I am certainly not complaining about being here. The pace of life is slow, the city is beautiful and I spend lots of time with my host family always learning something, and usually there is delicious food involved. The only complaint I can think of is the incredibly ironic fact that I am living in one of the biggest coffee producing countries in the world and I have yet to have a decent cup of coffee. I was told by friends who had lived in South America that they drank instant coffee, but I didn't think it was a big deal, forgetting for a moment my love of coffee. So, three weeks into drinking instant coffee I was very interested in finding some espresso, or just good drip coffee. I went downtown with my hostbrother, Hernán, to find a café where I could read a paper and sip some coffee while he was working. He pointed me to the newsstand and the café, and I thought I had just what I needed. I got a paper and proceeded to the café. In keeping with the slow pace of life here, turns out most cafés aren't open at 8:30 a.m., seems strange to me, but there wasn't a ton open anyway. Instead, there was a resturant right above the café that was open. A full-service, white tablecloth, full-bar resturant nonetheless. They said they had coffee, so I took my pick of tables and there I was with a white tablecloth and a full table setting, including wine glasses at 8 a.m. I was the only person in the whole place and the waiter was confused as to why I only came in for coffee, I was confused as to why the resturant was open at all. But he brought me a cup of hot water, some sugar and a thing that looked like balsalmic vinager. I wasn't sure how a cup of coffee translated into vinager and hot water, so I just stared at it for a minute, then I smelled the vinager looking stuff and it turned out to be coffee concentrate of some kind. What it really was, I found out, was really, really strong instant coffee to be poured into hot water. It really didn't taste good at all, but what the heck, it was good enough. I read my paper and drank it, and for the whopping $1 price it was fine.
When I went home and told the American couple about it, we laughed and they said that everything they try to find turns out a little different too.
On Saturday night it was just Caroline, Jason and I at the house, because everyone else had various functions. We decided to watch a movie and have some popcorn. We went to make popcorn, but the stove didn't work. We figured it was just the igniter and that we could light it with a match, because we have to do that sometimes, but that failed. We went to the backyard to check the gas, couldn't figure out what was wrong. So we heated some food up with the microwave. Then we wanted some hot water. That didn't work either. They turn the water heater off a lot, and we don't know how to work it, so we we're out of luck 'til the morning. Then we went to watch a movie. Pirated movies are pretty much all they watch here because they're on every corner, they're pretty good quality and they only cost $1.25. So we found a couple movies, 2 pirated, and one original. We wanted to watch the one that was an original, but, low and behold, neither of the DVD players plays the original, only the pirated ones worked. All in all, we were fine, but we all had a good laugh about how they left the silly Americans at the house and we could not for the life of us figure out how to use anything. We laughed too at the irony of the fact that the DVD player only played pirated movies. Oh man...
A reprive from the lack of familliarity came for us on Sunday when we went to watch the Super Bowl. Jason, Caroline, Hernán and I all went to Sports Planet to enjoy good 'ol American burgers, beer and football. We had a really good time, and Hernán got to learn about fútbol americano.
This coming weekend is carnaval and I'm going to the beach with a big group of Hernán's friends. There are 11 or 12 of us staying together from Saturday to Tuesday. I can't wait! The town is called Montanita, and it's a tiny little surf town where people lay on the beach all day and go out all night. Oh yea, and they surf. I might take a surf lesson, they're only $12. Sounds pretty good to me.
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