A stressful time and a death

August 19^th – August 21^st

My first full day back after a long weekend was not as action packed as I thought it’d be. My class in my campo school was cancelled, and I also learned that my classes in my other schools would be cancelled the following day as well. Thank god I already had my business competition.

With nothing else to do, I did some major yoga (I’m getting back into the rthym of it again), and continued reading my book River Town. In fact, I finished it:

River Town – A. The memoirs of a Peace Corps volunteer in China. While this volunteer lived in a large city in China, most of his experiences were reminiscent of my own here in Achuapa. Furthermore, he changed as a human in ways he thought he wouldn’t. It’s a great perspective of Peace Corps service and a really well written book.

Later that Wednesday, I went to the birthday party of my now 5-year-old neighbor, Omara. Being the first official birthday party I’ve attended I had the expectation that it would be similar to a party in the States – and I was wrong. It’s a custom to show up late, so I planned on arriving late as well. However, a handful of kids were yelling at my from my neighbor’s yard because they wanted me to show up, so I got changed and headed over right around when the invitation said the party would start.

I dropped off my gift among the anonymous gifts (I wrote my name on mine), and sat down and awkwardly waited with everybody else for the rest of the invitees to show up. When everybody showed up, it more of the feel of a structured board meeting than any birthday I’ve been to – very systematic. Once everybody showed up, they set up the piñata and a couple kids tried breaking it. Once it was broken, and the kids had grabbed their candy, they handed out food to all the guests. This same process was followed with a drink, then once again with rice pudding for. Omara then blew out the candle on her cake, and the cake was distributed (with me getting the first piece since I took pictures of her). Everybody finished eating the cake, they all left. From start to finish, the birthday party was an hour and 15 minutes long. There was close to no socialising, no singing happy birthday, no opening presents, and no dancing. It all went by so quickly that I stuck around and helped clean up.

Some of the neighborhood kids

I had planned on spending the better part of the night at the party, but when everything was said and done, it was only 5:30 – not even dinnertime! So without much else to do, I cracked open another book, thus continuing my insane month of reading. Being so early, I once again assumed (incorrectly once again) that I’d spend the whole night reading. However, come 7 PM, I just couldn’t keep my eyes open (even though I’d done practically nothing the entire day)

Thursday was much of the same of the previous day – I spent the majority of the day reading and spoke with 2 of my counterparts to discuss plans for the rest of the school year.

I also continued my return to intense yoga sessions. Before I left for Peace Corps, I downloaded a bunch of yoga PDF files with the intention to do yoga all the time. While this worked out in training, and I got a lot of mileage out of routines, after a couple months in Achuapa, I stopped using them. It was clearly a foolish thing to do because I feel a whole lot better now that I’ve started doing them again.

This day, I also noticed that I’m pushing 4 months without a stomach illness (my 1 week stint in Managua doesn’t count because it wasn’t stomach related). While those of you that are reading may not realise the significance of this, let me tell you that it’s big. Getting a bacterial infection, parasite, worms, or something like giardia is almost unavoidable over long periods of time here.

That said, while I’m stoked that I’ve held out this long without getting massively sick, I’m paranoid that the next bug will hit me soon. In the past, I’d averaged almost 3 months exactly between getting sick with stomach illnesses. The longer these periods of time in between being sick last, the better you start to feel about everything. It’s great to wake up in the morning without having to question my health for that day. From that point when I realise that I’m still good for yet another day, the endorphins start going. Never did I think that I’d celebrate such a basic thing, but I’ve realised that I’ll never take advantage of good health again.

Friday mostly went the same way the rest of the week has gone – I read, and finished another book:

Jennifer Government – C+. In this book, the government is privatized and the world is virtually run by corporations. Everybody is driven by profit – even the police require funding for every case they want to undertake. While the book itself really wasn’t that bad, it has been so long since I’ve read a over the top fiction book that I wasn’t too entertained with it.

I didn’t want to start another book and fall into the same cycle, so after eating lunch, I watched a movie and then went to my friend’s farm where I spent the better part of the afternoon. It was good to get out of the town and just chill out on their farm where there was nothing going on. Another plus was that I could hang out with their cat Chungo. Basically, it was social interaction without the pressure of actually interacting. I can just hang out there and relax instead of having my host feel they need to entertain me. Definitely a good way to end the day.

