Another one down...
I think I'll define the past year as beginning in mid-November 2004, when I hit Botswana and my life veered substantially from its rather mundane original path. Since then, I´ve made my first visits to nine countries - a personal best! In chronological order : Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Zambia, Zimbabwe (surprisingly glorious), Mozambique, Swaziland, Costa Rica, Nicaragua. I´ve lived in 7 different homes and had 6 different jobs (including studenthood). I've stumbled through half of my master's degree and learned a reasonable chunk of a not-too-foreign language. I've eaten unspeakable quantities of fried chicken, beef stew, and beans and rice... and precious little ostrich, warthog, antelope, and mophane (don't ask). I swam with a whale shark, scaled a few mountains I shouldn't have underestimated, and stared mouth agape at a wild baby elephant. I visited ancient cities I saw in video games 15 years ago (and never assumed were actually real) and villages a day´s horseback ride from the nearest road, spent many consecutive days without either going indoors or putting shoes on, and flirted with death a couple of times I shouldn't have. I met hundreds of new and fascinating people and made a handful of new lifelong friends. I witnessed quite a few things I wish I hadn't and even got my first eyeball sunburn, but I neither caught malaria nor otherwise died, so things have gone as well as I could have hoped for. It's been my most eventful year, methinks.
I think it unlikely that 2006 will bring as many stories to tell, but it's worth a shot. If I'm lucky, I'll visit Panama, Peru, and maybe even China. I'll finish this degree and get back to selling my soul to corporate taskmasters and accumulating pricey electronic trinkets... or I could go back to Africa. Also, given a minute dose of luck and a generous dollop of the good sense that I occasionally lacked in the past year, I'll survive 2006 with few additional scars.
Those few who still visit this site, thanks for your tolerant and patient patronage, and in 2006 I'll return with much more detail.
My predictable resolution: blog more!
In which I have no excuse...
... for not posting more.
Civilization 4 has eaten my life. That's the only reason I haven't touched the blog since Christmas, nor written about the following:
-My parents spending Christmas at my new apartment in Ciudad Colon.
-My glorious snorkeling trip in Cahuita National Park, from which there will be underwater images in a few weeks (once the ancient disposable film returns to Canada for development).
-The continuation of my glorious culinary adventures in Cahuita.
-The endless staccato detonation of firecrackers that has punctuated nearly every waking moment since the second week of December.
Actually, I will post about that last one at the moment (the rest will wait). As I intimated when chronicling my brief adventure in Nicaragua, noisemaking is a cherished practice here and interrupting the peaceful slumber of another is not generally considered rude in Central America. What I've just realized is that virtually all the pyrotechnics that pulverize my sleep have no visual effects nor complex whistles... just a simple "Pow". That is, they don't entertain their ignitor, nor provide a sparkling beacon by which to track and tenderize said miscreant. Their explicit sole purpose is to wake people up.
That's the most obnoxious minor irritation I've ever encountered.
In which I realize...
that blogging about my vacation at the beach isn't nearly as exciting to who aren't me as hearing about my wanderings in elephant-infested Africa.
So I offer my warmest holiday wishes, and I rejoice in the fact that my eyeballs have healed (ow!), and I bid you adieu until tomorrow, when more detail will be forthcoming.
Remember the words of Krusty...
I don´t even know what day of the week it is...
I´m visiting Puerto Viejo right now, a little tourist town on Costa Rica´s Southern Caribbean coast. It´s hot. Really hot.
But also quite pretty and full of happy people. There´s endless reggae pouring from the handful of short buildings clustered in the town centre, and the Rastas who form the heart of Costa Rica´s small Anglophone culture are scattered everywhere, lazing in the heat. They´ve got the right idea. I shouldn´t be here at an internet cafe at the moment.
My folks arrived three days ago, and after discovering that their hotel had forgotten their existence and their reservation, they found a few nights lodging in San José with an old friend. We visited the city center and the small but quite entertaining amusement park in the suburban outskirts (where, sadly, I received sunburnt eyeballs... no fun, that). Yesterday we finally rocketed from San José, in a tiny rented SUV, to the coastal hamlet of Cahuita, a few kilometres north of Puerto Viejo. This part of the coast is festooned with coconut and banana trees so densely packed that the forest is about impenetrable. Starfruit, mangos and papayas litter the ground, growing too plentifully for the locals and tourists to devour them all. The beach sand is a dark volcanic grey, nearly black, and vast piles of torn fronds of the innumerable palm trees dampen the violence of the surf.
We´ve most of the time since arriving lazing about and eating, both of which Cahuita is spectatularly well-suited to. The Jamaican-inspired local cuisine is worlds away from the rice-and-beans blandness of the Central Valley where I live, so now I´m feasting on enormous portions of seafood and smoked chicken slathered in curry and peanut and coconut. Yay!
Having come to Puerto Viejo just to visit the bank, we´re back to Cahuita tonight, where we´ll spend another couple night sleeping and eating. I´m going to try to snorkel the local reefs tomorrow without being incinerated by the big evil fireball in the sky. Then, on Christmas day, we´re headed back to Ciudad Colon, where you´ll hear more from me.
