back to costa rica and augustus gloop

so once again i'm back with the disclaimer of "well, you know that NORMALLY i'm not very girly/paranoid/insert caveat here, but just in this ONE instance..."

*wHaTeVeR*

back to the day miss h. and i were at the german's hut/bar in the middle-o-nowhere:  as we are getting in the car, i see miss h. chatting up a little boy (ok, not so little, hence the nickname.) i don't think much of it since she's had a few cervezas, and her spanish tended to get better and better the more and more she drank. she is also the social one between the two of us, as you know, and lord knows my spanish is not so bueno. however, next thing i know, augustus is jumping in the back seat with his backpack.

h: "we're giving him a ride home from school!"

t: "whaaaaat?"

h: "yah, he just lives down the road!"

t: (thinking of course he lives down the road. there is only one damn road in all of costa rica!)

t: (looking at augustus) "um, hola."

a: (blank stare at me, then says something to miss h. in spanish.  i think it was "arriba!")

so we're driving down the road for like two minutes, maybe less, when he shouts "alto!" and points up this huge hill.  but you see, we are not going up that huge hill, augustus. we are staying along the agua, so i'm afraid you are on your own now.  miss h. converses with him and then explains to me, "but he lives up the hill. we have to drive him!  i mean, look at him ... there is no way he can walk."  but i'm thinking the exact opposite, i'm thinking that little augustus needs nothing more than some daily cardio. but i lose.  "tia! it will take 5 minutes."

so now back to my disclaimer of me normally not being paranoid. but i swear, i'm not!  it's just that i just so happened to read before our trip that pick-pocketing and theft was a pretty common occurrence in costa rica, on account of it being a third world country and all. seriously, they will even steal your flip flops and your flimsy-yet-totally-overpriced-towel on the beach while you're swimming, so watch out!  they also said that common "decoys" were women and kids who would chat you up, distract you, while some boy hiding in the bush would come grab your shit.  so yah, i read that as i was sitting on my $3,000 white ultra suede couch and naturally thought, "oh brother.  like that would happen to us? as if!"  i probably forgot about it five seconds later.

fast forward to augustus in the back of the car as we are driving up this knarly hill. i look back at him and decide that he looks highly suspicious. i'm also pretty confident that he no speaky ingles, so i give miss h. an earful:  "um, hello?? what are we doing? you know that i read that this is a very common thing...  little chubby boys acting as decoys, pretending to be too fat to walk home from school, but nooooooo. he's bringing us to some shed where they are going to chop us up and throw our body parts in the wood pile!  or even worse, omg, they are going to take my camera. i have like 500 pictures already!"

but this is what miss h. probably heard instead of my paranoia: "WAK WAK WHANA WAK WAK!" to her i just sounded like miss othmar, the teacher from peanuts.

ok, obviously we were neither abducted nor chopped up into multiple pieces, and it turned out that he didn't live that far up the hill. so we dropped his ungrateful ass off as he gave us very weird directions to get home.  um, no thanks augustus, we're just going to turn right around and go back in the direction from which we came. but thanks for your second yet passive attempt at getting us killed on vacation.

we did have a good laugh about that afterwards for quite a few days (being alive will do that to you, you know.) but every time we passed a hitchhiker for the rest of the trip i would have look at her and say "NOOOO! don't even THINK ABOUT IT!"

jesus.