WE NOW OWN A SCOOTER!!
Well, it took three days, but we finally bought a scooter. After having to reschedule our first attempt to meet the seller and then driving all the way to Masaya to make the transaction only to have our good friend Bosco tell us that we really should do this with a lawyer present, we finally got it done today.
We agreed that she would meet me in Granada in Parque Central at 6:00 pm then we would head over to the lawyer’s office, which is just a couple of blocks away. There were a few translation and technological hiccups involved in the process, but we finally got it worked out and I met her and her brother (who’d followed on his motorcycle to take her back to Masaya) in front of the Cathedral of Granada.
Then came my first time ever to drive a scooter. On a busy Friday night. In one of the most trafficked hubs in Granada.
Since Sixy (that’s the seller’s name) had no idea where we were going, I was to drive there on the scooter with her on the back while her brother followed on his motorcycle. Sixy handed me the key and I put on my super cool motorcycle helmet. I then told her that I had never driven a scooter before and promptly proved this by trying to turn the scooter on by sticking the key into the glove box lock. Sixy chuckled nervously and showed me how to turn the thing on correctly.
And we were off, zooming like a guy who’d never driven a scooter before and wearing a super cool, full-head motorcycle helmet that obliterated about 80% of his peripheral vision. Sixy kept telling me to go easy on the throttle and slow down, although I felt like I was going pretty slow, if only in random directions and directly toward just about every dangerous object that could completely ruin our nights and, possibly, lives.
We eventually made it to the lawyer’s office and the deal went down. When it was all done, when all legal documents had spat out of our lawyer’s dot matrix printer and were signed, and when the money had changed hands, Sixy gave me the scooter key and her helmet. She said my super cool motorcycle helmet was too much and that I should wear hers so I could see better.
She and her brother rode off into the Nicaraguan night on his motorcycle like heroes in some action film. I climbed onto my scooter and almost wrecked immediately, but eventually made it home.
