el crispito

January 16, 2010

Christmas in Mexico with Bagley

Crispy at Solea in Mexico City

I have uploaded a selection of our vacation photograps as a flickr set, complete with links to further information on the attractions pictured therein.

Posted by crispy at 01:06 PM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2008

Eating Vegetarian in Puerto Vallarta

Introduction

Although we can usually find something to eat at your average restaurant in Mexico serving traditional fare, seafood restaurants are different. Because they specialize in seafood, they offer little else on their menus. The logic is, it is stupid to go to a seafood restaurant for something like cheese enchiladas or chiles rellenos de queso - one goes there for seafood.

Fair enough. A restaurant should be able to focus on their specialty without having to be concerned about all the other foods that are not. Yet consider the situation when members of the meat-eating ruling majority wish to dine out at such a place and want their vegetarian friends to go with them. That is a lose-lose situation. The vegetarian is going to have to make due at a restaurant that they would never choose, and the restaurant is being asked to accommodate with something that might be way beyond their regular scope. There has to be some accommodation on both fronts.

For my part, I try to do some advance research in screening restaurants that either have some interesting dishes on their menu that we can eat or those that will accommodate us by making some special dishes that are not on the menu. Most kitchens have plenty of things in their larders that do not have meat in them, but it still takes some effort on their part to make something vegetarian out of those basic ingredients. It takes even more effort to make something with them that is truly compelling.

Method

I started by searching for restaurant recommendations on the Internet. I narrowed the first list by looking for more upscale restaurants, because they are often more willing to accommodate special requests and their chefs tend to be more skilled at making those irregular dishes well.

It should be noted that in Mexico lower-end places (like tacos al vapor stands) also tend to offer vegetarian options because they are not preoccupied with having to serve so-called 'fancy' food in a place where fancy always requires meat. These places do not usually advertise on the Internet (although some of my favorite food blogs chronicle them), and finding them requires asking the locals or happening upon them in the street.

The research turned up a couple of strictly vegetarian restaurants, a restaurant recommended by vegetarians for being accomodating to vegetarians, and a handful of restaurants that did not have any vegetarian dishes on their online dinner menus, but did seem like they might consider special requests for customers. I wrote to the listed email addresses for the restaurants in the latter two groups to ask what they could do for vegetarians interested in dining at their establishments. I told them that I was interested in a hot meal, not just a salad. I also notified them that Shawn and I are the kind of vegetarians that eat eggs and cheese (usually in Mexico, everyone thinks vegetariano means what we think of as "vegan." I heard back from three of them.

In addition, Molly insisted on dining at a restaurant with a view of the ocean. I did not believe that any of the ones I had selected had a view of the ocean, so I did some further research and found Le Kliff, a fair drive from Puerto Vallarta in the area known as Mismaloya, but built on a cliff with a fantastic view. I wrote to them and asked if they could accommodate vegetarians that eat eggs and cheese and they also wrote back.

I put a restaurant recommended to us by our friend Joseph on the bottom of the list - La Palapa - after they wrote back to me. The restaurant and bar looked very nice, but in their reply, the items they said we could have as main courses are on their menu as appetizers. By that I mean, they said that they had main courses for us and then proceeded to list the two appetizers. If an item is an appetizer for someone that eats meat, it should be an appetizer for us too. Yes, at times everyone eats an appetizer as a meal, but the fact that they tried to pass off the appetizers as a full main course instead of just being up-front and saying, "you can make a meal out of a couple of our appetizers" made me hesitant. I did not cross them off the list entirely, but I did put them at the bottom of the list.

The Restaurants

Planeta Vegetariano: Strictly Vegetarian

We arrived in Puerto Vallarta a day before Molly landed. That gave us a night to go out to one of the strictly vegetarian places that people rave about: Planeta Vegetariano (Iturbide 270, 322/222-3073).

We had been there before when we visited Puerto Vallarta with our friend Tara, and I did not like it then. This time around, my expectations were low going in, and it lived up to those expectations. Planeta Vegetariano is better than a lot of restaurants that serve the vegetarian community in Mexico, but this is not saying much. They are buffet-style, and things served from steamer trays are already going to lack the potential of dishes made to order.

The majority of their offerings are cold salads (I have to say that their vegan potato salad was one of the best vegan potato salads I have ever had), and the hot dishes are so-so. When we went they had chiles rellenos de papa, a soy-meat "stir-fry" with mixed bell peppers, and a cauliflower gratin. Unfortunately, these were mostly the same dishes we had the last time we went there. I think if this restaurant were in any of the other smaller cities in Mexico, I would give it higher ratings, but as it is in Puerto Vallarta, a town loaded with spectacular eateries, its relative blandness really stands out.

Worst of all though was the thing that made Shawn remark, "This is the last time I'm coming to this restaurant." Luckily I had quickly gathered only a few things from the salad side of the buffet and not noticed this, but Shawn went to get a couple of different items and saw bugs swarming around the serving dishes. He said they were not in the food itself, but they were crawling all over the edges. Later on, he went to get some bread, and found that there were ants in the container and on the food. I can deal with so-so vegetarian food. In fact, I have grown accustomed to it when eating out. But bugs all over the place? Ew.

Le Kliff: Room With a View

We had to take a taxi to Le Kliff (south coast, 322/224-0975), because it is in Mismaloya. It has a beautiful view of the ocean, and the restaurant cascades down in many levels. I thought it would end up being a long evening of enjoying the view with a lot of lingering over the meal, so I decided to start it off right with a nice dry gin martini. This arrived and was quite good.

There were no vegetarian main courses on the menu at Le Kliff, so I wrote well in advance and asked them if they could make us something not on the menu, alerting them that we do eat eggs and cheese. The sales manager for the restaurant, Carlos Gutiérrez wrote back and said that they could, and that when we made our reservation, he would notify the chef of our visit and that eggs and cheese were okay. When they came to take our order, I told them about this arrangement. Molly ordered the huachinango, which gets translated in English as "red snapper."

We had some salads, and as those were very good, I was excited to see what the chef had dreamed up for us. When the huachinango was placed in front of Molly, I grew even more giddy, because the presentation was very nice. Then they put down in front of Shawn and me a couple of bowls of red and yellow bell peppers lightly sautéed in oil with some chunks of panela cheese and hard-boiled egg whites tossed in.

What a disappointment! I felt like our dish was an afterthought, and that the word that we eat eggs and cheese was taken too literally. A big problem I have with the Mexican concept of vegetarian food is that the dishes have to be dietetic for some reason. I suspect that is why they gave us egg whites and no yolks, and panela cheese, which is kind of like cottage cheese were it pressed into blocks and dried out. While this was a very healthy dish and well-executed for what it was, it had no seasoning whatsoever and severely lacked flavor. As a main course, it was very underwhelming. I left Le Kliff happy only because I had seven martinis over the course of the evening.

The next morning, I did not wake up with a hangover, but I did wake up angry. The trip to the restaurant was not a cheap taxi ride and I had put a fair bit of effort into writing to señor Gutiérrez trying to clarify what we wanted. I wondered though if perhaps I had not been specific enough in what I was expecting, and that was an error that I could correct with the next few places with some advance notice.

The River Café: A Classic

I had been in correspondence with the general manager of The River Café (Isla Río Cuale #4, 322/223-0788), Michael Boufford, for several weeks before we arrived. He was very helpful and quite friendly in his email messages, so I thought that perhaps he would not find it too rude if I wrote and told him of our experience at Le Kliff and why I had found it disappointing. I already expected more from The River Café, given the things Mr. Boufford had told me about the restaurant.

With the way our schedule worked out, we had to go to The River Café for lunch, and not dinner. Their standard lunch menu has a fair number of vegetarian items on the menu (or items that one can request to have made vegetarian), making me feel a little silly for having bothered the GM with so many email messages back and forth. After we had been seated, he came over and talked to us. He took the time to welcome us to the restaurant and explain what options we had open to us, including a couple of off-menu items.

We all shared a Mexican combination appetizer, consisting of cheese quesadillas, guacamole and nachos. I had the black bean soup, then I had the Mexican combination platter, made vegetarian. This was a big plate of two types of quesadillas (flor de calabaza and huitlacoche), more guacamole and beans. Shawn had mushroom crepes. I had another dry gin martini; Shawn and Molly had a few of their fruit daquiris - peach, mango and kiwi.

The River Café experience was much better for us as vegetarians than that of Le Kliff. The view might not have been quite as spectacular, but we had a very lovely table overlooking the river, shaded by broad reaching trees that provided a beautiful dappled sunlight (see photo from previous entry). We even were able to watch their resident iguanas patrolling the trees above us. Every person that provided us with service was very professional and Diego, our waiter, demonstrated a perfect knowledge of the food on the menu. He knew, for example, that the refried beans on the nachos were made with some animal products, allowing us to order them with no beans if we so desired (although I had to wonder if the beans that came later on the vegetarian platter main course were the same ones).

I only had a couple of martinis at The River Café, but I wished I could spend the rest of the afternoon there at the bar, catching up on old times with Molly or debating current events. I think if I lived in Puerto Vallarta, I would spend many an afternoon doing just that. (Actually, Shawn and I did return to have lunch at The River Café again before the end of our time in Puerto Vallarta.) To me, the atmosphere there says classic Puerto Vallarta - beautiful, casual yet refined, relaxing.

In my email correspondence with Mr. Boufford, he mentioned that he is also the GM at another restaurant in town, Mestizo. Given Mr. Boufford's helpfulness in assuring a good experience at The River Café, after looking at the more experimental menu of Mestizo, I decided we had to make a stop there as well.

Mestizo: Elegant Dining

While The River Café serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, Mestizo (Abasolo 233, 322/223-0788) is a dinner restaurant. Our reservations were for 9 pm, but Molly was hungry so we went over at closer to 8 to see if they would let us dine a little earlier. They were very obliging with the request.

While The River Café is set up on wide, sweeping terraces, Mestizo is in an old house. The tables are set up on the back patio, where a lion's head fountain provides the soft sound of trickling water. The menu has relatively traditional flavors, but the dishes are a bit more upscale. While The River Café offers a more casual dining experience, Mestizo is about fine dining.

I have to say here though that the service at both of Mr. Boufford's locations is top notch. He has really done a great job in hiring and training an outstanding staff in both restaurants. Molly ordered a glass of wine from the list and the waiter had her taste it first. I thought this was somewhat unusual, since that process tends to only be done when one orders a full bottle, to ensure that the bottle is good. She was not at all happy with that selection, and was grateful that he let her try it before pouring out a whole glass. Even if that wine has drawn particular criticism from diners, that kind of anticipation of the customer's tastes by servers is rare in Mexico.

Shawn had the Mestizo Salad (lettuce with beets, jicama and biznaga served with goat cheese croutons and a tapenade) while I had the Tomato Napoleon to start. Both were very good. We then moved on to our main course, both of us having enchiladas rellenas de flor de calabaza (we could have had them filled with huitlacoche, but neither of us relished the idea of that much huitlacoche all at once), covered with a creamy poblano chile sauce. These were delicious, and unlike some places we have been to that serve flor de calabaza, they definitely were not stingy with the filling.

My one complaint with Mestizo would be that their vegetarian main courses are not as exotic as the sides that come with the meat dishes: mini queso y rajas sopes, little poblano custards, grilled watermelon, grilled cactus and garlic mushroom tamales. All these seem like they would (or should) be vegetarian. While what we had was good, I enjoy trying unusual vegetarian stuff I have never had before, and I probably would have enjoyed all those sides more than what we had as our main course. I admit, it might be entirely possible to do just that, but as we had made arrangements in advance and the enchiladas were what the kitchen was prepared to serve us, I felt we needed to stick with that. Also, having worked in a kitchen, I know that the amount of the sides paired with certain dishes might be exact and serving some without their main course partners might mean the kitchen would run out of the proper sides to go with those dishes. However, if I am able to give them advance notice the next time, I think I might ask them if I could arrange for a main course of all their cool sides.

I know. They might not all go together so well, but that is part of experimentation, ¿no?

The next night I was to get my fill of unusual dishes, at El Arrayán.

El Arrayán: Unusual Eats

El Arrayán (Allende 344, 32/222-7195) is named after a kind of tree that bears fruit similar to what in English is called a guava. They do have a drink there - the house Margarita - that is made with a puree of this fruit, and it is very tasty.

I had read on a couple of vegetarian forums that El Arrayán would accommodate vegetarians if they are given a little advance notice, so I wrote to the email address on their web site. I inquired, and promptly got a reply back from Carmen Porras, who is a co-owners along with Claudia Victoria. She assured me that they could indeed accommodate us, and named some very interesting dishes that they can make for vegetarians, but she did note that they would require four days notice to make them. I was shocked and feared that this might make it an impossibility for us, given that we were there with a friend that wanted to play things by ear.

Nonetheless, we made our reservations for the end of the week and showed up at El Arrayán ready to try some interesting new dishes that we had never had before. On the outside of the restaurant, they have plaques awarding them Reader's Choice Selections on Virtual Vallarta - which they have won for three years running. Walking inside we found it to be a cozy and charming dining room, done up in traditional Mexican decor with Huchol-style paintings hung on the walls. No sooner than we walked in the door did Ms. Porras come over to introduce herself, seat us and point out the vegetarian options on and off the menu.

We delighted in several courses of their unusual dishes. We had de jamaica y queso, marinated goat cheese, and empanadas de platano y frijol negro to start. Then we followed with a salad: Shawn had the nopales tiernas and I had a very interesting ensalada de chayote. We followed this with this funky dish that they made especially for us that was not on the menu - huauzontles rellenos de queso Oaxaca - that utilizes the green part of the plant that amaranth (a grain) comes from. We had dessert, but unfortunately, I forgot to write down what we had.

Porras and Victoria have a hit on their hands. While we were there, the dining room filled up and everyone seemed to be enjoying the experience. Because I like to try dishes that I have never had before, our dinner at El Arrayán stood out as the most interesting of all during our visit to Puerto Vallarta. It is unfortunate that they need four days notice to ensure having the huauzontles, but I have to say that it was certainly worth the wait. Everything else that we had was on the menu (well, the ensalada de chayote was on a little special table-tent-like menu, but maybe they will add it to their standard menu on the next printing), so a vegetarian could still just walk in off the street and have plenty to eat. They also had some chiles rellenos de queso that we did not order since we had the huauzontles, and while not nearly as unusual, I am sure they would be very well executed at El Arrayán.

And The Rest

I wanted to include a special note about the restaurant in the condo building where we stayed, because it had a couple of vegetarian items on it, and one that really stood out. The place is La Época (174 Aquilles Serdan), and while they had a vegetarian tamal that was exquisite, the real thing to try there for those that eat cheese is the panela coated in nuts and fried, served with a sweet-hot sauce on the side. After enjoying it the first night we tried the restaurant, we went back almost every day for the rest of our trip to have just the crispy panela. How could I resist? It is a dish that speaks to me!

Posted by crispy at 07:53 PM | Comments (1)

October 27, 2008

Puerto Vallarta Hiatus

Molly at The River Café, Puerto Vallarta

We were away in Puerto Vallarta for the week, and contrary to what the listing for our rental condo said, there was no wireless access in the unit. Yeah. I was really angry.

Let me just indicate that as the reason for there being so few new entries of late. I'm working on a write-up of our experiences as vegetarians there, but it's not ready.

For now, enjoy this lovely photo of Molly at one of the places where we had some vegetarian food. There is no fuzzy filter nor a Photoshop® effect involved; it was so humid there the lens of the camera fogged over while Shawn was taking photos.

Posted by crispy at 07:33 PM | Comments (6)

July 20, 2008

New York, New York

View, Empire State Building

Despite Shawn's promise to help out with entries about New York and Boston, I have yet to get anything from him.

In the interest of posting some of the stuff about some of the cool things we did in New York so I can get back to the daily grind in Guadalajara, I'm going to go ahead on my own. If he wants, he can do the Boston entry.

Molly and Shawn at the Campbell Apartment

One of the coolest things we did was to go to The Campbell Apartment. It isn't an apartment now, and in fact, it never really was an apartment. It used to be an office for John W. Campbell, the railroad magnate, tucked away in a corner of Grand Central Station. It has been revived as a very cool cocktail lounge, with a hand-painted wooden beam ceiling and stained glass windows.

My saying this may reveal me as an incorrigible lush - or maybe just a fan of the horribly plush - but I think that everyone that goes to New York needs to have a drink here. It is classic New York in so many ways: big money, big room, big drinks.

Crowd, Empire State Building

New York is huge and crowded. The view from the Empire State Building (above) shows how the buildings are crowded, and the view of the Empire State Building Observatory shows how crowded the people are. This is kind of cool in some ways, as there are spots with a lot of famous or cool places that are all in a tight radius. There is hardly a walk or a cab ride that you take without seeing a slew of landmarks that you have seen on screen or read about in books. "Oh! That was the Sherry Netherland! Wow! The funky Apple Store! Cool! The Plaza!"

New York is also home to a mind-boggling number of museums that have incredible collections. We went to The Brooklyn Museum of Art because they had an exhibition of work by Takashi Murakami.

Brett at The Brooklyn Museum

The guards were a little rude there though. They wouldn't let Shawn simply walk through a section of the museum to check it out because it was 8 minutes until their posted closing time. Then, upon trying to use the bathroom located in the lobby of the museum, they again gave him a hard time because it was closing time, even though it was five minutes before closing time. He blew the guard off and went in the bathroom anyway.

We did not have much luck trying to see The Guggenheim Museum, as 80% of it was closed for the installation of an upcoming exhibition. Their web site did not really make this clear, instead talking about the two small little exhibits that remained open. To their credit, they charged a reduced price, and the two exhibits they had available were quite good. But that, combined with the fact that the outside of the building, a classic Frank Lloyd Wright design, was completely obscured by scaffolding, kind of foiled our Guggenheim experience.

The Guggenheim, New York

The ramps inside were even closed, so all we could do was get this photo of them from the lobby.

The King Cole Lounge, The St. Regis Hotel

We stopped by the St. Regis for cocktails in the King Cole Lounge. It has a mural painted by Maxfield Parrish, the trippy American painter and illustrator.

Radio City Music Hall, New York

There were many other things we did not get to see or do in New York, but hopefully we will get to return in the future for another visit.

Posted by crispy at 10:25 AM | Comments (1)

July 10, 2008

Alla cuelga mi vestido

View From Window, Manhattan

Shawn and I are still on our tour of the United States. Having spent the past month on the east coast, visiting Boston, Providence and New York City, we are now in southern Illinois. Most of the driving is now behind us. Most of the big city experience is over. Now we are spending another week with my parents, then passing through Chicago once more before returning at last to Mexico.

A lot of people have commented to me in email that they miss my blog entries. Thanks for saying so. And to those dedicated readers that have been seeing the bottom of the page creeping higher and higher, perhaps even coming here to find only a blank page, please accept my apologies. I know it is emotionally disturbing to see that. It makes it seem like the author has vanished into nonexistence. Blog entries have been few for a number of reasons.

I've been sending a little more email to individuals on the trip, as many small details have reminded me of particular people and do not seem very interesting to readers as a whole. How many people would laugh about my walking by the Museum of Folk Art in New York City by coincidence or celebrate my home town's "Specialness?" Only a select few even understand what those things mean, so while our trip has been full of many funny moments like those, they have not made it to the page.

I have also been trying out Shawn's preferred mode of travel: to travel first and blog after. He gets upset with me that I spend so much time blogging while we are actually on vacation. He thinks it would be better to just take brief notes (if that) and write about it when we return back home to boring old Guadalajara (or wherever is the relative equivalent of "home" at any given point).

Yet having now tried it, I must say that despite the logic behind taking the opportunity to experience a foreign place in a hands-on manner as much as possible, I need to write about it to process it a little. Also, it helps me to remember the best parts. I really enjoy the funky stuff that happens when traveling around the world, but I have a terrible long-term memory for the details. Already I am starting to feel the little things fading away about Boston and New York - how much did an unlimited Metrocard cost and for how long was it valid? - as is my interest in talking about them. I prefer to write about how a place makes me feel, not simply catalog what I did and what I saw. Any guide book can give better details on things like that than can my hit-or-miss memory.

Last but not least, what I feel like writing about is kind of gloomy. It is sad for me to see the land that raised us slipping slowly into chaos and disrepair, the once-great empire quietly sinking into an apathetic mediocrity, the talking heads telling us all the while that there is nothing to fear, everything will be okay. Yes, it still has a long way to fall, but what we had is gone, and despite a renewed sense of hope that change is possible, to an outsider looking in, it seems that it is all too little, too late.

This time around, the United States seems like a cartoon character that is suspended in mid-air only by the ignorance that she has no ground below to hold her up. Yet I really do not want to write about that. Despite all my caustic commentary and preparations for the oncoming darkness, it turns out that I'm not ready to face the twilight. I still want to write just a little more of the song and dance, before they ask us to pay the bill, and while we still have the chance.

Shawn said he'd help me pick out a few photos of the good stuff from our trip and give me a hand with the copy. Stay tuned for stuff that's a little more fun.

Posted by crispy at 02:13 AM | Comments (4)

June 19, 2008

Providence

Power Plant at Night, Providence

We visited Providence, Rhode Island, the capital of "the biggest little state in the union." Our friend Brett found it "cute" and even "cutesey" at points. I suppose in contrast to Los Angeles, it could be so considered.

I thought it had that cool college town feel that many places do; both Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design are located there, right next to each other, in fact. We stopped to see the RISD Museum, which I suspected would have a lot of design-oriented stuff. They did have that, but they also had a bunch of more traditional art such as ancient statuary and European paintings.

The RISD Museum, Providence

That museum is on Benefit Street, which is an old historic street with lots of old houses. Shawn insists that I put in a picture of one of them, so as to give all you dear readers a sample of the old crap that one can see there.

Aston House (built 1790), Providence

In contrast to several other college towns, the college angle doesn't seem to be overdone in Providence. You do not have a lot of ratty bars that cater to the drunken carousing of students, nor numerous mid-quality fast food outlets that pass off sandwiches that are merely overpriced as "gourmet." It might be that this is because Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design are both top-notch schools, or it might be that the city's raison d'être is not just the schools. In any case, it is a very beautiful place with some very interesting offerings.

I wanted to specifically note a place called The Meeting Street Café (220 Meeting Street), because it was incredible. They are more-or-less a deli, but not of your specifically Jewish variety. They have soups and sandwiches, as well as some other entrees and desserts. Everything we had there was really tasty, and incredibly huge. Unfortunately, I was so overwhelmed with the eating experience there, I didn't get any photos.

Apart from the cutsey old homes, there are some killer buildings in the downtown. Among them are...

The Bank of America Building, Providence

...and...

Court House, Providence

...and...

Citizen's Bank/Apartments, Providence

...and...

Some Random Building, Providence

We also had some good Italian food in Federal Hill, and went to a pretty cool gay bar named "Mirabar."

I'd tell you about our shocking hotel fire alarm experience (5:30 am!), but I don't have time now. That'll probably be related in a summary of our hotel experiences in a later posting.

Posted by crispy at 09:09 AM | Comments (2)

June 13, 2008

A Look at Boston

Shawn in Chinatown, Boston

The above shot was taken in Chinatown, as was this one of a bilingual Dunkin Donuts sign.

Dunkin Donuts in Chinatown, Boston

The Theatre District is next to Chinatown, and one gets the "border effect" of sorts at the Wang Theater.

Wang Theater, Boston

Let's just say that I was greatly disappointed with that place. Not so with the Museum of Fine Arts.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

They have a great Asian section, as well as an incomparable section of portraits of several early Americans.

Portrait of Paul Revere, MFA

They have a lot of pre-American stuff too, like the British lion on top of the Old State House, seen below.

Lion, Old State House

This is one part of the Potato Famine Monument, which shows an Irish immigrant woman looking back to the Old Country.

Potato Famine Monument, Boston

This building has fire escapes that are all spiral staircases.

Buildings with spiral fire escapes, Financial District

These are homes in the South End.

Residences, South End

These are in the Union Park area of South End.

Residences near Union Park, South End

These last two were not taken in Boston itself, but rather in Milford, an outlying town where Shawn and I spent the night. This first one was such an oddity that I had to include it. I figured readers (apart from those who live in Oregon) have not seen full-serve gas for a long time. It was roughly the same price (or cheaper) than the self-serve gas places in neighboring towns.

Full-Serve Gas, Milford

And the former smoker in me has to gasp at these cigarette prices. Note that these are on sale.

Cigarette Sale, Milford

Posted by crispy at 09:28 AM | Comments (3)

June 12, 2008

Specialists Admitted in Rear

General Hooker Entrance

It's even funnier because it's an entrance for the State House.

Posted by crispy at 06:03 PM | Comments (1)

June 08, 2008

The Photograph That Helped al-Qaeda

MBTA Advisory, Riverside Station

I was snapping this very photo of a sign at a train station for a collage I'm going to make once we return to Mexico of signs telling of all the things Americans are not permitted to do when I heard a voice asking, "May I help you?"

"Oh!" I exclaimed, having not seen him walking over. "I'm just taking a picture of the sign."

"You're not supposed to take any pictures of the equipment," he told me.

"No photos of any equipment?" I asked, not exactly sure how a sign was equipment.

"No," he replied with a sigh, indicating a mild annoyance.

I suspected I knew the reason for this, despite its being utterly ridiculous. Recently, I have been stopped from taking any number of seemingly innoccuous photographs like the one above.

The first time we ever ran into the phenomenon, we were in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Shawn was going around to see the locations used in the opening credits of one of his favorite shows of all time, The Mary Tyler Moore Show - the house where she supposedly lived, the park where she walked, the street where she tossed her hat in the air. When attempting to take a photograph of the escalator she rode in the Nicollet Mall, he was stopped by a private guard that wouldn't allow him to take a picture "for security reasons." At that time, it actually took us a while to figure out how a photograph of an escalator could be a threat to anyone's security, but by now, we've heard it as often as we've heard the one about putting your liquids in three-ounce bottles in a clear Ziploc® bag in your carry-on luggage.

All the same, I like to hear them say it. I put the camera down and asked him.

"Why is that?"

He looked at me for a moment with a corner of his mouth raised and issued a brief snort, and replied simply, "9-11." He stopped just short of following that with, "...smart-ass."

I thought I'd try to lighten the mood a little, so I asked him about what caused us to notice the sign in the first place: to reach the exit of the station, one has no choice to cross the tracks (visible at the lower left) about five feet from the location of the sign telling riders it is FORBIDDEN. I asked him how one was to get out of the station if they adhere to the mandate of the sign.

He was not amused.

"You exit down there, in the yellow zone," he said, pointing to a strip painted on the ground.

It was late. He didn't need some joker taunting him about the rules; people probably hassle him about the contradictory signage on a daily basis, each one thinking they're the genius that was the first to notice it. I abandoned my hopeless mission to turn his frown upside down and exited the station as he had indicated.

In my defense though, I wouldn't have joked with him about it if I could have just taken a photo of the sign. In his defense, he seemed, by his manner and tone of voice, to realize that it was ridiculous that I couldn't take a picture of signage at the station.

It made me wonder exactly how long people will continue to actually enforce such ridiculous knee-jerk prohibitions in the United States that were pushed on them in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. I mean, honestly. Even if I took a photograph of the entire station, it's a train stop in a suburban town in Massachusetts. It's unlikely to be a high-priority target on even the most unambitious terrorist's list. I would be open to consideration of the idea that high-resolution photographs of more serious targets (Grand Central Station, airport terminals, Fort Knox) might be of aid to those wishing to do harm to the United States and its citizens, but one would be an idiot to think that a tourist's snapshot taken in a train station, especially one that simply shows what a sign says, is helping terrorists.

I know, it's easier to just write a blanket law that uses language like "transportation facility" and "equipment" than to exhaustively list which manifestations of those things are subject to a law and which are excused from it. I understand that such vague terminology has certain advantages to legislators writing the laws and those who enforce it. Yet when will the old chestnut of selective enforcement of such laws start to kick in and give people a little relief from the martial law effect in the United States?

Even the guy that told me to stop taking photographs seemed to find it ridiculous, but he had to do his job. Will life in the United States be like this for the rest of my life?

Posted by crispy at 10:59 PM | Comments (8)

June 01, 2008

Toronto: What I Liked

CN Tower, Toronto

Two and a half days in Toronto is not much time. It is not enough time to experience a decent sample of what the city has to offer, let alone to get a good feeling of what the city is really like.

Given that our stay at the Sheraton Centre Toronto was the worst part of our trip (I won't go into that here; let's just say that the $18 veggie burger was not the only rip off there), I wanted to talk about some of the great things I liked about Toronto.

View from the CN Tower, Toronto

Toronto is a huge city. It is big not only in population and area, but in vertical space as well. Unlike Shawn, I am not a huge fan of high views, so I let him go on his own to the CN Tower to get his fix. The pictures he took there show how massive the city is, in terms of big, tall buildings. I have yet to reach New York City, but Toronto is in many ways how I picture it: skyscrapers cluttered together perilously close and teeming with surging masses of people betweent them.

View from the CN Tower, Toronto

I also liked that the people here are of all different types. Half of the population here is foreign-born. We had a cab driver from Kenya that told us about being thrown into jail in the United States at a border crossing and being held for six hours in a crowded cell just because the country where he was born (but hasn't lived for more than 20 years) is on "the list." We heard all kinds of different languages on the radio here, many that I couldn't identify, and of course, the ubiquitous French.

Multilingual Signage, Royal Ontario Museum

I love Mexican food. I have found a number of places in Guadalajara that have tasty delights that I miss already, having been on the road for a couple of weeks. Yet the ethnic diversity results in a great diversity of ethnic restaurants, the likes of which I'm not even sure they have in Mexico City. We didn't eat there, but yesterday we passed an Eritrian restaurant. We were so taken with Full Moon Vegetarian Restaurant (638 Dundas Street West, 416/203-1210), a place that serves a huge selection of all-vegetarian Chinese dishes, that we ate there twice. We also had great Indian and Thai food too.

Full Moon Vegetarian Restaurant

This was a sauteed eggplant with vegetarian ham, which had a beautiful palette of rich colors.

Eggplant with Vegetarian Ham, Full Moon restuarnat

Big cities always have the best graffiti, and Toronto has some of the best I've seen in a while. Moreover, one doesn't tend to see all that many boring, crappy tags, but when there is graffiti, it's almost always the elaborate kind that demands real artistic talent.

Graffiti, Toronto

I don't like to see Shawn in pain, but this was one of the funniest unexpected things I saw on the trip. I looked up from taking that last shot and saw him bent over and rubbing his back next to this sign. I quickly snapped another shot just because the symmetry was so funny.

Shawn In jured, Toronto

Posted by crispy at 11:45 PM | Comments (3)

May 31, 2008

Toronto, Ontokyo

The Amazing $18 Veggie Burger

Shawn and I are in Toronto, where we are enjoying a beautiful view from our 33rd story view at the Sheraton Toronto Centre Hotel.

What we're not enjoying is the nickle-and-diming. They charge guests an additional CAD $9 to use the pool, hot tub or gym, and a CAD $2 access charge (plus CAD $0.15 per minute) to make toll-free calls. They give you coffee in the room, but apparently they only give you two packages (enough to make two cups total) for your entire STAY (not per day), and if you want more, you can buy it from them.

But what really got us was this CAD $18 veggie burger in the restaurant. Of course, it's $18 for fish and chips too...

Posted by crispy at 03:30 PM | Comments (3)

May 27, 2008

I went to Cleveland and it was closed.

Shawn and I planned three days in Cleveland, as there were several things we wanted to do, like visiting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

We also thought we'd need considerable time to visit the renowned Cleveland Museum of Art and the Contemporary Museum of Art in Cleveland. Yet as our luck would have it, neither one is open to the public at the moment. The former is closed for renovations; the latter is closed for the installation of their next exhibit. Go figure. That exhibit opens the day we leave town.

The Cleveland Museum of Art closure makes us really mad. It's lame to close the whole musuem at once. Usually places will renovate in sections so they at least have something open at all times. Instead, they suggest that you visit one of their traveling exhibits. That's all well and good...if you're in Nashville!

