untested on the trails. I had made sure to bring my knobby tires, my biking shorts, etc., but somehow in the hubbub of packing, I had completely forgotten my helmet. It kind of killed the ride. We still went, but I was especially cautious the entire time- I didn't try anything risky, didn't ever go very fast. All in all, it wasn't the balls-to-the-wall biking experience I had been hoping for. However, it did remind me how much fun it is to mountain bike, especially on a great trail with a great buddy. So, on this second trip, I was doubly excited to show off and have a blast. I made sure this time to bring a helmet. The weather didn't fully cooperate. It was pouring in Lexington, but we figured we'd head out to Frankfort anyway and if it was totally flooded we'd just hit up a bar that Shane knew. But it wasn't totally flooded- it was soggy and drizzling but completely rideable. I had my helmet on and was on my bike hopping around in the parking lot while Shane finished putting on his gear, and then we were off. The first stretch was pretty flat and straight (with TONS of deer- all day, we easily saw 100+ deer in that tiny park), but then it comes to this steep, technical section. We both skidded down unsteadily. I ate shit multiple times, but it was fine. Then we were off again, cruising on winding singletrack through the beautiful rainy deer-filled woods. And then it happened. I felt the wind in my hair on a little downhill stretch. It felt deliciously cool, but somehow off. I realized I wasn't wearing my helmet! I stopped Shane, we talked it over. It was absolutely certain that I had started out with my helmet. He even thought I had it on one minute earlier when we had stopped for a second to strip layers. But we rode back and forth over the entire stretch of trail- the technical downhill, the winding singletrack, back to the car, and back and forth and back and forth, and there was no helmet to be found. Let me just interject here, that this is not like the old days of riding to Diamond Middle School when we used to take our helmets off and stash them in the Valsky's hedge or drape them on our handlebars because they weren't cool (and our moms always knew because they had a secret Helmet Patrol network of vigilantes watching out their windows for us along the route to school). I wanted my helmet, bad. I had already ruined one ride here by not having it. I wasn't purposely losing it so that I wouldn't be the dork wearing his helmet. I was desperately looking for it along the trail, both sides, riding slowly, over and over. It was gone. It had just disappeared! Poof! Right off my freakin head. One second it's there, next second I'm feeling wind in my hair. Weirdest thing that's ever happened to me.
(Mom and Dad, I do want to take this opportunity to tell you that I was lying about wearing my helmet that time when I rode to Concord Academy and Susan Plumb said she saw me without it on and I said well then she must be crazy. She wasn't crazy. I had stashed it in the woods along Wood St., because I was trying to impress the girls at CA and I was embarrassed to have helmet head and to be wearing it at all, and then I thought I would get in trouble and you wouldn't let me go back. That was dumb and I won't lie to you anymore. I'm sorry to you, and I'm sorry to Susan.)
The two runners up to that story for weirdest thing ever were the time I really needed 8 burgers from 1 pound of ground beef, but no matter how I stretched it, I could only get 7 reasonable patties. So I just put them on the grill, figuring the last person could eat hotdogs. But when I opened the lid of the grill to flip the burgers, there were 8! No joke, I almost shit myself. Then there was the time I was playing tennis at Center Courts in Lexington MA, which I've done maybe 13 times in my life, and I found a pair of blue checkered Umbro soccer shorts pulled through a link in the fence. I checked the tag on them, and in black sharpie was the name "Kissel" in my mother's handwriting style. I recognized them as shorts I had lost maybe 7 or 8 years previously. (Disclaimer- I'm not so sure about this story. Although I remember it clearly, it has a certain dream quality that I associate with other stories that I cannot get corroborated by other participants. Examples of these stories would be the one where I am in my sister's room, maybe 5 years old, and my father is holding me over his lap while my mother spanks me over and over and over and over. Neither parent will confirm this story. And then there is the one where the tree in front of Caitlin's house is covered with gigantic rainbow colored cocoon things that we later realized were her own turds, fastened to the bark with mussel-like stalks. This "memory" has the feeling of perhaps being confused with a bizarre dream (not that I have lots of rainbow turd dreams)). Anyway, if you have any weird stories or miraculous experiences, please share and I'll publish them in a magazine. It can be anonymous if you want. Seriously, this is gonna be awesome.

Instead of a million other things

I figured I have a million other things to do right now, so why not post a little blog? Ain't that the way of it. We have our histology midterm coming up on thursday. Histology, for those who don't know, is where you look at a bunch of blobs under the microscope. The more seniority you have, the more often you will be correct when you identify one of these blobs. If you are a department chair, you will be correct 100% of the time. Assistant professor- 98%, adjunct professor- 92%, all the way down to students, who are right between 60-80%, depending on how big your smile is (and by smile, I mean boobs). These blobs have no actual correlation to real life (I mean, they are microscopic- duh!), but you still have to memorize the arbitrary names that the department chair gives them, so that you can randomly assign one of these names to the particular blob with the arrow drawn to it on the exam. Again, it doesn't matter which name you choose, so long as it is from the proscribed list, because you will not be able to improve your percentage without a promotion or cosmetic surgery.
They say you have to get over how hard this stuff is, stop complaining and telling yourself and your (dwindling) friends how unfair it all is, and just get down to it. It's the same information that they've been teaching for thousands of years and those crusty old guys in the ubiquitous portraits hung down every hallway had no trouble memorizing it, so suck and deal. But what the hell fun is that? How much smarter am I than all those morons who just put their nose to the grindstone, if I can piss and moan and whine and still get around to memorizing huge lists of latin/greek/sanskrit names for every single goddamn fiber in the body and blob on the slide? Way, that's how much.
After the anatomy midterm, a few of us went out to the Red River Gorge (aka 'the Gorge' (or 'the Red' if you're a douchebag). We ate pizza and camped at Miguel's, the place at the gorge where you eat pizza and camp. Got its own little culture going on there. Then we did some climbing and I led for the first time. It was a fearsome 5.6. I took the rest of the weekend off from studying, too, and now I'm having trouble getting back into the swing. Mariam was sick yesterday- hopefully nothing serious. Tim and Amy had their little girl, Joleigh, on Fri night, and we have yet to see them. I should go try to learn these stupid cells for the test on thursday, or make an appointment for a "teeth whitening" ;-)

Med school blog?

I'm thinking about turning this into a med school blog, but I don't want to be 'that guy.' So I'm just going to write it as if it is notes to myself for the future, for when I write the med school admissions book that I'm gonna write, because I do want to be that guy. The book I'm writing is going to be kind of a response to the "Med School Confidential," "White Coat," etc books that I read when I was thinking about med school. Most of them were stories of fairly traditional students, either going straight through undergrad to med school, or coming from impressive biomedical engineering careers or some such, and all getting in to Harvard, where their stories start. My story is going to be one about the tortuous path that a mediocre student with no idea what he wanted to be when he grew up took to get into med school. It will be a book for all the non-traditional applicants out there- we are usually a footnote in those mainstream books ("A post-baccalaureate program can be a wonderful way to boost your GPA before reapplying"- that kind of bullshit). I was the guy who had to worry about every step of the way, because I felt like nobody had done it like I had before. I had a crappy undergrad GPA, I was told at Harvard Extension Post-Bac that there was basically no chance that I would get in with my GPA (Owen Peterson told me that he wasn't going to say anything was impossible, but...), I never did any research, I spent loads of time bumming around New York and New Zealand and Central America, without any specific job or focus to point to. When I started my Harvard Extension post-bac, my resume was: farm worker, traveller, summer camp counselor. So, there is no book for people like us yet, and I want to fill that nook.
Meanwhile, I'd just like to put down for my own memory what UK College of Medicine is like so far. I said earlier that I had my ass kicked in the beginning. I've since realized that I actually need to study or be in class about 40 hours/wk. And it needs to be real studying, for the most part, which means no Sox game on in the background. The thing that helped finally for anatomy was making notecards, which I've never done before really. First off, finding the info and translating it into bitesized pieces for notecards helped immensely, and then having the cards to quiz myself wherever I am is a bonus. I just did this for the second anatomy quiz, and even though I made the cards like 2 days before the quiz and therefore didn't get a chance to do a lot of self-testing/memorization, just having made them boosted my score by 100%, from 8/20 to 16/20. And now I have those cards for the midterm, which is in a week. We've got histology now, too, which has been much more manageable- more like a post-bac class (I can't compare to undergrad classes because a.) they were so long ago and b.) I never did any of the work there anyways) where you go to lecture and then study a day or two before the quiz. The third class we're taking is called 'Patient-centered Medicine,' and it is all about how to actually be a doctor. It is a great class, where we learn how to do the physical exam and take a history, as well as where we listen to all kinds of stories from real doctors about their work. I love it and look forward to it. But most people hate it because we don't have any tests for another 2 months, and they feel it takes away from studying for anatomy and histo. I tend to dislike those people, whose lives seem to revolve around studying or talking about studying, which tends to put me on edge and make me feel like I'm slipping behind even when I'm doing fine. So screw all you for stressing the rest of us out. Just chill out and go to PCM and stop whining- this is what we all want to be doing eventually (except for you few MD/PhD research freaks who will never lay a hand on a patient)(I also tend to feel like I should have twice the say of other students since I'm paying out-of-state tuition, which is double in-state, which is why I am justified in taking such a self-righteous tone). I feel the other way around- like anatomy and histo are a waste of time that we could be spending learning how to actually treat patients. Not because I don't think anatomy and histology are important, worthwhile things for a future physician to know, but because the level of detail that they teach and test is ridiculous and instantly forgotten. We should be learning anatomy and histology in broad strokes that will actually stay with us, instead of this pseudo-weed-out style flood of information that they try to drown and intimidate us with. Especially in histo. So it pisses me off when those knuckeheads complain about having to learn real medicine in PCM because it takes time away from their memorizing the amplification pathway of G-protein receptors. The other problem is that these are the only people you hear from, because the cooler people tend to be less vocal about all this school stuff- they just take it in stride and spend the rest of their time climbing or riding bikes or saving the world, and not being my friend, so I'm left with all the obessive-studying christian-fascist whackjobs (not you, Adam- you're cool).
I meant to blog all the responses to the kinds of things you're supposed to notice when you start med school. You're supposed to dream about your cadaver- I finally did today during a nap. Actually, it wasn't about my actual cadaver, but about my class, who had this body where there was some interesting thing going on in the liver or kidneys or something, and they wanted to cut into them and find out more. But I realized it was my dad's body, and I didn't want them to chop him up, and so I said something to everyone. And they all grumbled, and agreed not to cut him up, but I could tell they were pissed and disappointed and didn't understand what my problem was. And I dreamt I had to strangle my dog, Afon, and I could feel her little cartilaginous trachea and everything. It was a horrible nap. So I think the dad-cadaver thing has to do with how much thought we put in to the fact that these are the bodies of people, with families and everything. I always think, with each new dissection, whether I would want to donate my body to a med school, or have a family member donate theirs. On the one hand, it is just a vacated, useless body, and we really do learn so much from them as students, and we try to maintain a fairly respectful environment. On the other hand, it is a very intimate act to cut into somebody's naked, dead body and see their insides. I feel like we judge people a lot, based on how fat they are, whether they have gallstones or pacemakers or lung cancer, or even just unusual venous patterns. What kind of a person or family would let themselves or their loved one get into this kind of situation healthwise. And then I think of my own family and how people would be judging me based on my parents' bodies, or my own body- all the cadavers are old people, so they've been through a lot. If I had to say today, I would probably vote not to donate to a med school. Take my organs, but spare me the dissection table of a bunch of twittering 20 somethings.

