Road Trip

Before I forget it, I wanted to offer up one scene from the drive so far.

My aunt and me driving through St. Louis.

Her: Wow, the Arch is beautiful.
Me: Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Her: But it's silver. Why do they call it the Golden Arch?
Me: Uhhh....they don't. You're thinking of McDonald's.
Her: Oh.

And also, to keep the musical pelota rolling, one more great guest appearance.

It's another one starring Eddie Vedder.

Reasons it rules:
- no ridiculousness, he just comes out (at the beginning of the song) and sings the hell out of it
- no asinine new lyrics
- Tom Petty looks like Penny Marshall

Pics From Perhew

I am in Sheridan, WY. Tomorrow we go to Cody, WY. My aunt and I are driving from NC to CA.

These are pictures from Peru that Wynn took. I took some, and I'll put them up when I haven't been driving for 29 hours in the last 2.5 days. Or something like that.

Hector and me gettin' loco.

The Field General, surveying his troops.


Another sign that the U.S. is improving in soccer. I AM THE WALL. (Even though he's far away in the background, my soccer strength is so mighty that Daniel still feels the need to grab onto his pelotas.)

Stories And Performances

The other night, I think I found too many musical pairings that I love. I don't know if I'll ever have time to post them all.

And YES, in hindsight, clearly Axl's jacket should've received mention in the last post. I think four people emailed me to tell me about my mistake. I was shocked that four people had actually read it.

Let's keep the good times rolling........

Bono again. This time, with The Edge. And with Pearl Jam.

Why this is awesome:
- they named their collaboration "UJam"

- Bono strictly follows one of the Rules Of Duet Greatness. At least one performer must enter stage mid-song, regardless of how long the song has been going on (not very long), or how impactful it is (not very). I wish this wasn't a rule. You're not going to top "Ladies and gentlemen -- MR. ELTON JOHN!" And you're certainly not going to top Axl Rose's entrance at Wembley, so you may as well get to the stage when the song starts.

- the two ingenius prophets love reading-from-my-notebook style poetry so much during their OWN concerts, that when they play together, it's one big poetical douche-off. Did the song really need new words? Were Bono and Eddie Vedder sitting in adjacent stalls before the show thinking them up? Isn't the song about poverty already?? They should've called the pairing "UDouche." Or "DoucheJam."

And on top of all that......it still totally kicks ass.

This post was originally going to be more stories from South America. Including an anecdote about an Argentinian woman at a club telling me she didn't like American men because "most of them are like him" and then pointing to an intoxicated gringo at the other end of the balcony. Who was my travel companion. Wynn. Who will now be upset that I wrote this. But he knows I love him. The next story will hopefully involve something equally embarrassing occurring to me.

Hilarious Musical Collaborations

I like them. I like finding them, and I like discussing them. Usually I can't tell if my love is ironic or not.

You could probably have a whole mega-section solely devoted to Axl Rose, but this is my favorite so far -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzZXXCDakjY

Reasons why this performance rules:
- when this originally aired (in the early 90s??) I was watching this with my father, who is an enormous Rolling Stones fan. I was captivated. His only response was, "Why did they bring out this jackass?"
- it's an awesome Rolling Stones song that gets very little attention;
- Axl and Mick engage in a tense battle of who can do their worst go-to stage moves (Mick's spirit fingers on steroids and Axl's ridiculous sway);
- the ABSURDLY unnecessary inclusion of Izzy onstage instead of Slash;
- Keith Richards singing the first stanza as if he's never heard the song before;
- and finally, the two performers are billionaires singing a song that's meant to be a reversely-ironic discussion of the common man.

And no, despite it's awesomeness, it's still not as good as this.

The only person who may rival Axl in the ridiculous collaborations department is Bono. But what would happen if somehow, the cosmos aligned and they joined forces? What if the two Kings of Silly Collab collided? Would the world explode?? What? One exists? Seriously?

Wait A Darn Second

Soon, I will post more pics/brilliant analysis from my past two weeks in South America, but I wanted to step aside for some much brighter brilliance.

Has anyone else seen this? Why is this not the most popular sight on the internet?

Buenos Aires

I should´ve bought a watch in Buenos Aires. I was probably aware of what time it was around 10% of the time. I think BA is very similar to New York City. Wynn has lived in NYC for years, and is naturally contrarian, so he disagrees somewhat. I don´t think my body was ready for five straight days of arriving home after the sun rose.

Wynn and I were both given counterfeit money at different times. I was informed that mine was "muy muy falso" and part of the ink had even appeared to bleed all over the rest of the bill. And the watermark that is supposed to be a drawing of a politican looked like a drawing from an uncoordinated 4th grader.

We ate a steak restaurant and I ordered "steak wrapped in bacon." The steak was one of the biggest pieces of meat I´ve ever seen, and the bacon was a veritable sheet, wrapped around the giant piece of steak. Wynn got a giant piece of steak wrapped around a large piece of ham, with cheese and peppers in the middle. We were unaware that the side dishes were plentiful. We took part in a two-for-one special on bottles of wine, but you had to take one of them to go. The rest of the night and morning was spent handing the bottle to employees at clubs and seeing how funny it was that two shabbily dressed gringos were toting around wine. We left it at a club and forgot about it. I think that was the club where a group of girls wanted to practice their English, which mainly consisted of the phrase "I love you." As I type this, I realize that it was not anywhere near as cool as it sounds.