We will end up going to see the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum at Case-Western University, and that will be cool. We hope to join the leagues of people that claim that they expected the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum to be lame (as do we), but were pleasantly surprised to find it both interesting and cool. We have tickets at will-call to see the world-famous Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall, considered one of the top five orchestras in the country.

So we won't be without things to do, but it is a pretty big drag for us that both of the big art museums will be closed while we're here.

Posted by crispy at 10:14 PM | Comments (3)

May 24, 2008

Chicago: Part Two

Friday we moved downtown, to stay in the W Chicago - City Center. I was a bit apprehensive about this hotel, because I'd read some reviews of it that had criticized it as being very dark and having miniscule rooms. In fact, when you make a reservation for the cheapest room rates they have, it even warns you with the text "SMALLER ROOM" in the description.

The person at reception that checked us in upgraded us to a larger room, which is, I believe only the second time that we've really been upgraded at a Starwood property, despite the fact that we've been members of their frequent stay program for a few years. That perhaps tipped our perception of the place toward the positive from the start, but I have to say that this downtown W seems a lot cooler than the Lakeshore. The staff is a lot friendlier, the location is killer, and the hotel itself is dazzling. It was formerly the Midland Hotel, and still retains the vaulted arches in the lobby and the gold, silver and bronze plaster-cast ceiling on the mezzanine. Yeah, it is kind of dark, but in a good W Hotel sexy way, not a dim, seedy, too-cheap-to-buy-decent-light-bulbs kind of way.

That can be fun too, I guess, but after our return flight experience and the Chicago zombie tour of our first 24 hours in town, it is good to be in a cushy spot. In addition to the featherbed and down pillows, this hotel softens the blow of being in a strange land by providing a concierge. In our experience, the W Hotel concierges range from being so well-informed you fear their falling into the wrong hands and being used for evil, to having such a lack of knowledge that might be similarly dangerous, if they actually had any follow-through whatsoever. Luckily, at the W Chicago - City Center, we had the benefit of Li Feng.

Li is the kind of concierge that can tell you the street addresses and hours of operation for a restaurant in town at the mere mention of the name. He pointed us to the incredible experience we had at the Green Zebra, and he sent us to the fabulous Lou Mitchell's diner for breakfast today, after we'd slept through it here at the hotel. He explained that the latter is kind of a greasy spoon kind of diner, although it is really very good. "People actually line up there in the morning to get a table," he told us as he wrote the address out on one of his W business cards. "If you get there and there is a line, just go in through the door to the hostess, give her my card and she'll get you a table right away."

We went to the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture on Saturday, then that night we went to see "The Strangerer" at the Chopin Theater. Sunday we're checking out of the W Chicago - City Center and heading down to Effingham by train, where my father will pick us up and take us to Olney.

Posted by crispy at 04:02 PM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2008

Chicago: Green Zebra

Tonight we ate at a restaurant called Green Zebra. It is at 1460 West Chicago Avenue. The phone number is (312) 243-7100.

I cannot begin to relate what an amazing experience it was for me. I have long griped about how vegetarian restaurants are prone to overlooking flavor, taste and artistic merit for other, less interesting criteria. Vegetarian food often gets a bad reputation because those that make it do not approach it as chefs approach regular food. Too often "vegetarian food" means simply "health food," and while it most certainly is not the case that food that is tasty must be unhealthy, it is presumed that if vegetarian dishes are more healthy than your average dish, they will be appealing to vegetarians. This is not true.

Vegetarians appreciate presentation, balance, complimentary flavors, texture, just as much as meat eaters, but rarely do we get the same attention paid to these details by chefs cooking for us as those cooking for omnivores at the finer establishments. Often vegetarian dishes are accomplished by merely omitting the meat from dishes that normally contain it. This upsets the integrity of the dishes, and often leaves such plates thoroughly unsatisfying. Dishes so prepared are about as rewarding for vegetarians as girl-on-girl scenes in heterosexual pornographic films directed by straight men are for real-life lesbians: they may achieve a technical accuracy, but they have no real depth or soul.

Green Zebra does not get overly concerned with being a vegetarian restaurant as much as it just makes great food from products that are not meat. There is no effort to substitute anything to replace "missing" meat. Green Zebra's dishes do not originate from a position of inferiority because they start out already lacking some aspect for which the chef must compensate. They are just well-designed dishes that are made from the wide variety of things that fit into the category of not being meat.

There are plenty of dishes that are vegetarian in the traditional cuisine rosters of various ethnic foods. Italian has lots of pastas and polentas, Greek has salads and spanikopita, and Asian has tofu and tempura vegetables. These are all great, but they are not necessarily exciting. The stuff at Green Zebra made me go, "Wow! That's really brilliant!" Fresh burrata cheese, grilled mango, haricot verts and shaved fennel. Hawaiian heart of palm, cape gooseberries, pasion fruit cream and szechuan peppercorns. Poached Prospera Farms egg, smoked potato puree, served with country sourdough toast. It doesn't all work equally well, but enough comes together in an unexpected way to make it a truly exciting experience of eating vegetarian food. And when was the last time you thought of eating vegetarian food as exciting?

Sure, this is a place for foodies without a doubt. If you can't imagine spending ten bucks on a plate of vegetables, no matter how well they're crafted, this place is not for you. Yet if you are a vegetarian who appreciates culinary artistry, this place is arguably the most important restaurant in the world.

I'm not kidding.

Read the New York Times review.

Posted by crispy at 10:00 PM | Comments (1)

May 19, 2008

The United States Trip

It is official. Shawn has reached a settlement with his former employer, so we will be visiting the United States for several weeks to visit our parents. We will also be doing a bit of sightseeing along the way in places like Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto and New York.

I already have mixed feelings about the trip.

On the positive side, it will be great to see the folks and our friends, and to catch up on what is going on. I will delight in going out to a bar, being able to choose a whiskey from a list that has more than just eight Scotches and one Bourbon, then sitting back to enjoy some real jazz played on a real piano, not a synthesizer with a built-in drum kit. I will revel in the cool cascade of iced air that pours forth from the open freezer case as I try to decide which of the ten varieties of Morningstar Farms® burgers I want, or maybe I'll just get a box of Boca® Bratwurst, some sauerkraut and pumpernickel buns. I might just buy some electronics without the 270% markup.

Yet while I look forward to basking in the unrestrained consumerism that is perhaps the best remaining aspect of life in the United States, I fear just being there. It is funny to us that gringos coming to visit invariably ask if it's safe here in Guadalajara, because it's so quiet and calm around where we live. Here one has to be cautious about the occasional cab driver that wants to overcharge you by ten pesos, the government official that promises to fix the roads and then absconds with half the funds for the project, or the sharp pieces of metal that jut forth from the crumbling remains of some neglected building, started long ago but never completed. There is danger here, but it does not seem to have the same violent, lethal quality that danger in the United States has.

Sure, Mexico has some dangerous places. News stories appear with an alarming frequency about the escalating war between the narcotraficantes and the authorities. Charles just recently reminded me that, while I fall in love with Mexico City every time I visit the Zona Rosa for a few days, in neighborhoods of the capital that have not been sanitized for public consumption, people are afraid to walk the streets at night or wear jewelry outside. There are parts of Mexico that are dangerous, but in general, for most people, Guadalajara just isn't. It is a big city where one should be cautious, but overall, it's a nice, quiet place.

In contrast, in the United States, it's the nice, quiet places that scare me the most. It will be a long time before I forget the experience of driving across the United States with Shawn about a year before we left, going to Massachusetts to get married. Along the way, we got our fair share of weird looks from front desk clerks when we checked to a reservation for only one bed and caused many an eye to roll when we asked for the salad without the apple-smoked bacon or the flame-broiled chicken breast on top. Yet it was the public opinion we heard on the radio driving through nice, quiet places that finally got to us.

"Them immigrants come here tuh steal awr jobs, 'n' they don' even bother tuh learn them some English!" one caller to a talk show railed. "They needs tuh learn the language if'n they wanna live here."

Another, calling in to answer the host's question about how the audience would feel if Condoleezza Rice ran for president, said, "I don't think America is ready for a black woman to be president." She was not the only caller to have such sentiments, although other callers said, "I don't think America is ready for a black woman to be president."

The last time we visited the United States, in April 2007, while stuck waiting in an airport, the TV monitors were showing an Anderson Cooper special on CNN. Despite plenty of ongoing real news (a bomb set by Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq in the cafeteria of the National Assembly of Iraq kills eight people, 33 people are killed and 29 others wounded by shooter Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin dies at the age of 76), Cooper was immersed in an hour-long, special presentation investigating the gay question.

Once again we will be driving across the United States, and I hope that this time we find that Americans have gotten tired of discussing whether homosexuals and people of color deserve any rights and have moved on to discussing what new direction they want the country to take. I hope that we are surprised to find our fellow citizens engaged in a respectful and intelligent debate about things like the economy, education, or technology instead of fiercely arguing the source of the next great threat to life and liberty and the best way to snuff it out entirely before it takes over.

The last time we were traveling across the United States, the whole place seemed like one big paranoid science fiction film from the 50s, where people are threatened by some metaphoric mouse and end up razing entire cities in their fearful panic, trying to cleanse the world of the menace that never really was. The events of September 11, 2001 were not yet five years past, the War on Terror was blindly lashing out against inappropriate targets, and the American public was too numbed to give a damn that their government was torturing prisoners, wasting billions and illegally monitoring their communications. Maybe enough time has now elapsed that Americans are ready to get back on the horse and take their place at the reins of one of the most powerful countries in the world, tackling difficult problems and returning the nation to a place where at least the ideas of truth and justice have some value. Or will rising inflation of key goods, a collapsing housing market and an impending recession bring out the worst in people?

If history is any indication, I'm afraid we are to be disappointed.

Posted by crispy at 07:08 AM | Comments (9)

May 09, 2008

You Pee, You Pay!

Bus Station Pay Toilets, Querétaro

They lack the vitriolic signage of some facilities in the United States, but Mexico has its fair share of toilets where one has to pay for entry. These are especially common in bus terminals, like the one in Querétaro, pictured above.

In most cases, they cost MXN $3, which is roughly USD $0.28. The machines as shown above make change for 10 or 5 peso coins, but they do not accept 20 or 50 peso notes. If there is a human standing or sitting outside the entrance of the facility, they usually can make change for smaller bills.

The theory is that the money goes toward the upkeep of the bathroom and to provide things like toilet paper, hand towels and soap. I'm not convinced that there is not some serious skimming off the top going on.

I do not expect scented terrycloth towels and a foot massage for that price, but I have been to several such bathrooms where it seems like a rip-off. At times, an attendant will give you three squares (yes, three individual squares) of toilet paper for your MXN $0.30 as you enter. It's better if they have an actual roll of toilet paper you can use as you need it, but often, when these are provided, they're not in the stalls where you use it, but rather out by the sinks where you wash your hands. All the stalls share one big industrial roll from a dispenser mounted on the wall, and the user is supposed to tear some off as she enters. I do not understand where the economy is in that. I think the idea is that they only have to pay for one dispenser that way, but when faced with the decision in advance about how much toilet paper one is going to need when the actual time comes, the tendency is to over-estimate. No one wants to get caught with his pants down, literally, in such a situation.

It doesn't hurt when traveling in Mexico (and probably anywhere, for that matter) to bring one's own toilet paper. It seems odd to me that no company has come up with any kind of product for this here. I've seen Charmin travel rolls (small, packed in a hard plastic case) in the United States, but to my knowledge, they don't sell those in Mexico. Go figure. The best commercially-available product that I've seen here are moist wipes that are used for babies, and those seem to be available everywhere here. Otherwise, you should try to remember to wad up a bunch and stick it in your bag or pocket before going out and about.

Sooner or later, you'll be glad you did.

Posted by crispy at 12:10 PM | Comments (3)

April 30, 2008

Querétaro: Part Three

Paper Head Guy, Querétaro

I wanted to see the place where Emperor Maximilian was executed, El Cerro de las Campanas, or "The Hill of the Bells." We set out on foot this morning before noon to check it out.

It was already hot, and I was in semi-dressy clothes. At first, it wasn't so bad. Walking down Avenida Hidalgo, I saw a bunch of stuff that struck me as funny or cool, and I was able to snap some photos of them.

Lavandería/Tintorería Veronica, Querétaro

I don't understand the one below. It's a sign for a place that sells medical implants and prosthetics, and I'm sure their products help their clients to live fuller, more satisfying lives. Yet I suspect most of them do not go on to be communications directors on the crew of an open-wheel, off-road racing team.

Adventures in Prosthetics, Querétaro

I mean, where did they get this photo? Did they make it themselves? It looks like a poster for a Hollywood summer blockbuster about a racer that loses an arm in a terrible accident but whose courage allows him to take his former teammate to the championships as the tough but caring crew chief that inspires everyone that gets to know him.

A reward is being offered for this lost dog.

Perrito Perdido, Querétaro

Why, I'm not exactly sure. It looks like Darth Poodle to me, but then again, I'm not a big dog fan.

Is it just me, or does this...

I AM A MONEDA!, Querétaro

...remind anyone else of Don Hertzfeldt's "Rejected"?

Soon enough though, we started having to go uphill to get to the summit, and site of the historic stuff I wanted to see. This was annoying because I was a little dressed up, and I was sweating like a pig the whole way. As we got nearer and nearer to the top of the hill, Shawn noticed that all the gates to the park were closed. He started to worry that one had to go in through one specific gate to get in the park, but there were no signs whatsoever anywhere to direct one to the proper entrance. The gates that were closed didn't even have a sign telling one which gate to go to.

This isn't entirely unusual in Mexico, but one would think that, at one of the biggest tourist attractions in the city, they'd have signs telling you where to go to buy your ticket to get in. Of course, our friends Larry and Joseph would argue that this is where you make your first mistake, presuming that people think about such things here.

We finally got to the top, and found that we were in a big empty parking lot, unable to get in through the fence that encircles the whole park. Luckily, Shawn spotted a gate that was ajar, although it said (in Spanish), "EMPLOYEE ENTRANCE ONLY!" They can't afford the time or expense to put a sign up telling you where to get in, but they can somehow manage one to tell you to keep out. I was annoyed, hot and sweaty by this point, so I squeezed in through the gate after Shawn. I wasn't about to go back down the hill just so that I could go back up to get to the proper gate.

View from El Cerro de las Campanas, Querétaro

While climbing the hill, I was quickly losing interest in the park, cursing our even thinking of going there. Yet once inside, I was glad to have made the effort, because it was quite verdant and beautiful.

Shawn at El Cerro de las Campanas, Querétaro

There is a great, enormous statue of Benito Juárez in the park, which is kind of funny because he was a pretty short man.

Monument to Benito Juárez, Querétaro

Shawn commented that it looked so severe as to seem Russian.

Monument to Benito Juárez, Querétaro

You can't really tell in the above photo as resized for the blog, but Shawn's giving old Juárez the Lynndie England.

The Lynndie England, Querétaro

Emperor Maximilian was Austrian, and had been appointed as Emperor of Mexico by Napoleon during a period when France had conquered Mexico. His reign was brief though, as Juárez and the resistance movement overthrew the monarchy and had Maximilian executed. The family of Maximilian sponsored the building of a chapel to commemorate the re-establishing of diplomatic relations between Austria-Hungary and Mexico in 1900.

Chapel at El Cerro de las Campanas, Querétaro

It is a nice little chapel, but it does not seem like people are allowed to enter, but they do have the doors open so you can see inside. When we arrived, a bunch of school kids on a field trip were all bunched up at the entrance checking it out.

Chapel at El Cerro de las Campanas, Querétaro

There's also a fountain that is dedicated to children, their learning, and being the future. Yada, yada, yada.

Child Reading Sculpture at El Cerro de las Campanas, Querétaro

We didn't notice until posting the picture, but it looks like the kid in the above sculpture is missing a foot. Maybe he needs to visit the prosthetics store and make something of himself, instead of just moping around reading all the time!

We exited the park, buying the entrance tickets as we left. I suspect they thought we were crazy, but I didn't want to explain our whole gate-crashing earlier. We hailed a cab and went to Harry's, a New Orleans-style restaurant and oyster bar in the Plaza Constitución.

Shawn at Harry's

Harry's was a pretty nice place, and they had a handful of things on the menu that we could eat as ovo-lacto vegetarians. Meat-eating fans of Cajun and Creole food would probably enjoy it even more.

I was delighted to discover that they had pecan pie listed as a dessert on the menu, but I was disappointed to find that it was more like a Mexican pay de nuez than a southern US style pecan pie. Instead of having a layer of glazed pecans over that delicious sugary, gooey filling, it was more or less all crushed up nuts in a crust. Not awful, but not at all what I was expecting (and craving).

Harry's of Querétaro

It's in the same building as the Gran Hotel, and seems to be the most happening night spot in the Centro Histórico. We went back later at night, around midnight, to have a nightcap and celebrate our last night in town, but there wasn't a free table in the whole place.

Yet before all that, still in the afternoon, we walked over to try and hang out for a while in the Alameda Hidalgo, a huge park with lots of trees and grassy areas. We had driven by it last night, and it looked beautiful. Yet when we got there, we found it closed. There were maintenance people inside, but all the gates were locked up tight.

Alameda Hidalgo, Querétaro

Again, there were no signs anywhere telling visitors why the park was closed, or when it would be open.

Alameda Hidalgo, Querétaro

We suspected that, since they had maintenance crews inside doing things like watering areas of the grass and sweeping the walkways, they do open it up at some point.

Alameda Hidalgo, Querétaro

Yet since we had limited time in town, we didn't stick around to find out. We took photos through the fence and then decided to get our shoes shined. We asked the shoeshine guy what the deal was with the Alameda being closed and he explained something about how it actually is open at certain times, but he was old and a bit mumbly, so we didn't fully understand his answer. We think it's open on most days but only after a certain time. If visiting Querétaro, and if you want to visit the Alameda, be sure to inquire as to when it is open, or you may be very disappointed when you show up and can't get in.

Alameda Hidalgo, Querétaro

We hoofed it back to the center and walked up Anador Libertad, a very pretty street that is now a pedestrian walkway, to reach the Plaza de Armas.

Anador Libertad, Querétaro

Shawn went about taking photos of the plaza while I got off my feet in a seat off to the side of the plaza.

Plaza de Armas, Querétaro

We had coffee at Gloria Jean's Coffees, where the staff was exceptionally friendly.

Plaza de Armas, Querétaro

As we were leaving, Shawn spotted a restaurant next to the coffee place that said, 'COCINA HINDÚ' - an Indian restaurant! That's our favorite national/regional food, so we were thrilled to find such a place. They were obviously not open, as they had all their tables and chairs stacked outside, and were doing some remodeling inside. Shawn went in and asked if they would be open for dinner, and a man told him, yes, at 8 pm.

Plaza de Armas, Querétaro

We were excited and immediately decided to return for an Indian feast that night for our final dinner in Querétaro.

Plaza de Armas, Querétaro

As we left the plaza, we were surrounded by a bunch of school kids who wanted to interview us in English for a school project. They had some 20 questions about genetically-modified foods. It was incredibly hard stuff for non-native speakers, but they did a pretty good job.

We walked back to our hotel and relaxed for a while in the air conditioning. Eventually we showered (again), shaved (again), ironed our clothes and went out for our Indian delights. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the restaurant, the furniture that had been piled up outside was piled up inside. We entered and a bunch of people were all sitting around talking. We asked if they were open, and they said that they were opening on Friday. I was a bit miffed. I said that someone there had earlier told Shawn that they would be open at 8 pm for dinner, and the woman that seemed to be an owner apologized to us. We were really bummed because we were really looking forward to Indian food. It's very hard to find it here in Mexico.

It was nice however, to actually get an apology for being misinformed by someone on their staff. That usually doesn't happen. Normally you get a shrug and a laugh, and nothing more. Because people think it's better to tell you what you want to hear rather than to tell you something that will disappoint you, people lie to you all the time here, and nobody thinks there is anything wrong with that.

While we didn't get the chance to eat at the place because we're leaving Thursday afternoon to return to Guadalajara, I submit to you the information on the place in case you are going to Querétaro and would like to try it out. The place is called "bhaji" and is located at Pasteur Sur #8, in the Plaza de Armas. Their phone number is (442) 224-2814.

We ended up taking a chance on an Italian place called Trastevere (16 de Septiembre #28; 212-1472) and were positively surprised. Instead of the exact same boring three or four vegetarian dishes that they offer at seemingly all the Italian restaurants in Mexico, this place had interesting dishes that we have never seen anywhere else in the country. We had a cheese fondue with artichokes and grilled tomatoes that was out of this world, followed by a spinach and cheese ravioli in pecan white sauce for Shawn and a spinach lasagne for me. The service was excellent and the atmosphere quite nice: an open courtyard adorned with several interesting paintings. After our Indian disappointment, it was an absolutely delightful end to the evening.

Tomorrow we head back to Guadalajara, but we have had a great time here in Querétaro. I would recommend it highly to anyone interested in a good mixture of the historic charm and modern 'conveniences.'

I just wish they would get a little better about their signage telling visitors details like where the entrances are and when places are open so one doesn't end up wasting a lot of time.

Posted by crispy at 11:31 PM | Comments (5)

April 29, 2008

Victoria Soda

Victoria Soda, from San Juan del Río

I am delighted to have discovered yet another Mexican-made soda that has somehow thus far survived the Coke®/Pepsi® holocaust that has killed off nearly all the independent soft drink manufacturers of Mexico: Victoria!

It is manufactured about 32 miles southeast of Santiago de Querétaro in San Juan del Río, Querétaro, the second largest city in the state. It is also imported to the United States by The Victoria Beverage Company, Inc., Conroe, Texas.

I saw it at the Oxxo, and selected the unusual red currant flavor over the more typical lime, apple, sangria, and orange. At first, I thought it was a little funny tasting, but the more I drink, the more I like it. It seems a little weak on flavor, but it's certainly not weak on sweet.

I was unaware of the Spanish word for red currant, which appears to be grosella.

Refresco Victoria, de San Juan del Río

Black currant is grosella negra.

Posted by crispy at 09:32 PM | Comments (3)

Querétaro: Part Two

Shawn reads The News at the Museo de Arte, Querétaro

Today we woke up early to make use of the continental breakfast at the hotel. It was, as I suspected, nothing to write home about. In fact, it was not anything worth writing about in the blog, apart from the fact that it forced us to get up early, and that let us get a pretty early start on the day.

Before noon, we got the the Museo de Arte de Querétaro, which normally charges MXN $30 per person for admission, but it is free every Tuesday. We paid the additional MXN $15 to be permitted to take photos in the courtyard.

Porticos, Museo de Arte, Querétaro

They currently have an exhibit of work by contemporary Mexican painter, Carlos García de la Nuez there, and we both really enjoyed it. He uses mixed media to cover huge (10' x 10'?) canvases, but unfortunately, we were not allowed to take photos of those works.

I can show you some of the details of the architecture though.

Inside the Museo de Arte, Querétaro

All the faces of lining the courtyard are different; they do not repeat.

Inside the Museo de Arte, Querétaro

However, they all terminate at the bottom in this single-leg and foot ornamentation.

Inside the Museo de Arte, Querétaro

We then moved on to the Museo Regional de Querétaro. The admission there is normally MXN $30, but it was free today because it was Tuesday. Again, we paid the few pesos extra to be allowed to take photographs inside the museum.

Hallway, Museo Regional de Querétaro

I wanted to go there because they supposedly have the table on which the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was signed. Unfortunately, we were not able to find it anywhere in the museum, and it looked like a huge section had been closed off. We did find the desk where the orders to execute Emperor Maximilian were signed.

Poor Max Was Bound to Die

Tonight, we are hoping to go out to either Bangkok Mex Thai, or Chino Lung Xing
 (Blvd. Bernardo Quintana 110). The former only has photographs of the food items online, no real menu. If it turns out they do not offer any vegetarian food, we will try to get to Lung Xing, because we've read online that they have vegetable dishes with tofu. I'm not holding my breath in either case.

Posted by crispy at 02:38 PM | Comments (2)

April 28, 2008

Querétaro: Part One

Chris and Shawn at the Hotel Quinta Santiago, Querétaro

The ride from Guadalajara on the bus was pleasant enough. We both slept off and on for most of it. The films were Rush Hour 3 and Monsters, Inc. The former was subtitled yet still unwatchable, while the latter was dubbed, much to my annoyance, for previously mentioned reasons.

Our cab from the bus station to the Hotel Quinta Santiago cost us MXN $37 (about USD $3.54) and took about 20 minutes. We were delighted to find that the hotel room was huge and quite comfortable. We took a few moments to figure out where we wanted to go with the help of a handy free map they had in the lobby, and then we struck out to get lunch and a feel for the area.

Shawn Surveillance, Querétaro

In mere summaries and snapshots, I fear that one Mexican colonial town comes across as identical to all the others. It is hard to convey the subtle differences that exist between each of them with a hastily put together collection of photos with brief notations. Querétaro seems to me like a composite of Morelia and Guanajuato. Like Morelia, the public areas around the center are spacious, yet like Guanajuato, they seem somehow more gussied up for tourist consumption.

There are the requisite plazas, with beautifully manicured trees and walkways.

Jardín Guerrero, Querétaro

Yet just a few blocks off of these, one quickly comes to the Mexican equivalent of row houses along old cobblestone streets.

Street Scene, Querétaro

Doors range from the simple to the ornate, but there is always an artistic touch.

Door, Querétaro

I especially liked this one...

Door, Querétaro

...because of the stone birds above the doorway.

Detail of Door, Querétaro

There are the statues, like this one dedicated to Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, aka La Corregidora, a conspirator in the Mexican struggle for independence against Spain.

Monument to La Corregidora, Querétaro

She is elevated on a tall pedestal, flanked by eagles resting on cannons that are draped in what look to be flags.

While looking upon this monument, Shawn made the observation that there are so many women throughout history that played crucial roles in freeing their societies, only to have their gender given the shaft by the male-dominated governments that they helped to establish.

Monument to La Corregidora, Querétaro

One occasionally runs across something that just seems odd. I sometimes find out after-the-fact that these things seem funny because I don't understand what is actually being said or I do not know some secondary meaning for a term. This tends to give Mexican readers of my blog no end of fun in ribbing me.

In this case, I understand the word la moraleja to mean "the moral," as in "the moral of the story is..."

La Moraleja Parking, Querétaro

Maybe one of my Mexican readers can set me straight as to why this isn't as odd as it would seem to someone not in the know.

Many times, the things I remember about a specific city are images that are not intended to be artistic, but they achieve a certain accidental beauty that stays with me even after I've forgotten which statues of whom are in which parks in whatever cities. These are things that never seem to come across properly in blog entries or flickr albums.

A Mona Lisa for our times, Querétaro

This is a wall that was originally painted a certain shade of yellow, but has subsequently acquired a patchwork of other shades as graffiti and cracks were painted over through the years.

Yellow Mural, Querétaro

Running the length of half the block, this wall is an unintentional mural of chromatic minimalism and abstract expressionism, akin to that of Josef Albers...

Yellow Mural, Querétaro

...or Mark Rothko.

Yellow Mural, Querétaro

Sometimes it is just a face in a crowd that strikes me, and the moment is horribly poignant because I know, unlike all the tourist attractions that I can visit time and time again on return trips to any given city, I will probably never have the chance to see it again.

Cutie, Querétaro

Sure, the haircut, the shoes, or (as in this case) the pants might make me laugh a bit.

Cutie, Querétaro

Yet I cherish these snapshots among all those of the monuments, buildings and landscapes that I take in our travels across the country, because the people are the most beautiful part of Mexico.

Posted by crispy at 10:54 PM | Comments (2)

April 27, 2008

Querétaro: Prologue

Santiago de Querétaro, Querétaro

Shawn and I have decided to take a trip next week to visit the nearby city of Santiago de Querétaro, in the state of Querétaro.

Founded in 1531, the city, usually referred to simply by "Querétaro," is the state capital. In Mexican history, it is famous for being the place where Emperor Maximillian was executed and for being the capital of the country during the Mexican American War, when the United States invaded the republic and took Mexico City in the Battle of Chapultepec. More recently, it is renowned for being one of the cleanest cities in Mexico, and in 2007 was ranked as the second-best place to do business in Mexico, according to América Economía magazine. In all of Latin America, they ranked it fifth, just ahead of Miami at #6.

We always want our first stay in an old Mexican town to be in or near the historic center. Since we do not have a car, it is easiest to stay within walking distance to the sites and museums. On the other hand, it's the hot season here in central Mexico, so a place with air conditioning is preferable. Often the hotels in the centro are historic landmarks and cannot be modified, so many do not (and cannot) have air conditioning. Luckily in Querétaro, there are a few options that satisfy both criteria.

The first place we considered was La Casa de la Marquesa, a stunning property that is ranked #1 on Trip Advisor.

The main problem with La Casa de la Marquesa is the price. The property has cheaper suites (USD $108 per night – USD $127 with tax), but these are reported to be in a second building that serves as sort of an annex to the main hotel. I have read reviews that say the charm of the second building is lacking, as is the service in that section of the hotel. Besides, a big part of staying in La Casa de la Marquesa is the historic appeal, and only the main structure is part of the legend: a Spanish marquis supposedly fell in love with a beautiful nun who could not return his love, yet as a last gift, she asked him build an aqueduct to provide water for the city and the most beautiful house in the city. Why exactly a nun would be concerned about having a beautiful house built for her that she couldn't live in doesn't make any sense to me, but that's how the legend goes.

To be in the main building, one must book the higher priced rooms, a Royal Suite (USD $180 per night – USD $211.50 with tax) or and Imperial Suite (USD $245 per night – USD $288.00 with tax).

It should be noted that these prices are at odds with the published rates on the web site, and have been obtained by doing an actual search for a room through the reservations interface.

That was considerably more than we wanted to spend, even though the hotel does look beautiful and luxurious. Yet in a city where one can find accommodation for under USD $100 per night easily, it should be possible to find something in-between that offers some of the modern conveniences we wanted as well as a good location.

We then considered two other hotels, Hotel Quinta Santiago and the Mesón Santa Rosa, ranked at #2 and #5 in popularity on Trip Advisor. While their web sites offer some information about the amenities, we had to have Charles call to nail them down on the availability of the services we wanted and the room rates.

Both are in the historic center, and both have air conditioning in the rooms, but it turns out that the Mesón Santa Rosa only offers air conditioning in some of the rooms, and one has to specifically request that when making a reservation. I tend to be wary of such special requests being noted on the hotel reservation, and I am afraid of arriving at the hotel only to find that they do not have a room with the thing I particularly asked for.

That alone made me a bit hesitant to go book a room at the Mesón Santa Rosa, but their accommodations look a bit nicer, and all the rooms have bathtubs, a feature that Shawn looks for when we stay in a hotel. On the other hand, the Hotel Quinta Santiago has not only air conditioning in all the rooms, but it also has Internet access in the rooms, which is something that I look for when we stay in a hotel. The Mesón Santa Rosa has wireless Internet access only in the restaurant and bar. The Hotel Quinta Santiago offers a continental breakfast, included in the room rate, whereas the Mesón Santa Rosa does not. Both were about the same cost for their standard rooms – MXN $1,258 (about USD $120) at the Hotel Quinta Santiago and MXN $1,292 (about USD $124) - so it came down to the features of each.

In the end, the in-room Internet access, guaranteed air-conditioning and continental breakfast included won out over having a bathtub. Of course, when we arrive, we may find the Internet access in the room to be slow, the air-conditioning to be barely functional, and it's a given that the continental breakfast will be nothing to write home about.

To get there, we booked tickets on ETN, our favorite bus line. It is, after all, "la línea más cómoda." Instead of having four seats per row (two on each side of the aisle), they have only three, and they are wider and cushier than most regular seats. They give you a little bag with a ham and cheese sandwich and a Coca-Cola® brand soda of your choice when you board the bus, and they usually have movies during the trip that do not make you want to gouge your eyes out. The cost of the tickets was MXN $366 per person, each way, or about USD $35. The drive will take about four and a half hours.

