I’m beginning to think I’m
not meant to fly.
This is the fifth attempt I
have made to the two hundred-foot seaside cliffs, in search of a fool willing
to strap me to the harness of a giant kite and jump off with me. It’s a service provided to the tourists for
about $50 USD. My wife has been talking
about it for months, and finally she went yesterday, but I missed it, due to my
late arrival at the designated rendezvous point.
We returned today, only to
find that the wind was too strong for anyone as small as our children to fly,
so we put it off yet again. That’s not
interesting at all, so you must now be hoping that the story is going to pick
up, otherwise you are clicking off. I
get it.
We were riding the
combi-bus, a small Peruvian community transport in the form of a Toyota bus, which will
hold about a dozen of your close friends. Including the driver and the conductor, there
were 19 people on it today. The driver
had a thing for old rock and roll (in English), and several Beatles songs had
played. To the chagrin of Middle-child,
I was singing along to every one of them.
Then something very strange
occurred. The song, “Twist and Shout”
began to play, and the gentleman behind me started to sing along, too.
Except it was painfully
obvious that he didn’t know English.
As he sang “Twee an Shau,”
along with equally butchered lyrics, I stifled a chuckle, not wanting to be
rude. In his seat behind us, he couldn’t
see my smirk.
“I’m totally amused right
now,” I told Middle.
“I’m only partially amused,”
she replied, but was smirking the same as me.
“Shake your shake your baby
now, come on shake her…”
I almost lost it. If I had been drinking Inca cola, it would
have been coming out my nose. I couldn’t
lose the visual about the clueless guy behind me singing happily about shaking a baby.
So, gringos…the next time
you think about singing along to “La Bamba,” or “99 Luftbalons,” as catchy as
the tunes are, if you don’t know Spanish or German, respectively, then don’t…just
don’t.
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