this past friday might go down as my favorite day yet. it was my last day of classes in san pedro (i love it here but my brain is about to explode from all this spanish--so by the time you read this i should be on a beach in el salvador with jessie and nate). during class we delivered food to 25 families the school provides food for every other week, the afternoon included a visit to my favorite coffee shop, but friday night is when the fun started…
every other week most of the male teachers from school and any interested students play a little friendly game of soccer. now, since i am pretty sure all these guys came out of the womb playing soccer, i’m not sure, other than the fact that they are all stellar people, why they even allow us non-soccer all-stars to mess up their game. but they do. on friday evening we all met at the school around 6 pm and hopped in the back of a pick-up (i’m a pro now and don’t even flinch) to head to the soccer field. as soon as we arrive, all the teachers promptly take the field, warming up, stretching, doing drills. meanwhile, i’m over on the bleachers with paige and jen reenacting cheers we know from movie “bring it on.” after the warm up, as we all lined the field single file to select teams. at this point, i’m pretty sure all the students had flashbacks from 4th grade hoping they weren’t going to be the last one picked on the team. but in the fashion of a true cooperative school, one teacher, mynor, picked teams by numbering us off randomly.
the rules were this. the team that scored stayed on to play the next team until another score. as i quickly learned, i randomly made it onto a pretty stellar team--which meant we stayed on the field for a freakin long time. i must say, i do think i kicked a soccer ball more friday night than i ever have in my entire life. now granted, often i would kick the soccer ball to a member of the opposing team, but i kicked it none the less. we had a fantastic time playing for a solid 1 ½ hours before it was time to go. by this time it was approaching 8:30 pm and the students had planned to meet up with some other students down at a bar in gringoland (the strip of bars/restaurants along the water that pretty much only the tourists frequent). but one teacher, jose, said he would be down for a drink, but we should go local and hit up a cantina. we all agreed it was a fabulous idea and met up an hour later for a drink.
if you’ve ever been to a cantina you probably know what I’m about to say—cantinas are all male. and by all male, i mean all male (as in, women don’t go to cantinas). that is, until our entourage arrived. for some reason, i was the first to enter the cantina. the guy at the door (which is really half a door on the bottom and open on the top) looked at me kind of like, “you sure, lady?” but after he saw our three local teachers, i think he realized we didn’t end up at this cantina by mistake. cantina’s are really basic places--cement floors, plastic chairs and tables that you set up yourself, a place in the corner of the patio, kind of like a troth, for the men to pee (not even lying…). this cantina, however, also plays 80s songs in english (still trying to figure this one out…)
so, we headed past the bar and subsequent glances and headed straight for the patio where two other tables of men were already drinking. one table was comprised of middle aged men who were just out for the evening. right in front of us were a table of guys who pretty much didn’t even look the legal drinking age. i asked nicholas (a teacher) what the legal drinking age even was in guatemala, and when i found out it was 18, i figured they were at least legal (only later did i find out that they were actually 24, which reminded me that i no longer am…)
about 30 minutes in, mr. california comes over to our table. mr. california (nope, don’t know his real name), was a friend of jose’s and was sitting at said table of 24 year olds. those guys were so drunk in the first 10 minutes we were at the cantina, they knocked over two liters of beer…twice. once mr. california found out some of us were from the US, he wanted to let us know that he lived there too. after fumbling through his wallet for a minute, he found his old california ID from when he lived in los angeles. at this point, he began parading around our table of 12 people, yelling “california, mother f*$#%@#@”). in a strange way, it was kind of cute—he wanted to let us know that we had something in common. it was also freakin hilarious.
and i’m not quite sure how this happened, but a few minutes later jamie ordered a flask of rum (disclaimer: we seriously don’t drink that much here, i promise!). once nicholas saw the rum he told us that people often use this when they sick. i am thinking, oh, “like you put it in a hot toddy or something?” nope, he means, when they are injured they use it—to which I thought, um, rubbing alcohol? and rubbing alcohol was a good foreshadowing of what it tasted like. now, keep in mind, as i later learned, this flask of rum was also 8Q, the equivalent to 1 USD--i am not sure how good 1 USD of any alcohol is. we’d all agreed to take a shot together. but I’m not a shot girl. so i took a small sip and threw the rest over my shoulder onto the floor (i figure if guys can peethere, i can dump my nasty rum there).
cantinas aparently close at 3 am but we were out around 11:30 pm. friday night just felt like such an appropriate ending to my time here in san pedro. on saturday nate and jessie returned from xela (a city about 2 hours away), and we decided we’d head out to the beach in el salvador sunday morning. i will be there for about a week and then who knows (clearly being with all these nomadic people is rubbing off on me—jessie and nate, for example, are on a 2 year world tour). so el salvador this week, maybe some more traveling in a bit, and then back to school for some more spanish (nicaragua, perhaps?)—i’ll keep you posted once i know.
adios guatemala. hola el salvador.
