Recently in Travel Category

Two completely new experiences within one week...a trip to Vicksburg, MS and a signup on Flickr. Yes, I've finally caved. Photo gallery is linked from the picture above.

Most commentary from the trip is on the pictures but I would be remiss if I didn't mention those that took care of me - the band for putting me and my hosts on the guest list AND taking my "Mountain Cry" request, and my generous host who not only showed me around town and took me to see the sights but also put me up at his parents' house, a mere 10 minutes from the venue. Saved me a ton of money and a lot of lonesome time.

Congratulations to my friend Chris and his lovely bride Marissa - more wedding stories to follow, but a selection of pictures in the meantime...

The ushers (Joe & me), groomsman #1 (Chris G), the groom (Chris S), the best man (Chris C), and groomsman #2 (Tony)

The ceremony

Just married!

Goofing around

At the reception

Here comes the airplane, into the hangar...

THE BAND! (Jake & Elwood not included)

Now two married couples

Champagne, water, Altoids and Tylenol. The ending to a perfect day.

…and up at 6. I’d been warned ahead of time about the traffic on the way to the airport – it’s about 20 miles from our hotel – so I’d been advised to leave at 6 if possible. I rolled out around 6:40…and got in at 7. For a 10 o’clock flight. So I caught up on my writing.

Five things I learned about Mexico:
1) “Bueno”, the typical phone greeting when you pick up a call, dates from the days when phone lines were so unreliable that people asked ¿bueno? to find out if the connection was good.
2) Many Mexico City taxis are old-style VW Bugs – the last functioning Bug factory was in Mexico, and the last one rolled off the line less than ten years ago, so many of them are still in service. But since there’s no back door to a Bug, most ones used for taxis have had the passenger seat removed so the back is more easily accessible. Very nice leg room for 6’3” gringos like me.
3) The yellow sauce is mild, the red sauce is hot, and the green sauce is infernal. Unless the yellow sauce is one step up from the green. Or unless the house chipotle sauce comes in a squeeze bottle, encouraging you to give it a good squeeze. Not the best idea. I managed to narrowly avoid this, but one of the client editors was sweating up a storm for the remainder of lunch after putting a little too much on his chicharrones.
4) Mexicans like their cigarettes. To the extent where in the restroom at the office we were working at, there was an ashtray bolted to the top of one of the toilet paper dispensers.
5) ESPN is equally as idiomatic in Spanish as it is in English. “Madera y fuera” ("wood and out") was one of the less-annoying home run calls on SportsCenter. And oddly, they pronounce ESPN the same as in English, rather than eh-eseh-peh-eneh.

And while I’m at it, one thing I learned about Atlanta – apparently you can do all of the implying and outright stating that you want about explosive devices in the airport and not much of anything will come of it. As I went through the security checkpoint in Atlanta after clearing customs and immigration, one of the TSA workers pulled a man aside for a random search. Upon asking him to remove his sneakers, he said – and I swear I am not making this up – “Oh, is that because o’ that SHEW BOMBER?” I was probably no more than 15 feet away, picking up my laptop and case off the conveyor belt. Of course, I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing, so my head snapped up and looked over at the guy. The TSA agent looked right at me, shrugged, and rolled her eyes. But Cletus wasn’t quite finished: “I mean, a BOMB in a SHEW? That’s just SILLY!”

The last day in Mexico! Monday is Labor Day here in Mexico, and it was interesting to see that of the traditions I enjoyed most while in Spain – the puente, or lengthening of an already long weekend – is alive and well in Mexico. We came down to the lobby at 7:30 to find it absolutely overrun with college-age kids. Whereas we’d been seated immediately for breakfast the last three days, we had to wait a good 15 minutes this time around.

From the start, today had been designated an extra-work day – since I was only going to be working for four days, and since there were six units to be released at the rate of one per day – we knew going in that Cliff would have to be doing the last third of the project on his own. But thanks to the excellent production department – and a quirk of the schedule that dropped one pass from the last unit - they were able to leapfrog Unit 6 over 4 and 5 for when we arrived that morning, and then feed us Unit 4 to review later on in the hotel. And a good thing, too, since losing a pass meant that the text was a total disaster. We ended up having to rewrite a half-dozen activities completely, and I’m not a creative person to begin with when it comes to writing lesson plans in the first place. Fortunately we were able to recycle some of the previous activities so it wasn’t a total loss, but all the time we though we’d gained over the previous days was pretty much dedicated to pulling these two grades out. Ugh.

