You're not from around here, are you?

Every big city, every place, really, has them. Rules. Particularly for public transportation. Certain people give up their seats. Stand to the right on the escalator. When the train is packed, the people near the door step off so others can get out from the center of the car.

And above all else, do not make eye contact or speak to strangers.

It was a normal morning commute to work. I got on the train, transferred to the red line at Metro Center. When I stepped in to the car - the one I had strategically chosen so as to be let off closest to the escalator at my destination - I settled myself against a wall and was about to plug in to my iPod when he broke the rule.

Out of the blue, the man sitting in a seat on the other side of the aisle says to me, "Aren't you cold?"

Granted, I was wearing a 3/4-length-sleeved top and it is winter. So at face value I suppose he could be forgiven for assuming he had recognized a kindred crazy spirit in me.

No, asking me if I'm cold does not a crazy man make. But proceeding to get into a whole conversation about post-traumatic stress disorder, over-medication, and the body-is-a-temple philosophy while he had me as a captive audience for the 3-minute ride from Metro Center to Dupont is... well... a little crazy.



And more than a little amusing. If for no other reason than getting to watch other passengers squirm in discomfort at having the status quo of morning commutes disrupted.

I hope he keeps breaking the rules.

Weekend wife

It's an odd regret to have, really. I have no photo of Dave - that's not the regret - but I didn't say goodbye to him, and that is the regret. The fact of not explicitly parting ways is not an odd thing to regret on the whole, but the fact that whether I said goodbye to him or not would not change a thing makes it a little strange that I'm still thinking about it.

He's a tall, skinny accountant from outside of Philly who, in addition to being a great tango dancer, has one of the most bizarrely interesting hobbies I've encountered - circus arts. He is funny and charming, and we fell naturally into joking conversation during which we negotiated the terms of our imaginary marriage. He owns a house, but I can't move to Philly, so I'm destined for a life as a weekend wife.

Maybe the real regret is that I didn't dance with him one more time, and that I won't get to dance with him any other time either. He was fun and real and did not take himself too seriously on the dance floor, which made him an ideal partner. A great weekend husband, if you will.

I would be remiss if I didn't add an updated note on my weekend husband. I got to say my goodbye, and not only did that vanquish my regret, it also gave me a new friend in Philly.

Ode to mixed signals

If only I could write you a poem

...but you are a poet.

What about a love song?

...you're a composer too.

A clever allegory or some brilliant prose would do.

...you plan to make your living as a writer.

I could write a dance piece, or perhaps just dance with you.

...you're better at that too.

Tell an original joke?

...you did a stint as a stand-up comic.

What could I possibly offer you?
You are chemistry and art and brain power and laughter and charm.
You are creativity, you are patience.
You are cynical songs and unconsciously romantic notions.
You are dance.
You are criticism, you are confidence, but you are warmth and you are not condescending.
You are touch. You are a million kisses.
You are seizing the day, but you are responsibility.
You are aware, you are intellectual curiosity, you are sweetness and you are sexy.
You are everything, which also means that you are sensitive, you are self-involved, you are an artiste.

I suspect that the years between us are of more consequence than the distance, but nevertheless, you are,

for a couple of days, for tango and lunch and laughter and driving around aimlessly,

Perfect.

And then,

You are gone.

And I am truly and completely
Perplexed.

WTF mate, WTF?

With the burning passion of a thousand suns

I've met a few drama queens in my life. If you know me, you know that I'm not one of them, which means that I'm also not the type to tell someone to their face that they're a drama queen.

There is an exception to every rule.

I met Ponti at a milonga on U Street the night after I returned to DC from Guatemala. I'd been feeling a little insecure about my tango after having spent two months in Guatemala not dancing it, and I didn't know any of the leads at this milonga because it was the first time I'd been there. He asked me to dance, this dapper and slightly-greasy-in-a-strictly-Latino-way man, and the first thing I noticed about him was that he was an excellent dancer and a master lead.

The second thing I noticed was that he knew how good he was.
The third thing I noticed is that everyone else in the room also seemed to know that he knew how good he was, and they didn't appear to appreciate his ego crowding them out of the room and (sometimes literally) stepping on their toes.

