Peter Piper Pizza: Mexico

I am now about to write about a strange evening that occurred about a year ago, near the end of my youth groups Mexico mission trip. I have always been tempted to write a post about this, but the embarrassment factor made me hold off for a whole year. I think it has finally been long enough, though, if you promise to pretend that you don't know me while you read it.

Every year after the work is complete and the house is finished, there are several things that we do. One is we collect an offering-type-thing from ourselves and then go shopping with the money raised to buy the Mexican family some household things. Another is that we go to a slightly shady market place where the vendors try and convince us that our lives would not be complete without vulgar T-shirts and brass knuckles. We also hold a barbecue that is really an excuse to embarrass ourselves in wicked game of sand soccer.

Those are all good and well, but when we hop in our 1927 school bus and descend on Peter Piper Pizza like pack of hungry American teenagers who haven't had pizza in, oh, all of four days, then the party really gets started. That is, the party of us making complete idiot tourists of ourselves.

That Peter Piper Pizza is kind of like ChuckE Cheese's for big kids. Lots of arcade games and dumb ways to lose money. After we ate, our team split up and made our way through the throng and did things according to their own taste. One of the guys promptly settled into slaying zombies and some others went to the virtual roller coaster to get a full body massage. Mitch and I simply got chewed out in Spanish by a nine year old girl. To this day neither of us have any idea why, we were just standing there.

The embarrassment started when me and another guy were watching the zombie exterminator ply his trade. After about one second we decided to try and find something else to and the other guy walked quickly away. There was a group of girls standing (but not playing) on the dance and prance game that I will never understand why anyone likes. As he walked by they tried to get his attention with a barrage of Spanish. He didn't even look at them but mumbled something about, "no habla...espan..." as he passed.

I thought that was rather rude so as I passed I decided to at least respond when they tried to get my attention. That was a mistake. After a few seconds of try to understand each other they tried to get me to do that dance and prance thing. I pretended I couldn't understand them. Then one of them held out a digital camera to me and said, "Mm foto, por favor." At first I thought they wanted me to take a picture so I said sure. The next thing I knew there was a stream of short Mexican females getting their picture taken beside me.

I looked around, hoping no one from our group was watching. I couldn't see anyone. Then I looked to the right and through the heads of the clustered patrons, I saw two girls from our group smiling and giving me thumbs up. Nuts. I gave them what I hoped was a tolerantly embarrassed grimace.

The I pivoted and looked behind me. Thirty feet away, on the other side of the cyber pinball weird thing, all four of the youth group leaders were watching me, and apparently their day was being made. Crud. At least they were laughing and not glaring.

Eventually I made my escape and pointed them toward one of the guys on our team who is tall and blond, both of which are surprisingly rare in Mexico. They then went after him and I made myself scarce, basically hanging out with the leaders while the other guys made even bigger fools out of themselves then I had.

Afterwards the guys stood around congratulating each other on their manliness. Basically everyone had weaseled their way into a photo shoot, except Mitch who had the good sense to avoid it from the beginning. Suddenly the zombie killer showed up and excitedly started telling everyone how he had beat the whole game and had a crowd of little kids cheering him on the whole time. Surprisingly, not one of the highschool-boys-who-just-had-their-egos-seriously-boosted-by-a-bunch-of-cutish-Mexican-girls listened to him. Can you believe it.

Now, I realize that most people who read this aren't going to think it is very funny. In fact some of you might be rolling your eyes and thinking that I should be above these kind of stories. But if you pretended you didn't know me it could have gotten a few laughs, right? Maybe? Just a little? No. Oh well. I guess I'll stick to intellectual and meaningful stuff from now on. That's the trouble with people thinking I'm so mature, they get offended when I prove them wrong.