First email

She said "Patience is a virtue"

He responded "Patience is the virtue of asses - French Proverb."

Antigua – first impressions

It reminds me a lot of Peru, specifically Cusco. All the streets are cobbled; the houses are all small; there is no building and seemingly no second floor in this town. All houses are painted in different colours, but mostly in pink, yellow and brick. The street and house lamps give it an elegant touch. The pavements are small. At the center of the town is a garden surrounded by shops, cafés and a church. I think I will be spending a lot of time in cafés here. They are very very inviting.

Beyond the houses, we can see mountains everywhere. There are three volcanic mountains around Antigua, out of which one is active. And it is possible to climb it. :)

In the guesthouse where I’m staying, there is a courtyard with hammocks, a small common room and my room is furnished with wooden furniture.

Is it an island?

The taxi driver from Pune told me it would be best to leave early because of the Ganpati Visarjan and that traffic might get crazy in Mumbai. Finally, the biggest traffic jam was near home, and we were probably stuck for 5 minutes. It turned out that I had never ever seen the streets of Mumbai with so little traffic. I reached well before time, and that may have been a blessing, because in Mumbai Airport I was asked a thousand times where my Guatemala visa was and made to wait until they photocopied my passport, the Spanish school registration, and the print I had of the law that states that Indians can indeed receive a visa on arrival in Guatemala. I had to go through this at the check-in counter, and then again experienced the same ordeal at Immigrations.

At the check-in counter, the officer asked me if Guatemala was in Europe. At immigrations, I was asked if it was an island.

After the Indian immigrations, it was all smooth sailing.

In Guatemala, the immigration officers sang to me “No problem! Welcome to Guatemala!”

I already love this country.

Today, my favourite word is "tupperware"

“What do you do when you feel drained inside? You have nothing to give. When a simple smile becomes a big insincere effort?”

Run away to the mountains and be alone for a while.

A butterfly followed me yesterday.

Inside Sheldon's head - The Big Bang Theory

Penny: I'm a Sagittarius, which probably tells you way more than you need to know...
Sheldon:Yes... it tells us that you participate in the mass cultural delusion that the sun's apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality.

Leonard: Shut up Howard! Sheldon, we have to do this.
Sheldon: No we don't. We have to take in nourishment, expel waste, and inhale enough oxygen to keep our cells from dying. Everything else is optional.

Leonard: What was I supposed to say?
Sheldon: You could have told her the truth.
Leonard: That would have hurt her feelings.
Sheldon: Is that a relevant factor?

Sheldon: That is my spot. In an ever-changing world it is a simple point of consistency. If my life were expressed as a function in a four-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, that spot, at the moment I first sat on it, would be [0,0,0,0].

Sheldon: I'm a physicist. I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and everything it contains.
Penny: Who's Radiohead?
Sheldon: [after twitching for a minute] I have a working knowledge of the important things.

Sheldon: What are you talking about?
Leonard: The cultural paradigm in which people have sex after three dates.
Sheldon: I see, now are we talking about date, the social interaction, or date, the dried fruit?

The House of the Dead - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"The thought once occurred to me that if one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, one at which the most fearsome murderer would tremble, shrinking from it in advance, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning (to him)."

"I subsequently came to understand that in addition to deprivation of freedom, in addition to forced labour, there is in a convict's life one more torment, one that is almost more powerful than all the others. This is forced communal existence."

Talk Show Host - Radiohead

I sat on the ledge looking at the sea as I had done for the past few days. I put on my headphones. I looked at him. I tried to look discretely but lost in observation, I may have sometimes stared.

He wore a flat cap, beige fishing pants and a checked shirt. His moustache was graying; he smoked as he looked on at the water. He hung his fishing rod on a tripod stand and waited. At times, a few locals would come and sit with him and they chatted. Their mannerisms suggested that they were talking about matter of fact things, daily events. Events that continuously shape society and that members of society talk about, because they need to be talked about. They wouldn’t hang around for too long, and eventually he would be left back to his thoughts. His facial expression suggested that this was what he had come here for. Or it might have been my perception of him because of what I was looking for. Anyway, he seemed to enjoy his cigarette and solitude with the sea. Every now and again, he would grab the fishing rod, turn the reel and pull the line towards him. Most times, he would get an empty line, but sometimes he would carefully remove a dead fish trapped on the line and place it in the bucket where he sat. And after straightening out the fishing line once again, he would fling it hard towards the sea, place the rod on the tripod and sit and smoke. He sat crossed legged most of the time, his arms resting on his knees, and cigarette between index and middle finger.

I looked at the sea. I could see the reflection in the sky of the setting sun.

I sang out along with the song in the player… softly not to be heard but loud enough to let myself go.

“I’ll be waiting
With a gun and a pack of sandwiches
And nothing
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing”

Tears rolled down my cheeks.
I smiled.

prrrttttt!!!!

i have a geographic tongue. it's a condition.

and presumably, only 2% of the population have that condition!
That would make 12 million geographic tongues in planet earth.