Kilometer 59.2 on Mexico 1
 I drove to Mexico this weekend for a wedding. If our nation organized its wars the way this wedding was organized, there would be friendly governments from Iraq to Iran (if one started from Baghdad and went west around the world to Tehran).
I didn't do any driving once I reached the resort where the wedding was held, but I will consider the following when I return to Baja California:
- I passed from the United States to Mexico merely by momentarily slowing down my car. The trip from L.A. to our destination between Rosarito and Ensenada took three hours on a weekday morning.
- The documents proving my Mexican car insurance were not checked or asked for at any time, but I still think the $90 I paid to AAA was a good investment.
- I crossed the border at San Ysidro into Mexico by momentarily slowing down. The drive through Tijuana was pleasant. When hookers would approach the car, I would point to the passenger seat and say "Tengo uno ya." Big laughs all around.
- Aside from Mari, the resort's head of housekeeping who babysat our tots splendidly and affectionately (all without knowing a word of English), I found the service pretty surly. I tip well, I order in Spanish, and I take a vacation once every five years. Why was I made to feel my business was not welcome in a place where the only money came from the north? That attitude would not fly at In 'n' Out Burger.
- The food was great, and despite the best efforts of Donald Trump to sully the coastline, the beaches were beautiful.
- Everyone takes dollars. I got dirty looks when I asked "Cuanta costa en pesos?"
- Crossing back at midday on Sunday, the line to get into the United States took two hours, and then there were stupid accident rubbernecking delays in the United States that consumed more time. It took six hours to get home. Next time I will return under cover of darkness.
- Churros sold on the road to U.S. Customs are the best churros.
- I handed the U.S. border guard my and my wife's passports and our tots' birth certificates. He then asked where my son and daughter were, and I pointed to them in the back seat. I was momentarily scared that, after waiting in line for two hours, we would be indefinitely delayed. All he would have had to ask my three-year-old is if we had kidnapped her at gunpoint and she would have said "Yes." Children are not reliable witnesses.
On the way home, we stopped at a McDonald's in San Ysidro that figures prominently in my memory. It was built a few hundred yards up the road from the site of the biggest mass murder in U.S. history (at the time), when a former welder named James Huberty opened fire at a McDonald's, killing 21 people. After the murders, that McDonald's was torn down and its replacement opened a few doors up San Ysidro Boulevard.
My father and I had been having a fight in July of 1984 when this happened, and as I left the room he returned to his paper, where he read the word "Huberty" aloud. I thought he'd said "Puberty" (I was 14) so I thought he was negating all my significant points by reducing them to a phase. So I responded "Senility." Then we figured it out. No big laughs all around. That's not how it worked back then.
See also: Bridget La FondaLabels: mexico, personal history, travel
Bonsai Mariachi
 According to El Diario del Trovador Cientifico, a trade journal, the newer, more compact mariachi will be easier to transport across borders, less expensive to clothe, and is a natural tenor. Pitfalls include greater vulnerability to el chupacabra and ducks.Labels: mexico, news
Tengo que pellizcar un pan
I went to Mexico for a few days.
Mexico is a place where a man can think.
(This isn't necessarily more true in Mexico than it is anywhere else, but it's an interesting thing to say to someone.)
I was under the impression that once one puts up a huge sign, one's alcoholism is no longer anonymous. Do you think AA Mexico thought no one would catch on because the sign was in Spanish?
This is a statue of Lazaro Cardenas, former President of Mexico and the man who nationalized the Mexican oil industry. One can get the same price for gas in Tijuana that one could get across the country in Quintana Roo (currently about .30 less per gallon than in California). There are statues of Cardenas all around Mexico - this one stands in Ensenada.
He is a national hero.
Among other things, Cardenas expropriated the oil machinery of corporations like Shell in the 1930s and was neither bombed nor sanctioned out of existence. In fact, the United States and Great Britain grudgingly submitted to his terms.
He improved infrastructure and public education, his administration was known for its honesty, and he campaigned in some of the remotest parts of Mexico on horseback and without the coterie of bodyguards employed by politicians of the time.
Despite these, my friend Alx, who is from Mexico, tells visitors that this is the statue of the man who invented the elbow fart. Ay cabron.
I know this 400-ft. flagpole and immense flag look cumbersome, but I bought six or seven of them along with bags of churros from enterprising street vendors on the way back to the United States.
Previously: EnsenadaLabels: mexico
 I went to Ensenada for the beginning of Carnaval last weekend. Ensanada is in Baja California, which means a trip south on the 5 through San Diego and Tijuana. I drove down with my compadre Alx and two people he knew from his job, who happened to be Norwegian. It is rare that I am not the whitest person in the room, pigmentally.
I have never driven to Mexico, only flown to Cabo San Lucas, at Baja's tip. So I was looking forward to rolling through the border, guns blazing.
