It's not the end but we can see it from here

Okay. So. Um. This is probably my first blog post without any form of caffeine or alcohol. Yes, I have a problem. I have blogging compulsive/hatred disorder. So I need one or both of those drugs to get me to take off my metaphorical clothes and take a shite in the public fountain. Or maybe (by the looks of that last sentence), not. hmmm.

What to say about the starting. . . Okay, We´re in Juayua now, and since I last blogged we have been to Santa Ana, Lago Coatepeque and Cerro Verde. And lots of other things have happened as well. For example, after a week of feeling mostly healthy, being able to walk and hike and drink and sleep (sort of), I have come full circle to not wanting to come home after having some homesickness two weeks ago. Which brings us to the fine print. We´ll be home in nine days. Isn´t that the number of times Ferris Buhler was absent? Nine times. Ni-ne times. When Cameron was in Eygpt´s land. . .

Nope. I don't want to leave. I don't want to leave this place where honking is a not just for fun, but a moral nessecity. Who needs reasons when you have a loud horn? And besides the fact that most of the time horns have been used to instill the fear of gawd in me, they have also proved useful. For example, this morning we were staying in Lago Coatepeque. Through our intensive scientific research we had discovered that we could hear the bus honking from the otherside of the lake at about six in the morning. Since, once started, this honking didn't stop until the bus had driven all the way around the lake to our hotel (why quit when the job is only halfway done?), we could safely use this as our alarm clock. This fifteen solid minutes insured that only the dead would miss the next bus that came around seven (who's horn had an even more abrasive tone and diligent driver, he provided us with sounds that not even rocks slept through).

Sleeping would have been dumb at Coatepeque anyways. This is your picture perfect post-volcanic eruption caldera that formed a deep and beautiful lake. It was shadowed by it's still semi-active and fully active cousin volcanoes and made for an incredibly tranquil couple of days. Oh and super-rad bitchen camero swimming. Perfect water. I couldn't get enough. The only non-tranquil moments were the excessively loud Maddonna moments. Now we loves us some 'donna. But seriously the dude at one restaurant played lucky star on repeat at least sixteen times. No feckin B.S. Now, I know, and have been repeatedly told, that some people respect her political and religious stances and therfore find her to be vaulable and meaningful beyond her music, but lets be feckin serious. Come on. She's a pop star. She's not even John Lennon. She's selling political awareness with sex. And don't give me that tired old argument of, well she's drawing attention to these issues, so who care how she does it? That´s a load of crap. If you get people's attention you have to consider the quality of it. If they're looking at you because you're mock fecking somebody on stage they're not going to have some epiphany about their place in the world or their personal politics. They're gonna be thinking about two things. Gettin some and gettin some more. You can sell anything you want with sex, but you can't make people think. Ever. and I think the last thing we need with most people's current religious and political views is less thinking. Eh?

Feck, that was a rant. No wonder nobody posts comments or reads this thing. Well feck it, it's my blog. I have another rant before I tell more about what's been happening. I promise, there will be some more meat here, some descriptive tales of places I went and things I saw. But first. How is it that it is illegal to smoke marijuana or refuse to fight in a war but it's legal to pollute a small body of water with a jet ski? Innocent, harmless activity? Sure, of course it is. In small bodies of water (or even in larger water systems) the pollution created by these water toys is relative in scale to the atmospheric pollution in a hypothetical world in which all of us drives 747's to 7-11 for every little errand. Let's face it folks, it's cool in the States, and to my eyes becoming cool elsewhere in the world, to burn as much gasoline as is humanly possible. In the states, down here, everywhere I go; there are motors left on, bigger and bigger and biggest vehicles with one person in them, huge oil dumping boats in lakes and rivers that will take centuries to clean out. Feck, how does anyone in the business of making and enforcing laws expect me to take them even slightly seriously?

So now, back to the beautiful town of Santa Ana. We liked it. Santa Ana has been a center of the coffee producing plantations in western El Salvador for hundreds of years. Therefore, it's always had an interesting history of having some very, very rich people and the peasants who actually get you your joe. Some of the uprisings that led to the civil war here began around Santa Ana. But by the time of the actual war, the west had been thoughly pacified by the secret police of the military. So, there was a lot of colonial era buildings left to be seen. Hmmm. Yeah, no camaro. The Santa Ana theatre was definently a fascinanting peek into a bygone era. Erected through philathropy of the coffee elite it was built in the early 20th century to reflect those georgous old school theaters that had been built since the 18th century. Kinda like a Carnegie library I suppose. That sort of thing always leaves me feeling a little odd. It's beautiful, it's a history lesson and it's made possible by figurative (or often literal) slavery. So yeah. The main cathedral was also fascinanting and just as much a confusingly complex metaphor. It was massive on a european scale (or so I was told by my personal expert on such matters) but was a complete hodgepodge of gothic and byzantine and other construction styles. It looked like a bunch of churches in a blender. I know little about such matters, but even I could see it was feckin weird. Whatever, the thing that really stuck with me was the acoustics in there. Man, I gotta buy me a big church like that. I don't really care if gawd actually lives there or not. When you play music in there, it sounds like he does.