Look at me

Wow, life is so easy now. I just pulled up my old blog, on my laptop, on a wireless network, while I'm just sitting here in the library (yeah, these days I can occasionally be found actually sitting in a library). And I was remembering how much more trouble it would have been to post down in Guatemala. And, after rereading (damn I am boring and long winded...) a bit, and realizing how easy it would be, I decided to post something. I've had a busy few weeks here.
I'm in med school, my wife's pregnant, and we're buying a house. I want to squeeze in here how absolutely excited I am about all this, especially the ectoderm in the oven part, before I start making fun of myself. I mean, if you know me from my old life, maybe from the ten minute breaks we used to take between double-block chem, or Friday nights in the Woods, or the Hovey Lane house or Burning Man, then maybe you are having a bit of trouble believing that I am talking about the same guy. In a way, I'm not. But we have the same name: Jake Danger Kissel. (Speaking of names, anybody have any good ideas for the spawn?) Saying those three life events are happening to me (all within a three week period, mind you) makes me feel kind of old. Like I might as well have said "Gee willickers, guys and gals, my knees started aching, I'm scheduled for a colonoscopy, and me and the missus invested in neighboring plots down at ol' Oaken Fairmeadow Glendale Granite Heights Cemetary." Actually, you could all probably have seen it coming when I started a blog, which, as everybody knows, is the beginning of the end.
Med school is hard. I know I told everyone, including myself, that it was going to be a breeze, that nothing could be as hard as working full time at the hospital, taking classes at night, and volunteering on the weekends. That it is only school, and out at noon every day, and so I would have plenty of free time. In actuality, I've found that I can have plenty of free time, along with an F- as a GPA. And here, a C avg is failing (which is shitty- if you get too many C's, they send you to some committee which decides if you have to repeat the year or not- there is no hard and fast cutoff). So, in order not to repeat my Dartmouth experience of shitting in a hole, jumping in, then spending the next 3.5 years trying to climb up the slippery walls, I have actually started studying my ass off. Which is why I can be found in the library, right now. When not here, I spend time with Mr. Bouncie, our cadaver (so named because of a tattoo on his arm that said Bouncie, in cursive, with the "i" dotted with a little heart...), trying to identify the flaps of jerky that we've reflected off his thorax and upper limbs. We've just finished dissecting the heart, which is amazing. Anatomy in general is awesome. At first it took some getting used to slicing up a dead person, but I can tell I'm comfortable now because the sight of those well-marbled muscles actually makes me hungry these days.
Buying a house is fun, especially when you're already as far in the hole as we are. What's another $100K? And that is how much our 3 bedroom place is costing us- eat your hearts out, Manhattanites.
Mariam is pregnant. I have to say, I still don't know anyone (maybe Mike and Emily?) our age who has had a kid on purpose. We were close, but we were planning on settling in here, buying the house, getting health insurance, getting Mars off the rock. Oh well. The worst part is that I'm taking embryology, which is pretty much following exactly the course of our pregnancy. Sounds great, you say? First, we learn about all the gajillion little things that happen as that little pile of ectoplasm develops- miracle of miracles that it happens at all. Then, we learn the name of the gajillion syndromes that you get if each of those little noodly appendages doesn't plug in exactly where it should. Then we look at pictures. I have something they call an "Embryology" textbook, that I paid $37 for. It is actually just a big dead baby picture book. It is a frigging horror show.
But really, it is so cool, being pregnant. She's got a little baby in there. It's gonna come out and grow up and call me Pa or Dad or Babba or something (assuming it doesn't have a foot where its mouth should be: podo-oro-switchesia), and drool, and smile, and listen to music (again, hopefully doesn't have podo-auro-rearrangia), and see the ocean for the first time. It's going to be born in Kentucky, in the South, and yet still be a Red Sox fan. It'll be all smooth and helpless and smell like babies smell. So, we're very excited, and feeling blessed and miraculous. And hungry. Well, Mariam is hungry, and I just use it as an excuse to eat more. We take a picture of her belly every Sunday- you can't see any difference yet, hardly. But she's gonna have one of those big old pregnant bellies that sticks way out and hopefully she'll show off. Kid's due in mid April, so I guess her belly might get cold if she's showing it off too much in the middle of winter. I'll post a picture when it's worth it.

Last One

So we're back, in the States, happy and just flushing the hell out of the toilets and going to drive thru's for iced coffee and watching the Sox on TV (Hey Mal, I saw them drop the flag at Fenway on the 4th...). There's lots of everything again, back here in the land of plenty. I know people always talk about how hard it is to reacculturate when you get back to the States after time abroad, but I think it's hard not to reacculturate. Hell, I'm reacculturating at the rate of about 5 pounds a week.
Anyway, we had a grand ol' time down there in Guatemala. Our spanish is pretty fluent, ish, and we're hoping to keep it that way by listening to Aventura non-stop. It's working so far. At this point I could easily say something very deep, too, about the suffering down there and the overabundance and greed up here, but I won't. It's good enough just to feel so lucky and blessed by all the riches in my life- my new wife and family and all my friends. And my iPod. We're not going to UC Davis, we're going to UKentucky, and right soon at that. We're packing as I speak (and by we, I mean Mariam). Everything is wonderful, it's wonderful, like that Johnny Mathis song. We're very excited to move to Lexington, Kentucky and start this new chapter in life. To the people we're going to be seeing there, we can't wait to hang out again. To the people we're leaving in Boston, well, we'll see you at Thanksgiving.
Love,
Jake and Mariam

