Popcorn

I’ve had a hard time mustering inspiration to write for a couple reasons: 1. We’ve found a rhythm and routine here that suits us, and as life becomes more familiar it simultaneously feels less blog-topicy and 2. Steven’s last post, let’s be honest, was really fabulous, and who wants to follow that up? “Not I” said the fly on my computer as I type this, outside of our teeny-tiny casita on a sweaty Saturday. But if you can’t write about the familiar than you’ll never write about anything you actually know, right? “Right!” said our house gecko, peeking out from behind the lace floral curtain that hangs above our easy-bake-oven sized propane range. (Don’t worry mom, most of the time we remember to turn it off.)

Anyways, this post is an attempt to rip that writer’s avoidance band aid. I’ll keep it short and spicy, with a high and a low and a short story about popcorn.

A HIGH (Or four. Oops): LIFE HERE. While texting Steven’s sadly flu-ridden parents last week, I had this revelation: This is the best I’ve been for the greatest amount of time in my memory. Steven and I are absolutely loving it down here, even more so as the words start to come ever-so-slightly more readily.

A few weeks ago we visited Guadalajara. Alejandro’s sweet parents generously put us up, and we were able to spend five days exploring the art, architecture, markets, food, etc. of Mexico’s second largest city. The highlight of this highlight was a private tour to Tequila (and by private, I mean we couldn’t find a formal tour on the day we wanted to go, so we hired a guy online who takes people up there himself, like in his actual car. It was perfect.) He walked us through the entire process, from planting the blue agave to distillation and distribution, taking us through several distillers, museums and of course, tasting flights. We were so happy, for so many reasons.

When we’re not on vacation from our vacation, we’re spending a lot of time in our Spanish grammar books, teaching mini English classes to a few of the neighbors, having intercambia conversations with people all over the Spanish-speaking world via italki, and continuing our taco stand tour, which has now been expanded to include chorreadas (sort of like a taco, but on a flat, thicker tortilla with cheese). We regularly attend a tiny baptist church on the island, where we sit in children’s chairs (the space doubles as a kindergarten classroom) and sing worship songs played from a boom box. We love it.

A LOW: The other night we went out to dinner with our neighbor, and Steven and I both followed her lead and ordered the shrimp. As a Coloradan, I had a picture in my mind of a nice Chilis’ shrimp fajita platter, sizzling and ready to eat, everything but the blooming onion. What we were served, however, was a plate of probably the freshest shrimp I’ve ever eaten, which were a total waste on me as I could not get over their beady little eyes or the sound as I broke their necks (do shrimp have necks?) or the blood juice that soaked my rice as I ripped their heads off with my bare hands. A toxic mix of stubbornness and politeness got me through the plate, but I still hear that crack at night when I’m trying to sleep.

THE HIGH OF THE LOW: If decapitating shrimp is your low, you’re doing fine, and maybe even living a more cultured person’s seafood dream.

Exploring the elaborate cathedrals of Guadalajara.

Our tequila tour crew.

Typical.

Angela goes wild for a good YouTube piñata video, but gets confused by the real thing.

Provecho!

A STORY: Since we landed in Mexico about a month and a half ago, I can count the number of times I’ve felt unsafe on one hand, and three of those were while watching Narcos. This very well may be because I am naïve and have no idea how close I’ve come to being napped/mugged/food poisoned/recruited into the drug trade, or because I’m living in a city where a large part of the economy depends on visitors with deep pockets and headlines about missing white girls are bad for everybody’s business.

Regardless of why, outside of TV shows and accidentally getting on major highways with zero shoulder on a Mongoose Mountain Bike that saw better days in the 80s while wearing a dress, I’ve felt very comfortable here. Except this one time.

A few weeks ago, while waiting for Steven outside an OXXO, about a half dozen cops walked out of the gas station, in their usual black jumpsuits, face masks, and assault rifles – a get up that to the untrained American eye, make them look more like they are about to attempt a risky diamond heist or perform some sort of SWAT operation than buy a coke.

I’ve been told to be wary of the police down here, and seeing how I was a gringa standing alone at night on the side of a gas station with an armful of beer wearing, once again, a dress, I felt a bit vulnerable.

