in ascending order of difficulty:
- reading Spanish in books (I found Michael Marshall Smith´s Only Forward! Yay! Reading a book you already know inside-out in a different language is a great way to pick stuff up. It´s just called Ciudad, City, though, which is well boring)
- understanding clearly spoken Spanish
- speaking awful Spanish with the articles and genders all magimixed
- reading casual, dashed-off email Spanish with no punctuation, of which more later
- understanding fast/slangy/muttered spoken Spanish
- understanding Spanish on the phone
- ....when there´s a crap laggy line because you´re in a noisy netcafe and you failed to understand something in the person´s last email which said to phone them the previous day because by now they would be deep in the jungle and it was highly unlikely their phone would work
- ....and trying to communicate with said person when you´re floundering and self-conscious because you feel like a fool for misreading the email and you´re trying to make a good impression but you´re just a blundering blob of a foreign tourist and you´re sweating buckets and having a sugar crash because you didn´t have lunch and this would be a rather nervous-making conversation even if it was in English
This was what did for my plans of yesterday evening. I was supposed to be going to stay at the house of a local shaman (a thoroughly modern one, with his email and cell phone). It may still happen next week, but seriously, this last couple of days absolutely nothing has gone as planned.
I tried to go to a lake in a mototaxi to watch the sunset and instead I ended up at a random zoo and was shown jaguars by torchlight. Literally minutes after I made that slightly glum post about having no one to talk to, I made friends with Yves the tattooed Belgian psychonaut, who´s a bit of a dude, and was supposed to go to a river beach with him and a bunch of his friends, but the friends all drank rum all night and showed up at the Yellow Rose the next morning moaning "oh god, we´re so fucked, oh god, my head, I´m sorry," and then couldn´t manage anything more that day beyond slouching in the baking heat, inhaling hair of the dog and groaning. (Later I heard that the next day they missed their boat to Colombia because they were drunk.)
I made friends with another bunch of people, Katie, Omar and Hector. Katie and Omar had been on the plane to Pucallpa with me, then they showed up at the bar here. Katie´s from Canada, has hipster hair and does Latin American Studies at university, so she has dozens of friends here. Omar´s from Puerto Rico and looks a bit like Jesus. Hector is a local guy Katie knows, who works as a mototaxi driver. His mototaxi is called "Dragon". (They all have painted names on their soft-top covers. Or slogans. I´ve seen one with "In Memory of my Adored Mother" and dozens with variations on "Jesus is my guide".) I was supposed to go to a different beach with them the next day, but instead I ended up in a zinc-roofed raw brick house in a residential area with them, meeting the old man who was putting them up and being fed delicious cake from a street vendor Omar knew, as a deafening rainstorm battered the roof.
I was supposed to be going on the jungle trip with an expensive and rather posh company (mostly to reassure mum) but every time I went to their office to try and finalise things they were closed and in the meantime Katie et al convinced me to go with a different company, who are lovely and helpful, go to a quieter bit of the forest and do cooler stuff for longer for a quarter of the price. Sadly they don´t go to the Canopy Walkway, but all the rest seems so mind-blowingly cool that I don´t care. I´m off with them tomorrow morning for four days. Katie and Omar have now also gone to Colombia, which is absurdly sad considering I only spent about 24 hours with them, but I´ve met other people at the bar who seem nice and who are likely to be on the same tour. Yay.
Just about the only thing that went to plan was doing my laundry. I had lots of company and enormous fun and most of the time I felt like I was in a state of travelling Zen. The way to do it, I said to myself, is to have intentions but hold them lightly; know where you want to go but don´t panic if something else starts happening; leave room for serendipity; float downstream yadda yadda yadda. And largely I did manage that, except for just after the phone fiasco, when along with my plans I´d also lost my hat and (briefly) my friends and got really fucking pissed off. But dinner and a cold beer sorted me out, and then my friends showed up again, and we chatted and ranted and smoked and exchanged email addresses and then walked along the riverside boulevard, where there was a comedy drag show going on in the amphitheatre with the comedians singling out all the gringos for good-natured mockery, and it was all OK really.
Today Hector gave me a tour in his mototaxi, and in a rented boat, and we visited tribespeople (which is worth a whole post in itself, all the mixed feelings), and ate alligator and lizard, and went to an animal sanctuary where I swear to God I wore an actual anaconda. Albeit a baby one, only maybe five or six metres long rather than twenty. Hector took photos. They look like paintings of Eve and the Serpent. A rather plump, red-faced, overexcited-looking Eve, but still.
And after a day conversing with Hector who has almost no English, I´m floundering much less.
This is all summary-ish, no atmosphere, it doesn´t really convey anything, but that´s what happens when you let the blog pipe clog up for several days and then unblock it suddenly. Meanwhile, in the ordinary world, there are things like house bills and the A-level results (which ugh, but I won´t discuss in an unlocked post). I have to address these things but it´s very hard to climb back into the mindset of stationary me. Well, I had best roll up my sleeves and do it and then head off to the jungle with a light heart.
