Day: November 27, 2004

the money is all one colour

The gray weather has caught up with us in movie heaven. I’m working today, sitting on the hotel bed with the children scrolling by on the light up laptop screen. Music is on finally, my propensity for sending files to everyone paying dividends I never expected.

We started to Tijuana with the jeep top down, cliche divas in for hot weather on the american Thanksgiving Day. We packed the camera and bottled water, and got caught in traffic, surviving off granola bars. We stopped in San Clemente, where Alastair will be living in a week or two. Two little girls came up to me as I was playing in the waves, “Have you ever been to a beach before?” She seemed sad when I said I had. She asked if I knew if the skinny man over there was taking my picture.

Mexico was frighteningly simple to get into, a roofless metal tunnel, jury-rigged from corrugated steel sheeting and four by fours, hammered together over stained cement. Everyone else was carrying something, plastic bags and backpacks. The end of the path forked, the majority walking right, but to the left was a light up sign saying TAXI. The second man who approached us, we took his vehicle, a mary magdalene hologram sticker on his dashboard next to the speedometer. “Take us to Revelucion?”

The traffic is more chaotic, but friendlier, a more organic extension of travel. The air is simply poison, a scraping miasma of acid that burns the back of the throat. We were dropped off on a raucous corner, barkers starting in as soon as I stepped foot to pavement. Rapid spanish chattering from all directions, mixed with protestations and cajoling lures in english imploring us to buy from the shops lining the street. Above us pounded heavy dance music, hits that weren’t from the 80’s and 90’s, like a retro night gone sour, the sort of music people dance to at drunken weddings. We followed a man up yellow and black caution line painted stairs to an empty restaurant, every step with a message in english with odd grammar. YOU CUSTOMER IS MOST IMPORTANT PERSON HERE, OUR TACO IS BEST. I was surprised by how much of the menu I could read, the language keeping me on my toes, an edgy realization of faded knowledge bothering my mind with inconsistencies.