Sitting on eagles is fraught with Peril

Quite a few summers ago, I was doing volunteer work in Cozumel, Mexico. I, along with about 20 other people, was building an addition to a church in a poor neighborhood whose members were apparently so desperate to expand their facilities that they would allow a group of high-school and college students to handle the construction. Or perhaps that reveals the quality of building construction in Mexico, where untrained, lazy students would be competitive when working for free.
Either way, it was a great experience that presented many challeges for us to master.
1. It's very hot in Mexico. Drink water or some other beverage, or pass out. I chose to pass out, but then your friends will find the most readily available liquid to re-hydrate you with. In my case, it was some local fizzy drink that tasted like dishwater used to clean out a glass of apple juice.
2. There is a trick to sleeping in a real, non-decorative hammock. You have to lie in it diagonally, so that your body will lie flat instead of like a banana. The other option, which I instinctively chose, is to forgoe sleep altogether for several days, while doing heavy manual labor from 05:30 to 16:30. At the end of the several days, you will sleep in a hammock even if it is drenched with rain and covered in mosquitos. I know this.
3. If you go to a beach at night, don't make sudden movements. You'll mess with the local bats' navigation, and they will collide with you. I thought this was really neat, but that may have been caused by experiencing items 1 & 2 first.
4. Don't build a campfire on the aforementioned beach unless you are prepared to bribe the police. The fires keep returning sea-turtles from... well, returning, and the locals hate that.
5. Keep off the eagles. This may seem like a no-brainer, but let me explain. There are a pair of large golden eagle statues by the pier in Cozumel, positioned to greet passengers disembarking from cruise-ships, presumably to inform them of Mexico's greatness or their eagle surplus or something. There is no guardrail around said eagles, nor signs of any kind. These eagles are easily ten feet tall, and very eaglish in form. Meaning that I am going to climb them, and sit on their heads. Our group's photographer hails this as a capital idea, and informs my friend and me that immortality awaits were we to climb on the eagles and be photographed.

Done.

As we dismount the eagles, elements of the Mexican equivalent of the national-guard advance on our position, determined to avenge the eagles' honor. They are coming in jeeps with men manning mounted machine guns. They look unhappy.
We are taken into custody by assault-rifle toting Mexicans who shout reproaches at us, following a general "DON'T SIT ON THE EAGLES!" theme. They begin to lead us to Mexican jail, which sounds bad, but according to reputation is truly quite horrid. Fortunately our group translator begins explaining that we are so stupid, it would be a disgrace to the jail to put us there. The convicts would surely revolt at being forced to breathe the same air as a pair of eagle-squatters. The troops see the reason in this, and let us go with a stern warning against a relapse of eagle-sitting behavior in any future contact with eagles.

I slept pretty well that night, so if you can't figure out the hammock, go sit on the eagles.