Que chílero

In Cobán, a surprisingly nice little town. Been dealing with lots of administrative baloney with med schools, so any town with good internet connections seems nice to me. Ryan and his funny british friend Dan (ever met a brit who wasn´t funny?) are coming to meet us tomorrow, so we can go on to Semuc Champey, do some swimming in the stepped pools there, as well as hopefully a candlelit cave tour, where you have to swim through underwater tunnels from one pool to the next (yeah, I´m not sure either how that works with the candle). I say hopefully because Mariam has flat out refused to go on anything that requires holding your breath just for mere survival, and Ryan has recently seen a movie about a group of people that got sealed into a cave long enough ago to have since evolved into whiskered, eyeless, albino freaks who are constanly hungry for human flesh, so he´s a bit iffy on the idea. And I would have been fine on my own, until effing Ryan told me about this effing movie. After Semuc Champey, we´ll head up to Tikal, where Ryan has promised as his wedding present to put us up at the nice hotel. After that, we´ve changed our tickets to come home so we can have a little time in Lexington before potentially moving across the country to Sacremento for UC Davis, which starts July 30th.
This Dan character is quite funny (I find myself using British mannerisms myself after hanging out with him for a bit). He´s a 3rd year med student (med school takes 6 years in Britain, but you don´t have to go to undergrad first). One story he had involved waking up, the morning after going out big. He woke up in that strange way that you do, after really tying one on, very early but ravished by hunger and unable to sleep anymore because of it. He set out into the streets to see what there was to eat, and found one of the ubiquitous orange juice stands. There was even a little grill out in front of it, smoking as the charcoal came to life. So when he was asked if he´d like his orange juice with an egg, he quite fancied the idea- fresh squeezed juice with a nice little fried egg to answer his stomach´s craving for something a bit greasy. Of course, he wouldn´t have told the story, and I wouldn´t retell it, if that was what they meant. He was handed a tall glass of juice with a raw egg cracked on top. I like to think that he´s watching them squeeze the juice, pour it in to one of those ice cream sundae glasses that they use, while all the while Dan is kind of watching with one eye and dreaming about all the fun things he´s going to do for the rest of the day. He watches disinterestedly as they lift a fresh egg, probably stolen from under the chicken only an hour ago at most, with its little bits of turd and straw still clinging. He doesn´t see a pan or anything, but he´s still not worried, these people are professionals. As they go to crack the egg on the rim of the glass, Dan´s hungover med-student brain perks up a bit, and he lifts his arm in a motion to stop them, searching among the eight words of spanish that he knows for the silver bullet that will keep the edge of the glass salmonella free. Then horror stops him in his tracks as they plop that egg right into his nice, fresh, juice. Now his hand raised in protest looks like it is reaching to take the drink that he did, after all, order. The way he explained it, he maintained complete composure, nonchalance, even James Dean cool, as he poured the whole thing down his throat without a blink.
He said nothing has ever set him so right, for a hangover. He swears by it now. He´s even out at the stand, imbibing his drink of choice, on off days.
The other drink story I have is as follows. Conchi, my old Casa Xelaju teacher, explained to me the tried and true method of producing tons of breast milk. I mean gobs, heaps, unrestrainable floods of the stuff. Actually, she can tell which mothers have used this recipe by the height of their children as they grow. What you do is, the day after you give birth, you cook up a Moza, which is the national dark beer here, with cinnamon, on the stove. You have to use cinnamon stick, not powder, and you have to drink it when it is as hot as you can possibly manage. You do this before bed for the first 6 days after birth, and then you will have more milk than sexteentuplets could drink. I thought, hmm, that´s nice, maybe we´ll see what Mariam thinks about that some day, and I just went right on about my life. It turns out, that everyone in Guatemala knows this, to the point that if you are seen drinking a Moza, it means you´re working on your milk res. Moza happens to be my new favorite beer, because everything else is piss. Now I know what all that sniggering has been about at the bars...
Remember how Delta is the bane of my existence? How I failed math my senior year in high school because of them, and it´s been all downhill since? They´ve managed another twist of the knife. I called up to change my return flight, and after being on hold for the better part of a Sox game, I was told that in Guatemala you can´t change your flight over the phone. You have to go to Guatemala effing City to do it in person at the Delta office there. Are you kidding me? We´re, like, a few Google employees kids away from being able to beam ourselves to the moon, and Delta can´t even change a ticket over the phone? No. So we cancelled our trip to Mexico, which was mostly just to leave Guatemala and reenter 3 days later in order to get a new visa, and instead head to Guate City where we could go to the Immigration office for a new stamp, which is reported to be a horrid, miserable epic of line-waiting that often takes three days in itself and people who have done it say it´s worth just leaving the country, really, worth about anything, to avoid. And we could change our tickets at the stupid Delta office. We woke at 3am to get the 4am bus, and were in Guatemala by noon. When we finally found the Immigration office, which had moved, in the craziness that is Guate City, the lady told us that the stamp we got when we reentered from Honduras was valid, even though there is supposed to be some new law that says Honduras, Salvador, Nicaragua and Guate were all on the same visa. We didn´t argue, though. And we managed to get screwed by Delta into having separate flights a day apart, on the 25th and 26th of June. So we´ll see you then.
One more quick story about chicken buses and their ayudantes. These are the people that manage the crowds, that live by the axiom that ´there is always more room,´ collect money, and deal with baggage (which as often as not is alive- we saw a flock of turkeys on the roof of the bus in front of us on the way to Guate the other day, waddles flapping in the wind). They also have the life expectancy of veal. Their preferred seat is hanging on by a pinkie out the door, but they can also be seen crowd surfing through the bus to collect fares, climbing up the back ladders with cattle resting on their shoulders, doing amazingly complicated sums in their heads instantaneously, and sprinting after the bus then leaping in impossible arcs right through the front door, coming to a perfect rest with their pinkie back on the survival bar bolted above the doorway. On one particularly crowded bus, aftering fighting his way to the back to collect the fares while the bus snaked along a winding mountain road, the ayudante didn´t feel like fighting back through the way he had come. So he snapped open the back door and disappeared, just as the bus started pulling 10 g´s around a hairpin turn. I thought he was a goner for sure, with the emergency door just flapping back and forth, but, I kid you not, his foot appeared in the window at the front of the 75 ft. converted schoolbus 3 seconds later, and he popped in through the front door like a gymnast dismounting from the uneven bars. I tried to figure out the physics of this for the rest of the trip. As far as I could tell, there was no way he could have gone from back to front in such a short time, at least on foot. I think he may have timed it so that as the bus approached the hairpin turn, he leaped from the top of the bus, and as the bus rounded the corner, he landed again, perfectly, in the front door (you may have to draw yourself a little force vector diagram to picture this). Frigging bus ninjas. Adios.

We can't seem to ditch this place. Not that we would want to, since Xela has everything we're looking for. Except for vacant apartments that aren't made of particle board and plastic bags. We arrived yesterday, from the Mountain School, and after meeting up with Ryan (an amazingly smooth procedure- he emailed where he was staying, we emailed him a time to meet, and then we stuck to the plan. Harder than if we had cellphones and cars, I guess, but much easier than smoke signals or pony express), we searched out our favorite watering hole(s). Fun having a "favorite" anything in a city 10,000 miles and two international borders away from home. Today we've been looking around for more of a permanent place to stay here, with no good luck so far. Yoga House and Sabor de India are full, as are the other gringo haunts. However, we have run in to about a jillion acquaintences and friends, on the streets, everywhere, including a group of Kansan catholic college girls who miraculously found themselves at the Mountain School this past week. Just for some background, this is a school founded in an area formerly dominated by Marxist guerrillas and currently dominated by people either slowly starving to death working in miserable conditions for slave wages on plantations owned by the rich, or barely not starving to death by organizing themselves into various cooperatives and communes. Everybody remembers scores of people from their towns or families that were disappeared during the civil war for being accused of supporting the guerrillas, or simply for walking home from work too late at night. In short, a school in an area of fairly progressive political leanings. In roll the Kansans, with their huge wheeled suitcases full of fancy clothes and grooming products. Overhearing one conversation about local news, they mentioned "we don't think about politics back home, why should we think about it here?" They were most captivated by the beauty pageants reported in the papers (every Sunday paper is full of models in bikinis- this way the evangelical men can get some girly pictures in the guise of "news"). They complained about everything, all week, including the food they were served and the spanish instruction they were receiving, and left early Friday before graduation. They weren't horrible people, just exhausting, and now they have positioned themselves at strategic intervals all over Xela so that it is impossible to walk more than a block without running in to one of them and having a strained conversation through a fake smile. That is the general trend here- it is becoming more and more gringofied the closer we get to the summer season.
The Mountain School finished up awesomely. We had a few more adventurous pickop rides to Colomba, through the most incredible mountain scenery, including one ride in the rain where Nana and I were hanging on to the outside bar in back, standing on the slippery round back bumper, me feetsies clad in my new Brasil flip flops (I had to throw the last pair out after buying them at the Chichi market- awesome leather flops with colorful patterns woven into the footstrap- after we discovered in Antigua, with the sisters, that none of us had stepped in shit, it was just the way my flops always smelled), as the truck caromed down the winding, pot-holey mountain road. The bed of the truck was filled with campesinos coming home from work, standing like sardines huddled under the tarp that was keeping off the pouring rain. By the end my hands had clawed up around the bar so that one of the guys had to pry my fingers off for me. Mariam also had a watery adventure when they lost the path on the way back from a remote waterfall they had hiked to. Luckily Jorge had his machete and blazed a new trail down the steep mountainside until they popped out on the highway.
We're now planning our visa-renewal trip to Mexico, after which I think we're going to meet Ryan in Coban, check out the cool stepped river their before heading to Tikal, and maybe returning by way of Lago Izabal (we missed the north side of this lake on our last trip east). There is also a six day trek from Nabaj to Todos Santos in a few weeks, and Todos Santos might be a nice place to hang out for our last few weeks doing some last minute volunteering.
Miss you all. I'm admitted to UC Davis, which really just confuses things, so we'll have to find out a few more specifics before we know where we'll be living when we get back.

