The picture in the last post

Sorry: that last post deserves further explanation, at least of the picture. And I've been accused of plagiarism by one sluice, so I guess I'd better reference.

Nearly two months ago, Lucy and I hooked up in Mexico, to celebrate all things Central American, and more broadly all things hispanic, and more narrowly all things Carol-and-Lucy. This is not the blog where I write about all the adventures we had in Mexico. Hell, I'll probably never write that blog, let's be honest. No, this is the blog where I reveal the secrets of manga stills photography.

One Monday morning we got up early to pack in all the extraordinary Mexican artwork we could. We were downtown and breakfasted when we twigged that the museums don't open on Mondays. This was a pity: we had scheduled a very tight five days in DF, and one day wandering aimlessly looking at traffic police with elaborate eye make up wasn't on the cards. Since everything that had been on the cards was closed (we did a LOT of things related to the arts/tourist infrastructure, which, you should know if you ever go to Mexico city (and you definitely should) closes down tight on Mondays) - since everything was closed, we decided we'd get a bus to the ruins. Teotihuacán. Birthplace of the gods. Home of the ancient aztecs. Wonder of meso america. And so on.

Lucy's a bit of an expert on wonders of meso america, and not, I got the impression, by choice. It's not that Lucy doesn't love ancient ruins - who doesn't love ancient ruins? - rather that she's seen lots of them. And teotihuacan isn't in a rainforest, it's not beside a flawless powder beach; it doesn't take 3 days to hike through the mountains to stumble upon it, and it doesn't have the best preserved artefacts of the region. It doesn't really have any artefacts. Just pyramids. Great pyramids, but still. It wasn't top of our list of things to do in Mexico.

So as we walked down the avenue, surrounded by pyramids, we got to thinking how this all brought us back to our childhood, in particular to that cartoon with which I was obsessed when I was nine: The mysterious cities of gold. Remember? I loved it so much. You have to click on the link above, to remind yourself, and see the opening credits again.

And that's when the manga stills photography began. Lucy was very good at it, and executed two perfect pictures of me-as-cartoon-character-against-backdrop-of-mysterious-cities-of-
gold:



How completely japanese and hand-drawn do I look?
I wasn't so good at the behind-the-scenes part. It took me a while to get my head around the whole perspective bit. As you see:

First, Lucy is very far away from the mysterious pyramid...

Then she's a little closer...

Getting better.... (hey! what happened to my font?!)


But the sun's glaring in her eyes, and she can't put on her shades because who ever saw an animé character in shades?

She's pretty exasperated with my poor manga still photography skills...
But finally I think I get it! More or less....



And that, my friends, is what we did in teotihacán. I shall try to blog about Honduras soon. Now I have to go cook dinner.

Darn luddite

Sometimes I think I'm so darn clever, but I'm not. I CAN'T get blogger to upload a photo into my profile. And I really want a photo in my profile. So I'm going to try this way instead..... Thank you for your patience, this is not a proper post.

It still won't upload the goddamn photo! What the hell gives? I need a tutorial, and I need it form someone moderately more able than lousy google help menus.

Thank you

The meeja

Shazzle was disappointed not to get a photo of the dead body featured in my last post. But as anyone who's ever been whitewater rafting knows, you can't bring a camera with you (duuuh) because it'll just get all wet and ruined. However, if it's photos of dead bodies you're after, I knew I wouldn't have to wait too long to satisfy the bloodthirsty hoards. I monitored the papers day by day, knowing the right one wasn't far away, and lo, just three days after the request, Mr. Meeja comes up trumps.
Here's a photo of three dead bodies.


The headline, as I'm sure you figured out, reads "Bloodbath!" And the text beneath, which Spanish speakers will be zooming frenetically to decipher, tells us that the three men pictured, and a female friend, were standing outside a pool hall when two guys dressed as police passed in the back of a pick-up and sprayed them with bullets from their AK 47s.

