What your stomach says about you when you aren't looking

I discovered something interesting on the drive back from the ranch today.  It appears to be literally possible to feel what someone else is feeling.  I had a bit of a head ache and lay down in the bus with my head in Murray’s lap.  I could feel her stomach muscles against my head in what felt like a laugh.  I couldn’t hear over the road noise, it was a quiet laugh.  But I am pretty sure it was a laugh.  The driver’s phone rang with a bird call.  Earlier Murray had asked what kind of bird it was looking out the window trying to see it as we nature watched from the van. 

Later I felt, but didn’t hear, what seemed to be a yawn stomach muscle action.  I am pretty sure it was a yawn because after she drooped to one side a bit as we are want to do when we get tired.  I am not a sensitive person, but this is an interesting insight into how other people feel.  I don’t know if this would help me in a business setting.  I am sensitive enough to know that for most business meetings, sitting with your head in someone’s lap is not acceptable.

Happy Turkey Day-

Tender Nipples and a Leather Diaper

I must say surfing is great fun.  It was only after 3 more hours on my second day that my nipples got really sore.  So- no breastfeeding for me for at least a week.  The trick to making surfing work was getting to the right place at the right time, which required paddling.  And, even though I wore a long sleeve, synthetic, “rash guard” shirt, my nipples and the insides of my knees took a paddling.  I suppose board shorts are long for a reason. I will have to get some if I go again.

Today we went to a resort to do ziplining, horseback riding, a giant water slide, and the spa.  Apparently women’s bathing suites don’t quite work as well as men’s bathing shorts, so they provided the women with leather diapers to go down the ¼ mi long water slide.  I would have worn one as well since I usually wear a speedo, but Murray thwarted my speedo preference till we got to the mud bath at the spa.  I mean, we are covered in mud, how much more embarrassing can it get?

Guatemala Final Fiesta

Before leaving the family in Guatemala, I bought pizza for the kids adults and students in the house so the grandmother Rebeca wouldn’t have to cook.  The kids definably dig pizza.  Perhaps that is true of kids the world over. 

Then I headed from Antigua Guatemala to Tamarindo Costa Rica.  I met Murray at the airport.  Yeah!  I asked and she doesn’t have anything to say to the blogosphere.  I have noticed that in Latin America, they lag behind on a number of technologies.  Fortunately they have mastered one American technology that I greatly appreciate that of fried chicken.

I heard people in Antigua talk about how great the fried chicken was and never got a chance to try it.  I saw the same franchise in San Jose and Murray and I gave it a try.  It was great.  Of course, I like Kentucky Fried Chicken or Churches chicken so perhaps my standards are low.

It is interesting, when in places with lots of tourists, you get drivers used to tourists.  They seem to have a knack for using simple sentence structures, speaking slowly, and using many of the words that are similar between English and Spanish.  It is amazing how much you can get across when someone has some practice with low Spanish speakers and a willingness to work with you.  With all the complex stuff you have communicated you get to feeling pretty good about your progress.  Then you meet someone in the street that doesn’t have the skill or the patience as you try to buy a jugo de narange at a kiosk and you are immediately humbled by how much further you have to go.

A quick note

Today was my last day of class.  Murray thinks she hasn’t taught me anything since we met, but I did learn the importance of note writing from her.  The difference today was I could give my thank you note to my profesora as my free writing homework assignment.  I gave her a thousand quetzals ($125) which is only $40 a week tip for working with me 30 hours a week.  When you consider what you give the bellman for taking 5 minutes to schlep your bag it still wasn’t much.  But here a tip goes a long way for the locals. 

She said she used to get tips commonly when she was younger but not so much now that she is in her 40s with teenagers.  I suppose the same invisibility of middle aged women that Murray complains about exists in Guatemala.  At that age perhaps a person isn’t interested in using their special power to sneak into the locker room of the opposite gender.  In which case it isn’t much of a superpower.   

Notes are nice because you can pretty easily make someone’s day with a note, but a decent tip here can make someone’s month.  Of course Murray and her sister just finished a hundred or so notes after her mom’s funeral.  I am not in that league.  I think I wrote about having to track who brought what while the two of them were out with funeral errands.  I now understand the method to the madness was for better note writing ability.  I like to be kind, but I don’t want to get carried away.   Although it does seem that notes are becoming a thing of the past.  For me paper notes and emails are fairly equivalent.  Generally I use notes for people over 50. 

This time it's personal

It is interesting when you spend 30 hours a week with someone for a few weeks and their job is to make you talk and listen.  You wind up talking about the things interesting to you, your girlfriend, your life, your political views and in a few weeks, this person knows everything about you.  And, you wind up knowing lots about them and their kids and spouse and issues and trials.  She has a chipper daughter that is smart, but probably has ADD, a son who is struggling to become an Electrical Engineer, or electronics technician, while working a job.  If my Spanish were better I would offer to talk to the kid.  I have to say it is odd struggling to explain why you get emotionally drained by certain things and having to stop to correct your use of articles and prepositions.

