Victory at the Bank

So it actually turned out that my experience at the bank was a little less monotonous than I anticipated. There wasn’t a robbery or anything because that would mean a crime would have to be committed in San Cristobal and that doesn’t seem ever to happen. Unless it’s like that town in the film Hot Fuzz in which case I should keep an eye out. Anyway so I went to the bank this morning early in attempt to escape the queue but clearly everyone else had the same idea and so there was a pretty long wait. After about 5 minutes I noticed someone pushed in the queue (something of a taboo in England) about 2 people in front of me and started speaking to someone who had already been in there which somehow made it okay for everyone else. Shortly after the same thing happened but right in front of me and the ‘pusher-in’ gave the person in front of me a hug and they started chatting, and again, no one pulled them up on it. I thought to say something but I didn’t want to make a scene. However I could not restrain myself when literally 2 minutes later some local did the exact same thing to the person in front of me. He turned to me and gave me this smug grin and so, very politely, I said in Spanish, ‘sorry but I was here first’. To my disbelief he proceeded to say that in fact he had been here first and that he’d just popped out for something. Now I may not have been born with special powers like immortality or the ability to fly, but I was fortunately blessed with a short-term memory. I thus stealthily employed that to quickly deduce that this bloke was, in fact, a lying tosser. I therefore, slightly less politely, repeated myself and he realised that I wasn’t the foolish tourist he mistook me to be. He then said okay and went to the back of the queue. Victory! To top it all off I got the nod of approval from the security with a gun strapped to his side, which is always a bonus.

Apart from that my day was pretty comparatively banal. Teaching was hard as my class weren’t in the mood to work. I’ve identified a couple of trouble makers and so I’m working out what to do with them at the minute. I might move a couple of them into different classes. We will see how they are in the next class but my patience is certainly wearing thin. In other news I’ve started to plan a trip to visit one of the other islands this weekend with a few of the volunteers.  The two main trips are Isabella and Santa Cruz and so I think we are going to split that up over 2 different weekends so we can see everything. I realised I spent too much last week so I’m going to try and spend nothing this week. I will keep you updated on how that pans out. Until next time.