August 22^nd – August 31^st

The 22^nd I spent the majority of my day hanging out in my house and reading since the potential of doing activities on the weekends is severely diminished. During this time, I finished yet another book (I’ve lost count of how many I’ve put away recently):

The Other Side of the River – B-. A book about a murder in St. Joseph/Benton Harbor, Michigan. The two towns are physically divided by a river and are super racially charged due to the racial barrier that this river has created as well. The book was written to solve a murder of a black teen in the white part of the town, but the author discovered nothing new and only delved into the potential theories he had. The book is well written, but the book was more about race relations between the two towns as opposed to the solving of the murder.

On the 23^rd, instead of waiting around, I headed down to Malpaisillo to help Brie with organizing her competition. I helped wherever I could, and we made the final preparations on Monday before the competition.

The 25^th really left me with a sour feeling all over. I won’t discuss what happened, but rather detail my perspective on how I now feel about development. I realised that no matter how hard one tries to do good things for anybody, there can always be somebody whose goal it is to ruin the outcome. There doesn’t even have to be any reason for the deplorable actions of this person aside from being prejudice. I don’t understand what drives people like this. The people that are most hurt by these actions are the people from this country. It was super disheartening to see a completed bigoted person ruin something that would have benefited so many. I was so shocked that I briefly considered quitting and going home due to the disenchantment of seeing people who claim to be there to help the people but do the exact opposite. I quickly reconsidered since what happened did not happen in my site – I couldn’t punish people that didn’t do anything. However, at the same time, the incident caused me to lose a lot of faith in what I’m doing. Definitely the lowest point of my service (even though it didn’t directly happen to me).

I headed back to Achuapa on Wednesday for a couple of days of classes and activities before heading down to Managua on Friday for an in service training session. While I initially had no interest whatsoever to go to the session, I ended up grasping more from the session than any other session I’d attended in the 15ish months I’ve been here. The meeting also scared the crap out of me because we started talking about post-Peace Corps plans.

While I’ve always had a problem living in the now with all the decisions I make, professionally, living in the now is the only way I’ve ever approached it. I always had the goal of joining Peace Corps. Well, after realising that goal, I’ve had no fixed plan since. I know I want to keep studying (looking at Environmental Economics) for a master’s degree, but aside from my personal education, I’m not sure. I know I’m not interested in a government job or a development job. I would like to keep teaching though – perhaps I could make a career out of that. However, I don’t know when I’m going to get into the “OK, let’s get into career mode.” I love studying and learning new things, but going in and out of an office every day will never appeal to me. I don’t care what I’m doing. I need a job interacting with people on a regular basis. I want to be tested and challenged. If I don’t have a job that’s not constantly challenging, then it’s not for me – and the job that fits this description best is teacher. I know that after Peace Corps, I’m not going back and taking it easy in the States – I’m going to pack my bags and go somewhere else for some new experience. So we’ll see how it goes and when I finally kick into that mode.

Saturday we had a meeting in León with all the volunteers (a sort of welcome meeting). I’m not big on hanging out with the volunteers, so after about an hour of that, I took off and chilled out in my hotel room. Later that night, I went out for a nice dinner and had a glass of wine. It’d been so long since I’d drank (around 6 or 7 weeks), that I got a headache. In spite of the physical discomfort, the day in the hotel really helped me calm my nerves and gave me the feeling of having spent the day in a spa. It doesn’t take a whole lot of luxuries to release all the tension I build up while in site.

Sunday, I headed back to site in the afternoon, and went and visited a friend of mine that’d gotten in a motorcycle accident. She’d been in the hospital for around 40 days and won’t be able to walk for 3-6 months apparently. I spent a couple of hours talking with her before heading home for dinner.

I have no interest whatsoever in cooking a huge dish of rice and beans, so I buy them from my neighbor every night and make some other dish with it. This time, I went over there to hear an off comment of, “Oh, Richard, did you hear? One of you best students died on Friday.” After further inquiry, they told me it was one of my good students in my private school. The explained that he went to the stadium for a while, and then later in the day, he collapsed in the street and died. It wasn’t all that clear who they were talking about though. They told me his name 2 million times, but their descriptions of him didn’t fit the kid I was thinking about. I headed back to my house to grab my camera (I took pictures of every one of my students), and asked my neighbors to confirm that it indeed was my student who died. It was then that I learned that it was another student who died, but was the brother of one of my students. While I was relieved that it wasn’t one of my students, it was sad because I did know the boy.

