The Special Center for Children God Bird

We finally have transportation! I just drove to use the Internet now instead of walking half an hour! It was awesome! On Friday we took the bike to Aguadulce (where we get Internet) and back twice without any problems, so by island standards we’re good to go. It was the first time we went out on the main road, I was driving and Silvia was on back. And of course, because we have a very odd kind of luck on this island, on that first ride I had to navigate both a torrential downpour and a herd of cattle. (It was the first time we’ve ever seen cows on this stretch of road. There were maybe 20 of them and we just kind of honked and poked our way through). I feel fairly confident in our ability to deal with unexpected situations at this point, automotive or otherwise.

Also, I was bit by a fish the other day. It was like a marine blitzkrieg, it just made a beeline for my finger out of nowhere, attacked, and then darted away. It really wasn’t serious at all, there’s not even a mark, but it was off-putting all the same.

So my next post is going to be a bit odd. A little while ago somebody commented on one of my posts, referencing the literary critic Harold Bloom. It’s a name that I’ve heard before but didn’t really know anything about, so I went and googled him to see what popped up. I tried reading a few pages from one of his books, but more to the point, I came across a review he wrote in the Wall Street Journal about Harry Potter back in 2000. You can read it for yourself here, but the gist of it is that the Harry Potter series sucks. I happen to really enjoy the whole series and consequently was really irritated by his review, so I ended up jotting down some thoughts while reading it and then putting them together into a defense. (Hey, I’m on a remote tropical island and have plenty of time on my hands. And it’s a good activity while watching Futurama in Spanish, which I can only follow because I’ve seen them all before anyway.)

I’m going to post that review as its own post, but in case you really just came here to read about Providencia (very understandable), I decided to do a parallel post. Since I was already writing one review, I figured I’d do another, this one of something related to Providencia. It’s a bit of an odd idea, but it’s for a blog, so why not? Call it a review/treatment of a hypothetical movie. They should both be up in the next day or two (assuming our Internet connection isn’t interrupted by a thunderstorm or passing bird or something).

And now, for your viewing pleasure, some pictures. I haven’t taken a huge amount yet, as we’re going to be here for a while and I was going to wait until we had transportation and could get around more easily, but here's a small sampling nonetheless:

San Andres from the air


Front view from the shack


Back view from the shack


The shack

Bathroom area

Road to the beach

And a small narrative:
Look at the children playing and having fun!


Whoops.
(He was fine, but the game was over)

And in case you were wondering about the title of the post, it’s what’s written in huge letters on the side of one of the school buses here. It doesn’t really have to do with anything else, I just thought it was funny.