The Odyssey (except replace boats with chicken busses)

I apologize for the lack of updates. Those who know me (why else would you read this tripe) are aware that was traveling in Central America a few weeks ago. As developing nations, civil war, diarrhea and ridiculously disparate income levels are a comedy gold mine, I figure I can kill two birds with one stone.

I took a surfing lesson while in Costa Rica. I’m not generally one to brag, but I was awesome. Surfing (or, as they say in Ess-pang-yol, “hacer surf”) is not terribly easy, but when I say “awesome,” I don’t mean “competent” so much as I mean “relatively certain to revolutionize the sport.”

Allow me to elaborate. Surfers wax philosophical about one the sport’s hardest tricks, “hanging ten.” For those without my surfing acumen, hanging ten involves moving to the front of your board and dangling your toes over the edge. I decided that sounded a bit pussy, so I created my own trick, which I call “flailing twenty.” Unlike hanging ten, flailing twenty requires that your entire body leave the board and enter the ocean. I not only mastered the trick, but was able to perform it while swearing loudly and swallowing large amounts of sea water.

My travel mate Jake, not to be outdone, managed to complete the flail twenty and, with amazing consistency, whack his head on the board upon resurfacing. We lovingly named this trick the “daño en mi cabesa.” We could tell by our instructor’s yelling and screaming from the shore that our new style put his livelihood in serious jeopardy.

But the vacation wasn’t all fun and games. We learned a lot about cultural differences between gringos (Spanish for “American that needs a shoe shine”) and ladinos (literally, “one for whom ‘now’ means ‘in forty-five minutes or when the bus is full, whichever is later’”).

Here in the Minnesota, much political debate focuses upon the recent decision to issue pistol conceal and carry permits. In El Salvador, the question is how many locks to put on the gun cabinet in front of the dance club. They don’t bother concealing them; they give them to a concierge the same way we would a jacket to the coat check clerk. In some ways, this gun culture is nice, particularly when the assault rifle toting guards use their, ummm, influence to persuade some native giving you the ‘sieg hiel’ to move along.

All in all, the trip was a success. No one mugged us, our Spanish improved and we saw a lot of mountains and chickens and Central American people.