Week Two

Basically, the landscape here is amazing, due mostly to its vast difference from Maryland. Here are the following things you can't see in my hometown.

1. Most of the horizon
2. More stars than you can count on your hands
3. Buildings made of tires and beer bottles

By the second week I was well accustomed to these things. A while back I discovered that while I love traveling and am impressed with the many people and places I encounter, I am rarely in total awe of things around me. Once I arrive somewhere, I already feel at home. I feel confident when I walk, even if I am completely lost. Sitting inside the HIVE upstairs, in the sun room where the walls are glass windows overlooking the fern-covered plateau, I felt totally at ease and natural, despite being in an area I had never seen.

It is very cool, the landscape. Across the rock and ferns you can see mountains topped with snow. If you look to the road you see a flat line, with an occasional truck driving down it, like a silhouette.

At work, we've been mixing cement and adobe, the latter of which is a mixture of dirt, sand, water, and straw. It's cheap and extremely useful material, as well as easy to use. We've mostly been using it as mortar slapped on top of old bottles and cans, our bricks. With these materials, the walls and domes have a sort of polka-dot effect. I read years before I knew about earthships about a man who built his own house own of hand-made cement and mud, and used bottles as bricks. The coolest aspect was that he lived by the shore, and when tide winds came, they would blow into the empty bottles and whistle, like an alarm.

I'm mostly happy that we use an electric mixer for cement and adobe. In Guatemala we plopped the materials into a blob on the ground and mixed it with shovels.

The older men at the sites, the workers and foremen, are all rugged and hilarious, as expected. They came up with a nickname system using people's initials. So for example there was Damien, or Dick Hungry Leprechaun, and Brian, or Boys McCuddle. A administrative woman who stopped by occasionally was dubbed Anal Before Sunrise.

So it's quite a thing to work and hear in the background "Hey Ball Munching Cunt! You get the fucking beer yet?"

Nick, Luke and I tried eagerly to come up with ones for each other. Nick got Nightly Teabag Service, and Luke got  Licking Dick Nightly. The best they could come up for me from Cunty Hoochie Cock. I explained this to Damien a few days later, who instantly looked at me and said, "Oh, like Cock Hungry Cracker?"

Luke and I bonded early with an interest in fast, violent, underground-like movies such as Pulp Fiction and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Alicia and Ahmed introduced everyone to Settlers of Cattan, a board game like Risk except with resources instead of armies, and more betrayal. It was a common sight for the rest of the month to see four to six interns grouped on the wood floor, shouting and laughing about sheep being stolen from them.

Alicia pulled off the most insane move ever. There is no trust in this game, but this stunned all of us. Basically, everyone owns settlements adjacent to certain resources, When dice is rolled, if the number is on a resource you control, you get that resource, which you use to buy roads and etc... But there's a piece in the game called the Robber. When you roll a seven, you move it to someone's resource and can steal a resource card from their hand. It also blocks that resource, rendering it useless to the person you just stole from.

Now, there is also a card called the Knight, which allows you, on your turn, to move the Robber and steal from someone. Like rolling a seven.

So Alicia pleads with Luke to trade her a resource she needs for one he doesn't, on the condition that she'll move the Robber off his resource, since she just rolled a seven. He agrees. So they trade cards and she moves the Robber off, thereby freeing the resource to him. Then without any evil grin, maniacal cackle or emotion at all, she plays a Knight card, dropping the Robber right back on Luke's property, and steals back the card she just traded him. There was a moment of silence after this, and then we all went nuts. From this point I often referred to Alicia as Ladrona (thief) and I learned never trust Spanish women.

Ahmed, in his own quiet, mischievous way, appeared to be losing the whole game until he basically assembled an empire on his last two turns and won. Luke tried to stay professional and ended up getting worked over, although close to winning. I made jokes and talked shit most of the time, and as a result got absolutely obliterated.

It sounds lame, but I'm telling you, if you got a group of fun people, get the game. I'll probably buy it back home, and my mom will be able to take revenge on my dad for massacring his wife and children in Risk.