Mexico City (this one has been waiting around for a long while)

I have kept a Mexico City roadmap in my backpack for all these months, because I was fascinated by the street names.

Most Latin American cities have a variety of streets named after important dates (assumably) in that country’s history. The Centro Historico district of Mexico City is no different: 5 de Mayo (even I got the significance of that one – though I still associate it more with a Corona commercial than its true meaning) and 16 de Semtiebre roads. A variety of roads named after other countries in Latin America: Republica de Uruguay, Republica de El Salvador, Republica de Brasil, Republica de Cuba (the Republic part would be news to most Cubans), Republica de Colombia, and so on. I didn’t notice a Republica de Estados Unidos, but since we had taken about a third of Mexico from them a couple hundred years ago, that didn’t exactly surprise me.

It was the other districts of town that I really found interesting.

The San Miguel Chapultepec area seemed to have all of its streets named in a military fashion: General Molinos del Campo, General Zuaza, General Leon, General Gomez Pedraza.

The Cuauhtemoc district had all its streets named after international cities: Londres, Liverpool, Tokyo, Genoa, Oslo, Copenhagen, Roma. Once again, no streets named after American cities. Hmmmmm. Liverpool and Hamburg get streets named after them (and pretty big ones in fact), but no Nuevo York or Chicago street?? I could understand why no Los Angeles avenue – we did sorta take California from them – but what about some cities east of the Mississippi?

Right across the Paseo de la Reforma was the Cuauhtemoc district with streets all named after rivers: Rio Nilo, Rio Po, Rio Tigris, Rio Elba, Rio Amazonas, Rio Sena, and . . . Rio Hudson. True, it was only one block long – wedged between Rio Panuco and Rio Lerma – but we made the map!!

The Polanco district was my favorite, all named after famous authors west of the Parque Lincoln (I feel pretty sure that was named after Abe) and famous philosphers and scientists east of that. To the west: Dickens, Moliere, Ibsen, Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, Julio Verne, Alejandro Dumas and Edgar Allen Poe. To the east: Galileo, Aristoteles, Hegel, Newton, Schiller. There did seem to be a bit of confusion on a street here and there in this district: Platon and Socrates streets were to the west and Hans Christian Andersen and Homer were to the east.

The driving was completely and totally insane in Mexico City, but I do have a soft spot for any city where I can get in a cab and say: “take me to Florence and London please – right on the corner will be fine.” Or perhaps “to the bookstore right there at Aristotle and Homer.”

Mexican/Guatemalan border crossing

Dec 27 – border crossing

Border crossings make me nervous. Although I’m not doing anything wrong or carrying anything illegal, I feel trepidation as I approach every single one of them. Even when I traveled to Europe, I felt the same things as I got off the plane, got my luggage and went to the customs area to cross into whatever country where I was arriving.

The Mexican/Guatemalan was an entirely different experience from any of my previous border crossings. As our van approached the border and you began to see Mexican soldiers carrying assault rifles, they looked like M16s. They were stopping northbound cars and trucks entering Mexico to inspect their passengers and cargos.

The sight of law enforcement folks carrying shotguns and automatic weapons is supposed to be a reassuring one – and you see them all over Central America, at banks, hotels, stores and so on – but it doesn’t really inspire me with much of a sense of confidence for my safety. Then again, I haven’t been robbed yet, so perhaps I should be a bit more open minded about the whole thing.

One of the reasons I always have a bit of angst as I approach border crossings is that I despise looking like an idiot. I have a fear that I’ve done something that is going to screw the crossing up – I don’t have the visa money in the right type of currency, or I’m supposed to be in another line than the one I’m in, or I need some sort of document that I haven’t gotten beforehand, or I didn’t get some stamp that I needed at the last border, or whatever.

For this particular crossing I had a specific worry – the Lonely Planet guide that I was using for Central America said that I needed to pay some transit tax to leave Mexico. It was supposed to be about $20 U.S. dollars or so. The book said that you had to purchase it at bank and if you didn’t have it at the crossing, you’d have to find a bank to pay it and get the appropriate document or receipt. When I entered Mexico from the U.S., I asked the border agents there if I needed to pay a “transit tax” because I was leaving Mexico and eventually going to Guatemala. The border agents said I didn’t need one. I asked a few fellow travelers about the issue and they all told me that I didn’t need it also.

