que dios te bendiga!

Sometimes you want a fruit smoothie and a quiet walk home. Sometimes you get a fruit smoothie and a frantic Peruvian man instead.

I was minding my own business at a corner smoothie shop, sipping on some pineapple-banana deliciousness, when a man walked up.

"Do you speak English?"
"Yes."
"Hablas español?"
"...Si..."

And then a rush of rapid-fire Spanish that I didn't understand.

"Señor, mi español no es tan bueno. Necesita hablar más despacio."

So he slowed down. Kind of. He needed to make a phone call to Kuala Lumpur and was having trouble with the international calling card he'd bought. I told him I had never used a card like that before. There were no instructions on it, which didn't matter, because he didn't know any English.

I spent the next hour figuring out how exactly I could help him make this oh-so-essential phone call. Turns out, he had the country codes written down incorrectly.

After a few failed attempts at finding this information (including calling a Thai phone number he had on a scrap of paper and subsequently leaving some Thai lady thoroughly confused on the other end), we wound up in the lobby of a nearby hotel.

There, I told the concierge about our problem (because by this point, it was my problem, too), she made a couple of phone calls, and 10 minutes later we had country codes for Peru and Malaysia.

We walked outside where I tried no fewer than 12 different combinations of adding or taking away plus signs and zeros from the phone number.

When I finally got through to Kuala Lumpur, I handed him the phone. He talked for three or four minutes without taking a breath, hung up, and thanked me effusively, asking if he owed me anything.

"No, no, it's perfectly all right..."
"Gracias, gracias," etc.
"De nada. Que Dios te bendiga!"

He strode away and I walked home, thinking about how surprising life can be and thanking God that my parents convinced me to take Spanish in high school instead of Latin.