I Hate the Country: An Extensive Rant
Perhaps you remember this post wherein I described my hellish trip to the countryside last spring. Well, I went back. Why? Eli's cousin was getting married, and also because I am bag-o-hammers stupid.
I don't usually think of myself as terribly prissy. I'm not a very girly girl that requires a nineteen piece set in order to bathe. That being said, I do need a toilet. It pains me to admit this, but all my life I have been unable to make in the woods. Apparently I was born without the ability to simultaneously activate the Squat Like a Ski Racer muscles while disengaging the Don't Wee in Your Pants muscles. So imagine my helpless despair when I had to take a whiz and was shown to...a shower stall. What? No toilet, not even a hole in the floor - nothing. I asked Eli what exactly I was supposed to do in there. He told me to pee in the normal way. The normal way?? No sir, normal is a toilet, dagnabit! A toilet!! One that has recently know the sweet kiss of clorox!
So we hiked a good hundred yards over to the latrine which, and I cannot stress this enough, smelled awful. Also, it appeared to be made of tin and I was pretty sure that at any moment it was going to collapse and I was going to get to reenact a scene from Slumdog Millionaire.
Then it came time to get ready for the wedding and take a quick shower in the aforementioned shower stall/pissing place. Except the walls of this particular bathing cube were only about 4 feet high and I am 5'6". Oh, did I mention this shower is outside? Outside! Where there are people, with eyes! This isn't a problem for the locals because they are all really quite short. And maybe you are thinking that 5'6" isn't that tall (because it's not). But I am here to tell you that in Nicaragua, particularly in the country, I am fee-fi-fo-fumming my way through the Lilliputians. Anyhow, my husband rustled up a blanket from somewhere and held it up to shield me from unwanted boob ogling while I took the world's fastest soap-n-rinse ("shower" implies an actual shower head and not a bucket/bowl combo as was the case here) in water cold enough to make pie crust.
The no running water thing aside, the country can be a lot of fun. Ok, maybe I've overstated that a bit. By "a lot of fun," I actually mean "skull-shatteringly boring." For me anyway. The boys (including Eli) decided to go to some remote location and take a group swim in the river which left me behind to do...nothing. All the girl-related activities involve cooking or sitting around and chatting. I am fairly clueless when it comes to cooking various cow parts on a open fire (at one point in the weekend, I swear I am not making this up, I was served fried udder. Really). And the thing about trying to follow a rapid conversation in heavily accented colloquial Spanish is: I can't. To illustrate my problem, at one point my sister-in-law, Claudia, asked me if I was pregnant. Except the words she used were hasta el queso. Until the cheese?? That doesn't mean anything! /weep.
So my options for the day were pretty much limited to staring at the wall for 9 hours. Thankfully my cousin, Maynor, on a hunch that I might be bored, showed up and invited me on a short hike with him, his girlfriend, and a cousin up to part of the gold mining operation that is the lifeblood of the town. I saw a purple tree that was beautiful, tasted a hickory seed (it tastes bad) and even more importantly, killed nearly a whole hour. After that we trekked over to Grandma's house for second lunch, coffee, and baseball. To my great delight, someone actually had a left-handed glove! Also delightful, after all these years, I can still throw a decent curve ball. I can also, with the use of a glove, catch any ball not thrown too hard or too far away from my person (a ball thrown with any kind of velocity will cause me to automatically leap out of the way like a frightened gazelle). A bat was found somewhere and a few of us got a nice game going. I don't want to brag or anything but I did hit several weak grounders back to the pitcher. I also got hit by a pitch twice, which just goes to show that the whole gazelle thing doesn't kick in if I am also holding a chunk of lumber.
By the time I was too tired to play anymore, my beloved husband showed up on the scene freshly returned from his Boy's Adventure Day. Hand in hand, we wandered off to refresh ourselves with leftover wedding cake.
I will admit that the whole baseball thing was actually kind of fun. Of course after that I had to pee again and that ruined my good mood. But as they say, all's well that ends well. And in our case, it ended with us having to change a flat tire on the side of the road, in the dark, in the middle of nowhere.
Yup.
