From the beach:
I have always loved coconuts, and when I was in Australia I climbed the trees every chance I had to get some fresh ones. Feeling satiated by some fresh coconut milk immediately after arriving to Playa de los Muertos, I set up my hammock and settled in. In the shade of some whispering coconut trees, I had one of those moments that you know will stick with you.
Pelicans were sunning themselves atop the rocks overlooking the waves reeking havoc on the otherwise quiet beach, fragile frigate birds cruised high above the trees on thermals, occasionally bombing into the surf for small fish. Drifting in and out of sleep, at one point I remember looking around at the few other lucky people who had found this small beach and just thinking, "Wow, I have three more weeks to do nothing but this if that is what I want. Dis is a good life."
In the City:
On the subway one afternoon in Mexico City on my way back to Lindsey and Carolyn's apartment in Tlalpan, I was impressed by the diversity of ways people cruised the subway cars scraping out a living, or maybe not. People with speakers in their backpacks played homemade mixes of anything from salsa to Christmas carols, classic rock to classic orchestral. Other people walked around selling small bags of candy or packets of gum. The going price for most items was rarely more than 5 pesos, that's less than 50 cents. Some played beautiful songs on a guitar then walked around asking for spare change. Others took it to the nth degree, circumventing a 'fair' exchange or even guilt, and moving straight to shocking pity with self mutilation.
As one guitarist made his way onto the next car, I watched a boy and a girl about my age walking towards and past me as I clung to the railing over my head. The black wife-beater the girl was wearing said 'Puerto Vallarta Pirates' in faded white letters. The boy wore a white wife-beater and held a flannel shirt with some contents in it like a sack. I noticed huge, fresh scars on his shoulder, some with dry beads of blood still on them. The girl started spouting out a well-rehearsed pitch, and the boy dropped his sack to the ground with a clinking sound. I looked over, and there were some coins in the sack, mostly mixed with a pile of glass shards. I then realized where the scars had come from. As the girl told a story I mostly didn't understand in Spanish, I did manage to understand something to the effect of, "We have nothing else to do, all we have left is our body, and we are willing to cut it if you will help us." The boy sat on the subway floor and slammed his shoulder into the pile twice. It seemed a solemn shutter pulsed through the onlookers. As the car came to a halt, they picked up the sack of shards and coins, and walked around with their hands out. A lady my parents age dropped a 10 peso coin in the sack. That's about 80 cents.
