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November 30, 2005
5 Days
I know. It's getting old.
Shawn forgot that he had to renew his driver's license and realized it just this past weekend. It will otherwise expire while we are in Mexico and then he'd have to renew an expired license, which is much more involved.
In California, they take appointments at the DMV. Shawn called, and the earliest appointment he could get was Thursday.
Now we're staying through the weekend so that we can travel through Mexico during the week. We figure maybe it's less crowded. Why we care that it would be less crowded, I don't know, except for the fact that we're just going to the bus station the day we want to leave, buying tickets for the next bus out and heading south. I'm finding that it's as often worse to make advance reservations in Mexico than it is to go in cold. Still, you don't want to run the chance that you won't be able to get seats.
We expect to stay in Tijuana overnight and then head on to Guadalajara so that the bus station experience doesn't have to share the stage with the crossing of the border with tons of luggage experience and any potentially long and drawn-out goodbyes.
Hopefully Shawn will pass the test.
Posted by crispy at 02:38 AM | Comments (3)
November 25, 2005
XHUAN, Tijuana
Relaxing at the W San Diego, me on the blog and Shawn soaking in the bathtub. We're listening to Tijuana's eclectic radio station, XHUAN at 102.5 fm. It's only 8,000 watts, so it's not all that easy to get in. But when the waves make it to your radio, it's a little slice of Mexican musical heaven, playing a broad range of classics, from Freedom of Choice to Arráncame la vida.
After a sweet Mexican ballad accompanied by a jarana chaquiste, Louis Prima belts out a raucous number. This station is all over the map. It's kind of like Tijuana itself: a hodgepodge of many different elements. They play a lot of Brazilian music, jazz and old Mexican standards, and of course, el himno nacionál signals midnight, every night.
Our friend Brian likes it, but doesn't really listen to it that much. He gets easily frustrated by all the charlar they have on there, but that's mostly during the daytime and evenings. We tend to be listening late at night, while the clouds settle in as a lush blanket of fog enveloping the city and the last of the after-hours rush at La Posta is staggering homeward, or maybe just onward. At that time of night, it gives the city of San Diego a sensual exotic quality that it lacks during the daytime, making you want to lay in bed naked feeling the cool, moist breeze coming through an open window, thinking about how beautiful life is.
It's one of my favorite things about San Diego, right up there with Balboa Park.
Posted by crispy at 04:34 AM | Comments (0)
November 23, 2005
5 Days
With the adjustment of our schedule to spend Thanksgiving with friends, we're back at five days until we enter Los Estados Unidos de México to head down toward Guadalajara.
We just might stop over in Puerto Vallarta to check it out. It will be our most easily accessible coastal town while we're in Guadalajara and it might be nice to have some prior experience there if we end up playing tour guides to people that come to visit and want to go to the coast. Plus, it would be nice to have a break somewhere in that 36-hour bus ride.
That puts us arriving in Guadalajara in the first few days of December. We will most likely arrive and check in at the Hotel San Francisco Plaza for a few days. We have fond memories there from last year, and we think it might be a nice way to ease back into being in Deep Mexico. Then the plan is to probably relocate to a place closer to Chapalita where we want to get an apartment.
Posted by crispy at 11:09 PM | Comments (0)
San Diego Revisited
After an aborted attempt to save money by staying in Tijuana, we came back to San Diego and will spend Thanksgiving in the states. The new date for departing for Guadalajara is Tuesday, 29 November.
We went down on Wednesday (16 November) to make reservations at the Hotel Villa de Zaragoza for Friday night (18 November). We asked for a room with one bed and the clerk seemed to think we were mistaken, two men wanting only one bed, so he asked us if we were sure we wanted only one bed. I repeated that we wanted only one bed.
We got a ride down there from Brian and Nicole, who had decided to spend the night in Tijuana. They figured they'd get another room at the same hotel.
When we arrived, we were given a room with two beds, and a higher class of room than we had reserved. The desk clerk had written all the information down on a Post-It note on Wednesday, and I had not thought it would be important to look at it to be sure it was correct. I told him that it was okay, that we would take the room with two beds because it ended up that we needed them. He kept insisting after this that I had asked for a room with two beds, but I know I didn't. My Spanish isn't so rusty that I'd not know the difference. I certainly didn't ask for the more expensive handicapped room. He said that we could change to a room with one bed in the morning, and that was fine by us.
