Still not thirty

It seems to be the done thing to blog about your upcoming thirtieth birthday, and when the title occurred to me at 3AM in the ocean while watching the phosphoresence trailing behind my skin, I felt it had to be done.

Yes. I am an impossibly smug spoiled brat. Other people grow up some time in their mid twenties: not me. Here are my instructions for seeing in your nearly-30th birthday without an instant's remorse:

• Go to a pacific island with a teeny population and views of volcanoes in three different countries.
  
• Rent a house on the beachfront, looking out at the volcanoes. Do not attempt to climb volcanoes - they are for looking at.
  
• In the absence of your closest friends in all the world, get 10 people you like rather a lot who happen to live in the same country to come along. Makes accommodation and boat rental easier. And cheaper.
  
• Eat lots of prawns the size of your own head.
  
• Build a bonfire.
  
• Swig tequila out of the bottle.
  
• Go skinny dipping at 3AM, so you can lie on your back and watch the phosphoresence trailing behind your arm, while lightning flickers in the completely cloudless sky.
  
• Along with your youth, leave behind your sandals and your towel.
  

I'll be out of the office for yonks starting on Wednesday, but I'll pass by in case anyone wants to send me commiserations on the departure of my youth. Me, I don't mind a bit. I'm going to Mexico in 2 weeks time!

Credit card fraud

I logged on to internet banking to pay my mortgage on the 7th of May 2007. That's when I generally pay my credit card bill too. You know the way these sites are really clunky and sometimes ask you to enter your transfer amounts in cents instead of Euros, so that E50 has to be entered as 5000? And you know the way I live in a non-decimal currency? All of this contributed to it taking a good while before I registered that Euro2,600 was a disturbing sum of money to have spent in less than a month on a credit card. I'm dozy enough that I spent a little while trying to remember where I'd spent Euro 2,600 (that meal in the Patio? Maybe in Costa Rica airport? I hardly use my credit card!) before I realised that clearly I had been robbed. Violated. Taken advantage of. I started to cry.

I pegged it to my house, which is near my office, to get the number of my credit card for cancellation purposes, and to confirm that the card wasn't where it always is in my bedroom. The card was where it always is in my bedroom. Somebody had faked my card without ever holding it for more than 5 minutes.

Further investigations, since I cancelled it, have been incredibly slow, resulting in theory after theory. On the internet you can only see the last 20 transactions (with my bank anyway); and those I could see had all been registered on the same day (May 4th). They were in petrol stations and fast food outlets which are ubiquitous in Honduras. And they were for squeenchy little amounts. One was for 18 cent. At first I figured that the transactions were going through like phone bookings, simply quoting the card number and expiry date: I imagined a network of complicit petrol station goons allowing their mates to use card details they knew to be stolen. But how did that work? Why would anybody steal credit card details just to buy bottles of water and fast food? Where were the flights to Miami, the laptop computers and ipods, the saleable technology? That's when my flatmate's boyfriend came up with his gruesome theory that the card was being used to finance a kidnapping. I think the kidnapping was an embellishment; but I think he's spot on with the nature of the use: someone forged my card, and now it's their petty cash fund to finance their criminal activities.

The theory was backed up when the bank statements arrived. The first 8 transactions are in Guatemala, city and up the border with Honduras towards the Carribean coast where the narcotraficantes hang out. Then over the border to Cortes, the neighbouring province, where the Honduran narcotraficantes run. Over and back, over and back, stopping mostly in motels and fast food chains with just one massive hit of E1,260 for electrical goods (why was my credit card not automatically stopped then?). They overran my credit limit by 20%, and it kept going. For 2 weeks, until finally I noticed and cancelled it. Trickle by trickle, the payments are still going through.

So the good news: the bank recognises the fraud, and I'll get my money back. So now I don't need to cry any more, and I'm very intrigued.

I went to the police today to make my denuncia, and open the investigation. It was hilarious. It took the woman QUITE some time to figure out that the Euro is a very valuable currency, and that it's worth considerably more than Honduran lempiras (25 times more, to be precise). She insisted that I dictate my credit card statement to her line by line, since her computer "doesn't have a calculator" (I tried to show her where it was, but she didn't want me to see the game of free cell open on the screen, so she wouldn't let me near it); and she wasn't able to use the photocopier. I have an appointment with an investigator on Thursday.

