Photo of the Day: Chicken Buses

From Chicken Buses

nothing better than a good Nicaraguan chicken bus. If you haven't ridden one yet. . .you haven't traveled.

Photo of the Day: My favorite sunset

From Various old

San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua

Notes from a French Cafe -- Berlin -- Nicaragua

"Drunk in a French café. My ipod. Great music – as well all think. Elvis Costello. Remembering san juan del sur, Nicaragua. Powerless nights. Ipod dj’s. then the disco”

So, I was recently getting fairly drunk on some pretty good red wine in French café in Berlin and the note above was what I jotted down. My journal is going to be absolute gibberish to anyone but me.

Not sure if I have mentioned this before in the blog, but I am semi-psychotic about rating all the songs on my iPod. The ratings are on a simple one-to-five star basis and then mean absolutely nothing, except that your four and five-star songs get automatically put on a play list called “My Top Rated” on your iPod. I should preface this by saying I have 7,789 songs on my iPod. My top rated play list is currently at 1,738 songs.

I say currently, because I haven’t rated all the songs on my iPod, though, as I said, I am semi-psychotic about doing it. So, I fairly regularly will run through some albums or artists that haven’t been played in a while, just to rate songs that are not yet rated, even if I don’t really want to listen to them at that particular time. I also regularly debate, and change, ratings on songs that I have previously rated, some times bumping them up from three to four stars to get them on the list. Some times knocking them from four to three and knocking them off.

Even more oddly, sometimes I have a long internal debate about changing a song from a four to five star or vice versa. . . although that has absolutely no difference in meaning for any practical reason at all. But I am sorry, if a five-star song on my iPod is an honor not to be taken lightly.

Is that only semi-psychotic or all the way around the bend?

If it’s not all the way ‘round, I think I might be able to see a curve in the road.

To make a long story short (“too late!”), that is what I meant by the ‘Great music – as we all think’ note. For those of us that love music and have rated songs on our iPod, randomly playing songs off your top rated list invariably at some point causes you to stop, look up and say to no one in particular:

“I have great fucking taste in music. My iPod rocks.”

Of course you do – you self-rated the songs. And this was after you bought them or ripped them to your iPod in the first place. Not exactly shocking that you’d think your own music is fabulous, but I think I’ve said that to myself, while my iPod is on random mode on my top rated list, at least a hundred times on this trip.

And yes, I do have great fucking taste in music.

The San Juan del Sur reference was a couple nights out of the month that I spent there in December of 2007 and January of 2008. There was a nice restaurant in town owned and run by a couple in from Northern California. The food was good, though expensive for Nicaragua, and I really enjoyed their company. She was in her late twenties, and a very outgoing, talkative hippy (though not in appearance) who was the bartender, main waitress and hostess. He was in his mid-30s and a quiet surfer and more importantly, the head chef.

San Juan del Sur was the first time I’d ever been in a town where the power completely went out in the entire town. It happened four or five times in the month that I spent there. Two of those nights were spent in this particular restaurant. As in all locations subject to power outages like this – as I have learned on this trip, being that I’ve been in many more of them – a good business is prepared with its own generator. They, of course, had one.

For some reason both nights, the power going out signaled some internal signal in the three of us that it was time to party. Both nights, I ate dinner up at the bar, read my book by candlelight, and occasionally talked to Claire, when she wasn’t running around. John would occasionally come up in down moments and chat a bit. I let the both of them order not only my meals every time, but also my drinks.

I think Claire took it as a personal challenge to get me wasted. That particular Olympic routine had a very low degree of difficulty, but even the Russian judges gave her good marks.

Side note: as I was just typing this, ‘London Town’ by Wings just got bumped down from four to three stars. Sorry, Paul, you lost one song off the top rated, but I still love ‘ya. Next song up is ‘Personal Jesus’ by Depeche Mode. Solid five stars. Time out while I sing along and freak out some Germans on this train.

OK, so after dinner both nights, the customers would slowly file out as I continued to drink at the bar. When everyone in the place had finished eating, John would close the kitchen down and come up to have some drinks with Claire, me and a few others that had stuck around to beyond the bitter end. Eventually, a few other of their friends that worked in other local restaurants also wandered in, until the total crowd was about seven or eight or so.