But I took it all in stride because I knew I could learn a lot from him, he was really nice to me, and let's face it, I also knew that he made me look good. Good enough, in fact, that he asked me to perform tango with him at a concert the following night. Which was totally insane to me. I thought about it overnight and decided, what the hell? This could be fun.

Oh, it was all kinds of fun.

We actually had a great time dancing together, and the audience seemed genuinely impressed at our improvisational performances. No choreography there, thank you very much. (This was a first for me - on stage without a plan.) Everything was going so well, until it wasn't.

It started when he decided to dance with someone from the audience. No problem there, we didn't have any kind of pact and I was perfectly happy to take a break because my quads were killing me after all the stunts he was making me do. So I chilled out in the chair with all of our belongings and enjoyed the music and the entertaining conversation of the small group gabbing next to me. After Ponti continued making the rounds and ignoring me, I found myself sucked into the chatter and was enjoying myself immensely. After a while I decided to check in with Ponti, so when I saw him head for the back table where they were selling CDs, I followed him over to see what the plan was for the rest of the concert.

Upon asking him if we were going to dance any more tango or if we were done for the night, he accused me of ignoring him.

Ummm.... quoi? Oh yes, apparently I was ignoring him by just sitting there, minding my own business, and getting distracted for a few minutes by the group sitting next to me while he wandered off and flirted with all the middle-aged women in the audience for half an hour. I tried explaining to him that I had just been quietly waiting for him to come get me when we were going to dance again, but he insisted that I had been ignoring him.

And that was the moment. I told him in no uncertain terms that he was a drama queen. He balked, he scoffed, he roundly denied. I told him to forget it, I was going to leave if we weren't going to dance again because I didn't need to deal with his ego.

That's when he told me he hated me. And that's when he grabbed my hand with a harumph and led me to the space in front of the band where we proceeded to dance two last tangos. During which he frequently told me he hated me. In the gleeful spirit of passionate hatred that can really only be coupled with tango, I dished it right back at him. I also mocked him when he began strutting and shaking his mane of greasy hair in front of the video camera he had set up to record all of our dances.

Afterward, I left with that group of fun people and had dinner with them. Now they were a great group of single serving friends.

Addendum: Ponti doesn't really hate me, but he really is a drama queen. I saw him the next day and it was as if we'd never had a fight. What an amusing little man.

No, the other Fidel.

I've made generalizations about boys from Barcelona, so now I'm going to make a generalization about Victors from Guatemala.

I like them, they're good people.

Meet Victor Fidel. He has an advanced degree in economics and works in a sugar factory.

Victor floated onto the scene on our second day at the docks, waiting to get to Utila. We sent Jesus, our little posse's only remaining native Spanish speaker, on a mission (ha!) to track down an alternate form of transport to the island. He didn't have any luck with that, but he did bring us Victor. A happy guy with a penchant for good rum and very cheap cigars, we quickly befriended him and he became a constant companion on the island.

When it came time to leave, we took Victor up on his generous offer to drive us back to Guatemala, so we hopped back on the ferry from hell (well in this case, it was going to hell) and upon landing in La Ceiba, embarked on a road trip to the Copan ruins with Vanessa along for the ride.

Several roadblocks and one very determined corrupt cop later, we made it to Copan and managed to enjoy the peace and quiet of the ruins and the quaint historic town before begrudgingly making our way back to Guatemala City and - for me and Victor - back to work.

He graced us with his presence once again in Antigua for the last hurrah, the final group of 6, and a reunion of el grupo ruedo - there we were, 4 silly kids in that group of 6, taking infinite pleasure in our ridiculous system of sharing around the circle.

Sometimes it's the simple things in life, like a cheap cigar, eh Fidel?

A breath of fresh air

Every adventure needs a catalyst, and Vanessa was ours.

A fiery pixie of a girl who spoke a tossed salad of 3 languages and laughed easily at the sometimes confusing results, she was traveling solo in Honduras on vacation from her 6-month stint as a volunteer physical therapist at an orphanage in Guatemala, which I suppose was something of a break from her life as a physical therapist in her hometown in Germany.