There's no taboo whatsoever about showing dead people in the Honduran media (the TV news is worse). So when we stumbled across that man on the rocks the other day, he looked strangely familiar. The convention is to pull up the shirts of the corpses - particularly bullet-riddled ones - for the photos: the gents above got away lightly having their clothes left on. I think since all three have blood spurting from their heads, they've done their bit.
It's the car crash mentality gone mad: the only thing they seem to report is violence. "Keep people scared" our driver said to me this morning when I pointed out the picture. Scared is right. Imagine someone opening fire outside a pool hall in suburban Dublin. No, yes, I know, they shoot people everywhere. But with kalashnikovs! The odd thing is that so many things here are just like suburban Dublin: friendly people, nice cars, kids out having a few drinks. And then someone drives by in a pick up, dressed as a policeman, and opens fire on the kids (they were all in their early 20s) with an AK. And the next morning, arranged neatly radiating from beneath the feet of the police, their corpses appear on the front page of the newspaper.
On a regular, regular basis.

The other big story that sells papers is dengue. We're all obsessed with dengue. Even simp, when a little fluey a few weeks ago, self-diagnosed with dengue. Remember when you were in secondary school, and you were a world record, Mastermind expert on meningitis? Like that. But with pictures:
For those of you who've been put off your breakfast by all this ailing human flesh, here's a nice soothing picture of me asleep.

PS: Can anybody tell me how to upload pictures in portrait form to the interweb? No matter how fully rotated they are, they always come out on their sides.

Blogworthy

There's a whole weekend lost to loneliness and pfaffing about on the magical interweb then. My big ol house feels so enormous now it's empty that I've taken to carrying a bag around with me so that I don't have to go back to my bedroom to find my phone every time I need to know the time.

But look! I found out how to put photos on my blog! Simp gave me a camera for my recent THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY, so there'll be lots more of this, I like to think. In as much as there's more blogging of any description. Here's a picture of a frog:











But that's not why I'm blogging this evening. I'm blogging because I want to tell you about the dead man I saw recently. About two weeks ago myself and simp went up north to the Parque Nacional Pico Bonito, to enjoy the splendour of the rainforest, pretend to be intrepid on rafts and kayaks, and mingle with backpackers. It was marvellous, as I'm sure you can imagine. (But if you can't, here's a picture:


So we signed up for a whitewater adventure trip, which, I must insist, was entirely Simp's idea (I had suggested reading and sunbathing as a more fruitful activity). We were grouped with a pleasant Honduran family and their German (almost certainly Christian) exchange student. And a couple of annoying gung ho GI Jo type instructors, who are unavoidable if you're going to take it upon yourself to do adventure sports anywhere in the world.

There are three lodges strung along the Rio Cangrejal, all offering adventure sports of this sort, and all embarking their rafting expeditions at the same point on the river. That point is also very close to the site of the brand new visitors' centre and suspension bridge. In a pristine and barely touched part of the country, this is pretty much the epicentre of human traffic. Which is why the dead body came as a surprise.

Our group drove to the embarking point on the river, then we had to scramble down over large rocks for about 10 minutes, to get to a tiny little beachy area. I was about fifth in the line, and so I didn't immediately know why the people ahead of me had stopped and turned round. The Honduran dad was taking responsibility, having been the one to spot the body. It was a man, naked from the waste up, slumped just beneath a huge overhanging rock. He had no visible bullet wounds, but his back was tattooed heavily with the marks of the "mara 18", the 18 gang. We turned around and conferred about what to do.

Obviously, there was very little we could do. Hans, a German instructor checked the man's pulse and confirmed he was dead. The sinister thing is that from our lodge alone, a rafting trip had left that morning at 9.30, passing the same point where there was no dead body. So whatever happened happened between 10Am and our arrival at 1ish.
Hans concluded that it was an accident, and given the trauma he'd been through with the pulse checking and all, we figured it would be indiscreet to argue. Nobody else felt it was an accident though; there have been 1,400 homicides reported in Honduras since the beginning of this year, and they frequently involve the major gangs (of which 18 is one of the most major). There haven't been that many deaths by falling in highly public places.
The Honduran man seriously contemplated calling off the trip, claiming that he didn't want his teenage daughters seeing the body (he wasn't bothered for his son). But in the end, once the police had been called (it took them 6 hours to arrive, in a private car, to take the body away) there was really nothing else to do. I was spooked for a while, wondered if the bad guys mightn't be back to get us, but pretty soon I was more spooked by trying to stay afloat in the rapids and forgot all about it. In the end, the most sinister thing about the whole incident was the grinding banality of it all. I fell asleep wondering if the image would make it into the papers the next day. It didn't. We'll never know anything more about the incident.

