Closing a chapter

We had one last tranquil week in Mexico and a rude awakening during our layover in New York city that closed the chapter on our adventures in Central America.

We spent our second week in Zicatela with an already established daily routine that included trips to one or other of the local restaurants and a late afternoon trip to one of the beaches. 

Anne started referring to the several young baristas and waitresses that I struck up conversations with in Spanish as "your girls" - a reference to how charmed I was by them.  At one coffee shop in particular there was a lovely young girl who was happy to correct my Spanish and suggest ways to greet her, place orders and promise to return soon.

Our casual Spanish conversation is improving and I’m almost at the point where I’ll be able to say that my Spanish is as good as my Afrikaans.  As I'm writing this I'm imagining my friend Kees saying loudly “and that’s not saying much!”

Kees and his family are South African friends we met in 2001 after we had been in the USA for about 9 months and he is off on his own journey right now with an RV, his destinations unfolding a little like ours, excepting his wheels never leave the tarmac.  He has also been documenting his travels.

We have more or less been insisting to our waiters that we’d like to use Spanish where possible.  The waiters in Zicatela and La Punta come from all over the world and all speak fluent Spanish after spending a few months at the coast. 

A French girl told us that she came to Puerto Escondido for a 5 day holiday two years before and had never left and an Italian waiter insisted we try his home-made pesto to remind us of Italy when he heard we'd visited Florence.

A sweet Argentinian girl (another one of “mis chicas” according to Anne) said “Oh I remember you!  En Español!” when we stopped by for the second time and passed us a menu in Spanish as she led us to our table.

At one lunch in a quiet restaurant near our AirBnb  I asked the waiter if the woman behind the counter in the kitchen was his mother.  He is young, perhaps early twenties and we discovered the restaurant (in retrospect this is probably true of many of them) was run by his mom and his two brothers and when I asked where his dad was, he shrugged matter of factly and said "who knows?"

Our beach trips - after my workday ended or on weekend days - continued to feature crazy big waves on most days and mostly vain attempts on my part to body surf. 

I did catch a few good waves but invariably got tumbled and ended up with a pile of sand in my hair.

There is a portion of the main beach that has a rocky outcrop in the ocean close to the beach and has slightly less violent waves.  Anne took to going there in the early afternoons because of the flocks of pelicans that hovered and dove into the sea there.  She called it Pelican Beach.  

Really close to Pelican Beach is a lookout where on the Saturday we saw a girl and her family dressed up beautifully for the young girl's quinceañera.  Turning 15 is a huge deal for young girls in Central America and there are usually large parties to celebrate the right of passage into womanhood.  The young girl wore a peach colored dress and her mother wore a head-dress that reminded us of Frida Kahlo's. 

I remembered that at the Frida Kahlo museum they mentioned that she had adopted some of the traditional clothing and headdresses of the Tehuana in the Oaxaca region because this was where her mother was from.

 

Our sunsets on the beach also came with some pretty spectacular surfing and wake board action which were amazing to watch.

The beach had this sign as you enter that said “no smoking” multiple times in multiple languages but was largely ignored.  We usually had to navigate to a spot closest to the water to allow the sea breeze to  reduce the chance of cigarette smoke triggering Anne's asthma.

 

Since we’d given up the scooter, our taxi rides were filled with conversations with the drivers and a chance to repeat a set of common topics.  Where are you from?  How long did you live there? Where are you going next?  Do you have children?  All of which offer a wealth of phrases to practice and to listen to how the taxi drivers phrased things.

At the end of our 11th week in Central America we headed back to Mexico for one day.   We spent the day visiting Nick and the small coffee shop near him where we were greeted warmly.  We also met his girlfriend from Colombia who speaks a little English. 

She loved hearing some of our family anecdotes told in halting Spanish.

The trip to New York involved an Uber ride from JFK airport.  The driver was from Venezuela and apologized at the start that her English was weak so we ended up with the same pattern of questions and phrases in Spanish that we had practiced in Mexico for the hour long trip to Manhattan.  She was quite interested in the composition of people and languages of South Africa and complemented us on what she considered unaccented Spanish. 

Our hotel in New York was in the evocative Hell's Kitchen section of Manhattan, just a few blocks from Times Square.  

A restaurant in Hell's Kitchen

 We met Matt, who took the train trip from New Haven especially to meet us and his girlfriend joined us at an Indian restaurant for a surprisingly affordable meal on the Sunday evening.  We were so engrossed in our conversation with them that we forgot to take a photo of all of us.

 

On the Monday evening after work we headed out to find a clothing store.  I am traveling really light and my jeans were showing signs of falling apart so we had decided to find a new pair and to look for some new shoes for Anne because her shoes had suffered the same fate as my jeans.

We have been to New York about 5 times altogether and Times Square is one of the places we've always visited.  This time around, though, we really had no intention of going there but our route to the nearest Levi store went right through it so we had no choice. 

If you've never visited there you should know that it is always teaming with people and has probably the most expensive restaurants in the country.  

 

It was loud as usual and had a bunch of crazy costumed characters who we deftly avoided only to be interrupted by a man with the question “do you have a minute?”  It was innocent enough and our guard was down so we politely replied that we didn't - to which he, with a broad disarming grin replied "it’s because I’m black isn’t it?" which made us both laugh.  "No, it’s not…"

He then asked where we were from and Anne said "South Africa" to which he replied: "Well then, you’re blacker than me!" which was pretty funny too.

I got sidelined by what appeared to be his friend who passed me a small CD sized sleeve with a marketing card in it and QR codes while he did the same for Anne. 

He said that he and his mates were in a band and were promoting their tour.  He asked my name and then invented a gansta slag nickname for me "T-smooth" which wasn't too original (Anne was given the nickname "A-sexy") and then dropped the question of whether we were going to be able to help them with a donation.

 

I'll claim that our recent visits to Central America, where we didn't really experience any "hard sells" lulled us into complacency and we ended up donating to "their band" at which point they revealed that they were in different bands!  Who would have thought!  One even offered to bring over a credit card machine for a donation which left me gasping.

Anne stopped donating after handing out 3 bills and we made our way out of the group which was now 5 people, two of them complaining rather aggressively that they were being short-changed.

As we walked away I said to Anne “did we just get fleeced?”  She was unfazed.  “We did!”  But I think we were also a little impressed at how it had gone down.  “Damn we were so naive, but they were so entertaining!”

One the way home we found a little Italian restaurant off a side road. Also affordable and with a server from Uruguay and a waitress from Kazakhstan.

On the way home a older guy with a white cane tried to strike up a conversation near our hotel in Hells Kitchen and we brushed him off rather rudely.  We had learned our lesson.