Detour: Vamos a Mexico!
Well, from a safety and security standpoint, this was probably the most worrisome day of our trip. Yet, at the the same time, for me in particular, but also Susi, it was the most monumental and eye-opening. For all the time I spent in Western New York and the Northwoods of Wisconsin during college, (even the UP of Michigan for goodness sakes!) I had yet to travel outside of the country. We did all our research (you don't need a passport until 2008) and talked to all sorts of people about where to go, what to do, what to expect, and yet still felt unprepared.
But first, a sad story.
We had been recommended the Sovereign Grace Church in San Diego, and had checked their website to get the service time (although I hardly needed to ask - after all, it IS a SG church!) and directions and stuff, and had managed to get ourselves ready to go and stop by Starbucks and were still almost on time. Well, we pulled into the parking lot of the school that the church meets in, and there were lots of people, but they were all following signs for this suspiciously California-sounding other church. We walked up to the location the SG church meets in, and were commenting on how strange it was that no one was outside - I mean, we weren't really late at all! So it turns out that church was cancelled that morning, because the entire congregation was attending some event called "Together '06". Sadness. Susi called her brother to check if he could give us the location of his church, and when he didn't pick up,
she called the people who let us into the place we were staying, but since they didn't pick up either, we figured church had already begun. We eschewed the California-sounding church, and went and had our own church at Starbucks. OK, not actually church. Just quiet times, but it was good to sit in God's presence again.
After caffienating fully, we were reading for our Mexican Adventure. Back down the road, to "the 5" (don't you dare call it just "5" or worse yet, "I-5" in California!) southbound towards Tijuana. We stopped at one of the last US exits for "$20 piece of mind" as my friend Josh called it, Mexican car insurance for the day, and then proceeded across the border. Apparently, Mexico has none of the concerns of the US and Canada (that story later!) about who it lets in. We just drove across, no stops, no questions, no inspections. We noticed that there was a considerable line on the opposite side, but figured we'd find out all about that later in the day. I haltingly used my high school Spanish to translate the road signs for Susi ("no something on the left") and was grateful for the dual speedometer readings that allowed me to drive the correct speed in kilometers per hour. 
(Hooray for the metric system!) We paid our tolls ("cuotas") on the highway down the coast easily - that portion of Mexico takes US dollars and pesos with equal ease, as long as you don't try to mix the two! This was our first viewing of the Pacific this trip, and it was fun to see the bright colors and smell the aromas and hear the noises of the towns we drove through. Despite Catholicism being alive and well, 
we saw "Jesus on the hillside" instead of Butte, Montana's "Mary on the Mountain". And made it to the Puerto Nuevo (New Port) exit. We had a little map from the insurance company, but Mexican roads are a little different from those in the US, namely that paving is rare and any indication of the road name (in any language) rarer still. So we fussed and fuddled our way down some bumpy dirt roads until we found what looked like a downtown area. As I was becoming nervous about parking, a man waved us into a spot on the street. There were no signs about meters or anything, but a man from across the street shouted to us to park over by him because his spot was free, whereas the nice man giving us a parking spot was going to charge us $5 or some such absurdity. I asked (in halting Spanish) if it cost - expect I couldn't think of the word for parking, so I just asked if it cost. He responded in English (What, two blond girls? Were we that obviously out of place?) that it was free, and he'd tell us why - he wanted us to eat at the restaurant we'd parked right in front of, and said something about margaritas and tequila. Ha. Well, we didn't have a better plan, so why not? 
I could see the car from our table, and most of the time we were eating, this same gentleman was sitting in a plastic lawn chair, so I wasn't too worried about anything (uncovered by the Mexican insurance policy) happening to the car. We ordered margaritas (yum!) and I got all brave and had lobster (which I don't remember ever having before, at least not where I got to pick mine before it was cooked! We started with some delicious tortilla soup and chips and salsa. 
Really good chips and salsa. Then my lobster arrived with Susi's carne asada and I sheepishly looked over at her and asked, "How do I eat this?" The tail meat has a great fishy flavor that's good on it's own, but even better when it's dipped in melted butter. I'd gotten the pequeno one, so I didn't even worry about the rest of it. Susi's meat was a little tough (susi: "a LITTLE?? i couldn't even cut it with a serrated steak knife!!"), but when our waitress noticed her struggling with it, she brought a new one and little baby margaritas (how cute!) and then we figured
out how to ask for the bathrooms and the check (Visa... it's everywhere you want to be!) and thus ended our Mexican lunch.
