urban cowboys

i posted two this morning. check the other one first.

so i decided to go to san luis jilotepeque´s ferria after all this weekend. there are two pc volunteers there - mirna, my good friend, and caroline, who is also very cool. i invited sindy, the secretaria of my office, to come along with me. she´s a lot of fun and is always up for dancing. and she usually doesn´t have a problem finding partners - she´s was señorita estudiante when she was in high school. so i wait for her to get back from chiqui on saturday because she´s studying psychology at a university there on the weekends and we head to san luis around 6 or so, in plenty of time to primp and get ready for the dance. mirna, caroline, sindy and i head out, on a mission to enjoy ourselves. the baile itself wasn´t of the highest calidad in terms of the dj and couple live groups that were there, but San Luis is a smaller town so it was to be expected. overall the music was pretty good and definately good enough to get our dance on. now, i´ve been told i´m a pretty good dancer and i´d agree. and although i might not merengue with the exact right steps, i get the job done. where i really excell is with the regaeton. it´s like carribean hip-hop more or less. but when it comes to ranchara or banda, forget about it, i´m a mess. i´d really like to practice and get it down. so in the beginning the four of us girls were mostly just dancing together, which didn´t appear to be all that normal, but we didn´t really care. we are obnoxious norteamericanas who don´t follow the rules. then slowly we started getting asked to dance by mirna and caroline´s friends and strangers alike. i have a hard time dancing merengue with another person because i mentioned i just fake the steps, i don´t really know what i´m doing and i have a tendency to try to lead. anyway i danced with a few guys. and then the reggaeton started and i really got my groove on. there were actually a lot of people from ipala at the dance. josé, the guy who is in charged of the water projects at the muni was there and told me he wanted to dance. alright. so we start dancing ranchera, he´s got a beer in one hand, singing the song to me, and trying to teach me the steps. i think i got it more or less. but i was pretty self concious because a lot of guys just hang around on the outside of the dancefloor watching. i was really not that confindent in my performance. but it didn´t seem to matter because they kept asking me to dance. and then i realized that all the guys i was dancing with toward the end of the nite were all in the jarepeo (rodeo). that´s right, the bullriders were taking turns asking me to dance. do you know how hard it is to dance merengue with a guy in a cowboy hat? especially when he´s guatemalan and not that tall? i should have worn protective googles. it was later in the nite, around one maybe and things were winding down. i was pretty tired and kind of hanging off to the side with my girls. a couple guys asked me to dance but i told them ¨quiero descansarme un ratito. he estado bailando toda la noche.¨ which was the truth; i wanted a breather. then another cowboy asked me to dance and i politely turned him down, saying i was tired. but he called me out saying i was mentirosa (a liar), but here it´s a playful thing to say and he was right. and then this 80 year-old guy, totally wasted of course, starts chasing mirna around the dance floor trying to get her to dance with him. my new cowboy friend swooped in like the cabellero that he is to rescue her. i decided to reward his act of chivelrousness with a dance or two. after the dance ended we all went outside - juan josè (my friend) and other compañeros from his bullriding team. they were all really nice. and frankly i was very surprised. they all live in the capital and have other jobs and just do the jarepeo thing on the weekends. i found it really strange that a) one of my most pleasants interactions with a group of guatemalan men was with a bunch of bullriders, and b) that they all live in the capital. which in turn explains why they were so much cooler than the guys around here. they asked us if we were going to the jarepeo the next day and i said that i was not because i had to get back to ipala. of course they were all upset and tried to convince me to come. mirna and caroline were going to go. so we said goodnite around 3 in morning (i think maybe the latest i´ve been out since being in guatemala, including trips to antigua) and went back to mirna´s house. the next day sindy and i got up early to get back to ipala. but later in the afternoon i decided to go back to san luis for the rodeo. this was my second guatemala rodeo. i don´t really like them very much, and i had said as much the nite before. you know the animal abuse, the danger, the mc´s dirty jokes. but the three of us had a good time anyway. unfortunatley our boys didn´t do very well. i think juan josé lasted maybe around one second. but hey, he lives in the capital. what can you do? after the the rodeo was over, they had to take off right away to get back to guate. so we all exchanged numbers and stuff (thank god for cell phones!) and said that since we go to the capital de vez en cuando we´d try to call them up sometime. and the ipala ferria and jarepeo is just four months away. so if they are still in the business, maybe they´ll come through town. who knew i´d have to travel all the way to guatemala to find my coyboys.
ps my favorite song is called volverè by a group called k-pak or k-pac or k-paz or something like that if you want to know what´s the jam here in ipala right now. i love banda even though i can´t dance to it.