He's A Bus Driver, Not A Baseball!!!

The other day I was walking down Universidad Street (a main, busy street) in Queretaro with Jean Paul. It was a sunny evening, and we were going to the park. All of a sudden, we saw at the intersection ahead of us, two men fighting, and one of them was hitting the other repeatedly with a baseball bat!! We stood there for a few seconds trying to figure out what waso going on... There was a bus parked in the middle of the road, a taxi idling on the side of the road, and the guy hitting a man in a bus-driver shirt in the arm with a baseball bat. Pretty much if there are two men fighting here, everyone stays out of it and just watched. JP wanted to go help the busdriver out, and of course I wasn't too cool with that. But right then, a traffic cop showed up, and JP and a couple other men went to the fight scene with the traffic cop to help settle things down. Apparently the bus had cut in front of the taxi on the road and the taxi driver had a bat hidden under his seat, pulled it out, and hit the door of the bus with it, breaking the bus window. I know it's frustrating to be cut off by a bus, but out of the approximately 4 hours I've ever driven in Queretaro, I think I've probably been cut off by a bus maybe three times. So, I'm gonna guess that it happens every day to taxi drivers... So pretty much there's no reason for whacking a bus with a bat! And REALLY no reason to start hitting the bus driver with it! JP was talking with the taxi driver for a while trying to calm him down, while the traffic cop and bus driver were filing an incident report. I stood by the bus (parked in the middle of a busy street, nearing rush hour), and directed other cars around it.

Everything ended fine I think - we left before any other police officers got to the scene. But I was really surprised, road rage (with physical violence) just doesn't happen much here. In fact, that's the first time in my 2+ years here that I've seen violence used in a traffic incident! JP said that Queretaro is turning into the United States - next thing you know people will carry guns in their cars for when other drivers make them mad. It's interesting what a violent reputation the US has in many places! But it's true about the whole road rage thing - I remember ducking under a table in a donut shop on Lancaster Dr. on night about 3 years ago because some people in the parking lot and on the road were waving guns at each other. Living behind the Taco Bell on Commerical Street (the one at Madrona) had it's little perks like that too - the stabbed guy ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night, another lady who'd stabbed her boyfriend in "self-defense," and all kinds of good stuff that went on in the park across the street... Oh, not to mention the fugitive that was caught in our backyard one evening when I was home by my self wen I was 13! Really, it's true! I felt actually rather scared one night in January or February of this year walking behind the Salem Library by myself in the dark, and it was only like 6pm!

And then there's life in Tegucigalpa - don't talk to anyone on the other soccer team in Yaguacire, they'll start a fight; get back inside the house, the police just apprehended a murderer across the street; don't go to the market place alone, Suyapa got robbed at knife-point twice...

Well, I feel blessed to live in Queretaro, it's pretty safe in general!