• Reality Biting

  Filed under Blog Notes
  Jan 8

  Yahoo!

   

  Some observations about Mexico. It is chock full of Mexicans. English is not necessarily spoken, which, believe it or not, threw me for a complete loop. I don’t know why…for some reason it freaked me out to get to Immigration on the Mexican side and find that there was not even a cheat sheet for gringos. No. You are in Mexico now. In Mexico, the language is Spanish. Therefore, since you are in Mexico, speak Spanish. By the way, for those of you who think it’s a constructive use of time to natter on endlessly about whether English should be the official language of the States? Wow. The Mexicans don’t have any such conversation happening.

  I notice something else. When you speak English, there is no reason for anyone to listen to you if they don’t want to. Maybe they do want to, which can lead to a conversation of hand signals combined with the cannabilized spanish that is a rung or two below spanglish. That’s what Bruno speaks, and he sounds, mostly, like an Italian with Tourettes. Still, his efforts are generally well received. If you are speaking English and trying to make yourself understood, and whoever it is you are speaking to feels that Spanish is called for, then Bruno-Spanish is better than English. In that case English turns into Harry Potters cloak, and renders you completely invisible. There is a  flip side, which happens to me more than I care to admit, and that is if you are speaking Spanish and whoever it is you’re talking to is in a hurry. In that case, there’s a pretty good possibility of your waiter suddenly switching to unaccented L.A. style Americanese. That can’t be counted on, though. Besides, Spanish is so much fun. Everytime I learn a new word I’m thrilled to death when I can use it in a sentence, and the maid and gardener, at least, have a vested interest in helping me along.

  We spent one night in Laredo, a dark and desperate place if ever there was one. It is almost impossible to describe how ugly it is, and I apologize to the Rotary, or anyone else who may take offense. I frankly don’t believe for a minute that there is some hidden gracious Laredo full of historic charm, but if there is, you need to move it closer to the highway. Everything I saw in an afternoon of driving around looked like a low rent strip mall in really awful colors. Hideous. Having said that, however, it’s not Mexico, any more that San Antonio with it’s gorgeous River Walk and Mission architecture is Mexico, although it seems really, really Mexican. I guess that’s why I was so thrown when we actually got to Mexico, and ran into the whole language thing.

  I find myself feeling a little panicked, now that we’re here. I did expect everything to fall into place, and I was aware of it, in a weird outer-body-experience kind of way. Any time any practical consideration came up I would just wave it off with the assumption that it would take care of itself once we actually arrived. We’ve been here for a month now and nothing really has happened. At all. I haven’t met a lot of people, or been given a fabulous business opportunity or even started a new weight loss initiative, always a centerpiece of any action plan for lifelong happiness that I have. Mostly I’ve been watching a lot of TV since we got the dish hooked up. The Bachelor in Rome. Real World/Road Rules. Lifetime TV. We have the exact same channel line up we had in Virgina, courtesy of Satellite TV. Which for some reason seems more strange than if they were all different.

  
  
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