I've been at the receiving end of some heavy duty Hispanic kindness and hospitality lately. It was a fine summer day at Newcastle beach park when I, busy digging sand for my son's sand castle, proceeded to drop my wallet unawares on the beach. This woman walks up to me, asks if I am "Priyanka" (prompting mildly deluded, heat induced sensation of meeting yet another giddy reader of this blog, haha), and returns my wallet to me, with not a slip of paper missing!

On the way out of the park on this dreadfully crowded day, this middle aged guy's walking out with his wife. I wait for them to cross the road before I start taking the car out. He merely looks at me, sees the overfull, chaotic parking lot and and decides that I need help. Usually, any criticism about my driving- (which is PERFECT, people! I drove for years in India of all places with not one accident or a single ticket!)- gets me into the Crouching Tiger pose, nails out and everything. But this man moved soo quick, I was just left laughing at the sheer innocence of his political incorrectness ! I mean who sees a woman with a kid in the back seat, and automatically thinks she needs his help with pulling a car out of a tight spot?! That he didn't speak a word of English, helped the situation quite a bit. He came close, smiled, shouted some directions in Spanish, and next thing I know, he zoomed his arm onto the wheel, moved it this way and that, and 7 seconds later, I was out of the lot! All this while his wife smiled proudly, clutching a habachi full of chorizo. I smiled my best smile, waved a "Mucho gracias" and drove home in mild daze, also laughing at the "private space" interpretation of the Mexican culture. An Indian man will think twice before getting so close to a woman not related to him!

The next Tuesday, I got a chance to interview Pedro Esquivel at the lovely Crossroads Farmers Market. Pedro is a farmer, a class of people deeply close to my heart since I looove to garden and had many many relatives and friends in whose orchards and gardens I've spent some of my best childhood afternoons. However, I don't usually get to interview farmers too much and it's a bit hard to shift gears from talking business with senior UN diplomats to talking shop with a farmer. We both started off a bit hesitantly, he not sure of what to say to an Indian woman holding a dictaphone to his face, and me not sure of what to ask first. But I'm nothing if not tenacious and then of course, a smile is the same in any language! Our interview went very well and ended with Pedro loading me with his prized produce that took 6 hrs to get to Bellevue from this Yakima farm. He refused to take any money from me. I told him to charge me fairly, that I valued his hard work and wanted to pay him fairly for his hard work. What he told me left me with a smile. "In our culture, Priyanka, when we give something, we do it with pure love, without any expectation of getting something back in return. This is our gift to you." I told him we also did the same in the Indian culture, and made a farmer friend from Guadalupe, living in Yakima and selling in Bellevue that day. Growing sweet peas on trellises in Chandigarh, who knew this would happen one day?! It felt so nice to feel like I belonged to a community at the market. Life is good in Crossroads, Bellevue :).