The Adventures of Guapisima and Booboo

Only a week left, but lots to do. After our Sunday walk tomorrow, I’ll probably get as much work done as possible before we go to San Pedro to visit the hippy town and enjoy nature by the lake. THen I’m verryy excited for next Saturday’s Noise Bash, which should be something like last weekend’s rave. yay! It looks like we won’t be making it to Tikal this time. I have a stupid cough that won’t go away; at least it’s a good excuse to stay inside and earn some dinero via internet freelance writing . . . But I’ll definitely be coming back to finish my sight-seeing because MAteo-potato is my special lindo para siempre

mateo and I pictured in a magazine with photos from the Infected Mushroom Rave

Their cook, Anna MAria, made burritos for Mateo. Wow.

playing with the camera

me n mateo-potato

July 19, 2009

Last night (Saturday night/Sunday morning) was an experience unlike any other. It was a celebration for one of Mateo’s old friend’s 25th birthday. I was told his friend would be DJing, just like Mateo had once DJed, so we were both excited to go. But I pictured going to some night club that this guy must have rented out for his birthday, with a bar and people dressed up for his birthday, yahddy yahddy yah. Just like how someone at college would have done it—renting limos and dressing fancy and buying champagne and taking pictures left and right so they feel like a celebrity on their birthday. So, I was excited to hear his friend DJ, but I wasn’t in the mood for all this pretentious party nonsense. I reluctantly showered and put on a black dress and heels, to which Mateo immediately shouted, “Oh, no you don’t. You’re going to be standing in grass, don’t wear those.” Since I broke my black flip-flops at the last concert, I was already grumpy that I didn’t have those anymore, and I was glad to finally be able to wear heels . . . so then I was in a bad mood when I had to switch into another pair of flip-flops I was worried were fated to be broken like their comfy counterpart. I thought Mateo maybe didn’t want me to be too tall in heels and was making excuses—even though I know he just wants me to be comfortable. Plus at the last few concerts, there were plenty of people dressed up, so I pouted that I could not wear heels for once. But thank goodness I didn’t.

Mateo’s friend, Caesar, picked us up around 6:30, and me and Mateo sat in the back with another girl who’s name sounded like “Berlin,” and Caesar’s cute Catherine Zeta-Jones-look-alike girlfriend, Alejandra, sat up front with him. The party was at a place near Antigua, so we drove through the L.A.-like traffic up and around the mountains surrounding Guatemala City, blasting the fast-paced psycho-electronic music the whole way. I was already glad I hadn’t worn flip-flops, and glad Mateo had convinced me to bring my white zip-up jacket. Alej and the other girl were both wearing jeans, and Alej had multi-colored ankle warmers pulled over her tennis shoes, too. She looked back at me and was surprised I didn’t have long pants on, insisting that I would be freezing, and she offered to let me borrow a pair of hers. I said no thank you, mostly because I don’t think I’ve ever been able to squeeze my thighs into a pair of my friends’ jeans, so I wasn’t about to try hers. And oh well, I figured we’d be dancing, and I’d stay warm. And I was right.