I don't know where she came from, but after spending an entire day waiting on that dock in La Ceiba, she was a gust of wind looking for some hapless leaves to carry along on a journey to discover whether La Ceiba didn't have something worthwhile in it, and she found us. We quickly formed what would be the second group of 6 for me on this trip, and off we went in our taxis to... some place. Though not the original intention, we did find a nice swimming spot in a lagoon with waterfalls, a run-down motel on the beach, and a decent restaurant for a warm meal and ridiculously loud music to dance the rum off with.

Just as you would expect from the wind, Vanessa's path was unpredictable. She was there and then she wasn't. She went with us to Utila, then disappeared, only to reappear on the same return ferry. And so she came along for the next adventure - the Copan ruins near the Guatemala border - before setting off again in her own direction.

But once again, she breezed her way into my life - our lives - and joined the final group of 6 in Antigua for her last weekend before returning to Germany. Generous, vibrant, easy grace. A technicolor traveler. Sin viento, no hay aventura.

Did I accept Jesus as my personal savior?

A friend of mine likes to say that you haven't really been traveling until you get sick at least once. That's a nice mantra, but mine is a little different: I haven't been traveling until I get drunk, make a bad decision, and fall in love. Not necessarily in that order, and rarely are the all three occurrences connected (though the 1st and 2nd occurrences are quite obviously intertwined with frequency).

Jesús was another one of the fantastic people I met upon disembarking from the bus in La Ceiba, Honduras. Actually, I met him in a restaurant later that day, where he was eating with Daniel. Another Spaniard, but from Madrid, so no mullet. In addition to different hairstyles, our 2 Spaniards were also entirely different characters: while Daniel is the type who imprints himself on your memory from moment one, Jesús is more the type who sneaks up on you and leaves a deeper impression. Or at least he snuck up on me.

Unhappy with the life he woke up to every day in Madrid, he sold his business and left - almost - everything behind to travel Latin America, the US, and Japan for 6 months to clear his head. It was 3 months and many countries into this journey of discovery that I found myself laughing at his unapologetically politically incorrect jokes about China and sharing the sentiment that swimming at midnight in the ocean under a full moon isn't really as romantic as one would hope.

He was determined to dive as much as possible and spend as little money as possible doing it, and I aimlessly followed him off the boat and up the street to Paradise Divers, which became our home for the next 5 days.

Perhaps it was the scenery, the hot weather, the early mornings on the dive boat, the lazy afternoons in hammocks, the meandering down Utila's main street in search of food. Or maybe it was the kind eyes, the thoughtful gestures, the unfaltering patience with my slow Spanish, the quick humor, the fact that even when I couldn't understand every word of his Madrid lingo I could still understand him... It was all of this, and just enough je ne sais quoi added to make me bemused, but not surprised, that after one day in his company a Honduran woman in a restaurant assumed we were married.

It also made me wish it were true a little bit. But Jesús, emotionally unavailable and dead-set against the institution of marriage, could offer me no more than eternal friendship. An offer I couldn't refuse, even if for those 5 days, and many 5 days after, he was my 3rd occurrence.

1 in 6

Caryl materialized, seemingly out of thin air. Admittedly she actually just got off the same bus that we had spent the last 14 hours on, but she didn't enter our consciousness until we were standing in a parking lot on the outskirts of La Ceiba, Honduras. As the sky was making up its mind whether or not to ramp up the spittle into full-on rain, Susan and I tried to figure out where we were going to spend the night and how we were going to get there. As we stood there discussing our options with a fellow passenger from Guatemala, I realized that, as if by design, there was already a solution, literally right in front of us. 3 boys, 3 girls, and 2 taxis. The boys all bonded over being Spanish and hopped in one taxi, the girls - Susan, Caryl, and I - decided we might as well stick together since we all spoke English. Good a reason as any.

This trip was yet another case in point that nothing succeeds as planned, but everything works out in the end. Especially when traveling in developing countries. The 2 taxis were supposed to go to the same hostel where the 6 of us would all stay together, but they got separated. Nevermind, us girls found our way to a hostel, a supermarket and a deserted cafeteria-style restaurant in the urban dump that is La Ceiba, and we also managed to negotiate for a ride to the docks the next morning since we all had the same destination - the island of Utila.