I have no idea how it started both nights, but I do seem to recall that it was John’s idea that he and I would have a “Battle of the iPods.” And so we did. The emphasis was on 80s music, because after a dozen drinks, that genre fits the mood for most everyone and he and I had grown up with that music. Bonus points for one hit wonder songs, which was a deep field to mine in the 80s. One iPod got plugged into the stereo for a bit. Then the other. Wine. Drinks. Music. Everyone telling their stories that the songs would pull up from depths of their memory banks. At this point in the drinking, some of the stories were even uncensored.

Both of the iPods gave it their all. And both preformed with aplomb. I must say that he also had great fucking taste in music.

While those two nights would have been memorable if they’d just ended at that point, neither night did. At about two in the morning both nights, their generator ran out of gas and the power finally gave out. He suggested both times that we relocate down the street to an after-hours, all-night, locals disco. The place was about 40 feet by 20 feet. One-third was the bar, one-third was the dance floor and one-third had a few tables and places to stand.

The music came from an iPod plugged into the stereo. There were about twenty-five people drinking and dancing when we walked in the first time. He and I walked up to the bar to order some beers, he reached over and grabbed the iPod they were using over to the two of us and turned to me.

“You ready to take the battle to the people?”

O yea. It’s on, brother.

Quick thoughts on chicken buses

I took my first chicken bus a few days ago. After taking a quick tour of a cigar factory in Esteli (unfortunately not my favorite, Padron) in the morning, I asked the people that did my tour where I could get a bus to Leon. They checked on their computer, pointed to one of the two bus stations in town on my map, and told me the bus left at 3 that afternoon. I had been riding on the nice, big, air conditioned (overly so) buses up till then, and assumed, since they looked up the schedule on the computer and told me there were only two buses a day to Leon that this was another one of those buses.

Au contraire, mon ami.

Got to the bus station around 1:30 or so and started looking for the ticket agent. Not a ticket agent in sight. Hundred or so people sitting around waiting for buses, mostly locals, on benches underneath a covered part of the parking lot, which appeared to be the "terminal". A few buses were parked there under signs that signified which towns they were headed to. I hopped into some little food shack at the station and choked down a pretty poor meal of fried chicken and rice and when I asked the people in there about the bus to Leon in my pigeon Spanish, they pointed to one of the buses parked outside (under a sign for Managua, of course).

I got on the bus, which, unlike the nicely painted chicken buses I took pictures of in Antigua, was just a plain old school bus, still painted its original yellow. There were a couple other gringos, actually a gringo and a gringa, sitting on one of the benches and asked them if this was the bus to Leon. They assured me that it was and I prepared for my first chicken bus experience of the trip.

So here are some things about chicken buses: they literally are old school buses -- I have no idea how thousands of these buses made it down to Central America, but they are everywhere. No air-conditioning, obviously. Sometimes a few of the windows will open up, but if you remember your old school bus, that just means an opening of about 1 foot by 2 feet -- don't want those kids falling out of the bus. They all have welded on a luggage rack that covers almost the entire roof -- if the bus is crowded, you are supposed to give your backpack for a guy up there to tie down for you. I really don't trust that process very much, but in this case, our bus was mercifully not very crowded, so I just put my pack in the seat next to me. The suspension, and roads for that matter, usually leave a lot to be desired. And normally, the bus will stop and pick up anyone flagging it down from the side of the road -- but this bus actually didn't make many stops at all.

In short, it is an experience. Not like I want to take them all the time, but every once in a while, it quickly brings you down to earth.

The ride was supposed to take about two and a half hours. I spent most of it talking to the gringa, a really cool girl from New Mexico (Tina). She was on a long Latin American tour. Luckily it wasn't overly hot, so the ride wasn't too bad at all. The bus wasn't very crowded at all, which was even better.

Although the trip wasn't that long in miles, probably 150-200 miles or so, it was long in duration, about 5 hours or so. There were a couple amusing notes from the trip. First, as usual for Nicaragua, the road was under construction. Every once in a while, the bus driver would pull off the road to some side road, cut out of the surrounding forest, that ran next to the road that was being repaved or whatever. What was amusing was that not all the traffic would divert to these side roads -- so that we'd be driving alongside the main road for a quarter mile or so and some other bus or car or whatever would be whipping on down the regular road, dodging construction equipment or potholes or whatever. Quite amusing.

