Tijuana Roadtrip 2004

Looking Ahead Backwards

Long road trips are often filled with spells of grogginess, dissociation and intense impatience. Travelling as fast as you can with a single destination in mind and knowing that the end of your trip is still several hours away can flood you with a restless feeling, a dissatisfaction that erases any sense of the progress you've made ... as you whiz by other cars at almost a hundred miles per hour. So a road trip is the perfect metaphor for my life right now.

On Thursday I was at the top of the world and I really felt at peace. I was focussed on the life I'll have several months from now after I get rid of all the "debris" from my current one. But by Friday I could feel myself getting caught up in the here and now. I knew that if I didn't get out of the apartment things would only go downhill emotionally. So on Friday night after hanging out with friends in San Francisco, I got in my car and drove to San Diego. The time that I spent with my wife last weekend was awesome. But I knew that even if we had another great weekend together it would be like throwing gasoline on the fire ... there's a part of me that's going to get hurt no matter what. I needed to put all my attention on some other part of my life and a road trip seemed perfect.

Inside Aunt Jane

I made it to San Diego in eight hours with only a tank and a half of gas and an hour of sleep at a makeshift "rest station" ( read: pulled over on the side of the road in the wee hours of the early morning ). The check-in time at the hostel wasn't until 2pm so I had a lot of time to kill. I got onto the trolley and took a trip to Tijuana. Does Tijuana actually mean something as a name ? What if it's some shortened form of "Tia Juana" that would make for a number of interesting stories since it translates as "Aunt Jane". For most people in the U.S. the word Tijuana is synonymous with dirt, squalor, and a tourist industry that caters to Americans looking for both. I took a taxi over to Avenida de Revolucion in order to do some shopping. I think it's mandatory that most large cities have an area dedicated to quarantining obnoxious foreigners and Revolucion is just such a place.

Made In Mexico, Poorly But With Great Pride

But I actually had a fun time shopping. One of the annoying things about Spain is that after about two hours of "tourista shopping" you had a complete inventory of all the items that you're likely to find in such shops across Spain. There are the leather items and metal work from Toledo, the fans from Seville, the gold filigree work from Granada. And all the little shops are buying from the same suppliers in China. This is the real miracle of outsourcing: everything everywhere looks like everything else. But Tijuana is different.

Obscene Shopping Fun

Part of the reason is that Mexicans are selling crap that's so bad, the items couldn't even find their way into a street stand in Madrid. Everyone is familiar with American kitsch, right ? Well rural Mexicans certainly are and when you combine that with some mediocre paper mache skills and a keen interest in an American buck ... you have a recipe for obscene shopping fun. Some of my personal favorites include the very poorly made life size reproductions of Spider Man, Bat Man, and miraculously the Green Lantern. Or the vendors with burros painted with prison stripes so that American tourists could take pictures of themselves "in Tijuana". I'm pretty sure that with a polaroid camera and a Mexican flag, I could make an outrageous fortune by charging drunk tourists for the opportunity to take pictures of themselves peeing on the pride of Mexico.

Now don't get me wrong. There were a handful of rather nice shops including one that sold reproductions of well known Mayan, Olmec, and Aztec artifacts. There was also another shop that sold things with a "Day of the Dead" theme. I distinctly remember one rather nice skeleton puppet: it was bright white and had a giant pink penis. I'd like to think that this was the artist's way of saying that in the end we're all fucked by death. If so, the statement was wasted on the marines from Camp Pendleton who actually bought it. I focussed on shopping for that soon to be light of my life, Zoe. I bought two slightly ridiculous dresses that probably won't fit her for five years and I called it a day. One was a little flamenco dancer outfit and when I returned home, I realized that the skirt portion was attached to the dress by eight extremely large, sharp pins. Perfect for a small toddler ...

I Worship Ochango

The trip back was living hell. It took forty-five minutes to get through customs and the trolley to San Diego was packed. I did have one interesting experience though. A young Mexican-American asked me if I had accepted Jesus Christ as my saviour. What does one say to that ? It happens all the time but I'm never ready for it. And I'm rotten at improv. I thought very hard very quickly and responded with "Who ?". I then explained in two or three-word sentences with the worst fake Dutch accent I could muster that I was from South Africa. The kid asked me if there were churches in South Africa and I told him that we only had temples. So who do you worship ? Ochango ! He seemed very confused and proceeded to ask six or seven more questions about South Africa, ending in a "I thought everyone there was black" ( with a disturbing little snicker at the end ). The only other high point in the conversation was when I asked him if he had children. He was only sixteen and looked at me with a slightly horrified expression. He shook his head then asked me the same. I told him that I had six children. His response said alot ... "Ohhh, the cost of living must be very cheap there." Smart kid.

