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What to do during San Juan del Sur’s daily power outages

I was sitting on the toilet. And then the most horrible of horror nightmares occurred…

The power went out. I wouldn’t be able to flush. Argh! So, I filled a bucket of water and tried to manually flush. No luck. My boyfriend was out, but the youngest son (appropriately named “Lastman”) of the family we were staying with was home. He wasn’t that young. Just a few years younger than myself. And if I didn’t have my boyfriend with me, I am sure he would have been trying to holla.

In my mocho Spanish, I told him I couldn’t flush the toilet. The nastiest of smirks stretched his face from ear-to-ear, and I thought I would die of embarrassment.

He took care of the problem, and I stayed in my room the rest of the day reading about PHP programming and Stephen King’s evil car, “Christine.”

The whole experience of the power going out seemed like a good experience for an American kid who grew up in the suburbs, where the lights always turned on at my every command.