Day 9

The fences / cement walls have an interesting feature here – they use broken bottles, the jagged edges up, as added security. Yesterday Benjamin had a new rubber ball that we were playing soccer with. He kicked it over one of the walls, it glazed the top of the wall, and that sliced it right open. They even paint the glass the same as the wall, for that aesthetic effect.

I’m not sure what I think about the French. There is a sizeable French community here, and I notice something – a certain distance, a refusal to speak any language but French – but I don’t have any exact experiences to go on. I have all the cultural knowledge – the longstanding western animosity towards the French – but none of the specific experiences to base it upon. Perhaps now I can learn to properly hate the French.

Another step in the network trudge – the Italian, Cyril, gave me the password to his network signal, and told me I could come by any morning and use his network. I don’t know how often I’ll be there, but just having the opening is a good feeling. I sent some pieces through the verizon network – they seemed to go okay, with a couple shaky moments when they were denied – and everything seems to be okay. Ugh. It’s going to be a slough of various networks. I don’t know if any of us will have the pleasure of sitting on our home couch surfing the web, but it’s better than losing all of my work.

Benjamin is very free here – he’s talking about race and how he feels about having other brown people around – he likes it. While race isn‘t a huge topic in our family yet, I hope this experience is planting seeds for us to make it an easy subject to talk about in the future.

We had a drink with Daniel and Sonya, the man whose house we are renting and his girlfriend. He speaks French, Spanish and a little English. She speaks only Spanish. Amy speaks Spanish, French and English. I speak only English. Somehow it worked. Maybe it was the rum.

The initial rush of being here is over now, I think. We are into a routine, without wanting to rush out to another must see sight every day. I’m tired. I hope this is not the way it’s going to be the entire trip – I want the energy to be up again, not just making it through each day, counting the days until we leave.