La Micro, Part 2

¡HELADO! ¡HELADO! ¡HELADO! ¡CIEN PESOS! ¡HELADO! 

Cheap ice cream is always nice on a hot afternoon. Vendors, mainly men, hop on the bus when it stops to sell ice cream (or pencils, pens, candy, bags...). You can see one, two, sometimes three or four vendors in a single trip, especially if you decide to take one of the Libertad micros to get back home. A Libertad micro means you have to go through the plaza in Viña with its plague of Argentines and other tourists who swarm the town during the pleasant summer months. 

Once you enter the plaza it may literally take another fifteen minutes to get around it because of the number of people, and the fact that the micros often linger here to pick up passengers. Imagine a largish roundabout with a small park in the middle with a fountain, trees, benches and a number of oversexed teenagers.      

“Tengo una gran enfermedad y no tengo dinero y tengo diez hijos. ¡Ayúdenme!”

 “I have a disease, and I don’t have money, and I have ten children. Help me!”

Here you see a whole new spectrum of people—the beggars. They might have a personal story of woe and misery—how their husband left them with a troop of children and how they need money to feed said children. You don’t want them to starve, do you? They might be sick and can’t afford some desperately needed surgery, such as the woman with the hole in her throat from her tracheotomy. If you don’t want to contribute to improved tracheotomy surgery or whatever it was she said, you don’t make eye contact. You’re left feeling slightly guilty, since you never know if she was telling you the truth or not. 

After you’ve made it through the plaza on the micro—if you haven’t just decided to walk home from there—about twelve blocks or twenty minutes—you’re pretty much home-free. All you have to do is hop off the bus, or squeeze off of if it is rush hour, and walk the one or four blocks home, depending on which bus you decided to take. This method of travel is considerably more interesting than driving to work or to school every day and considerably more exhausting. However, you find that you can have more social interaction, without ever opening your mouth, on a single bus ride than you can in a whole day at home—a far cry from the independent yet isolated American South.

January 22, 2009