The main reason I was slightly worried about it was that I was on a van with about a dozen others traveling from Antigua to Copan and I didn’t know what the van driver would do if I needed to go back somewhere and pay this damn tax. Or whether it would also foul up the crossing for the rest of the van. I asked one of the passengers whether she knew anything about it – she was an American studying Spanish in Guatemala and had come to Antigua for the weekend. She said she had crossed the border a couple of times and didn’t know anything about it.

The van pulled up to the Mexican immigration building. All of us piled out and got in line to get our passports stamped. The girl from Guatemala was a few people ahead of me in line. When she got up to the border agent, they had some sort conversation in Spanish – she was obviously asking him questions back about what he was telling her. He pointed to the left and she walked off that direction. The next few people got their passports stamped without a problem. I got up to the counter, handed over my passport, he asked me something in Spanish, I told him that “me no habla Spanish,” he pointed to the document that I got when I entered the country (they filled out some one page form and stamped it, instead of stamping my passport with the visa stamp) and said something that I translated as “you need to pay the transit tax” and pointed off to the left.

Luckily, the girl from Guatemala was over there when I got there and she was paying this mysterious transit tax. She was trying to get an explanation from the official in this building, but she never really got any solid reason for why just the two of us had to pay the tax. No one else on the van had to pay it. She at least explained to me how much it was and made sure I did the transaction properly. It was about $12 and I just handed over the cash, got my new stamp on my document, and went back in line.

After we left the Mexican immigration office we continued driving down the road towards the Guatemalan side of the border. Although it had a definite Latin American flavor to it, it started to feel like some modern version of an Indiana Jones movie – the scenes where Indiana Jones has arrived in some Middle Eastern city, with monkeys running around, people everywhere, organized chaos.

This had a feel like that for me – organized chaos. Although it looked completely chaotic, there was some sort of organization there. Its just that I had absolutely no idea what sort of organization it was.

There was trash everywhere. As we got closer to the border, and I imagined as we got further and further away from any remnants of governmental oversight, there were two huge piles of trash that were being burned, right by the side of the road. Piles of burning plastic bottles and other garbage spewing God-only-knows-what type of pollution and dioxins into the atmosphere is one of the signs I expected in a true 3rd world country, not Mexico.

It felt like we were in a no-mans zone between the borders. To be more specific, it appeared to be a no-law zone. Sort of a modern Wild West.

Well, frankly. Not THAT modern.

A rather large shantytown had taken root on both sides of the border. There was an open market than ran on for a half mile or so, selling everything you can imagine. Clothes, DVDs, bicycles, fruit, fireworks, and on and on. All of the buildings and market stalls looked like they had been put together in the most haphazard manner possible, and with the cheapest possible materials, many of which appeared to be ingeniously recycled from their original uses.

The van parked on the Mexican side. We all piled out, got out backpacks on, and started hiking up some street towards the border. When we got there, there was a big sign saying, “WECOME TO GUATEMALA.” It was the only English I heard from any official at the border.

We got in line to go through Guatemalan customs. Were surrounded by various moneychangers wanting to swap our dollars or pesos for the local currency. The Mexican van driver swapped out with our new driver on the other side. The Guatemalan guy made sure we were all in the correct line and told me that I didn’t need to change my money here (I didn’t remember from my guidebook whether this was one of the borders that it was good to use the border moneychangers or not). After we stood in the non-moving line for about five minutes, the new van driver grabbed up all our passports and went into the building to try to sort out the crossing.

Apparently he got something going properly. The line slowly moved forward. The guy behind the counter started calling out names of our group and as your name was called you went forward and got your stamped passport. You also had to pay him a couple bucks – although the guidebook said there was no visa fee at this crossing. As in one of my (many, many) favorite lines of Casablanca from Captain Renault, “well, I am only a poor corrupt official.”

Has a better movie ever been made? Every single line in that movie works. Go watch it again – it is one of the funniest movies of all time. “I am shocked. . . shocked that there is gambling going on in this establishment!”

In any case, our new driver/fixer shuffled us through the border crossing and then checked each of our passports to make sure that we were properly stamped. We got in our new van and then drove through the shanty town on the Guatemalan side.

My favorite image on that side: laundry out to dry. . . on top of a barbed wire fence.