Death and severe injuries here happen so frequently, I can’t believe it. While it’s shocking that so many catastrophic things can happen to such a small town, what’s even more shocking for me is the fact that a death or serious injury can be such casual news. I guess that really illustrates the kind of history this country has gone through. In spite of this though, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to view such events as they are here. All in all, this was by far the most trying week for me professionally as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was one of the first times that I’ve been really pushed with something that didn’t involve something away from my main job. I’m glad to have had the experiences of the past week for what I learned from them, but at the same time, I’d really rather not experience such things in the future (as if I had some influence on them).

A meltdown and getting better

July 19th

Well, good or bad, I intended to document my experiences here in Nicaragua so I could look back on them in some years and say “OH YEA!”

Today I had a complete meltdown.

All the stressors of the week:
-    Last due dates for projects
-    A youth group without a tangible result
-    Some issues with the host family
-    Word choice blunder
-    Finishing ASBO project
-    Finishing youth group prep/presentation
-    Bobby getting sent home
-    No clean clothes
-    Mold growing on all my hats (save the Goggins hat) due to rainy season, total loss
o    Losing my sense of identity with this one
-    Lent my sandals to a fellow volunteer, came back with a not so nice smell

All in all, they were all small things, but holy crap did they ever pile up. I canceled everything I was planning on doing right as I was walking out the door because I realised I just couldn’t handle it.

I ended up locking myself up for 5 hours meditating and being introspective. This session helped a lot.

Not regretting being here at all – love it here. Not wishing I could leave – excited about what I’m here to do. It was just a completely new experience. When they said you’d be exposed to extremely stressful situations, they weren’t kidding. Intense experience.

The field trip into my mind was all I did today. That was an intense enough activity for one day.

July 20th

The day today started relatively bright an early at 6:30 (still not able to sleep in) because I had to get out of the land of SBD volunteers. I was just craving contact with my fellow TEFLers, particularly following my meltdown of yesterday. The game plan was to meet Danica and Dianne in Diriamba (whoa – mega alliteration!) just to hang out. However, while I was getting ready Dianne called with dreaded news – she was sick so she wouldn’t be coming (it turned out that most of the TEFL volunteers were sick with an amoeba and bacterial infection (double whammy!) that they got from food they got in a workshop with the ministry of education. So with her out of the picture, I called up Danica and planned on just hanging out with her.

The bus ride down to Diriamba was a…new experience, as it appeared to have 2 clowns on it making the ride to Jinotepe. They were just bickering back and forth with jokes and making balloon animals, making the ride itself quite entertaining and tolerable. I ended up buying 2 balloon animals from them to give to Danica and Dianne, as well to support these guys who obviously put forth an impressive effort for out hard earned cordobas.

When I got into Diriamba, Danica and I chatted about the whole situation with Bobby, then met up with Maria, a new TEFL “aspirante” who is a transfer volunteer from the Republic of Georgia (she came straight from Georgia following her 2 years there). We walked around and hung out for a bit, then went to the Pali to put together a care “sack” (cookies, banana, and juice boxes) for Dianne since she wasn’t feeling too well.

Dianne was super surprised by our unexpected visit, but she ended up needing the visit just to improve her mood (it’s the end of training blues, everybody’s got them), in addition to improving her health. We ended up spending about 2 hours there before convincing her to go to Jinotepe to go indulge in some pizza.

Our lunch trip to Jinotepe was full of distressing, as well as poking Maria’s brain for info about spending 2 years as a Peace Corps volunteer – how it wears on you and whatnot. However, the conversation covered several million topics (I can rarely remain focused, but apparently other people couldn’t either), and it was just a good way to relax following the overly stressful week. Apparently TEFL had been pushed to their limits after the last week as well, so we had a good venting session. This venting session was continued as we made our way to a bar in Jinotepe to meet a bunch of other TEFL volunteers – good times.

Coincidentally, the bus ride home included the same entertainment that I enjoyed on my trip down to Diriamba this morning  – that’s right, the clowns were back. This time, I was able to refrain from buying one of their balloon animals, and just donated a cord to their cause (yea, only around 5 cents, but 5 cents goes far here).

