Canadian Softwood

Anyone who gets the title reference (Kristen Schroer, Gus Caravalho and possibly Eric and Amber) hang tight, I will get back to that....

I don't have a terrible amount of stuff in common with my friends in Lima. Sure, we all work for international development agencies and went to school in the US, but apart from that, our backgrounds and experiences are very different. But the reason we get along so well I think, is because we share a love of people and being together. Clearly, my friends are very open and generous with their house, as they gave me my own set of keys and let me stay over whenever I want. They not only extend their warm welcome to me but to any one passing through Lima. This past weekend, the small ocean view apartment which usually houses just Tania and Candice and the occasional peace corps refugee (me), played home to 7 people. It went from being a cozy home to a busy home base where people were constantly coming any going. Tania described it managed madness I call it organized chaos, but we all agree it was a lot of fun.



So with all of these out of town visitors, I tried to help my friends by taking the tour guide burden off their hands for a few hours and took 3 people to my girls home Saturday evening. I brought along a fellow youth PCVer, and the girls couldn't get enough of his goofy, lovable infectious personality. I brought the other out of towners who had never seen a Peace Corps site so I was further fulfilling my job as mini ambassadors. My friends even helped me and my counterpart out with the community meeting, which not only reflected well on me but allowed for lot's of cross cultural exchanges.



Afterwards, we met up with the rest of the group at a club on a beach 10 minuets away from my site. It was such a neat club I can't believe it took me so long to discover it. I spotted my friends across the way and noticed a tall, white boy I had never seen before with them. I made my way over and went to meet the new face but before I could even say hi he said "you went to UC Davis didn't you?" I immediately replied I did and he said he was an international something or other grad student there. I thought for a moment that perhaps he had been one of my TA's or maybe I had met him through all the other grad students I was hanging out with before I left for Peru. I didn't even get a chance to ask when he said "I recognize you from the bars". I was shocked. There are 30,000 students at UC Davis, how the heck did he remember my face, especially considering I haven't been there for 9 months. I interpreted this as me going to the bars way too much. But if this was true, if he recognized me from the bars, that means he must have gone out a lot too.

The next day I couldn't quite get over the fact that I was that big a party girl in college. It's true I did go out a lot, but I didn't recognize him at all. Then I let myself play with the idea that maybe I was so dang cute, he picked me out of the crowds and has remembered me since. To my surprise, the next night when we were organizing a dinner with the same crowd we normally hand out with, Tania had invited the UC Davis guy. I was excited, cause I had a couple a questions for him. I wanted to know exactly why and how he remembered me. I started out by asking if he recognized me, would he recognize any of my friends? If he could pick my face out of a crowd, than he could surely do the same with Steph and Sandra. He asked if I went to Sophia's a lot. I said, sort of. I played trivia there every tuesday. And there we found our answer. He said he was a regular, that he was on the team Canadian Softwood. Canadian Softwood?! I screamed at him with way too much enthusiasm. Of course I remember Canadian Softwood! They won all the time. I even went up to them at one point and told them how good they were.

This may be one of the weirdest coincidences I have had to date. I cannot believe that in some crazy beach bar right by my little site in Peru, I ran into a trivia tuesday regular. After dinner we ended up playing poker and we decided we needed to get a hold of some sort of trivia game in English and have a trivia night. Or maybe i should challenge him to a game in Spanish. He was on the best team back in davis, but maybe he's not so tough in Peru.