We got there around 8, after driving through some bumpy side streets to get to a larger road that cut through the mountainside. We parked in an empty field next to what looked like a garden center and some houses with metal-scrap fences. We crossed the street to go through a gated driveway with five or so security guards standing by in their fluorescent “security” jackets and holding guns. The party was treated like a real concert almost, with payment taken at the gate and the fence around the field guarded on all sides. Nothing like this could have gone on in the States without the cops breaking it up after a half an hour, let alone with cops actually helping keep it secure. When we walked in, we went down what seemed like a driveway that let to a small concrete building that looked like a one-person house. There was a shack on one side where people were selling sodas, red bulls, water, rum, beer, lollipops, granola bars, and tortillas with beef or chicken. On the other side of the field, which was probably only two acres across, was a building with bathrooms and out-of-order sinks. On the porch of the house-like building (which was just a ground-level concrete slab beneath a wooden shelter) is where the DJ equipment was set up, with giant speakers on the grass right in front. When we got there, people were just setting up decorations around the porch: over-sized neon dream-catchers arranged to make a hanging smiley-face like this→ 8 D . . . black light cloth with holes ripped in it, to create something like an other-worldly-looking fungus growing up the side of the porch, plus some color-changing lights that lit up the big tree that hung over the house. The dance area was between the house and the grassy area that went all the way up to where the fence met the road. We saw a tent set-up near a tree. We were some of the first people there, and the music was just starting, and only a few people were out on the grass dancing. Soon, people started showing up with big hiking back packs, and the next second there were bout ten tents set up all around the yard, and people were sitting in circles on the ground or up dancing, drinking and smoking all over the place. The crowd gradually gathered in front of the DJ area, dancing like mad to the insanely fast beats and strange sound effects that tend to linger in the background of dark psycho music. I was surprised to see a bunch of hippies there, people with dreadlocks and earthy clothes that smelled like body odor and patchouli. There were also people with a techno-European style, with tight jeans and expensive shirts with intricate graffiti designs, and black jackets with neon green and pink and yellow colors in geometrical patterns, and flat-brimmed hats that look brand new. There was a group of girls and boys who all wore thick black-rimmed glasses and had long mousey brown hair and looked like young high-schoolers from art class; but they stood right in front of the speakers all night and danced with so much energy with smiles on their faces the entire time. There were a lot of people wearing sunglasses and woolen snow caps with ear flaps and strings, and at least five people who were acting like Johnny Depp from the movie “Fear and Loathing in as Vegas,” making strange faces and tensing up in their necks and looking way too interested in the bushes on the ground in the middle of the dancing area. There were people dancing with flaming balls on the end of strings, and batons with the ends lit on fire, and a Swedish girl with blond braided dreads that hoola-hooped faster than I’ve ever seen. I kept smelling a mixture of strange smells like gasoline, burnt wood, chap stick, nag champa incense, marijuana, tobacco, burning plastic, sweat, and grass. I saw some people sitting on the ground Indian-style with their head in their hands, and some people dancing like the ground was on fire, flailing their arms and legs around and jumping back and forth. It was like a strange tribal ceremony of the 21st century. With so many different types of people to describe, it makes it sound like the lawn was jam-packed with hundreds of people, like a music festival from the 60s. But really there were only about 250 people. It was just such a fantastic mix. Not the birthday party I was picturing. Way better.

Mateo and I danced from about 9:30 til the sun started coming up. Seriously. We drank a lot of water and red bull. The music is so hypnotizing. (There’s actually a whole philosophy behind it . . . check it out on wikipedia, search for Goa Gil.)We stopped around 1 a.m. to eat a granola bar and recharge for some more dancing, since Caesar didn’t start playing until 1:30. Mateo dances with the beat all the time, and can go so fast, it’s amazing. He used to go to these sort of raves all the time when he was younger. He got paid to dance at them sometimes. Now I know where he gets his abs . . .
The music was still blasting and the people were still dancing when Caesar told us it was time to drive back to the city. I was ready to go, since I had a blister randomly appear on my left toe next to the pinky toe, and it started stinging like a b*atch. And I wanted sleep. And some cereal and scrambled eggs ☺

I kept wondering where all those people at the party came from. Who are all these people in the real world, when they aren’t dancing like crazy at these obscure parties? Mateo says they’re just regular kids from the city who are bored with regular life just like every other privileged young person in the world. But some of them were from other countries, and seemed older, like my age, not just high schoolers partying on weekends. I said, Maybe they are professional explorers. They are nomads wandering the earth looking for a place to pitch their tent and buy a granola bar and dance the night away under the stars and a skinny sliver of moon. (Which reminds me, I saw so many shooting stars that night. You could see so many layers of galaxies that night.) Perhaps I could find a way to be paid to be a professional explorer myself . . . I could write a paper on my adventures and get a grant to study youth culture night life around the world. Or the sub-culture of raving. The modern tribe of the psycho-ravers. I told Mateo he and I should become professional explorers someday, and rome the world with our backpacks.

Last Saturday, Mateo and I went to the Infected Mushroom concert.  They are an electronic group from Israel that are known to play Psycho music–which is like techno with a super-fast beat.  They started off as a two-man DJ group, but now there are five men and they sing and play instruments on the stage instead of just using mixing tables.  It was quite fun, and it was outside, which made it different from the last two raves we’ve gone to.  

It was a gorgeous night out, with a steady breeze and thunderstorms lingering on the mountains surrounding the city.  The rain and lightning stayed far away from us, but the storm clouds looked like sublime explosions on the edge of the skyline all lit-up yellow by the moon.  The wind pushed wisps of low-flying misty clouds overhead, but the sky was never clouded over above us.  It was a perfect night for dancing.