Lunch was a quickie order-in; we got all sorts of empanadas along with agua de Jamaica, the Mexican version of homemade Kool-Aid. Mine were pierna – pork loin – and milanesa – breaded chicken filet. All of the sandwiches came with lettuce, tomato and avocado. While neither Cliff nor I are big fans of avocados – which pretty much means we’ll never pass for natives – they fit these sandwiches perfectly, and after stuffing ourselves with sweet sweet energy-providing sammiches, we went once more into the breach.

Things were still pretty gruesome after lunch, but the promise of dinner awaited us, so we plugged on. Things wrapped up around 9:15, we grabbed our extra evening work and dropped it off at our hotel along with our laptops. And then it was off to my farewell dinner. We had reservations at La Casa de las Sirenas (The House of the Mermaids), which we had been told was in the historical center of town, near the cathedral. Mental note: when they say near the cathedral, they mean NEAR THE CATHEDRAL. we turned down a chained-off road, drove all the way to the end, and climbed three flights of stairs to get to an outside terrace. Upon going through the final door out to our table, we looked across from us and saw the side and back courtyard of the cathedral, spectacularly lit in all of its glory. We could also see the Palacio del Gobierno (Government Palace) and part of the ruins of the Templo Mayor, the original main temple built by the Aztecs when they build the city of Tenochtitlán. The temple was later mostly disassembled and its bricks used for the cathedral, but parts of it are still visible. It’s too bad it was dark because it would have been nice to take a walk around the Zócalo (the main plaza), but instead, the entirety of my tourist view of Mexico was from the back seat of a Renault in a brief spin through the neighborhood.

Our party of twelve had a table waiting for us, and after a round of drinks, we all ordered heartily. My dinner started off with a caldo mixteco, a spicy tomato-based broth with rice and shrimp. It reminded me quite a bit of the spitfire shrimp that Mrs. Dave is known to prepare from time to time, and needed a roll or two to calm things down before the main course. My entrée went by the name of filete de cazuela, and consisted of a beef filet covered in hot peppers, served on top of a flour tortilla. On the side were two slices of queso panela, a type of white cheese, and and two pieces of nopal, better known as prickly pear cactus. And once the first round of beer had finished, Cliff and I ordered up a couple glasses of tequila añejo, the aged stuff that’s darker and much smoother than the white stuff that’ll pickle your Adam’s apple in a hurry.

The night ended with some pleasant farewells, and after Cliff and I were dropped off at our hotels, we said our goodbyes to our chauffeur/co-workers as well. Despite the clock having ticked past midnight already, we sat down with more page proofs and worked until 2:30 before surrendering in the interest of three hours of sleep…

Despite the late hour of last night’s turn-in, we were up bright and early the next morning since we knew what awaited us – the arrival of the client editors. While we were tackling all of the core lesson pages of the program, they were writing all of the interleaf, frontmatter and endmatter pages, which were on the same delayed schedule as our part of the project. Since they’d gotten in the previous afternoon, we assumed they’d be raring to go given the rapidly-approaching due date, so we planned our arrival at work for closer to 8:30 than 9, determined to make a good impression.

Unfortunately, we got there so early that there was no work to do for a good half-hour. Fortunately, the other editors didn’t roll in until 10:30, after which they got the same tour we had gotten, and didn’t start work until at least 11:15. By then we were well on our way, killing off one grade each before our 2pm lunch.

As opposed to the two previous days’ lunches, this midday meal was at a place right down the block, so we walked instead of taking a car – much easier when there are ten of us. The Casa del Toño whisked us in to a table that had already been set up for us (according to the manager, they eat there all the time, and he joked that he wished it was a little further away so that he could walk off the 10 kilos he’d put on since it opened two years ago). I got to know our fellow editors over a bowl of pozole – a corn-based soup with chicken and perhaps a little more hot sauce than I should have added. My main course was a quesadilla, but this one had no resemblance to the flour-tortillas-and-cheese combinations you’d get at most Mexican food places in the US. This was a fried corn tortilla stuffed with cheese (hence quesadilla – literally, “little cheesy thing”) and shredded beef. The whole thing was folded over to make a roughly football-shaped thing that I dug into with gusto. Maybe the best lunch of the entire trip. I would say best meal, but the last dinner would prove to take the overall cake. One more michelada and a flan later, we were back in the office. We stayed until 8:30 again, caught the Barcelona-Milan soccer game over another dinner in the hotel bar, and called it a night.

