All's fun and games until someone get's pooped on by a pigeon.

That's my new motto for downtown Cuernavaca. I spent the grand majority of today's financial allotment on groceries for the coming week and opted to have lunch/read in a little park-ish thing near the food-buying-place (whoa, losing some descriptive abilities in English today, standby...). Quite nice in theory, huh? I set up a little desk (the kilogram box of crackers I bought. Something to behold, let me tell ya) and had at it. I bought a wonderful-smelling loaf of bread, much richer than the typical loaf here, a piece of which you could crush down to the size a lump of sugar (and then feed to a horse as a cruel joke) but it turned out to be olive bread, and olives are one of the three foods that I prefer not to eat. The others are large cuts of raw onion and raw octopus. Fortunantly I'd also bought some Valentina salsa, an institution here in Mexico and more often consumed than water. It made a nice complement to the olive taste.

Anyways, there I was enjoying some food and a short story by Juan Rulfo when I heard a very wet, heavy splat on the bench next to me. I looked over. The man on the other bench appeared unphased but then again, he was wearing a hat. I simply put the bread back in it's ill-fitting bag and kept reading, not daring to look up into the branches above. The ambient splattering around me was just growing familiar when my head and reading material became an LZ. Splat.

Taking the hint I walked on. Picked up some coffee at a little kitchen store I found last week (very good Chiapas coffee for $0.50 US; the downside is it's always to-go) where I got a lecture about how coffee was originally intended to be a rich medicine and "not an aphrodisiac." "Lies." said the coffee lady, "All Lies." I took my cup of medicine and ambled up the road to find some shade. I took a turn through the grounds of Cuernavaca's XVI century cathedral and found a quiet spot under the arches of an open-air chapel to reset my crackerbox table. I began reading again, terribly pleased at the place I'd found to pass the afternoon. I was reclining in same place an hour later, talking to an old woman from Guerrero when I heard an ominous "Coooo!" (which reminded me of Graham). My body tensed, ready to react, but as with all good stories of natural predators it was too late. Splat. I'm glad the lady was with me or I might have done physical harm to the perpetrator. I walked away to find a rag or something and my old friend yelled after me the Spanish equivalent of "There's piegeons I tell you! Piegeons!" Don't I know it.

So I retreated with my few pesos to coffee shop without a soul, possessed of the ambience of a Dunkin Doughnuts with cheap coffee to match(not a complement for you New Englanders out there). I thought I'd crossed this one off my list for good, but I was compelled to make the compromise this time around.

Pigeons'll do that to you.(photos: 1. the perp 2. my hero)