Definitely a good day spent unwinding and getting out the tension, for all involved parties it seems.

July 21st

Today started early. I woke up at 5 AM so I could be out of the door by 6 AM because Peace Corps wanted us at the UCA at 7:30. I got out after a few issues (my host sister was sick), grabbed Jordan, and we headed to the bus stop. After a quick stop by the ATM, we were in the bus and I was seated on a bucket (they were out of seats).

Our cobrador was anything but pleasant and insisted on giving crap to pretty much everybody. He made me move to a different seat 3 different times, as if it were more efficient. However, in the end he got his own – the bus got pulled over and was ticketed because we’d crammed 25 people in the bus and people were standing. He continued to whine before the guy sitting in front of me, a 20-year officer (I think a general) in the Nicaraguan navy just told him to shut up and quit his whining.

Jordan, Owen, and I ended up being the first people to show up at the UCA. We ended up finding Douglas, the awesome Peace Corps party bus driver waiting for us and enjoyed all its air-conditioned goodness (it’s about 87 degrees here at 7 AM everyday). After we got the majority of people in the bus (Avi was sick, and Joey was severely bitten by a dog), Douglas proceeded to take us to La China, Matagalpa. The ride itself was absolutely gorgeous and reminded me of how Colorado would be if it were incredibly lush all the time.

La China is situated in a mountainous community just outside of Sebaco, Matagalpa and really is quite a beautiful place. All the SBD volunteers went there so we could observe an agriculture volunteer and learn more about agrobusiness opportunities (well for those of us that are in small sites). There we had a 3 hour presentation by the program director for Peace Corps Ag program, then broke for lunch. One of the projects the volunteer had done was create a park for the town. This involved getting 55 dump truck loads of dirt brought in to level the ground, a bank donated a stage for the park, they put in a tetherball pole, and he recently just got funding to build a basketball court. In addition to that, he’s been working with a woman who started growing mung beans in a garage. She went from having absolutely nothing to building a house, installing running water, a flush toilet, and buying a flatbed truck to deliver her beans as well as other goods in the community to the supermarkets in Managua. She really was a rags to riches operation and really amazed us all – just an incredibly talented, driven, and smart woman.

In addition to the aforementioned, we talked with some farmers from the area that the volunteer worked with. One is getting certified to be an organic farmer, one was lauded for having for “good farming practices”, and we talked with a few others that were creative/innovative farmers in the area. We ended up getting a tour of the organic farmers farm where he grew papayas, tomatoes, and passion fruit. He had all these incredible methods of naturally keeping pests off his crops it was unbelievable. But not only that, his papaya trees had at least 100 papayas sprouting off wherever there was room on each tree. All the other papaya trees I’ve seen in the country have not even compared, generally there would be 10 to 15 on an enormous tree.

After seeing the farm (and getting papayas for free!), we got to observe a methane storage area that a previous ag volunteer had created. In involved taking horse manure and mixing it in a gigantic concrete vat with water. The methane gas would rise after mixing it with the water, and in turn, this gas was used for the stoves in 3 houses. It was really incredible and one of the most sustainable things I’ve seen in the country – totally cool.

We ended up leaving around 4:30 (an hour and a half after we planned on leaving), but it was worth it in the long run. I’m excited about the opportunity to potentially find ag projects to work on when I get to Achuapa. Furthermore, PC is going to give us a ton of ag resources for those of us with the opportunity to work with farmers. Douglas, with his fearless driving, got us down to Managua in about an hour (instead of the 2 hours it normally takes), and I ended up getting back to Masatepe at around 7 PM.

The days tend to go by pretty quickly whether it’s a good or bad day.

July 22nd

Well, as our last day in our training towns, you’d think the day would go a bit differently – and you’d be wrong. The day started out at 7:30 AM so Jordan and I could arrive at Olla de Barro on time for our 8 AM charla. To say we were stoked to be having our last charla in our training towns would be an understatement. The wear and tear of training really has started to set in on us, particularly after this past week. Nevertheless, we stuck with it and will just hold in all the tension until we’re alone at our sites so we can explode there – just kidding.

Actually, the charlas today were halfway useful on top of being straightforward and non-sugarcoated, something that is always welcomed after 11 weeks of charlas full of icebreakers. The end is just over the horizon, and we’re ready to just get to it. The charlas themselves weren’t really noteworthy, but provided us with the information we’ve been pondering from the very beginning – at least we finally got it.