Rainy Season

It´s really something just how many indigenas live in Guatemala. Mayans are the majority here, and it is something that you really feel. A large percentage of Mayans, especially in the smaller towns and pueblos, along with the bigger highland cities, wear the traditional traje. The suit is really colorful- for the women, it is a skirt woven by hand with bright colors and an embroidered blouse with brilliant colors and funky themes characteristic of each area. The women also wear a scarf folded on their heads, often with dangling tassles. The men, if they aren´t simply wearing jeans, shirt and cowboy hat, wear bright, striped, hand-woven outfits topped off by a hat you might find on a Venician boat guy. Now that we´re out in the mountains, in the highland farming country, I´ve just been blown away by how much ancient, native culture there is, a culture that is a couple thousand years old. Compare that to Native Americans in the States, where you can still find a few pockets of the old cultures, but they are fenced onto a handful of scattered reservations or buried under casinos. It´s really stunning here. The school we´re studying at is surrounded by coffee fincas, with two villages nearby where we go to eat our meals with indigena families. Partly with the help of the school, and mostly by fighting tooth and nail, people have cement block houses with running water (as of 2 weeks ago- big party, with, I would guess, a shitload of water balloons). Some have electricity. The two families I´ve eaten with have dirt floors and cook over firewood. I´ve seen something like this before, in Kenya, but the cool thing here is that we get to know the townspeople a bit. Instead of just getting an eyeful of grubby children rooting around in their trash-filled yards and thinking ¨what a pity,¨ we get to see the other side, the side where the people are working hard with the tools at hand, raising their families, and having fun to boot. I´m also learning a lot: you don´t eat duck eggs, just chicken eggs and ducks; a machete can be used for anything- lawnmower, axe, harvesting tool, musical instrument, razor for shaving, and chew toy for infants; the word for goat is cabro, not cabrón.
We went to the championship game of Xelaju vs. San Marcos, and sat with the Marquense fans even though our hearts were past the row of cops bristling with machine guns and over the barbed-wire fence with the maximally crazed Xela fans, whose team won 4-1. Also, I will never forget my raincoat again, after enduring about 3 hours of downpour with nothing to keep me warm. We couldn´t even work up a sweat by cheering, since the bums were so far out of the game within the first few minutes. But again, it was an experience. Think Boston after the World Series, even in San Marcos where their team lost.
Time to go, peace out until next time.

Our Second Home

We´re back in Xela, and driving in along familiar streets and seeing all kinds of things and even people we recognized, while in Central America, was a heady feeling. Now we´re settled back in to the first hostel we stayed at when we got here, in the exact same garage converted to a room by pinning a comforter over the garage door windows and dragging two beds in. We ate at the great little taco place called Tacos, No Mas that actually does have mas, and now we´re in to the secret, good, fastly-connected internet place that only costs a buck an hour. So, I have the ´gameday´ thing for the second game of the double header on in the background, and it´s not even slowing my roll. I love Xela.
We´ve been attracting single travellers lately (Joost, I was about to take a stab at you then realized that I gave you the blog address so maybe I´ll pull my punches. But I take stabs at everyone, so it would have been nothing personal). Joost, a Dutch fellow diver, came with us all the way from Utila to Antigua Guatemala, with a few days in Copan Ruinas, Honduras. We had a great time with company, and since Joost had been through there, he had some good insights on where to stay and catch buses and stuff. Just didn´t leave a lot of make out time with three of us in one room, combined with his 9pm bedtime (just 15 min. after Mariam´s). Anyway, this time on the ferry back from Utila to La Ceiba, Mariam didn´t throw up on herself or me, or at all actually. Then we saw the amazing ruins of one of the biggest Mayan cities of it´s time (in the 7-8oo´s) at Copan. They just go on and on, with huge trees and forests growing up between, on and over them. I thought I saw a quetzal for a minute, but I didn´t actually know what a quetzal looked like so figured any bird with some green on it and a longer than usual tail might be one, until I saw a picture of one near the entrance to the park and it was nothing like what I saw. Also, the ruins are kind of scattered on these huge lawns that are neatly trimmed, and I just wanted to say something about lawns. For the most part, they are cut here, by hand, with machetes. I thought that stupid push mower that Paula used to make me use to cut her lawn, that had the stupid freewheel on it that, when you pulled the mower backwards, completely stopped the 20 lb. spinning blades which took a lot of energy for 12 year old me to get spinning in the first place. It was a safety thing so the 12 year old boy you hired to mow wouldn´t mangle his feet, but it was a huge pain in the ass. There is no safety mechanism for these guys, swinging their machetes in a perfect arc exactly 4cm above the ground, ending up with a beautifully manicured lawn. I hope that´s not how they cut the grass at Copan Ruinas, because it looks very tiring.
Next we went back to Antigua, which has become our hub for travelling. I had had a horrible hankering for McDonalds, even after we had a long discussion with Joost about its evils, and they caved and came with me. Mariam got a Cajita Feliz, and refused the accompanying Pretty Polly doll (boys get Ninja Turtles, which are hugely popular here but only allowed you if you have a penis). I got a double Big Mac. That scratched my four-patty itch. Then today we chicken bused it to Xela, on the way meeting a guy from Massachusetts, going from Antigua to Xela and then the Escuela de la Montaña (what we´re doing) who also had to get a new passport right before he left because he put his through the laundry. It´s like the land of frigging coincidences here. He proceeded to get pickpocketed and so we´re helping him out with tuition. Ma, you should expect a check in the mail one of these days (I was right on the Generosity chapter in my self-help book when he hit us up for the cash. What did I say about coincidences?).
We´re heading up to the Mountain School for 2 weeks, in Columbo, where it´s a lot quieter and more Mayan. Looking forward to going back to school, to having everything taken care of in terms of eating and sleeping, and in getting steeped in Guatemalan culture. This school is in a former guerrilla hotbed, and is known for being a little revolutionary in flavor, in terms of the afternoon activities they offer and stuff. I´m looking forward to that.

finally

Jake has had the blog market cornered for awhile now. we had the half way point of our trip a couple of days ago so i figured it's time. i finished the scuba course and am officially addicted, just like the crazy manic island man who taught me how to do it said i would. i was scared to take the class at first, talked to zanna, brielle and angela about it and they agreed that it was crazy, who would want to do that? it's like torture they said. i remembered the time when jake made me go diving in Fiji about 3 times as deep as i would be able to go after i took the beginner's course and i had to agree with them. but i'm trying a new thing in my life where i don't want to be afraid anymore. so i spent some time thinking about it, separating out the fear from the rest and decided that seeing a whole other part of the world that you can't otherwise see couldn't be bad. and the second me was right, it is thrilling, even without the nitrogen narcosis. just the coral alone blows your mind. my favorite thing is how all of the rules are different under water, all the things you thought were constants are no longer. like..people breathing under water, first of all. Rule number 1> fish don't fly> then there are the flying fish that don't just jump out of the water they are like birds that soar forever above the water. fish that fly. rule number 2> you are whatever sex you are born as. not true anymore. parrot fish are all born female and then the biggest one becomes a male and fiercely protects it's position so that other females don't become males. rule number 3> girls have the babies. while male seahorses are the ones who carry the babies, and everytime they give birth the female goes and impregnates them again. i love it cause it just goes to show that there are no set rules, everything is a variable that evolution can play with. turns the world upside down.
i don't think that the scuba place was ready for me, i think that they are used to hippie travellers who go out drinking all night before class and don't understand anything. i threw my long neglected swarthmore self into the course, it was my life at stake after all, and memorized every detail of the book. the instructor promises everyone that if they score a perfect score on the final exam he will by them ice cream. so i got to eat carrot cake and flaming ice cream while everyone cheered at the bar the night after the exam. the guy also misheard me and thought that i said i was going to medical school, so he would ask me all the time about the physiology of diving and stuff and after he had told everyone else that i was a doctor i couldn't reveal that i was just a silly youth worker with no job, so i had to pretend like i knew what apnia was and stuff. stressful.

my instructor, the pirate, invited jake and i over for dinner the last night on the island and in his craziness really made me think about some things. first of all he had fascinated me from when i first met him, he's like an island version of my brother Noah. he has way too much energy, can't sit still, and can sell anything to anyone. he has so much respect for things that make money, and you can tell he's so proud of himself when he can get someone to do something. he is also a self7proclaimed pirate which means that he drinks too much and smokes too much weed and can't be tamed despite the constant labors of his wife? girlfriend?. so, it always amazes me to see how different personalities manifest in different situations, if Alfred were born into my family i think he would be making tons of money banking in new york, but as an islander he's a pirate. it follows that he has a heavy dose of respect for the US of A. and we had a long drunken, on his part, conversation about the US and about how Americans feel about their country. He was very upset because he felt like Americans had the liberty to criticize our government, which he envies and thinks we should definitely keep doing, but that now that's all we do. "I have never met people who think so poorly of their country as Americans do" He said about 50 times. He definitely meets a certain type of American, but I still think he's right. and it made me think of MLK, of course, and how, despite everything that he was fighting against, never lost faith in America. He recognized the potential and had a vision for what it could be. Alfred made me realize that I don't have a vision anymore for what America could be, so of course all I do is criticize, and it's directionless because i don't even have something that I'm pushing towards really. So, that's what i'm going to be thinking about for a little while.

PICTURES! (I hope)

Try this link to my Picasa web album:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jake.kissel/WatermelonTravelsII
I'll put captions and a few more pics up next time I have 2643 minutes to spare.