San Cristobal to Antigua

If you are planning on doing much traveling in Central America, you are going to take some long bus or van rides. It just comes with the territory. What is amazing about most of these trips though is how few actual miles you cover for the amount of time you spend.

San Cristobal, in the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas, is about 500 miles from Antigua, Guatemala. The van ride took 12 hours. And that was over some pretty good roads, compared to what I am about to experience in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The bus ride cost the equivalent of $30 U.S. dollars.

The van picked me up outside my hotel room at 6 a.m. – if you are traveling down here, you are also going to have to get used to some early departures, my van from Antigua to Copan, Honduras leaves at 4 a.m. The driver drove around town and picked up the remainder of the passengers from other hostels and hotels and we were on the road by 7 or so. The van was a fifteen-passenger van, and we managed thirteen passengers, a driver and luggage in back.

A small aside here, as I am want to do. A few years back, I handled a personal injury case of a college age kid that was taking an overnight van trip from northwest Arkansas to Colorado, to go skiing with his church group. In the middle of the night, the driver fell asleep, the van flipped over, two people ended up dying and my client was pretty severely injured (but luckily had a full recovery). In researching his case, I came across a whole series of lawsuits in the U.S. about the inherent unreliability of fifteen passenger vans (my client was actually in a smaller van, so the research didn’t apply to his case). Suffice it to say that these large, fifteen passenger vans are quite unstable, top heavy, and prone to fishtail out of control and flip over at an alarming rate. As I recall, they now don’t sell these types of vans in the States to schools and such, because of all the injuries, deaths and lawsuits.

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/nhtsa_vans.html

There are many times it is a blessing to have the variety of knowledge that I possess, as a result of my legal education and law career. In this case, I’d rather not have known that I was riding in a van that isn’t sold in the U.S. for safety reasons.

One hour outside of San Cristobal, nine of the thirteen passengers were sound asleep. It is odd that no matter where you are, being a passenger in a vehicle almost always makes one sleepy. One of the two girls in the front seats was awake reading, one girl was knitting in my row, one guy in the far back row was awake listening to his iPod, and I was awake watching the hills of southern Mexico roll by, with my iPod on of course – how travel was manageable before that miraculous invention is beyond me. Everyone else was sound asleep.

And I hope you don’t mind, but I think I shall take a different format for this particular blog and just relay some things I saw and experienced on this route, without making any effort to tie them up neatly in some logical pattern:

• The girl in the middle front seat next to the driver was Japanese. She had spent a year in Seattle learning English and was going back to the Guatemalan town of Xela to continue her Spanish studies, where she had about five months left, after finishing seven already. At one of the stops she told me all of that and when I mentioned that she’d been sleeping almost the entire time, she said she didn’t get back to her hostel until about 4 a.m. before the 6:30 departure.

The way she slept is the same way as most of us all do, when you are in seats that don’t recline. Her head would start nodding lower and lower and lower, then to the left, and then as low as it can physically go. She was out. As the van bumped along and turned this way and that, her head would slowly nod slightly up and down and left and right for twenty or thirty minutes or more. Then at some point, her head would bounce quickly back up to its normal position as she jolted awake. And then slowly nod lower and lower to start the process again. Over and over.

• A white girl in the row behind me had full-blown dreadlocks, down to the middle of her back, braided throughout with little beads and such. She was from Scotland and we talked over coffee at a pit stop later that morning about my golf trip there and how friendly the Scots are. She’d spent three months in Copper Canyon in northern Mexico, which I’d looked into in planning the initial stages of my trip – a place certainly on my to-do list when I get back. She told a few of us awake in the van sometime that morning a story about breaking her arm badly in Ghana a few years ago. She was riding a bike and got hit by a car and then run over by the front tires of a truck, which then stopped before the back tires ran her over also. Some of the locals pulled her out from under the van (a painful experience she’d like to forget) and took her to the local hospital, where she stayed for four days before flying home – to have the arm re-broken and reset in Glasgow.

While she was an interesting sort, I just couldn’t get over the juxtaposition of her appearance and her accent. Somehow the Scottish accent on a white woman with dreadlocks just doesn’t go together. For that matter, lets just go with – no dreadlocks on white people – I’ve seen the look on both black women and men, and it can look pretty good, but I’ve yet to see a white person that can pull it off.