Once there, we hope to visit the Museo del Arte (Ignacio Allende, #14), and the Cerro de las Campañas, the site of Maximilian's execution. It is now a national park, complete with a monument to Benito Juárez, a museum dedicated to the siege of Querétaro, and a chapel, built posthumously by Maximilian's family.

We will surely check out a few other things of historic and cultural interest, but we still have to do a bit of research yet.

Our Lonely Planet guide to Mexico reports that there are two vegetarian restaurants in town: Restaurante Ibis Natura (Juárez 47 Norte) and Restaurante Vegetariano Natura (Andador Vergara 7). We'll have to see if they are still open when we get there.

One can view a map of the Centro Histórico and all the main tourist attractions online. as well as the municipal web site and a site providing tourist information in English.

Posted by crispy at 05:30 PM | Comments (0)

February 07, 2008

No More DEN-GDL on Frontier

I was daydreaming about a return visit to Denver, to visit some friends, revisit some dearly-missed old haunts and best of all, take in some much-needed Ellyn Rucker.

In the hopes that that a shockingly low fare might be available that would make me an idiot to not do it, I looked up random round-trip dates online at a site that draws results from several different sources. The lowest fare was through American Airlines, but after a terrible experience we had with American Airlines returning from the United States last May, I avoid them at all costs. Besides, it required a stop in Dallas, and I knew that Frontier had a nonstop between Guadalajara and Denver.

"Was" is the operative word here. The site I use includes Frontier, but none of their flights were in the results. I went to their site and did a search, looked at their route map, and finally wrote in to their customer service asking if they had discontinued that flight.

Their response arrived this morning:

   John,
 
   Good to hear from you. We’re happy to help. Frontier 
   Airlines has discontinued service to Guadalajara . This 
   decision was due to high fuel prices and lack of 
   consumer demands. I will pass your comments to the 
   appropriate manager to take into consideration when 
   reviewing our schedules.
 
   Thank you for visiting Frontier Airlines.com.
 
   Natacha Hager
   Customer Relations Specialist
   Frontier Airlines

I hate airlines.

Posted by crispy at 02:41 PM | Comments (2)

January 26, 2008

Turndown Service

Results of Turndown Service, Sheraton María Ísabel

Not all hotels do it, and among those that do, there is no consistent set of things that comprise it. Often it involves leaving a chocolate or some other little token on the turned-down linens. Also common is changing out towels that the guest might have used during the day. On occasion, I've had a hotel staff member just ask if everything is working properly, if we need anything restocked in the minibar, or if there is anything else we might want before bed.

If you have never heard of turndown service before, it's not a big surprise. Not all hotels do it. In fact, not very many seem to nowadays. Shawn had never heard of it until he went to Thailand seven years ago. Nowadays we only tend to get it when we stay at Starwood properties, and even then, it's ridiculously inconsistent.

For example, in our recent stay in Mexico City, at the Sheraton María Ísabel, we got turndown service on our second night there, but not the first. Even then, it wasn't much of a service. They didn't even turn down the linens. They moved the remote control for the tv and the guide listing which channels were which to the bed, and left us a solitary foil-wrapped chocolate. This is what confuses me: they know that there are two of us in the room, so why leave us just one chocolate? Starwood hotels are not exactly what one would call economy lodging. Can't they afford one chocolate per guest, not just one per room?

Solitary Chocolate, Sheraton María Ísabel

To me, it seems like if you are going to bother with turndown service, you ought to do it right. Why go through the trouble just to do something lame like leave a chocolate that people have to fight over. At least leave a knife so the two guests can cut it into halves. If I were running a hotel, I'd offer much more interesting turndown service. Maybe like the carts they have in prisons and hospitals, I'd go around with DVDs or books people could enjoy before turning in for the night. Heck, since it's my fantasy, I'll even throw in the option to have a story read to you if you want. You could also provide a short massage for those that were so inclined. Of course, if it was a big hotel, you'd have to have a fleet of massage therapists, and even then, you'd probably want to schedule each person's at a specific time.

I have also read that some places leave an aperetif on the nightstand in their turndown service. I don't tend to like apertifs, so I'd probably offer a fifth of bourbon and, since I'd have to be living and working where folks were not so uptight about drugs, a couple of valium or vicodin, delivered by a geisha that would also give you a good-night haiku.

So if you could design your own ideal turndown service, what would it include?

Posted by crispy at 09:45 PM | Comments (1)

January 25, 2008

Mexico City By Night: Part Two

Twilight view from 10th floor of Sheraton María Ísabel, Mexico City

We switched hotels today and got a new view.

Twilight view of the Angel of Independence from 10th floor of Sheraton María Ísabel, Mexico City

Posted by crispy at 06:19 PM | Comments (1)

Mexico City By Night

Sunset view from 16th floor of the Sheraton Centro Histórico, Mexico City

Shawn and I went to PapaBeto Jazz Bistro last night, where we saw the Juan Alzate Cuarteto. They said the cover was MXN $80, but we ordered food, and it seemed that we were not charged this. Their one vegetarian entree was spaghetti with a tomato sauce with tons of mushrooms, so despite the fact that I despise mushrooms, that's what I got. After picking them out and donating them to Shawn, it turned out to be pretty tasty.

Yet it is obvious that you don't go there for the food. The space is pretty small, the color scheme hideous (maroon, pink, grey and green), and I've seen better bars on airplanes. Still, given the fact that it's the only place yet I've been to see jazz in this country where they don't use an electronic something (synthesizer in place of piano, a drum machine instead of a drummer), I was thrilled to kick back, throw down a few Jack Daniels (at around MXN $70 each), and enjoy the show.

Sunset view from 16th floor of the Sheraton Centro Histórico, Mexico City

I was pretty impressed with the piano player, Nicolas Santella. He was both cute and talented.

Unfortunately, I did not have my camera with me, so I did not get any photos of him. That also kept me from snapping shots of the smorgasbord of hooker ladies lining the street we took getting back to the hotel. There was no effort being made at all to look discreet. They were clad in such stuff as white leather miniskirts, tube tops and huge cha cha heels. It was a beautiful sight to behold.

I must sign off for now, as we need to check out of the Sheraton Centro Histórico and move over to the Sheraton María Ísabel, the grand dame on the Paseo de la Reforma, which our taxi driver told us yesterday was the first five-star hotel in Mexico City. Maybe that's true.

Posted by crispy at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2008

Panama: Parting Thoughts

Now that we are back safe and sound in Guadalajara, I have time to post a few random thoughts about Panama that are too small or not funny enough to merit individual entries.

It should be noted that we did not venture beyond Panama City except when we went to Colón, the port city on the Atlantic side that is the destination of the Panama City Railway. I might post an entry about Colón, because it is probably the most dangerous city that I've ever been in, and it might prove helpful for those planning to take the train to know about it. We highly recommend the train trip, but the several hours that one must pass in Colón if one takes it (unless it's part of a tour package) might be enough to recommend against it. Note that it takes a lot for me to recommend not taking a train whenever possible. Colón is that bad.

Yet that experience aside, our time in Panama was limited to the captial, and there is a lot of beautiful country to visit outside the city. We prefer the amenities that cities provide, so we tend to stick to urban centers when we travel. Panama City did not disappoint. It is vibrant and exciting, rich with history and a very promising future. Shawn and I both expect it to become one of the world's premier destination cities within the next decade, and it is impossible to ignore the growing pains they are currently having along the way. They have gone from a city whose main reason to exist was to support the canal and the people servicing the canal to a city where people flock to enjoy the gambling, food, beaches, nightlife, retirement opportunities. They have not been able to grow fast enough to meet the demand, but it is not for a lack of trying.

According to our driver Roger, the Ministry of Tourism in Panama has been trying to educate service personnel on how to deal properly with foreign tourists. Unfortunately, employers do not want to allow the employees the time off to attend such training, nor do they want to pay for it, even though the Ministry of Tourism pays for half. Unfortunately, it shows in the level of service one receives at the restaurants and hotels there. Most of our complaints are about a phenomenon that we started to refer to as: This is what you want. This is what you get. You ask for one thing and you get what the service provider decides to give you.

Among our complaints about Panama are some of the following. The majority are about restaurant service.

Restaurants are often out of or do not really offer items they have on their menus, and servers do not seem to know about it.

Shawn and I had several experiences in restaurants in Panama where we would order something on menu only to be told a considerable while later that they did not have it. I believe that sometimes they had run out, but at other times, I think they just never stocked those items. As vegetarians, we order things that people never order otherwise in these meat-centric countries. It is amazing how frequently the things kitchens happen to have "just run out of" are the vegetarian items.

In one case, Shawn ordered a falafel sandwich from the menu. When it arrived, some 25 minutes later, it was a chicken sandwich. He called the waitress over to tell her, and she confirmed that he had ordered falafel. He opened it up to show her that it was chicken, and she just stared at him. We told her that we were vegetarians and could not eat pollo, and she silently picked it up and took it back to the kitchen. She returned a couple of minutes later explaining that there was no falafel; she offered no apology and no offer of anything else.

Servers that suck.

On another occasion, Shawn and I ordered the ravioli at a restaurant. The waiter came out after a while and told us that they did not have ravioli. At least he told us this before bringing us whatever the cook decided to serve us instead. He asked us if we would prefer to get spaghetti or fettucini in the sauce we had selected. Shawn asked for spaghetti and I asked for fettucini. When the food arrived, we both had spaghetti.

I would like to say here that we did have notable exceptions to this complaint, with excellent servers at Manolo's Cafe, the Four Points hotel restaurant and S'cena. However, Panama has a reputation for really bad service, and our experience generally supported that finding.

In general, Panamanians are not very friendly.

This was inconsistent, and we met a few people that were exceptionally friendly, nice and helpful. Yet on the whole, the people there do not seem very friendly. They are not mean nor rude. They just are not very friendly. It is hard to win a smile from Panamanians.

Almost any time that we would say thanks (or in most cases, "gracias"), people would not acknowledge it. Often when they did, it was with an "Okay." It seems the more educado of the people there would say the equivalent of "it is nothing," or "it is my pleasure," so I do not think that it is a cultural thing where the concept of "you're welcome" doesn't exist.

It's not cheap.

Again, there are some things that you can get pretty cheaply in Panama, but on the whole, it's not a bargain. Well, compared to traveling in Europe, it's a steal, but there are a lot of things that are as expensive in Panama as they are in the United States.

Our hotels that we stayed in ranged from USD $90 to $155 (including taxes) per night, and none of them were five-star establishments. Cushier places like the Bristol Hotel run about $300 per night. The Marriott is USD $280. Dinner out at Habibi's cost us USD $60 for two.

Shawn, as he is wont to do, looked into real estate listings to see how much propery costs in Panama. He saw many condos listed for USD $500,000, and he saw homes ranging from USD $250,000 to $750,000. Another source claims that new housing costs have doubled in the past two years, but apparently if you buy a used place, it is cheaper.

It is really hot, humid and rainy.

We went for the coolest time of year, and even so, it was constantly above 80° F (26° C) with 70% humidity. We were also there for the driest time of year, yet it rained 7 out of the 9 days we were there. I was not as bummed out about the heat as Shawn, although I was not crazy about the humidity, and the rainy aspect was a little inconvenient when we wanted to get out and about.

Despite all that, we loved our time in Panama, and hope to go back again sometime soon. Hopefully after they get a decent service ethic, but even if not, we would go back for the following.

The city is beautiful.

Panama City skyline, from Casco Viejo

It has some places that are less beautiful than others, but the skyline is magnificent and getting better all the time. Everywhere you go it's nice and verdant, with lots of beautiful, old, spreading trees and lush grass. It's right on the ocean and nestled up against mountains. Certain parts of it have architecture that looks like the Vieux Carre in New Orleans. There is no shortage of scenic beauty in Panama City, and we hear it's even better if you venture outside the city.

It is hopping.

After being in the relative snoozearium that is the second-largest city in Mexico for two years, it was THRILLING to be in a city that parties all night long. Sure, Guadalajara has clubs where you can dance to dreadfully repetitive techno or the same moldy Reggaetón hits you've been hearing everywhere for the past three years until 5 in the morning, but in Panama City, you have that plus bars and British pubs that are open late, late, late, clubs that play rock music, several chains of 24-hour restaurants and a handful of completely independent ones and casinos that never close.

It's racially diverse and the various ethnic groups are well-integrated.

Mexico seems really tolerant to us after coming from the United States, but a lot of times, I have to wonder if that is because they do not have a lot of racial diversity. That isn't to say that there has not been a lot of mixing in Mexico's past, because there has been. It's just that you do not see a lot of ethnic diversity here nowadays, at least not in Guadalajara.

In Panama City, you do. According to recent estimates, some 70% of the inhabitants are mixed Amerindian and white or mixed white and black while 14% are West Indian. Some 10% are white ('European'), and 6% are Amerindian. There is also a Chinese community of about 100,000. That might not be a big plus to a lot of people, but it is to me because I find diversity (ethnic or otherwise) to make a place more interesting.

The food is diverse.

This has a lot to do with the previous item, but the culinary side of travel is such a big thing for me that I think it deserves its own specific item. We had Italian, Chinese, Indian, Lebanese and Mexican food while we were there, and had we more time, we could have enjoyed several other national cuisines.

Of note, Panamanian food is very heavy on meat. For this reason, we didn't have anything that was specifically Panamanian, but those that eat meat would probaby dig it.

Everything is within walking distance.

Given that it is awfully hot and humid, one can get really sweaty walking around. Yet it does seem that one can walk easily from any one place to any other in town. That's not really true, but compared to the scale of some cities we've been to, it is a walkable city. One night we dined out at a great Italian place (Napoli), walked over to El Pavo Real for a few drinks, then meandered back to our hotel, stopping in a casino to lose ten bucks in a slot machine along the way. Traffic can be very bad in Panama City, and the buses are crazy. Therefore, being able to walk around to a lot of different things for an evening's entertainment is quite handy.

They have a great selection of booze.

Living in Mexico and being involved in NAFTA, you'd think that we'd be able to get the vast array of alcohol that people can access in the United States, but unfortunately, that just is not true. I have only seen Bushmill's Irish Whiskey once in this country, and that was in a hotel bar in Mexico City. In Panama, the selection is very good. It is a little slanted towards European bottles; they do not, for example, have a great variety of bourbon, but you can get some very decent gin or Scotch.

We had a very good time in Panama. I would recommend a visit there to nearly everyone I know, but I might add the caveat that it would be better to wait a few years first. They have a ways to go before they have refined their service ethic to properly deal with tourists. Even so, if you were to go tomorrow, you would be sure to find a lot to love about Panama.

Posted by crispy at 04:20 AM | Comments (2)

January 13, 2008

Aerolineas Argentinas Continues to Suck Rocks

Readers might remember our horror stories about Aerolineas Argentinas, wherein what we came to joke about being an imaginary airline cancelled our flight to Bogota two days in a row, and passengers nearly rioted at the ticket counter in Mexico City.

It seems they have finally pushed folks over the edge.

Posted by crispy at 12:45 AM | Comments (2)

January 01, 2008

Assault on Batteries

Starting the 1st of January, the Department of Transportation has decreed that airline passengers in the United States will no longer be able to take lithium batteries in their checked baggage unless they are installed in the devices that use them. Passengers will only be permitted to carry up to two loose batteries, stored in plastic bags, in their carry-on luggage.

This regulation is being enacted to reduce the risk of lithium battery fires, following a 2004 report published by the Office of Aviation Research that found plastic coatings on lithium batteries can deteriorate rapidly in a fire and allow adjacent batteries to fuse, increasing the intensity of the fire. The report also stated that the fire control systems in cargo holds are not capable of stopping lithium ion battery fires.

Security expert Bruce Schneier explains on his blog that these rules should only prevent audio-video professionals from taking any batteries on-board flights, because of the type of batteries that are limited by the new regulations. According to the DOT, "almost all consumer-type lithium metal batteries are below 2 grams of lithium metal."

Yet the restrictions limiting the number of batteries that can be taken even in carry-on luggage will impact a broader range of passengers. Even if security officials are well-versed in the nuances of the new regulations and do not erroneously confiscate batteries that do not violate the limits set forth in the law, travelers that need to carry extra batteries because they are flying to distant places or facing long layovers will be seriously handicapped by these new regulations. People who are traveling to countries where the voltage is incompatible with charging devices previously have been able to get around that problem by taking several pre-charged batteries. As of the first of the year, this will no longer be permitted.

For those readers in the United States that will quickly dismiss the idea that these new regulations will do no more than mildly inconvenience a small number of AV professionals, I wish to relate two experiences that Shawn and I had flying from Mexico that illustrate how inconsistently and arbitrarily these vague guidelines can be applied. You see, the battery paranoia has been brewing worldwide for a while now.

Before our acquisition of Larry's camera, which is much more efficient in its battery usage, the camera we used on trips was a nearly 10-year-old digital Kodak camera that consumed AA batteries like you would not believe. If we were out for an day of sightseeing, it was not uncommon for us to have to swap out the four batteries it uses three times during the afternoon, maybe four if the excursion continued into the night and required use of the flash. For this reason, we usually traveled with around 20 rechargeable nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries in our luggage. We (used to) carry some in the camera case, others in a carry-on bag, and the majority in a checked bag.

It should be noted that security checks in Mexico are a lot more polite and a lot less intrusive than in the United States, with the people inspecting the bags doing it in plain view of the owner and explaining what they are about to do before doing it. Sometimes they even ask your permission, although I suspect they do not expect anyone to deny them permission to do what they plan on doing. When you are used to the standard, courteous treatment normally offered at Mexican airport secutiry, it is shocking to suddenly be treated like a criminal suspect. All of a sudden, you feel like you are going through security in the United States.

A few months ago, Shawn and I were returning to Guadalajara from one of our brief vacations in Mexico City. We were stopped at security in the Toluca airport and asked if they could examine our bags. They seemed to take issue with a clear plastic bag of AA nickel metal hydride (NiMH) rechargeable batteries that we had in our carry-on for use with the old energy-guzzler.

They asked us why we needed so many batteries and I explained it to them as best I could in my mediocre Spanish. They told us that we would be allowed only the ones in devices and another four, because, "batteries can explode from the pressure changes resulting in changing altitude." I did not argue that they would be in the pressurized cabin area; if they did not already understand that, my explaining it would make little difference.

I asked why this was the first we'd heard of this restriction, since we had not been hassled about the same bag of batteries on our flight from Guadalajara to Toluca. The guard answered with the following, and even after living in Mexico for two years, I am still having a hard time getting over this one: every airport in Mexico has its own distinct set of regulations for what they will allow through security checkpoints.

I stopped myself before commenting that this seemed ridiculously inconsistent, because inconsistency is universal in Mexico. Instead, I asked how a person was supposed to keep track of the different regulations for the republic's some 130 civil airports. I was informed that supposedly every airport has an office where one can get a listing of disallowed items for all of the country's airports.

I was still skeptical about this regulation, having never heard of batteries being a problem before. I gently suggested my suspicion that someone in security needed some AA batteries, and I asked for proof that they would be destroyed and not just given away to someone for their own personal use. I was told that I could return to the airport and file a form to receive such documentation at a later date. Of course!

(By the way, every time I tell a person that lives in Mexico this story, they respond at this point with the exact same thing: "No, they weren't destroyed. Someone needed some AA batteries, and they took yours home.")

Since they would not let us pass with all our batteries, Shawn removed five from the bag of about twelve, and played dumb, like he didn't understand that he was supposed to have only four remaining. That seemed to satisfy them. They let us board the plane with the remaining seven. The letter of the law is not that important in Mexico, and at least this time, that worked in our favor.

A couple of weeks ago, we flew out of Guadalajara to Panama City. Our experience of losing about USD $20 worth of batteries in Toluca led us to pack all our NiMH AA batteries in one of our suitcases.

At the Guadalajara International Airport, they do not x-ray bags, they check them by hand before you check-in. The attendant checking the bags pulled out our bag of 20+ batteries and asked if we really needed all of them. I said yes, as I was not about to throw away another USD $60 in rechargeable batteries. She called over a supervisor who explained that we could not have all those batteries in one place. Luckily, upon our asking, they said it would be okay if we divided the batteries between us. Apparently, in contrast to the regulations in the Toluca airport, it is not okay to carry batteries, or at least not so many all in one place, in checked luggage either, at least not when flying out of the Guadalajara airport.

I suspect that this is based on wild tales of lithium batteries spontaneously bursting into flame, but it might merely be a misinterpretation of the 2004 Office of Aviation Research report. In any case, it does not seem that air safety administrations and security personnel around the world are not being educated as to the difference between various types of batteries, like alkaline, nickel metal hydride, and lithium ion.

It doesn't seem like I am the only one to encounter this problem, as another world traveler notes in his blog.

Posted by crispy at 09:02 AM | Comments (2)

December 26, 2007

The Worst Taxi Drivers in the World

Okay, I admit. I have not been around the world, so I might be wrong. Yet in my experience, Panamanian (or perhaps I should say Panama City's) taxi drivers are the worst.

They are not bad at driving by any means. They tend to go respectable speeds - not terrifyingly fast, nor annoyingly slow - and their cars are usually in adequate condition. They do not execute maneuvers that you would expect to see in a NASCAR race, nor in a Hollywood movie, nor in a Hollywood movie about NASCAR like our hometown drivers sometimes do. We have definitely had more white-knuckled moments in Guadalajara than we have had here.

No, the cab drivers in Panama City are bad because they seem reluctant to have customers. In other places we have been, when we are standing on a corner or walking along the street, taxi drivers will slow down as they pass and ask, "Taxi?" At other times, maybe if they do not see us, we will flag them down to get them to take us from one place to another. At worst, they suggest a price that is ridiculous and we reject their offer. It is a rare occurrence when one cannot negotiate a deal of some kind to get you where you need to go.

In Panama City, such is not the case. Cab drivers do not seem very interested in getting you where you want to go, regardless of the fact that you will pay them to do it.

One of the first few days that were were in town, we had gone over to the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, and we were trying to get over to El Pavo Real, an English pub that was like a 5 minute drive away by cab. We had to wait a long time, as most of the passing taxis already had passengers. Yet eventually, we got a cab to stop. Shawn told the driver that we wanted to go to El Pavo Real. He shook his head and drove off. This left us flabbergasted. We did not have any idea why he did not want the fare, but he obviously did not.

We tried again, only to have the same reaction from the driver. The place to which we were going was not in a bad neighborhood, and it is not in a dangerous area. It is not that the cab drivers did not know the location. That was our first hypothesis to disprove, so Shawn got out a detailed map of Panama City and had it ready to show to the second driver. Yet that did not seem to make a difference. He also dismissed us and zoomed off.

The same thing happened a third time, then a fourth. The fourth driver explained that we wanted to go in the other direction, so he would have to turn around in order to take us. Then he drove off. True, it was in the other direction, but it was not on that same road. It was not like he would have to make a U-turn on a busy road to get us there. He could have turned right, gone a few blocks, then turned right again.

On the fifth try, we got a cab to take us, but instead of telling him that we wanted to go to El Pavo Real, we told him that we wanted to go to a large, well-known hotel and casino that was right across the street from where we were staying, the Wyndham Grand Veneto. This was only about four or five blocks from the English pub, but after the hassle of trying to get a cab, we were not interested in anything but going back to our hotel.

The next evening, we tried to take a cab to a Thai restaurant that we had read about in a guide book. We were worried that maybe it was no longer around, so we explained to the taxi driver that we are vegetarians and asked if he had heard of the place. We thought maybe, if he had heard of it, would know if they had vegetarian dishes and if it was any good. He had not heard of it, and when he could not find it, he stopped to ask a guy working as a valet for a nearby restaurant about it. The valet indicated that indeed it had been where we thought it should be, and then he told us it was no longer there. He suggested Madame Chang's, a Chinese restaurant nearby, and we thought that sounded okay. We asked the cab driver to take us there, and he said he would, but he had to go down the street, then turn around to come back on the street where Madame Chang's was located.

He started to do this, then he ended up stopping in front of some other restaurant and asking if we wanted to eat there. We told him that we were really in the mood for Asian food, because we felt we would have a better chance of being able to get vegetarian food, so we would preer Madame Chang's. He pulled back onto the street, turned a few corners, and then, at a place called "Crepes and Waffles," he pulled into their parking lot. He asked the valet there, "Do they have vegetarian food here?" The valet there confirmed that they did: crepes and waffles. He then turned around to us and asked if we wanted to eat there. We politely tried to tell him that we understood that we could eat there, but that we really were in the mood for something else, like, oh, Madame Chang's that we'd indicated that we wanted to go to multiple times. His response was, "This place has food!"

We paid him and got out of the car, deciding that it was not worth the hassle of arguing with him about it any longer. The valet began to guide us to the stairs for Crepes and Waffles, yet he seemed to understand completely what I meant when I thanked him and explained that we wanted something a bit more exotic. We finally encountered a great place called Habibi's which serves great Leganese food, but the experience left us really cold on Panamanian taxi drivers. Why he even asked what we wanted, since he was going to take us to some random place of his choosing anyway, did not make sense.

Whe had a similar problem trying to get to the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, wherein the taxi driver pulled up and stopped in front of the Museo de Antropología, telling us we had arrived at our destination. Shawn pointed out that it was not the right museum, that the one we wanted to go to was on a different street and had a large park across from it. The only thing across the street from the museum where we were then parked was a row of tall office buildings. It was clearly the wrong museum. It took some coaxing and demonstrating that we were not going to pay until he took us to the proper museum before he drove the three or so blocks more to the proper location.

Of course, not all taxi drivers in Panama are this way, and we were happy to find an exception one night while we were out walking about and trying to find a specific bar. More like the cab drivers we were used to from other places, this guy came up to us and asked if we wanted a ride. We told him we were not going far - less than 10 blocks - and he offered to take both of us in his air-conditioned van for two dollars. (In Panama, even at night, the idea of being able to pay a couple of dollars to go even a short distance in air-conditioned comfort is very attractive.) He was pleasant, obviously knew the city, and took us exactly where we wanted to go, not just where he wanted to take us.

He gave us his card and a couple of days later, when we wanted someone to drive us around the city to do the few remaining things on our list, here and there about town, we called him. He not only drove us around, but he gave us some great information on the city. When Shawn wanted to take some photos of a government building exterior, he excused himself for a bit, and when he came back, explained that he had arranged with the rector an invitation to come inside to take photos. After I fell in a hole while shooting photos, scraping my knee and muddying my pants, he stopped and bought alcohol to clean my wound and a rag to help me clean up my pants.

It was nice to find such a gem, after dealing with what seemed to us to be the worst taxi drivers in the world.

If you need a driver in Panama, we highly recommend him. His name is Roger O. Caparroso, and his cell phone number is +507 6634-2482. He has an email address too, but I do not want to publish it here for fear that he will end up getting lots of spam and scam emails. If you are interested, drop me a line in the comments below and I'll send you his address. Oh, and he speaks both Spanish and English.

Posted by crispy at 12:15 AM | Comments (3)

December 22, 2007

¿Qué pasa, ese?

Ese laundry detergent, product of Panama

I wanted to rinse out some of my sweaty clothes in our hotel room sink, so I went to the mini super to buy some laundry detergent. When I got there and saw this box, I had to buy it.

[why this is funny]

Posted by crispy at 05:11 PM | Comments (2)

December 20, 2007

Panama: On the Ground

View from the Torres de Alba, Panama City

We arrived in Panama last night, after a relatively pleasant flight on Copa Airlines.

Our one observation about Copa, having now flown on them three times, is that one should arrive at the airport about three hours before the departure of the flight, because checking in to a Copa flight seems to take a little over an hour. Their check-in desks are always understaffed, the employees tend to waste a lot of chatting amongst themselves, and when they are servicing clients, they're very slow.

The flight was pleasant enough though, and they did remember to serve us a vegetarian meal, consisting of a little dish of honeydew melon and an alfalfa sprout and tomato sandwich. Because, you know, vegetarian = rabbit.

We took a cab from the airport to our hotel, the Torres de Alba for USD $28.00. The cab driver told us that this would be the price without tip, and he knows that Americans always tip. The listing of the price in United States dollars in this and subsequent Panama entries is not for reader convenience; they not only have a currency pegged to the dollar, like many other countries. They actually use United States dollars as their national currency. As for values below a dollar, they seem to have their own coins, but they also use U.S. coins too.

View from the Torres de Alba, Panama City

The Torres de Alba thankfully has industrial-strength air conditioning, because it's hot, hot, hot here in Panama. It's not even 10 am yet, and it "feels like" 30.5°C (87°F) outside. It is located right next to the enormous Veneto Hotel and Casino, and about a block down the street from a 24-hour restaurant, and even the restaurants that close do so no earlier than 11 pm.

The Torres de Alba also has kitchens in all the rooms. The one in ours is easily four times the size of my kitchen in Guadalajara. Unfortunately, we will probably not be making many meals here in the hotel before we check-out tomorrow.

Kitchen, Torres de Alba

This city is exhillarating. It is hot, crowded, bustling and falling over itself with new growth. Whereas Buenos Aires seems much more like an older, European metropolis, Panama seems fresh and positively Pan-American. Shawn says it reminds him a lot of Miami. The joke here goes that Panama City is like Miami, except people here speak English.

Yeah, a lot of people here do speak some English, but don't be fooled. They prefer to speak Spanish, but it is surprisingly a very Caribbean form of Spanish, where the letter "S" before a consonant apparently costs extra. Our cab driver told us that there are a lot of English speakers here because they have a large number of immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean islands. Given the sound of their Spanish, I'd guess they hae a large number of Cubans and Dominicans here too.

I've been here about twelve hours and I already love Panama. It even has one of my favorite things about Colombia...

Colombiana soda

...Colombiana soda.

Posted by crispy at 07:30 AM | Comments (1)

November 30, 2007

Christmas in Panama

Shawn and I have booked our tickets for spending some of his Christmas break in Panama City.

We'll be there during the coolest time of year, when the average high temperature drops down to a brisk 86° F. It will be a nice change after freezing our behinds off in Buenos Aires in July.

Seven out of the ten tallest buildings in Latin America are found there, and they have a very diverse populace. We're particularly excited that this means they have a lot of Indian restaurants, which means that we should have little problem finding tasty vegetarian food there.

We leave on 19 December and will be flying on Copa Airlines.

Posted by crispy at 02:38 PM | Comments (3)

October 20, 2007

I went on a date with a real clown last night.

I was looking through a newspaper while in San Luis Potosí, San Luis Hoy. I turned the page and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw what I thought were personal ads for something like Clown Seeking Clown:

Clown Classifieds, San Luis Hoy [larger image]

It was one of the most surreal things I'd ever seen. But, I figured, clowns need love too.

On closer investigation, I saw that they were just clowns for hire, advertising their services...

...as clowns.

I hope.

Posted by crispy at 12:18 PM | Comments (3)

October 13, 2007

San Luis Potosí: Part Two

In the last entry, I mentioned that we did not come to San Luis Potosí for any particular attraction. It's a good thing we did not come to do a museum tour of the city, based on our experience yesterday.

Shawn likes to see the renowned sights when he visits a place. San Luis Potosí does not have many, but in our guide books, they did list several museums. Since the day before, we had merely walked around and looked at the city from its sidewalks, our Friday agenda included a stop at a museum. Since the Museo de Cultura Potosina was near the point where the taxi dropped us off downtown, we decided it would be the one we would visit. That would give us a chance to say we'd actually done something during our trip to San Luis Potosí.

We found it easily enough, as it was marked by a stone plaque on the wall of the building as well as a metal street sign with a big "M" out in front that they use here to mark museum locations (very similar to the ones in the United States with an "H" that direct one to a hospital). Yet we could not figure out how to get inside. We were contemplating whether or not the entrance was on another side of the building when a man came over and told us that the museum was no longer open.

Okay, it happens. We went to lunch at the Tokio Café, where oddly enough, they serve only Mexican food; after that, walked over to another museum, the Museo Mariano Jiménez, named for a local artist and featuring his works as well as some other exhibits about the history of the revolution in the area. We found it easily enough too, as it also had a big "M" sign in front. Yet it too was closed.