We ended up getting out of Olla de Barro at around 4:30, completely charla-ed out, and with but a mere afternoon left in our training towns. Katie, Lindsay, Jordan, and I ended up grabbing going to the Pali in Masatepe, then hanging out in the park for a while to do some reflecting on the day/enjoy some ice cream/oreos/chocolate milk. However, as luck would have it, it started to sprinkle after very little time, and we had to split ways.

On the way home, I stopped by the Tiendita, the shop my host mom’s cousin owns, because I heard she had a guayavera (a lightweight Nicaraguan shirt) that was in my size. Unfortunately it had 4 pockets, and struck me as more of a lumberjack shirt than one that would scream “authentic Nicaraguan,” so I ended up holding off on the purchase and will just swear in as a Peace Corps volunteer in my normal clothes that I teach in – I’m not here to impress anybody (with my looks anyway).

The rest of the night just held the always-dreaded packing. It’s awfully strange to have packed up my entire life in a bag 3 times since December. I’m actually looking forward to getting to my site and having all my stuff in one place (well, when I move out of my host family’s house) for an extended period of time. Who knows? Maybe I’ll find more of a sense of myself than I did in the U.S.?

PC continued…

July 17^th

729 days to go! Just kidding.

Woke up at a more reasonable hour this morning – 6 AM – where I pondered over whether or not I’d head to Masaya to get a shirt for the swearing in ceremony. I ultimately decided that I would not because I’m cheap. That 10 dollars could be the difference between me eating for 2 days or starving – who knows what the situation will be at site? Anyway, we have to present our youth group tomorrow to the rest of the business trainees/PC staff about our results, or in our case, our “learning experiences.” I worked on that a little bit before ultimately deciding to work on our business advising report that we also have to turn in tomorrow. We’ve all been doing interviews/assessments of a small business owner (in most people’s cases, this small business owner was in the family), and we do an assessment of their business, and give advice accordingly afterwards. In particular, we look at 4 areas – Human Resources, Production/Operation, Administration, and Marketing. After analyzing their responses and observing the business itself, we lump our recommendations into one of the aforementioned categories. After making the recommendations we are required to make a plan of action for said recommendations and indicate the priority of each. The whole prospect of doing this and providing feedback was incredibly daunting, but after jumping in, I got on a roll and it became relatively easy and I churned out a good 3 pages of recommendations. Just gotta get your feet wet I guess.

In the midst of writing my report, a “Buenas” came from our front gate where some desconocida was looking for me. She just came on in and asked for my name. I had no idea what to make of her – whether she was from the government/Peace Corps/was there to kill me/give me a present or what. It turned out she was the lady who was going to give me my language interview at 1 that afternoon. However, since she was in Masatepe, she wanted to try to get one interview over with in the morning. So I did mine a couple of hours early, and judging from the questions she asked me, I think I tested around the same area. She asked me a bunch of technical questions, about bicycles for example, and riding 21 miles for my birthday. She wanted to tell me how it was – what am I supposed to say? “Well…it was fun, pretty, lots of hills…” I also didn’t/don’t know the names of bike components in Spanish so that really set me back. Overall I was really unsatisfied/pissed with the interview, but whatever. I’m already at a high language level, this interview was worthless for me anyway.

I then headed to the gym for a couple hours to de-stress – god I missed the gym! There is a gigantic (like the size of 2 Olympic swimming pools enclosed paved area in back of the gym where there were around 20 guys brushing kidney beans around on the ground. I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life, but I think they were drying the beans? Honestly couldn’t tell you, but it was just a whole bunch of beans – and now I know the process they go through before they get to my plate.

Following the gym, I worked a little longer on the small business report before meeting up with Jordan and our youth group to discuss our presentation that we’re going to talk about. It was a pretty successful meeting, and we didn’t have to pull information out of the kids like I thought we’d have to. Nevertheless, during the brainstorming process, we asked Javier what he thought about the goal of doing a mini-project. He responded:

Visualizar un proyecto que nos sirve de alguna manera para mejorar el ambiente o facilitar información histórica de nuestro pueblo.

The above is just a bulleted caption for the quote, so it’s not conjugated, but what it says is that we wanted to visualize a Project that would serve the group in some way to improve the environment or facilitate historical information about our town. We were pretty dumbfounded as this is the kind of textbook like answer that we, and Peace Corps want to hear, but it came straight from his mouth without feeding him ideas. Nuts.

