Highlights, week one

Because this is in theory a way for the Internet (okay, mostly my professors, my parents, and GEO) to know what I’m up to work-wise, I will mostly only be writing about the progress of my Div III. However, please don’t think I haven’t been having (mis)adventures, because I certainly have. Quite a few, actually. I feel like I have more cuentos que contar than I will remember. Okay, so a few highlights:

• Acted as interpreter when a group of us got stopped by a cop for an hour, at first for being potential spies, and then for being a potential security risk because no one spoke conversational Spanish and no one had their IDs on them.
• Had our own private Krudas show and interview, and later a few of us hung out with them at the after party.
• Became the impromptu DP for an artist’s photo shoot for a performance piece about jineterismo he’s staging in Chicago.
• Found the punx, all of whom are very young and one of whom is the star of Eye of the Canary and now goes by Formol and has lots of piercings and fetus tattoos.
• Swam in the Caribbean on a rainy day.
• Went to a Beatles-themed club called el Submarino Amarillo and was regaled by a Beatles cover band whose lead singer sounds like Mad Marge if she didn’t speak English.

There are also the mundane things to share as well, like getting used to it taking two days for clothes to dry because of the humidity, using bathrooms with no toilet paper and no soap, waking up everyday with sore legs from the incredible of amounts of walking that happens here, the constant mental conversions between the two currencies, CUCs (worth slightly more than a dollar) and moneda nacional (about 5% of a dollar), deciding between walking through puddles or risking getting hit by cars to avoid them, ignoring the barrage of piropos in Spanish, English, and French thrown at me wherever I go, trying not to giggle when saying coger instead of agarrar. I’m actually kind of surprised, though, at how easy it’s been for me to understand Cuban Spanish. Apparently this is because I am not Cuban, therefore people don’t talk to me like I am Cuban so they don’t use as much slang when speaking to me as they do to each other. My new friends Hendrix and Mario explained this to me by speaking in Cuban slang to each other and then watching me blink at them like a slow toad when they asked if I had understood what they were saying. It’s also really interesting to see how my Spanish gets read here- I’m either Mexican, Spanish, Argentinean or something vaguely Central American. My accent is all over the place because the Spanish I’ve spoken since I was ten has been mostly with non-Salvadorans, but I feel like the harsher the accent I’m surrounded by, the more Salvadoran I sound. At least I think so. I can’t imagine leaving Havana cogiendo everything and calling everyone chico and punctuating my sentences with ya tu sabes.