December 10, 2009

Great parts of my past few days:

- I saw a baseball game with my host brother! The Nueva Segovians beat some construction crew team that had previously been undefeated; it was exciting, and made me want to play again.

- I played Frisbee with said host brother (Ronald) at the baseball stadium, which I was surprised to find was close to my house, after the baseball game finished. I’m hoping to find enough kids to teach/play Ultimate with, eventually.

- I wrote like 8 postcards yesterday; I’m hoping to write as many again today, though I need people’s addresses to send them to!

- Happening to run into an Aggie volunteer in the post office, and him giving me his key to his mailbox there.

- Going to Ocotal, seeing Laura, eating pizza, buying three kinds of soap (dish, hand, and shampoo), tea, and a clearly unauthorized Spiderman mug to drink it out of.

- Seeing Las Nenas (think Spice Girls of Nicaragua) in concert with Diego!

Terrrrible part of yesterday:

So, I’ve mentioned before that I miss my guitar a lot, and it will be another 120 days before I can go home and retrieve it. Guitars were super expensive in Masaya ($200-500), but I found some cheaper ones in my city ($30-80). I finally went with my tuner to the furniture shop I found these guitars in, and tried to get them in tune to play. Because they’ve probably never been tuned, the strings were especially susceptible to breaking, and they tended to fall almost immediately out of tune after playing for a bit. I spent like an hour and a half in this shop, and finally got one to sound decent some of the time. The guy had said it would cost me 80 bucks, but dropped his price to 50 when I said 80 was a lot. I was like “sold! I’ll be right back!” and went to get my money from my house. When I got back not 15 minutes later, some other dude was noodling around on the guitar I had spent an hour making playable – MY guitar – and like a nightmare happening in slow-motion, said “yeah, I guess I’ll buy this one,” and I had no words to say to stop him. I frantically tried to tune the other (there were only two) as the store was closing, and broke a bunch of strings. The salesdude suggested I come back tomorrow “with more patience,” which was good advice. I went home and watched most of Forgetting Sarah Marshall in Spanish on TV while eating curry for dinner, and all of Inglourious Basterds in my bed. I didn’t feel the revenge scene at the end of the film quite as much as I did in the theatre, but it did help a bit to watch a bunch of Nazis burn and get shot and carved up and beaten to death by baseball bats. Hopefully today will be a better day.