Wednesday – Thursday
Hike. Drink. Hike. Mis-communicate with natives. Have mental breakdown. Hike. Get kicked out of hostel. Swim in a waterfall. Cry. Laugh. Tasty food. Slip on a rock and into a creek ruining the sneakers that I need to wear on the overnight bus.
The miscommunication situation is almost comical. We are constantly using words incorrectly. I was trying to tell someone to leave me alone with my beliefs. What I really say is “leave me alone with the children of whom I am the guardian”…Um….preeeetty close. While trying on jeans in a store one of the girls explains to the store owner that she’s not sure if she wants to buy them because they are a little tight in her rocks (legs.).
I realize that in this part of the world they don’t have a lot of experience with foreign accents, but their inability to just work with context clues is hysterical. At one restaurant for breakfast, the procedure goes:
Waiter comes to table. You tell your waiter your order. He looks at you without a glimmer of recognition in his eye. You repeat it. He makes no attempt to help you. Then each of the other people at the table has to confirm that you’ve said the correct words. Each person then has to try their hand at pronouncing the words in your order BETTER, and more clearly, so that maybe the waiter can understand. We do one rotation around the table. Nothing. He calls over a back-up waiter. We each take a turn trying to clearly annunciate the words in the order to the two waiters. Nothing. A third waiter is called over. They understand that we are ordering eggs but the word that comes AFTER eggs is a real doozie. Juevos revueltos. Scrambled eggs. I mean listen, I’m saying EGGS. You’ve got the egg part down. How many other words could I possibly be now using to describe the eggs? It’s like fried, scrambled, poached. Work with me here. It clearly starts with “R”. Revueltos. Scrambled. They look as if I might be saying ANY effing THING to describe how I want the eggs. Eggs Bricks. No. Eggs Paperclip. No. Eggs Train. Probably not. Think of what word might work here. For God’s sake have you people never worked on a fill in the blank exercise?!
They finally nod and bring out a bunch of stuff we didn’t order, and none of the stuff we did. We laugh and eat.
Thursday Night:
Overnight 9 hour crazy bus ride. No accidents this time, though we are no warmer nor safer.