We walked back towards the center of town, and on the way saw one of the bilingual plaques the city has put up, and it directed us to the Museo de Artes Populares de San Luis Potosí. Given the placement of the sign in the plaza, it was unclear which of the buildings around it actually was the museum. Shawn went up and asked a guy standing in the doorway of one of the buildings which one it was. He didn't know, and he came over to look at the sign talking about it. After reading it, he told us that it must have been the one with the doorway in which he had been leaning, but that building had been converted into offices, and was no longer a museum.

We asked him what was up with San Luis Potosí and their getting rid of all their museums. He told us that they were not very popular, so they have mostly been converted to office space. He did point us toward one museum that he knew to still be open a few blocks away, the Museo Regional Potosino. We went there and spent about 20 minutes walking through the three rooms that remained open with exhibits. The other half of the building was closed off for construction.

We saw enough masks to last us a lifetime when we went to Zacatecas, so luckily we didn't have to deal with the heartbreak of not being able to go to San Luis Potosí's Museo Nacional de la Máscara, which we already knew was closed. Supposedly, it's only closed for renovation, but now I'm starting to wonder if that means renovation into office space.

Sometimes Mexico is really lame that way. You hear or read about some cool attraction in guide books or even tourism web sites promoting a city. Then when you get there and go to see it, it is all boarded up or perhaps even the building is gone. You ask many people around the site what happened, and it often takes a while before you find someone that remembers the place and knows that it closed down a long time ago. Still, nobody has bothered to take down the signs pointing to it or marking it, edit the listing on various web sites, nor get the word out to tourist bureaus and hotels that the place is no longer around.

I guess I shouldn't knock Mexico in particular for that. We had the same experience with a couple of museums in Buenos Aires. They were listed in all our guides, including online ones. Yet after spending the time and money to get across town to see them, we found one to be entirely gone, and another under renovation, slated to re-open...a year ago.

Posted by crispy at 12:53 PM | Comments (1)

October 12, 2007

San Luis Potosí: Part One

360° Panorama of the Plaza de Armas, San Luis Potosí [larger image]

Shawn had a four-day weekend, so we decided to visit another Mexican city that we had not yet seen: San Luis Potosí, the capital of the state of San Luis Potosí.

In 2005, it had a population of just over 685,000, making it only the 15th largest city in Mexico. It is known as la ciudad de los parques because there are so many parks here. We had to ride five hours in a bus, heading northeast from Guadalajara. If you have Google Earth, you can call it up.

It is not high on the list of tourist destinations within Mexico, and to be honest, we did not decide on it as our next domestic destination because of any particular attraction. We selected it simply because we could get to it in a relatively short time (less than a full day) and we had never been there. It is outside what is considered Mexico's colonial circle, but then again, some say that about Zacatecas. Like Zacatecas, it has its own particular charm, no small part of which is the fact that it is not a big tourist destination. We were not expecting much, yet we have been very pleasantly surprised.

First off, it lives up to its reputation as a city of parks. It seems that the slogan is taken as a guiding philosophy, for one sees many spaces of only a few square meters about town where a mass of plants or cacti have been squeezed in to spruce them up a bit. The more formal parks offer a diversity of trees, plenty of benches, well-maintained sidewalks, verdant lawns, and fountains that are operational.

The city is a pedestrian paradise. Large sections of the historic center have been closed to vehicles, providing safe, wide venues for foot traffic.

In other places, they have nice shaded walkways set apart from the streets, like this one (pictured below) that stretched so far we could not see the end of it.

Walking is not the only thing to do in the city, however, and just because they are not known as one of the colonial gems of Mexico, it does not mean that they do not have their fair share of historic attractions. Along this walkway is a famous historic and architectural icon of San Luis Potosí, el caja del agua.

Because I learned caja to mean''box' or 'cage' in English, I hear this in my head as "box of water" or "cage of water." Both seem funny to me. It is actually a colonial-era water tank, which is notable for its size and ornamentation. A sign, printed in Spanish and English, located next to the caja del agua, tells that there are others about the city, but they are all smaller and not ornate.

There are things like clock towers...

...non-traditional (for Mexico) architecture...

...gargoyles...

...theaters...

...gazebos...

...and temples...

...in San Luis Potosí that we passed while walking around the centro histórico. We passed by this ice cream shop, and I had to go in to try their coconut ice cream.

Stepping inside was like stepping into the 50s.

It was part of this larger building, which is the Mercado Tangamanga, a typical market where they sell all kinds of stuff from religious candles to seafood. The design was so reminiscent of the Pan Pacific Auditorium from the golden days of Los Angeles that I stood there a while looking at it, thinking of what all it would take to find an old musician who would help me turn it into a hip nightclub/roller-rink.

The old metal furniture inside the Fonda Doña María looks like its as old as the building itself (and it probably is), but it's in great condition.

La Cubana is a tienda de abarrotes, the Mexican version of a corner convenience store, and is just up the street a block or so from the Mercado Tangamanga.

This convenience store has been open here since 1875.

After all that walking, Shawn and I both decided to shell out the MXN $10 (just under USD $1) each for a shoeshine.

They let you read the newspaper for no additional charge.

I considered buying a donut-making machine, but I just don't have the room in my kitchen.

Posted by crispy at 11:33 PM | Comments (3)

September 19, 2007

The FM3 Process Begins

Today I went to the federal building downtown to start the process of getting an FM3, the non-resident alien visa that would allow me to live in Mexico for more than 6 months.

There are a few different types of visas for traveling and living in Mexico. As an American, you do not need one to travel into Mexico's border towns, but if you plan to go 18 miles (30 kilometers) or farther into Mexico, you need to have an FMT, also known as a "tourist card." That lets the visitor stay in Mexico (or make repeated entries and exits, for that matter) for up to 180 days. If you fly into Mexico, the fee (about USD $20) is included in your ticket price. If you cross by land, you have to pay this fee either to the agent at the border (in Tijuana, for example) or at a bank, once you are in the country.

The FM3 visa allows one to stay for one year, and it can be easily renewed each year for five years (after which one must re-apply). One can apply for an FM3 while one is in the United States, or he can 'upgrade' from the FMT to an FM3 after arrival in Mexico. The requirements for the application differ between doing it in the United States and doing it in Mexico, and interpretation of the requirements may differ from consulate to consulate.

Only those readers considering living long-term in Mexico will be interested in what follows, but for those folks, I hope it might give them a better idea of what is really required for an FM3 application (in the Guadalajara immigration office, at least, in September of 2007). When I looked things up online, the answers about the prerequisites only seemed to raise more questions, but I have now been to the immigration office and have found out exactly what they want. It should be noted that this is only half of the process. Officially, I have only submitted a request to apply for an FM3 visa, which means I have submitted all the paperwork, it will be reviewed for compliance with the regulations, and in about 10 days, they will inform me what I need to do to have the application processed and approved.

I will list what the instruction document says (typos and errors in grammar included) first, then I will relate what that actually means.

Fill out the application form, correctly and signed by applicant.

There is a form that one must get from the immigration authority (here in Guadalajara, it's the immigration office in the federal building downtown). It asks very basic questions, like the applicant's age, his address in Mexico, and country of origin. I filled this out while I was in the office waiting for my turn at the counter.

Original of the unexpired Migratory Document of the foreigner.

For me, this was the FMT that I got the last time I entered the country (in this case, flying into Mexico City as we returned from Buenos Aires). For nearly everyone applying for an FM3 within the country of Mexico, it will be the FMT that they got when they entered.

Original valid passport and submit a photocopy of each page, even if the pages are in blank. (You should submit BOTH the original and the photocopy to compare them)

Before going to the immigration office, I went to a papelería (paper store - these almost always can make copies for a fee) and had a copy of every single page of my passport made, including the cover. Yes, most pages were blank, and I had a big stack of copies as a result, but they will require it. You must not skip any pages or they will send you off to the papelería to try again. Bring along your passport to the office when you submit your paperwork, so they can verify that the copies turned in match the genuine article. After verification by the agent (while you wait at the counter), the passport will be returned to you.

Original and three photocopies of the receipt of immigration taxes payment of the corresponding fee of $444.00 per foreigner, for the concept of revision, exam, and study of the procedure, this payment shall be made with the form, key number 400001. Must be payable in Mexican pesos at any Financial Institute in Mexico.

(See how this can be confusing?)

There is an processing fee of MXN $444 for the application (distinct from the fee to be paid when one actually gets the FM3) that must be paid at a bank. It cannot be paid at the immigration office. We went to the bank with the form, filled out the form (again, just name and address stuff) at the counter, paid the 444 pesos and got a receipt of that payment. We were lucky in that the immigration office in Guadalajara has a copy center. We didn't have to stop somewhere else to get the three copies of the receipt, we did it as we waited to be called to the counter. They keep the original and two copies, and they let you keep one copy as your receipt of paying the fee.

NOTE. If your procedure is authorized, you must pay the correspondent fee.

This just means that if the request for an FM3 is granted, there is another fee. The aforementioned fee is only for processing the application.

Letter in Spanish addressed to the proper immigration authorities, the body of the letter must include your full name, current address, a request to change your immigration status and the reasons you decide it.

This is where it starts to get weird. Luckily, the woman at the counter told us verbatim what to write. I provide my letter here merely as an example; other applicants in other places at other times might have to write something completely different. It is advised that you ask someone in immigration what the letter has to say, and they will probably be very helpful.

I transcribed the following down by hand on a blank sheet of paper as the agent dictated it (and Larry and Charles repeated it as necessary). I turned it in just like that. It did not need to be typed.

Instituto Nacional de Migración

A quien corresponda:

Por medio de la presente me dirijo a ustedes, yo John Christopher Coen con domicilio en Avenida Cubilete [specifics deleted], Colonia Chapalita Sur, Zapopan, Jalisco 45050, de nacionalidad estadounidense, requiero mi cambio de características de turista a no inmigrante visitante rentista.

John Christopher Coen
19 septiembre 2007

Note there are really no reasons stated as to why I am applying. Perhaps that would be different if I were involved in a business. Then I might have to state the name of the business or the nature of the work I would be doing.

Proof of monthly income. The minimum total monthly needed is the equivalent of 250 times of the actual minimum daily wage in Mexico City.

Yeah. I don't know exactly how one would go about finding the current minimum daily wage in Mexico City [note: see link in comments below], but I'm presuming that 250 times that would be under USD $1500. Several sources I've seen cite this as the figure in dollars that foreigners have to have, although they never show their math. I suspect that the immigration office agents could tell you what this figure needs to be, but USD $1500 should cover it for the time being.

I took in printouts of the PDF files I download from the Wells Fargo site each month that are the only monthly statements I receive from them. It seems this is now very common - people apply with only computer printouts of their financial records - as the agent asked us (in Spanish, of course), "These are from the Internet?" They are obviously not statements mailed out from a bank; they are on 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of unfolded plain white paper, but those are the only statements I can get. Banks in the United States are not going to mail their account holders in another country. I'm not sure they even still send out print statements when their customers are in the United States.

There's a little note that says that if you own property in Mexico, you only have to have 1/2 of that amount monthly, but then you have to turn in notarized copies of the deed or trust. I don't own property here, so I can't say anything more about that.

There is also a section at this point that talks about the requirements if someone else is acting on behalf of the foreigner applying for the FM3. More or less, the representative has to have identification and power of attorney. Again, I don't know about that stuff because I did it myself (with a fair bit of help from Larry and Charles, of course).

You must present a photocopy of valid proof of address of the foreigner, such as Gas bills, telephone bills, water bills or electricity bills. (No more than 90 days old)

Long-time readers may remember my writing about how the electric bill is used for all kinds of identification and validation purposes in Mexico. Here it is being used to verify that I live where I claim to live. Nevermind that the electric bill is not in my name (it is in the name of some person that lived here before us, and not even the last person to live here before us). The fact that I have the electric bill in my posession is proof enough that I live at the address stated on the bill. Otherwise, how would I have access to it? (At least, that is the thinking behind it.)

I went with both a photocopy and the original, again for verification purposes, and they returned the original to me before I left.

The agent reviewed all my materials and upon noting that they appeared to be complete, she gave me a document that replaces the FMT she took from me. It is more or less just a letter, albeit a very official one, stating that I am in the process of applying for a visa, and this is why, should any official stop me and ask for my FMT, I do not have one. It also says that I am to return to the immigration office a week from Friday, on the 28th of September, when I will be given further instructions.

My understanding is, on that day, I will be told whether or not I will be getting an FM3, and what I need to do to finalize the procedure. This will include getting photographs of a specific size (similar to, but different dimensions from passport photos) and paying the fee for the visa itself.

The fee for the visa itself is rather high - on the order of a couple of hundred bucks, if I remember correctly. Even so, it's cheaper than airfare in and out of the country twice a year.

[continue reading part two of three in this series]

Posted by crispy at 08:23 PM | Comments (3)

August 06, 2007

There's No Place Like Home

Sign at Immigration, Mexico City Airport

(...unless it's Mexico City, and then it's like home but much, much more hardcore.)

We have returned to Mexico after having been in Buenos Aires for a month.

I must say we had a lovely time. Buenos Aires is beautiful, elegant and enormous in scale. The food is delicious. (Curse them! It's going to take months to drop the pounds that we gained there from all that pasta and pizza!) There are very beautiful people there. They take coffee seriously. All in all, depite a few inconveniences with our rented apartment and the freak snowstorm we were apparently so lucky to witness, I really dug the experience. We'd like to go back again for a visit. Only the next time, we'll go when it's not so cold.

Yet it's very nice to be back in Mexico. It's easier to understand that Spanish here, the people know how to relax and have fun, and it's hard to beat the weather. Buenos Aires was fun to visit, but Mexico is our home. People warned us that we might not want to leave once we were there, but luckily, we're quite happy where we are, at least for the time being.

Posted by crispy at 06:51 AM | Comments (1)

August 02, 2007

My New Fears in Flying

People were always shocked to learn that I didn't fly on planes, back when I didn't fly on planes. Then I started flying on planes and I was shocked that other people didn't avoid flying either, although not for the same reasons as I had. I couldn't believe that people actually tolerate the treatment that they receive from airlines! The video above, shot by Robert McKee and originally posted on Überzine, illustrates just how lousy an airline experience can be.

The flight (flight 6499, JFK -> DFW) of a Delta subcontractor, Shuttle America, was held on the tarmac at JFK for seven hours, while the passengers were lied to and denied food. The latter was attributed to 'company policy,' which reasoned that they should not be served food while stuck on the ground for seven hours since the flight was not scheduled to provide food during the three-hour flight. Before you chalk this up to being just one bad, isolated experience, note that this comes after the Jet Blue incident in January, and another Delta issue (Comair Flight 5637) where a passenger was so annoyed that he stormed the cockpit seeking answers from the pilots after being held on the tarmac for over four hours. Recently, Northwest Airlines has had an epidemic of cancelled flights.

Shawn and I lived through our own similar situation earlier this year when we were at DFW and a tornado passed through the area, requiring evacuation of the terminal and delay of all flights. Luckily for us, we had not yet boarded the plane, so at least we could move around, use the bathrooms, get things to eat. I'll have to write up a blog entry about our experience with that sometime. Maybe I'll get the chance when we fly back to Mexico on Sunday morning. I just might get lucky and our flight might be delayed.

Posted by crispy at 06:54 AM | Comments (1)

July 26, 2007

Random Weirdness: Buenos Aires

Do I really need to write a preliminary disclaimer about 'weird' being relative? You are all intellegent, educated readers, right? I'm not going to belabor that point. Let me just dive into some things that seem strange to me, a middle-aged gringo that has had some experience in Mexico.

The majority of ground coffee in supermarkets comes with sugar already mixed into it. 'Super Cabrales' is the only brand I've been able to find that doesn't.

Fur is in here. True, it seems to be the mark of a woman more, um, advanced in her years, but you can't swing a dead rabbit without hitting someone in a stole, wrap or pom pom scarf.

Hellmann's mayonnaise has mustard in it here. I don't have a jar from Mexico or the US handy at the moment, so maybe it comes in the versions in those countries. I never noticed it there, but the version sold in Argentina has an obvious taste and tint of mustard. That label also produces something called salsa golf that is mayonnaise and ketchup mixed together, and a line of spicy ketchup.

There are domestic whiskeys here, but they're all Scotches. One can find Jack Daniels and Jim Beam here, but they're like like USD $6.50 a shot. I've seen Jameson, but not Bushmills.

When you buy tickets to see a movie here, you get to select your seat assignments.

Courdoroy is hot here. Maybe it's a winter thing. You know, like flip-flops are a summer thing.

Coffee here always comes with little cookies called masas and tends to be something that you would have as a snack or as dessert. When I order coffee and a sandwich here, they think it's crazy. They always verify, "You want coffee...and a sandwich? At the same time?" (Inevitably, they bring the coffee out with the little cookies and won't serve the food until I finish the coffee and cookies.)

Mullets are fashionable here. Okay, let me rephrase that. People actually have mullets here. A lot of people.

People pronounce the 'll' ('elle' double L) consonant like "juh" (in English). So when they talk about tortilla, they pronounce it as "tor-TEE-juh." Here, 'tortilla' refers to the Spanish tortilla; the other, North American kind does not exist here.

Restaurants offer side orders (called porciónes) of vegetables here, like they do at old-school joints in the United States.

A lot of people are multi-lingual here. One sees and hears a lot of other languages in this city - French, German, Italian (but even the Spanish sounds like Italian here), English, (Brazilian) Portugese.

Kitchens don't open until 8 pm at the earliest. Most people don't seem to eat dinner until 10 pm at the earliest. Most places here close at midnight, although a fair number are open until 2 pm. A handful are open until 5 am.

Posted by crispy at 07:16 AM | Comments (2)

July 20, 2007

Friendship Day

Today, 20 July, is 'Friendship Day' in Argentina ('el Día de Amistad'). We were informed of this at the meeting of the English-speaking group, when one of the members advised me to make any intended dinner reservations a few days in advance. He told me that the holiday is relatively new, but it is growing in popularity, being celebrated with friends getting together to go out for dinner. Apparently it is even more popular than he knows, because even following his advice and trying to book in advance, I could not get a reservation for tonight.

The porteño that told us about the holiday is under the impression that Argentina originated this holiday, and that other countries around the world think it is so interesting that they are copying Argentina. Perhaps the idea of celebrating it on 20 July is an Argentine idea; it is the same day as the first moon landing in 1969, but nobody here seems to know if that is mere coincidence or intentional. Yet the truth is that in 1935, the United States Congress proclaimed the first Sunday of August as the National Friendship Day, and it has been celebrated as such there every year since. Of course, that does not mean that anyone knows that in the US, but supposedly, it's on the books.

Maybe the Argentines were the first to actually celebrate a Friendship Day. I suppose that should give them some claim to fame. It is only a social holiday though; everyone still has to go to work.

Posted by crispy at 09:21 AM | Comments (2)

July 14, 2007

How to Survive in Buenos Aires on $20 a Day

Don't come here, wait until the next economic crisis, or best yet, adjust your expectations appropriately.

We have been wondering where all the super-cheap stuff is we heard so much about from our friends that have visited Buenos Aires over the past couple of years. When we were planning our trip here, we heard fantastic tales of steak dinners for two complete with desert and a bottle of decent wine for under USD $15. Clothes, at a third of the cost of their equals in the United States, could be snapped up supposedly everywhere. One could even get a 10-day vacation package that includes a breast augmentation performed by world-class doctors cheaper than a weekend in Vegas! Ah, the promise of such deep discounts in a recovering economy beckons like an irresistable siren, especially if, as it does for us, his work schedule forces the traveler always to travel at peak times when the cost of getting to and from the destination is at its highest. He thinks, "Sure it will cost three months' salary to get there and back, but once I get there, staying there will cost practically nothing!"

Countries with an unstable economy can be cheap if one visits from another country where the economy is stronger, but unstable economies can fluctuate wildly. When travelers start to flock to a place in droves for its low prices, eventually there are enough tourists that the demand for goods and services become high, even if the demand for such things is low among those that live in the place. With high demand come higher prices, and if the economy is unstable and the cycle of inflation and recession does not happen smoothly, those high prices can come in dramatic spikes.

Last night we attended an English-speaking group in Belgrado. This is a group of porteños that get together to practice every week, and they often have visiting English-speakers dropping in to get tips about the city from the locals. We told them how much we liked their city, how beautiful we find it, how excellent the food is and how much nicer people seem to be than we had heard. Yet we also told them of our dismay that things are not as cheap as we had heard. They explained to us that yes, things used to be much cheaper, but inflation is on the rise. According to one of the group members, prices for everything have gone up about 30% since April.

That is quite a hefty jump, but that does not seem to be uncommon here. Deby Novitz, author of the TangoSpam blog says that inflation during the year of 2005 ran about 30%.

It should also be noted that these are not official figures. Official figures are supposed to look at a wide range of goods and services in the economy, whereas annecdotal reports tend to focus on the things people use on a regular basis. That often translates into a marked difference between what people see as a price jump at their local market or gas station and the numbers reported by official agencies that monitor the economy. The Buenos Aires Herald reported (6 July 2007) that 12-month inflation was 8.8% through the end of June, although the same article notes that critics of the present administration suggest that the politicians are tampering with the figures to make themselves look good.

In any case, porteños are being hit even harder than tourists who are, despite inflation, getting very good exchange rates. At present, the exchange rate for us is about 3.1:1, or ARS $3.10 to the dollar. Six months ago, it was ARS $3.06 to the dollar. One year ago on this date, it was ARS $3.08 to the dollar. Furthermore, compared to Europe and North America (including Mexico), the prices here are still cheap for a lot of things, especially things that you need on a daily basis.

Just like in Mexico, certain things are cheaper than they are elsewhere, and other things are more expensive. For example, in Mexico, the prices for electronics seem obscene to us, but the prices for produce are generally cheaper. It is when one starts looking for specific items that he tends to suffer sticker shock, and that is exactly what happened to me in Buenos Aires.

I needed to buy some shirts with long sleves when I came here because it is winter here and I could not find long-sleeve shirts in Mexico before we left. That was just as well, Shawn told me, because a student of his, upon hearing that we were going to Buenos Aires, advised him to buy clothes here because they are so much cheaper than they are in Mexico. I had to find a fat-clothes store in Buenos Aires, and through the help of the Internet, I did, before we even left Guadalajara.

We went there shortly after arriving, and it was the kind of place where you have a personal attendant that pulls items with no price tags down off of shelves from behind the counter when you ask to see them. Maybe that should have been a hint at what I'd end up paying, but at the time, I just figured that is how they do things here. I liked several things that they had, and I ended up buying several nice shirts, some ties, a sports jacket and some slacks. These were all things that I either needed for the trip (the shirts) or have not been able to find in Mexico (oversized sports coats and longer ties just for gordos). Then they handed me the credit card receipt to sign and I almost passed out. It was multiple thousands of Argentine pesos. To give you an example, the shirts ran from USD $80 to $150 each. They are all store brand shirts made in Argentina. They are not designer imports. Do not get me wrong. They are decent enough shirts (dress button-down, the most expensive claiming to be of "Egyptian thread"), but I know, having bought several over the years, that they would cost less in the United States. They would cost a whole lot less in Mexico. It certainly was not like what Shawn's student said about clothes costing one-third what they cost in Mexico.

It seems that there is a fat tax for finer men's clothing, but there might also be a tourist tax in the sense that, as a tourist, I was only able to find information on that one store, and perhaps there are others with much better prices that I might know about if I were a fat guy actually living here. One should also bear in mind that these are things I have not even been able to find in Guadalajara. It seems that there are a lot of things that are a trade-off like that; in Mexico, there are certain things we just cannot get that we have been able to find here. Is it worth paying a little more for greater selection? Yeah, I hate to have to admit that I'm this much of a consumer whore, but for me, yes, it is.

The problem is, one often hears amazing tales of unfathomable bargains in other countries. It is my experience that these should be taken with a grain of salt, for many different reasons. Prices go up. Economies fall and come roaring back. People forget to include other indirect costs when telling about their experiences. What constitutes good quality to one person is utter garbage to another. People have widely-differing priorities. The list of factors that can make a memorable cheap trip for one person an expensive waste of time to another are endless. Yet it is alluring, when considering a trip somewhere, to believe all the hype and convince oneself that, not is it only a sound financial choice to go there, but that one would be a complete idiot to not take advantage of such ridiculously good deals. The fact of the matter is, with travel, like with everything else, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

In closing, let me give you a few prices, converted for your convenience to US dollars, for things about town in Buenos Aires. Unless a location is stated, these prices are the going rates in multiple places about town.

• a shot of Jack Daniels: $6.50
• pad phai (choice of chicken, beef or shrimp) @ Empire Thai: $9.36
• Sprite Zero (600 ml/20 oz bottle): $1.30
• Sprite Zero (600 ml/20 oz bottle) @ Richmond Café (see Graham Greene's "The Honorary Consul"): $1.97
• double espresso: $1.61
• double espresso with cream: $2.25
• tapas plate (8 different tapas) @ Artemisia: $8.72
• order of 2 egg rolls at Cinco Corderos: $0.65
• oversize men's sport coat (silk) @ Big & Tall: $708.64

Posted by crispy at 07:38 AM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2007

Think Again

Time and travel give us new perspectives on our lives. Sometimes it is subtle, like realizing that at a certain point, all the signs have gone from saying "SPEED LIMIT" to "MAXIMUM SPEED." At other times, it will change your outlook on the world completely, like looking down one day and realizing they are your father's hands reaching forth from your arms to tie your father's shoes on your feet.

In our daily lives, the mind tries to assimilate everything it gathers into some world view that makes sense, and in doing so, fabricates illusory connections and divisions that are not really there. It is too complicated and requires too much effort to constantly discriminate the shades of difference that actually exist in nature. A line is drawn in the sand to divide 'same' from 'different,' and we start to sort things to one side or the other to make thinking about them easier. Once we have decided what the relationships are between things, we consider that job done. We move on to other taxing mental chores, acting like all those things will remain in stasis because we have clustered them into neat little packages.

We stay in the same place for a long time and we used to things being a certain way. Time passes slowly enough that we fail to notice all the slight changes that occur constantly. An ironic consequence of assuming such permanence develops where we tend to not see the things that are right in front of us every day. As David Byrne says in one of the best films of all time about man's (illusory?) relationship to place, True Stories:

When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is.

Traveling is like a good dose of amnesia. It shakes you up and makes you forget, so that not only do you see a new place for the first time, but you see all the places you have been with new eyes.

This blog is supposed to be about Mexico, the place I have lived for the past year and a half. I admit, at times I have strayed into diatribes about the things that motivated me to leave the United States and how I have found things upon my occasional return trips there. I have also written about other Latin American countries, comparing and contrasting them to Mexico. If I were more goal-oriented, I might be very good at sticking to just talking about Mexico, but the fact is, I have a lot of strong opinions about other things too. I just cannot shut up about those things, and I do not like to deny myself.

I indulge in a lot of things I should not, and writing about other places when we travel, even if it has nothing to do with Mexico, is one of those things. For the next few weeks, I'm going to be in Buenos Aires, Argentina. and I'm going to write about it. Up to its old tricks, my mind is constantly comparing this place to both the United States and Mexico, in ways both favorable and not-so-nice. I cannot help it. That is just the way the mind works, and it is just the way I work to shoot my mouth off about what I think.

For those of you that might be considering moving to Mexico or some other Latin American country - maybe Argentina - you might find the 'Crispito Goes to Buenos Aires' articles informative about this slice of South America. For those of you who come here to read about Mexico, dammit...do not despair. This trip has already wiped my slate and made me notice things anew about Mexico, even though we are thousands of miles away from it.

Many people, especially in Latin America, think the Argentines are snooty wanna-be Europeans. One of my friends and former Spanish teachers tells the following joke:

Q: What is the most lucrative job in the world?
A: Buying Argentines for what they are worth and then selling them for what they think they're worth.

If you find that more true than humorous, you might want to tune back in around August 6, when we return to one of my favorite places: Mexico City.

Posted by crispy at 06:17 AM | Comments (0)

July 09, 2007

Christmas in July

Shawn Keeping Warm, Buenos Aires

Those of you who know me know that I am not a big fan of cold weather and snow.

When we decided to spend Shawn's summer vacation in Buenos Aires, we knew that we were coming to the southern hemisphere during their winter, but we had heard that winter in Buenos Aires is like winter in Los Angeles. Having spent winter in Los Angeles, where the average daytime highs are in the upper 60s and the overnight lows are in the 50s, we figured that would be fine. In fact, after the unusually hot spring we had this year in Guadalajara, it would be a nice change.

As luck would have it, we arrived in Buenos Aires accompanied by a freakishly bitter cold snap Saturday, and wind chill temperatures have remained at freezing since we arrived. To top it off, it was snowing all day today.

For many of you, snow is not an unusual phenomenon for the winter. In some parts of Argentina, it is not uncommon either. However, today is the first time Buenos Aires has seen snow since 1918.

The story has made international news, and locally, television stations were covering it with no commercial interruptions as if it were a national disaster. Okay, so perhaps that negative perspective is all mine; looking across the street this afternoon, it seemed like everyone in the opposing building was captivated by the miracle of it all. The Associated Press reported thousands cheering in the streets and their image service had pictures of rejoicing couples making out in the snow. Of course, if Argentines are anything like Mexicans, it does not take much to elicit that behavior from them.

Far from being a miracle to us, it is a real nuisance. The apartment we rented for the month has two air conditioner/heater units, one in the bedroom and another in the living room. Luckily, the one in the bedroom works and keeps it quite toasty, but the one in the living room seems to have a broken heating element, because it does nothing but blow cold air. We have been trying to find ways to stay warm here, like spending hours lingering over dinner in the warm corner café or bundling up in multiple sweaters and coats and huddling together under blankets.

We have an "emergency" phone number and email address to contact the rental company in the event of problems like the busted heating element, but in a further twist that would amaze even Murphy, today was a national holiday here: Independence Day. I tried contacting the company multiple times before I realized this, with each message more desperate than the last. I hope that tomorrow we will hear back from them, but even if the cold weather results in a lot of "personal days" being taken from the office, the forecast calls for higher temperatures. They are predicting that tomorrow it will climb to a relatively tropical 50° F.

Posted by crispy at 09:09 PM | Comments (5)

May 15, 2007

Guanajuato

Guanajuato, Guanajuato

Shawn and I went to Guanajuato, the capital of the state of Guanajuato this past weekend with Charles and Carmen.

Guanajuato is known for two things that seem to overshadow many of its other interesting aspects. Still, the facts that the city's most famous citizens are mummies and that the majority of the streets crisscrossing the town run below ground in tunnels is rather interesting, so I should probably talk about those things a bit first.

The so-called mummies are really petrified corpses, but they have been called mummies for so long that the distinction has become unimportant. One can go to a museum to view the city's collection of these petrified corpses, so preserved because of the dry climate and soil characteristics in the area. This unusual phenomenon would remain unknown however, were it not for an unusual policy at the graveyard that allowed for the bodies to be exhumed from their resting places. It used to be the case that local laws required families of the dead to pay a grave tax. They could pay it just once or yearly, with the installment plan being popular among the less wealthy families. If a family failed to pay their annual installment for three years running, the law allowed for the removal of the bodies from their graves, when they would become property of the municipality to do with as they pleased. The municipality seemed pleased to display them as a kind of freak show for the public, and now, even though the law has been changed and the removal of bodies from graves for failure to pay a grave tax is no longer practiced, the corpses removed during that period remain available for your viewing pleasure.

Taking pictures of the exhibits is prohibited, so I don't have any photos of them to post here. Still, if you're interested, you can view a few photos of the mummies of Guanajuato elsewhere.

Tunnel Entrance, Guanajuato

The other thing that comes up whenever Guanajuato is mentioned is the system of tunnels that run under the city. The city was built over the Guanajuato River, which continued to flow beneath it through a system of tunnels. In the middle of the last century, a dam was built to halt the flow of the river and provide the town with a reservoir, allowing the tunnels to be paved in with cobblestones and used for traffic. According to Charles, only two major roads running through the city are above ground. The rest are all running through the tunnels. They are quite amazing, and just like a developing city continues to build roads, the city of Guanajuato continues to dig new tunnels to serve the cars driving through it.

