Alone in my Villa

Picked up my motorbike today. My new wild hog.




Easy enough to use. I decided to ride it around the city a little this afternoon when traffic was light. I quickly got the hang of it. There are so many bikes on the road, that they all have to kind of go at a moderate speed anyway. Still, it was a bit frightening at times. I pictured myself as the least likely person to drive around a huge crowded city with a motorbike, but I went ahead and did it. If I can confront one fear every day, I'm sure I'll never run out of fears but at least I'll grow more confident at doing new things. I would say the hardest part about driving in this city is finding a specific place. It's alright to just drive around in circles, but looking for a certain address is an exercise in futility. Streets change names several times, many are one-way, numbers on the right and left sides of the road count up differently, and google maps utterly fails at locations outside the US. Tonight I will attempt to drive to Greta and Genessa's new apartment for dinner, and it is pretty much a straight shot from where I live, so hopefully nothing will go wrong.

These past few days I've had nothing to do, so I've had a lot of time to muse on things.

I've been sleeping very unevenly, waking up several times in the night for no reason. Probably just things on my mind.
At 5am, a rooster in the neighborhood wakes up and feels that it is his duty to cooka-doodle his heart out until I know that he's awake and I am too. It makes it impossible to sleep, so I've taken to going to bed with earplugs, which is far from comfortable but at least it lets me sleep, and if I wake up in mid-morning I can take them out because he usually settles down by then..

My maid is really nice, she's only here in the mornings so I make a point to get out of bed before she leaves so I can say hi. She brings me coffee and a breakfast assembled from whatever is in the house, like bread and peanut butter and cheese and a banana. Today she also cooked me up a chicken quesadilla, which I heated up for lunch, and it was really quite good. My maid doesn't know English too well, but she's very nice and good at what she does.

I like my neighborhood. The streets are full of peddlers of all sorts of things, like fresh fruit and coffee and other random items. There are tons of tiny little shops selling everything from rain ponchos to motorbike helmets to lamps to phone cards. Everyone gazes at me as if I'm a martian, and I try to smile back. They'll get used to me. I'm their neighbor.

I've already seen a couple people interested in moving into the extra room here. They were both impressed with the place and the smallness of the rent. They're both British folk working as english teachers who seem to be in their 30's. One is male and one is female. She said "well maybe you'd prefer a lad", but it honestly doesn't matter to me. So, hopefully one of them decides to live here. This house is kinda big for just one person.

Tomorrow is an orientation day at my new school that I'm teaching at. I don't know if that means I'm immediately teaching after that, or even the very same day. At any rate, my free time will probably diminish significantly. Right now, that's a very welcome prospect, because I am bouncing off the walls just a little.