Drop That Spoon !!!

Latin men have a certain reputation around the world as seducers and lovers.  Pauline met one in the gym.

She was just finishing her workout, and on her way out, she stepped on the scale.  He saw his opportunity, he made his move.

You see, between a month in Florida (including Thanksgiving) and her above-average height, Pauline weighs more than most 45-kilo stick-thin Colombianas.

So the passing Latin lover asked her, romantically, if she could please step back on the scale.  And don't forget to re-zero the scale, baby.  Casanovas of the world, watch and learn.

Upon seeing her weight, he turned up the charm, licked his lips, and told her she really should leave the spoon alone.  Oh yeah, he was in the groove now.  Like Wilt Chamberlain in his prime.

Pauline, somehow able to resist his charms, left the gym.  As if Pepe Le Pew could be deterred so easily. He followed the scent.

When Pauline veered toward the supermarket, he told her, his voice heavy with lust, Really, you don't need to go in there, it's full of food.  Sorry Don Juan, this one's mine.

Incredulously, she entered the supermarket.

He wandered off, wounded, wondering if he should change his tactics.  Just then, he figured it all out : she must be a dyke !  Then he eyed a women of above-average weight strolling out of the pizzeria.  "Don't worry baby, I'm on my way," he thought.

Djokovic enters the Albanian Open (The Coal Cup)

How about that Swedish mullet ?

I used to play tennis. ..When I was 13 years old. Back when Stefan Edberg was number one in the world. Remember him ?

So I was taken aback when, on my second day on the new job, one of the secretaries asked me, "Do you play tennis ?"  "Well, I used to pl... Yeah, I play," was my confident answer. 


You see I had spent the whole month in November in Florida.  A trip home to mom's, whether for a weekend or a month, usually involves overeating. So imagine a month that includes Thanksgiving. I had to be rolled onto the plane to Colombia. I needed exercise...so I was more than willing to get back on the hardcourts and grease up the ol' tennis elbows. You know, just to hit the ball back and forth... to ease into the sport.

Three days later, she visited my classroom to tell me that I had a match that night in the community's mixed doubles tournament. What ?! The tournament was called, like every other sports competition at Albania's mine, the Coal Cup (Copa de Carbon).

And she told me that my partner for the tournament would be Loogie.  Uh, I remember "Booger" from the Revenge of the Nerds films, who did his own personal bit of mining, but I'd never heard of anyone being called or calling themselves "Loogie". I was worried.

That evening, I indeed met Loogie, or as I later learned : Lugui, which is short for Luguarda. It made me feel better that her name was in no way related to mucus. She was in her 40's or 50's, with short curly hair, perhaps the only woman in Colombia with short hair. Her laugh, omnipresent and loud and closer to a cackling guffaw, came out at the end of every statement or question she made. She played like a 45-year old woman who plays at most once a week. She hit some good shots, some bad ones, too, and she couldn't care less if we won or lost. She was the perfect partner.

Then we met some of the other teams : generally a desperate housewife who swung an expensive racquet and owned a different color tennis skirt for each day of the week and her arthritic husband with a distended bariga.

I played poorly, every game. But I can run faster, jump higher, and move quicker than any old arthritic goat. So we won. By a lot. We finished the first round undefeated, then we won in the quarterfinals, too. When Lugui saw me in the halls, she'd yell, "Hey Djokovic !"  When she saw other tennis players pass by in the school, she'd tell them, "He's my partner, and I'm never trading him !"

She even christened herself Lugui Williams: Venus and Serena's younger sister. Lugui's very Caucasian.

But not even Djokovic can win them all. In the semis, we finally met a team that wasn't a overweight husband / desperate housewife combination. Both players were young, athletic, and had trained every day. We were the old goats now. They had me running this way and that in the burning heat of Northern Colombia. By the end of the game, I was bleeding out my arm in three places from diving for balls. And we had lost.  But only in a tie-break.

Overall, we were pretty pleased with our performance. This summer, I'll be buying a tennis racquet (I had borrowed one for the tournament) so that when then next tournament starts, the duo of Loogie and Djokovic will bring home the coveted cup of coal.

If you live in an ugly city...

A few years ago when I was traveling through Germany, I stopped for a night at a friend's place in Hannover.  Like many German cities, Hannover was completely razed during the war. Unfortunately, the rebuilding process was swift and lacking in imagination. It's not exactly an ugly city, but it's certainly charmless.

