Part 3

On Sunday there is a parade on the boulevard Las Americas. It’s not a carnival, just a parade of people wearing their best sporting outfits, identifying themselves with Puma, or Pepsi, or Adidas, or Bancafe, or Municipal, the champion soccer team here … and a peculiar fact is that they are also parading their purebred dogs. No mutts, just a lot of Pekingese, Labs, Huskies, Samoyeds, Dachshunds and Shepards. C combined with the pony rides in the center median, it’s a real poop fest. There was also a large gathering that might at fist glance be taken as radical political happenings, but the numerous Mylar banners for bottled water and soda was a dead giveaway, Peppy speeches and dance contests boomed from a speaker system that would put Motley Crue to shame, and the gist was “make a stand, be a radical, keep the city clean,: Uniformed beverage distributors walked through the crowd giving out free waters and sodas which, I suppose, was a test to see how many ended up crushed underfoot. Many, I assume.

What can you say about the crass “show ‘em what you got” attitude here. Is it just a toned down version of the ultra-deceptive SF Bay Area thing where the dude in activity sandals, patched shorts and  a faded t-shirt could buy your entire city block and ship you all off to Bangalore … if he was so inclined. Are gringos just that much more secretive and insidious? I mean, I could afford better clothes … I don’t HAVR to wear dead peoples shirts (in other words, thrift store clothes. But I do. It’s just one of the many, many, many consumer options you have in the US. The fine art of looking like trash. My Polish ancestors dressed to the nines on Sunday. You put it all put it all out there, you kicked ass.  But poles aren’t exactly a select group, and I guess they were carrying the mutual burden of a massive historical debt: to prove to the fancy ass protestants that they weren’t dirt people.

When worlds collide, then the “business people” of the coffee-producing world get together with the mish-mash, rag-tag coffee buyers and roasters of the consuming world, the slipping of gears (and occasional striping of metal) is heard. And in the worst cases, you can freeze a piston in the cylinder or bust a cam. But that’s just me speaking. Maybe everyone else is getting along just fine. I never am. That's about it, end of commentary.