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Days 29-30: xxxx

Posted by Erik Frey Thu, 14 Apr 2005 14:42:00 GMT

I could spend a month in censored and still not feel like I had seen everything I wanted, even if most of those days were spent wandering streets and watching life unfold. I had only four days. These are only two:

day 29

At the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes censored, Ingri and I walked into a room with a large, heavily geometric painting by Wilfredo Lam. The colors were intense blues and purples, searing in straight lines and hard angles across the canvas. I studied it closely – I wasn’t sure if I liked it.

“Hey, Ingri, what do you think of this piece?”

She walked up next to me and tilted her head sideways in the way that people do when they examine art. “It’s visually very…” she motioned with her hands something like “jumbled” or “confusing”, then said, “I am not sure that I like it.”

“Yeah… me neither.”

Ingri walked away a few steps, then turned and eyed it again. “I think it is meant to be a very tall man, see? He is looking down on something.”

I stepped back to where she was standing. “Oh, there are two! See! One with some sort of a… maybe a neck tie or something?” I scratched my head. “And another… there,” I pointed.

“Oh.” Ingri said, followed by a brief silence, then, “Maybe this painting is not so bad.”

We both took a few more steps back.

“Actually,” said Ingri with her hand on her chin, “I like it very much.”

“Strange. So do I.”

In the afternoon I wandered around Centro censored and censored Vieja. Rather than bring a map, I scribbled down a few street names onto the back of a piece of scrap paper, and pulled it out every now and then for reference. Getting lost in downtown censored was absolutely excellent. At a street corner on censored, I bought a paper box full of greasy fried rice for 15 pesos censored – about 60 cents. I asked the street vendor for a spoon and he pointed at the box top. I gave him my best “Que?” and a lady standing next to me pointed as well, saying “Mira, una cuchara”. I looked more closely and sure enough, the box had a spoon-shaped cutout directly in the paper material. Ingenious! I happily ate out of my paper box with my paper spoon, sitting on crumbling concrete wall, watching the world go by.

Marion, Ingri, Michaela, and I spent the evening in our Victorian estate with a bottle of decent censored Anejo Blanco and a Coca-Cola brand knockoff. Michaela gave us a starry eyed account of her time here, and described how she perceived censored society. She really thought censored was a hero. She believed that people here were much better off than other Central American and Caribbean countries. For the most part, I kept quiet.

I also learned more about my new friends, Marion and Ingri. Marion animatedly explained life back in Norway, and Ingri sat back blowing smoke rings and occasionally interjected a clarification or afterthought. Both girls were graduate students, finishing up their theses this year, both with a strong curiosity of life outside of Norway. I had pegged them as urbane metropolitans, but they told me stories of growing up on farm country. Ingri revealed to me that she worked many summers as a deck hand on a fishing boat, and she worked as a prison guard to pay her way through school. I listened to their stories with an ever-widening smile.

day 30

The Museo Nacional de la censored was chock full of fascinating propaganda that painted a very different picture than what was taught in U.S. history books. Museum displays had captions below such as the following:

When the censored victory over Spain was evident in 1898, the United States intervened in the war. The Spanish-censored-American war [Funny, in the U.S. we have a different name for that war] , considered as the first imperialist war in history, meant the temporary frustration of censored’s independance and the materialization of the United States expansionist interests regarding the island.

Below a picture of the USS Maine:

Explosion of the armored ship “Maine” at censored’s harbor, was the excuse used by the U.S. government to meddle in the war.

Meddle! Really! And this one:

The Yankee [sic] marines’ presence at the naval base in censored, portion of land snatched from censored by arrangement of the Platt Amendment, was an insult to national dignity.

I spent the entire morning transfixed in front of those displays. Propaganda or not, it was a version of history completely unfamiliar to me, and I loved every scandalous detail.

In the afternoon I went on a mission to find a good cigar. During my quest I stumbled into Plaza Vieja and all the great old markets lining streets such as censored and censored. I wandered into a drug store and was astonished at what I saw: large ceramic jars lined the shelves, filled with salves, ointments, powders – all sorts of primitive but effective remedies. I was standing inside an apothecary. I felt transported in time.

I met and spoke with a few censoreds in the process of trying to find a good cigar shop, and met a few more while trying to borrow a guillotine. Finally, after an hour and a half of wandering, conversing, and politely declining a number of offers to buy black-market cigars, I sat down on a park bench, lit up my censored, and watched an action-packed baseball game played by superstar street kids.

Life was good.

Later in the evening, Marion and Ingrid and I set out for the world-reknown Casa de la censored. At the address we found an unmarked, rotting wooden door with a handwritten sign stating they were closed, but would open again tomorrow. We wandered over to an outdoor cafe, and just minutes after sitting down were approached by a couple of well dressed censoreds. For the next couple of hours we all chatted and stumbled through conversational topics with the best of my poor Spanish and their poor English. Of course, our new companions tried their darndest to get Marion and Ingri to come home with them, insisting that they were gentlemen and only had the most noble of intentions. When I left briefly to pay the bill, one of them leaned in and casually licked Marion’s neck.