When animals attack!

Hey Hey Hey! A dollar to the first person who knows which famous man I just quoted. To begin, I just started working with a rotaract club, and last weekend we tried to jumpstart a trash-recycling-awareness program in a beach town called Piriapolis. The deal is they´ve got a decent sized hill located behind a zoo that a lot of people climb. The hill is called (pan de azucar)sugarloaf, and with good reason. Some may not know it, but the bread of latin america is pessima. It´s all one flavor, sugar bread, and it´s hard like a rock. So the bulging rocks that form the south side of the rock have the consistency (and if I were to lick them) and the taste of sugar bread! Seriously, the problem is that people climb with water bottles, then leave them up top. There is no place to put the bottles and other waste as well as no easy way to bring them down; the trail is kind of rugged and requires a lot of 4 legged motion. So the idea is to take pictures, speak with the bottled water companies, and see if we can´t get a program of some sort going.

I hopped off the bus early saturday morning and asked the woman at the turist desk how to get to the zoo. Turns out the zoo was momentarily closed. There is another hill in town, so I went to climb it to pass some time. Upon my return to the bus station, Natalia (the woman at the desk) told me that the zoo was still closed because a little animal had escaped but it might open later. It so happens there is another hill in town. I got back to the bus station, and natalia tells me that the zoo, lamentablemente, was still closed. All of that fuss for a little animalito I thought? What happened was that a black panther had escaped from the zoo! Luckily, when I ran down the last hill at full boar waving my arms, I was only fending off the mosquitos as opposed to a hungry kitty. The result was similar though, the mosquito bites left me looking like a big pink lump of meat. Looks like I´ll try again next weekend.

I´ll end the story as a very sweaty, and very stinky, Yankee sitting in my assigned seat on the bus as the seatcover quickly stopped absorbing more sweat. Hey, it was at least 100 degrees outside. All you can do is sincerely say sorry to the person next to you.