One of the cops approached me, and as I cursed T-Mobile for selling us a phone plan that works roughly 2 percent of the time, he reached into his plastic bag, and extended a handful of the most delicious smelling freshly gas-station microwaved buttery popcorn.  

And so the two of us stood there on the curb together in silence, a small white woman with a couple of crappy bikes and a thoroughly armed middle-aged Mexican police officer, eating popcorn and waiting for Steven.

Lost in the Light

I have to tell this story, because — and I know it is overused — I find it incredible.

We are living in a community just south of Mazatlan called La Isla de la Piedra, or, Stone Island. It is actually a peninsula, but water is the dominate feature and you must cross some to get from La Isla to Mazatlan and back again. Multiple times a week, Maggie and I will make this crossing in the motorboat water taxi (a lancha or panga, they call it). It’s a quick, usually fun trip, complicated only by the fact that we bring our bikes onboard so we can ride to our next destination on the mainland. Practice has made far from perfect, this awkward dance, a tangle of pedals and spokes and almost taking out old women and children with knobby tires to the face. Most of the passengers are usually traveling light* and I am always aware of being the gringo with all the things and in the way. I paint this picture so you can properly visualize our embarking and disembarking, the heaving and leaning, the balancing act on the rocking boat.

*except when they are not. I’ve seen towers of cotton candy to be sold on the beach make the crossing, and just yesterday saw a full size 4-wheeler balanced half on/half off of one of these lanchas, cruising across the bay.

Around 8:30pm two weeks ago, Maggie and I finally made it back home after a semi-rocky shopping trip at the market wherein one of the members of our party became hungry, then sad, and then lost hope. We had everything we needed to make a steak taco dinner with all of the trimmings, thus, saving the night. As we began to prepare our meal, Maggie realized that she did not have her phone. Every corner was searched, every cushion overturned, every pants pocket in the vicinity turned out, and no phone. This is not the first time said phone has made itself scarce. You see, phones now are beyond smart, they have personalities, and Maggie’s phone is an attention-seeking, drunken debutante, with a touch of Munchausen syndrome. Without warning and indiscriminately, it dashes itself against the ground, carpeted and asphalted surfaces alike. It’s constantly hiding, usually just in plain sight, but other times it will lie flat, say, on top of the refrigerator, and we’ll call and call and it won’t make a sound. Sometimes it runs away from home, like when it flew to Columbus, Ohio without us. The worst, though, is when it fakes its own kidnapping.

When it was confirmed that the phone was in no way in our possession, we snapped into action, flipping open our laptops and activating the lost-phone-GPS-thing. Huddled around the table in our consumer-grade, Apple-branded war room, we watched the app ping out into the darkness, like the unanswered, bioluminescent mating call of the American firefly. And then…Pong! Or whatever the answer to a ping is. There was Maggie’s phone, according to the map, one mile from our house on the island. I saddled up the mountain bike and headed toward the pin.

Through the island streets, alternately paved, then pure sand, then drop offs, then compacted horse manure, I rode with one hand as the other held my phone out in front, my navigator, my R2. My iPhone tracked Maggie’s iPhone into the night, one hound on the trail of another, and I remembered Where the Red Fern Grows, and how it ended. After passing a local championship soccer (I know they call it fútbol, just let me tell this) game, I turned down two more dark alleys and finally emerged on a slightly less dark corner of a neighborhood. A man and an old woman graciously listened to my broken speech about what I was doing in front of their house, and patiently sat through my pointing-at-screen presentation, before I opened up the floor to questions. Another neighbor joined, and we all huddled around my phone, staring at the increasingly dubious triangulation. The icon depicting Maggie’s phone on the map (itself a tiny black iPhone. iPhones all the way down…) jumped around whenever we tried to zoom in further. I realized that it could not give us a precise location, rather, something like a 20 yard radius. Since I had checked the majority of this radius, the neighborhood consensus was that the phone was probably next door, and that person was at the soccer game, but I could come back tomorrow. They seemed not to be pulling one over on the gringo, and so I thanked them and returned home only semi-defeated.

When I got home, we reheated our tacos and beans and presented arguments in the case of the missing phone. My position was that the phone had thrown itself out of Maggie’s backpack during the recent aforementioned awkward disembarking. The opposing theory was that during that same passage across the bay, the phone had been stolen, presumably by the youths sitting directly behind us with access to the phone in the open backpack pocket. At this point the understanding husband inside of me went to bed without a goodnight, and I should have followed.