After our rendezvous, Jordan and I threw together a quick presentation for tomorrow for the rest of the trainees, and that was that.

Got 2 free pineapples too! Sweet deal!

July 18^th

Today started out as a pretty bad day – with tons of rain. Whenever it rains, almost everything in Nicaragua is bad as it inevitably causes not so happy things to happen.

I woke up to what was a dull roar – no, that’s a bad assessment. I woke up to an incredible roar, even though I was wearing earplugs. I got up to find that the source of this powerful noise was in fact the incredible downpour of rain. Whenever it rains, I have no desire to go anywhere because any and everything you possess will be completely drenched. Basically, you end up becoming so wet that it would be a laborious task to explain to anybody that you were in fact not swimming in your clothes. Another thing the rain brings – mold. When I first read about this in other volunteer’s blogs, I was not really concerned as they pointed out this is spontaneously occurs on leather products. Well, little did I know that mold grows on EVERYTHING. Mold has grown on every single one of my cycling caps, what the hell? I don’t know what the combination is to yield such an outcome, but it’s unreal. Some days I can’t even take this mold.

Wow, tangential.

Anyway, we had to go to Ave Maria today for a training session/youth group presentation, and this rain wasn’t conducive to any of this happening without massive issues. It was raining way too much to not wear my sandals and bring my shoes in a bag, so I compromised my professional look. I ended up arriving at Ave Maria completely drenched anyway, but fortunately, I had some warm/dry shoes to change into – oh yea, that’s planning ahead.

We had a charla on alcohol, which was a pretty standard informative but not overly new information for us. Generally this is how all the charlas are – they fill in the gaps for things you don’t know since most of what they teach you is common sense. Example: alcohol can impair your judgement. Further explanation is unnecessary. This was followed by our youth group presentations. At first only one youth group out of all the training towns showed up because apparently the PC bus didn’t show up to pick up any of the youths. The kids from my youth group were some of the missing youths, which led to worry – our youth group didn’t succeed, and now they aren’t there to help explain what happened? Oh no. Eventually they showed up because they took a normal bus (good kids!), and we gave our presentation. At first I was nervous about it compared to the rest of the groups, since they actually realised a project. However, in the end I discovered that if you presented a convincing argument for the outcome you got, that was ok.

Following the end of the ceremony, our youths got sent home and we headed to lunch. The afternoon session was followed by presentations by the trainees from San Juan de Oriente. They did an amazing job, particularly considering the horribly difficult topic that they had to present – easily the most difficult class we’ll have to teach in all our Peace Corps service.

After the presentation, we did evaluations, and then we all got hit with a total curveball. For reasons I won’t delve into, our fellow PCT Bobby was told he will be sent home and won’t be allowed to continue as a volunteer. Basically they believed he wouldn’t be a successful volunteer, so he’s getting sent home. We were all shocked and incredibly set back by this decision and headed straight to a bar afterwards. Due to potential issues with this, I’m going to limit the description of this incident to this paragraph.

After a couple of hours hanging out with the other trainees, we all headed back home to cenar (eat dinner). This trip home was a quick trip back as we were all going straight back out to San Juan de Oriente to hang out with Bobby for the night. So after getting some food in my system and money from the bank, I headed over to Avi’s house where Owen, Avi, and I sat around and talked with Avi’s host family before taking off. It was about 8:30 by the time we decided to embark – meaning there weren’t busses running. This meant that in order to get there, we’d need to be creative. Or in other words, we’d need to find an alternative way to arrive at our destination.

We ended up catching a ride in the back of a truck where we had a conversation with a police officer that was from 22 and from Masatepe. Apparently hitchhiking was the only way he can get to work in Masaya that late at night, but it’s far more efficient than any other form of transportation, and he does it every night.

We arrived in Catarina where we met up with Kat and Andrea to talk a bit. This meeting lasted only a bit before we headed to the Mirador to hang out with Bobby for the last night. Our rendezvous lasted a couple of hours but was a good time overall. The trip home ended up being more entertaining as I had to deal with some amiable drunk guy for 20 minutes. A cab ended up being the only car on the highway, magically, and we caught that home, putting an successful end to our not so great day.