• The two girls sitting on my bench were both from Spain. The girl next to me slept quite a lot on the trip. As we drove down the hills from San Cristobal to the Mexican-Guatemalan border, which is at a much lower elevation, the van snaked its way left and right, down and down. She was like a sack of flour and on every right turn the van took, she would tilt to the left, up against my shoulder, then back to the right as the van turned the other direction. Given the winding nature of the road, she swayed left and right rather rhythmically, almost like a human metronome.

• We drove past by scores of ramshackle little villages, made up of concrete cinderblock houses, almost all capped with plastic, corrugated roofs. Smoke rose from a number of them, as you realized that wood was their only source of both heat and of fires for cooking. Even on the main road, there were speed bumps every so often, so that the van would have to slow to a crawl to just ease over them. The houses were all in the valleys, while forested hills overlooked them. Well, mostly forested hills – some had barren patches, where they had clear-cut the trees. Those looked like someone with a beard had someone with a straightedge razor just do one swipe down the side of his face.

As we turned one corner, off in the distance on one of the hills, I saw a lone solitary, perfectly formed tree, placed upon the top of the ridge overlooking its brethren down below, so that its silhouette stood out beautifully against the light blue sky with two wispy clouds hanging off stilly to its right. It has the look of the tree that was in charge of the whole valley. The jefe. I wished I had some artistic talent at that point – it deserved to be painted.

• There is a hope that with the production of volume and time, that there will be improvement in my quality of writing and powers of observation.

• There are small fields of corn in almost every open space available. Now, in the middle of the winter, the corn stalks all stand empty and dead – a lifeless dull, light shade of brown – the color of weathered paper. They are completely withered and parched, only standing upright at all out of habit, ready to be plowed under to soon start the cycle anew.

There is something quite peaceful about movement overland. A feeling you don’t get by flying – the feeling that you are actually seeing the world – chewing up the miles slowly. Truly traveling. Quite peaceful.

Mayans, Marriage, Coca-Cola, and Chickens

Today, I took a tour of a couple local Tzotzil Mayan towns near San Cristobal, which is the city in southern Mexico that I’ve been staying in for the last couple of days.

Our guide for the five-hour tour was Julio, a local Mayan (from a different group than the people we were visiting) who spoke excellent English. I seriously need to make an effort to learn a foreign language – everyone speaks my own language better than I do, and for most of them it is there 3rd or 4th language. It was Julio’s 3rd language. His native language was one of the versions of Mayan (his parents still won’t let him speak anything else in their home), his second language was Spanish, and his third was English. I think he spoke some French also.

Pictures of the people are prohibited in both of the Mayan towns we were going to visit, because they feel that pictures steal part of their soul. The guidebooks mentioned that you had to ask anyone in this area to take their picture before you did, and that there were accounts of people getting beaten up for taking unauthorized pictures.

In the first small village we went to, we went into one of the three room concrete homes to watch one of the local women weave and for Julio to give us a run-down on Mayan culture. The tour group obviously had some sort of deal with this family, so we were permitted to take some pictures inside the house.

The floor of the house was a well-poured and level concrete slab. The main room, where the woman was weaving, must have been the main sleeping room of the house. At night, cots or whatever were pulled out and the family slept there. In the front of the house, there was a small room that was dedicated to a Catholic shrine of various statutes of saints, lit candles and such. There was a sink and a bathroom, so the house did have indoor plumbing. In the back of the house was the kitchen – a room with a dirt floor, some benches, a couple tables and two open fires. When we first entered the room, we could see one of the fires in the kitchen, but we became much more aware of it about twenty minutes later, when the wind shifted, began blowing into the kitchen from the one doorway leading out to the back, and filled the house with smoke.

Julio ran down some of the highpoints of current Mayan culture, with emphasis on marriage rites. Apparently polygamy is alive and well in this region. If a wife could not produce a male heir after the first three or so children, the husband was free to go and purchase another wife, in order to get a son.

And purchase seemed the right term. The family sizes were large. Julio came from a family of twelve and he said that was about average. When a boy reached the age of sixteen to eighteen, his family would pick out a bride. Apparently, it’s not a total arraigned marriage, the prospective bride, and especially the groom, had a say in whom was going to marry whom. The going rate -- I like to think of it more of a dowry than a straight purchase -- was about $25,000 pesos ($2,000 dollars or so) and a cow. Or as Julio shrugged and said, “40,000 for a pretty girl. Go ahead and just take the ugly one for free.”

