June 8, 2008
Tut tut, it looks like rain!!! It rained for the very first time today. In fact it is pouring rain right now. Well there have been a few nights that it has rained a bit but that doesn’t count. Now the rainy season has officially started!!! I am sooooo happy! Wow there was just some lightning that was so close I heard it. Not just the booming thunder that followed but the zap of the lightning. I don’t think I’ve ever heard lightning before. I think I will be investing in an umbrella today. I never thought that I would say it but I actually think I prefer freezing cold to horrible heat. At least when it is cold you can go inside and be warm. There is no escape from the heat here. It’s no different from winters back home in the sense that you still can’t go outside and do anything. It’s just too hot. Thankfully in the city where I live it gets cool at night. The heat is so bad here that our turtle died on Monday and on Wednesday Jous’ dog died. Hooray for the rainy season. What a glorious day!
Well all week I didn’t really do much. I suffered some severe dehydration on Monday and Tuesday and missed both days of work. This made me really sad because I never got to say good bye to Marcos who is now gone to Guadalajara. There is a new volunteer from LA named Brittany who came on Tuesday and is now working at the centre with me. Jous went to the centre with her on Tuesday to introduce her to everyone and discovered I hadn’t been at work all week. He came to the house took one look at me and asked if I had been drinking any water. My skin was all dry and my lips were cracked and I was dizzy and exhausted. He wanted to take me to the hospital but I opted to just drink as much water as physically possible over the next 48 hours. I felt fine later that day. Since then I’ve been making sure I drink lots and lots of water. We got two more new boys at the centre bringing the grand total to ten. Another one named Marcos who is about 15 or 16 years old and the little, chubby 12-year-old Chui (I don’t know how he spells it… pronounced Chewy). They are both real sweethearts. Very quiet and not at all trouble-makers like most of the other boys. Chui will always just come sit next to me and usually not even say a word; just smile his innocent little smile. Marcos is really into reading my Spanish-English dictionary and learning new words.
This weekend has been, well, interesting. On Friday I was feeling very sad because for a number of reasons I couldn’t get through to call Alexis for his birthday so Brittany and I went out for ice-cream to make ourselves feel better (I think she’s been a bit homesick too) and sat on a park bench chatting until it started pouring rain on us. The streets were like rivers and the thunder was deafening so we rolled up our pants and ran for it to our respective houses. I liked that walk home because usually you need to watch for cockroaches at night (I hate cockroaches) but they were all in hiding in the rain. On Saturday a bunch of the Canadians and us volunteers went to the pool. After some lunch at a health food restaurant (brilliant find!) and after getting terribly lost, we finally found the pool just in time for the clouds to roll in and take away our sun. That night we went to Lucha Libre!!!! It was brilliant! If you aren’t familiar with Lucha Libre, it is Mexican wrestling very much reminiscent of WWE. It literally translates as Free Fighting aka no rules. It was soooo hilarious! Everyone sits in the stands screaming random profanities at the wrestlers while the wrestlers pretend to fight each other. It’s all very dramatic with the wrestlers wearing masks and lots of spandex. It was a really good time.
Afterwards we went to a club called Plush that I will not be going back to. I have discovered that it wasn’t only the bar in Manzanillo where the guys are super-creepy and horribly insistent. This bar was just like it. I couldn’t be alone for three seconds without being hassled. I would escape from one guy and immediately be accosted by another. I would be dancing with a group of my girlfriends and every two seconds someone would come up behind us and start grinding on us or grabbing our butts. I think my clubbing days in Mexico are over. I can’t deal with this harassment.
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