making a phone call

Walking during the daytime to Huembes market is a challenge, but at night it’s even worse. Let’s just call it an adventure. First of all, rounding the first corner to the main road of the Fuente, which is the road that goes to my house, there’s a man selling pastries out of a wide wicker basket set up on a stand, swatting flies away with something that looks like a pom pom with strands of straw. Squeezing between the basket and the lamp pole, you immediately come to a hamburger joint that sets up it’s grill on the sidewalk. You have to slide by the grill and the chicken rotisserie without burning yourself, and emerge on the other side covered in sweat, like you’d just been put through the oven. Next door to the rotisserie is a bar, so the stumbling drunks smelling of Toña beer are the next obstacle. At this point in my journey, I noticed that it was particularly dark… No street lights, no lights coming out of people’s houses…a power outage, so I could only see the sidewalk when cars passed by. There were no shortage of cars and buses, but they tended to blind me first before illuminating the sidewalk. I slipped past commuters on their way home from work, vendors coming home from the market, and teenagers walking home from school. But it was virtually impossible to see the sidewalk so I was at risk of falling in the huge holes in the street that people mistake for garbage cans, cracks, and places where there simply was no sidewalk. The advantage to the darkness was that I received fewer catcalls of “chela” (gringa, essentially), because no one could see me. So aside from tripping a little on a crack in the road and almost running into a woman and her kid that I didn’t see coming, I made it home fine! And this was all so I could make a phone call to the states!!