Eat Your Bananas
Monday, October 23rd, 2006As the daughter of divorced parents who lived five hours apart from each other during my high school years, I like to think of myself as an experienced bus rider. I was, however, unprepared for the glory of first class Mexican buses. Two nights ago we took a 12 hour overnight bus from Tulum to Palenque. I was asleep for about 10 hours of the ride. But Megan tells me that they played three movies in a row (the one I caught was a wildlife special about octopi and birds that could swim). I hear that the other movies were: Shoulin Soccer (in which a soccer team flies and performs martial arts to win the game), Open Range (in which Kevin Costner gets Annette Benning to marry him after killing everyone in the town), and A Lot Like Love (in which Ashton Kutcher breaks up Amanda Peet´s wedding and they live happily ever after). All I saw were the octopi. Anyway. I slept like a baby, it was fabulous.
In fact, we both slept so well that the day following our overnight bus ride was FILLED with activity and not filled with naps (as I had anticipated). We visited the Palenque ruins which are AMAZING, but we forgot our camera, oops. We took a looong collectivo ride to the Misol-Ha and Agua Azul waterfalls, and we slept in a cabana in the jungle. Not bad.
Our last stop, Agua Azul, was on some kind of indigenous Mayan reservation and consisted of a long string of waterfalls flanked by stands with thatched roofs where people sold food and gifts. There were also an abundance of 7-10 year old girls selling various food items. One particularly adept salesgirl sat down next to us with her basket of bananas and spoke to us in Spanish. I kept shaking my head and saying ¨no, gracias,¨which is my technique almost every time anyone tries to speak to me in Spanish. She continued to talk, started making cupping motions with her hands and kept saying the word ¨banana¨ among many others. After she left Megan began to laugh while I asked, ¨What? What?¨ Apparently the girl had been explaining to us that her bananas (were we to buy and eat them) would make our chests larger. Thus the cupping motions. So, there you go. Eat your bananas.
We´re taking a bus in an hour to San Cristobal de las Casas where we´ll be for the next couple of days before heading into Guatemala. As we travel south, everthing is getting cheaper and cheaper. Yesterday we ate five empanadas for $1 total. Not bad, I suppose, not bad.
-Sarah (with translation by Megan)
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