Cold water sucks

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The worst thing that happened to me today will probably also be the coolest thing. It´s still only 9am but I feel pretty confident about this.

I had gone to bed early last night just so that I could get up while it was still dark and listen to the rain - the roof to my pension is tin and plastic sheets.

Laying theres, signing Edwin McCain to myself, I decided that there was altogether too much fun to be had outside to wax lyrical in my bed, so I put on my short shorts and skidded out the door. Not ´skidded´in a Nike-commercial, Speedy-Gonzalez way. My street is a few degrees less than vertical and whoever poured it thought that putting sea-rocks in the mix would be a great idea. Which is fine, it´s pretty, when it´s not raining. Today when I went out the door my feet shot out forward and I had to throw an off-axis pirouette to stop myself from biffing it.

The ocean was in an absolute uproar... the cool part was that the sun wasn´tup yet so all I could really make out in teh rain was the white of the breaks coming in and exploding on the rocks and breaches ...
I was running along Avenida de Perú, the walking street on the ocean that families and couples come to to watch the waves and the kiosks and ambulent vendors and gypsies come to hit up the families and couples that have come to watch the waves (as well as the drunk foreign exchange students that come stumbling out of the Casino at 8am. Which is funny, ´cause they never have any money).

I should have been paying better attention. Yesterday I had even been playing a game with the micro (bus) drivers: I don´t know if they do it on purpose or not (I would), but if there´s a puddle they just floor through it and shoot a wall of water onto the sidewalk. The game I would play would be to pretend not to notice the micro until it was really close, which would throw the driver into a frenzy, as such easy prey could not be passed up, deceiving him into thinking I was an easy target. Then, when they´d get really close, and the micrero thought he´d had me, I´d crouch and when the water came flying at me I´d leap high into the air with my legs tucked to my chest.

Extreme Viña Challenge.

But this morning, I was in my world, enjoying the play-by-play scenery, and didn´t notice the car zooming down the road at me. Meanwhile, a wave - forged deep in the bowels of the Pacific, that had traveled thousands of miles, had finally reached its destination and was poised exultantly about 4m above the rocks to my 11 o´clock.
I ran on, blissfully, into the epicentre.

These three bodies of energy moving in space (the wave, the car, and me) converged at precisely the right moment:
- the wave collapsed and desintegrated on the rebound, spraying out high over the sidewalk.
- The car hit the puddle at 80km-hr, sending up a beautiful curled arch of water.
- I looked up and saw two high walls of water soaring over my head. For about one & 1/2 seconds I kept running under my Gothic cathedral of white afghan.

Unfortunately, this was not the Red Sea and so the 400kg of water collapsed and sent me rolling in a foot of water.

Laying there, I thought how perfect an analogy this would be for ... something. Too bad I wasn´t in such a spiritual mood anymore and so the moment was lost, the water drained away and I got up, and kept running. The irony is that I didn´t swim that morning because it was too dangerous...

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