On the Road Again!
Strange! I meant to post this short piece back in early January and somehow it fell through the cracks, sitting here on WordPress as a lonely, forgotten draft.
It’s great to be traveling after a long hiatus! And adding to my blog.
We are in Mexico for ten days. Next month we’ll be going to Cambodia and Vietnam, and we are planning on at least two more international trips this year, dates and destinations TBD.
This week we’re in Yelapa, where I’ll be in a writing workshop and Yvonne will be hanging on the beach or volunteering at a local library for kids (we will do things together in the afternoons). After that we’ll spend three nights in Puerto Vallarta, then home again.
We arrived in Yelapa this morning by water taxi. On the way here, the chunky, six-year-old English boy sitting in front of me got sick and threw up all over. The driver stopped the boat and handed his mother a mop, which she used to clean up the mess on the floor and on the bench. The boy stood up and somehow he’d even gotten it all over the back of his shirt. Fortunately there was no wind or she would have been mopping it off of my face. I thought it was funny, but we wondered how long it would be before the stranger sitting next to him would agree.
We’re staying in a beautiful apartment right on the beach. This is the view from our room:
We walked up and down the hilly paths this afternoon. What’s nice about Yelapa is that there’s a real village with friendly people who offer a pleasant ¡buenos tardes! and a smile. Even the dog and cat that passed us in the opposite direction were mellow, unconcerned with us or each other. The only upset I saw was a squawking rooster running down the road with wings outstretched, followed by a man carrying a frying pan.
Where we are staying, which is on the other end of the beach from the all of the day-tripper thatched-roof bars and beach umbrellas, no one is aggressively pushing their wares. We do want to keep an eye out for the Pie Lady though.
Well, off to dinner and margaritas!
Students from the 6th grade class at Escuela Primaria Juan de la Barrera waited eagerly for me to begin reading them a story. Aline Shapiro, an American librarian whose dream had been to build a children’s library at the school, introduced me as a guest reader from California and handed me a book entitled Coyote: Un cuento folclòrico del sudoeste de Estados Unidos. I was a little nervous as it was my first time reading a book aloud in Spanish. In the middle of the story, after stumbling over just a few words, I asked the children “Me comprenden? Do you understand me? I was happy to hear them answer “Si.” …