At roughly 11pm, Find My Phone got a new pong. The map showed the phone again about a mile away, but this time across the bay back in Mazatlan. We floated 3 or 4 competing theories to explain this new location, but, alas, we were weary. The phone looked like it was on a street we’d biked down before crossing over, so I was hoping it had simply dropped itself out of Maggie’s backpack where it now lay still. The plan was to wake up early and retrieve it in the twilight hours before it could get snatched up.

My alarm went off before sunrise and I checked the app again. Find My Phone was not communicating with Maggie’s iPhone in real time, rather, it was going off of the last update it had received when the phone had signal, sometime around midnight. It was a total impossibility that the phone was where the map said it was, but I started getting ready to head back into town anyway. Maggie and I decided to take a wee-hours ocean swim to wake ourselves up. I made one of those apologies in which each sentence of apology is matched with a sentence of rationalization, what some would call a non-apology. Nevertheless, we swam and made breakfast. After my coffee, I biked to the dock to head back into Mazatlan.

Shortly after getting off the boat, I realized that the spot showing the phone on the map was not, in fact, in the street we had biked down. It was a block away, in the one place we had been advised not to venture into, day or night. A place called, of all things, Ciudad Perdida, The Lost City. This “city” is actually an obtuse trapezoidal section of roughly 4 or 5 city blocks. From what I have been told of it, it’s called “Lost” for every reason you would imagine, including that it is very easy to literally lose your sense of direction there as the streets are not on any grid and many are dead ends.

When I realized that the lost phone was in the Lost City, I weighed my options. It was now about 8am, and there was no chance the phone was in the same location as the update 8 hours earlier. This would be incredibly foolish, risking getting into trouble over nothing. But, I calculated* the risks involved, and made a game plan: I would go and somehow try to find the phone, and if, upon arriving there, I thought I might die, I would leave**. I biked to roughly the right block, dismounted and started following the GPS. There was no point in trying to blend in or act natural, so I was just going to be quick. I turned down a small alley from the main avenue off of the dock, and I was in the Lost City. As soon as I turned onto an actual street, a kid who looked to be about 13 came out and stood on the corner behind me. He glanced left and then right — the lookout. I kept walking, trying to figure out the rough epicenter of the elusive phone icon even though I knew it was irrational. I found a shop that was open and showed the phone to the man behind the counter, communicating in perfect Spanish, “Lost phone wife shows here, you know phone? This is a building, a, a place? You know this, is this here?” During our discussion, the kid from the corner came in to browse the chip aisle. Finally the man looked at me and said, “What do you want.” It was in Spanish, but otherwise like that, with a period, not a question mark. I said sorry and thank you and moved on.

*by “calculated,” I mean “thought about”

**if I could leave

My next strategy was to interrupt a family having breakfast in their poorly lit kitchen. You see, the door was open, and morning is as good a time as any to be interrogated by a stranger. Through many apologies, I pointed at my phone, cleared my throat, and explained again in Spanish, “I looking for phone. This map show phone here, or, here there. You know this? No accusation! Lost. I’m sorry.” The kid from the corner and from the chip aisle had also been listening to this, but had run off a minute before, either to get away from this train wreck or to tell his associates that he had just found a new business opportunity for them. It was time for me to go.

Before I could get out my last string of apologies and make myself scarce, the kid came back, and he wasn’t alone.

He had that prima donna of a cell phone with him, and he held it out to me. I was thunderstruck. In the Lost City, in a state in Mexico with a travel advisory from the US State Department, a kid handed me a cell phone that I never expected to see again. I tried to thank him, to tell him how grateful I was that he stepped forward. “Of this, sir you great, honest man.”

I’m not any more prejudiced than the next person, which is to say, I’m as prejudiced as the next person. I did not expect to find the phone or anything else in the Lost City. Least of all did I expect to find a young man with the courage and honesty to hand over something that could have paid his family’s rent for a few months. I hope I don’t have to keep relearning this lesson, to be savvy but assume nothing, that “lost” rarely means what I think it means, especially when people are involved, and it’s never the final word.

Unexpected color.

English/Spanish language exchange with some eager learners.

Maggie and JPII in Quelite