And I thought we overemphasized looks back in the States.

The lecture was good and fairly informative, but then there was a demonstration. Julio asked a married couple on the tour from Italy to play the bride and groom, me to be the godfather (in my case, think more classic Brando than Catholic please) and another woman to be the godmother. We then all put on traditional garb for the occasion of the wedding.

From San Cristobal

That is me on the right above. The Godfather.

From San Cristobal

There was a bunch of symbolism in everything we wore. I don’t remember too much of it. The groom’s hat represented the universe and the colored bits of cloth on the back of the hat were all good luck colors. The bride wears virginal white – and I think they actually mean that in this culture. Julio mentioned something about the girls being “protected” until they were married. Methinks the fathers might be a little rough on anyone prematurely deflowering one of their daughters.

The ruffles at the bottom of her dress represent one of the Mayan gods protecting her in her marriage. My headdress is a sign of intelligence – to keep my brainpower in there, I suppose. I guess I’ll have to start wearing hats more.

A very nice older gentleman took my camera from me as they put on the custom and took a few pictures of me in my garb. I so wish the other picture would have been in focus, because after Julio explained the basics of the wedding ceremony – which lasts for three full days – the Mayan family handed each of us a plastic shot glass of the local liquor, posch, which came in three colors. I chose red. We all toasted the ‘bride and groom’ and down the hatch it went. It wasn’t too bad, actually. Sort of a grain alcohol with a slightly fruity flavor.

I checked my watch. It was 10:45 a.m. A bit early for shots, but if in Maya. . .

A quick tour of the inside, open-fired kitchen. Some homemade tortillas. Much coughing from all the smoke and then we were off.

From San Cristobal

We then went to the much larger town of San Juan Chamula. I don’t have any pictures from this town, because Julio said we not only didn’t have permission, but that today and tomorrow were special days and that “there were many authorities around.” Apparently, they really take the no-picture policy seriously. You could tell from Julio’s facial expression that he was quite serious about it also. I wasn’t up for getting punched our or arrested, so you shall have to settle for my verbal descriptions.

At the end of the year, the local Mayan population elects new mayordomos, who apparently are the local elected honchos for political and religious purposes. We were there on one of the party days, where the exiting mayordomos were throwing a big public party for the town. There were a few hundred people out in front of the main church in the public square, some singing, fireworks – mostly very loud firecrackers, and religious chanting my the mayordomos to the observing crowd.

Julio led us inside the church, which was called the Templo San Juan. It was a fascinating combination of Catholic and Mayan inside and Julio filled us in on some of the local religious practices.

The one practice that San Juan Chamula is famous for, as written in the guidebooks, is that the residents drink Coca-Cola in order to burp, because burping helped evict bad spirits. As Julio explained more fully, the local shamans (I don’t think there were any Catholic priests) would take the pulse of someone and determine what illness or ailment they had. The most frequent remedy was that the parishioner was told to mix a combination of Coca-Cola and posch, the lovely local liquor I got a sample of earlier, and drink up. The resulting burps did indeed help rid of the body of what ailed you.

O yea – and you were usually also to bring a live chicken into the church and ritualistically sacrifice it by breaking its neck. In the church. Breaking its neck was to symbolize the breaking of the illness that you had.

One of my favorite aspects of this was why they were to use Coca-Cola. For this purpose it is referred to as the ‘black water of hell.’

Not sure that’s the same for Diet Coke though, so most of you are safe.

The inside of the church was white. White tiles on the floor. White washed walls. And white candles everywhere. Around the walls of the church were wooden display cases, encased in glass, with two to three foot tall, full-body dolls representing various saints. All of the cases were labeled, so you knew to whom you were praying – Virgen de Magdalena, Santo Thomas, Santo Marta, and so on. There were probably thirty of them or so. In front of most were tables that were filled with lit candles contained in glasses, most of which had some religious writing on the outside celebrating Mary. Most tables appeared to have about fifty or sixty candles on them – each table was entirely covered.

