Thursday, June 27, 2013

This taxi driver could have done brain surgery. While driving!

I was waiting for the taxi after the tour of the organic coffee farm ended.


The sounds of an approaching car sent the dogs into a barking frenzy and the red car appeared.

"Oh, you have a death cab to take you to your hotel" said the woman who was a part of our group.

She and her husband had the two of the most adorable and beautiful kids--about seven and nine years old, I think--that I have ever seen.  And so well behaved, too, which is rare anymore in the United States.  If they keep at this rate, the two girls will grow up to break quite a few young men's hearts; I feel sorry for those unfortunate lads already.

"The taxi drivers drive like crazy here" she added with a chuckle.

I got in to the car.  It was a female driver.  Probably in her late twenties or early thirties.

She let out a volley of words in Spanish towards me.

"No Espanol" I said with a smile.

"You speak English?" I asked her.  She didn't.

She asked me something that I recognized as where in Orosi I wanted to go. "Orosi Lodge" I said, and we took off.  "Took off" is a literal usage!

We barely turned a corner, when her smartphone called for her attention.  I noticed that she had the earplug on.  Boy did words pour out of her at speeds faster than a speeding bullet. I wondered if the person at the other end also spoke at such speeds.  I imagined sparks when the words collided in cyberspace.  No wonder there is network outage every once in a while!



Even as she was talking on the smartphone, the radio dispatch beckoned her.  She barked a few words into that even while continuing with the other conversation.  I was tired simply from watching all these.

She stepped up the pace of the car.  And her speaking.  I wondered which speed influenced the other.

For a minute there was no conversation.  And then a new kind of a jingle.  She yanked out an older model cellphone from her shirt pocket and started jabbering into that one.

When she was done with that, she said something at top speeds in Spanish all the while with hand gestures.  I understood what she was saying--with the radio, her cellphone, and smartphone, sometimes she gets confused as to which one was the one she was talking into.  I smiled.  She laughed a throaty laugh.

She tried to pass a bus on a curve.  And then she immediately slowed down to stay behind the bus.  I understood her exclamations as "a big truck."  Sure enough there was one.

I have seen women multitask and have always been impressed.  This woman beat them all.  She tops the woman I saw at the basilica, who was walking and crossing the road while talking on her cellphone even as her infant baby was suckling from her breast.

How do these women do all those at the same time, when I am incapable of even typing and drinking coffee simultaneously!


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