However, upon going to the desk in the morning, I was informed that they didn't have any rooms with one bed available. We'd have to stay where we were if we wanted to stay in the hotel. That made me feel like they'd really pulled the old bait-and-switch on us, so we opted to come back to San Diego, and after a bit of looking, settled in at the Super 8 Bayside, which was about what you would expect, but I did find the staff there to be very friendly and super helpful.
Now we've returned to the W San Diego because they're running a special during this Thanksgiving week. I guess they don't get many business customers over the holidays. We will spend Thanksgiving at the house of Brian's mother Jinny, along with that clan.
I'm not as mad about our Tijuana hotel experience as I am disappointed. It is annoying to me that so many Americans think that everyone in Mexico is out to con tourists, and it's a bummer to have an experience that puts evidence behind that argument. Oh well. It was an isolated incident, and I've been the victim of much worse rip-offs in the United States. But I feel pressure, just as I feel pressure to make things work out in Mexico for Shawn and me because we've been so often told how crazy it is for us to move there, to have Mexicans not live up to all the prejudiced stereotypes that people in the United States have of them.
I've put all my faith in you, mexicanos. Don't let me down.
Posted by crispy at 07:50 PM | Comments (0)
November 17, 2005
W San Diego
Posted by crispy at 07:25 PM | Comments (2)
Engrish Food
Posted by crispy at 07:20 PM | Comments (1)
November 11, 2005
Diss-neyland and Beyond
We arrived at Disneyland at 2 pm today to find that they were "full." One could, of course, opt to stay to visit California Adventure, but we, of course, did not.
It's just as well. A ticket to Disneyland costs $56 per person. That does not include parking. Furthermore, while they expanded the park in 2001, Disney fans report that there are no great dining options for vegetarians, and vegans are, as usual, even more screwed. And if you have a food allergy or require low carbohydrate or kosher meals, you have to go through a lot of extra hassle, including avoiding peak dining hours, demanding satisfaction from a manager and waiting 30 minutes for your food.
Instead we drove on to San Diego, where we'll be for a week or perhaps longer, visiting our friends Brian and Nicole. Our first stop was Mandarin Dynasty, which has an extensive vegetarian menu with several varieties of gluten dishes, such as vegetarian sweet and sour pork and vegetarian ham with string beans.
After dinner we drove through Balboa Park. Even in the dark, it's majestic.
Brian's mother is putting us up for a few days so that we can save our cash and stay in San Diego a little longer. She tells us that we are insane for moving to Mexico.
Later on, we went to Lestat's, a 24-hour coffee shop at 3343 Adams Avenue and saw some beautiful photographs of local kids by Terry Smith. They were at once sexy, melancholy and defiant.
Posted by crispy at 11:46 PM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2005
King Tutankhamun
Today we're going to see the King Tutankhamun exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Tomorrow we depart from Los Angeles to relocate in San Diego. On the way, we're going to Disneyland.
Posted by crispy at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)
November 09, 2005
Photographs: Los Angeles Views
Check out some of the views we've had here in LA.
Posted by crispy at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)
November 08, 2005
10 Days to Mexico (?)
According to the original schedule, we will be entering Mexico in 10 days. But will we be heading to Guadalajara, or ¿will we be staying in Tijuana por un rato?
Having confirmed that we can stay with Brian's mother for a few days, we can spend the money we save and stay in the area for a few more days. Brian, who is very anxious to have us spend two weekends here, is happy about that prospect. Yet we might be able to save some money staying at a cheap but secure hotel in Tijuana. At the moment, we're not sure. We found another place that charges $225 per week in San Diego, two blocks from Balboa Park, but they don't take reservations and they only had one room left upon our last check.
Posted by crispy at 03:25 AM | Comments (0)
November 06, 2005
Photographs: The Train Ride
Photographs from the Southwest Chief trip that brought us to Los Angeles. Click "Continue reading..." to view the pictures, but be aware that they will take a considerable amount of time to load.
Our trip took 21 hours. Then we went straight to Canter's for breakfast.
Learn more about passenger trains with this public domain film from The Prelinger Archives.
Posted by crispy at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)
November 05, 2005
At the Edge of the Continent
For 12 years I have thought of Los Angeles as home, despite the fact that my body has been elsewhere. Yet since we have left behind our place in Colorado, it is as much "home" as anywhere else. And for the first time, being here this time around I realized why I consider it more my home than any other place I have been, before or since.
