tales from the quick

Hola de nuevo,

first of all, for all those who wrote comments, i want to thank you for your funny, thoughtful, interesting notes. i responded to the comments in my last installment, and unfortunately didn´t have a chance to respond to the latest batch. next time. i did read them though.

well it´s been another action packed week. I finished my Spanish course on Monday, desafortunademente (how´s that for a word). i was having a good time studying for seven hours on my own each day and writing a silly story in spanish for practice. i will put that story in the blog sometime perhaps. in english it´s called A Dollar´s Worth Voyage, it´s the tales of an adventurer similar to me, only much more adventurous and wild, going all over the world almost on very little cash. Now I am officially a volunteer here, working about six hours a day doing all kinds of things. gathering firewood for the kitchen, sweeping very dusty rooms (in cob - earth - buildings what would you expect?), varnishing floors and doors with sweet smelling non toxic vegetable oil or something like that, helping make dinner, shoveling out the edge of a soon to be pond. it´s keeping me on my toes for sure, and it´s fun not knowing what i will do tomorrow. now my body is a lot more tired than my mind, which is the opposite of my state a week ago. feels good for a change.

i was thinking yesterday, why i haven´t had a regular conversation for more than two weeks. regular like a chat using my mother tongue, not thinking about how to say things but only about the ideas, talking quickly with ease and expressing myself clearly. like i said before, a couple of the people here at Gaia speak english fluently but it would seem disadvantageous to have big conversations in english. the one downside is i´m left a bit in the dark with being able to express myself. of course this is naturally what i expected. for someone who really loves to talk and control conversations, i think this would be extremely challenging. for me, often being quiet naturally and talking to myself in my head, it is still quite trying. so i was thinking yesterday, why this blog is the most regular conversation i´m having these days. how strange, seeing as how i´m talking to no one in particular.

this experience is really interesting for many reasons. besides the ones i´ve already told about, there is no alcohol, or chocolate for that matter, at Gaia. being used to a beer or two in the evening, i really crave a cerveza. it´s a detox of sorts, after all the various kinds of alcohol consumed in Puerto Rico and last fall´s travels in Europe. but all the things i often crave, like pizza, internet surfing for hours, milk, grapefruit juice, lots of things, i do want sometimes but generally speaking i have forgotten about them. in such a different atmosphere, i find my usual habits and addictions are not as pressing as they usually are. my habits are very much connected to the places, the locations, in which they have existed.

the weather here is really beautiful. after a week of rain upon my arrival (everyone joked that i brought the cold and wet from up north), it has been sunny and warm, sometimes hot, with just a day or two of rain.

i was running the other day on the dirt road that is next to Gaia, and i passed a big group of cows in the pasture on my left, all standing near the fence and hence close to me. all staring staring staring. the cows just can´t seem to get over this guy running down the road. maybe they´ve never seen this before, it´s possible for it´s a very quiet country road. well i didn´t think much of the cows´staring, because that´s what they all do each time i run, but suddenly one cow started running alongside the fence parallel to me. that cow got stirred up another to start running, and another, and soon enough the whole pack of 50 cows was running along with me! like dominoes. were they scared, were they hopeful for some treats, were they inspired? i don´t know. but it was a surreal experience, i just laughed outloud, running down the road with a big pack of cows alongside. and it´s hard to imagine cows running, right? because they´re always just standing around eating grass. but cows can run, let me tell you.