Pizza Brings the World Together

What a morning it was today - all of us kipping out of bed and cartwheeling in alternating, cascade formation out of our rooms, bouncing into our breakfast seats in unison while singing in four-part harmony. Like most mornings. I was quickly off to try out my new invention: The Exercise Bar Circumference Reduction Device. Schematic diagrams available at minimal cost. (Though you could just look at the photo.) A complete success. Total cost for parts and labor: $2.65.

The rest of the morning was given to recon and chores. Quinn and I did the rounds of the local pizza places, taking down notes on prices, while Janneke and Tess walked to Marshall's to get a few things. We were to meet on the beach at noontime.

Quinn has been fascinated with nature a lot lately. He'll start conversations by saying, "Papi, sabes mucho sobre las jirafas?" "Unas cosas, si." "Como que?" So the big idea I've tried to inject into these discussions of nature has been "ventajas" (advantages) and "desventajas" (thrombitis). No, no, "desventajas" does actually mean what you think it means. With giraffes, the advantages of the height were pretty obvious, but the disadvantages - lack of flexibility, difficult drop when giving birth - were less obvious. Yesterday it was birds. Advantages of wings? Easy: Flight. Disadvantages? Loss of the ability to do many, many other things. Gotta be small to fly - advantages: Don't need to eat much. Disadvantages? Can't fight back very effectively if caught. Etc. That filled the blocks between pizza places.

Our football was recovered this morning - we'd left it down by the big janitor's sink (the sink is big, not the janitor) on the first floor a few days ago, and he, not knowing to whom it belonged, had put it in a safe place. But today we asked if he'd seen it, and he gave it to us. So Quinn and I did that a lot when we hit the beach, waiting for Janneke and Tess. He's trying to perfect the various ways to throw in the style of rugby, with which he's still completely fascinated. In fact, here's the video he asks to watch five times a day. He usually gets to watch it about three:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=XaA80QDH4c4

And VERY oddly, the exact same family - this time extended, with cousins all over the place - with whom Quinn had played catch with the football on the beach the last time, was there again! I still can't quite figure out what the name of the little girl is - Maribel? Maibel...? - but she and all her kin were super-eager to play again. I kept trying to ditch them so they would be forced to communicate more with Quinn, but they kept coming back to me, wanting lessons on how to throw it, or, more likely, plain-old adult attention. (Their adults were hanging back on the beach a ways, socializing with each other.) They eventually tired of the football thing, but again that was largely because I bowed out. Quinn and I had been pretending the waves were tacklers - a game that the Puerto Rican kids caught on with completely, although it isn't really clear that they even know what football is - and as it turns out, lowering your shoulder to take on a large wave is a really bad idea. The wave smacks you in the temple. And after eleven or twelve of those, I said to myself, "Let's have a sit-down with the towel over my head to block out the searing rays of the sun and listen to the pounding inside my skull." The kids just played around me in the sand for a while then, but I did manage to snap a picture or two. And eventually I did come out to start making sharks and snakes and Darth Vader faces in the sand at the kids' request. (No, the Puerto Ricans didn't know who Darth Vader was, but it was indeed a request. From Quinn.)

Janneke and Tess came back, and Janneke had good news: She had found a cheaper car rental place that some locals had told us about, but which we'd kept walking past. No wonder, it's a kiosk the size of a phone booth. We had lunch in the shade (leaving the football and the buckets and shovels for the cousins to play with for a while), and as we were heading back to the beach, an ice cream salesman - who sells the sort of fruit-based sherbet-type stuff we had the other day - strolled past. Quinn noticed his cart and said, incredulous, "He only has two flavors? Don't most of them have three or four?"

I pounced. "Yes. What are the advantages of only having two flavors, and what are the disadvantages?"

Quinn eventually figured it out: Two varieties equals less weight to drag around. Perhaps reduced sales, perhaps not, if the two varieties are the most popular. I can see this theme going on for quite a little while.

Then I took off to check on car rental prices. It turns out to be a better deal at this place than at Hertz, so as of Monday, we'll be hitting the road. But we'll be back every evening, dear readers, fear not. Nowhere on the island is more than 2 hours away.

We were chased off the beach by rain around 3:00, and so were back at the homestead earlier than usual. The evening meal was pizza, using the intelligence gathered in the morning, and a movie night ("The Fellowship of the Ring", brought from home). We called in the pizza order around 5:00, and at 6:00 it was time to go get it.

I walked to pick up the pizza from Vittorio's New York Style Pizza, a block and a half from here. (Unbelievable, how much a good soaking cools down the air. It was easily 15 degrees cooler out.) I had to transport back to the apartment a very large pizza box, and the bottom was pretty hot, so I kept having to switch hands and weave along the narrow sidewalks, avoiding people with the big box sticking out on one side or the other. I started to feel self-conscious, and in that state I saw a somewhat tough-looking young fellow walking toward me on the sidewalk, in the company of another man on a bicycle, who was riding at the same pace in the street on the other side of the long line of parked cars. The man on the sidewalk was reaching out to pass the man on the bicycle a bottle of Gatorade, and the man on the bicycle was reaching back for it, but their hands were still a good two feet apart. Neither seemed in a hurry to alter anything about the arrangement, but, parallel lines being what they are, it seemed to me that this state of affairs would continue for another sixty feet until the block ended. What was going to happen? Would they walk along like that forever? Was he going to try to throw it? More importantly, was I going to be in his way, should he try to lean out toward the bicycle and poke his off leg out for balance...? I was ogling them in expectation as I waddled along with my pizza box. And as we neared each other, the man walking looked up and met my eyes, and quickly said something that I didn't understand.

My mind jumped ahead, though, logically, and determined that he had probably said "What are you looking at?" or "Get out of the way!" or "You got a problem?" But after I was past him, in the strange, one-second interim that can occur between hearing and understanding, suddenly the sounds he'd made coalesced into a sentence:

"Oye, amigo, disfruta la pizza."
("Hey, pal, enjoy the pizza.")

What a fricking fantastic bunch of people these are.

Just as I crossed the street to my house, I walked past a car wash, where another youngish man was washing his car with a friend. And he looked up and saw me, and said, "Este va a gozar de un poco de pizza." (This guy's going to enjoy some pizza.) I grinned and nodded and kept going. Would people be that friendly at home? Maybe. But somehow it feels nicer here.

Saw two policemen riding parallel with each other in the street today, slowly, so they could chat. Someone at an intersection pulled out precipitously ahead of them, nosing her way into traffic, and they had to veer out into the left lane to avoide her. The oncoming car had to veer to avoid the policemen.

The chat never even slowed down. On they rode.



The EBCRD (pat pending)



Quinn is leaning in here and saying, "Que?"
He had to do that a lot. Quite an accent here.



Halfway home, and the rain started in again.