The next day involved previously-mentioned hijinks with the new band of 6 and copious amounts of both free time and rum.

Caryl was along for the whole ride. She was quite happy to be adopted as she had no definite plans beyond a scheduled open water diving course on Utila and the desire to make it up to Mexico and back before she had to return to her native UK. She was scouting opportunities for future doctorate research, related to biological anthropology. Turns out she had spent some time working in the development field too. Three years ago I couldn't tell you the first thing about development, and now I seem to trip over amazing and fascinating people from that field everywhere I go. And Caryl definitely belongs to that group of people.

Much more than a single serving, to my delight, Caryl ended up meeting up with me and 4 other friends in Antigua a couple of weeks later and then she made the journey to Lake Atitlán with me where we studied at the same language school for a week. We finally parted ways when she came back through Pana on her way to less-traveled regions of the country.

Caryl is the best kind of traveler. Patient and easy-going, just as ready to laugh as to change her plans, interested in the communities she sets foot in and what their real lives are like, daring and independent enough to go to a new region on her own without speaking the language, but smart enough to know where not to go. I wish there were more people in the world like her.

Starting with me.

Rum on the beach...

I don't know what it is about Barcelona, but based on my limited experience in Honduras, it has a tendency to produce cheeky boys with full-on mullets.

Daniel landed on the radar when we boarded a bus in San Pedro Sula bound for La Ceiba, Honduras. He noticed Susan and I sitting in the nice comfy seats near the front and came to inquire how one goes about getting such a seat. We told him that you have to pay extra for one of those seats, but he was certainly welcome to try sitting in one and seeing what would happen. And that's exactly what he did.

If this were Japan, he would have gotten the big ol' X sign from the conductor, but it's Central America and that's just not how things are done. So Daniel was not evicted from his posh seat, but he didn't get any of the perks (i.e. food) that come with that extra service charge.

When we all got off in La Ceiba, the planets aligned momentarily to form a band of 6 travelers in that mysterious backpacker way (see 1 in 6 for more details), but our taxis separated and soon we were dispersed throughout La Ceiba. As is also the way with backpackers in small towns however, a few hours later we ran into Daniel in a restaurant, and then the following morning on the dock to catch a ferry for Utila Island. Alas, the boat trip was not to succeed as planned, and we spent a good chunk of our day playing some strange Spanish version of Rummy with only 40 cards.

A new group of 6 formed on the dock that day, including Daniel, Jesus, Caryl, Vanessa, Susan, and me. We set off on an adventure instigated by Vanessa and made infinitely more amusing by Daniel's procurement of two bottles of rum and his willingness to learn some new dance moves.

Sadly, Daniel lost patience with the waiting game and abandoned our sextet to catch a boat the next morning to Roatan Island, where he undoubtedly got up to more hijinks.

The tree of life

July 1 was a very busy day for me in SSF land. I suppose that's because I took a loooong bus ride from Guatemala City at the ungodly hour of 4:30am all the way to the wish-I-could-say-lovely town of La Ceiba in Honduras. It was a surprisingly pleasant journey however, thanks in part to the very comfortable seats (we paid extra) and the very interesting fellow travelers.

Meet Rick in profile. He's from the southern U.S. but has set himself up in Honduras after spending a number of years doing various church-related projects in Central America. Now he's all about the moringa tree, which from all accounts is nothing short of a miracle tree.

During one of the rest stops, Rick busted out his laptop and introduced Susan and I to a little powerpoint presentation about the wonders of moringa. And there are many. It grows quickly and is resilient to drought. It's high in energy and protein and all kinds of vitamins and minerals. It helps underweight and malnourished kids gain weight. Its seeds can be used to filter water, its juice can be used to fertilize crops. You can make biofuel out of it. (I felt a little like I was listening to Bubba list his shrimp recipes for a second.)