Another 7am wakeup call courtesy of Nokia, another breakfast in the downstairs café. No chilaquiles this morning though – the lunchtime tacos and the late-night dinner were still with me, so a little bit of fruit, a little bit of donut, and a lot of coffee. Two cups just like the previous morning, plus a fresh one once we got to work…got to get ourselves good and wired because if we’re working until 9:15 each night, we’re going to need it.

Unit 2 wasn’t nearly as bad as Unit 1 and we actually got a fair bit of work done by lunchtime. This time it was off to Chon y Chano’s, a local taquería, where I was introduced to sopa azteca, a thin tomato-based soup with corn tortilla strips, Oaxaca cheese, a slice of avocado, and a huge chile ancho served across the top. The chile was apparently decorative, as I found out from one of our lunchmates. Good thing, as I took a nibble and it basically tasted like solidified smoke. Of course, just about everything in Mexico smells like solidified smoke between the traffic and the cancer sticks.

After the soup I dug into my tacos insuperables con bistec y queso - literally, unbeatable beef and cheese tacos. For some unknown reason they also came with a garnish of what appeared to be a huge radish slice and some pretty wilted greenery, which everyone else also received and promptly cast aside. Yep, we’re all meatatarians. These tacos were roll your own – a half-dozen flour tortillas and a big steaming pile of grilled beef, cheese, onions and spices. I also elected to try some of the hot sauce, some of the pico de gallo (chopped tomato, onion and scallion topping – sort of like salsa without the liquid), and perhaps the most common meal topping, key lime juice. Just about every meal is served with a plate of key limes, which the locals will grab and drizzle over just about everything. I can’t say I blame them as it’s quite flavorful. They even have a contraption that looks like the bastard child of a garlic press and an ice cream scoop so you can squeeze without getting your hands all limey.

I attempted to order a Pepsi this time around – to make my afternoon more productive – but that fell by the wayside as they practically harangued me into ordering a beer. So, feeling adventurous, I joined several of our tablemates in ordering a michelada. At first I thought it was a brand of beer, but instead, a michelada is a way of drinking it – they bring you a beer mug with a salted rim, and maybe a half-inch of liquid in the bottom that’s a mixture of lime juice, chili powder and other stuff. The beer mixes with the other tastes to make a salty-tart combination that’s guaranteed to wake you up, as well as kill houseplants from 25 yards.

After some leisurely chatter about Mexican history and geography and a fruit cocktail dessert (only ordered by one of us, who was in no hurry to get back to the office – of course, he wasn’t the one working on the project, natch), they finally released us back to our task, which we wrapped up by 7 or 7:30. Since I’ll be leaving Friday morning and will be abandoning poor Cliff to finish up the last two units on his own, we decided to stay an extra half-hour and plow through some Unit 3 pages that they’d given us while waiting for the balance of the Unit 2 pages. Hopefully we can get ahead to the point where my poor coworker has two full days to do the last unit on his own, since I don’t see how one person can do a unit a day. We’ll see.

Back to the hotel by 8:30 or so, whereupon we hit the café downstairs for some dinner. As opposed to the previous night when the place was practically empty, we walked in to see a crowd circled around the TV set, watching the presidential debates. No big deal to us Americans, but my coworker informed me that these were actually the first presidential debates in the history of the country – a Really Big Deal, in other words. Apparently the same political party had been in power for 70 years before Vicente Fox won the last elections, in 2000, and while there had always been other parties, they had been more or less insignificant, as the “reelection” was more of a line of succession over seven decades, pretty much rendering the debate idea undesirable for those in power. There were four candidates in the race, and I got a bit of background on the parties my coworker was familiar with, which definitely helped to understand where each was coming from. Things wrapped up there around 10, and we headed upstairs to unwind before hitting the hay at about 12:30. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that last night’s bout with snoring was not an aberration, which explains why I’m up at 6am writing this – from a chair near the elevator outside our room.

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…

There’s nothing quite like being handed a big wad of cash.

So as previously mentioned, on Thursday it was decided that my presence was needed to grace the general Mexico City area, so plans were quickly set in motion to procure a flight and hotel room for the duration of my stay. I’d be meeting another editor there, Cliff, who lives in Mexico with his wife. The one minor complication: while our client was going to finance the trip, the person normally in charge of covering the up-front expenses for such expenditures – the boss lady – was out of the country at the time. However, as the head geek in the office, I had access to the company credit card number, so I declared an emergency situation and pulled it out.