Plaza de la Paz and the Basílica Colegiata de Nuestra Señora de Guanajuato, Guanajuato

When people talk about Guanajuato, it is the discussion of these two subterranean oddities that dominate the conversation, but it is the stuff above ground that makes a visit to Guanajuato special. Not only are there a fair number of well-groomed parks and plazas, but there is a considerable amount of street life going on.

Street Scene, Guanajuato

Cafés, bars and shops line the streets of the city, which are filled with pedestrian traffic. This is unusual in colonial towns, because the city centers are usually filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic squeezing through the old, narrow streets. Because most of the traffic through Guanajuato runs beneath the city, the roads above ground can be used by people walking about town.

Street Scene, Guanajuato

During the day, street performers entertain tourists for donations.

Street Performance, Guanajuato

At night, traveling bands of musicians known as estudiantinas lead revelers through the streets in what is called a callejoneada. The same thing is done in Zacatecas, but there the bands play banda and the musicians don't wear 17th-century costumes like they do in Guanajuato.

People on Steps of Teatro Juárez, Guanajuato

The city also has a fine old theater for more formal productions, the Teatro Juárez, built in 1875.

Teatro Juárez, Guanajuato

We debated with Carmen and Charles whether the Teatro Degollado (in Guadalajara) or the Teatro Juárez is cooler, and we decided that the one in our town is best. I suspect guanajuatenses might disagree.

Teatro Juárez, Guanajuato

Another of the city's attractions is a very narrow street, which comes with its own legend. The Callejón del Beso or 'Alley of the Kiss' is supposedly where a father killed his own daughter upon discovering her kissing a miner across the balcony. You see, the balconies are just 68 centimeters apart.

Callejón del Beso, Guanajuato

Supposedly, if you kiss your partner on the third step, you are assured seven years of good luck. Leave it to Mexicans to put such a positive twist on such an unhappy ending.

Carmen and Charles at the top of the Callejón del Beso, Guanajuato

The Callejón del Beso illustrates well one of the more challenging aspects of Guanajuato for tourists exploring on foot: because the city is built up the sides of hills, there are always stairs between where you are and the place you are trying to reach.

Attractions Up Stairs, Guanajuato

While I found this a bit annoying and exhausting, it does reward those that perservere with some nice views of the colorful houses lining the valleys.

Hillside Houses, Guanajuato

Guanajuato has a lot of political history as well. When Miguel Hidalgo started the war for independence in 1810, he was in the state of Guanajuato. After his capture, execution and subsequent beheading, the Spanish put his severed head in a cage (as they did with the heads of his co-conspirators, Ignacio Allende, José Mariano Jiménez and Juan Aldama) and hung it from the corner of the granary in the state's capital, Guanajuato. That building is the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, which has since been converted into a regional museum.

Detail of Mural by José Chávez Morado in the Alhóndiga, Guanajuato

The stairs of the museum are graced with a mural by José Chávez Morado, whose style in this work greatly resembles that of Jaliscan artist José Clemente Orozco.

Detail of Mural by José Chávez Morado in the Alhóndiga, Guanajuato

Guanajuato has some pretty good food too. At night, in the strip running just below the Plaza de la Paz, we had some delicious gorditas de nata. These are like the most delicious pancakes you could ever hope to eat - they're sweet, fluffy and piping hot as they're fried on the griddle right in front of you when you order them. (Supposedly we can get them here in Guadalajara somewhere, but it's rumored that the ones from Guanajuato are superior.)

I was also able to try out a regional specialty called enchiladas mineras, or 'miners' enchiladas,' which are vegetarian because supposedly miners are too poor to afford meat. Too bad for the miners, I guess, but great for me, because these babies are delicious. (Ours were prepared with corn oil, not the "butter of pig" listed on the previous link.) They consist of cheese and onion enchiladas covered by fried carrots and potatoes. In Mexico, these are considered comida típica of the state of Guanajuato, although you also find the same dish, made in the same fashion, in Argentina. In Morelia, in the state of Michoacán, we enjoyed a type of enchilada that seems like a somewhat distant relative, known as the enchilada placera. I would have a hard time deciding which of the two I favor. Hopefully I will never have to.

Our finest dining experience took place on Sunday night, when Charles decided to track down a really nice restaurant with a great view of the city. After asking a few cab drivers, he was directed up a series of twisting narrow roadways to the Refugio Casa Colorada, a hotel with six nice rooms and a lovely restaurant perched atop one of the hills surrounding the city. It used to be a residence for Luis Echeverría (president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976) and his wife, but it was turned into a hotel in 1975. For Shawn and me, it was a nice change of pace from the same old dishes we've come to expect. Shawn had a salad and cream of pistachio soup, while I enjoyed a cream of guajillo chile with camembert and a canelloni stuffed with spinach in a light cream sauce. After dinner, one of the chefs came out of the kitchen, and Charles called him over to pay his respects. The chef was very nice, and took us on a tour of all but one of the rooms.

View of Guanajuato from the dining room of the Refugio Casa Colorada

We also did a number of other things: visited a former hacienda where torture devices and corpses of people buried alive by the Spanish were unearthed, went to visit the monument to El Pípila, and saw the Templo de San Cayetano de Valencia, which was adorned with very elaborate detail work plated in pure gold as a gift from the owner of the nearby Valencia mine.

Gold, Gold, Gold at the Templo de San Cayetano de Valencia, Guanajuato

Charles told us that the owner of the mine had a carpet made of pure gold that reached from his front door to the church so that his daughter could walk to the altar over it on her wedding day. The gold from that carpet was then used to create the three large ornamented structures like the one shown above that adorn the altar.

Visiting Guanajuato, I felt like I saw perhaps the widest stroke of Mexican history that I've seen at any one time in any of the colonial towns I've visited, from the history of the indigenous people of Guanajuato who gave the place its name (originally spelled 'Quanax-Huato' meaning 'Place of the Frogs') to the home of a relatively recent president. Tourists can find a lot of things to keep them busy in town, but there are two things they won't find. First, they won't find an elevator. I don't think I've ever climbed so many stairs in my whole life as I did during my two days in Guanajuato. Nor will they find a whorehouse. According to a cab driver we had, that's not permitted in the city of Guanajuato because it's a city for tourists. "You have to go to Leon for that," he told us.

Visitors planning a trip to Guanajuato may want to look at the Virtual Tourist guide to Guanajuato and the resources at guanajuatocapital.com.

Posted by crispy at 09:42 AM | Comments (3)

May 07, 2007

Mexico Cooks!

Once in a while, I get exasperated with my chosen life as a vegetarian. It's not that I regret not eating animals, but rather, I'm infuriated with the fact that the world seems hell-bent on adding meat products to things that don't really need them. One big example here in Mexico is the caldo de jitomate (tomato broth) that one can buy in the stores here. It's a big component of many Mexican dishes. The grocery stores all offer multiple shelves and multiple brands to choose from, but every single brand contains chicken stock. You can't buy any tomato broth that is just that: tomatoes. Why they don't call it 'chicken stock with tomato,' I don't know.

Of course, it's the same situation in the United States, where you specifically have to buy vegetarian vegetable soup from Campbell's because their standard vegetable soup is made with beef stock. One can't eat the miso soup with tofu at any Japanese restaurants because it always has an undetectable, but for some reason manditory, addition of bonito. Onion gravy? Think again! That just means someone looked at an onion from across the room while they fried up flour and beef fat.

You would think that after 18 years, I'd be used to it, but I'm not. Day in and day out, I have to deal with meat bias, just like I did in the United States. Otherwise tasty enchiladas have their rich tortillas fried in lard. Those frijoles would be melting in my mouth, if only they didn't have big chunks of pork in them. Then there are the delicious potato tacos I could eat, if only they didn't have chorizo thrown in. There are times the whole experience just makes me want to lock myself in a room with a stack of rice cakes and a bunch of k.d. lang CDs, telling the rest of the world to go beat their meat elsewhere.

Then, a wonderful woman we have been most fortunate to befriend here in Guadalajara steps up to the plate, rolls up her sleeves and lets loose with a torrent of the good stuff that completely restores my love for the miracle that is Mexican food. Her name is Cristina, and she is the author of Mexico Cooks!, the most informative blog on Mexican food you'll find. With well-crafted first-person accounts and photos, she leads you around La República to sample the national staples as well as regional delicacies. She tells you the names of all those things you love but don't know how to ask for. She explains exactly what is in that curious stew that you saw but were afraid to try. She holds your hand and guides your lily-white behind through the market, removing the mystery behind things like chapulines and escamoles. Best of all, she reminds you of the sacred link between food, family and history that runs strong here in Mexico and makes the people so passionate about it.

Even after the most frustrating food experiences I encounter here in Guadalajara, Mexico Cooks! always lulls me back into a state of warm, bubbly love for the people and the food of our new country. And don't worry meat eaters. While she frequently writes about things that I can eat, she doesn't shy away from all those rich meaty treats for which Mexico is so well known. If reading Mexico Cooks! makes you so hungry you just can't stand it anymore and you want to come to Mexico to try out all the things she so lovingly describes, you're in luck. In addition to sharing her experiences through her blog, she also leads specialty tours here where you can go about and sample some of the delicious dishes she details in her blog.

Well? Why are you still here? Go check out Mexico Cooks!

Posted by crispy at 07:03 AM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2007

Deep In the Heart of Texas, Part Six

The Congress Avenue bridge, Austin

One of Austin's famous contemporary tourist attractions is the Mexican free-tailed bats that roost in the Congress Avenue Bridge. Spring and summer find 750,000 to 1,500,000 bats living in the heat expansion joints of the bridge, and each night, they all come out to feed on flying bugs. Starting as soon as the sun sets and continuing for the next few hours hours, they all come out and fly away in a column that stretches out for about ten miles before they break up and hunt individually. Altogether, they eat some 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of insects nightly.

Our camera could not take pictures in the low-light at a fast enough speed to catch the bats in motion without being blurry, but here is a shot that Shawn took while we were on one of the popular 'bat cruises' that cruise along around and under the bridge.

Bats departing for nightly feeding, Austin

While it is cool to see a huge number of animals in their natural (or perhaps acquired is a better word) habitat, a quick word of warning if you choose to take a bat cruise: wear a hat. Although the boat tries to stay out from directly beneath the bats' flight path, the bats are unpredictable in where they will go, and if you end up under the column, you're likely to be lightly showered in feces. It's not so much that anyone could even see it on you (the bats are, after all, very tiny), but it's enough to know that it's in your hair.

Posted by crispy at 05:45 PM | Comments (2)

April 15, 2007

Deep In the Heart of Texas, Part Five

Romance (1931-32), Thomas Hart Benton

I try to keep things related to Mexico, but the connection here is tenuous, I must admit. The place has some works by Mexican artists, but it would be a shame to visit just for those.

The truth is, because we were so impressed by the Blanton Museum of Art on the campus at University of Texas at Austin, I want to be sure to give it a plug. It has a very good collection of art from the Americas, although it also has a decent collection of European art. The interesting thing there is that they have some rather peculiar works in that collection.

Saint Agatha's Breasts

It's all housed in a beautiful, brand-spanking-new building. I'm tell you, it's well worth the USD $5 suggested donation.

If you are in Austin and you like art, I highly recommend it. To visit, park in the Brazos Garage on the University of Texas at Austin campus and walk next door. (A money saving tip: if you take your parking ticket to the reception desk in the museum, you can pay just USD $3 for the parking and skip stopping at the cashier box on the way out.) Were we not short on time, breezing through the European collection, we would have spent about 4-5 hours total in the museum.

Waitresses from the Sparhawk (1924-25), Yasuo Kuniyoshi

They are currently in the process of constructing administrative offices, a café and a better gift shop next door.

Black and White No.2 (1960), Franz Kline

Even if you can't make it to Austin, you should check out their website, as they have a number of pieces from their collection online.

Obviously, they let you take photos (without a flash), but only of pieces in their permanent collection.

Posted by crispy at 02:41 PM | Comments (3)

Deep In the Heart of Texas, Part Four

Main Square, La Grange, Texas

The town of La Grange, Texas was immortalized by ZZ Top in their song of the same name, which talked about the in/famous whorehouse known as The Chicken Ranch.

Being a fan of both hookers and ZZ Top, I was considering planning a day trip to La Grange while we were in Texas, because it is only about an hour and a half from my sister's house. When I found out that the Mexican restaurant in town is Guadalajara Mexican Restaurant, that sealed the deal. Shawn and Carol were both kind enough to accompany me.

Here are a few photos taken in La Grange for your viewing pleasure. We didn't try to track down the location of the former Chicken Ranch, but we did chow down and walk about the main square.

Street, La Grange, Texas

Beef Marketing Material, La Grange, Texas

Guadalajara Restaurant, La Grange, Texas

I also bought some delicious Topo Chico sodas, since you can't get them in Mexico.

Posted by crispy at 01:10 AM | Comments (1)

April 12, 2007

Deep In the Heart of Texas, Part Three

Topo Chico Beverages From La Grange

Many of you know how I love Topo Chico products, and have read how it has been impossible for me to find them in Guadalajara (despite the assurances of many a Mexican that one can buy them there). It is one of the sad aspects of the relentless Americanization of Mexico that one can find Coca-Cola® products everywhere, but finding domestic sodas can be tricky. That seems to be by consumer choice; most Mexicans feel that domestic products are inferior to American brands.

When stopping to get a soda on our day trip to La Grange, we went to the convenience store next to Guadalajara Mexican Restaurant (403 North Jefferson Street, 979-968-5935). They had a cooler full of Topo Sabores (pictured above), which you can't even buy in Mexico. The kid behind the counter overheard me telling my sister Carol about the oddity that one can only buy Topo Sabores in the United States, and he assured me that they were in fact available for purchase within Mexico. But as I said, I'm used to Mexicans telling me how easy it is to find particular things there. I asked him where he'd seen them and he said Guanajuato and Guadalajara. When pressed on where in Guadalajara he'd seen them, he told me, "Near the center. San Juan de los Lagos." I verified that he didn't mean "San Juan de Dios," the big mercado in the center of Guadalajara, and he said no, "San Juan de los Lagos, in downtown Guadalajara." I had never heard of such a colonia, but since I'm not a walking directory of the neighborhoods within the city, I figured I'd look it up when we got back.

Upon returning to Carol's house, I looked up the Topo Chico web site to see if I had been mistaken after all. Maybe in my relentless skepticism, I'd misunderstood the web site before. No, it turns out. I had not. The web site indicates that the Topo Sabores are sold in the US only. One can get sangria and grapefruit flavors in Mexico (as well as plain mineral water), but not the range of flavors shown above.

And San Juan de los Lagos isn't a neighborhood in downtown Guadalajara. It's about 75 miles north of the city.

Posted by crispy at 07:16 AM | Comments (5)

April 08, 2007

Deep In the Heart of Texas, Part Two

Sign on Club, Deep Ellum

I have something to say about the difference between American and European cities... but I forgot what it is... I have it written down at home somewhere.
- True Stories

Just because you attribute a characteristic to a thing or a place, it doesn't make it so. The sign above Oki Dog saying that it is "World Famous" doesn't elevate it from the relatively obscure infamy it knows in Los Angeles. Calling a sheep's tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. Merely proclaiming the "Mission Accomplished" doesn't mean it has been.

Proclaiming that the United States is the land of the free doesn't keep Americans' personal liberties from slowly fading away, snatched by the government, willingly surrendered out of fear, or atrophying from neglect. On the contrary, life in the land of liberty is regulated and restricted much more than it is in Mexico, where people are permitted much more flexibility in what they do and how they do it. That doesn't necessarily make life in Mexico worry-free; in fact, it often makes life more frustrating. In the United States, people have a much greater sense of personal responsibility, instilled by history and civics classes and continually reinforced by the ever-present threat of lawsuits. In Mexico, you try to get away with whatever you can, and there's no need to feel bad about it unless you get caught. It's not really very noble.

Yet at times, the concept of personal responsibility gets pushed too far in the United States. Whenever I return here after being in Mexico, I am always surprised by how unnecessarily nasty people can be toward others. Shawn always cites the example of a business that he went to in Los Angeles once when we lived there that had a sign on the wall over their cash register that said:

WE DON'T PLAY THE CHECKING GAME! CASH ONLY!

"Checking game?" Why not just say, "sorry, no checks?" Why the need to make out like anyone wanting to pay by check is playing some shady con game? In the above sign, isn't it enough just to say "NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS?" Does it really need to admonish people with the whole, "You pee, you pay!" bit? And why is it such a big deal to let people use the bathroom?

I have heard the rationale that homeless people come in and use the facilities for more than just emptying their bladders (shaving, washing up, etc.). Obviously, that gives a bathroom a rather sketchy feel, but maybe if business owners were a little more upset about the fact that such people are homeless in the first place, it might be a little more productive. Yet in the United States, it seems the modus operandi is to criminalize the poor.

Sign on Club, Deep Ellum

In the above sign, they tell customers not to allow people to wash their windows for change. Why not? Is it really such a problem to have someone ask you if they can wash your windows for change? If you don't want you windows washed or you think it's not worth the spare change, tell them no. The sign also indicates that in Deep Ellum (and perhaps all of Dallas? All of Texas?), it's illegal to ask people for money. This offends Shawn greatly, as he thinks this is an unconstitutional denial of free speech. I tend to agree, but furthermore, I don't understand why it's illegal to ask anyone for anything. The government insists on it's share of my cash in the form of taxes and they don't even ask. They threaten me with legal action like seizing my assets or sending me to prison if I don't pay up. Those same people are going to turn around and make it illegal for other people to ask me politely if I will give them some money?

Help us help you to be safe and sound in Deep Ellum.

Why is more sound for people to urinate on the street or behind a tree in a park instead of doing it in a receptacle actually designed for the elimination of urine? How do people asking me for spare change threaten my safety?

I grant you, I've run into some aggressive panhandlers that won't take no for an answer and some have said that cash I've donated to them isn't enough. That sucks. People that believe that is wrong are correct to feel that way; anyone asking you for money should be appreciative of any help you give them. However, I don't understand why this rudeness gets American citizens so upset while the rudeness of "you pee, you pay!" doesn't seem to bother them.

In Mexico, you don't tend to see signs like that. Instead of restricting freedoms and criminalizing the poor, they take the free market approach. Instead they will often make it so that you can only get into the bathroom by paying something like MXN $3 (a little less than USD $0.30). This pays for the overhead: toilet paper, paper towels and regular maintenance. People that don't have the cash don't get in, but at least they're not being treated like scofflaws just because they have the unfortunate luck of being simultaneously poor and in need of a bathroom.

Posted by crispy at 09:12 AM | Comments (1)

April 07, 2007

Deep In the Heart of Texas, Part One

Shawn and I are on the road, visiting my sister Carol who has moved to Austin, Texas.

Brett With Hidalgo Mural, Dallas

Before coming here, we spent a few days in Dallas/Fort Worth, being shown around by our good friend Brett (a frequent commenter on this blog) because he grew up there. I have not been to Texas for 20 some years, but seen through the eyes of a gringo who has lived in Mexico for a little over a year, it's very interesting.

First, a word about Tex-Mex food, or rather, Mexican food in Texas.

El Fénix Restaurante, Dallas

One night, we ate at the original El Fénix restaurant in Dallas, and I must say I was surprised. Okay, while it's not exactly what I've come to think of as traditional Mexican food (they offer many north-of-the-border items like fajita-style nachos and sopapillas), their menu also had some telltale signs that honest-to-goodness Mexicans were involved with the food at some point. For example, they offer their queso fundido with chorizo or with mushrooms, like you would find it at many a location farther south. They also have chilaquiles, a dish that is ubiquitous in Mexico, but hard to find up here in the United States. I have had better Mexican food in Mexico. There is no doubt about that. Yet I was surprised at the degree to which the Mexican food in Texas resembled the food I've come to think of as traditional Mexican food.

One often hears the comment that Mexican food in the United States is more Tex-Mex than traditional Mexican food. Yet a lot of the Tex-Mex I've had in this state has not been like the Mexican food I've had in other parts of the country. For example, I would not say that Mexican food in California is like Tex-Mex, because the Tex-Mex I've had resembles traditional Mexican food more than it does Mexican food in California. Of course, I've not had the food throughout the entire state of Texas, but I have to say that my first impression is that the Mexican food here in Texas has gotten kind of a bum rap, since the crappiness of the bland food passed off as Mexican in other parts of the country is so often explained as being more Texan than Mexican. In general, the Mexican food I've had here has been much better than it is in other parts of the country.

It is a lot hotter on average, though.

Hernández Finer Foods, Dallas

Posted by crispy at 11:34 PM | Comments (5)

March 17, 2007

When is a flight to Mexico City not a flight to Mexico City?

When it's a flight to Chihuahua!

Shawn and I arrived at the Guadalajara airport an hour and a half early for our flight to Mexico City. Shawn has a three-day weekend because of the birthday of Benito Juárez, so we thought we'd take a fun weekend trip to the capital. We booked our flight on Aero California and our stay at the Sheraton María Ísabel. We arranged the day before for a cab to take us to the airport. We packed the night before. We shut off the gas. We washed all the dishes in the sink and did a last run through the refrigerator to make sure we left nothing that would spoil over the three days we would be gone. It was one of those rare occasions where we did everything just right. We even arrived in plenty of time at the airport; like I said, we got there an hour and a half early.

But instead of writing this entry seated at the desk at the Sheraton looking out the window at the Angel of Independence, I'm at my dining room table at Casa Cubilete, looking at a down-in-the-dumps Shawn. Even though we we got there in plenty of time, and were waiting right at the gate when our flight left, we never knew it was our flight because they repeatedly announced it only as a flight going to Chihuahua.

To be precise, the flight was listed twice, with one destination being Chihuahua and the other being Mexico (what they call Mexico City here). On the departures board, they looked like this (I'm translating it to English for you):

Maybe it's just me, but when I'm looking at something like that, the way that I find the thing I'm looking for, the thing I isolate first, is the destination city. Looking through the airline abbreviations or the flight numbers is more work for me mentally than locating the city first, then drilling down to the airline and flight number. Therefore, when I looked at the board as shown above, I saw the line for "MEXICO" but didn't notice that the line for "CHIHUAHUA" was the same flight number, departing at the same time, at the same gate. Once I had found the three lines that had "MEXICO" in them, I didn't bother looking at any of the other lines. Why would I? I wasn't going to any of those other places.

When they announced the flight, they announced it with the destination of Chihuahua. Not once did they say "Chihuahua, stopping in Mexico" or anything like that. It was always announced as going to Chihuahua and only Chihuahua. It seemed funny to me that they kept announcing that departure, seemingly more than the others, and at one point, an Aero California representative came over to us and asked us if we were going to Chihuahua. We both said, "No." I added, although I guess he didn't hear me, "no, a Mexico." Supposedly, as they told us later, they walked around calling our names to locate us. However, we've noticed that in the US, when this is done, they use a public address system, or at least someone shouts it out. In Mexico, when someone addresses a crowd, they often do it in such a soft voice that only the people in the front of the line can hear and the people in the back might not even know they're being addressed. That was the case with us. We didn't even know they were looking for anyone, let alone that they were walking around trying to locate us.

Once the flight for Chihuahua left, we figured we were about to board, since we were the next flight out of Gate 14. But when time went by and they didn't start announcing our flight, we went to look at the board. It said that our flight was "CLOSED." We looked to find someone working for Aero California and finally came across the guy that asked us if we were going to Chihuahua. As soon as I showed him our ticket and started out saying (in Spanish), "We're going to Mexico but it says the flight is closed..." He said (in flawless English), "Oh, that flight left! I asked you if you were going to Mexico or Chihuahua and you said no!" Whether or not he truly believed he had asked us this way or if he knew he was lying, I don't know. But he didn't ask us if we were going to Mexico or Chihuaha. He asked us if we were going to Chihuahua. Period. We were not. We said, accurately, "no."

We got our luggage back, and after a lot of hassle talking to a manager, they put us on another flight. To their credit, they didn't charge us any additional fees. They kept maintaining that their representative asked us if we were going to Mexico or Chihuahua when he came over, but my Spanish isn't as bad as all that. The bummer is that we've now missed one night of our vacation in Mexico City, and since our hotel was prepaid, we lost USD $150 on a room we're not sleeping in tonight. It also involved another MXN $200 to get back from the airport, then another MXN $200 to take us back to the airport tomorrow at 6:30 am.

The moral of this story is, know the final destination of your flights and bus routes. This is common with bus routes, I realized later. You may buy a ticket on a bus line that goes through seven different cities and stops at the bus terminal in each one. The tickets and the boards don't necessarily list all the stops on the trip, and often at the gates, you have to identify the bus by its final destination, as it won't list an on-the-way stop in the banner above the driver's head. Usually, they list only the final stop, or on occasion the most major stop on the route. I just didn't think about that happening with airline tickets because when I bought them, I entered in the destination of Mexico City in the search. Not once when I bought the tickets did it talk about the flight being the flight to Chihuahua that stops in Mexico City, nor does it say anything about Chihuahua on any of the receipts, confirmations and itineraries. Yet it worked for our needs because it goes from Guadalajara to Mexico City. We just didn't have any idea that Mexico was just a brief stop on its way to Chihuahua.

Shawn, having so little free time feels like this has really soured the whole weekend. Hopefully we'll still have enough fun to make it worth going, even if we get there a day late. Hopefully nothing will go wrong tomorrow.

Posted by crispy at 01:41 AM | Comments (5)

March 11, 2007

Mexico City: Vegetarian Chains

I was writing a comment on Chowhound earlier tonight and I realized that I'd not put information in the blog about a couple of chain restaurants in Mexico city that serve a pretty wide selection to vegetarians. They are not strictly vegetarian, but they have a surprising number of vegetarian options. It's rare that I can open a menu and have a selection of more than three things. With these two restaurants, I think I had to spend 20 minutes or more deciding from among their various options. Vegans will have a harder time, especially at Saks, as traditional food here tends to use dairy products.

The two are Saks and La Buena Tierra. Saks is traditional and has an elegant atmosphere, whereas La Buena Tierra is more international and modern. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos to share with you of these two places, but the continuation of this entry has a list of their locations. There are other places to write about, but it's handy to know these since they have many locations.

Saks locations:

Insurgentes Sur 1641
Col. San José Insurgentes
5615-1500 & 5611-4803

José Ma. Velasco 100
esquina con Damas
Col. San José Insurgentes
5615-1500

Insurgentes Sur 4342
Col. Tlalpan
5485-3500

Plaza San Jacinto No. 9
Col. San Ángel
5616-1601

Campos Eliseos No.133
Col. Polanco
5545-6560 & 5545-6506

La Buena Tierra locations:

Atlixco 94
Local A
Col. Condesa
5211-4242 & 5211-4229

Anatole France 120
Local 9-10
Col. Polanco
5281-2324 & 5281-2363

Insurgentes Sur 2036
Col. Insurgentes
5575-1549 & 5575-1593

Periférico Sur 4606
Col. Pedregal
5528-3436 & 5606-2720

Centro Comercial
Col. Santa Fe
2167-4037 & 2140-4038

G. González Camarena 111
Col. Santa Fé Corporativos
5393-7174 & 5292 -8182

Plaza Satélite
Ciudad Satélite
5393-7815

Posted by crispy at 10:25 PM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2007

Mexico City: Photos

Statue Outside the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City

We have returned home to Guadalajara, but I'm going to run a few entries of photos Shawn took during our recent trip. First off are some of our favorite things about Mexico City.

Mexico City has lots of statues all about the city. One of the most famous is the Angel of Independence which graces Avenida Reforma.

Angel of Independence, Mexico City

Statue of Diana, Mexico City

Monument to Benito Juárez, Mexico City

Another cool thing about Mexico City is that is has large civic gardens all over the place, many more than we have here in Guadalajara, where it seems people are afraid of trees.

Public Garden, Mexico City

A popular museum in Mexico City is the Museo de Antropologiía. I'm not that big on anthropology myself, but I must admit that some of their recreations are really cool.

Museo de Antropología, Mexico City

Museo de Antropología, Mexico City

Now this is more my speed, the Palacio de Bellas Artes that houses a rotating exhibit or two and famous murals of the Mexican muralists.

Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City

This building has some beautiful art deco elements inside.

Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City

José Clemente Orozco, Katarsis

David Siquieros, Nueva democracia

Diego Rivera, El carnaval de la vida mexicana

Not exactly a museum, but rather the Palacio Postal, the central post office in Mexico City. It's obviously from the era when the sky was the limit in Mexico.

Palacio Postal, Mexico City

This Sanborns is in a really old building covered with fancy tiles on the outside. People say it's a must see, but frankly, just seeing that it's this old buiding with a Sanborns inside is sufficient. I include it here for all those people that would otherwise ask if it were absent, "Didn't you go to the Casa de los Azulejos?!"

Sanborns, Casa de los Azulejos

Zócalo, Mexico City

Subway Station, Mexico City

Finally, a view from Bellini, the revolving restaurant on the 45th story of the World Trade Center.

View From Bellini, Mexico City

Posted by crispy at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2007

Impressions of Puebla

As our vacation winds down, we find ourselves in Puebla, yet another beautiful, charming colonial town. Actually, with a population of 1.5 million, Puebla is a verifiable city, but we're holed up in the centro histórico, so it feels more like a town, what with the four-story buildings in bright colors, the plazas and the abundance of trees.

We are staying at the Hotel Colonial (4 Sur 105, 222/246-46-12), which is about a block off the zócalo. This colonial-style hotel is much more in line with the type I described in a previous entry, but it does have a few cool aspects that should be mentioned.

First, the location is top notch, if you want to be in the centro histórico. It also has a rich history (noted on the map of the city that they give you upon check-in), and the oldest (1895) operating elevator in Puebla. There are convenience factors, like the fact that they have a 24-hour coin-op landromat on the top floor, free wireless Internet access in the lobby/restaurant and they will bring an iron and ironing board to your room if you request it. Finally, there's the restaurant, which serves old-school food with perfet execution and boasts a mole poblano that they say is widely regarded as "the best in the world." Between you and me, they may be right about that. It is the best I've ever tasted, and I have tasted it because you can get it on eggs and cheese enchiladas.

I learned from another gringo couple today at breakfast that the owner has put in extensive improvements (following the 1999 earthquake that damaged a lot of buildings in Puebla), many of them structural reinforcements that cannot be seen because they've been sunk into the walls. That's quite a feat in colonial buildings, because they have solid-wall construction.

The city is known historically for its tile production, which is the type that you think of when you think of "Mexican tile." Colorful pieces with animals, plants and other designs on them, known by the name Talavera, a town in Spain. The quality of the tile and pottery of the area was well known even before the arrival of the Spanish though, with the rumor being that Moctezuma would not eat off pottery from anywhere else.

The cathedral bells are also notable, with some from the 17th century. There is even a saying, which goes: para mujeres y campanas, las poblanas. "For women and bells, those of Puebla [are best]."

Yet I know dear readers, and I have said before, that you do not tune in here to read of things you can find in any number of online travel guides. Chances are good that you're either bored or searching for some scoop that our particular insight can give you. What is it about Puebla that one should know as either gringo, gay or vegetarian? What don't you hear in other places that might be that make-or-break difference in your travel plans? What might I relate that could cure boredom for a minute or two while you're awaiting a printout or the arrival of your ride?

Puebla is enchanting. It makes you want to pass a whole afternoon sitting at a little table at one of the many sidewalk cafés bordering the zócalo soaking it all up. However, the biggest down side we've found to Puebla is that if you try to do just that, you're not given the opportunity. You will be hassled for your spare change by beggars or hustled to buy things from walking vendors every few minutes.

On our first night here, we went to a popular Italian café and decided to sit out at a table on the sidewalk, facing the zócalo. The dining experience took an hour, and in that space of time, we were approached by at least 10 different people who were either selling things or begging for change. One person came back and pestered us to buy his stuff again after we had bought something the first time he pitched it to us. Neither the waiters nor the management stopped these people from going around to every table outside and pleading their case, although there seemed to be some unspoken rule that they should not go inside.

