Wandering

I spent most of today just wandering around the town. There's a guy down by the Playa Ollas Altas who kept trying to say hi to me as I walked quickly (purposefully, like I knew what I was doing) and I finally stopped and said hello. Lots of people tried to get me to buy things from them and go hear time-share presentations, but I fended them all off successfully, and almost completely in Spanish. It's nice to have a functional grasp of a foreign language. Although I did keep saying that I'm twenty-new years old (veinte-nuevo) instead of 29 (veinte-neuve).

I found a good coffee place and went to a supermarket that had clothes too to buy toothpaste and razors. They had all the fancy chiles and vegetables that are always asked for in nice Mexican cookbooks, but which are difficult to find in places like Irvine and Kingston, MA. It seemed cheap too, but my grasp of the whole conversion thing is a little sketchy still. It's about 10 pesos to the dollar, but just trying to do the math in my head (easy as I know it is) makes it difficult to figure out if something is actually inexpensive or not.

I like my little hotel room, even though I've realized it's actually the worst hotel I've ever stayed at in my life. Even when my family was kind of poor we stayed in nicer places, like Motel 6 or something.

The mattress in the Hotel Cartegena is super-lumpy and the bathroom smells like either sewage or mildew, just vaguely enough so that I'm not quite sure which it actually is. But if I leave the door open when I'm out wandering. And the fan in the room works really well to keep the place cool, especially compared to the 93 degree humid humid air outside.

And, I finally heard from my brother. He sent me his address via e-mail. Thank god for e-mail.