This was my first non-working vacation since September, 2002 when I went up to Big Bear. I didn't know how to act with all the free time. I thought that drinking might help.
It took us two hours to leave Los Angeles on Friday afternoon. We traveled 25 miles in two hours. We got to the border in about six hours (it might take three hours, or less, with no traffic).
Just before we got to the border, we passed through San Ysidro.
San Ysidro was the location of the McDonald's massacre of 1984. There is now no longer a McDonald's where James Huberty opened fire and killed 21 people, but there is one about 100 yards away. I was having a fight with my father that summer and as I left the room he opened up the Lowell Sun and said, "Huberty". I thought he was attributing whatever indignation I was feeling to my pubescence, so I turned around and said, "Senility."
"A Drinking Weekend in Mexico" would not have been on my list of things to do as an adult back in 1984, but I remember reading that article and looking up San Ysidro on a map, thinking there would never be a reason for me to go there. It was odd seeing where that happened.
The road after the border was a big difference from the one that preceded it. There was a big anti-sex tourism billboard in English with a photograph of a dark-skinned child that read "I am not a tourist attraction". Chilling.
 I didn't care to stop in Tijuana, regardless of my respect and admiration for Herb Alpert. It was interesting to be able to see Tijuana on one end of the border and look across the walls and ravines at San Ysidro in the United States.
The highway through Tijuana did not reveal the city in its best light. Just as in California, though, the nicer houses were up in the hills (as opposed to South American cities in which the hills are where the poor live).
We passed through La Fonda, Rosarita Beach, and CantaMar, where there is a palm tree farm (palm trees are not native to the Californias, but CantaMar's developer was never able to sell his young palm trees so there is a forest of them along the side of the road).
Arriving in Ensenada around 11 p.m., we first traveled through the downtown area. One town is very like another when your head's down over your pieces, brother. Our destination was Alx' parents' neighborhood, which looked like certain sections of Los Angeles.
"This place is teeming with Mexicans," I said. I wished I could swap the population of my current neighborhood for the population of this one.
After unpacking, we took a cab back downtown, which was packed with locals, families, and street bands. It was good to see people walking in the street who are doing it by choice. I don't really see that here.
I was looking forward to getting some Mexican Coca Cola. In Mexico and Central and South America, Coke is made with cane sugar and just tastes better. In America it is made with corn syrup or a similar high volume sweetener. We stopped in at a tacqueria and I ordered a Coke with my three tacos. It was American.
 Compounding this dilemma was the place we spent most of the rest of the night. Papas and Beer is a big, American-style tourist bar. While I wasn't bent on going native, I didn't see a single Mexican in that place. Even the people behind the bar were American. It was like being in an Orange County bar, except there are still more Mexicans in Orange County bars. It was disappointing.
On the drive down Alx had told me that in Mexico (when Alx talks about Mexico, the X becomes an H, his moustache becomes pencil thin, and tears fill his eyes), margaritas are served strong in margarita glasses.
"Damn right," I said.
At Papas and Beer, I ordered a margarita at the bar and turned around to watch the general Wild On! action. When I turned back, there was a big cauldron of a frou frou margarita there ina very fancy glass with a straw. For the first time in my life, I almost said, "I can't drink this." But I did. I did, it was weak, and I am still embarrassed about it.
Afterward we went to a bar called Anthony's that featured a Mexican band that was playing Creedence Clearwater Revival. Our waiter looked like a better-preserved Ozzy Osbourne. We ordered drinks and were also giveen a free bottle of tequila that was free because it tasted like feet.
Turns out that Anthony's was a bar frequented by prostitutes. The process by which they could be acquired was explained to me by Mexican Ozzy. There was even a sign. But at no time would it have been clear that this place was anything but a great bar where you could hang out with your friends. There were old couples and groups of guys and men with their wives at the tables around us. At no time did one of the ladies pay any attention to any of the four fantastically wealthy Americans sitting in the corner booth.
We finished our drinks and left. It sounds like I'm spending a lot of time explaining something that never happened but my point is that I can hardly go to church in the United States without a hooker sitting on my lap. Hookers drive the buses here and sell pretzels in the park. I've got dead hookers in my trunk, for God's sake. I go to what turns out to be a Mexican whorehouse? Nothing.
The next morning, Saturday, we ordered empanadas from a bakery. A lady brought a box of 24 of them. We ate them with salad and Mexican Coke. Though Alx' parents were very gracious, I gladly would have killed them in order to eat the whole box myself, but my rigid moral code prevented me. I also didn't know how to drive back.
 That day we went into town and visited various landmarks, like the port and the old casino that faced it. The casino building is gorgeous; it seems like a good placee for my daughter to have her fifteenth birthday party, or quinceanera. I will start saving now.