As we approached our car, I was trying to figure out how to ask our parking attendant if we could leave the car parked there and walk around the town, but, of course could remember neither the word for parking (estacionamento) nor that for leave (devolver, I believe).
Thankfully, he anticipated the question and asked if we wanted to walk around for a bit. Puerto Nuevo is basically a glorified city block. There're the four streets around the square, and one more, closer to the highway, but in that tiny space are packed easily 20 restaurants - all advertising lobster and margaritas. At this point, we started to see what purpose our parking attendant played for his place of employment. He essentially guards the limited street parking for use by customers of his restaurant. Nearly every place in town had a similar employee - all of whom were tasked with getting customers into the restaurant. Half a dozen of them shouted to us about their specials as we walked down the streets, and when we responded that we had already eaten, they would say, 
"Next time, then!" So we have our restaurant choices picked for the next 6 or 8 trips to Mexico! I really liked Benny's restaurant though! "Pretty ladies, come eat here!" comments aside. We stopped in a few stores to pick up trinkets for ourselves and friends - cool spotted shot glasses, a new ring for Susi and a silver bracelet for me 
(we haggled and got a pretty good deal!) We stopped for street mango, served sliced in a plastic cup with salt, lime juice and chili powder -- possibly the best fruit I've ever had! -- and fresh churros (so different from Price Club!) then headed back north towards the border.
When we got back to our car, our "guardian angel" (as we'd taken to calling him by now) was still sitting in his plastic chair, and we tipped him and asked if he would pose for a picture with us in front of our car. He got one of his buddies from a competing restaurant to snap the picture and then stopped traffic for us(!) so that I could back out and head back to the highway.
As we got closer, the traffic got denser, and with it, the number of people in the roadway. It started harmlessly enough, with churros vendors and a family selling bottled water.
We moved farther into the backup and found Mexican newspapers, and people tying to wash our car for us. I was grateful for the exceptionally dirty state of our car, as it deterred most of them from even trying. We watched one guy wash a window of an SUV unasked, then, when the occupants refused to tip him, he squirted their window with his water bottle and stormed away. We rolled up our windows, tried not to make eye contact and shook our heads "no" when that failed. As we turned from the beach road onto the main highway they multiplied. There were no lane markings, but is was easy enough to tell where the lanes where from the pushcarts and people walking between. 
"Unreal" is a pretty good descriptor. The junk they were hawking intensified, from moderately useful (bottled water, gum, fruit ice) to inane (Mexican ponchos decorated with the insignia of US football teams, large tacky paintings, piggy banks or statues of every imaginable cartoon or TV character). We kept trying to snap pictures without seeming like we were trying to buy anything. Part of me knows it's calculating to capitalize on the pity of American tourists, but another part of me found it so eminately pitiable and heartbreaking. Watching families try to earn their daily bread, dads and sons selling whatever trinkets they've obtained, moms sitting on the barricade at the side of the road, nursing the youngest and overseeing the family operation, dirty-faced daughters looking into passing cars, holding their perpetually empty (and worn) paper coffee cups out to drivers and passengers alike and doing better impersonations of puppydog eyes than any child I've ever babysat, younger sons juggling fruit (for sale or for cash) that occassionally hits a windshield, or drops and rolls underneath a stopped car. It's sad, and it begs for something. Something I don't have in me. How do you hold out the love of Jesus in an hour-long line of cars to someone who doesn't speak your language and is only interested in your money? How do you have compassion when something inside you keeps saying, "They've made a choice to live this way. It's a calculated charade, an act designed to elicit the response you're so close to giving in to." Our windows stayed up. We drank the water we had brought with us and stifled our "desire" for a Spiderman piggy bank or a hammock for one.
The window went down again when we reached the border station, answered the questions asked of us (nope, no weapons of mass destruction in this little car!) and crossed back onto US soil. Susi got an A+ in Border Crossing 101 (according the agent at the head of our long line of cars) and I got a C- for relying on the license/birth certificate combo, but we both passed, and they let us back in. Of course, I missed the signs for "the 5" and instead tried to exit through the 
"secondary inspection" station, so a somewhat less cordial border agent "asked" us to back up and go either left or right. (Yes, we saw the sign that said secondary inspections, but we didn't see any other signs, so figured we had to drive through there to get to the actual exit!) Stopped at McD's for a restroom, called the folks to say, "We went to Mexico and we're back safely," and made it back to our place in Escondido. Ted (downstairs) had heard from Megan that we were going to Mexico and she asked him to check and make sure we came back!