More interesting was the transmission on our bus. About half the way through the trip, a loud squealing noise started coming from the front of the bus when we were in first or second gear. After a bit more time went by, the squealing seemed to expand to third gear as well. Tina turned to me and wondered aloud whether we'd be able to hitch a ride on another bus or car when, not if, this one broke down.

A few more miles down the road, the driver pulled the bus off the road. We were pretty sure this was the end of the road on this particular bus. The driver and his assistant, then got out some tools and a container of what we assumed was transmission fluid, opened up the hood and got to work. Considering they were prepared for this, it was obvious this was a reoccuring problem. And I'm no mechanic, but I don't think transmission fluid is the long-term solution to this problem. We were back on the road in about 20 minutes. . . and the squealing didn't start up again for at least 30 minutes after that.

We made it fine -- quite late, but fine -- and had a good laugh over beers about the folks that were destined to be on that bus when the make-shift repairs didn't work. Then we realized that we were jinxing ourselves with bad travel karma.

At least when it happens to me, I will be able to the point that I screwed up my karma.

From Chicken Buses

I wish our bus would have been this cool looking.

Expats in Nicaragua

"The Ugly American" was originally a book published in 1958 and more famously a movie, staring Marlon Brando, made in 1963. One themes is aptly summarized in its title.

Times haven't changed that much.

I've had a few ideas in the past year or two for possible topics of books I want to write. I still want to travel the exterior of the U.S. and write on politics and life on the edge. My friend Tim has a great idea for a book that he has handed off to me to write (though he wants co-author credit, of course), and conveniently, it might be plotted to take place in Nicaragua. I'd like to write a semi-true/semi-fictionalized book about my first couple years practicing law in a reasonably small town in the South. While in Nicaragua, I got a pretty good idea for a screenplay. And to add to all of those possible endeavors, I think I want to now travel around the world to various communities of expatriates, interview them, talk to locals about them, and write an "Expats in their Element" book. If the ones I've met in Nicaragua are any indication – there is plenty of amusing material out there. Of all my ideas, it might be the easiest one for good material.

And if any of you want to start harassing me on a good and consistent basis to move from conception to execution of any of these ideas – that would be welcomed also. Sometimes I think I need a good woman in my life, if only to have someone to kick me in the ass and get me moving forward.

The husband and wife that own the little hotel that I was stayed at in Nicaragua were named Ralph and Brenda Sue. She went by 'Renda. They were originally from Waxahachie, Texas. He liked to talk. A lot.

I arrived at about 5 p.m. on a Monday evening. Before I left the hotel at ten a.m. on Tuesday to go get breakfast, I think I'd gotten half of his life story. As I was planning on staying a full month there, I felt confident the other half was going to flow out of him long before I departed.

He had a number of different jobs over the years back home in the States, but "I was always the boss – never work for anyone when you can be in charge." A sentiment I appreciated. He'd built some houses. Done some other types of construction. Though he wasn't a lawyer, he was one of the first licenced mediators in Texas: "the judges loved me. I liked to separate the two groups into different rooms, turn to the lawyer in each room and tell him 'this is between your client, the other side and me – you are only here to give your client legal advice – if you don't like it, leave.' I could settle anything."

He had fourteen grandchildren. One of his kids ran a successful business in Dallas (there was a lot of success that seemed to naturally follow him). He and Brenda had been married for thirteen years. She was the most successful real estate agent back in Waxahachie County before they retired down in San Juan del Sur. "Now this one's a lady – and strong-willed. I don't think I've ever met a lady with as much backbone before. Now my children's mother – that's different story. Lady? Certainly not."

Ralph had an opinion on most every topic and he was glad to share them with you. Not surprisingly, he quickly put his expertise to work in summing me up.

"You know what you should do when you get home? Real estate mediation. With the subprime collapse in the housing and banking market, there has got to be a way to mediate the disputes between the banks and the homeowners. The banks don't want the real estate on their books and the people don't want to lose their houses. Find the middle ground and you'll make a killing."

See. So simple. My new work life mapped out within 24 hours of meeting me. I wondered if he also wanted to make my mother deliriously happy and introduce me to my future wife also.

I don't think I've ever enjoyed a single conversation where someone offers an unsolicited "you know what you need to do?" I put off law school for about four years because everyone told me that was what I should do.