And I genuinely, sincerely, can't wait!

Things I like about Honduras

• The mountains and
• The trees and
• The sea and
• The jungles and
• Did I mention the mountains? It's, like a wilderness. Complete.
• Nature, generally. It's spectacular.
  
• The geckos. Which are also part of nature.
  
• The street food, which is ideal for hangovers, consisting generally of maize stuffed with very salty cheese and fried in a variety of shapes and sizes.
  
• Dancing when not drunk. A bizarre national pastime.
  
• Constant latin junk music, generally clashing with different latin junk music in the bar opposite, and 80s power ballads pumping from a nearby pick up.
  
• Pick ups! I love pick ups!
• Piñatas in the shape of sponge bob square pants.
  
• The market (see previous).
  
• Giant ceramic cockerels with Honduras written across their combs; which I'm going to buy in job lots for wedding presents when I get home. Don't think I'm joking.
• The proximity to Guatemala.
  

I've to go to the pool now before it gets dark, so I'll leave it at that, though there are many more things. The pool of a weekday evening is definitely in there.

Lists

For Christmas, one of the 10 squillion things that simp bought me was the McSweeney's book of lists (which I would link to, but I can't find it on Amazon). I recently rediscovered it, nearly wet myself at the list of things this city was built on, other than rock and roll, and now I've decided to create my own lists using just keyboard and brain. I may get bored of this, or it may become a recurring motif, only time will tell.

Things I dislike about Honduras:

• Men hissing at me on the street.
  
• My credit card being falsified and used to the tune of Euro3,000 while it never once leaves a drawer in my bedroom, hence provoking me not to notice its use for a full three weeks.
  
• Sweating profusely, even while I'm in a swimming pool.
  
• Cars slowing down and the driver leaning out the window to get a better look at the foreign girls on the street.
  
• Being called gringuita.
  
• My friend´s boyfriend theorising that my credit card is being used by a crime gang as the petty cash fund to finance a kidnapping.
  
• Newspapers displaying corpses with their clothes pulled up to make it easier to see the wounds.
  
• People speaking to me in English with thick American accents because they think it will make me like them, because they assume that I, like them, am rich and spent much if not all of my youth in the US, and I, like them, disdain idiots who don't speak English, even though I'm a FRICKING DEVELOPMENT WORKER for chrissakes, I'm not going to be impressed because you know all the best clubs in Manhattan, or more likely Miami, so just BACK THE FUCK OFF.
  
• People speaking to me in English because I speak lousy Spanish.
  
• Police cars slowing, the driver leaning out the window to get a good look at the foreigners, and then cranking up his loudspeaker to announce "Hola amor I love you".
  
• People who say they don't like Honduras because of the machismo, the crime, and the inequality. And the dirt. Especially Finnish people who say that.
  

I feel that I should make a point of listing the things I like about Honduras. And I will. Soon. (Hint: it's not just its proximity to Guatemala, though that's in there too).

Apologies

It’s been a while, I know. There was a time when I used to go to the internet café dutifully every Saturday, generally just after phoning home, and file a thorough report on the activities of the week. The Saturdays melted into Sundays, and eventually even into weekday evenings, until eventually the whole game puttered out (with the exception of one marathon session in an airport hotel in the rain: the best imaginable context in which to blog). Some of you have mentioned. I know. I’m sorry. I’ll try to be better.

So anyway, shall we start with some updates? I went through a brief phase, after easter, of profound enchantment with this country, and started to make long term plans, and imagined the conversation in which I’d try to convince simp to come live here from October. It’s a beautiful beautiful country, and I have a good life here. Good friends, fascinating job, pleasant lifestyle. Hot weather. Use of a swimming pool whenever I need it, and where people I know turn up and gossip. That’s really all you need, no? On a good day.

The bad day came when our house in Dublin was broken into (Big sister, could you not mention this to our brother? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t read this. Thanks!). Although nothing of mine was stolen, and the break-in was clean and unthreatening in every way, psychically it had an effect from which I’m still recovering. Work got hard again. All my friends announced they were moving back to their respective countries. I wasn’t going to the pool that much anyway. And simp was so so far away.