I promise to blog about Mexico shortly. And Casa Guatemala. In the meantime, here's a link to my picasa account so you can look at some more photos!

...That's not working. Maybe try the old fashioned way: http://picasaweb.google.com/carolballantine/HondurasIntoTheCountry

Abandoned

Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.

That's that then. Over the next week I'll try to be a better blogger. And big shouts out to Walt and Oisín and Percy, who deserve grown up emails and not these silly messages on my blog. Right.

Simp spent 5 weeks in Honduras, and 4 hours ago I left him at the airport. This time, I hardly cried at all. I ran to the posh supermarket and bought the most expensive chocolate they had, then I came home and looked at old photographs of how happy I was when I lived in the same country as my boyfriend, before spending 150 Euro on clothes in the American Apparel online store. I really hope they fit me.

Up till 2 weeks ago I had 2 flatmates (you remember, from earlier blogs, right?), who also worked with me, and were definitely my closest friends here. They've left. My other closest friend, a Canadian girl who works for the UN, has taken 2 months' unpaid leave, while another very good friend finishes his contract with a Swedish NGO in August. My German colleague
with whom I share an office has gone to Germany for 6 weeks' holidays, while my boss is in Bolivia. If I didn't get out of bed for the next month, only the utilities companies would notice. And the lady who comes to clean our house.

(The paragraph above says a lot about my lifestyle here: all my friends are foreign, I have a cleaning lady; these are not situations I had anticipated or wanted. They're a lot less significant than I expected before getting here though. I'm an ex pat. No point pretending I'm not, at the end of the day.)

I'm very sad simp's gone, notwithstanding the fact that I didn't cry a lot when he left. That was contextual. In Tegucigalpa airport, you form a queue winding around the gift shops and towards the McDonald's to get to the passport check before boarding; all of this in the publicly accessible section, as opposed to behind the barriers where only flyers are permitted. So I could accompany simp all through the snaking queue, speculating about the Americans in their Christian Volunteer t-shirts who were his co-passengers, and passing remarks about the Honduran gringos taking leave of their families. All of a sudden, we're at the front of the queue, a man with a gun is checking simp's passport, and I can go no further. Or rather, simp proceeds on one side of a rope barrier, while I'm exiled to the other side.
Now, at this point I'm happy to leave the sentimentalism aside, and take myself and my dignity to the shop with the expensive chocolate, but there's a Honduran woman behind simp in the queue, and she's terribly moved by this young couple parting.
"Go on, give her a kiss" she tells simp; "I won't mind".
That's ok. I really don't like crying in public. He shyly pecks my cheek over the flimsy rope and returns to the queue. I brush away a few tears.
"Oh give her another one! Hug her!"
He does. Now I'm crying. The woman is delighted.
Hondurans LOVE public displays of affection. Which brings me back to my flatmates, who just abandoned me. All our colleagues spent the week of their departure trying to provoke tears on our part. "Will you cry?" they'd ask me greedily before the girls' going away party. No, I'd say, I imagine I'll be too drunk. This is not the correct answer. But it was the case.

Anyway, the friends I have left in Tegus (sniff) have assured me they'll look out for me in this big rattly house where I'm all alone. Meanwhile, simp left behind MY NEW LAPTOP, which is an INCREDIBLE machine, and thanks to a sprint to the telecoms office two days ago, our internet hasn't been cut off yet. What's more, I have this amazing new programme that allows me to play backgammon with simp in real time, and is integrated with the webcam, so WE CAN LOOK AT EACH OTHER WHILE PLAYING.

And that is the most exciting prospect ahead for the next few weeks I'm afraid. Don't worry about me though. My sister's coming in August and we're going on a trip up the Mosquito Coast. At the end of it all, I'm nothing but a spoiled brat.