We also had a good lesson on getting around via bus while in Santa Ana. We wanted to take the bus to Cerro Verde (one of the volcanos that hovers over Coatepeque) and climb around on it. We went to where the guide books said to go, but no bus. We asked people and got told a lot of things but no bus. Finally after hours we saw the number of bus we were looking for, flagged down and were rewarded with a ride back to the Santa Ana terminal and the info that the next bus left in over three hours. We decided to call it a draw and retreated to a bar that looked out over the franken-cathedral to lick our wounds. We had learned that the guide books (all of them, lonely planet, let's go, what ever) do only one thing: confirm the existence of the country you are going to and maybe a few of it's cities. The rest is useless feckin crap. We also learned that in this part of the world, people will happily give you the most thorough, complex directions to a place, when they have no idea where it is or if it truly exists. We also learned that when you give up on getting some place and decide to just go drink some beer, it's maybe not best to wander into a cute little church south of the town square. Who knew they were having a funeral? Not us. At least not until we were halfway to the front, gaping around like the tourists that we are. Back to the gawd thing, well, umm, yeah, I know that didn't look to good, but it wasn't my fault. I swear.

So we left Santa Ana, it's hourly rate hotels with cockroaches, pretty buildings that I can't seperate from the totalitarianism under which they were built, and it's thin young rich people who sneer at us then go slack-jawed when we respond to their snide comments in Spanish. I'm not fat, dammit, I'm big-boned. My mom says so. Yeah, I want some gawddam ice cream.

We got to the Lago Coatepeque and enjoyed walking around and sleeping and swimming. We also finally got our bussing together and caught a bus up to Cerro Verde. From there we spent the day hiking down and way, way back up to the summit of Izalco, a still semi-active volcano. It was really cool to walk down through the lush jungle and fertile ground of Cerro Verde to see the wasteland the is the landscape of Izalco. It had been erupting for hundreds of years and only stopped back in the seventies or eighties (I wasn't listening closely enough to the guide, I was busy gaping). So the surface of it was a steaming wasteland. Like I was Frodo or something. Only no orcs, flying thingies or big red eye. But otherwise, just like that.

It was also an incredibly difficult hike. We started at over 6000ft. descended over 2000ft., climbed back up to about 5500ft. Then we made the return trip. For me at least, seriously thin air, rough as hell terrain and a big boat load o' asskick. We had these two Israeli guys in our group. These fuckers were 22 and had just gotten out of the infantry, so, they... well, they made me feel really feckin old. But it was so worth it. The view, the terrain, it was double rad.

Today we bussed into another small mountain town, closer and closer to the border with Guatemala and our bird home. Juayua just happened (no okay, honestly we knew it was going to be happening) to be having their weekly festiva gastronomica. So we found a hotel and mingled with Salvadorenan tourists while feasting on amazing food. We discovered a heated milk and cinnamon with rum drink just as it started to pour down rain. Yeah. Puppies. All in all a very nice day.

I guess we, or really I shouldn't speak for Auna... Okay, I, like the natural aspects, the small town culture and the interesting peoples on the busses of these countries more than the more expected, typical gringo magnets. I like being able to use my Spanish to offer two old ladies my kercheif to wipe down their seats after it has rained (yes I'm a frickin boyscout). I like keeping my outward calm as I get told that some Arabs (not all mind you) are just bad and need to be killed. Maybe about 30% or so. The hard part, is choosing which ones, right? I like being able crack jokes with the old lady trying to sell me a wicker basket and the young hippy who was successful in selling me some stupid hippy crap. I like learning. I like learning that I hate reggaetron. I like seeing new parts of the natural world. I like being sad to see them destroyed right in front of me. I like coming up with a bad ass lick while sipping rum and watching the thunderstorms rage. I like blowing little kids minds by not only having red hair and playing some slick guitar, but by being the only gringo they're ever met who understands their comments about those things. I like sadly and hopelessly watching the locals throw all their trash out the window of the bus into a nearly pristine river or forest after they offer me a seat and help with my backpack. I like wondering why processed food is more popular than the cheaper, healthier, local traditional food. I like the way the stars are different here. Especially while I'm night swimming on my back and staring at Jupiter. I don't want to go home. But all things must end. And I really, really want to get back to my music. I want to play in front of people and grow my music. More and more and more. I want it so bad.

We've got two more towns in El Salvador, then on to Guatemala and three days after that, home. I'm excited to get back to my work (not my feckin job, mind you) and sad to be so close to leaving. I like it like that. Bittersweet.

