"It looks like parts of L.A.," Henry said as the bus pulled into an impossibly small lot halfway through the Avenue de la Revolucion, into an alcove on the side of an auspicious building -- so close, in fact, that I thought we were going to hit the wall in front of us. When it came to a complete stop, we disembarked into a welcome center/bus station indoors.
Honestly, it was a little anticlimactic for me in the station. There were little stores all over, catering to the tourists -- it was like being inside a foreign strip mall.
The only difference I found was in the shops themselves. The salespeople, trained to entice customers to buy by sheer will, are hyperagressive. Walking by, they called out, "Hello, senor! Buy your wife pretty things here!" or "Come inside and look senora -- I'm sure than that guy will buy you whatever you want!"
I was startled enough that I didn't even go look. One man, when we paused to look at some Japanese-like swords, told us a story of his two wives and nine children. I felt so guilty that I promised to return after we'd been out on the Avenue.
I'm not sure what I was looking for, really. Maybe just a sense of "otherness" -- assurance that we hadn't just crossed an invisible line, but that we'd really gone somewhere else. Somewhere with a unique culture, new rules, new laws, different people.
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For all the stories told about it, Tijuana's public face tries hard to look less like a place of debauchery than a tourist mecca. The signs were polite, but worded in a way that would put the most straight-laced among us at ease.
We wound our way through the glorified mall, learning quickly to say very little to those who called out selling flowers, ceramics, and knives, to find the open air of Revolucion.
Greeting us were a series of those signs -- "public drunkenness is not tolerated", and "a well-behaved tourist is a welcome tourist!" After pointing them out to Henry, grinning, it occurred to me that its reputation, though greatly exaggerated, must have some truth to warrant such public notices.
"Are you scared at all?" I asked him.
"No. Well...maybe a little."
"Good. Because I feel like a fish out of water."
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I must look like an easy target.
Maybe it is the practiced wide-eyed stare I get in new places; one I was wearing as I looked from sign to sign trying to call on my ten-year-old knowledge of Beginning Spanish I from high school so I could pick words out of the signs that I could recognize.
"Zapatas....that's "shoes", right?"
"Very impressive!" Henry said encouragingly, only serving to fuel the fire in my strange language fascination.
I strained my ears to listen to the conversations of people around me, but heard mostly english mixed with broken spanish. Even the shopkeepers called out in English. I did pretty well with the signs, though -- of the words I learned as a senior in high school, my retention rate ten years later is about half.
Not bad, I thought, picking "preguntas" out of a sign.
"That's "questions", right...?"
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From behind, a man emerged. Wearing sunglasses and smiling, holding out a thick gold chain -- one of many wrapped around his arms.
"You want to buy one of these quality gold chains for your wife? Only forty dollars! High quality. Real gold."
Henry tried to say no. There was no stopping the relentless vendor, though.
"You like silver instead? A deal for you. Only twenty-five dollars! Just look at this one, senora!"
He pulled a serpentine chain from his arm. I noted that he looked like a strange version of the Tin Man.
"It's very pretty," I said. A mistake.
He followed us for two blocks, lowering the price every few steps, until we ducked into a restaurant to escape.
Strangely, the club/restaurant we went into was named "Club Escape", a fact we found very funny when we were safely inside.
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