He told me, in his thick East German accent (he had moved from Dresden), that one nice thing about living in a city such as Hannover was that when people come to visit you, it's because they want to see you, not the city. Imagine you live in Paris, and your friends want to come see you every month. It's entirely possible that you are the only reason they are coming. Or perhaps not.

I was reminded of that as we traveled from city to city in Colombia and Venezuela. Colombia has its fair share of ugly and charmless cities, with Barranquilla claiming the top prize. Venezuela, on the other hand, has at least seven cities competing in the Ugliest City in the World Competition, every year...Maracaibo, San Felix, and Valencia come to mind. But during our time here, we've made lots of friends in every place we've visited, including in the above-named cities. So I'm hoping they realize that when we visit, they are the only reason we go.

So now we live in small village called Mushaisa, which, like Hannover, is certainly not ugly, but lacks a bit of charm and can get a bit boring.  But if you come visit this place, I'll know why you came.

Roraima Part 3 : Tony and the Lost Group

Here's part 1 of the story : Path to the Summit
Here's part 2 of the story : The Lost World

The morning came, the rain dried up, and we packed our things. After saying our goodbyes to James' group, we hopscotched from rock to rock in the direction of the flattish rocks to find Tony and our group.  The rocks were empty.  Our group, missing.  In our minds, there were three possibilities for their absence.  The first, the group, knowing that they were slow hikers, decided to start hiking down the afternoon before.  The second, the group, knowing that they were slow hikers, decided to leave very early that morning.  These two theories were immediately laughed at and rejected.  The third theory was that they had found a new, higher spot during the flood. We would certainly see them that night at the campsite.

So we started down the mountain in the midst of some heavy mist.  It was going to be a long day of hiking, needing to cover the two days' hiking distance (luckily, downhill) and needing to cross two rivers.  Pauline and I were two of the stronger hikers in the whole bunch...which included about one hundred hikers from Venezeula, Brazil, and some random Europeans.  With the exception of on top of Roraima, all hundred hikers camped in the same place each night.  By now, nearly every hiker knew Tony's name and face.  Pauline and I generally arrived early, then mingled with the others...the questions eventually arose : "Who's your guide ?",  "Where is he ?",  and "Seriously, it's been hours, are they walking backwards ?"


We arrived in the early afternoon. James, the sunburned Englishman was just behind us. We ate lunch, went swimming in the river, cleaned our clothes, then like usual, we found other groups to talk to us. We were the orphans of the camp.  No group, no guide, and now we didn't even have a tent.  We were homeless orphans.

From the camp, you could see the hikers come down a hill before crossing the river at the base of the camp. So we watched them come down for several hours.  Here come the Brazilians.  Now, here comes the large woman who leaves every morning a five am. Oh, here come the neck-to-ankle spandex group.  Wait a minute, is that Tony ?  No, no, false alarm, just a pudgy Venezuelan. The sun went down as the last hikers reached the top of the hill.  Every hiker had arrived by six o'clock.  Our guys, carrying our tent, didn't. We slept without our tent in our sleeping bags with the ants under a thatch roof pavilion.

In the morning, on our last day of hiking, we returned to the National Park outpost, where we waited to be taken by our 4x4 driver, who we had already paid.  He flatly refused to go without the group.  Without getting paid extra.  "Everything costs."  We tried to explain that our group was perhaps a full day behind us, but he wouldn't budge. Other drivers offered to take us down for exhoribtant rates as well.  We talked to everyone, pleaded even.

We stopped worrying about our own group started fretting about how to get home again. It was a long day's hot hike back down to San Francisco, and once there, we still had at least two or three days to cross the country and return to our little corner of Colombia. We continue pleading.  Finally it paid off:  the Brazilian group offered to leave us at San Francisco for no cost. Obrigado !

Once in San Francisco, our fretting continued, how were we going to get back North? The only busses headed North started on the Brazilian border and those busses were all full of the hundred hikers plus random travelers.  What to do ? So we hitched.  The first driver we met offered to take us the twelve hours in the back of his pickup truck along the scenic highway to Ciudad Guayana in the center of the country.  He even had a niece studying at the colegio where we worked !  We stayed the night in the city, and were lucky enough to get the last available seats on a bus to Maracaibo, cartographically millimeters from our home.  Seventy-two hours after finishing the hike, we had reached home again.


And we never saw Tony or the group again. (But a week later, we heard that they has survived !)