carnival!

i thought it was over, at least it was in panama 3 months ago... but it happened again last weekend in the mission!

celebrate! with pinto beans!


and sausages! when i took the first bite of the delicious sausage, this hipster boy (who forgot he knew me) who was passing us turned to his friend and announced, "phallic!" like he was going to win the prize for spotting the girl eating the giant wiener and making the connection to a real wiener. this is what art school is for, teaching you stuff so you don't feel so special all the time when you realize something.


this rooster had silky feathers like hair. it was soooo cute, and just hung out with this guy who was digging through the recycling. when this little kid asked the guy where the chicken came from, the guy said, "from a TINY EGG". we followed the guy and his rooster around for a bit because i was so in love with it, and all the time people would ask him what's up with the chicken. the guy would say, "he's helping me recycle! everyone should recycle!"


angie and betty as we walked home, full of sausage.

peonies

before i left ne.

sfff!

rabbit apple slices from taka!


passport to the future pictures?


what you find in the basement of a market street mall

welcome to hell

guatemala

tasha with the kids at our house in guatemala, i could never remember their names. lala and rosa?

i've started to work with my 35mm film from central america, developing and scanning and processing. i noticed that i have all these tragic photos of animals. photos that i don't really know what to do with, as they are kind of shocking and heart wrenching (for me at least). what do you do with photos of starving puppies who die the next day? what do i do with all the photos that i was forced to take because it was the only thing i could do? i don't like the spectacle of suffering, but i did take them. the photos don't even leave me with hope, only sadness.


fortunately, there were a few animals we could help out a little. my favorite was gusanita, a little kitten who would tear holes in the bread bag and ruin loaves of bread. she didn't even eat that much of it, cuz she doesn't even like bread! here's gusanita with some chicken scraps we brought her.

nebraska cola

still in nebraska. a place that most people don't get. when we were in guatemala city, we shared a taxi with a bunch of american boys and their surf boards. here's how the conversation was started, after they'd tied their boards to the roof of the car.
them- "where are you two from?"
us- "nebraska"
them- "ha! oh... is that susposed to be a joke?"
us- "no. but is it funny to you?"
them- "well..."
us- "because it's not."
them- "sorry"
us- "so where are you from?"
them- "virginia"
us- "sorry."
them- "ha! oh... you're not joking again, are you."
us- "no."

and they're feeling all uncomfortable because we made them look stupid (they may not look stupid here, but trust me, in real life it was great). so this is about how all interactions go when it comes down to people finding out i grew up in nebraska, and i don't care, i will always represent. not our football team, or the assholes who killed brandon teena, but i love nebraska. it's kind of like doing coke, when you do it you love it so much and think that this is the way the rest of your life should be because you're suddenly so awesome and everything rules. but after a two week visit you're ready to go home and figure out your life again. and where else can you find such awesome things like this stuff!!


fossils! just lying around for the taking! turn your room into a museum!


a frosting covered barbie doll!


my dad woke me up to show me these boots he found for me at a garage sale of some old girlfriend. (who he didn't recognise-oops) we went back later to look at a film projector he wanted, and i found this beautiful box set of art:


i was wearing my new boots and carrying around the kitty block puzzle when the old girlfriends' sister said, "now, what grade are you in?" this kind of shit drives tasha crazy, but i always get a kick out of it, especially since i just turned 29! (tuesday)
san francisco is the best place for one to be 29 and nearly unemployeed, because it's still acceptable to be old and living hand to mouth and not be starting on your "responsible" life yet, like all the people you know back home are doing.
but i still love nebraska, and that's what this will end on.

nicaragua

secret home activities

since i've been back home in nebraska, i've been doing all the secret activities you only do at your parents house.

THINGS TO DO AT HOME:
1)go to the mall with your mom and let her get you stuff because you're so raggedy
2)watch tv shows you've never seen before
3)wear flip flops outside
4)eat lots of bacon
5)read a 1998 copy of cigar afficionado magazine in the bathroom for 40 minutes
6)give yourself a pedicure
7)mow grandma's lawn
8)look in your sister tasha's room and see all the shit she has of yours
9)use a humidifier
10)take walks with the dog
11)tye-dye your black sabbath shirt that your mom got you at the mall
12)listen to your dad this time

home home

i miss my sister sooo much. i had to come back home, like in home home, like i'm sitting in my mom's bed watching the dog whisperer, eating snacks and getting fat, while tasha's in granada learning to salsa and avoiding chicharrones. so why does she have to call and say how i stole her guide book and how expensive everything is and how hot it is? hey, yeah i got walgreens, but you have an adventure.

so i made this collage of her, click it and see how cute she is:

what do you want to be when you grow up?

how about a beautiful french family that travels around the world together?



