Monday, October 3, 2005

I can’t get that song “Mexican Radio” out of my head, although the various “bar-grill-dance” places along Av Revolucion are doing their best to ply me with the best and worst of American and Mexican pop. It’s been stuck in my head ever since we requested the bus tickets in Anaheim. We have to get out of here.

Man, Tijuana. (I wish I was in Tijuana, eating barbecued iguana...) It’s pretty much as I thought it would be. Well, the tourist-oriented part at least. I’m sure there’s a “real Tijuana” out there but we’re being a bit lazy. So for us it’s been farmacias (“Xanax! Cipro! English spoken!”), tacos, and Mexicanesque nick-nacks. We missed our bus in Anaheim, tracking down some In-n-Out for Michael, and ended up arriving in Tijuana around 9:00 pm. So rather than schlepping our expensive stuff around unknown alleys in the dark while looking tired and clueless, we just headed to the first place listed in the Lonely Planet.

Our hotel is delightfully seedy. Seriously, I love it. Oh, they’re trying – they’ve bolted a Sanyo color TV to the wall and they provide bleach-scented towels and tiny soaps and a box fan, but that doesn’t take away from the mismatched linoleum tile floors, the battered furniture, the cigarette burns, and the wonderfully mysterious stains on the walls. The room also boasts a romantic bed – its convenient hammock effect makes certain that any two occupants will roll towards the middle of the bed and achieve constant full body contact with no effort. That’s good for me, because Michael always tries to crawl away from me in his sleep and then I get cold.

The LP suggested taking a room in the back of the hotel, to avoid the “cacophonous” Av Revo, the main tourist strip. Please. If I wanted quiet, I’d go to… some quiet place. This is Tijuana (hear the message of the DJ, can’t understand just what does he say…) No, I specifically requested a bird’s eye view of the cacophony. And we got it all right. Wall to wall windows, and jumpin' music till 4 am, free of charge.
 
But as I said, we have to get out of here. If I were a nineteen-year-old resident of San Diego, I’d be here every week for the 99 cent Coronas and tacos and the gringo-riffic dance spots. But I’m almost thirty and I traveled a long way to get here. This is not quite what I had in mind.
 
So we’re spending another night here and then catching a bus tomorrow to Guerrero Negro, even though it is not whale-watching season. I'll be glad when we get a little more settled into this trip. At the moment I feel like we're the gringoest gringos to ever gringo. We spent a good couple of hours blundering around trying to find the bus station and whatnot while fending off juggling children and aggressive taxi drivers. I've seen worse, but I forgot how it feels to be a blatant backpacker. I remember quite a good amout of Spanish but feel incredibly awkward using it. Hopefully that will change.

Update - January 13, 2007

I see from my stats that since my site has been up, 47 people have reached it through doing searches for "I wish I was in Tijuana eating barbecued iguana." So in honor of that, I have finally cleaned up the formatting of this entry. I'd love to edit it too, but that seems unfair for a blog, so I won't. Anyway, to those Mexican Radio lovers, the song is by Wall of Voodoo and I hope you stick around and check out the rest of the site.

June 5, 2007 - 142.

 

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Taco sauce? Chaw spit? Blood?

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