el crispito

Our bus arrived late and the whole experience left Shawn swearing he’d never take a bus between Guadalajara and the United States ever again. Yet we both felt very relieved to be off the bus after the 38-hour trip and to be back at last in Guadalajara. The taxi that brought us from the bus terminal to the hotel was a small economy job that had room for one of our four suitcases in the trunk. The driver tossed the rest of them on top of the car and strapped them down with a puny strip of nylon cord, a common maneuver down here that had us both very nervous. Our whole lives are packed up in those bags, or at least all that we will have with us for some while. Losing them would mean losing our music library, years of notes from Dr. Doerr’s classes, all our various forms of radio, photos, wedding gifts, medications, and all those other things that make starting over from scratch with a new life a bit more comfortable. Luckily, we arrived at the hotel with everything intact.

We retraced the route we took by taxi when we left Guadalajara, but this time in reverse. Roaring in the cab down Avenida Revolución, I had the feeling one has when one returns from a long trip away from home, breathing in familiar smells, remembering small details that have slipped just beyond memory from not being seen daily, reviewing what new things have popped up and what things have since faded into non-existence. Maybe things feel so normal to us here because we worked so hard to memorize every detail during our scouting trip, or maybe because we daydreamed so much over our fond memories of that adventure that they got worn into our minds. Yet this time around, we don’t need maps to get around. We know what places will be open at what times, which corners have pedestrian signals and can live out the daily itineraries that we laid out just for fun while we were marking time back in the states before our return.

One thing that had slipped our minds completely was the omnipresent corps of pigeons that roost in the trees and on rooftops in the daylight hours. Standing on the sidewalk outside the hotel while the taxi driver pulled down our bags, Shawn got bombed by one right on the top of his head. I laughed, until moments later, when I received a similar strafing on my shirt sleeve.

Checking into our hotel the same staff that worked here before greeted us, but this time around, the desk clerk that was as warm as the Taliban last time welcomed us with a smile. This hotel has no elevators, so the poor bellhop that hefted our overstuffed bags was winded by the trip up two flights of stairs to our room. A 100 peso tip (about $10 USD) seemed to put a little of the wind back into his sails. We soon discovered that one of our favorite things about the hotel, the satellite television that received the de Película film channel (similar to Turner Classic Movies, but showing all films from the rich cornucopia of Mexican cinema) had given way to basic cable. We also no longer get KTLA, CNN or TNT, although it’s the inability to stay up late in bed watching old María Félix movies that we really feel the most.

We had lunch at La Chata and dinner at Sanborns Café, where we were delighted to find all of our regular servers still laying down the molletes and chilaquiles. We tried to go to Café Madoka for a late evening coffee, but found that they’ve trimmed back their hours, or at least they did so tonight. That's a real drag. It's the first instance we've seen down here in a reduction of service that we've noticed going on everywhere in the United States.

We picked up an El Informador and clipped out apartment rentals from the classifieds and glued them onto pages in our notebook, arranged by neighborhood. We want to be in a relatively nice area of town, and even so, we're finding places with two bedrooms to run between $400 and $600 USD per month. Some include gas and water (although we've yet to find one outside of a hotel that rents by the day, week or month that includes electricity). That would solve our problem of having to have visas before we can get utilities, which is a very big concern for us. It's possible that the landlord has the utilities in his or her name at some of these places, and we'd just have to pay them each month for whatever they are. We've heard this is relatively common here, but we'll just have to wait and see. But then, of course, there is still the problem of Internet access.

One area where we were not as smart as we should have been was buying batteries for one of our radios. We needed four C batteries, and we figured that they'd have them at Sandborns. Lots of places have AA batteries, but nothing else. Sure enough, Sanborns did have them, and at the astronomical prices we've come to expect in Mexico: 4 C batteries was $14 USD. Later, when we found Café Madoka closed early, we stopped in at the Super G, a supermarket down the street. We found that we could have bought the same four batteries for only $8 USD.

We thought that we'd spend the first weekend back just relaxing and getting reacquainted with the city, but mild paranoia pushed me to start doing such things as starting to research apartments, tracking down a Laundromat and going over some idiomatic phrases with Shawn. We are anxious to get things rolling. The suspense is killing me as to whether or not we’re going to be able make this whole thing work out.