Hey, I’m Laura and today marks the beginning of my third week in Mexico City! To those of you who have been eagerly awaiting an update from me, I apologize for my seeming lack of urgency. The past two weeks have been packed with eating tacos, meeting new people, eating molletes, adapting to teacher-life, drinking agua de horchata, visiting a pediatrician (“wait… what?”), eating churros, learning Spanish, eating flautas, drinking salsa de habanero (jk… well, almost), and eating more tacos. Anyway, I finally took a break from all of the [predominantly] eating I’ve been doing to check in with you! To those of you who are checking out my blog for the first time, BIENVENIDOS!
Today, I would like to share with you about the time that I lost my credit card for 30 minutes (so like, three days ago)... BUT before I do that, I want to tell you that if you are expecting an in-depth life update here, you have my newsletter to look forward to! (That being said, if you are not yet on my monthly newsletter list, e-mail me at [email protected] and I’ll get that taken care of pronto!)
Now... storytime!
After school on Monday, my missionary coach Yuri (who is also a teacher at my school) and I decided that she would take me to meet her taco family that day and consequently eat the best tacos in Mexico City! So, we hopped on a bus and were on our way.
*Okay, but now let me briefly pause my story to tell you about my fanny pack (“What does this have to do with anything?” -You). In Mexico City, it is VERY important that you have a safe and ideally hidden place for your money and phone - thievery runs rampant here. For me, this safe place takes the form of a tiny little fanny pack that I can keep hidden under my clothes. Now that you have this ESSENTIAL piece of information, let’s get back to the story. *
So, I had a few pesos for the bus, a credit card (bad idea), my metro card, and my phone in my fanny pack, which was secured and out of sight. While we were on the bus, I pulled my phone out to take a picture of the scenery, we had a brief conversation with a local and his 2 sweet daughters (this is also integral to the plot), and soon enough it was time for us to get off of the bus and eat tacooooos.
When we got off, I paused to put my phone back in the fanny pack, and that’s when I noticed that my credit card and metro card were MISSING!! The first thing I did (after panicking, of course) was try to freeze my credit card. To my dismay, I was unable to freeze my card from my online account since I had recently changed my phone number, but my phone was rendered useless since I ran out of phone data usage right then anyway!
Our next option was to go to a pharmacy to buy more data for my phone so that I COULD freeze my card. Luckily, there was a pharmacy across the street, so we started heading there. When we were about a block away from the pharmacy, we heard voices behind us calling out, “Señora, señora!” Well, Yuri heard them and turned around... I had tunnel-vision and just kept walking toward the pharmacy, but when I saw that she wasn’t walking next to me anymore, I turned around and saw that she was talking to the same people we had spoken with on the bus! The father was talking with Yuri, telling her that his older daughter (probably about 9 or 10 years old) saw a card on the floor of the bus and thought it might be one of ours. So, the three of them got OFF of the bus and paid money to take ANOTHER bus back to where we had gotten off the first bus in the hopes that they would find us and be able to return the card!!!!
Now let me just say… DO YOU KNOW HOW ENORMOUS THIS CITY IS?!?! We could have been ANYWHERE by the time they got to the part of the city where we left the bus. We could have been on another bus, in a taxi, on the other side of the city (maybe not quite), EATING TACOS… The chance of them finding us was slim to none, but they still determined to find us!.
And I'll also mention that the father had had a few drinks at that point, so he probably would much rather have been home instead of searching for the owner of a lost credit card, but he and his daughters were on a mission regardless!
Anyway, he did say that his daughter had found ONE card on the floor of the bus, so the worry set in again as he had his daughters look through his wallet for my missing card: WHAT IF they had found my metro card instead of my credit card? I mean, that would still be nice to have it returned, but that wasn’t NEARLY as important as having my credit card back. So, you might be able to imagine the relief that overcame us when we saw the girls begin to pull out my blue visa instead of the bright orange metro card!
While I compensated them for their time and efforts, even 100 billion pesos could not pay for beautiful hearts like theirs, so...
THANK GOD for that family and their selflessness! I'm blown away.
Signing off for now—stay tuned, Mis Chilitos`!
P.S. Yes, those are the tacos I ate afterwards!
`My Little Chilis