We drove up to a crowd of a few hundred people lined up outside of a high fence, and we waited outside for a few hours because nothing seems to start on time in Guatemala except if you go see a movie at the theatre.  (By the way . . . going to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince tomorrow!  Extra excited since I just read it a few weeks ago  . . .)  Once we were finally let in through the gate, they stopped everyone and searched them for awhile, so by the time you got in there were not many people walking ahead of you, and you found yourself in a deserted parking lot.  We had to walk through there, and then we came upon a hill that overlooked a field where the stage was set up.  We could see the lights flashing and hear echoes of the bass and human commotion, but it all seemed small below the vast sky with the stars and the storms and the moon in view all at once, surrounded by mountains with house lights sprinkled along the slope, and the airport on the other side of the field with jets taking off into the night sky.  Quite an other-worldly scene.

This week is Mateo’s Special Week. That means I have to be extra sensitive to his needs, which entails giving massages, agreeing to watch high-action movies, letting his grumpiness go unchecked (although this has been minimal), and so on. Why is it his special week, you ask? Because he began QUITTING SMOKING on Sunday! I am so very very proud of him. This will be the first time he has gone even one day without smoking a cigarette in eight years (maybe even more?) He is doing so well, without any severe side-effects aside from cravings and occasional snappiness. We celebrated his third day of being cigarette-free yesterday by going to see Ice Age 3. The theatre was “VIP,” which meant it cost as much as a ticket would in the US, and the chairs were plush, leather recliners. I couldn’t believe it! And they had tables beside every chair, and menus with all the usual movie theatre food plus crepes, SUSHI, coffee, pastries, and so on. Waiters came in and took your order then brought your food before the movie started. Awesome. What a way to celebrate. We’ll have to do that one again . . . Our 5-month anniversary IS coming up . . . Hmmmmmm…

A picture of us from the Rave's website, from a few weeks ago.

It’s time to travel back through time and remember the weekend we spent at the beach in Puerto San Jose. Our time there was brief, since we left late Saturday morning and returned home Sunday evening. But it wasn’t so bad to come back to the city, because since it is in the highlands, the weather stays cool and tolerable. It’s usually in the 70s, I believe, with pleasant thunderstorms and plenty of rain in the afternoons and sometimes at night. Great napping weather But once you travel down the mountains into the lowlands, the weather rises twenty degrees and it’s no longer pleasant to be outside without a body of water to swim in nearby. Luckily, the house did have a pool.

We stayed with one of Mateo’s best friends, Jose, at his family’s beach house. It was a large house, with a kitchen and living room and then a long open hallway that stretched across their property and led to the other end of the house where many of the bedrooms were. Mateo and I visited Jose’s house in the city a few weeks ago, and it is gorgeous, too. ($$$). Anyway, their house was set along the edge of a canal that led out to the ocean. The yard had a pool and a covered patio with hammocks and a hot tub and an outdoor dining area. We spent most of our time out there. His house is a few minutes walk from the ocean, so we drove two of his RVs over there instead. Jose drives too fast so we opted to put three of us on one RV and drive slower (another friend of Jose and Mateo’s, Ricardo, was there as well.)

The beach has black sand, because it comes from volcanic rock. The color isn’t a solid black, but more of a dark gray. The beach was like a plateau, and the level area was about 100 meters across and then sloped down sharply to lead to a small bay on one side and the wild ocean on the other. The waves were huge and the water was like bathwater. It was a workout to stay in the water, because the slope leading down to the ocean dropped just as abruptly beneath the water, so you couldn’t stand for long before you had to start treading to stay afloat. Sometimes in was scary, because the waves came one after the other, and you kept having to dive under them or paddle out further to ride the bulge and then let them crash below you. Once you were out, the force of the tide from the waves rushing out and the next one building kept you from swimming ashore. You had to just keep letting them break on you and throw you toward shore until you could get a foot down to help pull yourself in. Quite fun! Despite much saltwater in my mouth and sand-burns from being knocked down. (Don’t have a heart attack, mom!)

I felt once again like royalty at Jose’s beach house, because he had a maid and another man who helped cook and clean, and they did all the dishes and cooked all our food and brought out snacks in the afternoon and set the table on the outside patio for lunch and dinner, etc. etc.  They cooked us steak, corn tortillas, buttery rice, barbecue chicken, eggs, grilled green onions (yum!) . . . traditional Guatemalan foods like that (spread out over several meals, mind you.)  It’s wild.  I’ve never been waited on like this before.  It’s hard to not feel guilty.  I want to try and help but then I feel like I’m offending someone somehow.  It’s nice and all, but sometimes it feels awkward.  I’m just not used to it.  Oh well

a scenic drive to the coast

Jose and his cousins/friends who live in the beach neighborhood

Ricardo and Isabel next to the pool, under the cabana.

