Cantina Days Lucha Libre Nights part 2

Originally an email sent 4/11/07


The deal-breaker I spoke of at the end of the last email was gaining the knowledge from Alessandro (our tour guide) that this Mexican masked wrestling event is pay per view and cameras are an absolute no-no. I almost start crying right there in the cantina (the one with Pancho Villa's bullet), seriously, this is unfair. I proceed to throw a small fit and in my altered state, mumble something about becoming Pablo's wife in Mexican prison coming a close second to sneaking my camera in and getting some killer photos. I ask Alessandro if anyone from his tour has ever got in trouble and he says something about tight security and it being a small venue, adding his two cents that it's probably not a great idea.

I think to myself that if I am going to go to Mexican prison, why not over this? I decide then and there to not check my camera at the door as my tour guide highly suggests. I down a shot of Mezcal and attach my camera strap to my belt buckle, I then let the camera fall down to where no machismo laden Mexican security guard would search. I plan my attack on the walk from the cantina to the venue (I hesitate to call it an arena because it was not that big, think one step up from the crappiest venue you can get in Fight Night the video game). The way I see it, I have three hurdles to overcome; getting the camera in, taking the pictures and lastly, getting out with my camera and liberty intact.

We walk up to the arena and I am in awe. People everywhere, vendors selling masks (SCORE!), people selling beer and food, drunken middle aged men stumbling over themselves, is this heaven? This is just like I imagine a WWE event would be outside some hick town in the deep south... only MEXICAN. I am so awestruck I almost forget about the contraband in my nether-region. Alessandro gives us the OK and we start heading towards the entrance. People are checking their cameras... I start sweating. I watch some of the people in our group go first, the security guards give them a pretty through pat-down, legs and all but are respectful about the no-no areas (even with girls). I breath a sigh of relief as I am allowed entry after a half-assed pat down. I love this. Phase one: success. We enter and find our seats, which are the absolute worst seats in the house. They provide an obscured view of the top of the ring when anyone does any above the second turnbuckle. I, of course, with my gregarious personality am placed in the buffer seat separating the tourists from the locals sitting next to a lovely family (I'm directly near the kids). I want to get high flying awesomeness caught on camera and doing so with this vista will be damn near impossible, I'm going to have to get a better vantage point. Phase two is not looking so hot. The first match of the night has already commenced, I guess the cantina tour took longer then expected.

I start scoping out the security inside... this is bananas, there are guards all over the place. For what? this is a weekly event here in D.F, I still don't get it but whatever. I undo my belt sitting in the darkened back row and think about how wrong it must look if anyone is watching, me fumbling with my belt buckle to try to get my camera out sitting next to a family with little kids... sigh, you would think I'd be smart enough to go to the bathroom but I am not. luckily, it was uneventful and I got my camera out. Now I have the problem of how to take pictures, obviously no flash can be used, but it is so dark where I am sitting that the light from the display illuminates my face... this is no good. I turn the display off and manage to snag a few junky photos. All of a sudden the security guard storms over and asks me what I am doing, I say taking pictures and he starts telling me I can't do that. I feign gringo-ignorance (always a good first defense in a foreign land). He goes away. Someone hands me a beer and a bag of microwave popcorn (which they sell there, how cool is that?). Life is good, I still have my camera, my freedom and some of my dignity (arguably).

