OH, RALLY?

Two nights ago I went out for pizza with esteemed fellow expatriate Amanda. Upon leaving the restaurant, we discovered that in the nearby plaza there were a bunch of people watching a film that was being projected onto the side of a building. We stayed to watch for a few minutes, and at first we thought that it was parade footage from recent Independence Day celebrations.

While we were standing there people were definitely giving us the crook-eye (as opposed to the evil-eye or the stink-eye). But that happens to us often, I think: Amanda is blonde—a rarity here—and I am the tallest person in the country. So we thought nothing of it.

After a few minutes of showing parades, the focus of the film changed to a man giving a fiery speech in front of a podium. The audio was low-quality, but we could still make out the word “Marcos”—and that, plus the fact that the speaker was wearing a ski mask, led us to believe that we were actually standing in a makeshift Zapatista rally, and were watching a low-budget, Mexican version of Triumph of the Will.

On realizing this, Amanda and I had a conversation that went roughly as follows:

Me: Shall we leave before we get our asses kicked?
Amanda: Definitely.