Suddenly I had no idea what exactly was the point of this whole carry-on. Why would I choose to live in a different country from my life partner for a year? For a job? What, really, was I expecting to come out of this? I was baffled.

And that’s the thing about this whole set up: when work is going well, it’s the perfect life, and I’m a blessed, spoiled brat, as I always have been. But when work stops working out, or reality invades via a worrying email or bad news from home, Honduras seems like a silly indulgence that doesn’t quite make sense.

This isn’t the entry that I’d started out to write, but now I’m writing it.

I feel as though I’m living two completely distinct lives. One is that of a development worker just starting on a career in which she can live anywhere, have adventures and learn millions of things. Which has, more or less, been my fantasy since I stopped fantasising about being a queen of Narnia (though I’d still quite like that too: I’d be an archer, and unlike in real life, I’d be very good at it and not at all clumsy). The other life is the one I started creating 5 years ago when I met simp, discovered a Dublin full of strange music geeks and gloomy bars with people who make me laugh until I cry. And stuff that I didn’t believe real people used, like art galleries and theatres.

Now the upshot of all of this is not problematic. I have to choose between those two lives, but only geographically. I hope to continue working in development, and I intend to remain with simp. So really, the only tricky part is where. It’s a decision I make categorically from time to time, only to change my mind, so my advice to you, reader, is to take no notice whatsoever.

Routines

I have two housemates, both Irish girls, who are by far my best friends here. Both are leaving in July. This has prompted numerous conversations about what we love about Honduras, and what we’ll miss. Out favourite thing is Friday evenings.

We finish work on Fridays and go to the market. Sometimes I give an English class to my Honduran colleagues first, sometimes we work late, but we always end up in the market. The market cheers us up and stops us being pissed off and reminds us why we love this country.

We have it down to a fine art by now. We start with pupúsas in the food stall area, or sometimes fried fish at the garífuna stall. Then we go direct to the alleys of fish and seafood to buy prawns and tilapia. Always prawns and tilapia. They quote us the price per pound, and we ask how many people a pound feeds. Who buys food by weight? Then we weave our way past the pigs trotters, tripe and liver to where the live crabs in a bucket indicate the end of the flesh zone and the start of the fruit and veg.

We are ridiculously enthusiastic. We coo over the enormous aubergines, the butternut squash, the tiny red tomatoes and the most sumptuous mange tout I have ever tasted. Eva nearly cried when she discovered pak choi. The toothless man selling it had no idea why the gringa was so happy, but he was very pleased with the sale. Once Eva told a vendor that squishy fruit terrifies her - apparently it does - so that he'd select the right strawberries. Whole families come up from the countryside for the weekend market, and the boys line up to stare at us, gringas being a fairly unusual commodity in this very Honduran space. This week, we saw a father and son shoving at each other in competition for the best view of the three foreign girls gravely sizing up papayas.

Honduras is the most fertile, fecund place you can imagine. Parts of the market reek of ripe, bitter fruit, a smell I remember powerfully from the orphanage in Guatemala as heaps of marañones – cashew fruit. Everything grows here. Fresh fruit salad means watermelon, papaya, melon, pineapple and mango. We buy a bag of strawberries and a bag of blackberries every week, just for juicing. Stalls are marked out by ludicrous heaps of oranges, mangoes or potatoes; piles so immense they can’t possibly all be eaten – but they can’t not, since they’ve come all the way from the mountains and can’t be taken back there. There’s a corner that is heavily scented with blossoms: immense tropical flowers, lilies and orchids and god knows what for about a dollar a throw.

The fecundity goes beyond agricultural productivity. The market is bountiful in humanity too, hundreds of filthy faced kids hiding under their parents’ tables, or pushing barrows full of chamomile or garlic. Not just the market: all of Honduras is the most abundantly productive place you can imagine: pregnant women, babies, rotting fruit and vegetables. All the mothers I know are single mothers, and even the most educated middle class girls seem to get pregnant by 22.

Anyway. We finish our shopping and wander out delighted with ourselves. On the way home we stop in a petrol station to buy wine, and then we go home and cook prawns and watch a video. It's been a solid Friday night ritual for 5 months now, and I dread the day the girls leave and I start going partying on Friday nights instead.