A Story Told Through Video

Look. I went to work today. And didn't do much else. (Besides catch a cold, it seems) So I don't really have anything to blog about. But last week? I was doing things worth blogging about but I was too busy actually doing them to actually blog about them.

Today I'm tired and cold-y so I'm going to half ass the blog by just posting videos. Writing is overrated.

Basically there was this school in Guatemala. It was at the top of a very big mountain. There were six grades of kids there and only one teacher. They were all really poor kids and our leader asked us if we wanted to have a party with the kids. I said that would be okay as long as some other non-Guatemalans were there as well, so there wouldn't be 200 kids staring at only us.

We decided that instead of toys we would buy the kids shoes, as most of the kids we'd come across on our trek up and down the mountain weren't wearing shoes. We decided to call the party "La Fiesta de los Zapatos" (The party of shoes)

This seemed like a grand idea. Until we actually had to go buy 70 pairs of shoes. In the market. My lord, it was like the most boring version of Amazing Race ever. The Not Even That Entertaining Race is what we were participating in.



Booooring. And that was only like a minute of the HOURS we spent wandering this maze of a market looking for shoes. We had gone to one place initially and they had given us a good price on the shoes. Then, in an effort to increase our buying power, we went back and begged for money from some of the other students at the Spanish school where we were studying. Then we returned to the market with the actual belief that we would be able to find that one shoe seller guy again. We were not correct in this belief. The main problem was that we went into the maze of sellers a different way, then we tried to wind our way through in the direction of where we thought the shoe guy had been. Along the way we found other shoe guys and bought about 10 or 20 shoes at a time at each place.

We left one shoe seller and headed off looking for our original low price shoe seller. We wound through the maze for like 10 minutes, we went outside, came back in, wound around some more and then, miracle of miracles, we found the original place. As we were getting the shoes from the original place we looked over to see a nice woman waving at us. At the place literally right next to where we were standing. She was waving at us because we had just bought shoes from her. Right before we went off on a 10 minute quest for our original shoe guy. Instead of walking 10 minutes we probably could have walked just two steps.

We are not smart.



Finally we got the shoes and made it to the fiesta. When we got there the leader guy asked a couple of the groups if they could sing a song in their language for the kids. We put our heads together and came up with some very inappropriate rap songs. Then we decided maybe the hokey pokey might be a better bet. The group from Canada sang some song in French. And the Koreans said, "I'm sorry, we did not know that there would be a song. We did not have time to prepare, we can't possibly perform."

These Koreans weren't really spontaneous people, on the whole. I sincerely hope they didn't think we had been given advanced notice and still all we came up with was this:




What is it about the butt? It somehow transcends all language and makes everyone laugh. Except the Koreans. They didn't know that there would be laughter, so they didn't have time to prepare for it.