July 4, 2009

Happy 4th of July!!!! I can’t believe it’s July already, not to mention Independence Day. It isn’t going to feel like it here at all, of course. There was a holiday here last week called “Day of the Army,” but all I noticed was that the 24-hour convenient stores closed at night. Exciting!

What WAS exciting was going to Cancuen. That is one of the Mayan kingdoms that Mr. Demarest has excavated and reconstructed for the last ten years or so. They have a camp set up there, which consists of a few wooden shelters with screens that serve as kitchen, dining room, and his office, and then some open huts with palm frawn roofs under which our tents are set up. Mateo and I had our own tent, and Mr. Demarest, Vilma, and Daniel have theirs near the end of the camp. A few feet away from the tents there is a 100-ft drop down to the river that is covered with jungle vegetation. Mateo said the last time he visited the camp, there was hardly any jungle next to the river, but Mr. Demarest did a reforestation project and now the jungle is everywhere again. He said it used to just be a field until the jungle began right next to the Cancuen ruins, and now it is all dense jungle right up to the river. It’s amazing how quickly it grew, they said, and they think it is because the river rises so high during rainy season so there is never a shortage of water.

With the jungle comes all the animals and bugs, especially during rainy season. I saw a tarantula, trails of ants carrying chunks of leaves, funny lizards that ran around on their hind legs, iguanas, and little mice that squeaked up a storm. At night we could hear howler monkeys crying from one side of the river to the other, a haunting sound that echoed through the forest above the rustling trees and patter of raindrops in the leaves. It hadn’t rained in two weeks before we got there, so this dry spell in the middle of the rainy season kept a lot of animals and lizards and bugs from coming out. I was disappointed, because I wanted to see the monkeys in the daytime, and toucans and parrots, and—even though it would be kinda creepy—I wanted to see scorpions and funky-colored caterpillars. Vilma said usually there are many more colors in the jungle, because the tropical flowers grow rampant with the rain. The mosquitoes are everywhere and we kept them away with burning buckets of old termite nests and “corroso” seeds and bug repellent, but they were not so abundant as they would have been if there were rain. I was only bitten a few times. The heat was more bothersome than the bugs because in the city—in the highlands—the weather stays cool and there is air conditioning and fans in the house. In the jungle in the lowlands the temperature jumps to the 90s and it is humid and there are no fans. We wore long pants and long-sleeved shirts to protect us from the bugs and we didn’t shower and I felt smothered with sweat and bug repellant and smoke from the burning buckets of nests and seeds. When I got back last night I showered and washed my hair twice and it still has a slight odor like a campfire from the smoke. We carried the buckets with us everywhere we went—walking through the forest, sleeping in hammocks, to the bathroom. The bathrooms were wooden stalls with toilets that opened up into a deep hole. There was a bucket of lime to sprinkle into the hole after you were done to keep the smell at bay. So there wasn’t much of an odor, not like in latrines you find at public events or anything.

Side note: I’m reading Hemmingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” right now, and I can definitely notice his influence in the way I’m writing. Interesting. Especially with all the mentioning of rain . . . (I apologize.)

Beside the heat and bugs, staying at the camp was a great experience. There were two women there who cooked, so we got to eat yummy, healthy food, like soup with big chunks of vegetables, beans, rice, chiltepe sauce (very spicy little pepper thingies that we love!), tuna from a can, oranges, and corn tortillas (which I avoided since I ate way too many of them the day before when we stayed overnight in the nearby city of Raxruha. The chicken I ordered at a place that we probably shouldn’t have dared to eat in was swimming in greasy water, so I opted for these tortillas that are usually brought in a basket with every meal. They sat in my gut like a rock. They are dense and thick compared to flour tortillas, so they aren’t generally safe to eat because the thickness makes it difficult to cook the corn flour all the way through so you could end up eating bug wings and such that get mixed into the dough. Mmm! Protein.)

