Pretirement

wow, i wasn’t ready for all the support i got for my broken heart letter. thanks! i’ll try to rack up a couple more. my heart’s doing much better now, but sadly my ass has regressed. they say immodium is bad for you because it interferes with your body’s natural defense against intestinal infections. but with a going away party tonight, a morning of horseback riding, and a five hour bus ride to acapulco coming in the next 24 hours, i’m saying “you can relax now, guts. that’s why god made antibiotics.”

three weeks of spanish classes have me cussing like a sailor. i started uploading my photos but they’re still private because i’m naked in several of them and i’m worried flickr might shut me down for distributing pornography. please bear with me a few more days while i figure out how to blur out my junk and we’ll get some gravy on this blogging biscuit, ok?

by far the best thing you’re going to see in those photos will be my trip to achichipico last week. go ahead and look for it on a map. it’s not there. the weekend started with a friday afternoon excursion with my grammar class to a water park by a stream in the mountains. my new watch gave up the ghost after a few trips down the water slides, so we used it as a diving ring on account of its bright yellow color and worthlessness. we failed utterly to retrieve it from some slimy rocks at the bottom of a chilly four-meter pool, so that’s where my new watch lives. if you have any leads on a $12 watch that lights up in seven different colors of indiglo, i’m in the market!

then my teacher and her boyfriend invited us three students back to her town for the weekend. i was the only one who accepted. the others had boyfriends or something. anyway we went for a long combi ride, stopped to buy me some cowboy boots, and took another combi to arrive finally in achichipico. kendy’s family fed me like a king morning and night for the next three days. i shared a bed with her boyfriend, luis.

friday night i learned to drive a combi. we picked up a dozen kids around town before stopping in a street to drink tequila from someone’s mom’s store. welcome to route 51, serving achichipico! i’m felipe and i’ll be your gringo driver this evening.

saturday i rode with kendy’s brother on his combi route, running back and forth between achichipico and yecapixtla, a bigger town nearby. not that i could ever find my way back, but if you wanted to get to achichipico, i think you have to ask for yecapixtla first (Travel Tip: the kids call it yeca!) and then hop on the 25. we charge 7 pesos, but i promise it’s money well spent!

saturday i took my new cowboy boots and a borrowed shirt to the rodeo. they call it jaripeo (that’s when they ride bulls) and the bullriders are called jinetes. i didn’t learn the word for standing in a downpour for three hours using folding chairs and plastic tables for cover, but i did get to learn a lot of swear words. we paid extra to get right down ringside and we saw a ton of action. i’ll prove it later with the photos. after the bulls and during the rain, lupillo rivera and his band played and everybody danced and got wetter and muddier, but we sure forgot about the cold. i learned to danse the paso duranguense, for which cowboy boots are absolutely essential. a cowboy hat is good too, but it just so happened that everybody with a spare hat that night had a tiny little head.

we spent sunday at a filthy little water hole in some tomato fields in the hills. you’ll see the pictures soon. those are the one’s i’m naked in. the plastic sides if the hole were steep enough you would (did. several times) fall in if you failed to hang onto the prickly weeds lining the edge. we chucked a sinful amount of tomatoes at each other. then, in what i consider the sad climax of the afternoon i had a bucket of slimy green water chucked at my feet where i was standing, naked, at the top of the plastic slope. when the water hit my feet they flew out from under me. i landed flat on my ass and slid naked down fifteen feet of plastic, ending in a green sludgy splash at the bottom. if there’s a scientific explanation for how i avoided dying of dysentery and tetanus and plague from that soaking, i’d like to see it.

then we climbed up the hill, ravaging every field we found along the way. as best i can figure, i ate twenty oranges, ten peaches, four and a half chirimoyas, and three avocados. i also smashed two melons which i was told were inedible. we posed for a photo with the volcano Popocatepetl and returned home like proper men, carrying an impressive load of fruits and vegetables in a bag we found. we were rewarded with meat. i had a nice shower. not a running-water kind of shower. they use a bucket of cold water and a bucket of hot with a little bowl to mix up warm water and pour on yourself. i can tell you, it washes off green slime and that’s more than enough for me.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.