Tuesday, November 22, 2005

The Migracion lady did not like us one bit. And to be fair to her, who do we think we are, galivanting around Mexico for almost two months without filing the necessary entry documentation and then waltzing into her office at lunchtime and expecting her to just hand over tourist cards right before we leave the country? U.S. Immigration would never put up with the same nonsense from her, so why should she put up with it from us? Let me just say we understand the situation from her point of view. But she sure punished us good.

Making us come back the next day for no good reason was just the beginning. She didn't do anything untoward, but she made the necessary steps as painful as possible and she made sure we had absolutely no idea what was going on at any given moment or what was going to happen to us.

Trying to avoid making the mistake we made yesterday (arriving at lunchtime) and also trying to make sure we were finished with our business in time to catch a bus to Palenque, we left our hotel at around 10:00 a.m. A pretty pathetic showing from two people who had made all kinds of big talk about being on Migracion's doorstep at 9:00 a.m., but that's us.

We checked out of the room, leaving our mochilas with the manager, and walked down to the bus station, around twelve blocks. After checking the departure times and reassuring ourselves that we had some bus choices in the afternoon, we took a cab to Migracion to avoid the thirty or forty-five minute walk. We were armed with all our photocopies, lots of pesos and our best intentions not to pick our teeth right back at her.

Oh - to interrupt this story of Things We Did Wrong with an incident of Things I Did Wrong - my ATM PIN is a word. Though I had meant to do this before leaving home, I forgot to memorize the number combination for this word. And finally today I encountered an ATM that had numbers only. Like an idiot, I hoped I could figure out the numbers through a combination of assuming 1 = ABC (it doesn't) and "finger-memory" (a myth). And after five fruitless tries, the ATM spit my card back out and told me to call my bank. At the bus station there was an HSBC ATM with letters, but by then it was too late. My card is frozen. So the pesos we were armed with going to Migration were all Michael's. And the intention not to pick teeth was all mine, because Michael never had that compulsion at all.

We arrived at Migracion at around 11:00 a.m. just as smiling and humble as we could be. The Migracion lady seemed somewhat less hateful. And it turned out that she could speak some English when she chose. She examined our photocopies. For the most part, they met with her approval, but she made us take out the copies of the passport pages without stamps. If you say so, but if you don't have a copy of every page, how can you tell we didn't refrain from giving you a copy of a page that does have stamps on it? Bad stamps from a country you hate?

She gave us some extension of stay forms to fill out, along with her patented disdain-filled gaze. She did not give us any pens. Luckily I'm a good little writer and always have a couple of pens on hand. We sat and filled out the forms braced against our knees, including our credit card numbers. Afterwards, she told us what to write in the parts we had left blank. Then she asked us when we wanted to leave the country. We'd like to start Spanish classes in Guatemala on Monday, but to be safe, we said December 10th and that date is now set in beaurocratic stone.

Then she got some other forms and dictated to us - in clipped, impatient, tooth-sucking Spanish - what we were to write in the various blanks. I think I did ok with this, but Michael was lost and copied mine. So if I miswrote things, I guess we're both going down. By the way, when I said I did okay, what I mean is I'm pretty sure I wrote the same words that she dictated. I do not mean I understood the words I wrote. ("Dear President Fox, We are stupid, stupid gringos, and ugly too, and should really be deported posthaste, but please have pity on our idiot selves and we promise to spend lots of money in Palenque...")

After the dictation exercise, the Migration lady got out some more forms and some carbon paper and typed for a while. She did not tell us what she was doing. I used that time to think about things that I haven't had occasion to think about for a long time, starting with carbon paper and moving on to flashcubes, oaktag, and cubbies. After the forms were typed, she gave us each a set, original and carbon, and gleefully told us to take them to the bank. At the bank, we were to pay $210 pesos each for our stamp and then come back to her. Clearly her glee stemmed from the fact that the nearest bank was almost all the way back in the Centro.

We didn't want to pay more cabfare, so we made the twenty-minute walk back along the Pan-American Highway to the Bancomer. This road passes over a river of sewage. I couldn't help but be fascinated by it, each of the five times we had to walk over it on our way to and from Migracion. I mean actual sewage with, like, feces in it (but no toilet paper because you don't flush that here), flowing under one side of the highway and coming out the other. (Gives a whole new meaning to the game of Poohsticks, doesn't it, Piglet?) It smelled bad there. Michael seemed concerned at my interest in the poo-river, but I couldn't help it.

At the bank, we walked between the rifle-clutching guards, and tried to figure out how to get into the building. After not-so-surreptitiously watching some other people, we got it. We pressed the button to get in one door, closed ourselves into a glass cubicle and then pressed another button to get out of the cubicle through the second door and into the bank. Then we took a number and waited in the chairs provided.

Paying our $210 pesos (which is standard for a tourist card) was simple enough. The teller just took our money, put some carbon paper between the pages of each of our two sets of paper and ran it through a machine. The machine typed out a whole block of text to give us a "stamp" showing that we had paid. We let ourselves out the two doors and took the walk back over the sewage river to Migration.

Back at Migracion, everyone - desk people and security guards - was gathered around looking up at a television mounted near the ceiling. It was one of those educational cable channels, in Spanish. We all watched while a chicken gave birth to a bat. Or something. At any rate, it united us all in a friendly moment of "what the...?" When the commercial came on, we presented our forms to our friend. She inspected my form at great length. Then she inspected its twin. (It's a carbon.) I waited calmly because to do otherwise would be sheer folly.

"Oh," she said sadly. "No photocopies." Photocopies! Were never! Mentioned! I pasted a confused and apologetic look on my face. She sighed heavily and took our forms to the back to copy them. And thank God, because if I had to make one more trip over the River Poo and back, I just don't know.

She came back out with letters written in Spanish, one for each of us. She did not tell us what they said, but at least I didn't see the phrase "pinche gringos" anywhere. She pointed to top of the letter and gave us more dictation. At least this time I knew what we were writing - that we had received the originals of these letters on today's date. Then she gave us our original letters, and some other form to be presented to the border people when leaving Mexico. And that was it. We were dismissed. We said goodbye to each other like the best of friends. It was around 1:30. Walking out of Migration felt like the last day of school.

Very close by Migracion - a stone's throw, as the Lonely Planet loves to say - is a big, fancy, giant, shiny mall, with a supermarket to rival any Wal-Mart, an arcade, a movie theater, a Radio Shack, and all the usual mall stuff. We went to that mall and ate at McDonalds. Yes, we did. The lunch discussion mostly consisted of wondering if people of a certain temperament are drawn to such government jobs (IRS, DMV, etc.) or if the jobs mold perfectly nice, sympathetic people into hate-filled drones. And then we took a cab back to the Centro.

Tonight Palenque, and then on to Guatemala!

Moral - You need a tourist card if you're going to visit Mexico! It's the rules! Don't mess around! Get one right away! If they don't give you one, ask for it! You'll be glad you did! Also, make sure you know your PIN in both letters and numbers. Michael thinks I'm the only person in the world who has a word instead of a number combo, but that can't be. (BOSCO, anyone?)

TIMES WALKED OVER A BRIDGE ACROSS A RIVER OF RAW SEWAGE: 5

TIMES DROVE IN A CAB OVER A BRIDGE ACROSS A RIVER OF RAW SEWAGE: 2

 

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