Pine needles were strewn about the floor of the church and there were about a dozen people on their knees on the tile praying in front of more candles that they had lined up on the floor and lit. Some were praying towards one of the display cases containing a saint and others were just out in the middle, praying towards the alter in the front of the church. Most had about 20-40 candles lit in front of them. Most also had bottles of Coca-Cola and some had eggs in plastic bags. I think Julio said something about the eggs, but I frankly don’t remember.

I was walking around the church with Elvira and Maaike (I hope I got those spellings correct), two beautiful women from the Netherlands that I’d been talking to on the tour. Taking it all in was a job for multiple people and multiple eyes. At one point I heard a cell phone ring, but didn’t think anything of it.

Maaike tapped me on the shoulder and pointed towards a Mayan guy who appeared to be in his mid-50s. I had noticed him earlier, because he had a most impressive display of candles lit in front of him on the floor – about 80 or so. He had been chanting some sort of prayer in the local language as I’d passed by him. When Maaike tapped my shoulder, I turned around and noticed he was the one whose cell phone had rang, and he was sitting there on the floor having a loud conversation with someone on the phone. It was apparent that it was just a normal, non-religious conversation. After three or four minutes of that, he got back on his knees and then started chanting or praying again – this time with the cell phone still open and up to his ear.

I’m guessing that someone couldn’t make it to church, so they called their prayer in. An idea for the rest of us?

As the three of us approached the alter in the front, we saw two woman down on their knees. One woman was chanting non-stop. I couldn’t understand whether it was one prayer over and over and over again or different content, but we watched her for over fifteen minutes and she never stopped. Why did we watch her that long?

Because the other woman was holding a small chicken by its hind-legs next to the praying woman.

The chicken was still alive. Every once in a while you could see its head move this way and that, but it mostly just laid there completely docile, as if it knew what was coming. Interestingly, there was one empty soda bottle next to the chanting woman and also one that was still full – but it was Pepsi, not Coke. In the Cola Wars for your soul, both sides are apparently equal combatants.

We waited for about fifteen or twenty minutes to see the climatic moment, but it never came. The bus was due to leave and so, alas, I did not get to see my first animal sacrifice.

Although the whole experience was quite interesting and a unique glimpse into a completely different culture, I felt like such a religious voyeur. It was odd seeing people performing their worship, obviously diligent and sincere and not an act for tourist consumption, while walking around their church watching them and wearing a fanny pack.

Or maybe it’s just that I always feel odd wearing a fanny pack.

From San Cristobal

Julio, our guide.

From San Cristobal

Tony from Tuxtla

I met Tony in the TAPO bus station in Mexico City (there are four large bus stations in town). I was waiting for my bus to Oaxaca, which was scheduled to leave at 6:30 p.m. and didn’t arrive until about 1 a.m. ($388 Mexican pesos, which at 13 pesos to the dollar, was about $30 dollars U.S.). When Heidi looked up the bus schedules that morning, I was aiming for a bus that left at 4 p.m., but by the time I got to the station at 2 or so, that bus was completely sold out. Tony had been in the station since 7 a.m. for his 13-hour bus ride back to his hometown of Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital town of the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas. His bus didn’t leave until 7 p.m., so he was going to do a smooth twelve hours in the station and then another thirteen on the road. He said that Christmas traffic was to blame and I didn’t doubt him, given the crowd at the station.

He spoke excellent English. For a number of years, he lived in San Luis Obispo, California, doing various jobs. When I sat down on the floor next to him, he immediately struck up a conversation on a variety of topics. In this situations, there are really only two possibilities – the person striking up a conversation is so boring or annoying that you have to make an excuse to get up and leave or they are interesting enough to make you want to talk to them for a couple hours.

One makes this decision in less than two minutes. Tony was definitely the later.

Tony had crossed the border a number of times, both legally and illegally. Before 9/11, he said he talked his way over the border at a crossing from Tijuana. The border agent stopped him at the crossing and asked for his passport. He spoke fine English, so he told the agent that he’d just been in Tijuana for a friend’s bachelor party the night before and that someone stole his wallet, so he didn’t have any ID. The border agent took Tony to see his supervisor, who was a blond haired, blue-eyed, attractive woman in her late 20s. Tony apparently flirted his way over the border. Whether true or not, I thought the spirit was admirable.

