A quick note on the nature of what is vs. what could be. This is Scabby, the first dog we brought in last year when I was here. He was the single most disgusting thing I had ever seen in my life. And believe me when I say I had seen a lot of disgusting in my life.
And this is Scabby now, only his name is BB now. And he is fat and happy and likes to play with the woman's other dog . He is just like anyone else's dog. The only difference is he's still missing that part of his ear. But none of us are super model material, really, so you can't fault him for the half ear.
Now on to the non-dog portion of the blog. And I don't have pictures for it so I'm just sort of peppering it with other pictures of Granada that I have because they're interesting. And we all know it's more fun to read things with pictures.
The Ganga Guy
You get used to the noises and the catcalls. There’s no harm meant, really, it’s just a cultural thing: men say things. Sometimes they hiss, sometimes they make kissing noises, sometimes they just yell ‘hey’ or ‘hola’ or ‘muy bonita’ or whatever. You just ignore it, sometimes with the elderly men I’ll smile or wave back, just keep walking, no harm meant. Every now and then you get one who has a few words of English just for heckling women. It’s never anything lewd - I doubt that half of them even know what it is they’re saying. ‘Hello you are beautiful good morning’. The best one I ever got was some guy in a business suit who, in passing me, said in one gigantic breath: “you are beautiful you are my life you are all I have ever wanted please come home with me right now.” He didn’t slow down or anything when he said it, just blurted it out like one big long word while walking by me. It’s kind of funny.
Sometimes I get followed, that’s annoying, get questions: what’s your name? Usually I’ll ignore them, if they’re particularly persistent I’ll say something nonsensical back to them - ‘en los estados unidos no tenemos nombres‘. Or I’ll just answer with ‘tengo un novio’ which shuts it down.
Occasionally, though, oh occasionally you get the ones who speak some amount of English and are unrelenting. Walking down La Calzadera one day some guy starts following me - I own a bar, you come to my bar, you don’t pay for anything, I have ganga, you like ganga? What’s your name? I take you to the volcano, you like volcano. I keep walking, say nothing, stare straight ahead.
I keep seeing the ganga guy everywhere. And he does not give up. No matter how often I keep walking and absolutely ignoring him, he does not take a hint. I have never said word one to this guy about ganga or booze or volcanos or food or anything but the assumption is because I am an enormous tattooed gringa I must love drugs and booze and need huge amounts of food and touristy amusement, all of which he wants to provide for me.
The other day I’m grocery shopping. I have a ton of crap - vegetables and fruit from the Mercado, some groceries from Pali, the grocery store. Usually I walk but it’s worth the sixty cents to take a cab, not do the mile walk back to my house with all this crap. Cabs in Granada are fixed rate - 10 cords - and shared. What that means is that they’ll pick up more fares with you in the car if they can. Because I flag down the cab outside of Pali, it’s unusually packed. Everyone doing their shopping. The driver, a guy in the passenger seat with a little kid on his lap, two elderly men in the backseat. I squeeze in next to the old men and am arranging my bags when I hear the voice.
Tattoo girl! Tattoo girl!!
It’s the guy from La Calzadera. Fuck. The driver, thinking he might be able to smoosh another person into the cab, stops. Vamos, I say, vamos. Por favor. Ahorita.
The driver isn’t budging.
And then ganga guy is leaning in the window yelling at me: I HAVE TWO OUNCES GANGA!! YOU COME SMOKE GANGA WITH ME!!! I HAVE HASHISH!! I OWN BAR!! YOU EAT, DRINK, FREE!!!
In front of all five people in the cab. Luckily the driver figures out that ganga guy is not getting in the cab and drives off, him trailing behind on foot, still yelling about two ounces of ganga and free food. Meanwhile everyone in the cab is staring at me. It is dead silent. I don’t think anyone spoke English but ‘ganga’ and ‘bar’ mean the exact same thing in Spanish and English.
Everyone is staring at the alcoholic drug-crazed gringa. No conozco ese hombre, I say quietly. I don’t know that guy.
Everyone looks away but I can tell. No one believes me.
The Best Spanish Teachers Ever
I started Spanish classes today. I was going to go to a regular Spanish school, the kind where you get a one-on-one tutor, a textbook, a lot of grammar - the same sort of thing you get in high school but never remember. There’s a billion in Granada, it runs about $5 an hour. I figured I’d do a few hours a week.
I mention this to Donna.
Oh no, she tells me, don’t do that. Have one of the chavallos teach you. They can teach you useful stuff, conversational stuff, teach you the way they learned English. There’s a guy who cooks at the café who speaks English well and is also Donna’s quiador. He’d be happy to do it, Donna tells me. He’d love it. And he’d charge you like half what the school would.
A week and a half later I find myself sitting in Donna’s living room with two of the chavallos - the one that Donna suggested and his friend who came along to come along. I recognize both of them from when I was here before. One used to teach at the school, the other has been Donna’s quiador forever.
Brief interlude here to introduce the concept of chavallos. Chavallos are gang kids, teenage thugs. Donna runs a couple of programs here that help chavallos get out of the lifestyle, teach them job skills. The two guys I’m working with are success stories. Ex drug pushers and pimps, they both now cook at the restaurant.
This is an odd situation. First of all, there’s a weird dynamic between men and women here, an awkward one. The idea of a platonic make/female friendships here is unheard of. Second of all I am fifteen years older than these guys and it’s their job to correct me, to talk to me like friends and correct me, help me with my language, my ability to comprehend regular conversations.
In the first ten minutes I can feel every second tick by. They are unsure of what to ask me to get me talking, a little shy about correcting me. I’m unsure of what to talk to them about, they’re posturing a little bit, doing the cool-kid thing.