I don't usually think of myself as terribly prissy. I'm not a very girly girl that requires a nineteen piece set in order to bathe. That being said, I do need a toilet. It pains me to admit this, but all my life I have been unable to make in the woods. Apparently I was born without the ability to simultaneously activate the Squat Like a Ski Racer muscles while disengaging the Don't Wee in Your Pants muscles. So imagine my helpless despair when I had to take a whiz and was shown to...a shower stall. What? No toilet, not even a hole in the floor - nothing. I asked Eli what exactly I was supposed to do in there. He told me to pee in the normal way. The normal way?? No sir, normal is a toilet, dagnabit! A toilet!! One that has recently know the sweet kiss of clorox!
So we hiked a good hundred yards over to the latrine which, and I cannot stress this enough, smelled awful. Also, it appeared to be made of tin and I was pretty sure that at any moment it was going to collapse and I was going to get to reenact a scene from Slumdog Millionaire.
Then it came time to get ready for the wedding and take a quick shower in the aforementioned shower stall/pissing place. Except the walls of this particular bathing cube were only about 4 feet high and I am 5'6". Oh, did I mention this shower is outside? Outside! Where there are people, with eyes! This isn't a problem for the locals because they are all really quite short. And maybe you are thinking that 5'6" isn't that tall (because it's not). But I am here to tell you that in Nicaragua, particularly in the country, I am fee-fi-fo-fumming my way through the Lilliputians. Anyhow, my husband rustled up a blanket from somewhere and held it up to shield me from unwanted boob ogling while I took the world's fastest soap-n-rinse ("shower" implies an actual shower head and not a bucket/bowl combo as was the case here) in water cold enough to make pie crust.
The no running water thing aside, the country can be a lot of fun. Ok, maybe I've overstated that a bit. By "a lot of fun," I actually mean "skull-shatteringly boring." For me anyway. The boys (including Eli) decided to go to some remote location and take a group swim in the river which left me behind to do...nothing. All the girl-related activities involve cooking or sitting around and chatting. I am fairly clueless when it comes to cooking various cow parts on a open fire (at one point in the weekend, I swear I am not making this up, I was served fried udder. Really). And the thing about trying to follow a rapid conversation in heavily accented colloquial Spanish is: I can't. To illustrate my problem, at one point my sister-in-law, Claudia, asked me if I was pregnant. Except the words she used were hasta el queso. Until the cheese?? That doesn't mean anything! /weep.
So my options for the day were pretty much limited to staring at the wall for 9 hours. Thankfully my cousin, Maynor, on a hunch that I might be bored, showed up and invited me on a short hike with him, his girlfriend, and a cousin up to part of the gold mining operation that is the lifeblood of the town. I saw a purple tree that was beautiful, tasted a hickory seed (it tastes bad) and even more importantly, killed nearly a whole hour. After that we trekked over to Grandma's house for second lunch, coffee, and baseball. To my great delight, someone actually had a left-handed glove! Also delightful, after all these years, I can still throw a decent curve ball. I can also, with the use of a glove, catch any ball not thrown too hard or too far away from my person (a ball thrown with any kind of velocity will cause me to automatically leap out of the way like a frightened gazelle). A bat was found somewhere and a few of us got a nice game going. I don't want to brag or anything but I did hit several weak grounders back to the pitcher. I also got hit by a pitch twice, which just goes to show that the whole gazelle thing doesn't kick in if I am also holding a chunk of lumber.
By the time I was too tired to play anymore, my beloved husband showed up on the scene freshly returned from his Boy's Adventure Day. Hand in hand, we wandered off to refresh ourselves with leftover wedding cake.
I will admit that the whole baseball thing was actually kind of fun. Of course after that I had to pee again and that ruined my good mood. But as they say, all's well that ends well. And in our case, it ended with us having to change a flat tire on the side of the road, in the dark, in the middle of nowhere.
Yup.
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1 comments:
Ohhhh girl. I hope you are telling that dear husband of yours that you do not so much care for the country, since he seems to love it so much! And I sometimes leap like a gazelle when nothing at all is happening in my vicinity... I'm just jumpy.
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