The Chicken on the Bus Goes…

Photo by Flickr user chudo.sveta

From the Muni Diaries submission inbox:

So this isn’t strictly a Muni related incident but it’s tangentially related to the fuss about the alleged story about Asian woman killing a live chicken before boarding a bus in Chinatown.

A few weeks ago I was visiting my friend who is working for the Peace Corps in Honduras. We were in the capital, Tegucigalpa, trying to catch a bus out to a town near her village. When the bus finally rolled by, it was nearly full but we got the last two seats waaaaay in the back of the bus. There was a family of three sitting in the two seats next to ours– a mom, a dad, and a young girl on his lap.

After settling in for the three-hour ride, I started watching the family. I don’t understand much Spanish, but I could get enough that they were worried about something. They had a small brown bag, maybe the size that you would put a sandwich and an apple in. The girl was really excited about something in the bag– I decided it must be a new toy her parents had bought her in the big city and now they were going home. The mom looked in the bag and said, “Where did the other one go?” and I thought, “Oh, there were two toys and one must have fallen out onto the floor.”

They started looking in their other bags and under all the seats around them. Then the dad picked up the paper bag, opened it up and a tiny chick poked its head out and said, “CHEEP!” The girl laughed delightedly and everyone around them suddenly had a newfound interest in finding “the other one.”