tasha is in the trenches, as in tutoring in the schools now. every day there are more stories about the kids than i can remember, but here´s a summary of a story that she read to a class the other day.

so there´s a french guy who comes to nicaragua and falls in love with this beautiful woman. they get married, and have a baby girl. he gets sick and goes to managua to go to the doctor, and then dies. the nica woman doesn´t know what happened to him, and ends up dying of a broken heart, leaving the baby in care of some guy. since the french guy was really rich, the baby girl got all the money. the guy who was taking care of her was in charge of the money, but guess what, he was a bad man. he wanted the money so bad that when she was 5 or so, he started telling her all these terrible stories about the house they lived in, ghost stories, to try to scare her to death. and it worked, she ended up dying of fright. she was buried on top of a hill by the villagers. the guy gets all the money and goes around spending it, and then the town starts getting suspicious about her death, and when they realize that he killed her, they lynch him and kill him. everyone loved the little girl and her grave turned into a shrine and becomes famous. not long later, a crocodile gets in the lake near the village, and everyone´s really scared of it. so this guy from the village goes to the girl´s grave and makes a pledge to kill the crocodile if she´ll help him, and he´ll give her the tail. he ends up getting the crocodile and is holding it´s head on a stake, and then the head looks at him and says, ¨i love the virgen mary¨nd the guy drops the head because he knows it was the dead girls spirit and the head swims away. so after that, everyone loved the girl´s grave even more.
the end.

tasha said the kids loved the story.

granada, nicaragua

hello everyone, as you may all know, i´m in granada, sweating my balls off. it´s great. you take a shower twice a day, you´re sticky, you´re tired all day, your clothes are contantly damp from sweat, and it´s barely bareable at night. there´s no ac anywhere, you don´t speak spanish well enough to do much, and 75% of the guys are sleazy. battle loosing your voice, having a cough, cracked heels, food poisening manifesting itself as the ´rhea or vomiting, and i´m sure there´s other stuff i just can´t remember. i´m a little cranky because of the heat, and now i find out that the cost to change my ticket home is the cost of a new ticket. just a little cranky. i want to go back to san pedro! oh well. bla bla bla. gonna go sweat somewhere else.

pepito, from panama

san pedro, i miss you sooooooooo much

hanging out on the ´buena vista´rock at lago de atitlan, our dayly ritual of swimming and sunning.


santa semana


night-time at FREEDOM! the bar to be at.


victims of freedom, with the ever present cuba libre


'tu hablas catitlan, no?'
'cathithlan?'


tasha thinking about whether or not she wants another drink of the calemocho--cheap wine and coca cola (a barcelonian 'specialty')


ALL NIGHT RAVE PARTY!!


after the all night rave party!

thumb up yo

semana santa weekend!

word, things are heating up for the semana santa weekend here in san pedro, the nightly drum circles are getting more frenzied, and hotels are filling up like mad and leaving sad tourists wandering about with nowhere to stay. we´re making new people here, and seeing old friends from a few countries back and generally having a good time. even hanging out with hippies!!! this is what i get for owning tie-dye shirts i guess. my spanish is slowly improving, though it only had one way to go. i have a new word, gracioso. yo creo el pelo de los hippies esta similar a que un buho vomitan.

more livingston.

lago atitlan, guatemala

tasha and i are in san pedro la laguna, on the shores of lago atitlan in guatemala. it's a beautiful little town with a nice climate and views of cloud forests and a volcano, and filled with mayans and hippies, though the hippies are slowly accumulating their own collection of authentic mayan gear. TRIBAL. there are so many hippies in this town, that one can be charmed on every corner by a talented band of street musicians. bongos, didgeridoos, clarninets and flutes can be heard when the sun starts to set. we saw one group of musicians sitting respectfully out of range of a store with a giant bongo painted on the wall, a giant red X through it. they must hate fine music there. we're staying with a family who rents out a room in their house by the lake and some stinky bony sorry looking ponies. yesterday the wife, nacha, dressed us up in traditional mayan clothes in hopes that we'd buy the skirts and stuff, or maybe it is a conspirancy to turn us into hippies like the rest of the town. on that note, i lost my favorite tie-dye t-shirt a few towns ago! wah! i only had two. i'll probably spot one of these folks here walking around with it on, with a thick coat of hippy juice on it, rendering it uninhabitable for all but hippies and gutter punks.
ciao!

who wants a broke camera today? 1,2,3...go!

livingston i presume...

tegucigalpa, honduras

hello ya´ll,

last night i had a dream that 1)i went on a date with george w. bush and 2)i said "ya´ll go fuck yourselfs" for some reason.

