I'm not sure how it happens, but I have no doubt that when you leave your personal belongings alone in a room all day for several months, they find a way to reproduce. I'll leave the scientific explanation to someone better equipped to analyze such phenomena but suffice to say that the three bags with which I came to Bolivia have no chance of containing the contents of my room. Hence the decision to blog at three o'clock in the morning, since certainly no more packing will be done until I can procure another vessel for my things. I'm moving into a new apartment tomorrow for the last month of the program, and in the meantime getting a taste of what packing to go home will be like. It's going to be difficult to avoid the impulse to give away half of my clothes around midnight of December 21st.
I should probably be going to sleep but in addition to the packing-induced adrenaline coursing through my veins, I'm kept awake by the excitement of the Leonids shower that I might get to see in an hour or two! My host brother is the only other person in my family interested in getting up before dawn (or staying up most of the night, in my case) for the slight chance of seeing the meteors. It's cloudy here right now, and the shower isn't expected to start until around 5, and all of the articles I've read about it say that the places to see it are North America and Asia, yet I am holding out hope that the skies will part and the sun will wait a half hour or so to rise and the Earth will tilt a little bit back on its axle and the sky will be ablaze with streaks of fire. We'll see.
In all honesty, half of my excitement about the meteor shower comes from the fact that my brother offered to wake me up to see it. Before yesterday, we had exchanged approximately thirty five words throughout the whole semester, most of which occurred when my host parents and I came to a language barrier during lunch and all eyes would turn to the end of the table, where Bruno would glance up from under the brim of his baseball cap and enlighten us all with a single utterance: "meat-ball," or perhaps "goblin". He speaks English and German in addition to Spanish, plus he studies medicine, so he is the source of all answers that the rest of us seek. Okay, maybe I'm being a bit dramatic, but he is certainly intelligent and chooses very select moments to reveal the information he hides under his long black hair. But as of last night, he suddenly decided to be my friend! My host dad had been waiting all day to watch "Inglourious Basterds" as a family, which seemed to me a peculiar choice for family movie night, but nonetheless we all piled into the living room for the movie. Before my host dad could get the machines all working, Bruno asked me if I had a program called Mojo on my computer. I said no, and he explained that it's a program for downloading music from someone whose iTunes library is on your network. Apparently he's been listening to my music all semester and wants to take some of it. For those readers who are not of the music downloading generation, asking to steal someone's music is a pretty big compliment, ranking up there with what I imagine asking to borrow someone's groovy polyester top would have been in your generation. So needless to say I was flattered, and he tried to copy the program to my computer after the movie. It didn't work, but the seeds for friendship had been planted. Then tonight he came into the kitchen while I was eating dinner (mini tuna melts on crackers) and began to prepare his own meal. We don't eat dinner as family, and as we both have had a lot of work this semester, I rarely see him at night. I offered him a tuna melt cracker, and he not only obliged but made a face of sincere enjoyment at the new snack, and then introduced me to his concoction: octopus with "salsa golf" (mayonnaise and ketchup mixed together), also on crackers. Food has a lot to do with social relationships here, far more than in the US, and I think our sharing of dinners was the second step to our new friendship. That's when he took the third step, inviting me to watch the Leonids shower with him tonight. It might just be my tendency to look for patterns, but something makes me feel like now it's concrete. I feel so accomplished, but a little disappointed that I'm leaving tomorrow. It's not as if this whole time I was longing for him to be my friend, but as awesome as Lucia (my younger host sister) is, she is fifteen and thus the pastimes we have in common are limited. It would have been cool to have someone closer to my age to go out with, since the law, my host mom, and rules of age-appropriate behavior all prohibit Lucia from coming out with me at night.
The one other event of note from today also has to do with showers, but this time the literal kind. Earlier tonight, I went into my bathroom and noticed a peculiar shape on the floor of my shower. I leaned towards it a bit to figure out if it was a strategically arranged pile of dead pill-bugs, which is commonplace in my bathroom, then jumped back with what I'd like to say was an uncharacteristic yelp upon realizing what it was: a scorpion, its translucent tail poised delicately above its back. I haven't seen a scorpion in my whole time in this country, and now on my last night in this house, there it was, taking a rest in a place where I soon would be barefoot without my contacts in. Even right now, hours later, the thought of it makes my stomach flip. I have no idea if the scorpions here are deadly or just sting like wasps, but I would very much like to avoid both of those experiences. I regret to admit that rather than dealing with it the way I could have (I was wearing sneakers), I sheepishly went into the house and asked none other than Bruno to help me deal with the situation. Judging by the look on his face, he was no more confident about squishing the creature than I was, but in this case I was thankful that machismo lives on in this country, because he seemed to feel obligated to rescue me. Before stomping it to an indiscernible smear of what might as well have been the pill-bug pile after all, he took the opportunity to educate me about the lifestyles of scorpions, including the oh-so-encouraging fact that they travel in pairs, and that the smaller ones have the most potent venom (this one was no more than four centimeters long). Hopefully this one's partner will hang out somewhere outside until after I leave tomorrow afternoon. I want to feel that it's unlikely that I'll see another one in my time here, but something tells me that scorpions don't follow the the same myths that govern lightning. I might make it into a saying just to comfort myself, though. "Scorpions never bathe twice." However, as with everything else here, I can't plan on that. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.
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