In case I don´t post before then, you have my finest, happiest, most generous non-denominational wishes for a great holiday season. Spend it well!
In which the slow and uninteresting rehabilitation continues...
Yay! Tomorrow the Tempodog arrives! We´re going to (inexplicably) spend a couple of days in the dullish urban muck of San Jose, then vanish to the Caribbean beaches of Cahuita, the village home of Costa Rica´s small native anglophone community. I hear it´s nice. And my parents are coming too!
King Kong was waaaaaay overlong, and occasionally downright silly. But it was often genuinely resonant, and the astonishing T-Rex battle far outstrips my capacity to describe in actual words. But really, the whole movie could have been at least a half hour shorter. All told, a minor disappointment, but only because I was expecting an awful lot.
A post of staggeringly little consequence...
Yay! King Kong has arrived! In English!!!
Boo! I´ve been swatting
these all week. They´re easy to kill but distressingly numerous, and carry the unpleasantly-named Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever. Fortunately, they only operate in the daytime, leaving my sleep mostly restful.
But at least I get to see King Kong! And maybe even Munich and Syriana will someday strike theaters here...
Two rapidly consecutive posts? Will wonders never cease?
I tell you, I'm serious about rehabilitating this blog.
In half an hour, the UPeace bus will wind away from campus and through the vast park and coffee plantation (long since denuded of beans by criminally-underpaid Nicaraguan migrants) that shrouds the campus, and my first semester will come to an end. Christmas is upon us, and perhaps half the students have already fled for colder climes, and most of the rest are leaving over the weekend, abandoning those of me too poor to seek out the snow. After four months, there's fairly little to do in Costa Rica when you're not swimming in wealth.
But joyously, my parents and the Tempodog will be coming to visit in the imminent days, and we'll spend a few days wandering the Caribbean beaches and trying to find spicy food. I'll introduce my biological family to my host family, marvel at the interlingual stumbling, and probably let my folks go on their merry way up to volcano country on the 26th, simply because the area is too fantastically pricey. It'll be nice to see them.
As Krusty the Klown said in his Non-denominational Holiday Fun Fest - "Everybody have a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, a Craaaaazy Kwanzaa, a tip-top Tet, and a solemn, dignified Ramadan." Take it to heart, please, but since I plan to post again before then, I'll hold off on final best wishes.
P.S. I was remiss last time in failling to sing the praises of Hassan El-Menyawi, an Egyptian-Canadian professor whose indefatigable enthusiasm and terrifying life experiences made his class on governance and human rights the high point of a semester that was otherwise stunning in its academic mediocrity.
P.P.S. Naturally, I accept Christmas presents via Paypal.
Six weeks later...
It's funny. Life here is pretty dang dull - temperate weather, agreeable daily routine, mdestly challenging schoolwork - and I'd convinced myself that I couldn't blog unless I had something interesting to say. Then I started skimming mine blogs of old this morning, and discovered that the absence of interesting opinions has never stopped me before. I guess I have no excuse, and had better start talking again.
It's been six weeks. I offer no excuses or apologies - at the end of each school day (usually 1PM) I'm sufficiently eager to flee from campus that the last thing on my mind is to sit down for twenty minutes and spew out a blog post. But somehow, I managed (more or less) to hold up my end of the internet while in Vancouver, Victoria, and Botswana, so I'm going to try to rediscipline myself and make regular (once or twice a week at least) posts.
For (uninteresting) starters, I've wrapped up my first semester of classes. I took courses in Conflict Management and Peace, Political Economy and Peace, and Sustainable Development and Peace, along with a few procedural time-killing short classes. Noticing a theme here? It's all about peace. But it sounds more constructive than it is.
Conflict Management and Peace was a quick and cursory look at the root structural factors behind civil war, things like ethnic discord and stealable resources. It sounds like a nifty area, and I guess it is, but in two weeks we couldn't do much more than scan a handful of lists and snark at each other.
Political Economy and Peace was run by a burned-out old British anarchist whose dry wit couldn't conceal his general contempt for
all points of view. I don't just mean opposing points of view. I mean the man never liked capitalism, fell out of love with communism, and has even lost his infatuation with anarcho-syndicalism (don't ask). Now he just don't believe in nuthin' no more. This bitterness made the class more an exercise in sniping at The Man rather than an exploration of the way the world economy actually works.
Sustainable Development and Peace was provocative and occasionally even stimulating, but also supremely touchy-feely and profoundly devoid of specifics. By this point everybody was eager for more practical knowledge, which was sorely lacking.
I give the first semester a C-plus, which simply seems to be the way of things here. Semester 1 lays the theoretical groundwork for the much more practical Semester 2 to follow. My department head, who will be teaching us a course on terrorism and the mass media, just spent 6 weeks in Iraq chronicling the country's disintegration for the US State Department (I'm surprised she didn't get blacklisted for being French). She knows her stuff, and I'm looking forward to the class.
There's an upside to all this touchy-feeliness... I haven't spoken to anyone who's gotten less than an A in any class. I actually got an A-plus-plus-plus on one test, from an impressively enthusiastic teacher.
More interesting things to follow. Yeah, I know, you'll believe it when you see it.
P.S. I may be visiting China in March if I can raise the money.