Our room at the Hollywood Standard overlooks the city that stretches out below, and standing on the balcony, one cannot help but wonder about all the things that are going on out there in that sprawling metropolis. If they are anything like the things that used to go on for me when I lived here, and I'm sure some of them are, it would not be polite to transcribe them for a mixed audience. Some are surely exciting, some are doubtless shocking and many are undeniably tedious. Yet there is an electricity in the air that permeates everything here, perhaps a static charge that is generated by the friction of the racial tension, political corruption, glamour and heartbreak constantly rubbing against each other in the heat. Even in the most boring of moments, one feels it here, raising the hair on the arms and tingling throughout the whole body. It is the potential that anything could happen here at any time.
Los Angeles has a great metaphor for this feeling in its vaunted "big one" - the hundred year earthquake that is expected to flatten huge sections of the city within seconds and overshadow whatever was the celebrity scandal of the moment for at least a week. Angelinos (why not angeles?) do not waste much time worrying about that potential energy waiting under the earth's crust to shake them into oblivion like an enormous British nanny. And why would they? Nothing can be done to prevent it; when the time comes, it will just happen.
And that is what I love about Los Angeles. Things happen here. Big things.
I recognize the value of a slower-paced life, and as a matter of fact, one of my favorite editors has brought me to understand its benefits and that it isn't just boring. But a life such as that requires a great deal of focus and drive. You have to concentrate all the time on where you are going and what you'll do next. In a place where anything can happen at any time, you always keep your eyes straight ahead for the next thing that's coming at you.
But here, far from being merely a tense struggle against the rat race, an element of sublime beauty imbues even the most mundane objects and breaks through to the surface at the most unusual times. In the depths of winter, you can smell jasmine throughout the city. The fog rolls in and chills the valleys late at night as you wander down a wide, sweeping street alone, with a eerily obscure song playing somewhere out of someone's window that you have not thought of in what seems like a few years but actually calculates to be half your life ago. You can be standing in line at a grocery store and someone says something that has nothing to do with you, rather, the fact that her daughter got a bad perm, and you actually feel your life shift beneath your feet. It's like that kind of Zen Buddhism where you can be instantly enlightened by being hit with a stick.
But in Los Angeles, the elements are beautiful. Beautiful weather. Beautiful people. Beautiful coastline. Beautiful mountains. Beautiful smog. Beautiful tragedy. Beautiful life.
That is why I have felt like Los Angeles is my home, even when I've not been located here: only when I am here does it feel like life is actually happening. Everywhere else, it's just like I'm taking a vacation from my normal life. I'm hemmed in by limitations on what there is to see and do. I'm not really able to be myself because I'm not in the right environment, where anything could happen at any time.
I hope that our new life in Mexico will be as exciting and exotic. I think that just our being strangers in a strange land will certainly increase those odds.
Posted by crispy at 06:03 PM | Comments (0)
November 04, 2005
Arrival: Los Angeles
We arrived at Union Station in Los Angeles at 8 am on Friday, 3 November 2005.
It's so good to be back.
Posted by crispy at 08:30 AM | Comments (1)
November 03, 2005
15 Days (?)
Today we caught the train from the desolate station in Raton, New Mexico where we had to shelter ourselves from gusts of wind that lifted large plumes of dust into the air. It felt like we had been sucked into the opening of Once Upon a Time In the West as we sat watching the tracks for a distant sign of the train's arrival. The only thing missing was a squeaking, rusty gate.
Although starting the journey was irreversable, an email I received the night before may alter the length of our stay in the states.
Our friend in San Diego informed us that he might have an apartment available for us to use during our stay, which he would have until the end of November. He was hoping that we could extend our stay as we would not have to be paying for a hotel in the city, where lodging is relatively expensive. This would be a great opporunity for us, since we love San Diego and we have no solid date on which we must be in Guadalajara. Now that we've moved out, the date of our arrival is completely up to us and how well we can stretch our allocated travel funds.
He should know by Friday whether or not we will be able to use it. If so, I think we will be adding at least a week to The Southern California Tour. Shawn has yet to hear back from anyone at Hewlett-Packard about his job application, and since we'll be paying for a hotel in Guadalajara upon our arrival, we might as well save a few bucks and spend the time hanging out in a place we like with good friends.
But instead of 15 days, we may be 22 days from living in Mexico.
Posted by crispy at 04:38 PM | Comments (0)