I forgot to mention the reason we went into the jungle in the first place. A team of men from Argentina came to film Mr. Demarest in Cancuen for a film they are making for the Discovery Channel. I’ve already seen Mr. Demarest in a few shows on the History and Discovery channels discussing the Mayans. Mateo showed them to me when they came on TV when we first met back in Florida. Anyway, Mr. Demarest left a day early to meet the Argentines and show them the caves in the mountains, and then we met up with them in Raxruha to take the boat together to the camp. The driver, Alfredo Soliz, drove a van carrying Mateo, Vilma, Daniel, and me for eight hours along windy, bumpy mountain roads. The 40-minutes drive from Raxruha to the river is along a dirt road that shakes you back and forth incessantly so that it’s best to put a pillow against the window so you won’t hit your head. Good thing I don’t get carsick. But otherwise I enjoyed the drive, because the air conditioning worked well and there was plenty of room to lie down on the seats (three rows of wide seats with the luggage in the back. Eight hours o snuggle time with Mateo! ) I can sleep easily on car trips so the time went quickly. And I got to put a good dent in my reading, especially since the Hemmingway book was creeping along slowly before now. I read Harry Potter in a few days and part I of IV of Hemmingway in two weeks. Mateo always jokes and asks if he’s interrupting another riveting part of the book, and he laughed when I showed him the passage I was reading:

“I went out and carried my bags up the stairs. Rinaldi was not in the room but his things were there and I sat down on the bed and unwrapped my puttees and took the shoe off my right foot. Then I lay back on the bed. I was tired and my right foot hurt. It seemed silly to lie on the bed with one shoe off, so I sat up and unlaced the other shoe and dropped it on the floor, then lay back on the blanket again. The room was stuffy with the window closed but I was too tired to get up and open it. I saw my things were all in one corner of the room. Outside it was getting dark. I lay on the bed and thought about Catherine and waited for Rinaldi. I was going to try not to think about Catherine except at night before I went to sleep. But now I was tired and there was nothing to do, so I lay and thought about her. I was thinking about her when Rinaldi came in. He looked just the same. Perhaps he was a little thinner.”

Just riveting! Lieutenant Henry is a man of action. I have to admit, though, once I’m done a Hemmingway book, it stays with me, and I miss it once it’s done. Even though his characters are usually drunks with nothing to do except eat, drink, and sleep, and walk around the wonderful foreign villages in which they live. “The Sun Also Rises” comes to mind.

Hahaha I have the movie “Running with Scissors” on in the background. (It’s supposed to be a wonderful book.) Gwenyth Paltrow plays the oober-religious Hope, and I just watched the part where God tells her in her dreams that her cat, Freud, is going to die. So she puts him under a laundry basket, still alive, and dresses in black and sits beside him and mourns his imminent death. Her sister asks, “When will he die?” And she answers, “ . . . It will be the end of the week.” Then it flashes to the dead cat in a grave with the narrator voice-over saying, “Hope says Freud died from kitty leukemia. I think Freud died from being trapped under a laundry basket for four days without food or water.”

Yes. Okay, I got distracted . . .

So we went with Mr. Demarest and the Argentines on two long boats following the current down the river. We kept stopping so they could get their perfect shots at different angles of Mr. Demarest talking with the Argentine doing the interview. It makes you realize how phony TV is. There they were, the two of them on one boat talking casually about Cancuen, while on the boat next to them there are seven Argentines, his wife, his son, his step son, me, and two Mayans handling the boat, with a ton of luggage in the back. And you should have seen how long it took to get some of these shots. For example, once the boats were all packed up, we all got on one boat and went up the river a ways in the wrong direction, and then signaled “action” to Mr. Demarest and the interviewer, and they walked down the path from the road toward the river as if they were just arriving, and they filmed them doing that. Then they filmed them doing that again from the land, and again from the top of the hill. While in the boats, we filmed them from behind, from the side, then holding on to the edge of their boat to stay even with them while they filmed, and so on. I fell asleep so I’m not sure how long this went on before we finally got to actually go down the river at a normal pace in real-life mode.

After we finally got to camp, Mateo took me for a walk through the jungle to visit the sites of the ruins and the reconstructed areas. It was cool to be able to stay at a place that was only minutes away from the ruins of an ancient city. It was like, “Hey, lets go for a stroll through the woods. Oh, look! The throne of an ancient Mayan king, cool!” I have to admit, though, I took more pictures of flowers and animals than I did of the main area of the Cancuen temple. These weren’t the giant temples at Tikal, so there weren’t a tone of stairs to climb or rooms to explore, but it was still amazing. I can’t wait to see Tikal. It’s the largest of the Mayan structures. It will be fun to walk up the stairs and see the view from the top. And a good workout, too! (Don’t make fun of me.)

That night there was a mini-celebration to welcome the men from Argentina. We were supposed to meet at 9, and we got side tracked when Mr. Demarest decided he wanted to put up tiki torches around his “shower” area, which was just a designated area next to his tent that overlooked the river and had a big bale of water and a scoop. He says he and Vilma come out at midnight when it gets cooler and dump water over themselves and listen to the howler monkeys. Lovely. So we arrived to the celebration closer to 10, and the Argentines had already finished off a bottle of rum amongst themselves. We all gathered in the visitor center, which was simply a wooden screened-in structure with a palm-frawn hatched roof, and were served traditional Mayan soup while three men played Mayan music. One old man plucked a harp; another thumped on the wooden side of the harp to make a drum beat; the other held a violin like a cello in his lap and ran his bow over the strings. It all sounded out of tune, like the instruments were old and worn out, which fit the atmosphere of stepping into the world of an ancient culture. Mateo said the strings on the instruments were made of fishing line, which would explain the crude sounds it made. But like I said, it was befitting of the situation and added to the atmosphere. All the filming equipment took away from it, though, with the lights set up around the room and one man holding a light filter and three others handling sound and camera equipment. Mr. Demarest sat with the Argentine interviewer (who was the drunkest of all) and five other Mayan men and ate, and the rest of Mateo’s family and the Argentines and I sat out of camera view at a different table and watched. We didn’t have food yet. That was okay with me, because I had already eaten, and the soup had a layer of chicken fat sitting on the orange-red liquid and big chunks of chicken with bone and skin sticking out of the bowls. Everyone said it was delicious, you just had to take the chicken out and de-skin it and pat off the grease with paper towels. After my aching tummy ordeal the night before with the corn tortillas, I wasn’t inclined to eat so late at night, especially with the bathrooms being a good walk away through dark jungle. I did have a sip of Mateo’s broth, and it was delicious, and everyone said the fresh turkey meat was scrumptious, but I didn’t want to risk a bathroom emergency. I felt like a disgrace not eating, and I was afraid of offending them, but Mateo reassured me. Usually I’m adventurous with food ☹ (Except for when I’m on a cleansing-kick. Like fruitarian. I can’t imagine doing that here, I’d offend people left and right. Plus Mateo likes enjoying food with me, and he’d miss me if I only ate fruit. I do miss my durians, though. Yum.)

Once we’d all eaten and Mateo and I had watched everyone drink bottle after bottle of Argentine red wine, we went to sleep. We got up around 10 the next morning. I was avoiding getting out of the tent to face the bugs and heat. The night was so nice with the breeze and cooler air and the drizzling rain and the howler monkeys. I can imagine when rainy season is full-on how wonderful nights would be. I want to go back to find the parrots and toucans and monkeys and to see the flowers everywhere in the jungle. But it was nice to just be there for a day and night to get a taste of what it would be like to stay there. Remember, Mateo spent is childhood living there on and off for six months at a time. When I complain that I’m fat he says I should go live out in the jungle for a few months and then I’ll sweat off all the weight and won’t complain anymore. It’s funny because Mr. Demarest always complains that he is fat and says it’s because he didn’t spend his usual six months “in the field” where he usually loses around thirty pounds. He’s funny, he’s worse than me sometimes with complaining about weight, saying he looks like a whale in the films of him on TV.

That about sums up my jungle experience. I don’t know where my brain was with taking pictures, because I didn’t take any of the camp site. (?!!???!) I took a bunch in the jungle and on the river, though. I’ll get them up as soon as I can.

I feel very behind on keeping everyone posted on events, since this blasted blog wasn’t working for me. The last I wrote was about Antigua, which was mostly covered in my photo album. Since I have other things to cover since then, I’ll let the Antigua captions in the photo album suffice for now.

*** OJOS! (Notice!): If there is anything you’d like to know, any questions you have about what I’ve written, or any gaps in my story, don’t hesitate to make mention or ask away. The more details I get in, the better, and your comments will help remind me of things I may have skipped over on accident. ***

For the next post I’ll talk more about the beach . . . (I can’t do it right now, though, because I have to write fifty biographies on professors from Duke by july 16th for on of my oDesk jobs. Gah!) Unfortunately after I add about the beach, the posts will then be out of chronological order. Oh well. AND I don’t have pictures AT the beach because I didn’t want to bring my camera on the sand. I had a nightmare that I got sand in my camera and the clicker wouldn’t work for taking pictures. AAAAHHH!!! I woke up screaming in a cold sweat (not really.)

P.S. I uploaded a feature called OnlyWire that I need to use for a different job I’m doing on oDesk that involves wordpress blogging, and it requires me to copy/paste the Bookmarking button below. So use it if you want . . . I still don’t really understand it’s purpose. Maybe you can figure it out?