Melissa's Travels

So, while I was working with the students, on the 28th of July and onward, there were army exercises right near and in my site. Pretty funny. First day I show up after Granada with Annie and Tara, and there are all these militares around the pulperia and I talk to Marlon and hes like, yeah, they are doing exercises. Military here are all volunteer and they are only fed one meal a day. So the days they practice threre were all these fake bomnb sounds but sound reall, and they go running down one of the main fottpaths we were using, and one soldier was hitting on Nely, a student one day when she was checking nets and then she didnt want to go by herself for awhile. And one soldier came by with Marlon to the banding station because he wanted to see the gringa. He got bored and left after 10min. And one day when we were walking to the site, this jeep pulls up´and asks where the house is that the grings is staying at, and I{m like, yeah thats me, and why do you want to know. And it turns out they want to buy cuajada from Dona Isabel, the weird cheese everyone eats here, which I quite like, but is made from skimming the cream off of the milk and putting a pill in that makes it coagulate and squishing the water out until it is a big chunk. This is why I have gained weight here, That and the 2L of oil I consume a week. And Dona Isabel told me she puts cuajada, or heavy cream, in everything. Great.

Anyway, some militares came by the house the night before at like 11pm to buy cuajada, and apparently made Dona Isabel all upset because its very startling to have people come by your house so late, and wake everyone up, you think someone has died, but the they said they were military, and people here still get very jumpy about that because apparently one thing the military used to do during the war was just knock on your door late at night and when you opened it, shoot you in the face. Nice

anyway, got to go