Underneath The Thin Veneer of Grime Is More Of Same

I returned to the hostel and proceeded to sleep until about 6pm. I woke up just as some kid was checking into my dormitory style room. He looked about 22 years old and the first thing he did was pin up a giant poster of his girlfriend on the only available patch of wall space. As I think about it now, the poster was in direct view of his bed so maybe he had put it up for reasons that weren't purely sentimental. I showered and immediately headed back to Tijuana. My experience of the city was entirely different by evening. Side streets that had been deserted in the morning were now jam packed with natives out for their afternoon stroll. This was when I really began to love the city. I had more fun people watching in five minutes than I usually have in a week in San Francisco. A scam is taking place on every street corner. Look to the right, there's an old man who just shouted something to a group of teenage girls that would have gotten him arrested in California. Look to the left, there's a woman dressed like a whore and she just handed her baby to some guy. I'm pretty sure the last thing she said was "trabajo en calle" and then she blew him a kiss.

Tijuana is one giant seamy underside without censor or pretense. Best of all you can walk one block away from a tourist trap and not see a single gringo for hours. Sure most of it is shabby and there are a couple of streets that made me want to pee in my pants out of sheer fear. But it's actually one of Mexico's richest urban centers and over a hundred thousand people call it home.

Mexico: Where The Boundaries Blur

I was amazed by the number of children out with their parents. People seemed surrounded by kids like flies. Every woman that I saw in their mid-20s had two or three children in tow. And each little shop seemed to double as an alternative day care center. It seemed like the wall that separates personal life from work is very thin for most people in Mexico and after working at a huge lab for seven years I'm drooling with envy. I spent atleast two hours soaking up the city and it's sights. Finally starved out of my wits, I broke down and got a taco from a street vendor. I handed him a dollar which he promptly put in his pocket and then with the same bare hand he scooped up a handful of chicken and a grilled tortilla. He wiped his hands on his apron when he was done. This vendor hadn't been burdened by invisible things called "germs" so why should I ? I ate my taco with gusto.

When The Angels Are Deaf, People Shout The Loudest

After so much walking I needed a place to sit down. Right next to the taco stand was a church and it seemed packed for Saturday mass. In America popular religion was dealt a death blow by television but here in Tijuana it still seems to be going strong. I didn't really understand a lot of what was going on and the church was particularly odd. The walls were either falling apart or not entirely finished yet and as a result the acoustics were horrible. The priest was reciting mass but I don't think communion was being offered. In the back of the church a group of old women were weeping. And there was a side alter jam packed with people clamoring to place votive candles on a shrine. It was a strange slightly mysterious place to me. After twenty minutes everyone in the pews crossed themselves, and then got up and left so I did the same.

The Tijuana Dive Bar Experience

After properly sanctifying myself, it was time to hit the bars and I saw several guys who had been in the church do the same. After talking with a taxi driver, I found myself in this little hole in the wall that made most so called American dive bars look like hi-brow drinking establishments. I walked in and was seated at a dingy little table with four chairs. The table got the mandatory wipe down with a rag that looked like it had seen better days four or five years ago and I ordered a Tecate. There were only five or six people in the place. I settled down with my beer and waited for something to happen. Vendors came by and I had one of the best churros I'd had in a long time. Almost as good as the ones in Spain. It took an hour before the bar got really packed. By that time my table had three other guys only two of whom actually seemed to know each other. I said hi and bought a round of drinks. Everyone was really very friendly and we shot the shit for a couple of hours. I got lucky because one of the people at my table spoke English well. We made jokes about the tourists, and I asked them questions about the city. I noticed that almost everyone in the place was a guy. I couldn't help asking what was up. My translator smiled and said that in his case his wife was "working" over at a little bar in the red light district and that he'd be happy to get me a deal if I wanted it. Wow, I thought. These people sure are friendly ... I smiled and told him that I was already too drunk to take him up on his offer.

Is That A Part Of Mexico ?

I asked them about other places to check out and that essentially kick started a night of bar hopping and extreme drinking accompanied by my translator / wingman / would-be-pimp. I remember snippets of conversation that I had here and there throughout the night. I've been interested in travelling to Tabasco state and I asked several people about it. They all looked at me with a perplexed expression and said they hadn't been there and didn't know anyone who had. Well, that's what the people who knew it was a state in Mexico did. The others just smiled and looked at me with an expression that said, "What the fuck are you talking about ?". I also remember buying several rounds of drinks. But at about 2am I had to leave in order to catch the last trolley back to San Diego. I seriously considered staying until the first trolley of Sunday morning but I was pretty smashed so I did the wise thing and went home. I guess next time I should just get a hotel room in Tijuana. It would actually be cheaper than my stay at the hostel.

In any case, I fell asleep on the trolley and had to walk from the end of the line to the Gas Lamp district. For all effective purposes my road trip was over. The ride home was uneventful and long. If there was any where I'd like to go on a second road trip it would be White Horse in the Yukon Territory ... but we'll see.