From the Bottle

That's the coolest thing about being in any country besides the US- coke and everything comes in glass bottles. Even beer, and all those amazing Fanta flavors that they had in Kenya, like passion-fruit and mango. They don't have all the amazing Fanta flavors here, although they have fruits enough to inspire good ones. I wish I could remember the names of all the funky fruits they have here: there is this bite-sized fruit that you eat with salt, tastes sour and sweet, and then salty, and it's green and then more red when riper. I like that one. I hate papaya. At first I was trying to eat it, but now I've just given completely up, and ask specially that it not be served to me because I'll barf if I even smell it now. There were these weird fruits that we kept seeing in the markets and trees in Rio Dulce, that looked like a big, wooden pear. I think the lady said they were called zapotes, which also happens to mean "shoe." She said they were so good, that I had to try one, that they tasted like papayas except much stronger. Shoe, indeed. I didn't try one. Anyway, all the soda and beer comes in those awesome glass bottles here, with the little worn rim where the bottles knock and rub each other when packed together in pallets during their long, long lifespans. Seems very environmentally friendly, to reuse bottles like that. But it would never fly in the US. People would get freaked out that the bottles are obviously used, even though they are certainly cleaned and sterilized, and plus, what would we throw out after we were done? We can hardly consume a product unless we get to peel the plastic off the box, open the box to find the bag inside, then eat the ounce of whatever inside, open the plastic wrapped free toy/piece of garbage inside that bag, and then throw the whole mess away to let someone else deal with it. It is refreshing to be refreshed while avoiding that whole cycle (although the little industry that has people dumping drinks into plastic bags with straws, so that they can collect the deposit for the reusable glass bottle, sidesteps every benefit and adds its own trash problem to the equation), but now I find myself drinking 4 or 5 carbonated beverages a day, where before I drank 0.
I'm at the second internet cafe of the day, after spending over an hour at the first place downloading all my pictures to the desktop only to find it was impossible to install the software to upload them to this blog or anywhere, as well as to burn them to cd. Now I'm at the next place, where I made sure I could download the software first, only to find after the hour of downloading the pics again that uploading 425 pics in 'largest' format was going to take aproximately 2643 minutes. Then the computer crashed, so I started over again, this time using the smallest format for only a few pictures, which started out taking 15 minutes, but the counter kept going up, until it hit 150 minutes. So I'm just doing a few, and it's taking forever, so I figured I'd write a little while I wait, which is probably slowing it down but what the hell. See how hard life on a tropical island can be?
Tonight, after Mariam finishes her first few dives to practice all the technical skills, we're going to get sushi and play poker at the bar. I dove on a huge Halliburton wreck today, and did a big, long drift dive. Last night we did a night dive, where I saw a moray, an octopus, and a bunch of sleeping fish. Fish sleep resting on the coral, not moving even when you shine a light right on them. Plus there were these little nematodes and bitsy fishes that were attracted to the light beam, and they would swarm so thick it was uncomfortable at times. They'd fill your ears and ping off your mask and face and get stuck between your fingers. But if you shined the light on the coral, little polyps would shoot out, grab the worms, and suck out their insides right while you were watching. It was a great dive.
I really wish the pictures were easier to post, because they tell an amazing story without me gumming it up with too many words. I might try putting them on a disk and sending them to the States with someone whose going that way, to mail to my house when they hit US soil, and then have my dad post them.

Happy Birthday

Happy birthday to my sister, who is now 25. Just when you're about to catch up to me, I get another year older too. Guess I'll always be 3 years older. Happy surgery to my dad. Sounds like everything went as good as it could have. And they'll have that catheter out in no time. Happy Mother's Day to my mom, and happy anniversary to my parents, too. Write me if I missed you. Happy Beckett going for 7/0 (there's no dash key on this keyboard/ that's gonna cramp my style).
Chilling out on this island, Utila. You can see the mountains of Honduras' mainland from here, and great stars and sunrises/sets. Actually, I know the sunrises well, because my watch somehow got set back to Boston time, so I've been up for them, and pissed, too, because everyone else in my class keeps coming 2 hours late to everything. Really, I figured it out after the first time it happened, but not before I woke my sorry ass up at 4.30am and stood on the dock for two hours in a tizzy while I got the holy hell bit out of me by the dawn mosquito bumrush. Then everyone came and we went on the mother of all dives. I haven't been diving since Victor and I went for lobsters this past fall, and before that not since Fiji in 2003, and so for my first dive, we had a nice easy little jaunt to 40m (that's 130ft, the absolute deepest you're ever allowed to go without, well, without imploding). With a swimthrough, which means a frigging cave, at the bottom. It was absolutely fantastic, but I was a bit freaked out on the boat beforehand. We started down, and down, and down some more, and all I could concentrate on was following the instructor and clearing my ears. I didn't see anything. Then I was the second one into the cave, behind the instructor, which was filled with these little balls of schooling minnows, which you just had to swim right through, and reaching coral arms and colors and who knows whatall nasties in the nooks and crannies. I just followed the fins in front of me and tried to look unappetizing, and then, after a left turn, there was the light at the end of the tunnel. Closer and closer until wheeee, out into the dim light of the wicked deep. I could tell I was starting to get 'narcked' a bit (nitrogen narcosis, a diver's high that comes from having nitrogen forced into solution in your blood and brain, and that makes you feel loopy and, well, really good). My bubbles, because of the pressure or the narcosis, sounded like breaking glass, but pleasant. Actually, they sounded like icicles breaking off and then sliding away down a river of ice, tinkling along above me, defying gravity. Diamonds, maybe, in the sky, with Lucy. Okay, so I was definitely stoned on nitrogen. Then we cruised along, and looked at all the ridiculously brilliant fishes and corals and sponges and crawling unidentified things, and I got comfortable and actually started to notice things. Diving is funny, because you see all these incredible, mind blowing things, at an overwhelming pace, and you just want to grab everyone and show them and they want to do the same thing. But you all have big ol' regulators jammed in your mouth, and masks over your eyes and nose, so everyone has the exact same expression. It's kind of a serious expression, kind of stern, because the muscles are tensed holding the mouthpiece in. So you see some florescent technicolored oompa loompa coral crab, and you're so excited you can't believe it, and you turn to your buddy with wide eyes and point, and he just stares back, a stern expression on his face. Maybe you get a little nod. And what he has seen was you, pointing, and looking very stern and kind of angry, scaring him and the oompa loompa coral crab. And you go along like this for, like, an hour, trying to remember everything so that you can gibber about it back on the surface, and then you get back up, and everyone takes off their masks and you can see their faces again and everyone says "How was it?" and everyone just answers "Oh, it was great." And that's pretty much it, and all the specifics are forgotten or not talked about, and just kind of remain part of the allure and mistique of the deep, waiting until next time.
Mariam is doing the open water course, and I'm doing the advanced course, and hopefully she'll like it and we'll do a few dives together at the end. She's got a great instructor and it's a great outfit, so it should be fun. And the island is cute, our bedroom is more sauna than bedroom, but the food is good and the locals speak spanish and that funky english of the islands, and there are great views and cays and blue waters all around.

Forgotten unforgettables

In a really nice internet cafe, with a/c and ergonomic stuff. Actually, maybe ergonomic for a Honduran, so I´m kinda contorted using it, but like I said, a/c. So I´m happy. Plus, I´m completely healthy now, except for maybe a few malarial protozoans spreading through my blood. Mars and I never bothered to take the profilaxis (I just did spellcheck to see if profilaxis was spelled right (figure I better look like I know how to spell the medical terms...) and every single word was highlighted, except for ´I´, because, I think, it´s a Honduran spellcheck. Go google) so we´re just trying not to get bit, which hasn´t worked out perfectly. I guess we´ll start taking the pills today, but they say to start 1-2 weeks ahead of time, and we´re not even going to be here for that long, I don´t think. Although we´re considering a trip into the Moskitia, although Andrew and Anne have already done it, like everything we want to do, although Mars says that´s fine, Jake, what are you so worked up about? Ít´s not like you´d be the first person ever in there, anyway. True. Anyway, if we do that, we definitely need the malaria pills.
I forgot to mention how Brielle and Mars and I rented motorcycles in Antigua. It was awesome. We took them through those crazy cobblestone streets, dodging horses and deranged cabbies and stopping constantly for speed bumps, which are everywhere, because they are absolutely the only traffic regulator that centroamericanos respect. There are no traffic cops, stop lights and signs are at best noticed, if not totally ignored, and living creatures, from dogs to children, might as well be invisible. But speedbumps, man, earn a screaching halt and then a comically slow advancing of each set of tires over it. So that´s funny. Another funny thing is how the showers give exactly the opposite temperature from what you want. When you want a hot shower, there are these giant showerheads with dubious electrical wiring twisting all around them, that are meant to heat the water just before it comes out of impossibly small holes. I´m surprised we´ve survived this long. Brielle managed to get ours to spark and start a small electrical fire at a hotel in Antigua, without herself being electrocuted, after which, thankfully, it stopped working completely. Now here in Tela, where the air temp is over 100º and the ocean is in the high 80´s, the coldest water you can get from the shower is a lukewarm blast that would have been welcomed in Xela or anywhere else but here.
Anyway, we took the motos to a beautiful little coffee finca nearby, where we sat and had some great coffee, and then we went back. It scratched an itch.
Heard from UMass that I´m on the waitlist, and from Albany that I got in there (even though I had sent an email telling them that their interviewers are jerks and I would never go there just a week or so before. Maybe I should try that with UMass...?). Still waiting on UC Davis, although I don´t think we´d go there over Kentucky. It was nice to here something from UMass that wasn´t ´no´ but still a little hard. I guess it makes checking email that much more exciting. And c´mon, could there be a better place to wait it out? I mean, we´re going scuba diving on a tropical island for the next week, and then maybe, if we feel like it, taking a boat trip or a rafting trip into the jungle.
Yesterday we went to the old United Fruit Company experimental reserve, where they tested out all the different fruits they could grow here and honed their wage slavery skills and exploitation methods. Now it´s a park maintained by the Honduran gov´t, very pretty. We wandered and swam and tasted weird fruits against the advice of the signage. We even followed Royal deep into the jungle in search of some monkeys that we had heard from the dirt road, after which he thanked us for trusting him. Damn, we did until you said that, dude.
Gotta get a move on if we´re going to catch the the 4:30pm ferry to Utilan from La Ceiba. We haven´t woken up before dawn for, like, two days now, so we´re getting reaccustomed to the late start.

