He was a moron.

Some outings go better than others here in Guatemala.

Take Wednesday. I liked Wednesday. After work I went with Jo and Victor and a bunch of Victor's cousins on a tour of the local brewery (Gallo, which is rooster in Spanish). We got to see a bunch of old machinery, I learned the Spanish word for "hops" (lupulo) and took part in a beer tasting. I have to say that although I liked the whole experience, swirling "Gallo Light" around my goblet and breathing it in with my eyes closed was a little silly.

Thursday was ok too, after work I went to a movie with the Wheaton gang (my fellow interns, minus Jo, all went to school together). When Meredith and Jenny and I say down in the theater for our 6:20 showing, nothing happened. For 20 minutes. They told me it was a technical error (that's right, I got out of my chair, used my Spanish and asked) and when I returned the the theater most of the people waiting started chanting, clapping, and asking Jenny to teach them bad words in English to see if they would get "He's Just Not That Into You" to start (it eventually did).

Today was sort of a different story. I took a taxi in to meet everyone at a fondue restaurant for Alex's birthday. I left an hour and 15 minutes before I had to be there, because I knew the traffic would be bad on a Friday afternoon. The driver seemed ok at first, aside from his disconcerting posture (he leaned forward the entire ride, squinting at the road through some majorly red eyes) and the really loud soccer Q&A he was blasting on the radio.

But when we finally got to the shopping center where the restaurant was an hour and a half later, he totally ignored my directions and wandered around for a long time before stopping to ask everyone he saw where the restaurant was. I mean, it makes perfect sense to ignore your client in the back of the car SCREAMING at you to go down that road over there, right? She has no idea where she wants to go. She only asked you to pick her up and told you the name and location of Kloster, the restaurant where her friends were waiting for her for fun. Whatev.

At this point I'm getting super frustrated, especially when we're about 500 feet away from the restaurant, I ask him if I can get out, and he says he knows where the restaurant is and he's going to take me there. He jets off before I can open the door, and the next thing you know I'm on my way out of the shopping center. Five minutes later he pulls up at Hooters. HOOTERS. My least favorite place on earth. He assures me that my friends are waiting inside over my loud, consistent, "No, this is NOT the right restaurant" and finally demands that I pay him and get out of his taxi.

Needless to say, I was not happy, standing in front of Hooters wondering why the heck I moved to Guatemala (and why this awful chain has made it all the way here). I tried walking in the direction that I knew the restaurant was in, but at this point it was dark and there were a lot of scary people trying to sell me DVDs and I was lost.

Thank goodness for Victor, who picked me up in a Burger King parking lot and hugged me and didn't get weirded out when I broke down crying. I felt a lot better when he said "Rememeber that new word I learned? Moron? That taxi driver was one."