Dating was a subject he had some opinions on. It seemed that Tony was an equal opportunity dater. While in the U.S., he had a German girlfriend, one from London, and an Italian one. I asked if he’d had an American girlfriend, but he said ‘foreign’ women liked him more.

He had moved back to his hometown of Tuxtla a couple of years ago and was living with his girlfriend from Honduras (his luck with foreigners continued). They had just found out a couple of weeks ago that she was pregnant. He was quite excited about the whole thing, but he was a bit nervous that he hasn’t met her parents yet. He had been in Mexico City finalizing details of his second job, which was as a regional manager of some fast-food restaurants all around Chiapas. The prospect of making some reasonable money was exciting to him – he was saving up some money, so that he could buy some nice gifts for his girlfriend’s family before he went to meet them for the first time. His other job was as a recruiter to the local university.

He wants to go to law school in the near future (he appeared to be in his mid-20s), because he ‘wanted to make a difference.’ I may be slightly jaded about my profession, but I certainly admired his desire. He said the law school program was five years and that he could do it during the day, while keeping his manager job at night. The degree program was a combination of your undergraduate degree and your law degree. You could go on past that to get your Doctorate of Laws, which is actually what all of us lawyers in the States have (J.D. degree, or Juris Doctor).

As a side note, I had heard this Doctorate of Laws stuff a few years back, when I was visiting Germany. Apparently they have the same sort of split law degree education that Mexico has. Because I was a Doctor of Laws, they viewed me as some sort of impressive person. Occasionally when I mentioned to Germans that I was a lawyer, they asked if I had gotten my doctorate – as all of us U.S. lawyers had, of course I said yes. It didn’t mean much to me, but when I’m in Germany, I do want to be referred to as “Herr Doctor Hodson.” I take the respect any way I can get it.

In any case, back to Tony. He originally wanted to be a policeman, but after talking to a couple of his cousins, who were Federalies, he decided on law school. Apparently when he told his cousins that he wanted to be a cop in order to make a positive difference, they were less than impressed. They replied that he wasn’t willing to be a dirty cop, he’d probably be dead in a few years. Pretty much everyone who I talked to in Mexico felt that same way about the police. They were everywhere – I’d literally never seen more cops or cop cars in my life, anywhere – but there is still a huge crime problem all through Mexico.

When I asked Heidi about the strange dichotomy of seeing police everywhere and still having a very high crime rate, she replied, “most of the time, the cops are the ones causing the crime.”

Tony also liked to talk politics. He educated me a little bit about Mexican politics – he liked the new President, but there were already frequent rumors that he was being paid off by the big narco-criminals. He was also shocked that the U.S. had elected a black President over a white woman, Hillary, and a white man, McCain. The people he talked to in his hometown thought that it said a lot of good things about the States, that we’d been willing to elect a black man President. Can’t say that I disagree with him on that.

All of this conversation wouldn’t probably have meant too much to me, except that Tony went above and beyond in the middle of all this chatter. It was still a couple hours until my bus arrived and he asked if I had reserved a hotel room in Oaxaca for the night. I told him that I hadn’t yet, but I was going to go to the bus station’s internet café and see what options were out there for me, since I was going to arrive so late.

So I went to look up various hotels on the internet, sent some emails to some of them asking about rooms, and wrote down 5-6 telephone numbers to call, although I didn’t have a cell phone. While I sat there for an hour or so looking stuff up online, no hotel replied to my email, so I tried calling a couple of the hotels that had toll-free (800) numbers on pay phones. Even with my very, very rudimentary Spanish, I understood that they were booked and I didn’t know enough Spanish to ask for other hotel suggestions.

I went back to where Tony was waiting and asked him a favor: would be mind calling a few of the non-(800) numbers on his cell phone and ask them room availability for the night? He immediately said, “no problem,” and started dialing. He got me a room on his third call. He thought I was paying too much for the room (about $60 U.S.), but I told him it was fine, I just needed to make sure I arrived in the middle of the night with a place to stay.

I thanked him over and over and offered to buy him dinner for his favor, but he’d eaten while I was at the internet café. He said that he didn’t believe in karma per se, but that he thought there was no good reason to not be helpful to someone that needed some help.

It is really refreshing to meet truly nice people that are being good for no particular reason. I’ll never see Tony again in my life – we didn’t even exchange email addresses – but I’ll remember his as the first act of random kindness on my journey.