Most people I know have problems running their own lives – but they seem perfectly willing to tell you how to run yours. I've asked plenty of people in my life to give me advice on many things when I think I need it and am open to it, but frankly, if I don't ask you – I probably don't want to hear it. No offense.

So Ralph and Brenda invited me to a local expatriate party the second night I was in town. They said there were anywhere from five to fifteen American and Canadian expats that got together every Tuesday night for food and some friendly poker. I'd promised myself that I was going to try to a much better job of meeting people on this trip that my previous solo travels, so I figured, why not?

As Ralph and Brenda and I were about to walk down from the second floor balcony of their hotel to their Range Rover, they turned to me and said, "the woman walking up now is B.J. She's local color. Don't ask about the monkey -- She'll never shut up about it."

That's just not a sentence you hear very often.

Up the road walked a woman that looks to be in her mid-60s. She was fully made up, like she was about to go out for a big night on the town in Dallas. She'd obviously spent a lot of time in the sun. And she had the crazy eyes.

When she walked up and introduced herself, I wanted so badly to say, "I'm Mike. Good to meet you. So tell me all about the monkey." But I figured that I was staying here for a month and it might not be the best idea to completely annoy my hosts on day 2 of my trip.

Later I found out that the monkey in question was B.J.'s pet howler monkey, named Cindy. She regularly carried it around town on her shoulder. It wore a diaper – I'm assuming not by its' choice.

I found all this out as I was eating dinner at a pizza place in town a few days after this party and B.J. and Cindy were eating at a table in front. I was talking to Bob, the very, very large Canadian guy (he had to be 6'6'' and 250 pounds and was married to a local, Nica woman who can't be 5 foot tall and will never see the other side of 100 pounds) that owns Jerry's Pizza.

There is no Jerry. He moved years ago. Bob bought the place from Jerry and just never got around to renaming it and hanging a new sign. Life moves at a slightly different pace in warm weather locations.

Cindy was upset and howling away on B.J.'s shoulder. Bob said matter-of-factly, "B.J. really needs to get a to-go box for her food and take Cindy home. She's obviously tired when she starts screeching like that."

It was as if having taking a pet monkey to dinner was somehow normal and the only strange thing was that B.J. wasn't tending properly to it.

I thought it was best not to question him on this point and so I asked him how long B.J. had owned the monkey. He said it had been less than a year. The monkey was orphaned when its mother was killed up in the hills. Someone found it and dropped it off at the local veterinarian's office. She temporarily adopted it when the vet left it with her when he had to go back to the States temporarily for a few weeks. Now the vet was back in town, but she wouldn't give Cindy up. As Bob said, "she really does need to give the monkey back, but we think its sort of a substitute for her pet squirrel that died a year or so ago. She really does have a good heart."

What fucking alternative universe had I stumbled across?

In any case, back to the expat party. Joining us in the Land Rover were Christian and Wendy, a French couple that lived in San Juan for about half of the year. Christian was a lawyer of some sort in France. He spoke a bit of English, but his wife spoke about as little English as I spoke Spanish, which is none (yes, I know its silly to go somewhere a month when you don't speak a lick of the language). Of the six of us in the truck, Christian was the only one that spoke any Spanish at all.

Ralph had lived in San Juan for about four years. He didn't speak any Spanish at all. He was proud of it.

Within an hour of me meeting him the first night he said something along the lines of: "Look, there are a bunch of Americans and Canadians down here. We are bringing money into this community and those of us that are running businesses here are trying to impart a sense of a real work ethic in this community. I doubt they've ever had that before. They ought to thank us for everything we are adding to this community. We are the ones doing all the development and boosting up the local economy. I send all my employees to school here to learn English on my dime, to help them get a leg up in the world."

The implication of which population needed to learn which language was beyond clear.

The party was in a gated community about 20 minutes north of San Juan del Sur. The development was just off a road that the locals referred to as "El Chocolata," because when it rained it just turned into a brown, muddy slush. Ralph and 'Renda had just bought a lot in the development and they took us up to see it before we went to the party. It was "the best lot in the whole place. Look at the views of the three different bays from up on this height."

