Ocotal, N.S. signing off
Well, the time has come for me to pick up and head onwards. I feel well acclimated now after 2 weeks down here. My language skills have returned to about where I left them in 2004. I relearned all the good cursewords I need to show someone that I´m not a complete Gringo. Eesh, mentioning that word makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
RANT NUMBER 1: In the past, the word gringo was a rare occurance. Now I hear it with a greater deal of frequency and it really, really pisses me off. I always point that out to people when they say it. Chele refers to my skin… I can deal with that, I am white, nothing I can do to change it! Gringo is an offensive term with its roots referrencing US military involvement of past decades. I believe it etymologically meens ¨green go¨ or moreover, ¨green go home.¨ The green, here, referrs to the color of military uniforms. So yeah, thanks but no thanks. ¡Call me a chele!
Phew. Okay now. This past week has been Semana Santa and I´ll be honest with you it wasn´t that spectacular. Its very similar to the fourth of July weekend, but without fireworks. People from all over Nicaragua flock to the various beaches to get ludicrously drunk and pay outrageously gouged prices for goods and basic services. This isn´t funny, but I laugh at it nonetheless… there is this thing called Plan Verano 2008 which is a government-run program to ensure a ¨safe¨ summer at Nicaraguan beaches. They put up bouys and nets to keep people near the shore and try and find some lifeguards too. Invariably, idiots who don´t know how to swim get sloshed and go swimming. As of Friday I believe 27 Nicaraguans had drowned during the week. Who knows where the tally will stand when I read the paper tomorrow. In one TV report I saw, people were detaching the buoys that hold up the restraining nets and playing with them, floating around. If this isn´t natural selection in action I don´t know what is.
So thankfully I chose to stay safely hunkered down in Ocotal and actually earn money, thanks to the precious and ludicrous gift of the casino. That joy, however, had its serious drawbacks this past weekend, when for two straight nights the only store open in Ocotal was an ice cream shop. Not exactly the kind of intellectually stimulating nightlife I was looking for! So with nothing to do I sat home and watched some TV, which was dominated wall to wall with both old and new religious films. One can only watch Christ being crucified so many times before it becomes tedious (at one point Friday afternoon Jesus was on the cross, literally, on 3 different channels each showing a different movie). I finally did get to see Mel Gibson´s Gorefest-Passion and I rolled my eyes the whole time.
RANT NUMBER 2: I find it extremely amusing that Mel Gibson needed to up the violence factor with ¨The Passion¨. I know this is a dated discussion but I hadnt seen the movie prior to this past weekend and I have to point this out. Good old Mel did a great job contributing to modern desensitization with such family-friendly titles as Lethal Weapon, Braveheart, and The Patriot. So after a good career spent slaughtering hundreds on the silver screen he needed to plug the story of Christ´s death into the terminals of a car battery. Good job Mel, wear us down with watermelon brain-smashing to the point where the violence of ¨The Passion¨ becomes necessary… because before then having yourself publicly disembowled was the reigning display of love and sacrifice for your people. My two cents.
So maybe you can tell by the presence of multiple rants in this post that i´m a little wound up and it is probably time for me to hit the road. I will be leaving this coming Wednesday or Thursday for Leon. That journey is a wretched day of agonizingly slow bus travel… with a jewel at the end of the road. Leon is in the heart of Volcano country. I´m going to see how many I can scamper up in the time I´ll be there, which may be close to two weeks. Its been far too long since I felt the awesome humbling presence of those terrifying collosi. Check out the Nicaraguan Geological Foundation´s Volcano website at
http://www.ineter.gob.ni/geofisica/vol/dep-vol.html
Its all in Spanish but you can get cool links and photos on there, as well as real-time sismological data which will become very important to me in the coming weeks!
I´m excited to be shoving off, it is like a vacation within a vacation… deeper down the spiral of my dreams. These past two weeks have been like the lift hill of a roller coaster, clack clack clack clack up to the top. Now comes that brief silence and then the rush! Look for a post from me this Friday. Ciao, Chao, and Aloha.
4 years ago