So this weekend, I managed to find myself in embarrassing situation after embarrassing situation, and I'm not sure I'll ever recover from 2 of them in particular.
The first happened on Saturday. We went out for the day with one of the government workers, who wanted to take us mountain walking, but the weather was too dangerous, so instead he chose to share with us his other passion: caving. He took us to a huge labyrinthine cave system in the middle of the island; a system of lava tunnels which extends well over 4 km in length, and which is not open to the public due its being largely unexplored, and dangerous. With no helmets, and just a parafin lamp to guide us, we followed Jose Antonio into the darkness, at times crawling through the tiny tunnels, hoping he had memorised a route in the underground maze. At times, I had to go first to see if the tunnel was viable (one of the downsides of being thin), and on one of these occasions, I found myself in quick mud. Underground. In the middle of God knows where. I sank up to my neck before I managed to pull myself free in the dark. When we eventually found out way out, we emerged through a tiny hole, barely visible, into the middle of a field. The farmer standing a short distance away looked pretty surprised to see a girl/yeti-like creature emerging from the apparent ground in the middle of his field. I was CAKED in an inch-thick layer of mud all over, and probably didn't even look human. We then ended up driving to a nearby public area with toilets, and I had to brazenly walk through a group of tourists, as if I looked completely normal, and strip down to wash off the now solidified mud. Excellent. We also then had to go to Jose Antonio's house, to sneak some of his wife's clothes for me to wear rather than walk through Angra looking like a mythical creature. Unfortunately, his wife must have been a little bigger than me, so I had to walk back through Angra holding the trousers up with both hands.
Incident #2 was last night- another one of the government worker's is a dancer in a local folklore group, and so he took us to watch his group dance in Sao Sebastiao. This was all very fun until I found myself being dragged (literally kicking and screaming) to the dance floor, and being made to dance a traditional Azorean folklore dance with 12 random, sweaty, 50yr old, drunken men wearing traditional costume, in front of a very large audience. Half of the bloody island was there filming it. I would like to point out at this point that I actually wasn't that bad- but sadly one of the men I was supposed to be dancing with couldn't count to 3, and so danced in 2, so we ended up just stumbling around for a while, until another man came over to relieve me of the drunken man with a bad B.O. problem. My life mission is now to find the films of this, and destroy them. If only I could wipe the image from my memory...
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