The Blind Masseuse
A Traveler's Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia
Publication Year: 2013
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press

Introduction - The Charm of the Unfamiliar
...While walking home to Rafael’s house, I bumped into a cow. It wasn’t too unusual to encounter a cow in a place like La Victoria, Costa Rica; I was in farmland, after all. But because it was pitch black, I didn’t understand at first what had happened to me. My belly made contact with something firm, but...

Lard Is Good for You (Costa Rica)
...In Costa Rica, I lived on lard and coffee. There was lard in the bread, in the rice, and in the beans. There was lard in the cookies, in the imitation Doritos I ate at the school where I taught; it was coating the potatoes and being used to fry bananas in the cafeteria. Damaris, the woman I lived with, normally bought...

A Normal American Life (New York)
...The worst blizzard of the decade hit days after I moved to New York from the sunny climes of Costa Rica. Elevators all over the city were out. Snowplows growled through the streets like tanks and piled snow on top of the cars parked along the curb; the city became a maze of tunnels with five-foot walls of packed...

Coke Is It (Bolivia)
...street, wanted little to do with me, a white foreigner. But when I got sick, as Americans in Bolivia did, it was the most American of all American things that I turned to: the fizz and sting of Coca- Cola. But I’m already making excuses. The truth is I turned to Coke before I got sick. I turned to it like a tourist, because it was easy...

The Blind Masseur (Costa Rica)
...I asked directions from a blind man. This was in the Marriott hotel just outside of San José, Costa Rica. The Marriott was a luxury hotel with a driving range, two pools, and complimentary brunch. It was staffed by men who insisted on carrying one’s dirt- encrusted backpack even when one had a running rule to carry it...

One Side of the Story (Nicaragua)
...Diego and I hit it off at once. First of all, he could talk to me. I mean actually converse, which was unusual for him in his profession. Diego was my Spanish teacher, and I was the enigmatic student who came to the school in León who already spoke Spanish. Within five minutes of our first meeting, Diego laid his pen on...

I Know What You Did in Egypt, A Letter to Gustave Flaubert (Egypt)
...I also write because my feelings toward you, reading and rereading this text, have evolved, and I’ve been feeling an unexpected kinship with you of late. Initially, you were a villain (and in some ways you still are), an ethnocentrist traipsing about North Africa with a grin...
E-ISBN-13: 9780299295738
E-ISBN-10: 0299295737
Print-ISBN-13: 9780299295707
Print-ISBN-10: 0299295702
Page Count: 192
Publication Year: 2013
OCLC Number: 867741476
MUSE Marc Record: Download for The Blind Masseuse