Salama Safari

Life on the road is much more fast paced than Xela- every day new adventures. After climbing Pacaya, we took off for Lago Atitlan a day early. Had a great ride through the country, down through a huge ravine filled with a Colorado type landscape. A few hours later we were in Panajachel, the gateway to the lake. Most of the twelve little pueblos, named for the 12 apostles, are accessible only by boat. Mariam haggled for all she was worth to get the shoeless, starving teen to drop the price of the boat by $.46, and off we went, to Jaibalito and our beautiful hotel. Casa del Mundo is pasted on to the side of a steep mountain, brimming with flowers and stone terraces and patios. And stairs. We definately burned more calories than we ate, even though the chef served these amazing, family style dinners that we ate the hell out of. From the patios, or the wood-heated hot tub that we reserved one night (and had to share for a while with a bunch of bitter Peace Corp vollies who left a bit of their funk in the water and atmosphere), you could look out over maybe the most gorgeous lake in the world. Supposedly Antoine St. Exupery wrote Le Petit Prince while staying here. Remember how the little Prince lived on a planet with three volcanos? Me neither, but I said yes when asked, and Lago Atitlan has 3 volcanos towering above it, giving it these wicked steep sides perfect for jumping off and putting posh hotels on (and Charlie Sheen´s vacation house, of which we had many theories). Also, remember that part when the little prince asks everyone what that funny shape is, and all the old people with no imagination say ´a hat´and really it´s a snake that swallowed an elephant? Me too. Well, there is this big formation/mountain that looks exactly like the picture in the book. The landscape is this mixture of tropical flowers and verdure with little farms and towns and a bit of drier vegetation, with the biggest, bluest lake smack in the middle. We had a great couple of days mellowing out at Casa del Mundo, jumping off balconies into the lake, lounging in hammocks, taking some sun, and developing bulging quads on the stairs. Next we went to another little luxury hotel in the half hippie enclave of San Marcos. More eating and swimming and chilling and running away from these horrid black scorpions that seemed to have their kingdom in Susannah and Angela´s patio. We also found some really high rocks to jump off, and some really deep water to drop Brielle´s goggles in and test Jake´s diving abilities in. Then back again to Antigua, where we attempted to have a nice dinner but were thwarted when I fell for the trick where the guy runs you down in the street and tells you how good his food is. That dinner may have single-handedly undone what 5 days of powerful antibiotics had done for my bowels. Not to ruin my streak for the night, I also found us a classy hotel for the evening, using the same technique of following randos into whatever building, just because they are yelling at me. This place cost about a buck apiece, and it was worth it. We got a discount, because, as Mariam and Brielle found in the morning when they were waiting in the lobby/garage as men walked in and out and were checked off on the dry erase board, it usually goes for a buck an hour. Susannah and Angela got on a shuttle for the airport while I pooed in a baby food jar. Two hours later, I had the report back from the lab that I have no parasites. The only other part of the report that I could understand was the color part, ´cafe,´ but already, knowing I didn´t have any wormies in me, I felt better. I did fart out my mouth all morning on the ride to Rio Dulce (Mars and Brielle still don´t believe those smells didn´t come from farther south, but why would I lie about this?), but that´s a little later story. After trying to find a bus to Rio Dulce that day, we finally realized the futility and got a (different) hotel, smoked some Cuban cigars, and managed to find an amazing restaurant to splurge at for Brielle´s and my birthday. We ate our weights in meat, drank wine, had chocolate cake for dessert. Awesome. Then, pleasantly full, we wandered over to the central park, where the Guatemalan Symphony Orchestra was playing a free concert. We hit it just right, as my father-in-law would probably appreciate (hi Uncle Beaver), just at the loud part. We sat down, and after about a minute of the soft, boring stuff, the cymbols guys started in and everyone started wailing away at whatever they had in their hands and it got real loud and fun. And then with a little flourish, it was over, and they thanked us for coming and we got to go home and sleep so we could get up at 3:30am for the Rio Dulce bus. Then the part where I fart our my mouth and no one believes me, but at least I don´t have parasites so I feel real good, and we arrive at the edge of the biggest lake in Guat, Lago Izabal. Rio Dulce is a funky, colorful little fishing town, also full of yachties on their way around the world. Very tropical and muggy and slow, and we stayed at an appropriate hostel between the jungle and the river. Actually, in a little hut on stilts right in the water. Ate a ferocious shrimp stew before it ate me (these shrimps had claws). In the morning Brielle and I kayaked over at 5am (pre dawn awakenings are now the norm) to see, and hear, the howler monkeys. Who knew? Hiked all over the jungle later, and saw creatures and plants I still can´t believe. Brielle heard about Susannah and Angela´s misadventures at the airport, so we decided to put her on the 3am bus so she´d have plenty of time at the airport. Checked and double checked to make sure that the kid with the boat would be there at 2:45am to take us across, and were assured. Then, at 2:50am, he still wasn´t there (notch another pre-dawn wake up), so we did what any sensible person would do. We stole a double kayak. Luckily the dude with the shotgun didn´t see us or didn´t care enough to kill us as we slipped across the harbor under the moon. On the other side, we had to try a couple different landing spots before we found one with a low enough fence to climb over. This time, the guy with the shotgun did see us, but held his fire. Brielle made the bus, and I paddled home. Even managed to get the 40Q back that we had prepaid for the boat trip (even though kayaks rent for 100Q/hr! ha!) later in the day, and I don´t even think the kid lost his job. We packed up at a reasonable hour and took a boat down the river to Livingston, where we are now. Livingston is an amazing little Garifuna community, reachable only by boat, of black Guatemalans decended from escaped slaves, shipwrecked sailors and Carib indians, with their own language and culture. Lots of African ties. Great seafood, too. I ate another vicious stew, this one with coconut milk, plaintains, a whole fish and lots of creatures with claws. Getting hungry again, too. It´s hot as all get out here. Tomorrow we´re heading to Tela, Honduras, for a few beach days while we celebrate my birthday, then hopefully on to the Bay Islands, where I might be able to talk Mariam into taking the world´s cheapest scuba diving course (now why would she even hesitate?) for a week or so.
Ain´t life grand?

Dios Mio!

We're on the go, with the sisters. Still in Antigua, which is very different than Xela- streets aren't covered with dogshit, the bartenders all speak English. Actually, it's hard to find anybody who speaks Spanish. But it's a gorgeous city, full of old, impossibly thick-walled churchs that have been shaken apart by centuries of earthquakes. Reminding you of the fact that we are perched on the lip of one tectonic plate or the other is Vulcan Agua towering above the southern everything. You can't see the top unless you look straight up- like it's going to topple over onto you at any moment. Yesterday afternoon we climbed Vulcan Pacaya, one of the few active volcanos in Guatemala's collection. We had a great guide in Oscar (supposed to be Juan, at 8am, who we sat around waiting for for the better part of an hour, but he never showed. Turned out, he was the guy we saw eat it, hard, off his bike onto the cobblestone street outside the guide shop two days earlier when we were booking the trip. Sure enough, yesterday they had his arm in a cast to prove he wasn't just dogging it. (Although he did seem like the whiny type when he fell, so postponing the trip til sunset and getting Oscar didn't seem like too bad a deal.)) The volcano was amazing, with huge rivers of dried lava reaching over what was days earlier a green pasture. The volcano itself looked like Mt. Doom, or Narahoe, very severe and conical and dark. We hiked into the lava field, avoiding scorching vents and moving quickly when we could smell our rubber soles melting. We stopped for geothermally roasted marshmallows. Retreated to a safer distance for a great dinner of fresh veggie pitas while the sun set, and we could see bright orange rivulets of lava flowing down near where we had just hiked, standing out against the darkening sky. Impressive.
I made my first prescription! Mariam and my guts have been all kinds of messed up for a while now. Last weekend I felt crappy and peed out my butt. On Tuesday I took these pills that were for if you are sick of emptying your colostomy bag so frequently. They turned me off like twisting the nob on a spigot. For three days. Then they finally wore off and back on came the spigot. The water (or butt pee) pressure had been there the whole time, just without an outlet. I meant to go to the doc, or the lab where you poo in a cup (they have it down to assembly-line efficiency here), but time kinda ran out as we scrambled to tie up loose ends in Xela. There was the special lunch where we offered to take the Catalans to anywhere they wanted, and they voted on Pizza Hut, as well as packing and homework and other stuff. It even seemed to be getting a little better, so I missed the doc. Although by this time, Mars joined the butt pee train. When we got to Antigua, we found a clinic, but it was closed for the weekend. So I went to the farmacia and bought a bunch of cipro, which we've been taking for the last 2 1/2 days. Again, we're both corked, and our bellies kinda hurt, but it seems like it's probably working. And if it's working, that means it's not cholera. So we've got that going for us. Which is nice.
Two days ago, for the sisters' first adventure, we took the chicken buses 3 hours to Chichicastenango for centroamerica's biggest market. As ever, the ride was the best part. I think the driver didn't value his life (or ours) quite as high as we do. Brielle even said her goodbyes to everyone, as all 107 passengers were alternately plastered, along with any luggage not tied down and some that was, plus the seats from the school bus benches, which must have wrenched free of their steel bolts, to first one side and then the other of the inside of the bus. Screaming down a mountain road rivaling Lombard St. in curviness, I found myself praying for more gravity as I peeled my face off the window where I had just been staring at, and leaning over, a yawning abyss of death. At the breakneck speeds we were hitting, running oncoming traffic off the road as we passed chicken buses and other vehicles piloted by saner drivers, there was no way we would survive tipping over in either direction, but somehow you found yourself breathing a sigh of relief as the tires squealed around an inside lefthand curve where you would just have your face peeled off for the split second it was pressed to the pavement, through the window, before the bus was atomized in a collision with the mountain wall. The alternative to the right, somehow worse because of the contemplation time you would have, was just flying off the edge and drifting lazily through space before the aforementioned atomization. And oh yeah, all the other passengers, (including the Levys and Lenardi, and the guy whose job is to collect money and, presumably, to keep the driver coked up, and who was hanging out the open door this whole time), were laughing. But then that bus's engine exploded from the strain, filling the bus with smoke but forcing a life-saving stop and bus switch.
The market was bustling, full of color and smells. We bought a bunch of stuff, Mariam haggling like a pro, me not so much. There was the wallet that I bought, which I haggled the guy up from 15 to 30Q. That took skill. I momentarily registered 'quince' as 50, instead of 15, and when I proposed 30, the guy looked at me funny, made me repeat myself, and then finally borrowed a calculator from someone and made me punch in the price I was proposing. When he confirmed that it was, indeed, twice the price he was offering, he accepted quickly. I realized my mistake as I was happily walking out, but it seemed worth the roughly $2 difference to just get the heck out of there, away from the real or imagined laughter I faintly heard.
And yes, we saw the Sox game on Sun, at a gringo bar, and it was simply beyond words. I'm still floating.
Today we're going to decide between heading to the beach for a night, or going to Lago Atitlan a day early. We're talking over breakfast, so I should get the heck out of here before they leave without me.

