Our room is very odd in terms of what it does and doesn’t have. We have a TV…but no remote. We have a safe…but no lock. We have a shower with a handicap bar in it…but no way of getting a wheelchair into the stall, past the toilet and the step up over the threshold. And we have a nightstand with a lamp, a phone…and no alarm clock. Not even a clock of any kind. Not even a sundial. Or a sand timer. Well, you get the idea. I ended up using my cell phone.
Up at 7am (8am east coast time), down to the café for some typical Mexican breakfast fare. I ended up having a couple of molletes (mini-hamburger buns with refried beans and melted cheese), some sausages, a couple of quesadillas, and a few spoonfuls of chilaquiles – fried corn tortillas which are then cooked in a tomato sauce along with garlic, chili peppers, oil, onions until the tortillas are soft again. It sounds like it would give you ridiculously obscene breath but it actually wasn’t overpowering at all. And then it was off to work.
The place we’re working is located in a renovated Victorian-area residence in the center of Mexico City (though this place must have the largest town center in the world, given that there are 20 million people here). We’re up on the third floor of the building in a conference room, which overlooks the rooftop walkway, which overlooks the inner courtyard of the place. The company actually owns two adjoining buildings on the same block; they worked in one while renovating the second one, then moved into that one and are now busy renovating the first. They gave us a tour when we got there, then sat us down at about 10:30 with several sizeable stacks of paper to start tackling. And tackle them we did.
Lunch was at the typically Mexican hour of 2:30 at a place called Sanborn’s. They do lunch right here – we were there a good two hours, everyone had themselves a beer, and we waddled back at 4:30 at full to bursting. I had myself five tacos de cochinito en salsa pibil – pulled-pork tacos with a spicy red sauce – which probably would have been enough for lunch, dinner and maybe a midnight snack. But of course we have to avail ourselves of the local cuisine and take as much advantage as we can. We’re Americans, dammit, and we demand vast quantities of food.
The rest of the afternoon and evening was spent finishing up the first unit’s worth of pages – which unfortunately was the messiest, so it had the most changes. Probably 70% to 80% of the pages had an edit of some sort – far higher than the typical rate – but given that it was the first unit to that stage, we were expecting more work with that one. Unfortunately that meant that we were there until 9:15; back at the hotel by 9:30, a late-night bite at about 10 and then the last half of Jerry Maguire in Spanish (“¡Muéstrame el dinero!” doesn’t quite hold the same punch as “Show me the money!”) before we finally conked out. Well, Cliff conked out and it took me a while – he must have been exhausted since he was snoring loud enough to wake the dead…
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