Sunday, May 10, 2009

Happy Mother's Day. And Awesome Sister's Day too.


A private bathroom plus a nice clean room equals a deep sleep. But we still woke up a little groggy. It could be because we were sleep deprived after our week in Xela. Or it could be the firecrackers and M80s that the kids in the neighbourhood started letting off at 6am to celebrate Mother's Day. That´s right. Who needs chocolates or flowers to show Mom you care when loud explosives are readily available. I wonder when Hallmark will get in on this. Um, never I hope.

Since no Keebler elves showed up with my bank card overnight I went online to make sure it was still lost and not stolen. Nope, no missing money from our account. No weird transactions. Nothing. Time to cancel it and put our contingency plan into action. Our crappy bank (which starts with Scotia and ends with Bank) only gives cards out in branch or so we were told the last time we were there. So much for making banking easier. But expecting a bank card to get stolen, lost or eaten in our year on the road, we had added my sister onto the account so she could get a replacement for us. I emailed my sister to let her know that her services would be needed (albeit a lot sooner than we expected). Thank goodness for family. Although the hard part was still to come. We had to find a phone to call to cancel the card. And find a way to get a new card into my hands. FedEx doesn’t have many shipping options for Guatemala or Honduras. And it was going to take 2-7 days to get here. Adrian wanted to panic I reminded him that he still had his card and we still had our credit cards and traveller´s cheques. And frankly what's done is done. So let's move on.

Maybe breakfast would calm him down. We headed through the gauntlet of tourist tack towards the lakefront (picture above), stopping for an obligatory photo op with the worst souvenir we could find – a three foot tall sombrero – which seemed to cheer him up. With the sun out today, all the touts were out. It reminding me of Khao San Road in Bangkok (minus the prostitutes and lady boys, as far as I could tell). Plus there were plenty of gringo hippies with their homemade necklaces and silly devil sticks walking shoeless through the dirty streets. The lakefront was full of even more touts so we headed back up the main drag finding a place where Adrian could get an almost proper English breakfast but first stopping to book our seats on the Copan shuttle for the next morning. It’ll be 8 hours of transportation but that’s fine and not too expensive and I need a break from the chicken bus.

Then we went to the phone centre. Despite being gringo central, Panajachel had the worst phone connections. I cancelled my card (i think) and was then asked when they could mail a replacement (i think). What they now mail cards? Great, mail it to my sister´s place. Nope for some reason they only have our old address on file (i think), despite having changed the address to hers before we left. The customer service rep was getting really confused by my questions (i think) so I just told her to cancel it. My awesome, wonderful, amazing sister was already on top of it all anyways.

Now it was time for the most important part of the day. We called my Mom and through the static wished her a Happy Mother´s Day because, as we discovered today, family is pretty darn important.

No comments: