How not to speak Spanish
Well... We are driving from the middle of nowhere to Huejutla de Reyes,
a small town in the foothills of the gulf (east) coast. Its been a long
drive and we are a block from the hotel. We get to the last
intersection and watch the other cars/pedestrians/dogs/etc that are
milling around the roadway. It gets to be our turn to go through the
intersection, I look both ways and off we go... Except the nice cop
with the whistle is motioning us over for some reason... Can I see your
license please? Turns out that there was a stop light at that
intersection. Nobody else was paying attention to it and I was paying
attention to everyone else so... Now the nice police man is explaining
to us that we have broken the law! Suddenly we forget all the Spanish
we know... Huh? What? No habla Spanish senior... No senior, none at
all... We he didn¨t speak any English so we resorted to sign language
and he spoke very slowly and clearly in Spanish that we had gone though
a red light and that the ticket would be 300 pesos (about $30) and it
would be much simpler just to pay him... We just sat there and looked
confused. Every time he said "bolleto" (ticket) we nodded and made sign
language indications that a ticket would be just great. This seemed to
make him frustrated... After going around in circles like that for 10
minutes he asked for a piece of paper and a pen. Handed him one and he
laboriously wrote out in Spanish exactly what he had been saying...
Well Darby and I held that piece of paper up to the light and looked at
it one way and another and still couldn´t make much sense of it. We
even got out our dictionary and tried to translate it but after a few
minutes more standing in the hot sun outside the car window the nice
policeman said he would just let us off with a warning this time and by
the way could he have that incriminating piece of paper back? I looked
at him and looked at the paper and noticed it had a very important
grocery list from last week on the back so I said I was sorry but no, I
had to keep it. We thanked him (in perfect Spanish) and drove the rest
of the block to our hotel...
posted by Darby Watson @ 5:01 PM
2 Comments:
Works almost everytime, cop in sight and one's Spanish evaporates. I also carry a pocket voice recorder in the door pocket which can be fired up at the right moment, and also think writing down the info on the policeman's badge is a good strategy. Is this person really a cop with a good ID? All in sign language, of course. Make them sweat! Love what you did! To tell you the truth we have actually been stopped just twice in all the travels here over all the decades. In fact the police have proven an asset on more occasions than not, like the time the cops in their car followed us through part of Mexico City, shouting directions to us over their PA system, to get us to the airport to pick up my sister. Must have been a strange sight with them braodcasting derecho, izquierda, derecha? But with cops, it is getting too civilized now that the Federales can have hand heald radar guns, but then my rule of thumb is one must be doing 150% of the speed limit to be of any interest. What I do find disturbing is all the fear Americans can have surrounding cops here. Maybe it is just that thing about being afraid of that which we do not know?
Postman just showed up with a new sink faucet, not necessarily an easy thing to find in US and then have vendor that says, "Mexico no problem, we ship all over World." Thank you GoWesty. With luck will leave for coast Friday. To Chimulco, Villa Corona, west of Guadalajara a bit for a couple of days then to northern coast of Michoacan to find furture hide out. Then probably up coast to north of Vallarta for a few days. Much depends on Patricia's mother and her state. Hope all is well with the two of you! Mark Dunn; Zacatecas
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