The party was quite nice. About a dozen expats were there. Everyone brought some food. We ate buffet style and then played some rudimentary poker. Very rudimentary poker. We'd split into two tables and Ralph and 'Renda had me sit at theirs, with another couple folks. Ralph had pulled me aside before we sat down and told me some of the players at the other table were really good, so I might just want to play and their table and have fun.

Given the incredible lack of skill by everyone at Ralph's table, I feel pretty confident the other tables was far from scary. Suffice it to say that I would have been comfortable playing anyone in this room at any stakes they were willing. Anyone wanna bet their homes tonight?

We all bought in for the equivalent of $20 and played for a couple hours. Everyone was very nice and the game was obviously just for friendly entertainment. I got to listen to everyone's local stories – most of which feel in the category of "everyone moves so slowly here" with the occasional corruption story thrown in, broken up by how lazy and uninspired most of the Nica were (always followed up with a specific example of some particular Nica that broke the mold, just to make sure it was apparent they weren't prejudiced against all Nicas).

During the course of the party, the skies had opened up and dumped a couple inches of rain. At about 11 pm or so, we all got back into the truck and started the ride home. The road was muddy and slick. As we rounded a corner and started up a part of the road that climbed up a small hill and was one lane wide, cut right out of the heavy forest, we saw a pickup truck near the top of the hill that wasn't making any forward progress. There were four Nicas out of the truck trying to push it up the hill, out of the mud, while the driver repeatedly gunned the engine. The truck would go about 10 feet up the hill, stop and slide back to where they'd started. There was no way that we were going to be able to get by them, given how tight the road was at this point.

'Renda turned to Ralph and asked whether we ought to turn back down the road, drive that way (directly away from San Juan del Sur) until we got to Rivas and then come beck to San Juan down the main road. Ralph said that would take about two hours. I'd driven the main road from Rivas on my way down. He was right.

Ralph kept complaining that the Nicas didn't know how to drive, because most of them never had access to cars until recently, which was probably true given the lack of wealth in Nicaragua and the years of the Contra war and such. He kept saying, "if they would just keep the truck in 2nd gear and not gun the engine, they'd get some traction and make up the rest of that hill." He was right about that also. Unfortunately, he didn't speak any Spanish, so he couldn't get out and tell them.

Ralph was trying to explain what the Nicas needed to do to Christian, so that Christian could tell them in Spanish. Unfortunately, Christian's English wasn't that good – I don't think many of us have a chance to use phrases like "shifting gears" and "let the clutch out slowly" in a foreign language.

I am not a good enough writer to express in words how funny I found this whole experience. It was almost as if I was actually living out a bad B movie that would only play on Showtime in the late hours of the night or on a Saturday afternoon.

Chistian and Ralph eventually got out of the truck and tried to instruct the Nicas how to get the truck up the hill. I don't know if it was their instruction or divine providence that finally managed to get that thing over the top of the hill, but eventually we managed to make it home.

A few meager days in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua and I got to experience all of that craziness? I'd thought originally before I came down that I was going to just use this town as a base and explore a lot of the country. Change of plans. I wasn't going anywhere for a while.

Trip to San Juan del Sur

I flew down to Managua, Nicaragua on December 17th and hopped a van to the small, Pacific coast town of San Juan del Sur, where I'd booked a condo for a month. My plan was to chill out in that beach town for a week or so, talk to some people about things I should do while I was here, and travel around a little bit to see a few of the sights in Nicaragua and close-by Costa Rica. As usual, I traveled solo and I fully intended to make a much better effort at meeting people than I usually did while traveling, especially because I was going to be gone for such a long period of time and didn't want the risk of going more crazy than I already am during my first trip to the Third World.

I don't speak any Spanish. The van driver that picked me up at the airport, Manuel, didn't speak much English. As we waited for the other passenger scheduled for pick up to arrive, I asked Manuel how far it was to San Juan del Sur. He said about 120 kilometers. I asked him how long it would take to get there. He said about two and a half hours. Hmmmm. I'm not much of a math guy, but that translated to about 50 kilometers an hour. I think that's about 35 miles per hour. I probably should have been clued in at that point.

The roads here are horrible. There is no way to sugarcoat it. Not bad. Horrible. Most of them are barely roads.

The other passenger arrived about a half hour after me. He was a Chinese guy in from San Francisco here to teach at a local yoga academy in San Juan del Sur for about six weeks and he told me the classes were free. He'd gotten back from Tibet a few months ago. Made for some reasonably interesting conversation during the long van ride. I resolved to add some yoga classes to my previous intention of learning how to surf on this trip.