Therefore, I would suggest that if you go out to eat in Puebla, even though dining at one of the sidewalk tables might seem like a delightful idea, unless you like to be interrupted every six minutes or so by people wanting your cash, take a table inside the restaurant.

It should be noted that in some areas of Mexico City, we experienced this same problem, although not to the extent that we have in Puebla. I should perhaps also remark that this is over the holiday season, between Christmas and New Years,, and perhaps that's a particularly bad time for it. In general, one should consider being generous to and understanding of people that are supporting themselves by such means, as it's not the nicest of employment scenarios. Yet I want to be honest with you too. At the rate it happens here, it's annoying and really disrupts your ability to enjoy yourself.

On a more pleasant note, those looking for vegetarian food in Puebla can find it at a restaurant called La Zanahoria (5 oriente 20, 222/232-4813) that serves nothing but. We're particularly fond of their Milanesa with Pipián, which is made from breaded seitan. Their soups, which include a tortilla and an onion, both normally made with meat stocks, are also tasty. The bread there, like seemingly all the bread in Puebla, is soft and delicious, unlike the token week-old crap one gets at many places throughout the country (cough, Sanborns, cough).

But perhaps that's because of the last-but-not-least item: the lingering presence of the French. Like many colonial cities that are tourist draws, one can study Spanish at one of the "institutes" of Puebla created to serve foreigners wanting immersion training. Yet I suspect that one could also come here to have immersion training in French, because it is so widely spoken here. In fact, I suspect that the waiters at the restaurant in our hotel are more comfortable speaking French as a second language than English, but that's just a guess. They get HUGE numbers of French tourists here, and we've seen dozens.

The French did occupy this city for several years before being ousted by the Mexicans; maybe that explains why they keep coming back to Puebla. Shawn suggests that Puebla is the most European of Mexican cities, and therefore, Europeans might be most comfortable here. I don't know what the reason is, but whatever brings them here, they show up in droves. You can hear French being spoken all over town, and many signs are printed in Spanish, English and French, trying to make the most of their diverse tourist makeup.

In fact, it's even more diverse than just having French folks. For the past two days, a huge group of Asians has descended on the restaurant in our hotel for lunch. I don't believe that they're staying in the hotel, but they seem to like it. As I mentioned, it does offer a mole poblano that they claim to be the best in the world. Maybe word of it has spread to the East.

Posted by crispy at 10:56 AM | Comments (2)

December 30, 2006

Quotes From The Hotel Colonial Guest Services Directory

Hotel Colonial, Puebla
4 Sur 105

SERVICE DIRECTORY
HOTEL COLONIAL DE PUEBLA, S.A. DE C.V.

If you want a more pleasant stay, consider the following:

1 - The visits of friends or family members are not permitted in the rooms.

2 - All visitors can be received in the Lobby at a reasonable hour.

[...]

LAUNDRY SERVICE

1 - For this service there is a plastic bag, you only have to report it to the administration before leaving the hotel.

2 - This service in from 8:00 to 11:00 am we will return it the same day at 9:00 pm.

[...]

SAFETY DEPOSIT BOX SERVICE

1 - To deposit your vaulables you may arrange it with the administration from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm.

2 - You may only receive deposits from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm hour, you must notify the administration twelve hours in advance.

REGLAMENTO

[...]

WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR LOSTS IN THE ROOMS MONEY AND VALUE OBJETS MUST BE DEPOSITED IN THE OFFICE.

THE HEALT BOARD DOESN'T ALLOW DOGS OR OTHER ANIMALS IN THE ROOMS.

Posted by crispy at 09:44 AM | Comments (1)

December 29, 2006

Number 12 or There's No Such Thing as a Free Lounge

People make mistakes. It's a fact of life. I make mistakes on a daily basis, but the magnitude of those mistakes vary from error to error. I sometimes forget to turn the fan off when I leave the apartment. If the way I find out about this mistake is by returning home to find it humming along quietly and not by coming back to a pile of ashes on the corner where our apartment building was, with all our neighbors staring at me angrily through tear-clouded eyes, it's not that big a mistake.

The discovery on the day that we were to leave for our vacation that I had booked our return airline tickets for the wrong day was of the variety wherein you get a sinking feeling in your gut that the consequences of such a slip up are going to be very unpleasant. I figured we could probably switch the tickets, and if nothing else, buy all new ones, since they're on one of Mexico's new budget domestic airlines. Yet I suspected that it would be relatively costly to do so and a royal pain in the kiester to have to deal with customer service, in Spanish, over the phone.

Thank God for Charles. I don't say that enough, but it's true. He pulls my fat out of the fire on more occasions that I like to admit.

At my request, he arrived early (he was driving us to the airport too) to make calls and try to fix everything. He called the airline, and for the price of one ticket, he got them to switch both our tickets. Since we had to pay to switch the tickets anyway, Shawn and I decided to extend our trip by a day. This was possible because of a scheduling error on the part of Shawn's employer, wherein he doesn't return to work until several days after when we though he'd have to return to work when we were booking all our travel arrangements. The only problem with extending our stay was that we'd have to change our hotel reservations also. Once again, Charles came to the rescue, calling the hotels and changing the dates around: one extra day in Cuernavaca, and shifting our four days in Puebla by one day, arriving one day later and leaving one day later.

The only hitch was that in Cuernavaca, at the Casa Colonial, we'd have one room for the first two nights, then we'd have to switch rooms. We'd have to get up and pack just to change rooms, but overall, not a big hassle for getting to stay in the same hotel. It would have been worse to have to relocate to another place across town. The hotel even helped out by storing our luggage in a basement in the time where we were out of our room and waiting to take the new room. We didn't want to have to fold up all our clothes that had come back from being ironed the day before, and they took our clothes on hangers and hung them up too, so that we'd not have to stuff them into suitcases just to change rooms.

I sat by the pool, writing and awaiting word that the new room was ready for us to move in, and sure enough, at around 2:30, a nice young lad came over and told me that it was time. He hefted all our luggage and clothes on hangers to the new room, Number 12.

Our previous room had been Number 5, on the third floor, in what seemed like a gussied-up maids quarters. It was nice, but the three flights of stairs we'd have to climb every time we returned from being out, having to cross over the balconies that were adjacent to other rooms, and the small space was a bit of a drag. When I saw that Number 12 was on the first floor, I was relieved that we'd not have to climb what seemed like Mount Everest to get to our room. When I entered and saw the space, I was stunned. It was the same price per night as Number 5, but it was huge, had an extra bedroom and a fireplace! It was so big that it seemed like a small ballet studio with a bed placed on one side. Fancy artwork adorned the walls, and unlike Number 5, it even had a writing desk with a three-prong outlet so that I could plug in my computer. Writer's bliss!

It was so big it felt like we could have our own private lounge in the other two-thirds of the room not occupied by the king size bed.

Shawn and I discussed the difference in quality for the same price. Something had to be wrong with the room. But it seemed so much better in so many ways: hotter water and more pressure than upstairs in Number 5, brighter, more evenly-spaced lighting, a bigger closet, a fireplace, higher ceilings, and did I mention, no three flights of stairs?. I commented that the only thing I could figure out was that the room faced the street, and that the street was pretty busy. Shawn suggested that it would calm down at night, and I agreed, although I pointed out that it would probably pick up again in the morning when we wanted to sleep in.

Now, I don't have much trouble sleeping through loud noise. But what happened to us in the morning was like something out of an "I Love Lucy" episode. I woke up at around 8 am, to the sound of buses driving by to the terminal on the corner. The bus from Mexico City, the very line we were on, arrives every 15 minutes, and other buses from other places arrive at this terminal also. So bus noise was more or less a constant after 8 am.

I had to go to the bathroom, so I did, and upon returning to the main area of the room, I found that Shawn had gotten up and moved into the second bedroom that was adjacent to the interior courtyard so he could sleep. I sat down to write, and then in addition to the bus noise, someone across the street in a business started playing banda music really, really loud. You might have read elsewhere on this blog, of all the musical genres of Mexico, banda is my least favorite.

At one point, people passing by on the sidewalk right below our window stopped to yell at someone across the street, and their ensuing conversation was a series of shouts above the roar of the buses.

I put on my headphones and turned on my iTunes. A little music, perhaps at a volume slightly louder than I'd like, helped to drown out the chaos raging outside the quiet little enclave of the Casa Colonial. I could get back to writing.

Then all of a sudden, a table saw starts up and the blade rings out briefly before the screeching of it ripping wood apart. It sounds like it's right next door to our room. I look through the curtain on the wall that had covered the window overlooking what I thought was just a storage room for the hotel. To my surprise, a hotel employee was sawing pieces of wood in this impromptu wood shop in the storage room, right next to our room, at 8:30 am. It went on for a good ten minutes. I got a reprise at around 10:00.

So if you come to the Casa Colonial in Cuernavaca, unless you're a very heavy sleeper or are one of those crack-of-dawn types, don't get Number 12. And always be sure to double-check the details of your online ticket purchases before you click "Send."

Posted by crispy at 10:06 AM | Comments (1)

Pretty/Tasty

Cuernavaca is the capital of the state of Morelos. The state's name comes from a famous Afro-Mexican revolutionary, José María Morelos, who figured prominently in the war for independence, and it was this state that was the home of Emiliano Zapata, one of the biggies in the revolution. The capital is about 85 km (50 miles) south of Mexico City, making it a relatively short bus ride, traffic permitting.

I had always heard about Cuernavaca being a beautiful colonial town with perfect weather throughout the year, and it certainly lives up to that reputation. It is certainly a colonial town with a lot of the old stuff left in-tact: a cathedral that looks like a fortress when it's lit up at night, the Palacio de Cortés (which looks like a fortress at any time of day), and lots of smaller works like homes that endure from that era. And the weather is beautiful.

My experiences in colonial towns are also starting to show me that they usually have some great restaurants too. First there was the Café y Nevería Acrópolis in Zacatecas, and now I've stumbled across the Tratoría Marco Polo (Hidalgo 26; 777/318-40-32) in Cuernavaca. Located right across from the cathedral, it's located upstairs in a building that has an arcade of shops on the bottom floor. Their balcony overlooks the street and the cathedral and is nothing short of "charming." They have a wide range of food, and there is a lot of it that lacto-ovo vegetarians like us can eat. I'm usually not one to repeat visits to restaurants when faced with a limited amount of time in a city, unless (like Vege Taco of Coyoacán), their food is interesting and well-prepared. We ate at the Marco Polo three times during our visit, and I'm already looking forward to a return visit in the future.

We also ate at the Casa Hidalgo (Hidalgo 6; 777/312-27-49), a more hip and fancy joint located right across from the Palacio de Cortés. There were a number of things we could eat there too, most of them being pasta. Since we'd had our fill of that at the Tratoría Marco Polo, we opted for the chiles rellenos, filled with cheese. You can also get them filled with meat, like they serve them at el Rancherito in Olney, Illinois. This is a property owned by the same folks that own the hotel where we're staying, the Casa Colonial. The Casa Hidalgo also has rooms, but I can't say anything about those as we didn't stay there.

I have to admit that we did not eat at what is supposedly one of the most famous restaurants in the country: Las Mañanitas (Ricardo Linares 107; 777/362-00-00), which is also a fancy resort-style hotel. People can't say enough about this place, but we didn't venture out that way because we stayed within walking distance of our hotel and while they have a diverse and ever-changing menu, everything I read about them mentioned only dishes with meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat. One hates to make a reservation, get all dressed up, take a cab out to a place, go through the whole sit-down-order-drinks process, only to look at the menu and realize that the only thing he can get is a small salad. No, if we're going to that much trouble and expense, I want to know in advance that I can get something interesting that I like. I want to know I can enjoy the food as much as some meat-eating-José that goes there and has his run of the whole menu. Since Las Mañanitas doesn't publish their menu online (again, it changes frequently), and as they don't make any mention on their web site about having interesting vegetarian dishes, we opted out.

Of course, there's a lot more to Cuernavaca than old buildings and food. Malcolm Lowry's book, "Under the Volcano" was set here (although the town is called something else). Jazz greats Charles Mingus and Gil Evans died here, seeking indigenous treatments for terminal illnesses. Many gringos come here to study Spanish, and it's a great place for that because it's small, manageable and safe.

If you're a gringo and you come here, I can also recommend Casa Colonial for your accomodation needs. I expected it to be an overpriced "colonial" (read: old, no A/C, no hot water, no Internet) hotel, but in truth, it's not bad for the price. There are some limitations: a relatively limited breakfast (and no other meals) in the "restaurant," lots and lots and lots of stairs, windows without curtains that other guests can look into as they walk to and from their rooms, not-entirely-hot water, sketchy cable that comes and goes, having to get someone to open the gated entrance for you every time you come and go, a bar that is only attended if you ask for it to be, and Internet only reliable in the public areas. But it's kept spotless, the appointments are incredible (real, original contemporary art!), the beds are comfortable, the plumbing works, sewer gas from the shower drains is minimal (and they even give you covers for the drains), and most of all (and this alone makes up for all the other shortcomings), the views and the courtyard are spectacular.

Just make sure you don't get Number 12...

Posted by crispy at 07:53 AM | Comments (2)

December 28, 2006

To Cuernavaca

Taxi from the Zona Rosa to the Central Camionera del Sur, the 25 minutes costs us 250 pesos. Shawn throws in an extra 50 since the old guy driving helps us pull our bags out of the trunk, bags that have expanded with a few items we picked up in the Distrito Federal. Pass through the entrance into the terminal - CROWD - Mexicans from all over going all over. Jump into the current of one of the pedestrian canals flowing around the islands of still standing passengers waiting for who knows what all massed together. Find the Pullman de Morelos counter, figure out the proper line: Cuernavaca Centro, not Cuernavaca Casino de la Selva. Cash down for the tickets. Two at 62 pesos each. Involuntary gringo calculations pop into my head: 45 miles, 6 bucks.

Pulman de Morelos first class not up to snuff, a far cry from their Clase Ejecutivo Dorado, stylin', individual video screens, stewardesses, complimentary drinks, snacks. OUR ride: narrow seats, seat belt catch digging into my ass, air vents blow limp, headrest catching me at my shoulders. In front of me, passenger reclines his seat, putting it four inches from my chest. Movie on CRT screens four rows up: FBI co-opted canine runs off to become beloved bow-wow of latchkey loner, pursued by moronic maladroit mafiosos. Our stewardess, an old man with a ratty cardboard box selling warm juice and peanuts walking up then down the aisle.

Estimated trip time, one hour, fifteen minutes. At 40 minutes in, on the highway, we slow to a dead stop. People out of their cars, smoking, stretching, walking. Cops go by on the shoulder with sirens running. No view. Sun blazing through the glass. Waiting. Sitting. ETA comes and goes. Finally we start folling again slowly. Eventually we pass the cause of the bottleneck: a Jarritos truck has dumped several pallets of sodas all over the ground at a sharp curve in the road. Others stopped, scavenging unbroken bottles from among the splintered wood, torn sheets of plastic, paper, other trash thrown out of the window of passing cars. Past that return to speed, barreling down the highway.

Hit town, slow down, several jerky stops and turns to get to the terminal in el centro. Just before arrival, still rolling, everyone on the bus gets up and fights to be the first at the front of the bus to get off first. After sitting for 40 minutes at a stop on the highway, that two-minute advantage is really going to make a big difference. Call it - that Mexican obsession with jumping others in line. Crazy-loco for a country where the busiest day of the week is mañana.

Nos bajamos del camión, pick up our bags from a handler annoyed at our being the last ones to get our bags and in no rush. Taxi driver following, near chasing us, "¿Taxi, amigos? ¿Información? ¿Hotel?"

"No, no, no...gracias."

Walk out the bus entrance, climb up the hill on the sidewalk, not wide enough for a human and his suitcase. Time and again, forced down onto the street, narrow, cars honking, dust blowing, sun beating down, sweating, heavy suitcases, even on rollers. Gringos walking, definitely out of place, out of their element. Gringo gawk BIG TIME. Hotel reservations clerk directions for arrival: bus station a un costado del hotel - to the side of. Walk different sides of bus station, but no hotel. Try to ask directions of a man standing nearby. Tries to sell me a credit card. Doesn't know the area well enough to help because he's been in town only a week. Go to a cremería, ask "¿Dónde está el hotel que se llama 'Casa Colonial'?" Nobody knows. Suggestion: call for directions, say you're on Calle Morelos.

Phone. I hate the phone. The phone in Spanish is even worse. Try to find a quiet spot where I can hear over bus noise nonstop. Dial. Ring. Desk clerk answers, here we go. On Morelos, can't find hotel. Clerk says something about the cathedral, walking towards it, I ask how far maybe? Five blocks.

Go back out to street and collect Shawn, pressing on away from the terminal, towards the cathedral. Uneasy feeling - going away from bus terminal, going away from hotel if the station really is a un costado del hotel. Walk, uphill, sweat, GAWK, buses roaring by, taxis stopping, honking, pointing, "?" Big time frustration.

Shawn: what's the street address? I don't know. Unpack all my stuff to get to confirmation email printout. No address. Great. Shawn: call again. Ugh.

Dial, ring, desk clerk, again.

Hi, nervous laugh, lost gringo again! What is your street address?

Clerk says indigenous name that sounds like 20 consonants crammed together. Losing it, cracking up. "Uuuuuuuh.....repita, por favor."

Netzcuhwah...bus ROAR...tuhcuhultuh...ROAR...pecutuhwattle...ROAR...uh-something.

One last time?

Nothing but HONK...ROAR..."otl."

Sigh. "Bueno. Gracias. Si no nos vemos pronto, nos hablamos por teléfono otra vez."

Shawn gets brilliant idea: look at map in travel guide. Find street with indigenous name (Netzahualcóyotl) a block to the east. Head that way. Down to three blocks. Shawn runs up the street one way and sees nothing. Suggests: call again.

GRRRRR! Dial, ring, desk clerk, AGAIN.

Maybe exasperated, but staying cool: walk away from this building, toward this building, hotel is yellow, on the left, across the street diagonally from the bus terminal.

"To the side"? Not exactly.

Walking, dragging, sweating. Find the hotel, but not the entrance. Have to ask at neighboring coffee shop, where is the entrance to the hotel?

Friendly barrista walks me outside, points out the buzzer at the closed door.

Arrival: Casa Colonial, Cuernavaca.

BUZZZZZZZZZZ!

Posted by crispy at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)

December 25, 2006

Starstruck!

We used to live in Los Angeles. Anyone who lives there for a certain period of time experiences the phenomenon where they'll look up and see someone they recognize, only to subsequently realize it's not someone they know personally, but some celebrity that they know from television, movies, newspapers or tabloids. It's a strange phenomenon, but after a while you get used to it.

Then you move away and it just doesn't happen in other places. You get used to being in Zanesville, Ohio and not running into Kelsey Grammer with your shopping cart as you round an aisle in the grocery store. Life goes back to normal and famous people stay where they belong, on those screens and pages.

Shawn and I were out having dinner in Condesa and I wanted to go by Cinnabar, a hotspot in Condesa that is reported to have good cocktails. We're walking down Nuevo León toward the bar and chatting about our impressions of the neighborhood when no one other than Uriel del Toro walks by us in the other direction. URIEL DEL FREAKING TORO. The drop-dead, gorgeous, absolutely perfect Mexican fashion model that also has a show on Telehit, the Mexican music channel.

If you know me, you probably know what a thing I have for this guy. And unless you're a lesbian, straight man or dead, who wouldn't?

Uriel del Toro, on Telehit

After he walked by, I was utterly speechless. Hell, I was utterly breathless. Shawn turned to me and started to mention how that guy was really hot. Finally, I was able to mouth "DO YOU KNOW WHO THAT WAS?!" and Shawn wasn't sure. I had to try about three sentences, but at last I was able to get his name out, and Shawn didn't recognize that, so I had to tell him it was the guy I'm crazy about on that video show. Then he recognized who it was.

That will probably be the incident I remember most about this trip: seeing my favorite Mexican sex symbol in the flesh, not more than two feet from me.

You can say all you want about the evils of big city living, and I've been grouching about Mexico City the whole time we've been here. Yet there is a certain magic to moments like those, that only happen in big, glamorous, sexy cities like this one.

¡Viva México!

Posted by crispy at 12:34 PM | Comments (8)

December 23, 2006

Condesa (df): a last-minute rip-off

We were pretty delighted with our stay at the Condesa df, until we went to leave and found they had pulled a fast one with the laundry service. They changed our order without approval, charging us an additional MXN $300. Even though that's a drop in the bucket compared to how much we spent there on everything else, that made us mad enough that we may well never go back there again, just on principle.

I know. It's one of the biggest scams in the hospitality industry, just below the telephone charges and right above the minibar prices, so we should not be all that surprised. I admit, I was livid about the fact that it cost MXN $50 (currently USD $4.60) to wash a single pair of socks, but at least I knew about that in advance and begrudginly agreed. We didn't have enough time to wash the clothes ourselves, let along track down a do-it-yourself laundromat, so it was actually the most efficient thing to do in that case, pay rates like MXN $50 for one pair of socks and have it all taken care of for us.

When I dropped the clothes off at the front desk, I verified that the shirt types were properly indicated on the little form that you turn in with the laundry. I complained at that point about paying MXN $50 for a pair of socks, but the kid at the counter went over it alll with me and verified my markings and calculations. The grand total was MXN $930 (USD $85.52 at the time of this writting). I thought that was ridiculously steep for washing the amont of clothes that would fit in a small grocery bag, but even though it might have been a little more expensive to have them cleaned than to replace all of the clothes with brand-new versions, figuring in the time and cost of driving around to buy those new verisions made it a slightly better deal.

When we checked out though, it appeared that we had two charges from the lavandería on our bil. Instead of just one itemized charge from them, there were two. I asked them to clarify, and they had me wait while they pulled out the itemized bill. The order form, where one marks down the number of various things, looked like it did when I signed it and turned it over to the frond desk staff, but with a few additional marks. They were marks in the dry cleaning column, and I knew that none of the stuff I'd put in to have cleaned needed to be dry cleaned. The people doing the laundry didn't seem to agree though, and they decided for us that our shirts all had to be dry cleaned. They didn't bother to verify it with us first though, so we ended up with a bunch of shirts that cost twice as much to be cleaned as they should have.

I contested this with the front desk clerk, and he apologized, but was clearly not going to do anything about it. If we'd not been in a hurry with a lot to do today, I would have insisted on waiting to see a manager and taken it up with them. Again, it wasn't enough to cause us to raise a stink about it, and perhaps that is why that happened. I'm going to try to follow up and chew them out, but there will probably be no compensation for me. All I can do is to warn people to be CAREFUL in using the laundry serice at Condesa df.

We found out the day after we turned in our laundry that there is a laundromat just down the street. Go figure.

Posted by crispy at 12:28 AM | Comments (2)

December 22, 2006

Condesa (df): 2

Condesa df Entrance, Condesa

Here are some photographs of the Condesa neighborhood.

Parque España, Condesa

The Condesa df hotel overlooks Parque España somewhat. They have "city view" and "park view" rooms, but really, only the rooms in the corner of the hotel, the most expensive, overlook the park, and only the ones on the third floor have any hope of overlooking the city. All the rooms really have a view of the buildings across the street because it's a short little 4-story affair.

Condesa df Exterior, Condesa

Street Signs, Condesa

The street signs at the corner just outside our hotel. This reinforces my persistent claim that once you've been to Guadalajara, there's something about it that will always stay with you.

Sidewalk Café, Condesa

Lots of Mexico City has a European feel, and this is one reason. There are many cafés and restaurants that have sidewalk seating. And why not? The weather is beautiful.

Some photos of housing in Colonia Condesa.

Private Residence, Condesa

Private Residence, Condesa

Private Residence, Condesa

Private Residence, Condesa

Private Residence, Condesa

I just can't help it.

"Hey lady! Nice jugs!"

Fountain, Condesa

Last night we took in a midnight snack at the Barracuda Diner (Nuevo León 4-A), and it was really interesting. When we walked in, it was like Cleavon Little walking into the saloon in Blazing Saddles, with everyone in the place staring at us. Later I figured out this was because it's a very neighborhood-oriented joint, despite the fact that it's very strangely specialized. It's a diner, set up to be like a 50s diner in the United States, but they serve coctails alongside the shakes, chili dogs and chilaquiles. They have framed advertisements from 50s magazines, but they're 50s Mexican magazines, mind you, so they have slogans like: "¡Es nuevo...Es un Nash!" The waitresses are dressed up in typical waitress uniforms, which look incredibly frumpy down here in Mexico. I guess they look kind of frumpy anywhere, but because they're so out of place here, they look particularly unflattering.

There was a waiter there that looked just like Phil Silvers. No joke. I couldn't keep my eyes off him, because I kept expecting him to do something hilarious.

I also want to take the time to mention Barney's (Montes de Oca 43), a great bar in Condesa. It's got a hip, interesting mix of people as well as decent music. It's small, dark and red inside, and if you order drinks, you have to order some kind of food also. Luckily they have little antojitos like a cheese plate, olives and french fries. The look, for those of you that can identify, is sort of like a darker version of the old Skylark without the rockabilly and the old movie posters. They go for kind of a decadent swank look and feel, and it's obviously popular with folks because we could barely get a table there when we arrived at around midnight. They close at 2 am.

Posted by crispy at 08:49 AM | Comments (1)

December 21, 2006

Xochimilco

Chris and Shawn, Xochimilco

It means "the place of flowers" and is basically the last remaining part of a huge lake that was filled in with dirt to create chinampas, manmade islands used to grow crops without having to use irrigation. Now the series of canals that remain are traversed by boats filled with tourists and locals who have gathered together to enjoy a fiesta, music, food and dancing out on the water. It's a very tranquil oasis for those wanting to escape the chaos of the city, and a rather nice life for the Xochimilcas that make their living as guides, gardeners and artisans.

Boat Dance, Xochimilco

You can read plenty on Xochimilco that I won't duplicate here. Instead, here are a few items that you might want to know.

• Prices published as late as 2005 show an hour ride costing 140 pesos. We were charged 300. Did they more than double their prices or did we pay the gringo tax? We're not sure. There may be an official price board (often tourist attractions in Mexico will have these, and I think it may be a legal requirement), so if you're going, you might want to look into that before boarding.
• While the metro can be taken to get there, it seems that the trip would take a couple of hours, maybe more, to get from downtown Mexico City to the embarcadero. We took a tourist taxi from the Condesa df, and it cost us MXN $300. Often, it seems these taxis from hotels are a rip off. This trip seemed well worth the price, and we were dropped off right at the embarcadero.
• The driver advised us that there is a type of pork that they serve at the embarcadero that is out of this world. We're vegetarians, as you surely know by now, so we can't report on that.
• Getting a cab back from Xochimilco can be a hassle. Santiago (after driving us down there) talked to a friend there about getting us a "secure" cab back to the city, and he said he'd take care of it for us. It turns out that our very nice guide took care of this for us, waiting with us in the embarcadero parking lot until we left. If you're going, you might want to tip your guide on the boat and ask if they could help you arrange safe return transportation.
• You can buy sodas, beer, food and songs from various types of musicians while on the water. Two sodas and a water cost us MXN $60, and a song from a band of floating mariachi cost us MXN $70. I can't tell you about the food.
• There's a soft sales pitch. Like tour guides and buses that make a stop at a factory so that tourists can buy mementos and the guides can get kickbacks, we stopped at a little greenhouse during the trip, and near the end, our guide pulled out a big case full of jewelry of his design. They were not too pushy about it, and honestly, the jewelry was really cool. But you may want to be prepared for these "opportunities," since guidebooks tell you to take only the bare minimum of cash with you when out and about in Mexico City.

Shawn and I were not aware from having seen countless photos and travel shows about Xochimilco that there are lots of houses right next to the canals. You'll also see lots of greenhouses and a few places selling things like ice and drinks.

Lakeside House, Xochimilco

Our guides were both Xochimilcas, which means nowadays that they live in Xochimilco. The jewelry designer (on the left below) is Mayan, so there was a little joking about how he's not really of the indigenous group of Xochimilcas, even though he's called that.

Our Guides, Xochimilco

After a delightful and relaxing afternoon at Xochimilco, we were yet again reminded that life in Mexico is often stranger than fiction. After our guide had spent a fair bit of effort trying to arrange a cab for us back to the city (he made several calls that went unanswered, and the one driver in the parking lot was hesitant to take us), we finally crammed ourselves into the little VW bug taxi and took off for downtown. The seats were boxes of springs with thin coverings over them and sitting in the back seat, I had to sit on my leg. The driver asked us if we liked Creedence as he was flipping through the discs in his glove box, and we responded that we did. He then proceded to pull out the disc under that and put it in his CD player. Okay, it was banda and not my favorite of the Mexican musical genres, but it was his cab and as long as we made it back to the hotel in one piece, I didn't care about the music.

When the traffic got a little thick, he switched off the music. Shawn asked if he wanted a different CD, and he explained that he needed to concentrate because of the traffic. At certain points, he was, as Shawn described it, "driving like a grandmother." (Not you, Mimsie. He means a slow-driving grandmother.) When we got into the city, he became noticeably more anxious, timidly changing lanes and at one point being forced off the main road by a truck. Shawn quickly had to pull out his handy map and serve as navigator to the driver through Mexico City, and Shawn's not exactly an expert with the roads of Mexico City. Still, he did a stellar job, as did the driver, and an hour after we left Xochimilco, we pulled up at the Condesa df.

Knowing that he was used to driving only around Xochimilco and had been aprehensive about taking us through the city, Shawn congratulated him on doing a great job in getting us there. The driver laughed and then told us that yes, he was a little nervous, because he only has one eye. He then lifted his sunglasses to show Shawn his blank, dead, bluish-purple eye.

As we were walking later on to a local restaurant and battling the traffic ourselves, Shawn said "I hope our driver made it back okay." For all we know, he could be driving around still in downtown, stuck in some glorieta. At least he has Creedence to keep him company.

Posted by crispy at 09:50 AM | Comments (2)

December 20, 2006

Condesa (df): 1

We arrived at the Condesa df on Monday afternoon, and despite problems we had with the Internet access at first, it's a fantastic hotel in a much more interesting neighborhood.

It's always hard to leave a W hotel and not make negative comparisons at the new place. For example, our room at Condesa df costs more, but is 1/4 the size of our room at the W. The view isn't as cool. At the W, they give you plenty of bath towels (5) and at this place, you get the bare minimum (2). There is no concierge here, just the front desk staff. To get an iron and ironing board, one has to call down to the front desk and ask for one to be brought up (and when it is, it's built for someone 5'2" tall). But it's not entirely fair to make such criticisms because the W is a huge chain with plenty of employees to make sure things go smoothly, and even then, they sometimes don't.

The Condesa df, on the other hand, has but 40 rooms. While the W is plush and pretty nicely put together, the design in Condesa df done by India Mahdavi makes one say, "Wow!" They have a particular print pattern that they use, and a few very specific colors, throughout the whole hotel. The W retains a little business stuffiness, while the Condesa df is more playful, like André Balazs' Standard hotels. You get that feeling from the staff too. On occasion, the staff at the W, while always professional, seems a bit cold. At Condesa df, you get the feeling that the younger staff, while not always 100% professional, is having a good time and they want you to have a good time too.

But let's not waste any more time on making comparisons. There are plenty of funky things to note about the Condesa df.

The keys have a strange fob on them, like a stainless steel bolt. When you're in the room, you have to insert it into a hole in the wall so that it enables the power in the room. When you leave, you have to pull it out to get the keys, which subsequently shuts off the power in your room. Obviously that has pros and cons.

Guest Services Directory, Condesa df

The guest services directory is put toghether of folded pages of paper with their specific print pattern, but it also has sleeves for various things that are removable from the directory. For example, there's a Codigo-branded map of the local area. It also includes a little sleeve of postcards, which are all glossy color photo cards of local neigborhood scenes like fruit on display at a nearby abarrotes.'

Postcards, Condesa df

Signature Pattern, Condesa df

The bathroom is hidden away behind a wooden veneer wall panel, giving it a Bruce Wayne estate feeling.

