Ten Things That Have Happened To Us In The Last Week
Friday, November 3rd, 20061. All three of us, Megan, Sarah and Zil, rode a ferris wheel in Todos Santos. The ticket booth indicated that the ride had, at one point, lived in Chicago (like Zil). We were on the ferris wheel for, I kid you not, 1 hour.
2. We successfully navigated our way through the Guatemalan hillsides using only a map drawn on a napkin. We dubbed this map our “mapkin.”
3. Sarah and Megan both became ill and spent some quality time in the bathroom.
4. Megan met John, an attorney from San Francisco, who had previously been law partners and close personal friends with Bob Lieff, of Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, Megan’s last place of employment. Megan has never met Bob Lieff personally, though she has seen him in the elevator on two occasions. He wears expensive cuff links and, according to John, recently married his sixth wife. John, unlike Bob Lieff, knows Megan’s name.
5. Since then, we have met more than 5 people who live in San Francisco. It seems that there are far more Americans in Guatemala than in Mexico.
6. We watched the coronation of the Queen of Todos Santos, in which several young women paraded up and down a high-school auditorium floor and an announcer spoke into a microphone so muffled that absolutely none of the event was intelligible to us gringos. The only part we understood was the dancing.
7. We watched the All Saints Days festivities in Todos Santos, during which incredibly drunk men attempt to stay mounted on their horses as they raced back and forth. All day. In red striped pants.
8. Megan and Zil entered a Todosantero bar to escape from the horse races, where they encountered Julia, a small Mam woman who’s father had passed away. Since it was the eve of Day of the Dead, Julia was celebrating her father’s life by drinking and dancing. Julia proceeded to dance with Megan and Zil, grabbing tightly onto their index fingers, until her relatives took her home. Since Julia was about half the size of both Megan and Zil, things got interesting whenever she attempted to twirl them.
9. We took 2 buses on a 5 hour journey from Todos Santos to Xela, paying only $4 U.S. each. Each of these buses let us off at the bus station, which, conveniently, is on the Lonely Planet map.
10. Last but not least, we signed up for a Spanish school at Sakribal to start on Monday. The tuition, room and board comes to a whopping $145 U.S. per person per week.
-Megan and Sarah
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