- understanding clearly spoken Spanish
- speaking awful Spanish with the articles and genders all magimixed
- reading casual, dashed-off email Spanish with no punctuation, of which more later
- understanding fast/slangy/muttered spoken Spanish
- understanding Spanish on the phone
- ....when there´s a crap laggy line because you´re in a noisy netcafe and you failed to understand something in the person´s last email which said to phone them the previous day because by now they would be deep in the jungle and it was highly unlikely their phone would work
- ....and trying to communicate with said person when you´re floundering and self-conscious because you feel like a fool for misreading the email and you´re trying to make a good impression but you´re just a blundering blob of a foreign tourist and you´re sweating buckets and having a sugar crash because you didn´t have lunch and this would be a rather nervous-making conversation even if it was in English
This was what did for my plans of yesterday evening. I was supposed to be going to stay at the house of a local shaman (a thoroughly modern one, with his email and cell phone). It may still happen next week, but seriously, this last couple of days absolutely nothing has gone as planned.
I tried to go to a lake in a mototaxi to watch the sunset and instead I ended up at a random zoo and was shown jaguars by torchlight. Literally minutes after I made that slightly glum post about having no one to talk to, I made friends with Yves the tattooed Belgian psychonaut, who´s a bit of a dude, and was supposed to go to a river beach with him and a bunch of his friends, but the friends all drank rum all night and showed up at the Yellow Rose the next morning moaning "oh god, we´re so fucked, oh god, my head, I´m sorry," and then couldn´t manage anything more that day beyond slouching in the baking heat, inhaling hair of the dog and groaning. (Later I heard that the next day they missed their boat to Colombia because they were drunk.)
I made friends with another bunch of people, Katie, Omar and Hector. Katie and Omar had been on the plane to Pucallpa with me, then they showed up at the bar here. Katie´s from Canada, has hipster hair and does Latin American Studies at university, so she has dozens of friends here. Omar´s from Puerto Rico and looks a bit like Jesus. Hector is a local guy Katie knows, who works as a mototaxi driver. His mototaxi is called "Dragon". (They all have painted names on their soft-top covers. Or slogans. I´ve seen one with "In Memory of my Adored Mother" and dozens with variations on "Jesus is my guide".) I was supposed to go to a different beach with them the next day, but instead I ended up in a zinc-roofed raw brick house in a residential area with them, meeting the old man who was putting them up and being fed delicious cake from a street vendor Omar knew, as a deafening rainstorm battered the roof.
I was supposed to be going on the jungle trip with an expensive and rather posh company (mostly to reassure mum) but every time I went to their office to try and finalise things they were closed and in the meantime Katie et al convinced me to go with a different company, who are lovely and helpful, go to a quieter bit of the forest and do cooler stuff for longer for a quarter of the price. Sadly they don´t go to the Canopy Walkway, but all the rest seems so mind-blowingly cool that I don´t care. I´m off with them tomorrow morning for four days. Katie and Omar have now also gone to Colombia, which is absurdly sad considering I only spent about 24 hours with them, but I´ve met other people at the bar who seem nice and who are likely to be on the same tour. Yay.
Just about the only thing that went to plan was doing my laundry. I had lots of company and enormous fun and most of the time I felt like I was in a state of travelling Zen. The way to do it, I said to myself, is to have intentions but hold them lightly; know where you want to go but don´t panic if something else starts happening; leave room for serendipity; float downstream yadda yadda yadda. And largely I did manage that, except for just after the phone fiasco, when along with my plans I´d also lost my hat and (briefly) my friends and got really fucking pissed off. But dinner and a cold beer sorted me out, and then my friends showed up again, and we chatted and ranted and smoked and exchanged email addresses and then walked along the riverside boulevard, where there was a comedy drag show going on in the amphitheatre with the comedians singling out all the gringos for good-natured mockery, and it was all OK really.
Today Hector gave me a tour in his mototaxi, and in a rented boat, and we visited tribespeople (which is worth a whole post in itself, all the mixed feelings), and ate alligator and lizard, and went to an animal sanctuary where I swear to God I wore an actual anaconda. Albeit a baby one, only maybe five or six metres long rather than twenty. Hector took photos. They look like paintings of Eve and the Serpent. A rather plump, red-faced, overexcited-looking Eve, but still.
And after a day conversing with Hector who has almost no English, I´m floundering much less.
This is all summary-ish, no atmosphere, it doesn´t really convey anything, but that´s what happens when you let the blog pipe clog up for several days and then unblock it suddenly. Meanwhile, in the ordinary world, there are things like house bills and the A-level results (which ugh, but I won´t discuss in an unlocked post). I have to address these things but it´s very hard to climb back into the mindset of stationary me. Well, I had best roll up my sleeves and do it and then head off to the jungle with a light heart.