Oh Lord, I'm stuck in Suchi again

So I have no idea where I left off. I've been drinking pilsner for a while, so, well, here we go:

I think I left off with us heading to San Salvador. Yup, San Salvador was sweet. But something that quite nearly made me believe in gawd happened before we left. We walked out to a restaurant at the edge of Suchitoto that looks over the lake. It was an incredible place and we had it pretty much to ourselves. We had really enjoyed Suchitoto and so we were celebrating and drinking and the only other people there were at a far off table. After we had eaten one of the best meals we've had in central america we watched the sunset, drank more beer and watched the firefiles on the cliffs below us and the lightning above us. The restaurant was supposed to close soon so we asked for the check and the lady who had been serving us asked us if we would like to instead join "him" with a nod of her head to the other table. Mind you we were having this conversation in Spanish (not Spainish, we spoke that later). We were a little confused but we were waved over to the other table by a man there.

Turned out dude was the owner and he was entertaining some friends that were in from San Salvador. We stretched our Spanish legs and talked with them all about art and music for a few hours. We learned gradually that these people were all highly educated artist and teachers, and that they spoke alot of English, but didn't mind our Spanish (always nice to hear somebody tell you your favorite lie). Then the owner turned to me and said in perfect English, "So you are a musician. Now, I will drive you to your hotel and we will get your guitar. Then you can play for us and I will see if I can give you a gig." No, I'm not James Bond, I said something incredibly articulate, like, "oh, feck, really..., cause, like, feck!". Five minutes later we were in the town central park and I was drinking more beer from my new jefe's wife's bar and giving a little concert for a couple tables full of people. Auna and I did a number, it was tranquil and yummy.

So I got the gig and was to return to Suchitoto for a Saturday night show at my now favorite bar in Suchi. To give ya'll a little more back story, the first week in August is pretty much a national holiday, so the entire country shuts down and parties. Hard. Like frat boys with a coors sponsorship. But with nice people. And cute children that like to sit on Auna's lap. Bitchen camarro, eh? Ehhh? So we went off to San Salvador to stay with Auna´s family friend, but i had left my heart in Suchi.

And my nerves. I was really nervous to play for what could be a mostly spanish speaking crowd. But Auna helped me not be a stress biscuit by keeping me in sweet, sweet lovin and chocolate and peanut covered frozen bananas. Dude. I have no sweet tooth. But. But feck me on a tuesday those chocobananos were kick-ass-tastic.

So back to San Salvador. We went to the local fair, the modern art museum, the anthropology museum, a nearby Mayan site and out to see some music with my newest favorite person Karla. I have to give a super big thanks Auna's aunt and uncle for the hook up with her. Karla had taught english to them and they had stayed with her during breaks from there time in the peace corps down here. She turned out to be our best friend, info source, political debate partner, spanish teacher, cook and just all around best friend. Yeah dude, she kicked ass.

Besides all that, it was really cool to be speaking Spanish with her everyday and not just about simple things. She is well educated and politically aware, so we learned alot of new vocabulary if you catch my drift. No not swearing. Other stuff.

I don't really have it in me to go into detail about everything. But here's some really brief highlights. The Mayan site is called Joya de Ceren and is basically the Pompeii of the new world (dangerous phrase that one). If was amazing to see the food on the table and the crops in the field as they had been 1500 years ago.

The Modern Arte Museo or MARTE was really fascinating for a couple reasons. The first of which was that all though it's centrally located by the fair and another museum, people that live and work within a block of it have no idea it exists. I had three women in a farmacy tell me that I didn't understand them and that what i was asking about didn't exist. But the problem was more likely the material in the museum not my Spanish skills. My favorite exhibition was a series of monkey images using many different techniques and based on phrases from Kafka. In Spanish, that qualified as some "over my head" shite. Really, really fascinating though. We spent hours there, it was Auna and I's virgenal museum trip and we sang Madonna the whole time.

The last thing of note was when we went out to see some music and got rocked in at least two ways by a band playing, yes yous guessed it: Bon Jovi, Guns and Roses and Def Leppard. Seriously, only the hits. Two horns up.

So yesterday we came back here to Suchi and I played two long sets at Rene's Vista Conga Restaurant. First gig in El Salvador. And besided that, fun as hell. I had a mostly bi-lingual audience, and a few peace corps quys. Everybody was well lubricated and having fun. Auna and I did a number together and that felt really, really good. It was our first time performing together. We got fed, beered, rummed, and paid forty bucks. Hell´s yeah. Rene, si estas leyendo este, muchas gracias y buena suerte chero. So yeah, I'm on cloud nine.

Tommorrow we're on to Santa Ana. We don't have much time left and since I'm feeling better, my slight homesickness has evaporated and I don't want to go home. But that's for later today we are celebrating. Besides we were up until 3:30 last night and I'm a very fuzzy boy. Gawd i hope this is comprehensible.

Rawk on ya'll.