Each weekend, two cruise ships dock in Ensenada's natural harbor and disgorge thousands of tourists, who break on the first few streets of the city and buy trinkets and drink.
 The tourist areas are canvassed by small groups of Oaxacans who will sell gum and hammocks and plastic flowers, or will just beg. I was told several times to not buy things from them, because they are in fact kept by businesssmen and outfitted with cheap stuff to sell, selling more to people like me because I feel bad. This story is hard to believe because it is so cynical. That is what then makes it easy to believe, and a sadder story.
The homeless or beggars of any city have remained the constant ethical dilemma of my life, even as my other values rise and plummet according to my whims or the fashion to which, as you know, I am a slave. It is difficult to ignore a beggar who looks to be six months older than my daughter; she doesn't know she's being manipulated - she's just being told what an adult tells her to do.
What's more, they have no other kind of gum than blueberry. Don't they care about my veneers?
I'd been told that Papas and Beers was different during the day, because the cruise ship people got really wild. I didn't care to see more drunk tourists (and, again, not that I have anything against them but if I wanted to see drunk Americans I would only need to look in the mirror.
 But there we were again, this time in broad daylight, and the scene was much more like a frat party, except older. I asked for a margarita again, and specified a non-ridiculous glass and more tequila. This time the waiter just didn't bring me anything.
The American DJ said there was to be a wet t-shirt contest soon, and I spotted the likely participants. I moved to another part of the bar because I didn't want my t-shirt getting wet (I'd only brought one).
I saw people disappearing into a room guarded by an employee. This sort of thing always intrigues me. I got out two business cards. I held up one and handed the other to the employee and walked into the room (try it - it works). It was the wet t-shirt contest staging area. I thought about leaving but I thought better of it.
I've been to some wild events, but what was going on in the back room of Papas and Beers was desperate. Contest participants and their red-faced, backwards-capped male handlers were sort of standing around taking pictures of each other with camera phones. I think the only pictures that can be taken with a camera phone that don't make the photographer look like an idiot are 1.) disputed parking tickets and 2.) where your car is located in a big garage or parking lot. Looking at girls - or Metallica - on a camera phone is dumb.
But the peroxided and augmented ladies were dead serious. You have to change shirts to be in a wet t-shirt contest, so while the changing was going on the camera phones were going off. Various employees strolled around - what an interesting job - and manhandled the netertainment in a way that seemed to be predicated on the valid assumption that everyone was drunk, it was vacation time, and the atmosphere allowed it. The women really wanted Papas and Beers hats and apparel. What would they do for a Klondike Bar?
The contest wasn't a contest and no liquid was apparent, except for beer fumes and a pervasive melon body spray mist. When the women walked onto the stage area it appeared a riot would break out. It was fun to watch, but it seemed forced. I would leave thhat sort of thing to professionals each time. I walked outside.
 During the festivities upstairs, outside the streets were packed with people and the Carnaval parade was going by. This was the real entertainment. I watched that for a while and then joined my companions at Hussong's, which was a bar founded the same year (1892) as Doyle's in Boston, and seemed to be the south of the border equivalent thereof.
The bar was a big wooden room with high ceilings and simple, solid carpentry. We stayed there for about six hours, eating several pounds of peanuts each and drinking a lot. I got my shoes shined for three dollars by a guy sitting on a stool on the sawdust-covered bar floor.
It was one of the rare and almost-forgotten occasions when I would enter a bar in bright daylight and then look up for my first bathroom break and it was full darkness outside and the bar was packed. Alx spent about a hundred bucks on mariachis and became as maudlin as I would at Christmas with the Pogues on a jukebox. I made my way to the restroom.
 "Fucking goddamn logs in there," someone said from a nearby stall. I was again thankful for my tremendous retentive capabilities.
Someone went next door and brought back tacos. Some drunk cruise ship ladies in their early 40s were sitting at our table. I talked with one of them. She managed car insurance for an AAA office in Oxnard, she said. She kept falling off her seat. Her friend sat down next to her.
"You sound like you are from Oxnard, California," I said. She stared at me.
The first woman readjusted herself on her chair. "She thinks you're a wizard," she said.
We left and wandered the streets. I went on a roller coaster and didn't die, though the bar would not lock over my legs. I held on very tightly. We got several thousand pesos out of a bank machine. We were solicited for various pharmaceuticals and other contraband, but we ate hot dogs wrapped in bacon instead. We wound up back at Anthony's and we talked to an ex-Navy guy and his wife who manage an assisted living complex in Ensenada. It turned out the guy had a son who was a month older than me. The man called me his step-son all night and introduced us to the owner.
 I like vacations.
The next day we bought some trinkets and drove home, buying bags of fresh churros on the road through Tijuana. It took us several hours in traffic through Customs, but our car was not given a second glance. I wished we'd brought back some cigars.
There is a gallery here.Labels: mexico
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