tijuana, pt 2.

Last Sunday (holy shit... that was just last Sunday) morning brought with it one of the strangest and most-protracted "Where the hell am I and how did I get here?" moments I've ever faced. The only one I can remember more dramatic than this was my first morning in Scheveningen so many years ago, which lasted for untold millennia in conscious time (if only probably ten seconds if measured by clock). Lest the blurry pictures give the wrong impression, this was not a function of intoxication, but I suspect from the previous night's detachment and the culture shock of being somewhere and doing something so familiar, and yet still so utterly different from everything else I know. Tijuana is wild and weird and crazy, bereft of the fiddling authoritarianism we get here north of the border, but with a constant sense that fucking up- even if you don't know you're doing it at the time- can have spectacularly bad consequences.

I awoke to the sound of someone moving around. I'd awaken many times actually- about every thirty minutes for the entire night when the latest of my limbs to fall asleep did so- but when someone was moving around, that meant I had something to entertain myself with, and that we were hopefully somewhat close to finding breakfast. These things both proved true, as the rest of the zombie army rose from the floor and acquitted itself shortly thereafter, leaving Mika, Jody, Ed, and I to our plans for tacos and a brief sightseeing tour. This consisted mostly of driving around in Jody's car, examining the bizarre, fractured patchwork that is society in Tijuana.

But first, we stopped at the market, to grab something quick 'til we got further on.




Of course, again, I failed at the picture-taking, because I'm still not good at playing tourist. Watching Kate (of coming fame) snap off hundreds of pictures yesterday, I realize that I'm missing a lot, just giving a glance and a nod as we drive by. I balance this against taking hundreds of pointless pictures though, and the resultant sorting, as well as the critical failure that almost necessarily accompanies having so many pictures of mundane things. There are too many pictures as it is.

We also finally pieced together where the rest of the party guests and bands ended up. It was a near-even split between too drunk to get there (and remember, we're in a place that takes DUIs less seriously than 1970s Texas, so they were actually physically unable to drive due to intoxication... at 8:30 at night) and in jail for what they'd done the previous night. All told, out of four bands, part of one showed up and was joined by a few strays. I have to say, I'm (for lack of a better word) impressed.

Moving on, this was my favorite bit of the red light district, being Prince-themed, and all:




It means "chicken necks".







This is my favorite man in all Tijuana. His tacos are an all-purpose energy booster, rejuvenator, and complete hangover cure. In fact, I didn't even know I had a hangover 'til I ate one of his tacos and was cured of it.




The original plan was to eat more tacos, but at this point I was alone in the desire to do this, so we returned to the apartment through the growing traffic that marked the beginning of the Festival de Mariscos. Oh. Yeah. Somebody forgot to mention that there was a seafood festival happening that afternoon. Equipped with nothing but american dollars and our poor command of Tijuana's particular spanglish, Ed and I ventured out into the fray, leaving Mika and Jody to tend to the homeless man they were employing as a gardener and their three adopted strays.






(As a side note, I have a thing for cars with pickup truck beds, so I was excited to see this parked down the street, on the way:


)















Just like everywhere, cops in Tijuana are assholes:



(Inside joke.)

By the time we'd picked our way down the street, through the various car and bike and (other) bike venues, it became obvious that this was a time for showing off what you had for everyone else to enjoy. I was not expecting to see a huge quantity of really cool hardware, and I didn't, but what I did see there made me happy. These were people who liked stuff, and who were proud of their stuff, but who knew how to enjoy it. There was never a sense that a car or a bike owned its supposed owner, unlike so many I've seen in the past.

And then, in the middle of a closed street absolutely flooded with pedestrians, I kid you not, a drifting competition broke out...







(What you can't see is the three foot high, eighteen inch diameter, steel-clad concrete pole I'm standing directly behind.)


Eventually the black camo-print car lost both its rear tires, and the purple car did a standing burnout while the white car circled it, filling the air with so much smoke I couldn't breathe. Fast escape down some stairs toward the ocean, only to find a rock band on stage and a lucha libre match going right beside it.




This continued for most of the rest of the afternoon. Gabo's band played later that day, which sparked a spontaneous bout of dancing among the dance crew that was up next.






By this point, I was sufficiently disoriented and overwhelmed that I was pretty well done for the day. When I turned down a iced Clamato/beer/shrimp combination, I knew it was pretty well time to go. Back to the couch to regroup, then the short drive to the long wait at the border.



We got through in an hour and a half, which by all accounts wasn't too bad. That experience deserved a post and batch of pictures all to itself, but unfortunately it gets none of that. LA was cake from there.


Parting shots.







I wan'na do that again sometime.