During our time in Costa Rica, I also turned 21 and accidentally won $300 in a San José casino. Good luck duplicating that.
Sunday, 16 March
I guess I may as well admit this: the hills of San José are making me nervous. People generally have one of three responses to my weird hill phobia, or sometimes all three: (1) that's stupid; (2) that's crazy; (3) get over it. If I may respond to each of these points in turn:
(1) Well, no shit.
(2) See above.
(3) GREAT FUCKING IDEA, I'LL GET RIGHT ON THAT. GOLLY, WHY HAVE I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT.
Tuesday, 18 March
I started writing about our visit to the Chiquita banana plantation today, but we're going down a really bad road and consequently my writing looks like I'm having a stroke. Tyler is laughing at me. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.
Wednesday, 19 March
Tell you what, it is hot as fuck up in here.
Oh, novelas, love of my life. So far there's been a sugar daddy, a secret pregnancy, and an affair. (EDIT: Two affairs! Man, these bitches are slaggin' it up all over town.) How did I ever live without these?
I am digging this host family already. I finally have a cool dad! Seriously, I have had burning Cool Dad Envy ever since I started doing AMIGOS. My host dad in Paraguay was a shadow of his insane wife, and the only word my Nicaraguan dad ever spoke to me was adios on the day I left.
Plus, I mean, shit - this is easy. Families who accepted you in advance and actively want to house and feed you? That's patty-cake, man. Easy. Your Mom easy.
Auuuuugh. I came home from our seminar meeting at the albergue (lodge) to find a fat cockroach on my bed. Not as big as the ones in Nicaragua or Mexico, but still, you know...substantial. And right smack-dab in the middle of my bed. Everyone else in the house was asleep. I was barefoot, sweating like no human being has ever sweat before, tired and dirty and weirdly paranoid. I adjusted my balls, batted the cockroach onto the floor, and crushed it with a shoe. I'd like to think of this as some kind of personal growth.
Having said that, there's nothing quite like a roach in your bed to make you nervous in your own skin. It's my bed! I sleep there! I'm helpless! What if I wake up and it's on my face?
Thursday, 20 March
As always, things look better in the morning. There's something about the combination of restfulness, early sunshine, and hey, no enormous cockroaches on my face! that really brightens the mood.
I've been told a few times already that my Spanish is good. The thing is that at this point in my life, my Spanish is not, in fact, good. I can only conclude that people are fooled by my accent, which is still pretty decent. I've lost a lot of vocabulary that's taking its sweet time coming back, and I make amateur mistakes with verb conjugation if I haven't thought it out ahead of time. I find myself talking around missing words more than I used to.
!DIGRESSION ALERT!
Reminds me of the time in La Piedad that I forgot the word for "envelopes." (In keeping with the spirit of this story, I will not mention the word here. Also, I have forgotten it again.) I was in the only open papelería I'd been able to find in the whole city, and anyway I like a challenge as much as the next idiot gringa with no survival instinct, so I just admitted to the woman behind the counter that I'd forgotten the word. I proceeded to describe in detail what I was looking for: yea big, rectangular, made of paper, you put on a stamp and the address and you send letters in it. The woman offered up the word, then gave me a patronizing smile and said, in Spanish, "So you don't speak Spanish, huh?" I was thisclose to snarling, "BITCH, I AM SPEAKING SPANISH RIGHT NOW." I mean, geez, is it a crime to forget a word now and then? (Sobres! That's the one.) Especially considering how much variation in vocabulary there is across Latin America. I'm lucky I remember my own name sometimes.
END OF DIGRESSION
I am thirsty all the time. [Our professor] bought enough garrafones of purified water to give us each one liter per day. Ha ha ha...ha. According to the wealth of experiential wisdom that is AMIGOS, you need at least two liters a day in good conditions. Meanwhile, we're hiking hither and yon and I personally am sweating out at least a liter per hour. (Conservative estimate.)
Saturday, 21 March
I've been working at the coop's wildlife rescue center. The center is home to eight scarlet macaws, eight spider monkeys, three white-faced monkeys, a wild pig, and five assorted parrots.
To get to the rescue center, I walk down the road a ways, climb the big fucking hill to the albergue, then descend into the forest. The "steps" constructed for this purpose were clearly designed by someone with an eye for human suffering. Probably Eli Roth. Every step requires serious consideration of the laws of physics, especially when the rain has left the way muddy and strewn with wet leaves. I only fell on my ass once today, so I'm doing better than expected.
