As you know, my morning commute here in Nicaragua is pretty different from what it was in Chicago. There's no El, no taxi, and no airplane...just me and 8 of my closest friends in the back of a pick-up truck.
There's always a little more adventure associated with my Nica commute than my Chicago commute, but today was really quite exceptional. Shortly after we got on the main highway heading for the office, we stopped at a stoplight. As we were waiting, a couple young kids came up and started begging for money. One of the boys, who was no more than 10 years old, had a plastic pistol, which I found a little disturbing. One of the guys in the truck was asking him something about the pistol and sort of teasing him. The boy's reaction was to pick up a rock the size of a baseball and hold it above his head, threatening to throw it at us in the truck. Great.
The man who originally taunted the boy was trying to talk him out of it and distract him while we waited for the light to change. He was fairly successful until the very end when the boy, seeing that we were moving, chucked the rock at the guy's back. Fortunately he couldn't throw very hard, and we were already on our way. Or so we thought.
Unfortunately, the light changed again before we could get out of the intersection. We turned around to see that the boy had recovered the big rock he'd thrown before, and was once again marching toward us with it held over his head. Fortunately, as he got close to us, one of the other guys in the truck grabbed it out of his hand. Unfortunately, that just prompted the kid to find other rocks, this time smaller, which he began firing at us in rapid succession. Again, thankfully, the other Nicas in the truck were able to catch or block them, so no one got hit and people even got a laugh out of the whole thing. Still, as we were pulling away, I thought "Only in Nicaragua would this happen and people find it funny. You can't make this stuff up."
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