Friday, September 26, 2008

Ramblings from La Ceiba...

La Ceiba has a section of town much like every city in Ontario has its big box stores, designed for all the foreign businesses, their mall, their pizza hut, their burger king, their dunkin' donuts, all the signs in english, all the food expensive and i am sure just as crappy, and of course everyone here heralds it as mecca, the cultural renaissance of our generation, flocked to for birthdays and christenings and wedding anniversaries, packed bumper to bumper with SUVs and taxi cabs and old US schoolbuses that serve as the public transportation, all leaning on their horns at all hours of the day, all belching a visible smog of vicious air with that burnt-tire smell of lowgrade diesel that we have come to know all to well. Unfortunately, on the one hand, our daily commute passes through this section of town twice; fortunately, on the other hand, is that we are leaving the city in the mornings and returning at night, thereby generally moving in the opposite direction of traffic, allowing us to pass with our sanity. however on the rare occassion we are headed in the direction of everybody else, the scene is almost too much to visualize: standing in the aisle of a schoolbus packed to the gills with people trying to return to the colonias after a day of work, all sweating like pigs in a factory farm in the 100 degree heat, every window open only to let in the exhaust of the sea of vechiles that surround us, motorbikes screaming their horns as they fly along the side of the road, everybody trying to go in the same direction by going in different ones, more horns, and then it starts to rain like it can only rain in the tropics, drops that could knock you off a bicycle if you weren't careful, so heavy you can hardly see two cars ahead of you, and the streets immediately begin to flood, people pass trying desperately to pedal bicycles through the knee-deep water, and i am overcome with the simultaneous sensations of distress at the suffocating feeling that sits in my chest and an almost serene relief that maybe this time the heavens have really opened up to swallow this mess we have created, and that somewhere there is an ark with two of every animal and i hope that you are on it.

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