Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Carnival y El Diablo

So, there was one awesome thing that i forgot to write about last time! Orin and I attended a play at the Solis Theatro in Montevideo! It was completely in Spanish and we couldn't understand a single word of it. I was really hoping that with my meager spanish I could catch the gist of the play, but not so. They spoke about twice as fast as they normally do, which is already freakishly fast. I felt like yelling ¨por favor, mas despacio!¨, but for some reason I feel like that would have been frowned upon. Haha. We managed to watch the whole thing, wading through our confusion as to what in the fuck was going on and who the hell are these people, and why did they just kill that guy? We were both suprised by the intricity of the set and the costumes. We did manage to gather that it was set in Chicago, which made the costumes really funny....was this their interpretation of Americans. They all had very large forheads with very little hair, and had huge noses, sometimes accompanied by a huge chin. They wore creepy pleather trenchcoats too, and rubbed their hands together, as if planning something evil, which i´m pretty sure most the time they were. The only line that i could understand from the play was sung by the token whore, and i was ´nobody asks your name´. All in all it was an interesting experience, and I should actually go look it up on the internet and see what the hell was happening. I realize part way through the play that that would have been a wise thing to do before hand, because it would have been much more interesting if we could have understood a smidgen of the plot.

Last night we had another theater experience, again understanding absolutely nothing that was being said or sung. In Uruguay, Carnival lasts for 40 days, and the last two days it has been in Montevideo. So, we felt that we needed to experience Carnival ourselves. It was held at their main band shell, which was actually really cool looking. What it ended up being was groups of about 20 men competing against eachother in 45 minute stints infront of a panel of judges. At first, we did not realize that this was a competition, and thought it was really odd that they would have a timer counting down on the upper righthand part of the stage.

The singing was really amazing, and the costumes were pretty awesome, and they sang and danced their little hearts out. It was a comedic enterprise, which of course we didn't understand at all, except for when they talked about cocaine, police, and this guy feigned to be smoking a joint and then the word ¨tranquillo´ repeated a lot in the following song. Apparently Uruguay is the marijuana capital of South america, but so far I haven´´t seen the presence at all. Not even the smell of skunk on the street. So, even though there was no naked ladies dancing around, Orin and I had a good time listening to the amazing voices and the crowd laughing away at the jokes they delivered. By the end of the night I was pretty tired, as it went until about 1am, and we grabbed a taxi home, the last time we will have to pay carnival prices on a cab! Yay.

Yesterday, during the day, we went to the beach. It was awesome. We rented an umbrella for the all inclusive price of 2.50, and enjoyed the sun and the cool breeze from the ocean. Even though i slathered on the sunscreen, i still managed to procure an oddly shaped burn on my thigh, which Orin says makes me look like a dairy cow. Nice. We brought 3 litros of beer to the beach, and drank two, and managed to get a really nice buzz going on, which resulted in me raving wildly about politics, while Orin tried to comfort me. It was awesome. And for the first time we got in the water, and it was so warm and lovely.

The tent is set to arrive tomorrow, and Orin and I are itching to get our hands on it! Thank you so much to both our mothers for putting their efforts into this ordeal, and thank you Deb for kicking some ass and getting that tent into the sky and into the southern hemisphere! It is due to arrive some time around 3 pm, where we will be waiting outside of the Fed ex store, which is actually just across from our hostel. Then i think we are going to take off to some hippie beach town that was highly reccomended to us, and I just can´´t wait to set our tent up on the beach and wake to the sunrise over the ocean, with no fear of the evil maid ´el diablo´ burstting in yelling like a feign in spanish even though she knows we don´t understand her. And we also know that her and the other maids have been talking smack about us, as they all whisper in Spanish and then roar with laughter, shooting glances at us over their shoulders....this is where I wish that i secretly knew fluent spanish so that i could have some biting retort to bring her down a notch...and so the maid war continues.....

1 comment:

  1. Hello you two maid-fighters,

    Do you think the maids are saying in spanish "What kind of mother does she have that would have let her leave her clothes all around the room like she does!! What kind of mothers do they have in Canada!" Ha Ha Ha. No?

    Sounds like things are going better than in the big city of B.A. and I hope the tent arrives in one piece Remember to put sunscreen on backs and cow patches.

    Take care,
    Love mom

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