Not more than a few miles outside of town, we started down a highway and let's just say that there was some pavement between the potholes. I looked over the driver's shoulder. We were making about 30 kilometers per hour. I figured there that the Manuel's estimate of two and a half hours was just his way of being nice to foreigners, instead saying it would take four or five hours to get there and starting your trip off on the wrong foot. After an hour and a half or so, we actually did hit some pretty good road and managed to get it all the way up to 70 km/h or so in short spurts. I started to have some hope for a three-hour trip.

I told the driver, in that slow and loud, annoying way that we all speak, enunciating every syllable, when the other person doesn't speak the language you are speaking, "nice road." He replied, "American road." I knew Americans hadn't had anything to do with building this road, but I'll take the goodwill however it comes.

Vendantin, the yoga guy, spoke a bit of Spanish and also had a hand-held translation device. He'd occasionally ask Manuel a question for the both of us. As we drove down the better highway, we noticed in spots there were kids standing beside the road with shovels in their hands. As our van would slow down behind traffic, the kids would approach the van and ask for money. Vandantin asked Manuel what was up with the kids. He said that the kids filled the potholes and wanted to be tipped by the passing cars for performing the road maintenance. We began to notice that the stretches of road with the kids generally had the potholes filled with dirt from the side of the road and the stretches without the kids were much worse. He and I lamented that we hadn't changed any of our money at the airport and couldn't tip the kids (I didn't have anything smaller than a $20 on me – which I later found out was the equivalent of about 3-4 days of wages for most Nicaraguans). After doing a small survey of the roads on this trip – I think the government might ought to think about hiring more of these kids.

The good road was pretty busy, going both ways. I had no idea how these kids actually managed to get out to the middle of the road to fill the potholes without getting killed. Passing anyone in our van was difficult, given the amount of traffic, but that didn't stop the big trucks. As we continued down the good road, big 18 wheeled trucks would occasionally pass us and cut right in front of us, and our driver would have to slam on the brakes to give them room to merge in front of us.

And while we are at it, let me tell you that "lane of traffic" is also a relative term. Pretty much you just drive to avoid the potholes. If that meant on your side of the road, great. If that meant on the other side of the road, fine. If that meant on the shoulder area or in the front yard of some shack, it happens. I stopped counting the number of times that we got reasonably close to hitting another car or truck because were in the other lane of the road dodging potholes on our side of the road in the face of oncoming traffic. Fortunately the roads that you had to do this on were so bad that neither car would be traveling fast enough to hurt you too bad when you wrecked.

Nighttime travel didn't seem well advised. I made a note to myself.

So, back to the 18-wheelers. First, they were the main reason that the roads were horrible. Basically, the roads were built for normal cars and trucks and between the long rainy seasons, the corrupt and broke government and these long-haul trucks, the roads were just going to hell. Secondly, they do whatever they want on the road. Vendantin translated from the driver: "apparently the road rules is that big is the rule. If you are big, you rule."

We pulled into the regional capital of the area I was going to, Rivas, after about two and a half or three hours on the road and stopped to get some fruit at a local fruit and vegetable stand. I'd seen on my map that Rivas didn't appear that far from San Juan del Sur and asked the driver how far it was. He said about 20 kilometers. I asked about the road from this point in. He shook his head and said "worst."

Not sure how it could be worse than before.

'O how little did I know on day one of my trip.

Unlike the previous stretch of bad road, where there was at least some pavement between the potholes, this road was about 75% or more just dirt. Later, in town, some local told me that the road had actually been a paved road four or five years ago, but it was almost impossible to tell that driving down it on this trip. There were occasional parts of the road where it appeared there was a few hundred feet of pavement, but it was tough to recognize as such and more importantly, those stretches were few and far between. Walking would have been faster than driving parts of the road.

At one point a guy on a bike -- not a motorcycle, a bike -- passed us – frankly, he blew our doors off. . . and the rider looked to be about 10 years old. . . pedaling up a slight hill.

We finally pulled into town and he dropped me off at the place I'm staying in, which is great. Here's the view from the balcony on the 2nd floor.


Yea – the trip was interesting, but the 1st beer on the balcony didn't suck too badly.