What A Small World!

I had just gotten on the bus to Zamboanga and was still shaking my head at the fact that I was brow-beat into tipping some random guy for something I would have rather he NOT have done (run off with my bag and throw it on the train where he thought I should sit; he wasn't even an employee of the railway and I thought he was robbing me). He just stood there waiting for me to give him money, and even though we were still in Budapest he got upset that I didn't have euros to give him. And he got more upset when I only gave him the equivalent of one euro. "Too small, too small," he said. You all know I am a good tipper, so I don't mind paying what services are worth when I want them. But I felt like telling him to go fuck himself. Instead I gave him more money. Anyway, I had finally settled down and was reading about Vienna when there was this high pitched shriek right outside my little cabin, "FAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAaD." I nearly had a heart attack. The other people nearby in the train literally ducked for cover. It was the girl who lived below me in my freshman college dorm, and was one of my best friends at school. She was there with her parents, who I also knew (I went to her younger sister's Quinceanera, among other things) so after my friend stopped bouncing up and down and screaming, we had a nice three hour reunion on the train. Although I do tend to run into people I know in strange places, she is definitely the closest friend I have ever run into, and Budapest is one of the strangest places for it to happen. What are the chances, really? She could have been on the same train but in a different car, and we never would have known. Or she could have been looking right instead of left when she walked by me. Amazing. I did cringe quite a bit because she and her parents are ugly American tourists. They stay in fancy American chain hotels, they complain loudly when things are dirty, they disdainfully compare things to how they are in America, they expect people to speak English, they try to pay for things in American dollars (I had to buy the food on the train for everybody just because I was mortified that they tried to make them take dollars). And the worst, I think, is that they were laughing about how they "play the dumb American" when somebody wants them to do something they don't want to do, like buy a valid metro ticket instead of using an expired one. Yikes. The meeting was somewhat sobering, though, because while my friend and I were sitting in the dining car talking, she told me a story she had only recently felt comfortable sharing. Last year she was in Belize with another good friend of ours from college. They went to the Guatemalan border to see some ruins or something, and as they were on their way back a van pulled them over to the side of the road and 7 masked men with machetes and guns pulled them out of the van. They dragged them into the rain forest and lined them up. They stole everything, and in the meantime pulled over a couple more vans full of tourists and lined them up too. At one point my friend was dragged further into the jungle to be raped. As they were walking, she asked in Spanish whether he was going to kill her, and the guy said no. So she said "Oh, ok then, it's all good." Once he had her on the ground, he couldn't get hard. Her therapist thinks it's because it wasn't fun for him anymore after she "consented." There was no conquest. After a while one of the vans they were trying to pull over wouldn't stop, so they shot at it and hit a tourist. They knew the border guards would have heard the shot, so they had to hightail it back into Guatemala before the military arrived. That is how my friend escaped. The American Embassy in Belize took them to the hospital and put them on the next flight back to the US. Anyway, that was a pretty amazing story. I am glad it worked out so well.