Hideaway Bathroom, Condesa df

They have an iPod in each room, loaded with a great mix of music (Tainted Love by Gloria Jones, Killing Moon by Echo and the Bunnymen, Dear Prudence by The Five Steps, Frontin' by Jamie Cullum, These Days by Nico, Walk on By by Dionne Warwick, A Forest by Nouvelle Vague, Elle et moi by Max Berlin, Summertime by Montréal, I Can't Wait Until I See My Lover by Dusty Springfield, Climb Up the Walls 07 Remix by Radiohead, The Truth by Handsome Boy Modeling School, Alzheimers by Joy Zipper). It plays through the plasma television speakers. They also have DVD players in each room and films on DVD that you can borrow from the front desk.

They have a sushi bar (and a regular cocktail bar) on the fourth floor (roof terrace).

They have a closed-circuit channel with a looping independent video art piece (like the Standard).

Their guacamole has pomegranate seeds and comes with homemade plantain, potato and yam chips.

There is a 1950s Chevrolet parked (permanently) in front of the hotel.

It's in Condesa, which is a very hip (in some cases so hip they're too popular), but there's more on that to come.

Posted by crispy at 12:30 AM | Comments (1)

December 18, 2006

Thai Gardens Blows

The W concierge said that as vegetarians, we'd probably like eating at Thai Gardens (Calderón de la Barca 72, in Polanco). We didn't.

We took a taxi from in front of the hotel to go the distance that one could walk in about 15 minutes, and it cost us MXN $100 (a little under USD $10). (The "safe" hotel taxis end up costing a lot; it seems that MXN $100 is the minimum though, so if you're taking one to a place down the street, seriously consider walking.) As for the experience, we ran into the same problem that we run into a lot in trying to get vegetarian meals: three things are indicated on the menu as being vegetarian, one with fish, one with chicken, and the last being something as exciting as carrot broth, while a small notation at the bottom of the first page claims that they can make almost any dish to any dietary specifications.

When complaining about how 2 out of the 3 dishes marked vegetarian had chicken or fish, the waiter explained that they could be made without the chicken or fish. When we asked for items that were not labeled as vegetarian, but that could supposedly be made to our dietary specifications, we were told that, well, they really couldn't make them without meat. The waiter suggested a couple of very basic run-of-the-mill curries, and we got those, egg rolls and a soup that was supposedly made without fish sauce, although it tasted pretty fishy to me.

It took forever for the dishes to arrive. The curries were cooked well (not over- or undercooked), but they were nothing special. For MXN $168 (around USD $15.50), you want something pretty special. We were charged around USD $5.00 for about a cup and a half of jasmine rice. Worst of all, they did what I hate most. When preparing the dishes that were indicated as vegetarian but contained chicken and fish, did they use tofu instead of the chicken or fish? No. Did they increase the amount of vegetables at all? No. We ended up paying over USD $100 for about half of the food that we should have gotten, and apart from one attentive busboy, the service sucked.

So if you're a vegetarian visiting Mexico City and Thai Gardens comes up, be careful. Maybe we were there on an off night. Maybe you're one of those vegetarians that eats chicken, although I'd tend to argue that this categorically means you're not a vegetarian. Maybe you love to get ripped off and think it's a classy joint if you can't get a waiter to refil your drinks. If not though, you might want to skip Thai Gardens.

Posted by crispy at 02:06 AM | Comments (3)

December 17, 2006

W Mexico City

Reclining Shawn, at W Mexico City

We're spending the holiday season in Mexico City, and most people would have started a series on such a vacation with tales of the city itself. It's a beautiful, crowded, verdant metropolis that is at once dangerous and sexy. Yet I love hotels so much that where we stay is usually at least half the trip, and the W Mexico City is no exception.

This W opened in 2003, and was immediately a success. It's located in Polanco, which is a very upscale neighborhood, in a row of hotels that include Mexico's Hotel Nikko, a Marriott and the Hotel Presidente Inter-Continental. Walk out the front door, walk north, and in less than 10 minutes you'll be on Avenida Presidente Masaryk, which is very similar to Rodeo Drive. The biggest difference being that here, seemingly everyone tells you to not even think about actually doing such an excursion after dark, because surely you'll be mugged or killed.

I'm not at all sure that this is true; Shawn and I walked back after dark from dinner at Aura, the restaurant in the Hotel Habita without any incident. However, it should perhaps be noted that the concern even extends to the use of taxi cabs. There are certainly areas in the city where one would not want to go out at night, but I must say that walking around in Polanco, I have not felt threatened. Who knows? Perhaps that is when one is in the most danger, but if you can never leave your hotel, why bother going anywhere?

The hotel has a lot of nice amenities, as do all W hotels, but some of the particular perks of this one are the indigenous spa treatments, such as Mayan massage and facials, Azteca manicures and pedicures, and a Temezcal purifying ritual. Shawn enjoyed a more traditional, 90-minute shiatzu massage at the spa, followed by a bit in the steam room. There are hammocks located in the shower area, although why that's where they're located, I'm not quite sure. You can't really shower in the hammock, but I did hang out in it while Shawn took a bath in the funky round bathtub that looks like an oversized teacup.

Bathtub/Shower with Hammock, at W Mexico City

I really like the bars and restaurant (Solea) here as well. I was able to get a Manhattan made with Angostura bitters, an ingredient that is necessary to make them properly, yet I have been unable to find anywhere in Mexico. The chef at the restaurant, Chef Osuna, is creative and skilled; Shawn and I both have been delighted with everything we've eaten there. Among my favorites are the salads and this dessert they have: a banana tart served with chocolate-port ice cream. The brunch that they have on Sundays until 5 pm is also amazing, because they have a huge buffet of simple, but high-quality ingredients that you can put together to make a salad, or eat by themselves. They have all kinds of nuts, fresh herbs, greens, oils, vinagars, steamed vegetables, cheeses, croutons, meats and dressings, all isolated in their own dishes (the array of these ingredients stretches along an enormous table) so you can pick and choose as you wish. It's like the biggest, most luxurious salad bar I've ever seen.

We have been disappointed in a few things though, and despite the fact that we've had an outstanding experience here, I feel I should mention them.

While the concierge staff is very friendly and they try very hard to come through for you, it seems they're just not quite up to the level of your average W concierge staff. We asked for suggestions for a restaurant, not strictly vegetarian, but a place where we could get some decent food that was vegetarian. I had read online of Tandoor, an Indian restaurant with considerable vegetarian offerings, that has been around for about 20 years. The concierge had not heard of it. Granted, it's Mexico City, and one wouldn't expect anyone to know of all the restaurants in town, but given that it's one of perhaps four or five Indian restaurants in the city, you'd think he'd have heard of it. He offered to call them, but I had not brought their phone number down to the lobby with me, so we decided we'd go with his suggestion, a Thai restaurant, Thai Gardens (Calderón de la Barca 72), to which they'd sent many a vegetarian that returned with wide smiles. He said he'd try to find out about Tandoor while we were away so that we could eat there at a subsequent meal.

To limit this entry to detail about the W only, let me just say here that the Thai Gardens experience SUCKED. You can read about it in a separate entry.

We returned and told the concierge about it, and he apologized profusely. Supposedly, a lot of other vegetarians had been there and loved the experience. Maybe we're just picky, but when you pay that much for a meal, I think you're justified in being a bit picky. I was so unsatisfied with the Thai Gardens experience that I wanted to erase it from my mind with a delightful experience at Tandoor, the Indian restaurant that I'd looked up earlier. We asked him if he'd had any luck in getting information about it, and he had not. I suspect that he didn't have the time to look into it, but even so, that kind of sucked. I went upstairs to our room and used my Internet connection to look up their phone number, which I found in under three minutes.

Shawn at Handy Workdesk, at W Mexico City

When I brought it down to him, he called and made us a reservation. That place turned out to be great, and I'll probably talk more about it in a later entry.

I asked about a very popular restaurant that I'd read about too, which is only about 15 minutes walk from the hotel. He knew of this one right away, but feared that they may not have vegetarian food. I'd read a couple of reviews that talked about an assorted tamale appetizer, and it had about 3 out of four vegetarian tamales. I asked if the concierge desk kept menus on file for local restaurants and he said they did, but of course, their copy for that restaurant was missing. They called the restaurant, and someone at the restaurant said they'd email one over. Fine. We were not going that night, so the concierge's suggestion that he give it to us the next morning sounded fine.

It would have been fine, except for the fact that it wasn't slipped under our door in the morning, nor was it waiting for us when we returned from brunch after noon. We stopped by the concierge desk and the woman that had phoned to the restaurant the night before was dismayed that we'd not received it, but explained that she had only come on duty in the afternoon. Apparently the person working the concierge desk before her had not received it. Yeah, apparently not.

At other W hotels, there would have been follow-up on the issue until it was resolved. Instead of getting excuses as to why it hadn't happened, the concierge would have been on the horn getting a copy sent over within five minutes, and at five minutes and one second, they'd have been back on the phone finding out why it hadn't arrived. Heck, the concierge at the W Montréal would have probably arranged to have samples of the food delivered for free so we could sample it since we'd had to suffer the inconvenience of waiting. The W Mexico City concierge staff seems neither that motivated nor that in-command of the situation. That's too bad because in a city as big as Mexico City, it would really help to have someone you could turn to that was both knowledgeable and capable at cutting through all the extra stuff that isn't what you're looking for.

It doesn't help that they're stretched thin. The friendly (and cute!) young man that recommended Thai Gardens (and then apologized profusely when we hated it), had to keep running back and forth between the front desk and the concierge desk when people arrived to check in and reception didn't have enough people to deal with them in a timely manner. I want to say that I felt that he tried really hard (although I didn't feel that as much effort was put forward by the other concierge desk staff), but he just didn't have the resources to come through for us. And you see, that's what staying at a W is all about. You shouldn't be in want for anything at all, ever.

Another thing that was a little disappointing was the fact that the hotel is already starting to show some wear. The leather lounges in the lobby could stand a good polishing, and some of the furniture has bent legs and scuffed surfaces. Many of the chairs in the dining room are a little loose in the joints. It should be noted that these issues are all in the public areas; our room was in very good condition.

Last but not least, when I asked the bellhop that brought up our bags if the water from the faucets was filtered, he told me, "We recommend that you do not drink the water from the faucets." Okay, that's fine. Many hotels in Mexico have that same policy. But if they do, they provide you with free bottled water. The bottles of Voss water in the room to which they direct you for drinking water have MXN $70 pricetags on them (for 800 ml). I am not entirely sure that we'll be charged for those, but I'll find out tomorrow upon check-out.

Our next stop will be the Condesa DF, and to be honest, I don't expect an experience that is up to the same level as that of the W, but we'll see!

Posted by crispy at 07:36 PM | Comments (7)

October 15, 2006

Zacatecas, Zacatecas

Zacatecas, Panorama From Hotel Argento Inn Balcony [larger image]

No, it's not the new Mexican musical staring Bette Midler. It's the city (and state) that we went to this past weekend because Shawn had three days of vacation and we thought we should take that opportunity to explore our new country a bit.

Street Scene, Zacatecas

We traveled by bus (ETN, "la línea más cómoda") between Guadalajara and Zacatecas, going through Aguascalientes (again, both the city and the state. We like ETN because they have only 24 seats on the bus, which translates to more room per seat. This is generally referred to in Mexico as 'executive class.' They also give you a bag with a ham and cheese sandwich and the soda of your choice (as long as it's made by Coca-Cola®) as you board the bus. Luckily it's not so hard to peel the ham off the sandwich, because they don't offer vegetarian or kosher alternatives. Like most first class (and the higher, executive class) bus lines, they showed movies during the trip. All but one was dubbed into Spanish, and it was subtitled.

We only stopped in Aguascalientes for about 20 minutes, so information on that capital will have to come from another trip. It's interesting to note that it is known for wine and brandy production, although it's not like there's a lot produced there nowadays. It seemed to have a much bigger bus station than Zacatecas, though.

We arrived at the central camionera at sunset, and hopped in a cab to wind our way through the pink and gold maze of city streets to get to the Hotel Argento Inn where we were staying (pictured on the right in the photo above). We had a friend call to make reservations for us, because it was a complicated call. All the rooms in hotels around the city seemed to be booked up for some reason we couldn't figure out, and whether or not we would take a room in a hotel depended on the combined answers to a series of questions: Did they have rooms available? Did they have rooms with windows facing outside (compared to having windows that only face an inside courtyard, which usually results in the room being very dark and gloomy),? Were they located in or near the historic center? Did they cost less than $1500 MXN per night? Did they have one bed? Double beds? Private bathrooms? An iron an ironing board? The task of calling around to several hotels and struggling to get answers to these questions (and understanding those answers) was daunting to me, so I asked for help. I'm not proud of that, but I did. Unexpected surprises with hotels in Mexico can be quite disturbing, and I didn't feel like suffering (and making Shawn suffer) them gladly just to guard my pride.

Street Scene, Zacatecas

Zacatecas is known for having a lot of its colonial architecture still intact. It is, along with places like Cuernavaca, Puebla and San Miguel de Allende, one of the "colonial jewels" of Mexico. Like most of Mexico, you will find some crumbling about the edges in Zacatecas, but there was less than I expected. It isn't that all the old colonial stuff has been restored to its original beauty, but it seems to have been kept clean and the ravages one notices are of time, not the hand of man.

Guadalajara is considered one of the "jewels" as well, and it certainly does have lots of colonial gems that are still in good shape and worth visiting. However, Guadalajara, being a bigger city and having developed to serve the business economy, doesn't rely on the colonial and historic elements about town as much as Zacatecas does. In fact, much of the old colonial stuff here was torn down long ago to make way for more modern facilities. In turn, many of those have been torn down even more recently to make way for even more modern facilities.

The net effect of this is that in Guadalajara, the colonial and historic sites seem to pop up here and there within the city (granted, the centro histórico has a large concentration of colonial stuff), and one does not get a sense of being back in colonial Mexico as much as one does in the smaller cities such as Zacatecas. No modern buildings exist beside the old posadas, government buildings and cathedrals in Zacatecas. Those are all located outside the city center (which is the centro histórico), and even then, they are not of the steel-and-glass type, but rather just one or two story cement blocks common to more rural Mexico.

Street Scene, Zacatecas

That being said, the colonial stuff in Zacatecas is fantastic. There's the cathedral:

Cathedral, Zacatecas

As you can see, it is very ornate, and the detail is breathtaking. Across the street from the cathedral is a little plaque that identifies the various saints perched about the front.

Cathedral, Zacatecas

The town is buit among a set of large hills, so if you go there, be prepared to do some incline walking.

Uphill/Downhill Stroll, Zacatecas

There is a large mountain known as La Bufa hemming the city in to one side, and at the summit, they have a few shops, telescopes, a temple where a statue of the everpresent Virgin is housed and some statues commemorating the revolutionary battles that took place in and around Zacatecas. If you are strong of nerve and stomach, you can take the teleférico to the top, a cable car that runs every 15 minutes.

Teleférico to La Bufa, Zacatecas

Some of the very old buildings in town have collapsed in spots, but they have had their usable bits turned into useful spaces. That is the case with the Museo Rafael Colonel, which houses a lot of contemporary art and an enormous collection of masks.

Grounds of the Rafael Coronel Museum, Zacatecas

The most impressive thing to me about Zacatecas is its wealth of art museums. You can read all about the silver mine and the significance of the town during the revolutionary war all over the Internet, but those things do not interest me so much. I may have mentioned on these pages that I'm less of an antiquities guy and more of a fine arts guy when it comes to museums, and that came into play during our visit to Zacatecas. We elected to go to various art museums instead of the traditional historic hotspots, and we were not disappointed.

We visited the Museo Rafael Coronel, the Museo Pedro Coronel (they are brothers) and the Museo Manuel Felguérez. All of these are modern artists from Zacatecas, and their works are included along with those of other famous modern artists in their museums.

I liked the works of Rafael Coronel at his museum. The number of Miró pieces at the Pedro Coronel museum was astounding (just one set of pieces numbered 36), and they also have a Dali and a few Picassos. The best part of the Felguérez museum was the entire collection of the 12 murals painted for the Mexico pavillion at the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka.

The parks in Zacatecas are very lush and they keep them in great shape, like their old buildings.

Park, Zacatecas

Of course, those of you who know me well know that when I travel I'm most interested in funky and fine foodstuffs, restaurants and general lifestyle things that are not so much on the tourist's "Must See" list. In Zacatecas, I found plenty of things that I thought you all would find interesting, disgusting, or both.

Cow Stomach Tacos, Zacatecas

Yes, tripe tacos. Seeing this made Shawn remark about Carlos Mecía's bit about why they don't have Latinos on shows where people have to eat wacky stuff, like "Survivor": because they eat disturbing things on a daily basis. It would be no challenge whatsoever for them.

(I'd like to point out here, although I don't have a lot of photos showing it, whoever paints the signage in Zacatecas for all these businesses is a master. There are various styles of lettering all over the place and they're all machine perfect.)

Jicamoy, Zacatecas

This isn't so gross as just strange. It's a stand that sells jicama, that big root vegetable that is kind of like a bigger, sweeter water chestnut. They're popular all over Mexico, peeled, stuck on a stick, and dusted with chile. This place, Jicamoy, offers something like 15 flavor variations of the jicama-on-a-stick concept.

Jicamoy, Zacatecas

Then you have these places that have a simple menu and simple atmosphere.

Restaurant, Zacatecas [View Enlargement of Wall Photos]

Here you see the famous Mexican actor and singer, Pedro Infante pictured on one of the motorcycles. At the top in the center of this photo, you can see the hole in the wall that opens to the outside, covered with a tarp.

Restaurant, Zacatecas

My favorite spot to eat in Zacatecas turned out to be a Greek cafeteria. Here "cafeteria" is used in the Mexican sense of the word, which translates into the American lexicon as something more like a diner with a very extensive selection. It is the Café y Nevería Acrópolis, located right next to the cathedral.

Shawn at the Café y Nevería Acrópolis, Zacatecas

Don't let the name and the ownership fool you. This place is 100% Mexican, and pretty old school Mexican at that. They have all kinds of platos you can enjoy alongside shakes, raspados (kind of like a real fruit slushy at the Acrópolis - like a snow cone in some other places) and ice cream floats. It's the first time I've seen an ice cream float on a menu in Mexico, and the first time I've seen something I've heard about elsewhere: the excessive torta barrio.

We enjoyed ours in the ahogada ('drowned') style, so the whole thing consisted of a chile relleno made the right way with chile poblano, diced tomato, onion and crema, all on a bolillo (and not the birote common to Jalisco), then smothered in a spicy tomato sauce. DELICIOUS!

Also cool about the place is the fact that they display artwork drawn by famous local artist/customers on their walls, and they have a display of plates embellished with artwork made out of leftover Turkish coffee grounds.

The Café y Nevería Acrópolis also sells their coffee by the kilo, as well as some other, um, things.

Muchas Nalgas at Café y Nevería Acrópolis, Zacatecas

Some other visual things caught our eye in Zacatecas, like these school girls on their way to an event being held in front of the Palacio del Gobierno.

School Girls in Transit, Zacatecas

Run little girl, RUN!

School Girls in Transit, Zacatecas

This house was built with unusual bricks. I bet when they built it, the neighbors were shocked and appalled.

Bricks, Zacatecas

In Mexico, people still send telegrams, although with the growing popularity of email, business is falling off.

Telegrams, Zacatecas

'Street of the Sad Indian.' Given what white folks did to the natives in the Americas, there are a lot more than one, I'm sure. Which one qualifies as 'THE' sad one, I don't know. Iron Eyes Cody perhaps?

Esquina Indio Triste y Hidalgo, Zacatecas

One parting glance of Zacatecas that Shawn took from the bus station before we left, thus ending our Zacatecan odyssey.

View of Zacatecas from the Central Camionera, Zacatecas

Posted by crispy at 06:18 PM | Comments (5)

October 04, 2006

Cheaters

My friend Jonathan has a blog. He openly declares without any evidence of shame his love for Cheaters there. You will also find among his entries, odes to Joey Greco.

Until my trip to the United States, I couldn't see Cheaters. Now I have seen Cheaters and I get a very surreal feeling from it. Greco comforts the 'victims' with his soothing voice while he tells them all the nasty things their partners have done with other people, but the building intensity of the revelations also prompts them to break down and lose it. The ultimate confrontation is captured on film.

And I thought Mexican TV was wacky.

I also have been watching some CNN, which is absolutely horrible. The effect it has seems to be like some anxiety inducing drug. It makes me angry, hateful and disgusted, mostly at the American idiots they keep showing on it. There is considerable evidence that the justification for the war in Iraq was fabricated, then used by both parties to freak Americans out, perhaps to lull them into apathy about being spied on by the government. Nobody nobody seems to care about that. Yet a congressman hits on a former page and everyone freaks out.

Not that such behavior isn't inappropriate, but it's depressing to me to see what the American media has become, and how it's used primarily as a platform for politicians to control the public, attack each other and re-write history. In defending the Republican cover-up of Mark Foley's inappropriate conduct with pages on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Newt Gigngrich said, "I think, had they overly aggressively reacted to the initial round, they would have also been accused of gay bashing." On The Situation Room on CNN, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said, "it shouldn't be totally surprising when we hold up tolerance and diversity as the guidepost for public life. This is what you end up getting: a congressman chasing 16-year-old boys down the halls of Congress." Please.

To set the record straight, I've accused Republicans of being homophobic on numerous occasions, like when they repeatedly espouse that denying the same rights to gay couples to which heterosexual couples have access will somehow protect the 'institution of marriage' and that gays cannot openly serve in the armed forces because it makes heterosexuals uncomfortable. Also for the record, I've accused many, many Democrats of the same thing. Yet had the Republicans come out early to deal with the Foley scandal, I think everyone, gay and straight, would have felt it was appropriate to deal with it as the possible exploitation of minors by an adult. Many politicians are homophobes, but nobody calls them that for investigating allegations of pedophilia. Still, those folks are being allowed to say such things on television without their even being questioned.

Indeed, television has been a strange experience for me on my return to the United States. I get a little homesick when I see the Mexican government advertising here. The Secretaría de Turismo or SECTUR is running ads here for various Mexican cities: Guanajuato, Acapulco , Oaxaca, Queretaro, etc.

It's strange that between Cheaters and CNN, the ads on American television are much more enjoyable. Maybe that was the plan all along.

Posted by crispy at 03:28 AM | Comments (4)

September 25, 2006

Strangeness on a Train

Train travel used to be the norm for long-distance trips in the United States. Although the hulking metal monsters that glide along the rails have been replaced here by ones that manipulate lift and drag to fly through the air, some still meander over the countryside at their leisurely pace, allowing passengers a close look at the magnificent landscape that, in spite of my loathing for the systems of the United States, still captivates my heart and leaves me in awe.

Unfortunately, what should be a relaxing two and a half hour wandering along the coast of southern California as I make my way from San Diego to Los Angeles is not.

I wonder when exactly Americans started to swap pleasure for productivity, permitting it to creep even into moments like this, when the excuse to hang up the phone and put the papers in the briefcase for a couple of hours was made irresistible by the alluring vistas passing just outside the window. Was it ushered in by the country having to be ever-vigilant against the insidious evils of communism? Did it give way by the financial frenzy of the 80s when time was money and everyone was clamoring to get as much of it as they could? Was it the slow realization that the systems were going to collapse and that dogs would have to eat dogs if they wanted to survive?

Along the road to a life made easier by machines and technology, when did the tide roll back and give way to an existence lousy with wireless telephone headsets and Meals-in-Minutes®? Did leisure lose its value, or did it just acquire too great an opportunity cost?

On my train today, a lawyer and his team are seated two rows ahead of me. He has been talking loudly to himself (or so his microsopic headset makes it seem) since we pulled out from the station in San Diego an hour and a half ago. In reality, he is coordinating a meeting with another lawyer, who has a court appearance at 3 pm and needs to do some work in advance of his reunion with the lawyer on the train. A matter-of-fact female associate of the lawyer suggests that the lawyer at the other end of the line have their company's limo pick him up, either downtown or in the valley, take him to their office, where they will make a room available to him so that he can complete what must be done before the meeting he has with them.

During all of that, the gentleman in the seat in front of me got up and looked about for another open seat, but returned dejected. A couple of minutes later, he asked if the lawyer wouldn't be so kind as to speak a little more quietly. In doing so, his accent gave away that he is British. Have they somehow escaped this obsession with working at any given opportunity?

A few stops later, another lawyer gets on and sits behind me. I now have lawyer stereo. The new lawyer is rattling off instructions to her assistant, ticking off points of their agenda by saying, "NEXT!" after completing each individual matter.

"...and remember that I have to get photocopies of each individual report, and then those have to be sent over to Morrison as soon as possible, okay? NEXT!"

A brief respite will follow, for which I am truly grateful. Again I can hear the soothing click-clack of the swaying train for a few brief moments before...

"I don't know why she thinks that. I have been very clear about that numerous times. Okay, well what you are going to do is to call Henry, of course, but you're also going to call Robert and have him remind Henry too. This is very important and he can't forget. He has to remember it and he has to call them as soon as possible. Then you tell Earl to send copies of those to Monogram...there's a fax, if he doesn't have his own fax, there's a fax I bought for the company and it should stay there at the office. I think he took it home, but he's not supposed to. Tell him it belongs to the company and he has to bring it back. Jack is his cousin...call Jack and have him get on Earl because they're family. I bought it for the company. He's not supposed to take that home. NEXT!"

In contrast, the older couple from the Netherlands sitting behind me, who ordered red wine as their complimentary beverage that comes with business class on Amtrak, are delighful, despite the fact that their volume has grown in proportion to the amount of wine they've consumed. They must have traveled from Florida to Las Vegas at some point, because they keep mentioning the two in succession. Since I don't know Dutch, I don't really piece together anything else they say, but whenever they say "Florida" or "Las Vegas," it sticks out like shards of glass.

For you, Jonathan, that would be "sherds."

Posted by crispy at 11:10 AM | Comments (6)

September 24, 2006

Back In the U.S.S.A.

I thought you might be interested in some initial thoughts and details.

First the details on the trip from the Tijuana Airport to San Diego:

Taxi from the airport to the San Ysidro border: $180 MXN.

Four-Day pass for San Diego Trolley, taken from San Ysidro to San Diego: $15 USD.

Trip time on trolley: About 30 minutes.

I hit town and went to Dara (402 Broadway, #180, San Diego, CA), a great Thai place. I had Pad See Ew with mock duck (seitan) and the huge fried tofu appetizer, accompanied by a thai iced tea. With tax and tip, it was $25 USD.

As for initial thoughts:

• The stuff I overhear now (and can't help but hear now because it's all) in English is all about work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work all the time, everywhere.
• Whereas on the trolley from San Ysidro, there were two guys speaking in Spanish, and they were talking about how to make different types of cocktails.
• Everything here is so new! Buildings, roads, parks -.the oldest stuff one sees here are like a train stations from the 30s.
• The city architecture here in San Diego is like a museum of modern art whereas in Guadalajara, it's like one with antiquities.
• People wear shorts here.
• People react like it's inappropriate if you talk to strangers here...like in line at 7-11.

Posted by crispy at 11:32 AM | Comments (4)

September 19, 2006

Time to Renew

The story in the news today about Maher Arar, a Canadian falsely accused of being associated with al-Qaida who was "detained" at JFK Airport as he was returning to Canada after a vacation and sent by US officials to a Syrian prison where he was tortured, has me a little worried about my upcoming visit to the United States. But I have to leave the country to renew my travel visa here in Mexico, and with airfare being around $75 USD to fly from here to Tijuana, the price is right for a visit to southern California. Luckily I don't have to fly into a US airport.

I will be leaving Shawn behind, with two weeks worth of lunches prepared, parceled and frozen in the freezer, as his job permits him only certain vacation times. Although we used to travel separately quite often, over the past year or so, all our trips have been taken together. I suspect that it will seem a little strange at first to be going solo, but I am meeting up with friends in California.

While there, I will be doing a little shopping to buy things that we just can't get down here. Among them are the vaunted Tide-To-Go Markers®, Q-Tips® with paper "sticks" (down here, they only have them with flimsy plastic), and bulk ibuprofen.

While I'm there, I suspect I'll have some time to blog, but since this is a blog about Mexico, it won't be about what I'm doing in the states. I'll try to keep it on track, possibly with some observations about differences between the two countries that I didn't notice until after living in Mexico for eight months. Maybe I'll compare California's Mexican food to Guadalajara's. That could be some exciting research.

Posted by crispy at 08:25 AM | Comments (3)

August 08, 2006

The Road to Bogotá: Part Four

[part three]

We had only five of our original seven planned days in Bogotá, thanks to our flight being cancelled two days in a row. Instead of giving a day-by-day account of the rest of the trip, let me just comment on some of the more notable things we encountered.

Bogotá is delightfully cool, especially after the end of the pre-rainy season month of May here in Guadalajara. We had endured a long stretch of considerably hot weather, taunted by the promise of those refreshing and reviving rains, but as of the end of May, we'd not seen much of them. However, upon our arrival in Bogotá, we were welcomed by a slight drizzle on a nice cool night. Delicious!

The forecast said that we were to get serious rain the whole time we were there, but that didn't turn out to be the case. While it did rain now and again during our stay, we had a lot of relatively dry weather. It was pretty overcast the whole time, but we were told that the week before, it had been sunny and hot the whole week. The point of all this being, Bogotá has weather changes. That and the fact that it's beautiful to look up from the city streets and see the lush green mountains about the city, shrouded in clouds.

Bogotá

Bogotá

Bogotá

The fact that the city was not drenched in rain the entire time we were there allowed us to check out some of the city, which is exactly what we went for. On our second night in town, we went to a bar that charged a fairly hefty cover. When we got inside, we found out why: the cover bought you unlimited drinks from the bar for the entire evening. When this concept completely bewildered us, the bartender explaining it to us in Spanish thought we did not understand what he was saying. He sent over another bartender that spoke English, so that he could explain it to us. This bartender turned out to be one of the friendliest people we've ever met, a young Bogotano named Alvaro who is so proud of his city that whenever he has vacation time, he spends it in town going to the different attractions and excellent offerings that the city provides for entertainment.

He hung out with us for the rest of our trip as our friend and tour guide, and this absolutely made the trip an excellent experience for us. Without him, we would not have enjoyed our time in Bogotá at all like we did, and his being such an excellent human being helped to make up for my bad shoe cleaning experience and our discovery that Bogotanos are generally not as friendly as we'd expected them to be, after living in Guadalajara and having heard that Colombians are some of the nicest people on the planet. Alvaro certainly fit that description, making it so that we could say that at least some Colombians are the nicest people on the planet.

Alvaro playing before a statue of Giordano Bruno

Alvaro at the Museo de Oro

I believe I should say a word or two about the Museo de Oro. I will not say much because you can read all about it all over the place. It's a museum that showcases artifacts found in various regions of Colombia made and used by various cultures. The presentation is excellent, the artifacts themselves impressive, and the experience one that is called a "must-see" in every reference on Colombia that exists.

Exhibit, Museo de Oro

I think that is probably true, but my interest in museums tends toward those displaying fine arts, and usually even then, only more modern works. I do occasionally like to look at Indian (from Asia) artifacts, but for the most part, artifacts are not my cup of tea. Were I someone else, I might rave about the Museo de Oro, but it wasn't my favorite part of the trip, and it certainly didn't compare to the works we saw at either the Donación Botero nor the Museo de Arte Moderno (known as the MAMBO, tee hee!).

I recommend both of these places wholeheartedly. If you don't like modern art, you might not like the Museo de Arte Moderno, but I can't imagine anyone not enjoying the works at the Donación Botero, which include an overwhelming number of works by Botero, as well as spectacular pieces by Renoir, Dalí, Chagall, Picasso, Miró, and Bacon. You can't use a flash, but you can take pictures in the Donación Botero. Here are some of our photos, but without the flash, most turned out blurry.

