This site has now been retired. I've moved to my new site Silverknife, where you'll find new blog posts and all my latest projects and photos. These pages will remain for at least a while, as I know some of you are still looking through the archives, but I'm reposting my travel journals and many other articles on the new site. Come and check it out.
Everything here is noise, on a level I've so far not encountered. My room backs onto a truckyard and warehouses where lorries come and go all day and night and (mostly horrendous) Mexican pop music blasts out from a radio pretty much 24/7. Dogs bark, cats fight, crows and other unseen birds scream with deafening volume at each other from the trees, one sounding with eerie accuracy like a child yelling in pain.
When I go exploring, half the shops have big speakers outside playing dance music - several times what I've thought was a nightclub turned out to be an electronics store. The taxi drivers indicate their availability for hire by honking their horns in continuous staccato beeps - it may actually be a form of morse code communication I just can't decipher. On a busy street it adds up to quite a racket.
Once again food is everywhere - there are a dozen restaurants within half a block of the hotel. I quickly find a favourite, a big open-fronted space with a counter at either end and two rectangular, enclosed ones in the middle, each with a rank of round plastic stools. I eventually realise that the counters are all separate establishments with slightly different menus and their own staff (distinguished by the colour of their aprons). A window in the back wall is another business selling twenty different kinds of fresh juice and other drinks and snacks.
Each enamel counter is augmented with collections of antique-looking wooden shelves, cupboards and random bits of furniture, and has its own mini-kitchen with well-worn but spotless burners, hotplates and sinks. The food is prepared right there as you order by two or three women who double up as cooks and waitresses (and when they're not busy they yell to the passersby in the street "Flautas! Gorditas! Cafe! Dulces! Comeda Mexicana!").
I give my allegiance for the week to the Cafe del Norte (second counter from the left, dark blue aprons with red trim) and eat two meals a day there pretty much every day. I try something different every meal - the long thin flautas with chicken, barbacoa (barbecue pork) and bisteck, huge torta sandwiches so stuffed with ham, pork, crumbly cheese, vegetables and avocado that it's impossible to get them in my mouth without a vigorous squashing exercise, huevos al gusto (eggs with fried potatoes, pepper and ham, and pretty much anything else you can think of according to which variation you order) and tamales.
Everything comes with a little jug of hot sauce, a plastic thermal dish of tortillas straight off the griddle and is washed down with Escuis (the most popular soda around here, in various fruity flavours or a cola variant), coffee, or huge (maybe liter-and-a-half) plastic beakers of filtered water, into which the girls juice half a dozen tiny limes and add a spoonful of sugar (soon my favourite drink option).
For breakfast one day I finally try the menudo, a huge bowl of spicy soup or stew made from...wait for it...tripe. Some of you may recall I've tried this deeply controversial dish, basically the lining of a cow's stomach, before, and did not become a fan. But the way these folks prepare it I must admit it's not bad. The big hunks of tripe are kind of slimy and rubbery with an unpleasantly biological aftertaste, but the broth is delicious, richly flavoured and aromatic. It comes with a compartmented tray of sliced (mouth-destroying) jalapeno peppers and finely chopped onions and garlic to adjust to your taste.
On Wednesday, the skies having cleared and sun starting to finally warm the air back up to its former furnace heat, I once again decide to hit the beach. Then I finally get sick. It's not severe, just a stomach upset but it stays with me for two and a half days, making me pretty miserable and requiring that I stay within reach of a guaranteed accessible toilet. I don't blame the handmade food I've been mostly eating (which is always piping hot and prepared with scrupulous care), but a plastic-wrapped chicken sandwich from the grocery store I bought the night before, which definitely had a funny taste to it.
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