Chupacabras

The Chupacabras
(not sure what Chupacabras is/are? check here)

ok, you want a story of our adventures in Mexico? Here you go:

So there wasn’t much to blog about last week: we are into our routines, and believe it or not living here is a lot like living there, except there is only one Wal-mart, (not 50 within spitting distance), you can get everywhere here by bus, and, most importantly, you can get kinder buenos here. But besides that, there really aren’t exciting moments everyday that can be turned into interesting blogs. “We had quesadillas and avocado slices for lunch”... ooh aah.. not very riveting, until last night…

So, I should start the story by prefacing that two days ago Paul bought some turkey at the grocery to cook up later in the week. The package said it was good for three days when he bought it. However, the night he brought it home it started smelling REALLY bad (I’m talking dead yucky road-kill, a week old) in the fridge. So the next day (are you surprised we said, we’ll worry about it in the morning?) it smelled even worse so we bagged it up in two bags and put it outside. We have two porches here, a front porch where the front door is (there is a picture somewhere below) and a back porch for washing clothes (which we send to the laundry), where the hot water heater is located, and where we put our empty beer bottles because you can return them for a deposit on, well, more beer.

I should also say that there are 3 days for trash, which is separated between organic and inorganic trash. We have a tupperware in the kitchen in which we put the organic foods and put them out for pick-up on Mondays and Fridays. Inorganic trash I put on the back porch until Wednesdays for pick-up. ok.

So it was really stinky so I put it (I know, raw meat) on the back porch. Where else could it go? We don’t have a big trash can outside. Whatever, the organic trash goes out the next morning, no biggie…

We go to bed, the bad pavo (turkey) is outside and forget about it. Now, I have had some trouble sleeping lately, mostly because I’m over-stressing about the dumb thesis so I was very happy to fall asleep relatively quickly. About 3:30 in the morning we wake up to the two beer bottles falling over on the stairs on the back porch. OMG! What could it be? The Chupacabras.

So Paul rolls over and goes back to sleep in good Paul form (the ah, we’ll worry about it in the morning thing again) and I, now super-wide awake, decide I’m going to catch a glimpse of our Chupacabras, if for no other reason, I will feel more at home here if I have my very own Chupacabras story to share with others.

Well I saw them, and yes there were two. They looked like over sized rat-ferrets. They dragged our lovely bag of rotting meat across the porch and attempted to carry it over the wall but dropped it and crawled onto the roof instead. I made some noise (like, please go away nice really big rat-ferrets!) and they left. That was at 3:30, and at 7:00 I decided to give up trying to fall back to sleep and went to Spanish class!

After class Paul and I went downtown and happened into the bookstore on the main square (imagine us at a bookstore). There was a touristy book entitled, Mammals of the Yucatan and I looked in it and sure enough there were my Chupacabras. They are called Boxoch, and are really a version of a possum. Actually they are much cuter than possums in the book but in the middle of the night are actually a bit scary especially if you think they are some kind of mutant, over-sized rat-ferret. It was 3 in the morning and I had no other reference to measure the strange animal couple climbing over my wall.

So the mystery is solved, we have possums and we haven’t seem them since we cleaned up the raw meat mess they left! (um that was me and not Paul...) No more pavo from the grocery!

more soon…

P.S. the Dzibilchaltun photos are loaded now, just scroll a little to see them!