Casa de Moneda, Bogotá

Casa de Moneda, Bogotá

Casa de Moneda, Bogotá

Donación Botero, Bogotá

Donación Botero, Bogotá

Donación Botero, Bogotá

Donación Botero, Bogotá

Moonlight II, 1997
Alex Katz, New York, 1927
Oil on Canvas

Moonlight II, 1997
Alex Katz, New York, 1927
Oil on Canvas

Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá

There were many more attractions to see around Bogotá, like the salt cathedral and the view from Monserrate, but due to a combination of time limitations, motivation and rainy weather, we didn't see any of these. I know this may disappoint some readers, but for us, there were more basic cultural things we wanted to discover, like the food of Bogotá. That is what we'll talk about in the next installment.

Posted by crispy at 01:38 PM | Comments (4)

July 22, 2006

The Road to Bogotá: Part Three

[part two]

People want me to get there already.

In truth, I wasn't sure I was going to write much about Bogotá. This is a blog about my Mexican experience, and my trying to get to Bogotá was Mexico in a nutshell. Yet to make a long story short and to put down my thoughts on the Colombian capital, let's just say that on the third day, we walked to Chapultapec Park, participated in a riot at the Aerolíneas Argentinas office, and at last flew into Bogotá.

We arrived very late at night in Bogotá, which had us a bit wary, since all sources advised being cautious at night in the city. I expected to find it crawling with people that might cause one to be worried about being robbed, killed, or at least hassled about something. Instead, it was practically deserted, apart from random cab drivers and a few people outside clubs. It seems that everyone in Bogotá has heard how potentially dangerous it is in the streets at night, so nobody (and I mean nobody) ventures out in them after dark.

We arrived at our hotel and found our room to be surprisingly small for the suite we had requested. Our guidebooks and online sources reported that the Hotel Saint Simon had rooms for $45 USD per night, and suites for just a few dollars more. Despite the fact that we had added some padding for inflation, we were shocked to find that our dinky room was $79 USD per night and the suite which we eventually took so that we'd have a larger bed was $103 USD per night. I was even more upset when upon showering the first morning there to find that there was no hot water whatsoever.

We went out to cash some travelers checks we'd bought before we left, because once again, guidebooks advised not using ATMs in Bogotá due to crime. We wandered around for half an hour trying to find a place to which we were directed by locals, but it wasn't where they said it was. Then we tried another place that we were told cashes them to find that they didn't, and again someone there told us that another place cashes them down the street. We went there to find that they didn't cash them either. People at that place told us to try yet another place that cashes them, and alas, that place was closed. We later tried that place and found out that you could cash them, but only if you have an account with that bank.

In the midst of this frustration, which was really getting me angry, I decided it would be nice to get my shoes cleaned. Traveling and walking around in the rain the previous evening had gotten them dirty, and I'd been turned on to shoe cleaning of shoes that don't get polished in Guadalajara by one of the many shoeshines that work in downtown. At first in Mexico, I had been skeptical about the whole idea, but afterwards I was shocked to find that my old boots looked brand new. Therefore, I decided that having them cleaned in Bogotá would make them look nice for the rest of our trip.

I was approached by one guy that asked to shine my shoes. I asked if he could not shine them but rather clean them, and he indicated that he could indeed. Shawn was annoyed by me at this point because I'd stopped to get my shoes washed while we were knee-deep in the travelers check saga. As the shoeshine started in to work, he told me that he was going to use a very special soap to wash the shoes, which would enable me to not wash them again for four months. He even had a friend that came up while the other was working who told me that the soap was of the finest quality, and posessed special characteristics that bordered on magical in their shoe preservation abilities. I was a bit confused as to why the hard sell was necessary, since I had consented already to having the shoes washed.

After it was all done and they'd told me that I would not have to wash my shoes for four months four times each, I looked down to see my dark, wet shoes that I knew would dry to their lighter color (they're kind of tan). I asked how much I owed and the guy that cleaned them told me $40,000 COP (around $15 USD)...each shoe.

I asked them what they meant and they repeated the price. $15 USD, per shoe.

In Mexico, I pay between $15 MXN (about $1.40 USD) and $25 MXN (about $2.30 USD). I won't get into the kinds of things I was thinking that a shoeshine costing $30 USD should include. Since I didn't ask the price before he started, I didn't really have a leg to stand on in denying him payment. I further considered that if there were someone in the capacity of an offical to whom I could have appealed, they would have backed down on the price. Yet there was nobody around to use as backup in my argument to refuse their declared price, so I decided it was best to just pay them and move on. Remember, at this point, I had been told over and over about how dangerous Bogotá is, so I didn't want to cause any trouble over an amount of money that I could live without.

At the end of our time in Bogotá, I would have flatly told the guy where to go and given him like five bucks. By the time we left, I would have learned that Bogotá is not so dangerous as people make out that it is, including the people that live there. They do suffer from a high murder rate (23.4 per 100,000 in 2003), but that has dropped by 50% within the past 10 years. You can understand why they feel nervous, but the wave of post-traumatic loosening-up is lagging behind the decline in violent crime in Bogotá. It seems a little overly-nervous in a lot of places there in the way people act and precautions they tell you to use in order to be safe in their city.

At the time, having been in the city for not even 24 hours, I decided to pay for the lesson of learning to always ask how much it should cost beforehand. I should probably do this everywhere, but I learned to be sure to do it in Bogotá. Most of the time, the price you get stated is not what you expect because it's cheap, not because they're trying to swindle you. Yet it seems that Bogotá does still have traces of people living desperately that will do whatever they need to in order to make a buck, and tourists are very easy targets, unfortunately.

Those of you that travel, take note. If you go to Colombia, you should expect to pay no more than $7,000 COP at the most expensive of shoeshine venues (airports, apparently) for a pair of normal shoes. Owners of clown shoes, be prepared to pay slightly more.

As the shoes dried, I found that he'd used a brush that had been used for polishing black shoes with black shoe polish, so despite any delivered promises of the miracle cleaner (good for four months!), my shoes ended up being tinged with grey, just like the clothes in that old detergent commercial. Some parts that stick out more are more of a solid black.

On the positive side, when we returned to the room at the Hotel Saint Simon, we found that we had hot water. The maid, who had visited our room while we had our first Bogotá experiences, had turned on the water heater in our room, hidden behind a small closet door I'd not even noticed until seeing it left ajar by the maid. It should also be noted that the rooms at the Hotel Saint Simon, while lesser than expected for that price, were appointed well and the staff were all considerably friendly and some exceptionally so. The price also included a small breakfast that included some hot options, like eggs.

In the next installment, we'll have some photos of the city and - HURRAH! - things start to turn around for us at last.

[part four]

Posted by crispy at 03:41 AM | Comments (1)

June 21, 2006

The Road to Bogotá: Part Two

[part one]

If at first you don't succeed, go to the Casa Azul and putter around Coyoacán for the afternoon, then try to catch another late night flight to Bogotá.

Exterior, la Casa Azul, Coyoacán

We had nearly 24 hours to kill when we learned that our flight was cancelled, so we made plans for the following day to visit the Frida Kahlo Museum, housed in her family home in Coyoacán, also known as the Casa Azul.

We took a cab from the Camino Real that they 'arranged' for us, which ended up taking about 40 minutes and cost us about $25 USD. This was a 'tourist taxi,' which basically means it's a service that rips off tourists. The driver was nice enough, and the cab was very comfortable. We'd heard horror stories about getting kidnapped by illigitimate taxi drivers in Mexico City, so we wanted to be safe rather than sorry. The tourist taxi was guaranteed to be 'secure.'

The ride to Coyoacán was our first real chance to get the feel of Mexico City. It was nice and cool, being overcast and considerably higher than Guadalajara (about 2,200 feet). We were shocked to see how green and lush Mexico City was. We expected wall-to-wall urban landscape, but that was not the case. We passed park after park and went along many roads shaded by trees. In Guadalajara, it seems that people are terrified of trees, as people take any opportunity they can find - being near power lines, growing too tall, taking up space - to cut down the few that exist. Such didn't seem to be the case in Mexico City, which seemed like the Amazon in contrast.

I expected the Casa Azul to be pretty far out of town and in a dusty little pueblo, but Coyoacán is anything but that. It's a very nicely groomed, smart section of what seems like another part of Mexico City, like Tlaquepaque seems to be another part of Guadalajara.

Exterior, la Casa Azul, Coyoacán

While it does contain a few of works by Kahlo, the Museo Frida Kahlo focuses more on the life of the artist. There is a huge display case containing various medicines she took and a couple of self-decorated torso casts from a few of her numerous surgeries. There are a few interesting works by others too, and a little museum store where we bought postcards that we dared to send out through the infamous Mexican mail system. To date, nobody has mentioned receiving one. It's been almost three weeks.

The Casa Azul is very interesting, and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Frida Kahlo. Those wishing to see a lot of her work will likely be disappointed, but the fact that one can see unusal 'works' of hers (like the painted casts, the decoration of the kitchen, pages from her journal) is quite a treat. More interesting is being in the house where she worked and lived, and getting a sense of the history that took place there.

We left the museum to find some lunch. Normally, we have a decent guide book to get some direction in such matters, but because we were not at all expecting to spend the day in Mexico City, we had nothing but a barely adequate map of Coyoacán in a Mexico City tourism pamphlet given to us by the concierge at the Camino Real. We figured that if we headed toward the center of the neighborhood, we'd probably find something. We were not disappointed.

We came upon a nice park that had an information booth, where we asked for restaurant suggestions, being that we're vegetarians. I thought the woman there would suggest going to some sit down place that would have the usual: quesadillas, cheese enchiladas, enfrijoladas, chilaquiles, etc. Instead, she told us to go to Vege Taco, a place that serves nothing but vegetarian food.

For us, this was an amazing delight. So often people tell us, "You HAVE to try the pica..., oh, that's right. You're vegetarians." There are so many dishes down here that gringo meat eaters tell us are simply the best dishes in the world, and for the first time in my vegetarian life, I am ignorant of what something tastes like. That is, I'd tried pretty much everything meatwise in the United States that is common there. If someone eats a hot dog, for example, I know all too well what that tastes like. Yet there are several things here, often times sauces that are vegetarian in and of themselves, but end up always being served on meat, where I can't even imagine their flavors. Like the traditional sauce, pipian. It's always used to stew chicken or pork, so I never get to order it at restaurants here.

But at Vege Taco, I could get all kinds of things like that. Unfortunately, we had to choose just one dish each. Shawn got flautas, and I, being really into learning new things about our home state of Jalisco, ordered faux cabrito (young goat), Jaliscan style.

I won't knock anyone that digs goat, but I don't know that I would have really been all that jazzed about eating goat had I come down here as a meat eater. Okay, that's probably not true. I'd end up trying it one night while drunk and thinking it was okay. However, the nice thing is, even for people that eat meat, if you have a hard time stomaching even just the idea of goat, you could try the vegetarian version (made with seitan) and understand how it's prepared without having to eat goat. There were a lot of vegetarian versions of traditional Mexican fare that might give your average gringo pause, and I'm sure that a lot of meat eaters would be hesitant to eat at Vege Taco. However, all the people there (and it was pretty crowded), were chowing down without hesitation.

This is my fake young goat, in the Jaliscan style:


"Cabrito" Estilo Jalisco, Vege Taco, Coyoacán

Here's Shawn's flautas:


Flautas de "Barbacoa" Vegetarianas, Vege Taco, Coyoacán

I wanted to stay and keep ordering things from the menu, but a full stomach and the hour dictated that we return to the hotel, pick up our bags and return to the airport for our flight to Bogotá. We hailed a cab and paid about $18 USD on the return trip from Coyoacán, and on the way, I had a nice chat with the cab driver. He asked us all the standard questions, and I gave him all the standard (for us) answers. We talked about politics, the fact that we much prefer the relaxed rato de vida of Mexico, and that, despite the fact that all the Mexicans we knew that were from places other than Mexico City say that chilangos (a term for people from Mexico City, and supposedly pejorative) are rude and self-centered, we had not found that to be the case. He explained that it all depends on where you go in Mexico City. He claims that in some neighborhoods in Mexico City (he named a couple that unfortunately, I have since forgotten), people are very rude, but in many parts of Mexico City, people are very friendly.

We must not have gone to any of the rude places, because we found everyone to be quite friendly, polite, and when the need arose, helpful. Like when we got to the airport and got in line to check our luggage, the men going through and running chemical tests on the insides of our luggage were quite friendly. We spoke Spanish with them initially, but then one of them said that his co-worker wanted to practice his English with us, but was too shy to ask. We then switched over to English and had a nice talk with them while they processed our luggage with this funky device that checked for explosive residue on a piece of plastic (?) tape that was wiped along the interior of each of our bags. After passing the test ("TNT: OK!"), we stepped up to the counter where the same guy that had told us the previous night that our flight had been cancelled a month before was waiting with a pleasant smile. He was exceptionally friendly as he told us, "I have bad news for you. Your flight has been cancelled."

He was very friendly as he tried to calm us down, and he was exceptionally nice in putting us up at the Sheraton María Ísabel right across from the Ángel de Independencia on Avenida Reforma. Everyone in line behind us was also on this cancelled flight, yet instead of making a general announcement, they let everyone go through the security check of luggage, and then told them individually that the flight had been cancelled. I can think of no reason to do this besides really enjoying making people wait in line needlessly, but you get that kind of irrational stuff in Mexico all the time. Eventually, they herded us outside, to wait for a van that would take us to the hotel.

As we stood and waited, Shawn asked a young man who was also waiting if he spoke English. I thought this was strange at the time, but Shawn explained later that he presumed that the guy was English because he was paler than we were. It turns out that he did speak English, but he was a law student from Monterrey, and was heading down to Buenos Aires (our flight continued from Bogotá to Argentina) to study dance for three months during the summer break. He was quite cute, and we were delighting in the conversation, but then he started in on the whole thing about how he hates Mexico City and thinks both the metropolis and the people are ugly there. After that, I couldn't help but think of him as a little too prissy for my tastes, but luckily about that time, the van pulled up and we all got in.

The driver (David Montaño, cell 044/55/8560-9261, 044/55/2965-1437; office 55/2643-2406), who drives tourists around Mexico City for a living, was absolutely delightful. He asked me the usual questions, and upon my telling him how we were not really all too disappointed to be spending another night in Mexico City (since before we'd only been to the border towns and Guadalajara), started telling me all about other beautiful places in Mexico that needed to be checked out. I found us to have similar tastes in how we visit other cities. He recommended Acapulco, but when I said that I didn't really go for resort towns, he wagged his finger and said, "No, no, no." He suggested going for at least three weeks, finding a cheap apartment or condo that rents by the month and just living there, maybe checking out a couple of the big hotspots if you're into seeing what they're all about, but otherwise, just living there among the locals and asking around among them for recommendations on where to eat, what to see and how to pass the time. His loving description of excellent food, beautiful muchachas and thoroughly enjoyable time spent there sold me.

As we drove along, he pointed out a lot of sights in Mexico City, although it was hard to see many of them because it was dark out. Even the Ángel de Independencia wasn't visible, being under scaffolding for cleaning. Still, he gave us a rundown on the basics of our local layout, talking about the two Mexico Cities: the old and the modern. When at last we pulled up at the hotel, I was a little sad to have arrived. I would have liked to have hired him to drive around a bit more and show us some of the late night hotspots, but we had to check in with the others to be sure that Aerolíneas Argentinas would pay for it. After we got to the room, despite planning at the airport to go out and party down in the city, we were beat and just crawled into bed. The double-paned glass kept out any city noise, and those soft Sheraton beds were so comfortable that we passed out within minutes.

Here are some photos of the view from our room on the 20th floor.

Mexico City, from Sheraton María Ísabel

Mexico City, from Sheraton María Ísabel

Mexico City, from Sheraton María Ísabel

[part three]

Posted by crispy at 01:53 AM | Comments (6)

June 16, 2006

The Road to Bogotá: Part One

I got some Tafil from my doctor and I was ready to rock and roll to Bogotá, in just two hops. Yet upon our arrival in Mexico City, we learned that the flight between Mexico City and the Colombian capitol, the one that our travel agency supposedly confirmed three days before, had been cancelled a month earlier.

Shawn thought that we should confirm our international flight. I didn't realize this because I never fly. I tried to call and confirm the flight through AeroMexico, first asking the representative that answered if they had an English customer service number. We are in Mexico, but there are a lot of tourists taking AeroMexico flights that are not Mexicans, whether going between two Mexican destinations or coming from or leaving to another country outside La Republica. It seemed to make sense that they should have a number where you can talk to someone that speaks English from within Mexico, but of course making sense is not what airlines are all about. The representative explained that they have customer service lines where you can deal with an English-speaking representative, but only in Houston, which has a toll-free number that you can access only from within the United States.

I worried that trying to confirm our flights over the phone with my less-than-perfect Spanish introduced room for considerable error, but if they didn't have an English line, they would have to deal with it. When the guy asked me for the ticket number and I read off the big one listed in the center-bottom of the ticket, he told me that was not a valid ticket number. I later found out, upon asking the clerk at check-in, that the number I gave him was indeed the ticket number, and surprise of surprises: valid. Because we could not confirm by phone though, we decided to stop by our travel agency where we'd bought the tickets over a month earlier and ask them to do it for us. It's always easier to deal with issues that may suffer from language shortcomings in person.

We stopped in and explained to the only employee present that we were not the best with Spanish, but we wanted to confirm our flights that we'd arranged through them. We interrupted her watching what probably was a very juicy telenovela, but she took our tickets, went into another room for ten minutes, then returned and entered a few keystrokes into her computer. She turned the monitor around to show us a screen with our names, destination, flight number, etc. on it, and said that we were all ready to go. I asked her if the seat numbers we had been assigned were still the same and even read off the numbers to her. She said that the seat assignments were the same and still valid. I asked one last time to verify that I understood everything correctly: so our flights have been confirmed and we don't have to do that? She said that was correct and that the only thing we had to do then was to show up at the airport two hours before our flight time.

We left, discussing how great it would be to be in Colombia in just a few days, and stopped by at Larry and Joseph's place to chat for a while. I praised the travel agency for being so helpful and was glad that our neighborhood option was a pleasant place for doing business. I like to shop locally.

So you can imagine how confused we were after landing in Mexico City and walking up to the Aerolíneas Argentinas area only to be stopped by security asking us repeatedly if we were sure we had an Aerolíneas Argentinas flight that night. We explained that we did, showed them our tickets, and still they would not let us pass through. One guy we were talking to told us to wait while he went to talk to another security person, who chatted with him for a bit before coming over to let us through and directed us to the Aerolíneas Argentinas check-in counter. We thought it was kind of odd that we were the only people being detained in this manner, and that something about us required so much discussion and caused such confusion. Yet when you're living in a foreign country, you learn to not worry too much about things that seem a little strange. There are just far too many of them to get worked up about each one.

The attendant was counting slips of paper as we walked over, kind of like he was closing out a register. When we stepped up to the desk, he looked up surprised as we handed him our tickets, saying that we were there to check in. He gave us a curious look before looking at our tickets, and hesitated a bit before telling us, "I have bad news for you. Your flight has been cancelled."

It was around midnight at this point, and we were not prepared for this. In my mind, I got a mental picture of the travel agency woman sitting in the back room for those ten minutes like Ernestine the telephone operator, filing her nails and watching her telenovela, hoping that those pesky customers would go away if she just stalled them long enough. I was furious and vowed to never use Felgueres Agencia de Viajes (Niño Obrero 616-A, Zapopan, Jalisco) again.

The airline rep asked us if we'd confirmed our flight like we were supposed to, and I told him that we had, as far as we were lead to believe. He said they'd put us up in a hotel for the night and have us leaving the next night at the same time. I was worried that we'd be in some scary spot in Mexico City, but they actually placed us at the Camino Real Aeropuerto that was right at the airport. The Camino Real properties vary in their quality, but overall, they are generally okay, so I was actually glad to know that was our roost for the night. The Aerolíneas Argentinas guy marked boxes on the ticket we were to give the hotel desk staff that signified that we were to be given dinner, breakfast and lunch coupons, included at the airline's expense. That was an extra that we felt showed some good faith, and after perking up a bit, I was a little excited to be spending a night in Mexico City. I thought that maybe we'd go out and do something cool there. Since Guadalajara folds up completely at around 11 or 12 pm (apart from the one Sanborns Café, of course), I thought it might be cool to enjoy a little interesting nightlife.

However, when we got to the front desk, it took a good 15 minutes to check in, because the staff was so slow and they initially refused to give us vouchers for breakfast and lunch the next day. I was off chatting with the bellhop that had our luggage, and didn't realize that Shawn was having to argue with them for these things, even though they were clearly marked on the ticket. They called over to our Aerolíneas Argentinas representative to confirm it, and even after doing that, they still refused to give us anything more than breakfast. Later, upon trying to use these coupons in two of their three restaurants, we were told that the coupons were not accepted, and the only place we could use them (instead of the Italian restaurant or the Mexican restaurant that were praised by the bellhop) was the lame 24-hour cafeteria-style spot that was also the worst of the three places for vegetarian options: only a vegetarian sandwich that came with very ripe cottage cheese (despite the fact that the menu said all sandwiches come with french fries). The sandwich wasn't bad though, and after dealing with a snooty maitre d', the waiter was very friendly.

By the time we got done with this whole ordeal and waiting forever for our food to come out from the kitchen, we decided that we were not, after all, up for Mexico City nightlife that night. We made plans to go to the Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacan the next day, which turned out to be a delightful excursion and revealed to us that maybe we might prefer living in Mexico City.

[part two]

Posted by crispy at 12:29 AM | Comments (6)

May 31, 2006

Ay, Oh, Let's Go!

At this time tomorrow, I'll be having a chocolate santafereño. I hope to be able to comment on things while we're down there, and there are several Internet cafés. But I'm not sure that I will be spending a lot of time in Internet cafés when I'm in Bogotá...unless there's breaking news of international interest while I'm there. honestly, I hope that's not the case.

We will be gone until the 8th of June, so if I don't write from Colombia, I'll update upon our return.

Posted by crispy at 12:17 PM | Comments (2)

December 26, 2005

Restaurante Tai Spice

We fell in love with it when we came last year to check out Guadalajara, and we're pleased to note that it's still around now that we've returned. It's Restaurante Tai Spice, the only place we've found in town that has not only decent asian food that we can eat, but very good asian food we can eat.

It's located at Avenida Ninos Heroes 2966, in Colonia Jardines del Bosque. For those of you familiar with La Estancia Gaucha and La Tratoría, also on Niños Heroes, it's located between those two establishments.

The owners Robert and Kay are exceptionally nice people, the service is very professional, and the food is delicious. When we first moved here, we were a bit sad that it seemed like we'd never get to have decent Chinese food again (even the standard boring vegetarian dishes common in the US are absent here), but Tai Spice has a diverse menu that not only offers Thai cuisine, but dishes from all over Asia.

Go spend an unhurried evening there and enjoy yourself. The atmosphere is lovely and the food delicious.

Posted by crispy at 04:38 PM | Comments (1)

December 19, 2005

No More Wire Transfers! EVER!

If you ever need a lot of cash fast in Mexico, bear this in mind: their banks will not accept foreign credit cards for doing a cash advance.

So much for "...but they don't take American Express." They don't take anything. Not a debit card, not a credit card. Nothing. This doesn't really make any sense to me. Our hotel would let us run up bills in the thousands, and then charge it all at once. However, a bank, a financial institution like the ones that issued my cards, doesn't trust other banks. I have heard from our gringo friends that some stores in Mexico will not take foreign credit cards, but banks?

You can use foreign credit cards in ATMs. I have yet to find one that won't work for me this way. However, you are limited to $3,000 pesos, which is around $300 USD. That's usually just fine, but when you need a lot of cash at once, you have to come up with something else.

We had to do a wire transfer, which is called una transferencia in Mexico. This requires a couple of numbers, one called the "swift" number and then an account number. The local bank did not give me an account number when I first went there. I suspect that for transfers within the country, only the swift number is needed. Yet my bank insisted on a swift number and an account number, so I went back. After a 15-minute wait for it, the man I had been talking to came back and gave me an entirely different name and set of numbers: an account number and an ABA number. These numbers were for the J.P. Morgan Chase Bank in New York City, where the local bank has an account. At least in theory, the deposit is made in their account for me, and then the local bank contacts the central bank in the D.F. to have the money transferred to them, then I can receive the cash, on the second day after I request the transfer.

Hopefully it will work!

Posted by crispy at 12:26 PM | Comments (1)

December 13, 2005

Hunting and Gathering

My freshman year at USC, when I had just moved into the dorms and everything was new and strange, I wanted to get a small refrigerator to make the cinder block cell a little more like a home. I didn't know where I'd find such an item - it was not a regular sized refrigerator, so I imagined it to be some great rarity - so I asked other students who had one, guys I'd known for less than a month, where I might be able to buy my own. I was told that Sears sold them, but again, in what was then entirely uncharted territory, I didn't know where the nearest Sears was located. With the Internet not yet a public asset, I had to look in the phone book to find one. The only one listed was in Costa Mesa, a good 45-minute drive away from campus, and that's where I ended up going. It seemed ridiculous that in the city of Los Angeles one would have to drive so far to get what one wanted, but I simply didn't have any better source of information to help guide me to it.

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...

Posted by crispy at 11:04 AM | Comments (4)

December 09, 2005

On the Bus

Our bus arrived about two-and-a-half hours late to Guadalajara, which saw Shawn pretty frazzled. The experience left him sworn off of bus travel as the means to do the trip between Guadalajara and the United States. However, it should be noted on our Marco Polo bus on the Elite line of Estrella Blanca, the seats reclined more than on our previous bus trips, allowing both of us to get a fair amount of sleep along the way.

The problem is that the bus stops at many bus terminals in many cities on the route, and usually the bus terminals are not located near the major roads. Diverting to reach a station within a city often adds over an hour to the trip as opposed to just driving straight through, because the bus has to wind its way around a circuitous maze of narrow streets at very slow speeds. One solution to this, if you are interested in taking the bus from the states to one of the cities deep within the Republic, is to plan your trip in stages, and go from one town to another, spending the night in hotels along the way and checking out what these other cities have to offer. We considered doing this, but decided not to, as it’s already taken us too damned long to get to Guadalajara as it is.

We did learn an important lesson: while seemingly all first-class buses have air conditioning, very few have heaters. This was not a problem in our trip last year, but this year, in crossing the Sonora desert at night, the temperatures on the bus got downright chilly. We started to be concerned about this just before the bus departed, when the bus driver asked me where my coat was. When I responded that I didn't have one, he warned me that I was going to freeze. I thought that this was a joke until around 2 AM, when I had to pull my arms inside my t-shirt to stay warm. But I was rather lucky. Being a fat guy, I have a lot of padding to keep me warm. Shawn, however, was shaking all night long and had to huddle up against me as best he could in a bus seat to stay warm. The poor kid was still shaking so hard the next morning when we made a brief stop at a station in Santa Ana that his spoon could not make it from the plate to his mouth without losing most of the granola that was on it. We later noticed that some buses at the terminals, but not many, list among their amenities calificación (heating). So if you ever make the trip by bus through the desert at night, remember to bring along a very warm coat. Or you could gain a lot of weight, but it's probably just easier to do the former.

We had been concerned that perhaps customs or security would go through our bags and find that we'd exceeded the officially allowed number of certain things – we have more than 5 DVDs and probably more than 20 CDs along with us, as well as electronics equipment that would be valued over $50 – but we also knew that last time we entered the country, we did not have to worry about that at all. Last time, at the bus terminal in Ciudad Juárez, we went through a gate before the bus platform marked aduana (customs), and as each person went through, a uniformed guard pushed a button that displayed either a red or green light on a device that looked like a traffic light. If it was green, you passed through without stopping. If it was red, they went through your bags. We both got green lights and didn't worry. But this time, we were afraid we would have to go through that and have our stuff discovered.
In Tijuana, the official customs is located at the border. You walk through a turnstile and down a strip of wide sidewalk that goes by the immigration administration office, then the immigration "storefront" for people who need to get tourist visas, then a currency exchange and finally a little archway where on occasion a customs officer stands and watches people go by. I suspect that if there were a flagrant violation of customs or immigration policies going on while the customs official was standing there (if someone with a gun walked by, for example), they would be stopped. However, we walked by with our four suitcases and two backpacks without even a glance in our direction.

This demonstrates a very important aspect of travel in Latin America: while there are certainly cases where innocent travelers are set up by authorities, usually to extort cash from them, if one does not cause trouble that has to be dealt with, minor breaches of the law, like bringing in more than 200 cigarettes, are tolerated. Is it consistent enough to be able to rely on this? No, probably not. Yet we were prepared to deal with it if necessary, either by returning to San Diego and setting up other arrangements or by simply abandoning things.

Things within the bus were not that exciting. The videos they played were the typical Hollywood fare: The In-Laws, The Patriot and Hitch. I always hope that the novelty of two gringos traveling by bus will spur the other riders to ask what in the hell two white guys think they're doing there and this will lead to an interesting exchange of cultural tidbits, but that didn't happen. And why should it? For us, the experience is new, exciting and exotic. For Mexicans, they get plenty of the United States pushed down their throats all the time. It's the ever-present stronger, better-dressed and more popular big brother. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that we might be able to show them that even though that brother is often a jerk, he can be rather charming at times.

Posted by crispy at 06:17 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2005

St. Petersburg Times Article on Guadalajara

Pretty brief and not all that interesting, but a good introduction for those of you that may not know much about the basic attractions: Guadalajara: Mexican flavors

Posted by crispy at 04:45 PM | Comments (2)

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)

November 17, 2005

W San Diego

Shawn On Phone, W San Diego

Bed, W San Diego

Bedside Table and Lamp, W San Diego

Room Entry, W San Diego

Shawn On Phone, W San Diego

Shower, W San Diego

Shower Control, W San Diego

Posted by crispy at 07:25 PM | Comments (2)

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 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)

June 07, 2005

expatriates.com

All those who think it's time to leave the country might find some interesting information at expatriates.com, which has information on moving to many different countries, although the majority of information is about Europe and Asia. I find that the site isn't very well organized, but with a bit of digging, you'll probably find some stuff that is of interest to you.

Posted by crispy at 04:54 PM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2005

Mt. Colima Expected to Erupt Again

El informador reports that Mount Colima is expected to erupt again within the next 48 hours.

Check out the recent images from two (1,2) angles.

Known as the volcán de fuego ("volcano of fire"), Mount Colima erupted on Monday, stronger than it has in the past 20 years. Mount Colima is not located in the state of Colima, but rather in the state of Jalisco, 125 km (75 miles) south of Guadalajara.

Posted by crispy at 08:00 PM | Comments (1)

May 17, 2005

Colombian Town Outlaws Gossip

Psst. Hey Bud. Yeah, you. Word's out on the street that the clink zips loose lips in Colombia.

Posted by crispy at 10:00 AM | Comments (1)

May 13, 2005

The Land of the Flee

So as you may or may not have heard, Shawn and I are moving to Mexico.

The answers you would get if you were to ask us why would depend on which one of us you are asking and how long you could maintain your interest in the subject. In this blog we'll discuss many of the reasons in more digestable chunks, and you can chart our journey along with us. We'll discuss many aspects of Mexican history, politics, the people, the food - oh! the food! - art, literature and of course, Spanish. Commentary and questions are always welcome.

At present, our scheduled departure date is October. We have so much to do before then to be ready to go, like packing up all our things and finding someplace to put them, picking which books we want to afford shipping to Mexico and learning once and for all which verbs require use of the neutral object when referring to a previously stated idea. Of course, the work won't end once we get to Guadalajara; then we have to find an apartment, get furniture, come up with some way to pay the bills and find a place where we can buy Topo Chico. You will be there at every step of the way, having your shoes shined in the plaza and catching up on the day's news in El informador over an Americano at the Madoka. Don't forget - if you want ice in your water, you have to ask for it.

Perhaps somewhere along the way your wanderlust will stir and you'll decide that you want to move to Mexico too. And why not? Warm gentle evenings sipping a Bohemia outside an old church listening to mariachi singing timeless songs of love found and lost can be pretty alluring. If so, give me a call. I know this taxi driver whose brother-in-law's has a co-worker who is trying to rent a charming little cottage by the lake, and it even comes with a few chickens.

Posted by crispy at 06:22 PM | Comments (0)