I don’t know what broke the barrier but something did. We went from a stilted conversation about how to tell the laundry people I needed my clothes today to Why Costa Rica Sucks . It’s the sort of conversation that would give Don Vicente, my very good but very traditional Spanish teacher in San Juan Del Sur, the vapors.
They correct my pronunciation, teach me new verbs but in a totally different way than a regular teacher. We talk about my life in the states, their lives prior to being in the café and teaching programs, how Donna got them a teacher to teach them English. We do this all in Spanish with them correcting me. They teach me some slang. Don’t use this, they tell me, then they rattle off something I’ve heard before on the barrio streets but never understood. So that’s hello, I ask them? Sort of like ‘what’s up?’. I ask. No, not for normal people, they tell me, but it is for us, it means ‘yo motherfucker, what you been up to’ in Spanish. I probably will never use it but they teach me it, anyway, all of us laughing.
I mention the ganga guy. You need to tell him off, one of them tells me. You need to call him a son of a bitch. The other chavallo nods gravely. Si. Hijo de puta, they say. Hijo de puta, I say back. No no no, I’m not saying it fast enough. They make me practice again and again. Hijo-de-puta. Hijodeputa. You have to like, spit it out.
The same way they make me practice the phrases about laundry and being late, the same way they make me repeat past and present tenses on a bunch of verbs, they make me practice ‘son of a bitch’ until I cannot only say it, I can say it vehemently and with a Nica accent.
These guys are reformed, they are success stories. Both of them are accomplished cooks, one of them was a fantastic teacher and is now an amazing pastry chef. Even still, they are chavallos. I am not only learning Spanish I’m learning How Not To Take Shit In Spanish.
The Belgians
They are one of the single most attractive groups of people I have ever seen in my life. Not attractive handicapped people - attractive people, period. And in some odd parade they are coming down Calle La Libertad as I am walking up after locking up the clinic.
There’s a truck in front of them filming them, one in back, a bunch of people racing around next to them with television cameras and boom mikes. And then there’s the ten of them - a few people in wheelchairs, one guy with a prosthetic leg, another guy on arm crutches, a little person, a woman with a backpack of oxygen who occasionally puts the tube in her mouth. None mentally handicapped but all with physical handicaps. And they, with their retinue of cameras, are hauling ass down the street.
All white. All devastatingly attractive. Seriously. The guy on the crutches and the woman in the three wheeled wheelchair could be models.
I am trying not to stare but I’m the only one trying not to. School has just let out and all the Nica kids in their uniforms are streaming home, staring, following this group. As I walk by one of the guys in the wheelchairs hollers at me ‘ingles?’.
Yes, I say, I speak English.
Immediately I am swarmed, not only by the disabled people but by the camera crews, a mike is shoved in my face. The guy with the artificial leg, who looks infinitely more vigorous and athletic than I could ever be, asks me if I know where Rancho Major is. I don’t, I tell them, I’m sorry. Did you ask cab drivers?
Yes, they tell me, but we don’t speak enough Spanish and they keep sending us in opposite directions. Can you ask for us?
My spanish sucks but I can do directions.
I ask one of the school kids who tells me it’s next to the Malecon, near the lakeside, walk down to the lakeside and ask the police there. I translate for them. Well then how do we get to the lake?
Calle La Libertad ends at the end of the block and the road to the lakeside, while close, can be a little confusing - there’s a little fork there. I offer to walk them down to the fork, a few blocks away, and point them in the right direction. Just get the cameras off of me.
As we walk the guy on the crutches and the woman with the breathing tube explain it to me. They’re a group of handicapped Belgians and they have to make it from the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua to the Pacific coast in ten days, stopping to do all these challenges.
Yesterday, the crutch guy tells me, we climbed Mombacho. He indicates the woman in the wheelchair - she literally hauled her self up it on her ass with just her arms.
Holy fuck. Mombacho is a huge volcano. I wouldn’t, fully functioning, climb it.
Honestly - that's it. Look at it. It's gigantic. And hot.
It’s a reality show, the girl with the breathing tube tells me. The British did it last year on the BBC. Now we’re doing it. She pauses to take a breath off her tube. And we need to kick some British ass.
We get to the fork and I leave them there, amidst some very quick handshaking and a few hugs. There’s a ton of tourists at the lakeside, they won’t have a problem getting someone to translate for them.
As they haul ass down the street the rear production truck stops next to me, wanting to know if I smoke and if I do, if I have a lighter. It’s three guys, all younger. We smoke a cigarette together and they give me a bottle of water out of their cooler. We were walking really fast and it’s super hot out.
Those people are ANIMALS, the production guys tell me. They’re nuts. You have no idea. They have all these tasks they have to do that able bodied people would have trouble with and they are just whupping ass at them. There’s nothing they can’t do. I ask if they have a hard time with people heckling or anything. No, lot of staring but where ever they go everyone thinks it’s awesome.
I ask if they have a website or something that I can track their progress on. They don’t but they give me the website of the Belgian television network that’s making it. It won’t air until October and there probably isn’t much up about it until then. They ask me if I want to come along, ride down to the lakeside with them, see what’s going on, see where they go next. I’d love to but duty calls. They head off down the road in the truck, speeding to catch up to the group.
***The last of Bolsita's puppies died the other night. She is doing well, Freda and her pup are doing fantatically but we did lose that last Bolsita pup. And no, I don't want to write about that.***
****Other note: I enabled comments on this. I got some emails about people not having blogger accounts wanting to comment so I changed the setting - you don't need to have a blogger account to leave a comment now. But be nice, kids, be nice*****
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