Here I will briefly comment on how incredibly hilarious it was to witness Jose, who has excellent English, but a very strong Spanish accent, fumble with German around these old fuddy-duds. He's so funny and genuine, but they totally ignore his desperate attempts at learning their own language in order to better serve them. It was not taken personally, however, he laughs at all of them behind their hairy backs...
To my dismay, none of the geezers wanted to snorkel around the giant rock formation, where all the sharks and giant manta rays like to hang out. Since I didn't exactly feel right about insisting they wait an hour on only me to do it, we navigated on to the beach. Once at Porta Grande, I went snorkeling by myself around the mangroves (very cloudy mess) and almost RAN INTO a giant sea tortise! I nearly spit my snorkel out of my mouth, and he seemed to do a double take, before darting off into the cloudy water. I returned to shore and slept in the sun a little. When we were navigating out of the bay a while later, we saw many more tortises, one pair was, you know...copulating. Another sight that is rare and surely due to my presence on the boat trip.
When I returned, I went to school to help out on the Thanksgiving dinner that was planned for that evening. We had five chickens (I would have preferred cuy), mashed potatoes, spinach quiche, green bean casserole, stuffing, rolls from a local paneria (bakery), pumpkin pie, and apple crisp. It was so good, I couldn't help but eat a lot of everything. Fast. And so later, after one and a half beers, I started to feel like I was inflating slowly. After getting very sick from a holiday dinner overdose, I decided that my system can't handle meals without white rice and fried plantains anymore...
