All we had to do was ride the bus for 15 minutes. That’s it. But somehow a 15 minute ride took us 3 hours. Why we didn’t just get off the bus we still don’t know! Seriously, we should have just gotten off of the bus. LOL This story still brings laughter to our lives so I thought it would be fun to share.
We had only been in Guadalajara, Mexico less than a month. Our Spanish was quite rusty but we could communicate a little bit. We were there to learn the language and we had been staying outside the city center about an hour by bus. But we had been invited to stay a week with our friend Joan who lived right in the city. It was our first day at her house and we just had to hop on one bus and get off not too much further down the road and then walk the little ways to our class.
Guadalajara is a pretty big city so we kept our eyes open looking for our stop but somehow missed it. We had heard that the buses just circled around and ended up back at the beginning. “It can’t be that much further, we should just stay on the bus,” I remember one of us suggesting. That way we don’t have to find our way back. Somehow it made sense at the time. Thank the Lord this was before kids. The other agreed…and after 30 minutes more we were like “uh oh!”. The bus just kept going…outside the city, it was not circling back.
We did have phones so we texted our teacher to tell her we were going to be a little late for class. It was December and we had made Christmas cutout cookies the day before. We wanted to share some with our teacher and her kids but they were slowly disappearing as I half stress-ate/half ate because we were getting hungry.
Finally the driver stopped and said we had to get off the bus. He had stopped in a place that appeared to be the middle of nowhere. We thought we could stay on because it went back but we had to cross the street and pay again, 50 cents. We were not only losing time we were losing money! 😉
We got back on the bus and started to make our way back into the city. We hit bad traffic. The new driver tried to communicate to us in Spanish and gestures that we should watch a movie. What how could we do that? We did not have smartphones. I think he was trying to let us know it would be a long time. Oh my word.
We had private Spanish classes so we felt bad because our teacher was waiting for us! Three hours later, no joke, we FINALLY managed to get off the bus. We only made it for for last 30 minutes of class. Our bums were so sore from sitting on the hard seats.
We were like what were we thinking, staying on the bus? I think it was in part due to lack of confidence in our Spanish but mostly because we thought it would circle back around in 30 minutes. Oh goodness. At least we had the sugar cookies! Next time, we will definitely be getting OFF THE BUS!
Travel in a foreign country usually brings some entertaining stories and often mishaps along the way. We’ve had plenty! Do you have any that you would care to share?
