Feliz Navidad! and Feliz Año Nuevo tambien
I´m in Montanita. I´ve spent the past 4 days here and although I didn´t think I would stay up until New Year´s, the energy on the streets has changed my mind. For the first time in my trip, I feel like I am where I´ve always dreamed of being. I walk barefoot all day. There are stains on my clothes, and I don´t care. During the evening, I see street performers. There is juggling, fire dancing\spinning, hula hoops, miming, you name it, and all the while there is certain to be one or two barechested boys with long black hair drumming on hand drums on the sidewalk. Or someone playing guitar, someone singing. There are many artesans that travel from town to town selling beautiful handmade jewellery, I think of them as gypsys. And I had Christmas dinner with a group of them! I´ve met quite a few people rather quickly, a little to my surprise, and almost all of them South American, spanish speaking. I have spoken very little english in the past few weeks, even my thoughts are starting to generate themselves in Spanish. That said, topics of conversation are still quite limited, but I´m getting the hang of it, and I feel both surprised and grateful for being accepted within this community despite my lack of things to say...it makes me think, ah, so maybe Cynthia was right. My presence is enough. It says more than my mouth ever possibly could..
Probably the most amazing thing about the people here is their generosity. Things are not viewed so much as ´mine´ or ´yours´. For example, at home, if a group of people go out for drinks at a bar, everyone orders ´their´ drink, sits down, and drinks ´their´ drink. No such thing here! Everything is shared. And the party goes on all night, any presence of police seems unexistant, beer is drank openly on the streets, joints passed around circles on the beach. But don´t get the wrong idea, I´ve been enjoying being clearheaded, and in a place like this, simply being open to the energy is a little intoxicating. So yeah, I was invited to a house which this crazy lady named Luna owns and rents out to travellers, on Christmas Eve, and it was a really cool experience. Plates of food were passed around, some with cutlery, others not. I´d grab a piece of fish and a Patacone off a plate and much on that while I waited for the next plate to come my way, where I´d have a spoonful of beans and some more rice. There was singing, guitar, drumming, flying dreadlocks spraying beer craziness.
How do I experience it all?
It feels as though my self has been stretched out to a point where it fell back on to it self, and now I am experimenting with crossing the boundry between 2 different consciousnesses.
That´s all I can say for now, I think.
Today I had to move from the other hostal I was staying in to a ´dorm´, which is actually an open air attic with dinky stained mattresses lined up all along the sides, and a big wooden box with a rusty lock to store my backpack in... and today, let´s see, what will I do? The sun is shining bright, I think I might lie on the beach for a while.
So long!