With our gracious hosts in Buenos Aires, we ended up watching Free Willy one night with their son. We debated about whether or not "Will You Be There" was at the end of this movie, or the sequel. Thank goodness it was this one. That song has definitely become the most beloved song of this trip, if not my life.

Last night back in Lima, looking for a place to hang out late after dinner, we were directed to a club near our hostel. We were told it was one of the only places in Lima that was open at this hour. We were not told, however, that the place was mostly populated by Peruvian prostitutes. We sat at the bar with some of Wynn´s friends who happened to be in town from a trek to Macchu Picchu. The whole thing was pretty weird, until Wynn talked the DJ into playing...... "Will You Be There." The prostitutes cleared the floor and Wynn and our friends showed them all that South Americans aren´t the only people obsessed with 80s/90s power ballads.

P.S.

When he turned off Big Stan, he put on Happy Feet.

Good Movies In Peru

While I was strolling the streets of Lima this afternoon, I came upon a nice-looking electronics store. I went inside to see how much an HD television costs in Peru.

I found a gigantic HD screen in a full home theater setup in the middle of the store. I thought I recognized the crowd on the screen as a concert film I had recently seen, but couldn´t place. Then, as dozens of children came walking on stage wearing Indian/Middle Eastern-ish garb, I knew what it was. Sitting there watching Will You Be There live from Bucharest was amazing not only because it´s amazing, but because over the past couple weeks, it had been viewed in my apartment probably nine times. By many different groups of people, from my skeptical roommate, to me by myself, to a group of about 12 people who crammed into my apartment after the party on the eve of Sam and Sahar´s wedding. And before that, Sam and I had discussed all its merits at his bachelor party. Which are many.

Needless to say, I pumped up the volume as much as was reasonable, and nodded my head alongside the middle-aged Peruvian woman and her daughter. That song kills every time. Although it killed me much more than it killed them.

My traveling buddy over the last few days, Eric, departed today. It got me thinking about how if I was in a random city in the US, even by myself, I would´ve talked to Eric upon meeting him and probably had a decent five minute chat with him. Yet meeting him in Huacachina, Peru, makes it completely reasonable for us to say, ¨"Hey let´s spend the next week traveling around South America together, sleeping in hotels, sharing taxis, eating meals together, and taking walks on the beach." In the US, we probably would´ve felt weird sharing a cab.

During the bus ride to Lima yesterday, the excitable bus attendant had the unenviable (or maybe enviable) job of picking which DVDs to show. He picked Transporter 3 which was less than awesome. Although it was fun to exclaim things in Spanish like ¨"No es posible!!" when Jason Statham drives his car off a bridge into a moving train, then gets out and starts shooting bad guys.

But I was beginning to think the attendant had made a misstep when he started to show Big Stan, one of the latest Rob Schneider comedic vehicles. That I had never heard of. "I wonder how the parents on this bus feel" was the only thing I could think of when the first scene involved Rob Schneider trying to sell a condo to an elderly woman by convincing her that "The area is bad, but that means that there are many black men there, who will all want to give you their big black ---" The Peruvian parents made it past that, and all the way to the 15-minute mark when Rob Schneider convinced his wife to use a dildo on him to prepare him for life in prison. That got an immediate trip to the back from a nice Peruvian man who was not pleased with the attendant´s taste in cinema.

Viva Peru

I am in Lake Huacachina, Peru. I wish I had time on the computer to upload pictures, because it´s a tiny little village that surrounds a lagoon, with giant sand dunes all around. The main activity in Huacachina is to take a snowboard and ¨sandboard¨ down the dunes. I am still cleaning sand out of my ears, nose, and other places less mentionable.

I ran into a guy at the hostel here who graduated from UVA a couple years after I did. He is in the internet cafe with me right now and just got upset because the stock that he owns in his former employer has gone down. That seems to be a theme here, as almost all of the Americans I´ve met in Peru have been recently laid off from their jobs. Or have quit.

I spent four days in Lunahuana at the orphanage where Wynn works. The kids were awesome. Much of the time spent with them consisted of me trying to figure out how exactly they were making fun of me. One of the best experiences was washing my clothes by hand. I thought I was performing admirably, until three of the girls volunteered to help me as they laughed. Wynn translated for me: "Poor Ricardo, he doesn´t even know how to wash his clothes." When they asked me how I washed my clothes at home, I sputtered out some combination of "Not like this" and "I don´t." That was probably one of the least embarrassing statements I made in Spanish while visiting there.

We played an expectedly fun and rousing game of soccer one afternoon. I was lucky enough to be the goalie for most of it, and tried to get the kids to teach me fun things to yell at the opponents. The kids respected the dorky, pale, mosquito-bitten gringo shouting "I AM THE WALL!!!" as the ball zip passed me into the goal. Those guys were not messing around, but I managed to make a couple saves.

And now I think I must go. I don´t think I have any Peruvian coins left, and the signs here (and the grumpy Peruvian man) have repeatedly mentioned that payment must be in coins. Which makes sense, except for the fact that there is only one ATM in the town and it spits out bills in denominations of 20, 50, and 100. And people always ask for small bills. And the ATM is not working currently. If no one ever hears from me again, I am in Lake Huacachina, Peru, and I am trying to work off a debt of 16 American cents.