The Day a Boy Ran Away From Me

Kelley – You might find this particulary interesting since we are the ones usually doing the running away (brings back memories of a particular incident where we stared at some dude behind the glass without his ID then ran away?).

I’ve seriously been lacking in any good blog material so I though I’d tell a story about something I found amusing (although it could be interpreted as slightly embarrassing). So after some “despedida” (going away) party fun, another volunteer Karen and I decided to go meet up with my counterpart, Vivian, who was out on Pando (street with basically all the discotecas and bars) with three of her friends. We were having a grand old time of a girl’s night out at this place called “La Boom.” Yes, the name is highly suspect. Anyways, so in the middle of the night I found myself making eyes more than once at a very attractive (and tall! so not my type) gentleman and he was definitely looking my way too (this can be confirmed by Karen, and if he wasn’t this story never would have happened). Around 2 am, Karen gave me the signal that she was ready to go home and I told her I wanted to go talk to the “guy in the blue t-shirt” and she told me to go do it. After blowing in her face a few times to make sure I didn’t have bad breath (I couldn’t find my gum), I marched right over there where he was standing with his friend and asked him, “quieres bailar?” or “do you want to dance?” If you know me, I don’t normally do things of this nature, but it might have been the few beers that I had consumed that night while bopping around crazily while dancing (that is normal – and possibly WHY he was looking at me) or as Pat said, it might be that I have been watching too much Sex and the City and was trying to emulate Samantha but apparently lacked the technique that she has (I am so much more Miranda). So his response to this was that he couldn’t dance right now and held up his drinky drink (which I believe was a Red Bull and vodka)…which might possibly have been a line or was the truth? So I continued to make small talk and although I remember everything else about the conversation, his name fails to come back to me, I remember it was something difficult to pronounce that I had to repeat to him to see if I got it right. So it turned out that he was from Brazil (Rio de Janeiro to be exact) and we continued the normal conversation that I have with people which includes him asking where I’m from, I say I’m from the U.S., he says I look Japanese, what do you do, I’m a Peace Corps volunteer…blah blah. So I ask him what he does and it turns out he is a medical student (future McDreamy perhaps?) here and I asked him what year of med school he’s in and about what kind of medicine he plans to practice. He answers “neurosurgery”…and this is where I think I might have gone wrong. I was joking around and was like, “entonces eres muy inteligente, no?” (I think that might have been coupled with a cheshire cat-like grin too on my part) which means “then you’re really smart right?” But come on, if he said he was a rocket scientist I would have made that same comment, you know, there are just some careers that encourage that type of thinking. Then I went to talk to his friend who was standing next to him who turned out also to be from Brazil and in med school and I asked him standard questions like if they knew each other before they came here and stuff. And literally it was like in the (bad) movies. In the moment I was talking to his friend, I turned around, he was gone! He ran away from me! I think he was scared that I was a little too “fuerte” (strong, aka forward) but who knows. There are two theories: 1) he might have really had to use the baño, or 2) he was really scared of me (which I prefer to think because it makes a better story). After he disappeared *poof* into thin air, I kind of just stopped talking to his friend and sauntered over to Karen and told her that the boy ran away from me and we headed out. I did notice when I turned around as we were walking out that he was back with his little friend but I didn’t think to actually stick around to find out if he actually ran away from me or had to put his drink down or something. The reason I think he ran away is that I don’t recall him saying anything to me like, hey, I’ll be right back, going to the bathroom or put my drink down. Así es, pues. I’m still wondering if my failure was due to my outright (scary) flattery, the possibility that maybe he was looking at the girl behind me the whole night, or my grungy clothing (Karen and I were in typical PC attire that is sneakers, jeans, and t-shirts whereas everyone else was in cute little tops and heels) but there will be other opportunities! Seguimos adelante!