My instructor is very involved in her church but is in touch with the idea that good and bad people come from all faiths.  She has struggled with life and faith and being married to someone with significant flaws.  But I suppose we all have.  I get the sense she has grown a lot in the last 20 years with the help of some people in the church.  I get the sense she emulates that counselor demeanor which strives to show concern but not judgment.  Or perhaps it is just the somber, pensive state a Guatemalan woman gets to when considering the problems of her family and country.

I haven’t spent such a concentrated time getting to know someone in a long time.  She doesn’t really speak English and I am not yet at the first grade level in Spanish, which makes it all that much more incredible.  Extended one on one instruction is certainly more personal, than the group classes I took in Buenos Aires.  But then again, it may just be the individuals.  Most of the other Spanish “Maestro’s” and “Estudientes” are much younger than she and I.

I was able to sneak a shot of one of the guys using his head to cary a load.  As I said, it doesn't look as good for the posture as the Fem-Mayan method in the previous picture.

Moobs on the cobblestones

Nov 12

After seeing just a bit of the countryside and pueblos on some of the trips and bus rides, Antigua relative to Guatemala reminds me of Boulder relative to Colorado.  Both have drum circles in the park, a pedestrian mall with shops, restaurants and tourists,  15 year olds pedaling weed, and mountain bikers zipping through the streets in spandex.  You also find more coffee shops in both cities relative to surrounding cities.   

There are certainly differences between Antigua and Boulder.  For instance, at home I have never seen broken bottles poured into the top of a concrete wall as a sort of “poor man’s razor wire” for keeping the riff raff out.  In Boulder we just put conservative bumper stickers on the cars out front for that function.  And the fat guy on the bicycle in the cheap, tight cotton shirt that I saw here with his moobs bouncing over the cobblestones in Boulder would be a fat guy in expensive, tight spandex shirt with his moobs bouncing over the skree stones on the trail. 

Something else I was surprised to see here  that I don’t see in Boulder is catholic school girl uniforms.  I always assumed those were something that existed far away and long ago and were only used for the box covers of adult videos in the modern era.  Go figure, the past lives on in Guatemala. 

About every third day that clouds at this height would part and you could see the top of the volcano from the house.

American Part II

Nov 10

The Spanish lessons are going well.  People cycle through this place as they do at all schools, but at a much faster clip, typically people are here for 3 weeks.  It does give you a different perspective on being American.  When I am at a party at home, it isn’t central in anyone’s mind that we are Americans.  We are all Americans all the time.  Someone from another country is a novel occurrence.  Here I am one of perhaps only a handful of significant interactions that some folks with have with an American and potentially play a disproportionate role in the shaping of their view of “Americans”.  I am not typically self conscious, but it does make you stop to think, and to tip well. 

The US Flag on the huge kite is for the Guatemantecas living in the states and working to send home remitances.  The kites are supposed to be a line to god that the Myan's got from the Chinese a hundred and some years ago. 

Asking yourself the wrong question

Nov 8

I was at the kite festival in Santiago on the day of the dead and found one other thing that reminded me of home- the graffiti in a bathroom.  It was in English.  “Black Metal” it said.  Not only do vandals here have a bent towards the English language, but a bent towards the musical genre of my youth.  Great.  I did get a positive surprise in Santiago.  I asked the people at the lunch place to hold the cebollas (onions) in a dish I couldn’t translate and decided to gamble on.  What I got back looked like it was filled with inseparable little red slices of onion.  I get unwanted onions about half the time in the states as well.  So I dug in, only to find that they weren’t bits of onion, they were bits of bacon.  It isn’t too often you get such positive food surprises.

On the bus ride back I talked to a German woman who was working with local kids in the 0-4 age range that had been taken from their homes by social services.  Many of them had been malnourished by 13-14 year old mothers who did not have sufficient means or maturity to care for a kid while persuing whatever it is teenage girls pursue here.  The woman expected many of them would never develop to a level of self sufficiency.  I actually found myself second guessing the wisdom of putting one’s volunteer effort there.  It will be that many more people to be taken care of by a state with incredibly limited resources.  I found myself thinking “With so many kids that need help here, wouldn’t the country be better off if she went through the orphanages for some kids with potential and worked to develop them so that the next generation of Guatemalans have that much more local, raw talent for business and politics?”  How can you second guess someone who works with malnourished children?  Leave it to me I suppose. 

This sign was on the mens room of a local club.  I suppose when you have lots of tourists who have given their last brain cell to one of your cervesas, you have an excuse for being over obvious with your labels.

Passion and Discipline

Nov 6

It has been a while since the last post.  I find there is a discipline to blogging and perhaps to writing in general.  You need to have something with you at all times to capture notes on interesting things that you observe, experience, or even pop into your mind.  This was confirmed reading Mary Roach’s “Bonk”.  She talked about trying to decipher some interesting and cryptic notes from some of her outings as she wrote the book. 

I think many great things from: parenting, to music, to sex, to writing, lie at the intersection of passion and discipline.  It feels like I used to have more capacity for passion and less for discipline.  As I sift through hazy memories of things I wanted to share on the blog and consider my inability to keep Spanish verb conjugations in my head, perhaps I have been slipping on the discipline front as well. 



Isaac at Cerro De La Cruz above Antigua