Semana Santa 2012 — talk about a good Friday.

Last year’s Easter week was in town dur­ing train­ing and I kept myself occu­pied explor­ing the cul­tural side of the fes­tiv­i­ties in a very Catholic coun­try. So, I didn’t feel the need to do that again, and I was hop­ing for a climb­ing trip. I was feel­ing frus­trated that every­one seemed to have excit­ing plans and with myself for not just tak­ing off for some­where inter­est­ing, when my climb­ing trip finally came together. I went with friends down to the Par­que El Chico in the state of Hidalgo. This was where I had my Vol­un­teer Visit almost exactly a year ago, and I had been want­ing to go back for climb­ing ever since. It is a beau­ti­ful area, ridicu­lously full of won­der­ful things to climb. How­ever, the weather is not always coop­er­a­tive. It rains a lot more there. Still, we got a beau­ti­ful climb in on Fri­day, one of the more famous multi-pitch climbs on or very near “Las Ven­tanas.” Sat­ur­day was off to a slower start because of some wine and salsa danc­ing the pre­vi­ous evening, but that didn’t turn out to be the main prob­lem. Unfor­tu­nately, in the after­noon, we had a bit of a sprained ankle sit­u­a­tion. It wasn’t me, but a friend. We were play­ing around in an area just wait­ing to be a new boul­der­ing sec­tor, when he landed wrong. He landed with both feet on the crash­pad, but also landed with a twist, and the imme­di­ate swelling of his left ankle was impres­sive and dis­heart­en­ing. Luck­ily the car was 10 feet away, but there was to be no more climb­ing for him. Sun­day turned out to be rainy any­way, but Sarah and I got a nice run in before the weather turned really gross. Still, it was a good to start get­ting to know the park for climb­ing, and I don’t think that my guy can get here soon enough to go back and really climb a bunch of stuff.

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Although every­thing sounds cheery above, I have just a small rant. I’m get­ting really tired of this no dri­ving thing. I have great friends here who are incred­i­bly gen­er­ous with their time and vehi­cles, but it is one of the most frus­trat­ing things to not be able to drive because of a Peace Corps rule. I under­stand the safety thing for Vol­un­teers world­wide and that adding cars and insur­ance into the mix would add admin­is­tra­tive dif­fi­cul­ties (per­haps night­mares) — except that it hasn’t always been this way and motor­cy­cles and cars used to be more the norm. How­ever, I have never felt like less of an adult than when crammed in next to a car seat with a 3-year old, or hav­ing one eye on guard to the ride sit­u­a­tion at par­ties. I have learned to take the first ride avail­able, because it could be hours until the next per­son leaves, or I just skip things because I don’t want to feel like a depen­dent 15-year-old any­more. Also, the day of climb­ing never seems to really start before noon. Quite a change from the days of the 7:09am train down to Ticino. Any­way, I just needed to blow off some steam, because it is start­ing to feel like this is more of a hin­der­ance to life here rather than a great way to cul­tur­ally inte­grate or some other such non­sense. I don’t want a car for every­day dri­ving. I have no prob­lem tak­ing the bus, and I like all the walk­ing, but I don’t think that I’m going to shake this desire to not be so depen­dent on other peo­ple or at least a bit in con­trol of my time.