Various Photos

OK, I wrote some blogs but had trouble posting them. I have them in a journal and will do so when the internet is more reliable and cheaper. As of now I am in Utila diving and have some pictures I would like to share of an octopus I found at my dive shop. be well and check back often, as I will put more stuff up.

James stops drinking... the tranny hooker story.

the following is not incredibly work friendly but it´s also only about tranny hookers at the end. i think typing tranny hookers is fun and although tranny hookers don´t play a huge role in this story, i thought tranny hookers needed to be in the title. the girl above is NOT a tranny hooker. she is some girl in nicaragua who was representing the sandinista government at a rally i went to last night, my friend was on stage and got the pics for me. pretty amazing night. almost met the president but got to see him up close. that will be the next post. it was amazing. Before I went on a rant last post I was talking about the dirtbag bomb that went off at Tranquilo Backpackers... so let´s continue from there. Basically, I walked in, open minded but not feeling a huge desire to socialize too much with these people. I got my room (everything in Costa Rica is a lot more expensive than the rest of CA) and decided to stick with plan A. Plan A had been hatched days before when I found out I would arrive in San Jose late at night and therefor be unable to leave San Jose immediately (highly recommended). Plan A involved casinos and me, this is really all you need to know. Problem with this night was that I didn´t have a plan for losing my money. I was in high spirits since I finally had arrived and was ready to begin my trip. This created a false sense of ¨i can´t possibly lose all this money¨... this turned out to be very untrue. I brought an undisclosed amount of USD´s to the Horseshoe Casino a few blocks from my hostel. Took a cab due to the cash I was carrying and realize that i live in the tranny red light district of San Jose. At first glance they look like women, until you look again or hear them cat call you... then you realize that although they have clearly had some top surgery, they are not women. The cab driver makes some jokes about them then asks if I want one, I respectfully decline and ask if a lot of gringos ¨frequent¨the ladyboys. He says yup. I head to the casino thinking nothing of it. I walk in and realize it´s all Americans. They were incredibly obnoxious and since I usually enjoy being the only incredibly obnoxious American in a given place at a given time, I got a bad vibe but continued anyway. The positive to all these obnoxious Americans was a very live craps game. I rolled the dice, did ok, and started to really put down the free drinks. This is where the problems began. I leave the craps table for some game I don´t even know but am convinced by some other gringos (from some eurocountry) that it´s a lucrative game (they never are). Lose a little no big deal. Sit down at a rummy 21 table. Learn how to play that. Pretty much blackjack with more ways to lose. At this rummy table is the only Costa Ricans in the place along with an expat American from Texas who redefines obnoxious. He is a regular here and if there is anyone to blame for what happens next (beside the obvious: me) it would be him. He says, wanna do a shot? I say, !!! they give shots here (not standard casino practice as far as I know) he says yeah, 2 shots of jager. I dont need to tell the rest but basically I lost all the cash I had on me. Decide since i have no money on my person I can walk back. This is not the best idea but I was drunk and not thinking so clearly. Got approached by about 6 tranny hookers, told them how pretty they were but no thanks, this is definitely the best way to handle tranny hookers. You compliment them but clearly show no interest and they leave you alone and dont beat you up (I dont know if tranny hookers beat people up but some of them were way more jacked that I could ever be) So I returned back to the hostel, got the rest of my cash from my safe, talked with some people about why I was leaving again so soon. They say, bad idea, you are just going to lose it. I say yeah prolly but I could also win it all back (drunk logic). Now, as I have cash on me I take a taxi back. Takes even less time to blow through this cash. Not going into details about how much I went through because it´s disgusting and stupid and the details dont matter. The good byproduct of this is, I am spending off the money I would have used on booze (would have been the biggest expense on the trip) to feed street kids. This is really good and I have meet some really great kids because of it. I will write a post about that sometime in the future. So I walk back to my hostel, it´s about 230 am. I realize that I hate the hostel, it smells like mold (forgot to mention that before) in my dorm and I am done with it. Go online and find out a bus leaves to Nicaragua at 3am. I hurry, get my stuff, tell the girl at the desk I am going to try to catch a bus but might return, she give me back my deposit in dollars and rips me off for half my deposit (5$) I dont realize this till the next day. I take a quick taxi to the bus station. The bus was full but I buy a ticket for hte next afternoon. Return back to the hostel completely defeated and ready to crash. Girl lets me in but when I try to go to my dorm bed. She asks what I am doing because I am no longer a guest .... I do the scooby doo ¨HUHHHH!!?!?!?¨ I politely tell her I told her that I may return, she says she took me out of the system and I would need to pay again. I say its the principle of the matter. At this point she thinks since she already took my deposit and I didn´t notice, she can milk antoher 14$ outta me. Knowing I have no other option at 4am. I dont remember what I said but it was basically polite and rude at the same time. I then proved my thick-headedness (to her surprise)by walking out with all my stuff into the tranny hooker infested night. I walk down the street a short distance to another hostel I saw. I open the gate and am given a free peep show of a tranny hooker... how to put this.... orally satisfying a gringo customer. They pretend like they were doing anything but lets face it, they were caught pants down. I avert my eyes say sorry and run to the door looking directly forward. THe new hostel people are really nice and put me in a really clean dorm room with one other person who is not there. I figure this person is out at the bar for a late night and think nothing of it. I head to the bathroom, drink a gallon of tap water (they said it was safe, I was too drunk and thirsty to care ) and head to bed. As I am standing by the door putting my toothbrush away, the door opens and there is gringo john stareing at me. He says nothing, but his jaw literally falls open at the prospect of seeing the guy who just interrupted his tranny bj as his new roommate. I felt really bad for him because I got the feeling he was smashed, in another country and didn´t think he´d ever have to acknowledge this embarrassing event again (which i guess he didnt´but seeing me 10 mins later must not have been the ideal situation for him). He did an about face and walked away. It was really awkward and I dont know how many seconds this took to transpire but the grin was bubbling to the surface on my smug drunk face. He turned and I laughed to myself, hit the lights, climbed up into the bunk and pretended I didn´t hear him when he came back into the room a few minutes later. I fell asleep wondering about how I get myself into these situations and realize that had I just went to bed or payed the extra money at the other hostel, I wouldn´t have had this experience. Definitely bring them upon myself, but I still haven't decided if this is a good thing or not.... hasta la proxima

Tranny Hookers Coming...