Now, I'm a big fan of optimism, but I have to wonder, if this tree is so awesome, why don't more people know about it? I could go on a whole side commentary about the implications and unintended consequences this little tree of life could have for development, but in the meantime, I kind of want to try some moringa leaves. It's only a matter of time before Whole Foods starts selling it.

Cake (pie!) or death?

Matt is probably both the truest single serving friend I've ever had and the least single-serving single serving friend I've ever had - all at the same time. Like you do.

We were sitting next to each other on a flight from London to Chicago. Now as a general rule, when traveling solo I make a conscious decision to either be in SSF mode or not. This is out of necessity because I find that if you sit down next to someone and that golden window passes during which it is natural and socially acceptable to start chit-chatting, beginning a conversation becomes exponentially more awkward as each minute passes.

On this particular flight I was tired and not at all enthused about leaving the UK and returning to work. On the way over I had a lovely SSF to pass the time, but on the return journey all I really wanted to do was watch me some movies. So I settled in to my seat, took note of the nice-looking guy next to me, smiled briefly to prove that I wasn't mean, and put my headphones on.

We then proceeded to sit next to each other in silence, watching the same dumb romantic comedy.

After the movie, I started thumbing through the handy in-flight entertainment guide, and lucky for me, Matt chose to ignore the enormous accumulation of awkwardness sitting between us and strike up a conversation. We bonded over travel, and food, and movies, and books, and mostly over Eddie Izzard.

The conversation lasted the whole flight, through immigration and customs, all the way to his connecting flight back to DC (yes, we were going to the same place, though sadly not on the same flight...).

And it's still going!

Nose in the air

I meet a lot of interesting people dancing tango.

Charles is definitely one of them. He is a serious, opinionated, intellectual man who wants to be recognized for his clever turn of phrase and poetic observations and reminds me of Wallace Shawn for no good reason at all. Except perhaps because he's short. Like I said, no good reason at all.

He clearly is a person who can rub people the wrong way and is in his own right a snob.

Yet at the same time, he is a little bit humble and more than a little bit entertaining. While he may be occupied thinking of insightful things to impress me, what he really does is keep me engaged and challenge me to really think.

And he knows how to dance.

Goooooooooooooaaaaaaalllllll!

I love it when people surprise you.

This week was full of surprises for me. On Monday, one of my co-workers approached me and asked if I was free on the weekend to go to Orlando. You know, just like that. Surprise! I did a quick check to confirm that I had no good reason to miss this opportunity, and they booked my flight for the long weekend.

I went to help out with a promotional event for Nothing But Nets at a national 3 v. 3 youth soccer tournament, which meant I got to hang out at the Disney Wide World of Sports complex all day and teach kids and their parents about malaria and how awesome the Nothing But Nets campaign is for fighting malaria in Africa. It also meant I got to hang out with some Major League Soccer players who were there as spokespeople for our campaign. In the evening we had a meet-and-greet dessert with the athletes at Epcot Center and got to watch the fireworks show too. What a day.

Kevin is the goalie for Kansas City. He is also an all-round good guy who is genuinely interested in helping kids, especially with literacy. He wrote a children's book, which his wife illustrated, and he is hoping to use it to raise money for literacy programs. How cool is that? I love it when the people who made it remember those who haven't yet. Sometimes human beings are surprising.

Hello nurse!

So technically, I'm not sure I can say I met Sterling while traveling, because I was in Oregon at my best friend's glow-in-the-dark themed party. But since I live in Washington, DC now, I guess it counts. Besides, it's my blog, so I can make up the rules about who gets to be featured here and who doesn't.

Sometimes you meet people who are the right blend of fascinating and charming. Sometimes you discover that you don't have to work very hard to enjoy being around them. Sometimes if you're lucky, you get a few hours of great conversation with them.

Sterling is one of those. He's studying to be a nurse, and he's pretty damn cool in the pleasant "I'm not aware of how cool I am" kind of way. Plus anyone who show up to a party hosted by Jennifer and embraces the theme is good in my book.

Now, he wasn't supposed to be an SSF, because he's also cool enough to be willing to try out something new, like salsa dancing. But unfortunately schedules conflicted, and I flew back to DC to begin my second semester with a new SSF in Portland. Maybe I'll get a second serving next time around.