My jacket smells because I brought it in off the line still just a little bit damp and put it in a heap on top of the rest of my clothes, which are stacked on some shelves under a bedside table upstairs. I sprayed it with Lysol and Lydian kept saying that she was smelling the stinky couch while we were at the grocery store. She wrinkled her nose and said, “Don’t you smell that?”
“Yes…I do…It’s me.” I finally told her.
I can’t wait to take a bath again someday (there are no bathtubs here…only showers). And I can’t wait to wear something other than my seven clothing items that I brought with me here. I desperately want to go to a nice healthy vegan restaurant and order something decadent. I want to speak English when I go out. And I want to get into my own car and ride from point A to point B.
Tomorrow we’re going to Tortuguero National Park to see sea turtles on the beach. It’s four hours away from here and I have no idea where we’re going to stay. The directions to the place are convoluted to say the least, primarily because there are few or no road signs here. I wrote them out by hand off of a web site into a special notebook last night. I had to write them long hand because we don’t have a printer. The directions to the place were two pages long front and back in a notebook with one particular gas station in a city that we’ll pass through on the way acting as the point of reference for at least 50 miles of the trip. Does that make sense? I wouldn’t have even understood what I’m talking about two months ago (how can a gas station act as a point of reference?), but it makes sense to me now after having been here for a while.
Maybe I’m just tired of having to think about everything I do so much. Three days ago, for instance, we went on a simple trip to the grocery store. Five minutes after we left, there was a torrential rain storm and we had only two tiny umbrellas between the three of us. Water gushed down the streets and by the time we made it to the grocery store, we were all completely soaked from head to toe. We had to put our shoes out for two days just to get them to dry out because of the constant humidity here. Today, lightning struck and the electricity went off for over an hour. This is perhaps the third time this has happened since we’ve been here. It’s probably not a big deal, but I wasn’t really in the mood to deal with that sort of thing today.
Anyway, tomorrow we’ll wake up and get ready to go somewhere. Hopefully we’ll be a comfortable motel and the turtles will be interesting. We’ll spend our night on the beach on the other side of the country looking at turtles, I hope. And then, perhaps we’ll have a comfortable hotel room, or perhaps there will be stains on our sheets and dengue-infested mosquitoes buzzing over our beds. It’s hard to say.
