Pretirement

ok ok i know i’m travel blogging but i found a good picture and i have to share it. this is richie. richie is special and lives in chicago. we bought matching reebok classics one time at meijer because they had them 2-for-1.

the picture is inside a gymnastics gym in coal city. four of us went there on a friday night because coal city is a good place to have adventures. the rest of us were playing in the foam pit when richie came running out of a back room wearing this thing and his argyle socks and clapping for himself and started doing tricks awkwardly on the equipment. i’d forgotten all about this picture until now. i hope you enjoy it as much as i have.

(click on that pic to see more pictures of richie!)

Long time no posting, right? Last time I posted I was in Guatemala. I spent close to a month there and had lots of adventures. After a month of circling the country, I settled in Antigua for a few days to take some Spanish lessons and look for volunteer opportunities. Shadie, the guy in the black tshirt in the first photo, was doing the same. Now a lot of people asked why I was taking lessons when I could already get by. The simple answer, I guess, is I wanted to learn how to cuss better.

I ended up taking lessons with a nurse and single mother of three. In three days the only expressions she taught me were old sayings about how it’s bad to be friends with sinners. My favorite was the vaguely threatening, “If you walk among honey, something will hit you.” Shadie had better luck. His teacher taught him things like cerote and pajas (meaning “turd” and “bullshit”, respectively). After a chance encounter with one of his teacher’s friends, Shadie got invited up to a farm outside of town to hang out for the weekend.

We had big plans and six of us from the hotel were going up there to camp on the farm for the weekend, but in the end, all but Shadie and I thought better of it. Actually everyone else went out to the farm too and decided after seeing it that the whole thing was sketchy. But for toughing it out and being brave in the face of certain sketch, Shadie and I were rewarded with the little gem you see pictured above.

Luis Felipe and his friends own the farm. It’s not much. Mostly a shack and some open land, a couple of trees, one smart dog and one lazy dog. But when the sun went down and we got to drinking, Luis’ neighbor came by to see what all the commotion was. As you can probably guess, he stayed for a while.