Meanwhile, in another part of the world, the boss lady had managed to get herself stranded in Venice, on her way back from vacationing in Rome. Tough life, I know. Apparently there was a delay and they missed their flight back to the US, so she was attempting to reroute her flight. However, she made the mistake of trying to use the same credit card, which had a daily limit. Said limit would have been exceeded with her new plane tickets, but since she wasn’t expecting strange expensive charges to it, and since she lacked the means of communicating with the home office, she managed to get herself into a bit of a pickle. Or a bigger pickle (a cucumber?).

She finally managed to get through to us and figure out what was up, so once that was resolved, she invited me over to her house to pick up some spending money before I left for Mexico this morning. But of course, a visit is never just as simple as stop by, pick up, and leave – instead, she had to hand off the souvenirs from Venice she’d bought for everyone in the office, because of course I’d need them during the next week. And it’s not like the car in her driveway with my wife in the front, my suitcase in the back, and the engine running meant we were in a hurry to go anywhere. So I got myself a little silver bell, the largest pen known to man (a 12-inch-long, one-inch-thick behemoth filled with water and a little floating gondola – A FLOATING GONDOLA, PEOPLE) and an envelope of caaaaaaaaash money.

My seatmate from Boston to Atlanta dozed the whole way down, but a Mr. Grumpy sat to my right on the Atlanta-Mexico City leg. The Grumpster said it was his eleventh week going to Mexico City, advised me that the plane trip was the last chance to get ice without repercussions, and related that he was more of an American Mexican food man than a Mexican Mexican food man. Oh, and as the topper, he took the time to show me a little news story in USA Today about two police officers in Acapulco who had been found decapitated, apparently as revenge for four drug dealers that had been killed in a gunfight the week before. Thanks Mr. Grumpy!

Fortunately, our flight got in on time, and Cliff made it to the airport just in time to meet me after I cleared customs and immigration. And now we’re lounging at the Hotel Casa Inn. Yes, that’s right, it’s not just a hotel, it’s not just a casa, and certainly not just an inn – it’s the Hotel Casa Inn! They left out Resort Casino & Taxidermy Shop, I think…

Warning, back-dated entry ahead...

The two shows have already been chronicled elsewhere (see here and here), but briefly, a very entertaining weekend and I'm glad we had the chance to visit Mel and give her one last Guster-in-LA hurrah before her now-impending move to Houston. Our next road trip, perhaps? The shows were great fun - it's really unbelievable how gracious the band and crew are in hanging out with our sleepy, eyelid-heavy asses up to two hours before they're due to board their bus for the long trek to San Francisco.

One of the most serendipitous document of the shows was this photo, courtesy of a fan who posted it a week later in her own review. I'm checking my levels in that picture, which accurately depicts just how ridiculously close to the stage we were, and explains the uncharacteristically poor audio I managed to capture - I was far too close and it was far too crowded to set them properly, so it overloaded the mics quite a bit. Many thanks to the venue for charging $500 for open taping, necessitating the low-profile action. There are a few more photos on the above-linked review page, mostly of my glasses and nose - basically any picture she took of Adam has my 6'3"-high head in it. Apologies to those who stood behind me. The fruits of my labor can be found at archive.org:

Guster, 3-24-06
Guster, 3-25-06

We took the camera but decided not to bring it into either show, opting instead to leave the shooting to a more seasoned photog. Her full flickr set is well worth viewing if you haven't already. The few pictures I'll include from the weekend are actually from Redondo Beach...

L-R: water, more water, Mel, Mrs. Dave, more water

An adventuresome hang-glider availing himself of the high winds that day

A sign you won't see in every neighborhood

Beach flower

Post-wedding and reception pictures...

Everyone was given a handful of rose petals to throw as well as little packets of bird seed. Someone forgot to take their bird seed out of the packet...hope nobody got hurt.

The wedding cake. It was carrot cake, for those of you who are curious.

Mrs. Dave's cousin's children, Mikaeli and Andrea, commandeered the MC's microphone, while Gabrielle danced in front of the bubble machine.

Stefan really had an unfair advantage at the garter toss. I have no idea what Peter is trying to grab at.

The bride & groom's last dance of the evening.

And with that, the last pictures from the Philippines. I was sick all the next day, then packed up and left the day after. Not much fun (or photographic evidence, fortunately).