Playing Hooky

I'm ditching class today- feeling a little gurgly in the stomach, and tired, and like I just needed an extra day to myself. This Saturday we went to a Xelahu v. San Marcos soccer match. Crazy. The stadium is a few minutes north of our house, so we met some friends and walked there. Outside, there are a million amazing smells as people cook up everything from the usual tacos, fried plantains and papusas, to these stalls where they just sell grilled slabs of meat. Nothing comes with plasticware, so you really get involved with you food here. You do get a napkin the size of a silver dollar to wipe down your hands and face and the people who accidentally passed within your 'splash zone.' Anyway, I passed on all the outside food, including the plastic bags of beer they sell so that you can smuggle it past the pat-down. We were led to believe that they would only pat men down, so Mariam got totally busted with her Nalgene down the front of her pants. After smelling the contents, they let her through without a bribe. Inside, we found seats on the concrete slabs that pass for benches. The field was surrounded by police, both national and civil, dressed in full riot gear. They have a padded tunnel for the players and refs to get onto the pitch, which they take down once the opposing players and the refs are out of bottle/battery range. As people come in, they throw thousands of packets of little newpaper squares to the fans so that the fans can later fill the air with ticker tape. Then, as the team takes the field, the crowd erupts. Literally. Fireworks and ticker tape start blasting out all around you, from all around the field. The stadium itself has professional fireworks, blasting off from the four corners. But meanwhile, as the air fills with smoke and newspaper, hundreds of fans are lighting off those long strings of firecrackers, and especially, roman candles, which they aim downward at the riot police. Shooting exploding balls of fire at the well-armed police (fresh out of a civil war, mind you, in which they weren't well know for their restraint) wouldn't have been my first choice. But the cops didn't really seem to mind, as the fireballs bounced off their shields and uniforms ("Just ignore them and they'll eventually stop," is what their therapists told them in mandatory anger management class, I guess). Once the game got underway, things settled down a bit, even when points were scored. Their was a liberal sprinkling of new vocab that our spanish school failed to teach us, including a rising, stadium-wide chant of "wwwwwwWWWECO!" whenever the opposing keeper is taking a goal kick (weco=fag)(now you AND all the 7 year old kids in Xela know a funny thing to call someone when they do something as outrageous as kick a soccer ball). Not like it's any worse than a football game in the States, or puching a guy over a balcony for wearing a Yankees cap at a Sox game, as I witnessed a while ago. Anyway, I couldn't resist the meat slabs any longer, so I had me one. At half time and at the end, the refs are escorted off the field by a phalanx of shielded, machine-gun toting riot police. The final score was 2-1, Xela, but even this didn't do much to assuage the crowd's desire to bottle the refs.
It was awesome.

Holy Santa Maria

Yesterday at noon we got back from climbing Santa Maria. What an incredible hike! We started with good hot soup at Quetzaltrekkers at 11pm. All the guides, except one, have these cool German or Dutch accents, so it´s fun to listen to them talk even when they don´t say anything interesting. I found that I couldn´t talk with the American guide because it was too boring. Then the 20 of us piled into the back of two pickups (trust me, they have the transport of huge gobs of humanity in tiny vehicles down to a science here) for a short ride to the base of Santa Maria. Basically, it´s in the ´burbs of Xela, which means a decent number of stand-alone concrete block houses along a dirt road. We woke up all their dogs and roosters with our arrival and shedding of layers as we transitioned from the cold of the pickup to the heat of the climb. There was a thin layer of clouds, but it didn´t look like it would last. Two hours of easy climbing, during which we talked to this great guy named Kevin, who guides rafting trips in the summers along the middle fork of the Salmon, and then does whatever-the-hell the other seasons. Currently, he was on his way back to California after riding his motorcycle to Panama. On his four month trip, he liked to climb the highest mountains around (there´s Tacamulco in Guat, the highest point in centroamerica, but the night hike thing is alluring on Santa Maria). I bet he sells out soon and becomes a blood-sucking lawyer, but he´s still cool for now. After that, there was about 3 more hours of very steep hiking. It was great, though. Our packs were light, and the stars were coming out, and we could see all the lights of Xela and surrounding pueblos. If I haven´t mentioned before, Xela is fricking huge. I think something like 120,000 people live there, but basically it completely covers the bottom of a big, flat bowl surrounded by mountains. So it was cool to look down on that. We got to the top before sunrise, and were welcomed by a deep rumbling and hissing as Santiaguito erupted gas and vapor and probably sent some pumice airborn. Ana, our head guide, said ¨Ya, der are too kinds off wulcaanos, and dis iss vun off they more blowing-up kind.¨ She went on to describe all kinds of stuff that I don´t really remember, but that I listened to with rapt attention. Santa Maria used to be enormous, until in 1902 it erupted violently, blowing an entire side of itself off into the sky and killing between 5-10,000 people. The Guatemalan president at the time denied that it happened, so it is hard to know exact statistics. Today, Santiaguito is all that is left of the other rim of Santa Maria, and it erupts every half hour or so. We could see little specks of glowing lava in the dark. Then the sun came up, bringing an fantastic sunrise, and we could look along the entire chain of volcanos, all the way to Tacamulco, all poking their heads above a layer of clouds that we ourselves were above. We had some hot coffee and tea, some took naps, and then we hiked down in the daylight, getting a chance to see all the vegetation and landscape that we had passed unknowing in the night. At the bottom, we took a chicken bus (aptly named for one of many species of fauna you´re likely to encounter onboard. You basically cram into the seats and eat your knees, because there is ALWAYS room for more passengers. But they come with amazing frequency, are astonishingly reliable and colorful, both in paint jobs and passengers, and cost between $0.13 and $0.52 no matter how far you´re going) back to Xela. Mariam and I proceeded to sleep for the rest of the day and night, waking only to eat lunch and dinner. Mariam is feeling a bit crappy today, maybe because of the toll of hiking 9 hours, all night, when normal people are sleeping, but she is recovering quickly. Plus her teacher´s father is a doctor, so she gets great medical advice in class.
This weekend we are definately going to the local soccer match, and then the big market in Chichicastenango on Sunday. And I cancelled my crummy subscription to MLB.TV, which sucked. So no more Sox games for me. All you readers can leave Sox updates in comments, if you´d be so kind.