Once I make it to the center, shaken but alive, I have a whole host of wonderful things to do. To start with, I get to scrape out the rotting fruit from the stands, doing my best to ignore the deeply unpleasant sensation of grubs between my fingers. (Fruit, it turns out, rots really damn fast in the tropical forest.) I also attempt to give the baby white-faced monkey his bottle. (He's a little...skittish. I can handle skittish cats, but skittish monkeys are a whole other story.) Then, after cleaning the cages, I cut up more fruit so I can have more grubs to scrape out the next day.
The worst part of all, even worse then the bare-handed grub-scraping, is cutting up the papaya. I stand by my opinion that papaya is a demon fruit, full of lies and malice. Sounds delicious, looks delicious - smells and tastes exactly like human vomit.
On the bright side, I do get to cut up the fruit with a machete. Shit, y'all, I gotta get me one of those.
Alejando the spider monkey likes to take showers. Really! We spray him through the cage, and he scrubs away with all due diligence. It's a bit spooky, actually. He looks exactly like a small, somewhat hairy person who for whatever reason has decided to live in a cage and shit on the floor.
Monday, 24 March
Macaws, it turns out, are mean fuckers. One attacked my coworker Johan today, and not for the first time. I did the only thing you can do in that situation: turned the hose on it. Macaws fear neither god nor devil, but they are scared as shit of water. Once he recovered, Johan cornered the little fucker and sprayed it until it was drenched. As it clawed its soggy way up the side of the cage, I couldn't stop myself from thinking, "IT EATS THE VOMIT-FRUIT IN PEACE OR ELSE IT GETS THE HOSE AGAIN."
Besides being bastards, the macaws are seriously unnerving. They move with eerie symmetry, like the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp. When I clean the smaller cage, the two macaws in there will gradually edge closer and closer to me until they're perched right over my head, staring at me with identically tilted heads and sinister birdy expressions that suggest imminent homicide.
One of the white-faced monkeys has a nasty habit of leaping onto your head, biting your ear, and attempting to have relations with the nape of your neck. It's pretty funny. Also weird as fuck. But mostly funny.
Jesus fuck, it's hot. I come back from the rescue center and my host mom is like, "Hot lunch? :D?" I can barely work up the motivation to toy with it. All I want to do is drink every drop of water that has ever fallen from the skies.
Tuesday, 25 March
I had an extremely awkward interaction this morning with Juan Carlos, the guy who runs the rescue center. He was saying how some women apparently think one of the other volunteers is really handsome, and said volunteer made an obviously fake pass at him. This quickly devolved into a discussion of The Gays, complete with exaggerated mincing. JC turned to me at one point and said, "I don't understand it, M. With so many beautiful women like you, how can a man want another man?"
Reader, please picture this: I am literally dripping with sweat, bright red from heat and exertion, face smeared with rotten papaya and monkey excrement, plain (but feisty!) at the best of times - which this is appreciably not - and also, you know...queer.
"Uh," I opined, helplessly. WELL SAID, M OLD CHAP.
In other news, we have these Canadian volunteers working at the rescue center who are here as part of a rehabilitation program. None of them speak Spanish, and only a couple speak any English. (Fucking Quebec.) JC seems to have taken it upon himself to teach them about the sanctity of their lives and why they shouldn't smoke cigarettes. Yes, that's right. He is telling RECOVERING HEROIN ADDICTS in REHAB not to smoke. This will end well.
Wednesday, 26 March
Today JC left me in charge of the center for a couple hours. He told me to have the Canadian volunteers rake the paths that go up to the albergue (including the one with the unfortunate stairs). When I communicated this to the Canadians, they said they'd done it the day before. The sad part was, we still had plenty to rake - being in the middle of the tropical forest, and all. Super, JC. Demonstrate to the recovering druggies that they can do the same thing over and over and things will never get any better, no matter how hard they try. That'll learn 'em.
Thursday, 27 March
Our driver, Miguel, gave me a ride to Quepos, where I bought my ticket to San José and sat down to wait for a couple hours. There were a couple guys calling, "Taxi! Taxi pa' San José!" I seriously considered it for about 2.7 seconds, like so: I wonder how much that would - shit, to get axe-murdered? No, ta. I don't scare easy when it comes to foreign transportation, but I maintain a healthy fear of unregistered taxis.
Apparently Miguel really liked me. God only knows why. ...well. To be fair, it turns out that I am capable of being extremely charming for limited periods of time. For this reason, the people who like me best are often those who know me least. But the truth will out, unfortunately, and given time, the content of my character begins to shine through, like radiation seeping from Mme. Curie's pores. (Too soon?)
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