Popayán: Plan A and Plan B

  • Popayán, Cauca, Colombia
    Drunk and reading the newspaper in the city square - 1
  • Popayán, Cauca, Colombia
    Drunk and reading the newspaper in the city square - 2
  • Popayán, Cauca, Colombia
    Drunk and reading the newspaper in the city square - 3
  • Popayán, Cauca, Colombia
    Drunk and reading the newspaper in the city square - 4

Popayán: Plan A and Plan B.
July 10.

Learning a new language is hard to make yourself do.  I try to make 35 excuses of why I do not have time to study to avoid doing it.  Then as soon as I begin to study and learn, I think, “This is effing awesome.  Why was I not doing this earlier and why was I putting it off?!”  It is the exact same experience I have every single time I catch my guitar peeking at me.  It is like that every time.  I love to learn, and it makes me feel so smart when I am consuming this language, but that first step to start doing it during the day is really hard to take even though I know how it will make me feel.  Maybe I do not like the time it takes…  But, it is crazy what it does to my brain and how it helps me to understand words that we use in English that I now realize are connected to Spanish words.  I mean, the word for ‘hint’ in Spanish is ‘indirecta’.  Fascinating…  It is like exposing a little light on a dark part of something that I had no idea existed.  I feel infinitely smarter when I consume this Spanish.  It makes me feel like I wasted a lot of dating a German for four years and knowing so little German….

Colombia is a place where you will see a man wearing a massive Jesus belt buckle, and Colombia is also a place where ham means bologna.  I have a hard time remembering the latter and every time I get ham on a sandwich or in a bun, I am heavily disappointed…  However, my highlight of the day was for sure when I was in the city square and about 2pm and in front of a government building was the drunkest man in town.  He had a newspaper in his hand and he was reading it aloud in a yell to everyone in the park so that they could know the news of the day.  Then he went on a yelling, arm swinging, government rant while trying to maintain intoxication balance.  Some concepts in human nature are just impossible to create in a mind.  I do not see the sense in creating science-fiction novels when the most incredibly innovative things come from people on the streets.  Humans are entertaining…

Lucia came to meet me at 6:30pm.  She told me she had two plans.  Plan A was that we would go to the park for an hour or so to visit, go to eat, and then go to the metal bar that I like.  Plan B, if Plan A did not work out, was that we would go to my hostel bed and then she would sleep overnight.  I immediately suggested that we swap Plan B for Plan A and then after some Plan B we could try a little Plan A.  I whisked her away to my private room for some Plan B “Orgasmo!”s.  Then we headed for some Plan A dinner, but I felt terrible after a hamburger and we had to come back to the hostel.  Once I got better, we had more Plan B and fell asleep.

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