Accident

I spent about 8 hours on a long distance bus yesterday from Oaxaca on a quest for a bit of beach-time. I accidentally got off at the wrong stop and thus ended up at one of the best tropical beaches I have been to. It is much like some of the Brazilian places I got to see last year, only less crowded and more "laid back" (a word I hate when used to describe people, but it is accurate in this case). A tall, geeky Mexican engineer guy convinced me that I should come here and I am certainly not regretting it. I am staying in a very ecological cabin right on the beach and nothing bothers me, except for the mosquitoes and the Mexican engineer -  both of which are quite difficult to hide from.

My last two days in Oaxaca were equally entertaining. I spent them with my new American friends: Charlie, a slightly chubby, very blonde and quite pretty, loud 25-year-old, who does everything from construction work for her father in Michigan and photographing weddings to waitressing in Yosemite in the summer and (mostly) traveling around Mexico and Central America; Cheryl, a cute brunette, who escaped her Seventh Day Adventist family and upbringing in Idaho when she was 16; and Chris, her husband, who grew up everywhere from Dubai to South Korea thanks to his international school teacher parents and who now works as a firefighter for the Federal Forest Services in Oregon, where he lives with Cheryl. They turned out to be excellent company. We went to Monte Alban together, to see the major Zapotec ruins and also to some weaving villages around Oaxaca, which were serene and had beautiful handicrafts (including a carpet that I now have to shlep back to New York). This is why traveling alone is so fun. These people were up for dinners and drinks and by the last night, the girls and I bonded over a couple of margaritas over the inexhaustible topics of relationships and family.

Oh, and I think that I am now absolved of putting the crazy little thieving Japanese girl in the hands of the Brazilian police last year. One morning in Oaxaca, as I was sitting on the main square enjoying the sun, a fifty-ish, aging hippie type American man with a dog, accompanied by two tourist policemen and one policewoman came up to me asking if I could translate. The police was ready to take him to the station because his dog had just crapped on the newly planted Christmas flowers that were surrounding the beautifully renovated main square. The police were arguing that it would be wrong not to take him away because then people would say that they were not doing their job. I convinced them not to do that, translating as Steve (the dog owner) was pleading with them and swearing on his mother's grave that it would never happen again. So one in and one out. Granted, the Mexican tourist police are not nearly as scary as the Brazilian ones...Still, I am now at peace with myself.