Has anyone noticed lately how the quality of my posts has deteriorated? It's not so much that my entries are bad as that they just aren't all that interesting. I think that sort of reflects the current state of my life, so I'm going to try something different and start writing about incidents that happened during some of the more exciting chapters of my life.
Several years ago, I went on an overland trip from Muncie, IN to Belo Horizonte, Brazil. I just loaded up my backpack, hopped into a Trailways bus and kept going until I reached my destination. A lot of cool and hair-raising stuff happened along the way, as is often the case when traveling alone in the third world, and I got to visit ten Spanish-speaking countries. The whole trip took 97 days to complete. Instead of covering the whole journey, I've decided to tell one exciting or interesting story from each country. Tonight I'll start with Mexico:
It was around my third day in Mexico City, and I was heading out to grab some lunch at the local vegetarian restaurant and then to explore. After just a few blocks, I passed a policeman in riot gear complete with shield, bludgeoning stick, and helmet with a Plexiglas visor. He was just standing there all alone with his back against a building. It was all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing until I had passed him. I kept on going and quickly forgot about him and then spent the next several hours in another part of the city doing something interesting (probably visiting the National Anthropology Museum or the indoor crafts market).
On the way back, just a few blocks from my hotel, I was walking across the Zócalo when a riot broke out. It was all around me. Don't think that I was just not paying attention and walked into something without realizing it. This really did come out of nowhere. One second there was nothing, and the next, about a hundred people, caught completely by surprise, took off running in terror. There was a lot of screaming. And there I was in the middle of it all standing there with a silly grin on my face, because this was just so cool!
The riot went like this. There were people who looked poor, and they were throwing rocks. The police arrived almost instantly (perhaps some had been there from the start) in full riot gear and gradually made their way toward the rioters. Everything quickly coalesced into rioters with rocks on one side of me and police on the other.
I figured I was safe. After all, the police were the ones being attacked by rocks, not me. And I clearly was not a rioter. Certainly the police could figure that out from my clothes. I had on a large pair of purple plaid bermuda shorts, tube socks that went up practically to my knees, and a school backpack. Having never been to a riot before, I resolved to enjoy it from the relative safety of the epicenter of the conflict.
Then a rock came a little too close for comfort. It wasn't a near miss or anything; I'd estimate it cleared me by about ten feet. But I was a bit disturbed that I hadn't seen it coming and also that there didn't seem to be any other intended target nearby. So it was plausible that it had been meant for me. I was also beginning to intuit danger, and since I have a good sense for such things, I decided to exit the riot.
By this point, things had started spilling out into nearby streets, so I decided to go into a building and wait it out. I ducked into a department store in which I found a small crowd of people who were also a bit trepidacious about being out in the open. Amazingly, people outside were still being caught by surprise. Every couple of minutes they would run to the door (which had been locked shortly after my arrival) and knock frantically on the door to be let in, which the manager was fortunately willing to do.
There was a man in front of my with a large gash on the side of his head and a lot of blood coming out. I was quite impressed that neither he nor the other people in the store were freaked out about it. The fellow was very calm and seemed to view it as a minor annoyance. The manager got him some paper towels to help keep the blood in his head. (If this had happened in the US, he would have been rushed to the emergency room.)
It took a little over fifteen minutes (I was keeping track), but things quieted down and the door was unlocked so we could leave. People out in the street were still a bit jumpy, though. A couple hours later, I saw a couple of women go around a corner and suddenly come sprinting back in the other direction screaming like banshees. I walked over to have a look. There was just some guy playing with a stick doing a few martial arts moves with it for practice or just to amuse himself. Some other people saw him and ran away screaming.
That was Mexico.