we´re in tegucigalpa honduras now, it´s a crowded polluted dangerous city, but i like it. there´s bars on all the storefronts and armed guards at every pharmacy, but it´s nice. i hear they have a bookstore here too! tasha and i downloaded a bunch of books on tape to our ipods before we left, including john grisham´s "the testament"-a book i´m sure we sold at the book market (my last job) and a book i would never want to read in a million years, but i ended up listening to it and loving it. i was hooked. it was 11 hours long, and the guy who read it was good. it was all just great until it ended, like, 2 hours before it should have. what i mean is that it was cut off right in the middle of the last trial! i need to know waht happened to rachel lane and nate and josh and the family! it´s terrible. we need to go to the bookstore and find the book and finish it. it´s pathetic. yesterday i just fished bill clinton´s "my life", which i enjoyed. it sounds like i´m in a cultural wasteland or something.

nicaragua was ok, now that it´s behind us. the name makes me think of nicotine, smoke and tobacco. we went from the south to the north, and i don´t think saw one leaf. it looked how australia looks in my mind, hot and dry, trees with no leaves in fields with dead brown grass and bony animals staggering around. volcanos too. everything was a misadventure, the kind of travel diary entries i get sick of. "today we walked 5 miles in the dirt with 100 degree sun and then the bus never came and a dog died in front of me." when i read people´s travel logs, most of it is taken up with stories about how bad the bus ride was. yes, i know it was bad. but you paid 37cents for it and you wanted to go to a country where you could get by on $17 a day. of course it´s going to be uncomfortable. you´re not going to get a unicorn paddling you down a river on a rose covered gondola for 37cents.

but, my tattoos are a hit. here, tattoos will stop traffic, and help you make friends with 18 year olds. it scares me how easily the security guards are distracted by boobs and tattoos while they´re holding a rifle.

wah! my digital camera went wonky on me not long ago, it still takes photos but they all have lines through them and are all pixely. i knew it was going to conk out on me on this trip! so no more pics on the road...

last week while we were in leon nicaragua, tasha and i found out that a friend back home, matt lux, died. it came as a shock, and i don´t think i´ve fully absorbed the news, as it seems so far removed from my reality right now. our hearts go out to the people he left behind, josh, jasmin, zorano, and his family, we´re really disheartened to hear about it and hope everyone who loved him is getting the support they need right now.

so please, hug your people tonight and tell them you love them.
taura

ps-i just want to say hi to some of the great people we´ve met so far, sula, matt the climber and valk! a big thanks to david in san jose who put us up for a night! also, ha ha thomas you doubter, our paths did cross again!

los fotos...

taura and tasha in boquete!! beautiful boquete...

tombs in boquete, all covered in bathroom tile

beautiful boquete

just walking along and there´s a rainbow

looking a the horse next door through the window at night.

our giant friend eduardo and tasha

everywhere leads to boquete... what is carlos trying to figure out?

the bones in bocas del toro!!!

tasha at carnival, sunburnt again.

panama

hello everyone, just thought i´d put out the word that tasha and i are doing well! we´re in boquete panama, it´s really pretty with rainbows and ponies and nice mountain views everywhere you look. there is susposed to be great hiking all around here, but so far we´ve suceeded in doing our laundry, grocery shopping, and befriending the panamanian teenager who stays at our hostel. he´s hecka tall and spends alot of time jumping around and inspecting all folded up pieces of paper he finds in hopes that some other stoner lost their stash. it´s nice here though, tasha is thinking about teaching here at a language center called "habla ya", so we might come back to this place after we travel around a bit more. we came here from bocas de toro, some islands at the northwest tip of panama, where we arrived just in the middle of their carnival. it was worth the whole trip into panama, my favorite part was the baby doll contest. the baby doll contest takes place on a stage set up like a children´s tv show, with a line of girls aged 5-9years old doing the tootsie roll, the butterfly, and what could be the rodeo. i took some video, because i don´t think you´ll understand unless you see it. walking home that night, i knew there was no point for me to ever step out on the dance floor again, knowing that there are children who can dance worlds better than i. the winner of the baby doll contest gets a juice box. the other highlights of bocas?
wizard beach and the hike to it
mondo taitu - the hostel we stayed at was awesome
the cemetary - there was a bunch of tombs sans bodies, like they had been taken somewhere else. one wasn´t broken into, it just had a fist sized chunk out of the top corner, big enough for me to stick my digital camera into. when we looked at the picture, there was a freaking body there, all bones. when we zoomed in, we could see the skull! there was this red shape too, which turned out to be a giant cockroach crawling on the bones. it was soooo scary.
the people we met, monique, thomas, henry, orney, david. glad we met you all!!
tomorrow morning tasha and i will leave boquete for san jose, where we´ll figure out where we´re going next.
ciao!