Giving Thanks

Summer is coming. So are the holidays. The fact that the two coincide is so foreign to me that it feels nothing like the holiday season. Nonetheless I celebrated Thanksgiving with two other volunteers in Huanchaco, a beach town near Trujillo. We took our best shot at preparing Thanksgiving dinner at our hostel. I attempted to recreate my dad’s amazing stuffing and failed. It looked and smelled like it, but tasted like Stovetop. Luckily Ashley came to the rescue with an amazing and totally non-traditional mango dessert, a creation of her chef-in-training boyfriend.

Now, back at site since Sunday, I have played soccer with the girls three days in a row. They are kind of obsessed which is excellent, except it’s killing me. I can barely walk. My toes are bruised, possibly broken, my quad muscle is burning, and I twisted my ankle. On top of that, I went to use Internet in Pacora today and, while leaning down to move the chair closer to the computer, slammed my forehead into the monitor. It was ridiculously stupid but hilarious at the same time. I now have a welt over my right eye.

Common sense.

For awhile now, I’ve been fairly convinced that the Peruvian proclivity for blaring music was to blame for my own personal hearing loss. I’m not joking when I say blaring either. The other night the neighbors had a party and brought in a sound system, called sonido (sound.) Note: the speakers which accompany sonido are HUGE, larger than many Peruvians. The speakers were placed roughly 20 feet away from my bedroom wall and produced music so loud that it actually shook my bed. I was forced to sleep using earplugs and could still hear the music.

Now, I was judging my hearing loss solely on the fact that I now have to listen to my IPod on a much higher volume than when it was purchased. Finally, I confided in Susan that I thought I was losing my hearing. Thanks to her level-headedness I realized that I am not going deaf, but rather my IPod is probably less powerful than when I first purchased it.

Momentarily I was really impressed by Susan’s commonsense. That was until moments later we passed by what was clearly a military base. It was blatantly obvious. Every other building was painted in camouflage. I made a passing comment about how they had gone a little over the top and how it was clearly a military base. However, before I could finish my statement, Susan interrupted in agreement, but in such a way that made it clear that she did not know what it was. Turns out she thought it was some kind of business which involved cows and she had mistaken the camouflage for cow spots.