What a detour! What a day!
love, -sara&susi
But first, a sad story.
We had been recommended the Sovereign Grace Church in San Diego, and had checked their website to get the service time (although I hardly needed to ask - after all, it IS a SG church!) and directions and stuff, and had managed to get ourselves ready to go and stop by Starbucks and were still almost on time. Well, we pulled into the parking lot of the school that the church meets in, and there were lots of people, but they were all following signs for this suspiciously California-sounding other church. We walked up to the location the SG church meets in, and were commenting on how strange it was that no one was outside - I mean, we weren't really late at all! So it turns out that church was cancelled that morning, because the entire congregation was attending some event called "Together '06". Sadness. Susi called her brother to check if he could give us the location of his church, and when he didn't pick up,
she called the people who let us into the place we were staying, but since they didn't pick up either, we figured church had already begun. We eschewed the California-sounding church, and went and had our own church at Starbucks. OK, not actually church. Just quiet times, but it was good to sit in God's presence again.
After caffienating fully, we were reading for our Mexican Adventure. Back down the road, to "the 5" (don't you dare call it just "5" or worse yet, "I-5" in California!) southbound towards Tijuana. We stopped at one of the last US exits for "$20 piece of mind" as my friend Josh called it, Mexican car insurance for the day, and then proceeded across the border. Apparently, Mexico has none of the concerns of the US and Canada (that story later!) about who it lets in. We just drove across, no stops, no questions, no inspections. We noticed that there was a considerable line on the opposite side, but figured we'd find out all about that later in the day. I haltingly used my high school Spanish to translate the road signs for Susi ("no something on the left") and was grateful for the dual speedometer readings that allowed me to drive the correct speed in kilometers per hour. 
(Hooray for the metric system!) We paid our tolls ("cuotas") on the highway down the coast easily - that portion of Mexico takes US dollars and pesos with equal ease, as long as you don't try to mix the two! This was our first viewing of the Pacific this trip, and it was fun to see the bright colors and smell the aromas and hear the noises of the towns we drove through. Despite Catholicism being alive and well, 
we saw "Jesus on the hillside" instead of Butte, Montana's "Mary on the Mountain". And made it to the Puerto Nuevo (New Port) exit. We had a little map from the insurance company, but Mexican roads are a little different from those in the US, namely that paving is rare and any indication of the road name (in any language) rarer still. So we fussed and fuddled our way down some bumpy dirt roads until we found what looked like a downtown area. As I was becoming nervous about parking, a man waved us into a spot on the street. There were no signs about meters or anything, but a man from across the street shouted to us to park over by him because his spot was free, whereas the nice man giving us a parking spot was going to charge us $5 or some such absurdity. I asked (in halting Spanish) if it cost - expect I couldn't think of the word for parking, so I just asked if it cost. He responded in English (What, two blond girls? Were we that obviously out of place?) that it was free, and he'd tell us why - he wanted us to eat at the restaurant we'd parked right in front of, and said something about margaritas and tequila. Ha. Well, we didn't have a better plan, so why not? 
I could see the car from our table, and most of the time we were eating, this same gentleman was sitting in a plastic lawn chair, so I wasn't too worried about anything (uncovered by the Mexican insurance policy) happening to the car. We ordered margaritas (yum!) and I got all brave and had lobster (which I don't remember ever having before, at least not where I got to pick mine before it was cooked! We started with some delicious tortilla soup and chips and salsa. 
Really good chips and salsa. Then my lobster arrived with Susi's carne asada and I sheepishly looked over at her and asked, "How do I eat this?" The tail meat has a great fishy flavor that's good on it's own, but even better when it's dipped in melted butter. I'd gotten the pequeno one, so I didn't even worry about the rest of it. Susi's meat was a little tough (susi: "a LITTLE?? i couldn't even cut it with a serrated steak knife!!"), but when our waitress noticed her struggling with it, she brought a new one and little baby margaritas (how cute!) and then we figured
out how to ask for the bathrooms and the check (Visa... it's everywhere you want to be!) and thus ended our Mexican lunch.As we approached our car, I was trying to figure out how to ask our parking attendant if we could leave the car parked there and walk around the town, but, of course could remember neither the word for parking (estacionamento) nor that for leave (devolver, I believe).
