El coronel no tiene quien le deje un libro

A brief postscript to my last post: (hence the excessively laboured attempt to adapt another García Márquez work for the title of this post, which - mercifully - only Spanish speakers will understand and groan at.)

• My 15-hour journey to Mérida was actually only 14 hours long. Sometimes you get lucky with vague Mexican bus schedules.

• The movie they played was a French RomCom (in Spanish) with a plot that was conspicuously Hollywood-esque and reminiscient of What Happens in Vegas... starring Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher, which I sat through leaving Tijuana on October1. I watched the French movie because the light on my seat wouldn't work.

• So no Rebus until about 1am when I woke up, realised the bus was half empty and there was no need for me to sit right next to the Mexican girl in seat 13 beside me, and moved to a seat with a working light and read for a while before going back to sleep.

• When I arrived at the hostel in Merida, it turned out that the book exhchange in the hostel was suspended do to excessive abuse of the take one, leave one policy. So I had lugged War & Peace all the way there and still couldn't exchange it. (Though I did give away the one Rebus book I finished to Daniel from Israel.)

• Now I am in Playa del Carmen, reading Laura Esquivel's Malinche in Spanish (not loving it), and the book exchange in my hostel has a total of about 10 books to choose from, about 7 of which are in English. Not a good selection. Assuming I finish Malinche in the next couple fo days I think I will be exchanging Tolstoy for Andy McNab. How droll.

All of which goes towards proving something close to a point from an earlier post: you never really know how things will go until you actually live them.