Barbaria, Round 2

Just got out of Oscar the barber's shop. Needed a beard trim, but this time I went armed with the knowledge of exactly how diligent this guy is in his search for extraneous hairs. I was preparing the phrases in my head in how to instruct him (Mariam leaves me on my own for these little adventures). I did a pretty good job explaining just what I wanted, but still, when he was doing the 'stache, he snuck that damn machina up the left nostril. And once he'd done one, I felt like I couldn't stop him. Plus, like Mariam says about waxing, the second time is much better. I almost liked it. So much so that when we went for the ears, I didn't even flinch. Still, I gotta get a bit more assertive here before that nice ear peach fuzz starts coming in all coarse and black.
Now I'm at the new internet cafe (new to us, that is), where we also had a salsa lesson yesterday. My motivation was to sign up for online Sox games, so I could watch Dice-K face Ichiro. It's $85/yr, but I figure I'll need the subscription in Kentucky anyway, so might as well get it now. However, when I went to watch it, it didn't quite come through. Two seconds of action, and then long, long pauses while it continued to "buffer." I don't know if it's the connection here, which isn't too bad, or just as good as it gets, so I might get out of the deal while the getting's good (5 day free trial). I already feel pretty bad about sitting in Guatemala, plop in the middle of culture and music and language and arts, and here I am watching TV. I mean, there's a fricking salsa lesson 8 feet away. Not a healthy addiction, I guess.
We were kinda kidnapped this past weekend. Actually, technically our own crappy understanding of spanish kidnapped us. Sandra, the mother of the family we're staying with, told us on Friday of a nice little spot that they like to go to on this day of Semana Santa. She mentioned something about bouganvillas, and a nice procession, and asked if we wanted to come. We said sure, sounds great (we weren't exactly sure what was cool in Xela for Semana Santa, so it was perfect to have local insight for Friday night). Half hour later, at about 6pm, we piled into the minivan to drive to what we thought was going to be a nearby village. After almost an hour of driving, I asked Javier, the youngest son, where we were going. "A la costa," he said, which means the house we went to with them 2 weekends before, the one with the pool and heat and no-see-ums and millions of aunties and cousins etc. We were going for the entire long weekend, and Mariam and I had only the clothes on our backs (jeans and sweaters, to watch the procession in). Tragedy, no, but it was a bit awkward. That night, after the inevitable soccer game, in my jeans, I chugged down the inevitable warm glass of microwaved water, then went for a swim in my underwear. A pair of those hybrid tighty-whitey/boxers that Mariam talked me into getting once. Technically, I already was swimming in my underwear, because after two soccer matches, 4 on 4, to fricking 20 (scores 20-19 and 18-20), in my jeans (and we weren't even skins), there was enough sweat on me to do the breaststroke in. However, the next day, we tagged along to the market, where we bought bathing suits for about $3 each, and sunscreen, for about $10 (by far the most expensive stuff at these markets, because guess who buys it all? Pale white dudes, and they know what kind of hagglers we are). And everything turned out great. The coast is definately more of a vacation for the family than it is for us, to be surrounded by spanish-speaking cousins, but we had a great time. And apparently we didn't miss much in Xela. So.
Tonight at 12am we're heading out to climb Santa Maria, a nearby volcano. It is supposed to be a great hike, although it's about 5 hours straight up. We'll have a cup of tea and sandwiches on top (we're going with a guides from Quetzaltrekkers, this great outfit whose proceeds all go to the Escuela de la Calle, and whom I would love to volunteer with but they want a 3 month committment and I don't think I can quite swing that without seriously cramping my style), and if we get up while it's still dark, we'll see the glowing lava of Santaguito, a smaller volcano on the slopes of Santa Maria. Santaguito is apparently one of the 10 most active (and probably dangerous) volcanos in the world, erupting every hour or so. Should be a great time. We're going to Don Pedro's for what Mariam's maestra, Chris, says are the best burgers in town, as soon as the Sox game is over (they're down 0-3, in the 8th, the bums). We've already had some pretty good burgers, but gotta check out Chris' credibility because she has also offered to help out with the itinerary for when the sisters come.
Also, Shane is coming for a few weeks in June- we're looking forward to meeting up with him and tramping or staying put. Dave has said he will come for a long weekend, but I'm doubtful. Lexi, if you're reading, hope you got back safe and sound. And Asya, congrats on all your acceptances to med school! I wish I was in your dilemma of having to choose between all good options.

Which which there is no whicher

Many little adventures since last I wrote. There was the trip to the barber, where I had every orifice violated by the electric shaver (I politely declined the straight razor, because my skin is sensitivo. And I don't yet have Hep B). The barber, named Oscar, was very kind, but a haircut means something different here. Once he had finished my head hair, he started on my ear hair. I only have this nice, white, downy peach fuzz on my ears. Or, rather, had. But I didn't stop him- I kinda wanted to see where it was going to go. Next, the eyebrows- He ran the comb through them and buzzed off whatever stuck above the comb. He did the beard, and the front of the neck, and the back of the neck, and way down the back and even off to the shoulders where I didn't even know I had hair (thanks Dad). However, the worst was yet to come. I had that buzzer, probably three inches wide, crammed all the way up my nostril, and twisted. Remember Arnold pulling that homing device out of his nose in Total Recall? That was me, except my thing wasn't a smooth little ball- it had blades, which were slicing, and it was hot from running so long. Tears were streaming down my cheek, but I was smiling to maintain a cultural bridge. He then reamed out the little hairs and, I can only imagine, rivers of blood, with a hand towel before starting on the other nostril. Ow. But damn I look good.
Then there was our family's traditional birthday celebration for Christian, who turned 18 on Friday (we gave him a can of beer wrapped in the tattoo advertisements, which may have dropped our stock a few points in the eyes of the parents). This consists of lighting those long strings of fireworks on the patio just under his window (and ours), at 4:30 am! then the whole family barging in to his room with a guitar to sing a few songs. Later in the day, when it's cake time, as you go to blow the candles out they push your face into it. Gets 'em every time.
The Encapuchados had their parade, which was much lower key than all the hype. Really more of a frat boy parade with the whole town turned out to watch. What we saw was only some hooded guys zipping back and forth on scooters and motorcycles, wearing cheap suits with the butt cheeks cut out so that when they raised their arms in a Nixon-esque salute, the people behind them got the moon. A few had notebook paper taped to their backs, inked with little slogans or politicians' names, but it was all pretty bush league. I guess we didn't stick around long enough to see a few floats that they had made, but it certainly seemed like a political group past its prime.
Went to the beach on Sat. Black sand because of the volcanic soil, which is kinda cool, and huge waves because it's the Pacific. Took four hours by chicken bus each way, which was at least half the fun, and then we got there and just drank a few bottles of beer and ate shrimp ceviche, fried shrimp, shrimp pad thai. It was a shrimp day. The fried shrimp were amazing- smallish shrimp, fried without batter in oil which maybe had a little picante in it, and you ate the whole thing- shell, head, tail- yum. A plate came free with two liters of Gallo, the national beer (bleck, but worth it for the shrimps).
Sunday to Fuentes Georginas, a series of developed pools in the nearby mountains/volcanos, fed by hot springs. Very nice, although crowded. The spot is absolutely gorgeous, surrounded by cliffs covered in greenery and orchids, with funny birds and amazing views of the little town and surrounding farms in the valley. Afterwards we went into Zunil to find San Simon, a quirky saint/Mayan god/effigee of the Spanish conquistadors. He's this manequin, dressed in funny cloths and a cowboy hat, seated on a throne that moves from one house to another each year. You have to ask the locals where he is, and they all know and point you in his direction. If you bring him a certain kind of whiskey and cigarettes, he'll grant your more sketchy prayers without judgement. We saw a Maya woman bring her children and go through it all- put San Simon's hand on her daughter's head, his hat on her, his cane on her, all the while chanting and praying. Weird. We didn't take a picture because it cost another few Q and we didn't have any.
Looking forward to having Brielle and Susannah and Angela down here. Still learning lots of things ever day.

The tap´s just fine

So, I´m not sick, very much. Sorry to be so anticlimatic. All you readers, you swarming millions, were probably kinda hoping for a little excitement, maybe a story about bumbling through a visit with a doctor here, getting prescribed birth control instead of cipro or something. Sorry to disapoint. What can I say- guts of steel. I get ´em from my mama. We went to the bar last night to watch the USA v. Guatemala soccer game, which ended in a nil nil tie. Basically a win for Guatemala, as far as we can tell. Guatemala apparently usually loses to teams from tiny island nations where they are still eating limbs off the losing players (I can´t figure out how to pun on team member and dismember- help me out?), so tying the White Devils is pretty sweet.
Actually, there isn´t a lot of USA bashing going on here, unless you count expats. Much less than there was in New Zealand, and we hadn´t even been propping up military dictators or funding contras there. We´ll see tomorrow, though, when there is scheduled a big protest/march/parade of students from the 8 or so Universities in Xela through the streets. And then tonight is supposedly this strange event when the Encapuchados, the gowned and hooded student group, goes through the town at night and throws buckets of black paint on the businesses that earlier refused to pay them. A bit of back story: Mariam and I saw these 5 Ku Klux Klan-looking dudes coming out of the bank over a week ago. They had on the full flowing robes, and big pointy hoods with eye holes, in either white or black. They had some patches or insignias on, but we didn´t get close enough to read them. The shotgun-armed bank security (shotgun-armed security is the way to go around here, and everyone from banks to milk delivery trucks to little garages have a coupla pimply Wackenhut-uniformed teens packing serious heat) seemed to know them, or nod to them or something. When we asked our family about it, they seemed to say they were from the University, and that they would be asking for money. A bit more digging, and we found a more complete story. Apparently, 80 or 100 years ago, there was a big protest led by the med students in Xela against government persecution. Then they were all massacred. A politically active group of students from the University of San Carlos then started a protest group in response, and to avoid being identified and killed, they adopted these hoods and robes. They have been protesting and fundraising ever since, and in the past have done some very constructive, proactive things. They had the support of the general public for a long time, but lately it´s been slipping away. They´ve developed this tradition of extortion, where they ask businesses and people for money, and then vandalise the places that don´t pay, and they´ve supposedly been infiltrated by shady people who use the anonimity for even worse stuff than vandalism. So, the governor vowed that the businesses would not be vandalised this year, and to effect this, the semi-militarized police are going to be out in force tonight to stop the paint-throwing hooded students. Should be a blast.
We are really having an amazing time here. There is no other place, I´m sure, that would allow us to do so many amazing things- study spanish, eat amazing food, visit volcanos, live cheap, go to the beach, etc. We´re loving it. As long as we don´t get tear-gassed tonight.