ténganme envidia

Get ready to be jealous: Yesterday night I saw a free MOLOTOV concert on the beach

I am now in Playa del Carmen, Mexico at a sweet sweet hostel which I highly recommend with awesome German and Spanish and Mexican backpacker friends plus of course Alex and Lena. Before this we were in Tulum, Mexico where we saw beachside Mayan ruins and swam in warm turquoise water.

Happy New Year, everyone!

noticias argentinas

not the soda stereo reunion (which is noteworthy however).

I officially have been placed with my teacher and university (Universidad Nacional de la Plata - in the top 1 or 2 universities in all Argentina). Flight is confirmed. Go go, gadget job!

complements of the season

hi, everyone!

a quick update i write to you from mexico:
- got into san pedro sula late at night with no bags, came back to next day and they had arrived
- visited SHHers quickly
- hit the road: spent one night in guatemala, 3 nights in belize, and now i just got into tulum, mexico (in yucatan near the beach)
- christmas in belize was sketchy as crap but very fun. straight off the boat i stumbled into a reggae jam session (all townies plus me, lena and alex) and established myself as the best guitar player in a town of 1,003 - not hard to do.
i met a hermit who looked like a crossbreed of samuel l. jackson and papa smurf and he showed me his house which is a rebuilt mayan altar with a wood roof and no power in the middle of nowhere. he had run away from the usa round about 1971 when he had a hippie freak-out that never ended.
i recorded a demo cd at a crappy little rust-ridden studio about 10 meters from the ocean - where, incidentally, i met andy palacios, belize´s most famous punta singer - he autographed something for lena, who had heard of him in germany. i need help copyrighting my song just in case a certain sketchy hotelier bootlegged it before i erased it from the computer. as far as i know i have the only master copy with me and am hoping it doesn´t break before i copy it.

i´m so glad to be in mexico right now. it´s so built-up and relatively tourist-friendly.

signing out,
mochilero chuck

PS. so far so good! at a bus stop a little old granny tried to steal 10 mex. pesos from me when i went to buy a taco from her but i caught her - she was a turd, i don´t care how little or old she was.
PPS. this confirms what i read in the lonely planet this morning (thanks ma and pa!): the little tricky trick people sometimes do in yucatan is that they´ll pretend like you didn´t pay them enough. for this all you have to do is be like OKAY, I AM PAYING YOU ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR... etc PESOS NOW. i´ll give them this though: it´s more fun than people just straight up wanting to kill you like in san pedro sula.
PPPS. no, in all seriousness, i´ve had a good 4 or 5 people in mexico just help me out with this or that without asking for anything in return. combine this with a rate of zero people calling out racist names to us on the street so far, and you have a pleasantly surprised chelito.

insomnio/emoción

no puedo dormir, que estoy demasiado emocionado... en 3 horas me voy para el aeropuerto y otra vez a américa central y méxico

alcancé verles a tod@s de mi familia, más ale, más una chica de fulbright y su roommate (buenísima gente)... a ver dónde escriba mi próxima entrada.

so ends my sneak attack on the u.s.a. i'll be back in january for a week and a half, luego en seguida a la argentina y a perú (que tengo los vuelos confirmados ya) . . . dale. acabo de descargar los nuevos album de miranda y cuarteto de nos. buena música para el camino.

una brevísima vuelta a mi muy querida yanquilandia

i write to you from the land of the frost giants - that's right, i flew back for a brief sneak attack... i flew out of honduras on dec. 11 late at night and have been visiting family around this neck of the woods.

it's different to be able to drink tap water, to feel the cold all around me, the whole u.s. experience... going through customs in dulles at 1:30 am was quite an otherworldly experience also. it must have been even more so for all the salvadoran passengers who arrived with me.

in a few more days i'll be flying back to honduras, where i'll spend all of a day and a half before going to yucatan, mexico with lenita. meanwhile i'm shuffling around baggage and packing shtuff.

With work done, I am now morphing into hippie mochilero mode. Backpacker powers activate!

veintitres - dreiundzwanzig - twenty-three

The twenty-third birthday is way better than the somewhat anti-climactic twenty-second. This time, instead of being in college and maybe bumming just a little about not turning twenty-one a second time, I celebrated in the Progreso heat with my international crew of friendles in a restaurant with terrible food. And I was given a 45 minute set to play acoustic reggae music (accompanied by Rasta Carlos on drums) two nights in a row at Klein Bohemia. During the day I celebrated with Juan Alejandro and Cristian, 2 Copprome kids with the same birthday. We played videogames in the newly constructed MegaPlaza mall. They ordered burgers and - in perfect Copprome kid style - took one bite of their respective burgers and then said "HOLD THIS FOR ME!¨ (cuáles son las palabras mágicas, chicos?? ... POR FAVOR GUARDAME ESTO!!) so that they could divide them into tiny pieces for all their friends when they get back.

Tonight I make my farewell to Copprome (it will most likely not be the last, but it will be musical). Cosmo and I are going to play and sing for them.

I am dedicating the day to tying up loose ends and getting last minute kitsch to give to people. The project is in good hands, the droves of North American college students begin coming on Thursday, and all is good in the hood.

--charly--
your man on the street
reporting from progreso


Oh, Honduras, ¿cómo te quiero?
..Oh, Honduras, ¡cómo te quiero!

i am saint nikolaus

this morning i dressed up as german santa claus and visited the mapache kinder to give out candies. nobody cried so i think it was a success. i have a bit of a cold so my voice was nice and deep. FELIZ NAVIDAD, JO JO JOOOO!!!

my work is just about done here. soon i will be off for a quick visit north (not quite the north pole) and then a long journey to the south of the south.

today the high school girls are in ashonplafa (asociación honduraña para planeamento familiar or something) talking about self esteem and teenage issues. i´m over at their computer kiosk to the side trying to stay out of the way. it{s like being the parent of a teenager. i don{t want to embarrass them too much.

anyhoo, this weekend holds a few goodbyes and celebrations and goodbye celebrations before next week when i fly away with my mary poppins umbrella.

saludos de la población chela de progreso,

carlos abbop,
el sabor gringacho,
matador de dragones,
extranjero en todos países

diciembre ha llegado

well estimados and estimadas,

it´s december! where does the time go?

got to go, compy class about to start.