Shopping

Tuesday November 24th 2009 9:00am

Around noon yesterday, a Swedish man from an organization that helps support the CCD joined our office for lunch. He was 40, but looked younger than me. He spoke Spanish much better than he spoke English, and was excited to hear about my work here.

After lunch, Patty and I borrowed our green truck (which I had never driven before) and headed off to the store. I needed a lot of ingredients, and was surprised to find gravy, and stuffing in boxes, which greatly reduced the amount of work I was planning on doing for Thanksgiving.

We traveled around to several different stores all over town, and much to my dismay we did not find a single place that sold rolling pins, or pie pans. I don´t know how I´m supposed to try and butcher pumpkin and pecan pies if I don´t have pie pans.

By 4:00, I had dropped Patty off and was driving back to my apartment when I suddenly felt very old. I don´t really know why, but in that moment, driving down the streets of Tegucigalpa I felt much older. I got back to my apartment and watched an episode of Big Bang Theory before talking with our gate man about parking the green truck.

Freddy had warned me earlier that the truck did not lock, so I would have to park it inside. That, however, was much easier said than done. I had to get approval from Cristino (the gate man), Lady (the landlord´s assistant) and Roberto (the landlord). After some debate about circumventing the normal rules, it was determined that it would be okay for me to park there for the night. So I drove around the back, and parked in the garage we have under the building. There were no other cars in there. I have no idea why it would have been a big deal for me to park there.

After parking, I went up to Plaza to see if they had any rolling pins or pie pans at any of the stores up there. Skunked again.

I came back to my apartment, and made a pizza before reading some more of Cornell Wests book. I headed up to the roof for a while, and exercised for a while. It felt really good, and I felt very accomplished afterward.

I came back down and showered before making a couple of phone calls and heading to bed.