It has been an interesting few days down here in Guatemala. I suppose after an attempted mugging/killing in the Antigua hills by banditos, I’ve learned to re-think my expectations of what might happen each day. I haven’t figured out if it is the country or just my stupid quest for something different that puts me in these situations. I have never been opposed to finding a bit of adventure from time-to-time, but I just want to make sure I live through them. This, it appears, is rather difficult in this country.

If you would have asked me a few weeks ago if I could ever see myself taking on the roll of sober cab in Central America at 2:00 in the morning, driving around a group of drunken Guatemalans, I might have dismissed it off-hand. If you asked me that today, I would say … I’m never doing that again.

It all started a few days earlier when I met a group of Guatemalans during Pub Trivia at Rilley’s in Antigua. We ended up having a few beers and chatting away the evening. I expressed my interest in seeing what it was like to be living in Guatemala and with amazing kindness, they said, “Sounds like a great idea! We’ll come get you later this week and you can come into the city, meet our families and we can go out to dinner together.”

They picked me up in Antigua and drove me back into the city I left behind. Along the way I met the entire extended family, which I found is a pretty common thing in Guatemala. It was fantastic! They found me a guesthouse where I could crash for the night – even though I was also offered a place at one of their houses. Far be it from me to push the limits of local hospitality. I was scratching my head, speaking broken (yet improving) spanglish and wondering how I got to this point.

And this is where it gets funny.

I got picked up at my guesthouse later that night and we drove to our dinner spot. It was Chili’s. Yes, the American chain restaurant, Chili’s! I thought it was a special Guatemalan restaurant that just happened to be called Chili’s, but no … it’s the real deal, with the red chili pepper logo and everything. I really think congress should make laws about exporting this crap. They really should.

As if being at Chili’s was not a delight enough, the main event of the evening was live music, but not just any live music. I was treated to one of the best 80s cover bands I’ve ever heard. They sang everything from Rod Stewart to Journey … in perfect English, hitting some notes that men should not produce. As the band sang, the crowd drank. A lot. I was paying particularly close attention to the booze consumption because I was wondering who was going to help me find my way home. I didn’t even know the name of the place I was staying and I didn’t have my rock with me as protection this time.

I feel stupid for having to admit that I “closed down a Chili’s,” but I did. And that’s when the party moved to a German bar just down the street where more drinking took place. It is local custom for you to buy the entire bottle of booze at the bar and pass it around until it’s finished, or blindness occurs. For some, I think they were pretty close to the later. With any foreign language, people become really good at it after a few drinks and then … really bad after a few more drinks. We were at the later part of the language lessons when it was time to decide who got to drive who home.

I won the jackpot!

It was mostly out of self-preservation that I took up the honor of being sober cab for the evening. Plus, I don’t think anyone else could spell C.A.R., much less find one, figure out the keys part and then drive the thing. I took the keys from the owner with the idea that they would co-pilot our way to my guesthouse and help me navigate the Guatemala City streets.

There were a few flaws in this thinking. First, the windows of every car in Guatemala are tinted black. Not dark, but black. I couldn’t see a thing. And it’s not like they just tint a few windows, they do the whole thing all the way around. Second, the only directions I was able to get from my co-pilot were, “go straight.” The problem is that none of the roads in the city are straight. There are curves, roundabouts and everything but a straight road. As I’m flying down the road, not knowing where I’m going, I discovered that I had been blowing through red lights without abandon. I figured a flashing red arrow was stop, but my co-pilot, with great confidence, kept telling me to “keep going, go straight.”

When we finally found my guesthouse, I had the obligatory, “I’m not going to let you drive home conversation.” In Guatemala there don’t seem to be any DWI laws, or at least they’re on a whole other level than the United States. We bantered back and for the before one of the other people showed up to drive my co-pilot home. I thought I was giving the keys to him so the other person wouldn’t drive. In the end, they both drove home in separate cars.

I still can’t believe I ate dinner at a Chili’s. Oh yeah, and I guess driving a car in Guatemala City was a trip too.