La Cucaracha! La Cucaracha!

As one might rightly conclude by the name of today’s entry, we had our first encounter with a cucaracha. That thing was HUGE!!! It crawled under a lady’s foot and another lady freaked out and went toward the thing with a vengeance! Then, in a rage, she stomped on that cucaracha with the force that can only be rivaled by a nuclear warhead. Though we were quite disgusted by the scene, we decided it was a great memory that should be tenderly guarded for the rest of our lives. So we continued on to the lavanderia, laundry mat, and proceeded to make our clothes nice and clean. We had lunch at this Chinese restaurant that came highly recommended. We thought it was kind of funny how they had, you guessed it, Mexican salsa for people to put on their Chinese food. By the way, we got up very late today, thus the reason for our lack of spiritual activities.

After we finished with our laundry, we went to our Starbucks and again saw our friend Victoria. In the picture, she’s on the left, and the other girl’s name is Adriana. We studied for the book study (which we’ll be attending tomorrow evening) and then got directions to do some local shopping. We ended up going to Plaza del Sol. No, you may not ask what we bought nor for whom we bought it!

We’re going to take a moment to tell you about last night. After we posted our blog, we were hungry and didn’t know where to eat so we decided to go to the only place we do know: galarias mall. When we got there, we realized that the only food places are American chains which made us very sad. We thought, “Hey why don’t we check out the food court?” On our way up the escalator, we spotted Irving and Andy on their way down the escalator! We exchanged hellos in passing and when they got to the bottom they came back up to greet us properly. We explained our dilemma to them, for which Andy had an excellent solution. “There’s this great hamburger place we could go to,” he said. We were in! We shared jokes, mostly blonde jokes, through the whole meal and laughed so hard it hurt. It seemed like Jehovah was giving us the exact thing we needed at the moment, good fellowship and a good laugh (or a hundred).

Ok, so back to what happened today. We found another Starbucks at Plaza del Sol, but we didn’t go inside. We ate at this place at the shopping center called Hippos, which we thought was somewhat strange. Kelsey noticed this man sitting at a table behind us who had a horrible Spanish accent. She assumed he was American and we smiled at the thought that we weren’t the only ones completely out of our element. Well, after he got his beer, hamburger and french fries (ahem, AMERICAN!!!), I guess he got his confidence up and went over to a table with two Mexican ladies. “Me llamo Jason. Soy de Canada,” he said as seductively as a 37-year old Canadian playa’ with horrible Spanish can. It seems they were impressed and he joined them at their table. Weirdos.

Anyway, we finally decided it was time to go, and of course we had no idea which bus to take to get home. We took the server’s word for it and journeyed in an unknown direction. It seemed like things were going well until we got onto our second bus. That’s when things went south, and I don’t mean South Guadalajara! Turns out we were going the very wrong way and we just decided to exit the bus and get a taxi. As the frustration grew, we started to lose our sense of adventure, only to be reminded by our taxi driver that it’s ok to get lost in the city as long as you learn more about the city. I’m not so sure we learned much. It’s times like these we recall to mind the advice you dear friends gave us before our departure:

1. Be careful with sharp knives
2. Don’t eat lentil soup
3. Don’t agree to go with strangers to a place called “the Ranch”

All valuable advice, yes, but since none of it was especially helpful in this particular situation, we opted to take Doris Day’s words to heart: “Que será , será .” However it happened, we’re now back at the apartment, listening to some man (we can’t help but think he’s drunk) yelling for someone to let him in the gate. Rest assured that we won’t be letting him in, and don’t worry, even if someone does, he can’t get into our apartment with the two locked doors! But on that note, we will end this lovely post with these crucial words of wisdom: friends don’t let friends have cockroaches take up dwelling beneath their shoes.

Love, as we’re affectionately called here,

The Idaho girls