I swear. I have been uber busy with various philanthropic endeavors and have had limited access to my files although I do have access to the internet. This will be sussed out tomorrow with a grand post on tranny hookers and how I lost a brickload of money (lost not being the operative word here). I know some of you actually are looking foward to the amusing yet depressing story I will soon pen.. so to keep you satiated. I include a picture I took from my chicken bus today (notice the decrepit state of the surely once grand building). Plus another of a dog in the street. Because why not.

Central America 6-30-08 ´to 7-27-08.

I arrived in San Jose, Costa Rica a couple of days ago amidst positive circumstances. My layover in Atlanta was to be 7 hours (the price to pay for cheap tickets) but the fine folks at DELTA overbooked the flight from Newark to ATL and asked if anyone could afford to arrive in ATL a little later. Being the experienced traveler Ive become, I knew free $ when I hear it. They offered me a 200$ DELTA voucher and a 7$ food voucher to arrive in ATL an hour or so later. This served to break up my hellish layover so I took it more for the 7$ than the ticket voucher. I spent the layover in ATL trying to get 100´s for the 20´s the ATM gave me in about 50 airport businesses. Starbucks proved most helpful while TGIFriday´s were d-bags. I ended up protesting Fridays on this account and landed in teh bar of a seafood chain that made delicious (if not expensive) bloody marys. I wouldn´t have had so much food and drink had I not had the false sense of entitlement that the 7$ food voucher gave me, ended up being an expensive layover. The flight itself was uneventful save for a decidedly bitchy stewardess who proved to be the only capable person at perpetually incompetent clusterF%$k that is DELTA. I arrived in San Jose and got bent over for a 22$ cab ride to my hostel. Not only that but my driver (despite his lucrative racket) couldn´t even find the hostel and I was relegated to what he knew, mainly a sh!thole with the unfortunate misnomer of ¨Tranquilo Backpackers Hostel.¨ For those of you too dimwitted to figure it out, tranquilo = tranquil IE: calm, peaceful, what have you. It was heralded in my travel guide as a laid back place with a cool vibe. Great! What this translates to in my world is this... I enter the gate and get the impression that fraudulent-dirty-hippy-white-dreadlocked bomb exploded in this place. it was chock full of human d-bags posed as worldly travelers. I was dressed half well for 1 reason. When I travel to Latin Countries, I try to appear respectable. This is because it seems insulting for someone who can afford to not work and gallivant across the globe to appear as they don´t respect the places where they´re traveling to enough to make any effort not to look dirty. Anyone who knows me knows I´m all about ¨doing you¨ which is to say ¨be yourself and don't cater to the whims or expectations of others.¨ This does not fully apply in poor countries. If you want to look homeless in NYC, be my guest, I will more than likely make a snide remark to myself or who I´m with but that's the extent of my concern for you or your dress. To understand what I´m saying it´s required you understand a basic truth in Latin America. A majority of people in these countries are what we would call ¨working poor¨... there is a small middle class, a huge impoverished class and a tiny upper class (with nearly all the wealth). Even for the working poor, there is a very evident pride among the people. Even after working crazy hours to barely put the rice and beans on teh table, they get get out the irons and the bleach and put on clothes that give them some semblance or self worth in a society that has largely turned its back on them. I am not being presumptuous in this observation. I take advantage of my white privilege to make a sincere effort to speak with people from all walks of life on my trips and have heard varying degrees of what I just stated. I just learned from a taxista in Nicaragua that they call backpackers ¨Johnnies¨because we walk everywhere (Johnnie Walker). These conversations over the years have led me to my current line of thinking. If you dress like these fake dirty hippies, you end up resembling the masses of the tragic children that beg in the streets for food or money to buy something to take the pain away. I think this is an insult to these kids who did nothing but be born into abject poverty. Ok enough ranting. Transvestite hooker story is on the way... check back manana.

Sorry I suck at updates.

I promise to be better with these posts now that work is over and I am in Central America. The picture (mi hermano, mi mama y yo) is from my cousin´s wedding my last night in the states. I am posting it here mostly because I want to show some friends the bowtie look for consideration for my best friends wedding (isn´ñt that a movie?) but mainly because my brother´s hair looks like he got into a fight with a carwash. My last trip was the school trip... long story short, it was too hectic to post, and apparently it wasn´t even as hectic as the other educational trips they have been on. I hestitated to post information on that trip due to the fact that there are privacy issues with the students and even though I wouldn´t have used names, it still is a slippery slope. I just wanted to throw up a quick post to let you all know the blog will be back with posts every few days (more or less) depending on what trouble I get into. Thus far, 2 days in, after a fight with a dishonest hostal employee and several fruitless taxi trips to random places at 3am in San Jose, I arrived at a new hostal to experience an embarrassing (for once not my embarrassment) run in with a transvestite Costa Rican hooker and her gringo-john. Pretty much has been the norm for my trips. Im going to do a full post later today or early tomorrow. Keep coming back and I promise the stories will be worth it :) the hooker story is worth the trip back alone.