Pics from Halloween, and the story of How I Got Robbed

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I suppose I’ll give you the good stuff first. Halloween weekend was awesome. The town of Copan Ruinas is beautiful and expensive and full of gringos and everything that a touristy town should be. We had gourmet coffee and imported cheeses and dark beer and fancy bloody marys with celery salt [swoon]. It’s pretty close to paradise if such a place exists in Honduras. I am extremely jealous of Kyla because she gets to live and work there and now that just doesn’t seem fair.  

Photo courtesy of the TT website

Brent and I stayed at the lovely Twisted Tanya’s which isn’t exactly a hotel. It is a restaurant owned by two English ex-pats and their adorable 5-year-old daughter.  (Upon entering our room, I went into the bathroom to check out all the little soaps lined up around the sink. When I came out of the bathroom, there was a little girl with giant blonde springy curls sitting on the bed with her arms crossed and a very convincing pout on her face. “What are you doing in my room?” she asked me. For a while, I actually thought that I was in her room. Little did I know that was her idea of a prank.)

Not actually taken Halloween weekend, but still the two of us in Copan

The upstairs of Tanya’s is where the resturaunt and bar is which looks out over the town of Copan Ruinas. The ground floor is the apartment where the owners live, and one solitary room which gets rented out to backpackers (us!).  The small room is attached to a spacious courtyard with tall palm trees and a small table in the sunlight to sit and drink a cup of strong local coffee and smoke a morning cigarette – if you’re in to that kind of thing.  I guess you could say Brent and I had the place all to ourselves for the entire weekend (and that makes me feel special). 

The big costume party was Saturday night at Hotel Via Via and the Olancho girls and I were Lady Gaga(s). Pretty badass huh? The matching wigs and fake eyelashes were a prerequisite to be a Gaga. And if you look closely you will notice that each one of us is wearing a different Gaga-suit accurately designed to look like one she actually wore. In case you can’t figure it out I am the bright red Gaga, modeling the look from her appearance as host of MTVs TRL, during the peak of her spandex phase. I had a seamstress in Catacamas help me make the outfit for a grand total of 80 lempira ($4.21).  The wig was itchy and the bodysuit was hard to pee in, but it was worth it.

Liz, me, Erika, Tara, Katie, Jen

And the best news of all… the Gagas won the costume contest!! Well actually, we tied for first place but I’m not gonna nitpick here.

Josh, Eben, Matt, Julian

 (The other winners were the boys from Olancho who went as Piñata beer bottles which was simply awesome. Especially because those boys hauled their body-sized piñatas all the way from Olancho to Copan on public busses. Props boys. Props).

I think we won some gift certificates and free trip or something. But the trophy and the bragging rights are really what it’s all about – duh.

So basically, awesome night all in all.

Until I got robbed.

There was no weapon involved or anything. Some guy was walking behind me and just grabbed my purse and ran away with it.

And to be honest, it was about 90% my fault and 10% bad f-ing luck.

I was walking with Brent in the streets of Copan at 2 am, and we were going from one bar to the next. I was wearing crazy heels and the streets there are cobblestone nightmare. So naturally I was going pretty slowly. And there was a group of 6 or 7 volunteers about a half a block in front of us. So it was just the two of us in a dimly-lit deserted street (brilliant, I know).

But then Brent noticed this man walking pretty closely behind us. Brent turns around several times because he looked sketchy and was walking super close to me. I turned around and looked at him and he was smiling, and I thought it was because he was laughing at my costume or something. Finally Brent stops me in the street and tells the guy “pase, go around us”. So he does. And as the man walks around my right side, he grabs my small clutch right out of my hand and takes off running in the opposite direction. I was frozen in shock and just shouted at the guy but Brent ran after him. But by that point however he had rounded the corner a block ahead and was long gone.

Se fue el hombre. Se fue my bright red clutch with my cell phone, my ATM card, 600 lempira, and my pocket-sized water proof digital camera. Oh, and my bright red lipstick.

Some random bystanders called the police but as far as I am concerned they never showed up. (No surprise there). The Peace Corps Safety Officer made me encouraged me to fill out a police report at the station the next day. But I would be kidding myself to expect anything to come of it.

To be honest, I don’t really care about my things. My new ATM card is already on the way and my phone was a piece of junk. The only thing that makes me really sad is the loss of all the pictures from the evening. I would really like to have those back*.  I am mostly just angry that some asshole took me for an idiot and got away with it. And it totally could have been prevented.

The whole bus ride home I was thinking to myself “I shouldn’t have been in a bright flashy outfit with a little purse. I shouldn’t have been in the streets at 2 am. I shouldn’t have allowed that guy to be so close behind me.” … I also imagine what I would have done if we had caught the guy. I’m sure I would have given that sucker the ass-kicking of his life…

But I can’t change anything now. Thinking about it too much makes me angry. Even a week later it still makes my blood boil when I picture his stumpy legs running (surprisingly fast) away from me with my precious pictures in tow. I can’t believe that I let myself become a statistic**. I am going to be damn sure it never happens again. Not to me. And I am also going to try not to be bitter towards this country and all of Hondurans (because I was for a while).

Shit happens. I’m going to learn from it and move on. This just happened to be a very expensive and inconvenient lesson to have to learn. 

Paz mis amores, y cuidase todo el tiempo.  

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*if you don’t know much about me, know that I treasure pictures. I was a photojournalist for a while and I use photography as a way to document my most favorite adventures. I treat my cameras the way Mac owners treat their laptops. The loss of those pics from Halloween and the zipline is pretty devastating.

**Something like one out of every four Peace Corps Volunteers will have some kind of “safety or security incident”, be it robbery, assault, theft or some other petty crime.