Thankfully, he anticipated the question and asked if we wanted to walk around for a bit. Puerto Nuevo is basically a glorified city block. There're the four streets around the square, and one more, closer to the highway, but in that tiny space are packed easily 20 restaurants - all advertising lobster and margaritas. At this point, we started to see what purpose our parking attendant played for his place of employment. He essentially guards the limited street parking for use by customers of his restaurant. Nearly every place in town had a similar employee - all of whom were tasked with getting customers into the restaurant. Half a dozen of them shouted to us about their specials as we walked down the streets, and when we responded that we had already eaten, they would say, 
"Next time, then!" So we have our restaurant choices picked for the next 6 or 8 trips to Mexico! I really liked Benny's restaurant though! "Pretty ladies, come eat here!" comments aside. We stopped in a few stores to pick up trinkets for ourselves and friends - cool spotted shot glasses, a new ring for Susi and a silver bracelet for me 
(we haggled and got a pretty good deal!) We stopped for street mango, served sliced in a plastic cup with salt, lime juice and chili powder -- possibly the best fruit I've ever had! -- and fresh churros (so different from Price Club!) then headed back north towards the border.
When we got back to our car, our "guardian angel" (as we'd taken to calling him by now) was still sitting in his plastic chair, and we tipped him and asked if he would pose for a picture with us in front of our car. He got one of his buddies from a competing restaurant to snap the picture and then stopped traffic for us(!) so that I could back out and head back to the highway.As we got closer, the traffic got denser, and with it, the number of people in the roadway. It started harmlessly enough, with churros vendors and a family selling bottled water.
We moved farther into the backup and found Mexican newspapers, and people tying to wash our car for us. I was grateful for the exceptionally dirty state of our car, as it deterred most of them from even trying. We watched one guy wash a window of an SUV unasked, then, when the occupants refused to tip him, he squirted their window with his water bottle and stormed away. We rolled up our windows, tried not to make eye contact and shook our heads "no" when that failed. As we turned from the beach road onto the main highway they multiplied. There were no lane markings, but is was easy enough to tell where the lanes where from the pushcarts and people walking between. 
"Unreal" is a pretty good descriptor. The junk they were hawking intensified, from moderately useful (bottled water, gum, fruit ice) to inane (Mexican ponchos decorated with the insignia of US football teams, large tacky paintings, piggy banks or statues of every imaginable cartoon or TV character). We kept trying to snap pictures without seeming like we were trying to buy anything. Part of me knows it's calculating to capitalize on the pity of American tourists, but another part of me found it so eminately pitiable and heartbreaking. Watching families try to earn their daily bread, dads and sons selling whatever trinkets they've obtained, moms sitting on the barricade at the side of the road, nursing the youngest and overseeing the family operation, dirty-faced daughters looking into passing cars, holding their perpetually empty (and worn) paper coffee cups out to drivers and passengers alike and doing better impersonations of puppydog eyes than any child I've ever babysat, younger sons juggling fruit (for sale or for cash) that occassionally hits a windshield, or drops and rolls underneath a stopped car. It's sad, and it begs for something. Something I don't have in me. How do you hold out the love of Jesus in an hour-long line of cars to someone who doesn't speak your language and is only interested in your money? How do you have compassion when something inside you keeps saying, "They've made a choice to live this way. It's a calculated charade, an act designed to elicit the response you're so close to giving in to." Our windows stayed up. We drank the water we had brought with us and stifled our "desire" for a Spiderman piggy bank or a hammock for one.
The window went down again when we reached the border station, answered the questions asked of us (nope, no weapons of mass destruction in this little car!) and crossed back onto US soil. Susi got an A+ in Border Crossing 101 (according the agent at the head of our long line of cars) and I got a C- for relying on the license/birth certificate combo, but we both passed, and they let us back in. Of course, I missed the signs for "the 5" and instead tried to exit through the 
"secondary inspection" station, so a somewhat less cordial border agent "asked" us to back up and go either left or right. (Yes, we saw the sign that said secondary inspections, but we didn't see any other signs, so figured we had to drive through there to get to the actual exit!) Stopped at McD's for a restroom, called the folks to say, "We went to Mexico and we're back safely," and made it back to our place in Escondido. Ted (downstairs) had heard from Megan that we were going to Mexico and she asked him to check and make sure we came back!What a detour! What a day!
love, -sara&susi
posted by Sara at 10:31 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home