Boarding the bus

The two hours waiting for the bus passes slowly but pleasantly. I am like a child in this world; everything is new to me. I browse a few tables of books set up in the center of the large waiting area and am tempted by many, including a biography of Jim Morrison in Spanish, but my bag is too heavy to consider buying anything. I eat a cheap ‘torta’ or sandwich; and read signs: Sanitarios públicos (above the metal revolving door for the pay-to-enter public restrooms) and SuperVoy de 24hrs. (like mini 711, of which there are two no more than 30 feet from each other in the waiting area).

When ten o’clock comes, I pass through a metal detector onto the bus platform. The lady supervising asks me something in Spanish, then seeing that I don’t comprehend, takes my wrists, raises each arm out wide and, to my surprise, pats me down. I try to ask which bus is headed to San Miguel, as buses line the curb in front of me. Her response, as I’m beginning to expect, is unintelligible to me. ‘No entiendo,’ I say. I don’t understand. She says something, then seeing my still vacant face, points to the bus directly in front of me. The one with the sign saying ‘San Miguel de Allende’ in the window. Mmm. Like a child.

I hand my bag to be stowed away beneath the bus, and step aboard. Handing my ticket to the driver, he points behind me, where I see a line that I somehow bypassed. I mutter an embarrassed ‘Lo siento’— ‘I’m sorry’—and step off the bus. When it comes my turn, the woman tells me something and I start to turn around, thinking that’s what she wants. She laughs, stops me, signals me to step closer and, to my repeated and now greater surprise, begins to search me a second time. I hold out my arms again, resigned to a trip of continual confusion.