el crispito

A couple of years later, after I had dared to venture out of the secure oasis of the campus to get a taste of all the exotic new things I had been hearing about in the sprawling asphalt jungle that surrounded me - ethnic foods I'd never tried, a funky coffeehouse named "Jabberjaw" and the exhilarating black market street shopping at Pico and Hoover - I discovered that there was a Sears only 10 minutes away from campus. Why that location wasn't listed in the phone books they gave out to students I don't know, but the experience taught me what stupid mistakes one can make, how much time one has to waste and how mediocre the experience of a new place can be when one lacks good information.

Knowing that we were coming to Guadalajara to check it out last year, we bought multiple guidebooks to Mexico and the city itself. We read them voraciously before we ever got here, researching every aspect about the city so that we would not waste any time in familiarizing ourselves with all the groovy stuff in town and could hopefully avoid such incidents as my freshman refrigerator fiasco. We built elaborate visual worlds in our minds (much like the ever-failing holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation) of the city and its many features, and on cold autumn afternoons we would escape there to stroll along the sidewalks and take in the phantom representations of the sites as we had imagined them. (I was usually escorted all about town by a 15-piece mariachi band.) There were some things that never got included in our chimeras (like the bullfights), but many of the images we conjured from the guidebooks seemed right up our alley, like Copenhagen 77, a well-known jazz club in town.

On the first day of our stay last year we hit the town with a guidebook written specifically about Guadalajara, to start giving our virtual image of the city some substance. However, the book began to frustrate us when we discovered that half the things in the guidebook were no longer around. In some cases, they were around but the addresses were wrong, and in others, the hours of operation were considerably different. Nobody expects a guidebook to be completely correct about everything, if for no other reason than the fact that they come out with new editions so infrequently. Yet it seemed that first week that we had picked a ghost town as our destination because so many of the places that we had pictured in our minds had vanished long before we arrived.

The guidebook even seemed to contradict itself, saying how one could find any type of food from around the world that he or she might want, but then it would only list a handful of places to get Chinese food and a couple of Italian restaurants. One doesn't expect a guidebook to be exhaustive, but surely, we thought, they could devote a few pages to a list of the top restaurants for each type of cuisine. Yes, it would be very subjective, but at least it would give people a place to go if they wanted, say, spanikopita instead of sopes for dinner. We went to the Internet café across the street from our hotel and after a bit of research found a couple of interesting places, but even though the Internet can be more current than printed books, Mexican businesses are not up to speed with the United States in putting their information out there.

On our return, I expected that we might find a few interesting places slowly over time, as we happened upon them or made friends that we could ask for recommendations. I figured that at first, we would miss out on a lot of things and waste a lot of time, like I did getting that little refrigerator from the Sears in Costa Mesa. I dreaded this, and hated the thought that for a while we would be stupid gringo idiots that didn't have a clue about the city. However, on our first day here, we picked up a copy of El Publico, a local daily, and as it was Friday, we found their entertainment supplement, Ocio tucked away inside.

This has been the source of hours of entertainment.

The diversity of restaurants in Guadalajara, for example, is astounding. Not only do we have more than a handful of Chinese restaurants (the guide lists 32 this week and most of the ones we pass on the street around here in el centro are not listed), we have ones that deliver, and one that is Mexicali-style Chinese. Continuing around that side of the world, we find 36 Japanese restaurants, one claiming to have over 1,000 dishes and a couple that specialize in fruit sushi. There are several Thai restaurants, and two Mexican-Thai fusion joints. Or if you prefer, you could visit one of the two Italian-Argentine fusion restaurants listed. In what I presume to be the Lebanese sector of town, there are four restaurants listed serving the cuisine of that region. There are delis, "diabetic" restaurants, and although we're not into it, hamburger stands where you can have it your way if you prefer buffalo or chorizo burgers. In some places you can play canasta while you dine, and one where you can have a tarot reading with your paella. Don't worry. For those of you that prefer "normal" food, you can go to Chili's or (shudder) Applebee's.

Reading the nightlife section I learned that the Univeristy of Guadalajara is showing a set of Fellini films in their weekly series and that if the Turner Classic Movies jones gets too strong for us, we can take in vintage American films at a Sunday matinee (this past weekend was the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire film Shall We Dance). There are two art theaters, which this week are participating in a French film festival. Of course, there is no shortage of the standard Hollywood fare, all very current, in English but subtitled in Spanish. The list of music venues deserves a separate entry, but this weekend we could have taken in an opera or the Genitorturers. And despite the fact that Copenhagen 77 is no longer around, it doesn't seem like we'll have to give up jazz. Why, there's even a place in town to get Dixieland.

This is not to say that this guide is complete. It lists only twenty Mexican restaurants, or perhaps I should say that they list twenty restaurants that specialize in Mexican food. The ones I can think of off the top of my head that I've seen just around the hotel number more than that. Yet I feel that this little weekly guide has given us a good six months jump on learning about things over the word-of-mouth method, and instead of the $15 USD that we had to shell out for the Guadalajara guidebook, it cost us less than $0.70.

I am sure that we will not be able to avoid entirely stupid trips that take us way out of our way or buying items and finding out later that a better version exists, but I feel a lot smarter now that I have a good starting point for discovering good places to eat in Guadalajara. Now if they only had a section in the Ocio for appliances...