A Spanish Bus Driver: A Riddle

Published by

Clarissa

January 20, 2014

When I got my BA (with all kinds of prizes, awards and accolades), my parents presented me with a gift of my very first trip to Spain and Portugal. It was kind of weird to be planning a PhD in Peninsular literature without ever having visited the country, so the gift was very timely.

This was a bus trip where I was the only Canadian among a big group of Brits and a few Americans. We were led by our tour guide Francisco, a man who was gay in every sense of the word, and our driver Jesús. Jesús was in his fifties, didn’t speak a word of English, and was very happy to have at least a single Spanish-speaker on the bus whom he could regale with stories of his childhood under Franco and long quotes from his favorite book Lazarillo de Tormes.

After a few days of traveling, I noticed that Jesús kept getting stopped by traffic police. This was weird because he had told me that he’d been working as a tour bus driver for almost 25 years.

“So how come you keep breaking the rules?” I asked Jesús after we arrived in Seville. “I thought you were supposed to be hugely experienced at driving.”

“Oh, I do it on purpose,” he explained. “I want to get stopped every couple of hours. If I were driving a Spanish or a Latin American group, I wouldn’t need to. But with these crazy Anglos. . .”

And now the riddle: Why did Jesús make efforts to get stopped by traffic police when he drove this particular group?

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7 responses to “A Spanish Bus Driver: A Riddle”

E (The Third Glance)

January 20, 2014

He needed a break to speak with someone from his own culture?

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cliff arroyo

January 20, 2014

My first guess might be that he needed a break (or seven) from the racket?

IME non-anglophones often find English to be pretty unpleasant to listen to:

My second guess might be that if the passengers saw him being stopped they might feel sorry for him and leave something in the tip basket.

While I’m here, the British are my least favorite nationality among tourists (running away with the competition). Also I have trouble understanding a lot of Brit accents (when they’re speaking with each other) especially those that don’t make it into the international media.

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1. David Bellamy
  
  January 20, 2014
  
  OK, Cliff Arroyo, I cannot seem to see the connection between the Polish video and your comment.
  
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  1. cliff arroyo
    
    January 20, 2014
    
    The first announcement is made in her normal, basically pleasant, voice, she then stuffs her mouth full of dumplings so that the ‘English’ announcement will sound right.
    
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el

January 20, 2014

I think it was something in the group’s behavior. Can only think about 1 probably wrong thing:
Other groups wanted to exit a bus and walk around from time to time, while this group was forcing him to drive non-stop.

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Laura

January 20, 2014

Hmmm…. I have no idea here. Maybe he needed the break to get the tourists to behave (e.g. Being around police would make them behave?)

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Jones

January 24, 2014

“… Dios mio, I have to get away from them because they are the nicest unpleasant people I have ever met!”

Once I had the unpleasant niceness of escorting two Americans around a Scandinavian city, one from the Southeast, one from the Northeast. As they wandered around a city older than their country by several hundred years, they attempted to find equivalences between neighbourhoods established in the 14th century and American city centres.

Of course, there is no such equivalence, but I was wound up with prattling on with them so I could at least get them to keep up with me on our journey.

One of the local residents looked at me as I said something horribly misleading in a way that seemed to indicate I was totally off my nut and should seek medical attention. I held up my pointing finger to my lips, as if to say, “Shhh .. it’s our little secret”, and then grinned at her.

I realised what they really needed was People Like Them to converse with, so I headed in the direction of the south of the city where I knew of a hotel full of foreign journalists and business critters who like drinking together. They took up comfortable refuge in this spot for several evenings until it was time to go back to the States.

It was truly the nicest unpleasant experience I could wish upon anyone who has to escort people around a city.

Also, before you get too far along with riposting against Plummy British English, I offer the following look at the North American variation as presented by an Italian in the 1970s:

Adriano Celentano — “Prisencolinensinainciusol”:

Well, OLL RAIGTH then. 🙂

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