The crowd starts chanting something unintelligible as this "gay" wrester in a pink skirt and a pink mohawk comes out, his name is Maximo and the crowd goes nuts when he gets hit. Still they cheer for him as he keeps getting up after each successive beat-down. I found this more than a little disturbing but it wasn't the place to get up and start arguing for sexual equality. I just have to get photos of Maximo and pull my camera out again, I get a few shots and then the security guard comes over again. He starts yelling at me more sternly than before and I pretend I don't understand what he is talking about. I then get up and make like I am going to give my camera to the camera check lady. I leave that area, it's too hot to go back to now. I figure the only way to get some pictures is to befriend one of the pro-photographers there. I use this term loosely as I approach the only guy who isn't ringside. I start chatting him up. What's your name, where you from, I'm from NY, I'm a teacher, blah blah blah. We become cool, I look at his camera and say "wow thats nice" (it was a early model Kodak digital cam, read: crap, and I was buttering him up for the kill). He loves me. He gives me his card. Eduardo Jimenez C. (AKA the Dark Mictlan) Editorial Director for the premier "revista virtual de lucha libre" El Pancracio. Awesome, I go back to my seat armed with my new nifty yellow business card. I start taking pictures like a boss. Security arrives seconds after. I hold up my finger to my mouth in an obnoxious display of Americanism (I actually didn't do this but how funny would that have been, I did think about it though) and take my card out and declare "I'm with this guy." Mr. Security guard looks at the card and leaves in defeat. Phase 2: partial success. Partial because after this is all said and done the final match is over.

I hurry ringside to try to snap some pictures of the Russian champion only to get yelled at by another security guard who is directly guarding the champ. I decide I have pushed my luck far enough for tonight, slide my camera into my pocket and return to find the gringos and head to another cantina. All in all, the anticipation was a little better than the actual event (especially after four run-ins with security) and the pictures I got are nothing to write home about. If you see me in the near future, make sure you ask to see my yellow wrestling business card, it's still in my wallet...

Peace, love and tolerance (especially for Maximo, I felt bad for that guy)
James

Cantina Days Lucha Libre Nights part 1 -

Originally an email sent on 4/10/07

Hello various gringos and others,
Where to begin, it has been a very event filled couple of days. I don't want to spend too much time writing emails so I think I am going to save some stories for when I get back to NY. I do, however, want to share my experience of the Lucha Libres. This was something I was very very excited for. I don't know about you, but when I think of Mexico, I think of masked wrestling. Ok, to be honest there are some things I think of before masked wrestling but it does rank high on my Mexico word association list. So I am in walking around the city the first night and I see signs for a tequila and mezcal tasting tour followed by a night of wrestling (I will hereby refer to masked Mexican wrestling simply as "wrestling" although when I get back to the states, I will revert back to the more preferable "Mexican masked wrestling.") I thought to myself what a fine idea lets sign up. So I get a few of my new mates (hanging around many English people, my lexicon now includes mates, dodgy, wanker, fit, bellend and some other fine contributions by the originators of our language) and we sign up for the "cantina tour." A little history; cantinas are/were traditionally bars where men gather to shoot the proverbial expletive and get rip-roaring drunk without the accompaniment of women. They gained a reputation as dangerous places (cant see why can you? loads of women deprived drunk Mexicans with guns?). Nowadays, the Cantinas often put "bar" on the signs to try to break the image but are still not regarded highly by all citizens. The history of Mexico was often shaped by events that occured in Cantinas, most notably, during the Mexican Revolution. Anyway, we tour around the second day, heading to the churches and ruins that I breifly spoke of in the previous email. Then, we gather at the hostel and wait for the tour to start. It starts DOWNPOURING in a major way. I, being the excellent planner I am, didn't bring any type of raincoat or umbrella. No problem, I hear from other people at the hostel that they went looking for umbrellas but couldn't find any. I find this disagreeable and I tell them they just didn't look hard enough. So i brave the elements and run outside in my 2 size too small/13 year old NBA jersey, shorts and sandals. I get to the corner and start chatting it up with a guy who is selling candy and other assorted things. I ask where I can find an umbrella. He says he doesn't know, then he remembers his wife has an umbrella she isn't using and I can buy it. I say "sold" how much. Now, usually this is a time to bargain, but since I was in a hurry, getting rained on, and had already accepted the goods site unseen. I saw no reason to try to backtrack. The friendly salesperson goes behind his stuff and pulls out a floral and very pink umbrella. No, it wasn't shaped like a drink umbrella but certainly had the color scheme going for it. I laugh to myself, hand the money over and triumphantly return to the hostel. Picture this, a tall gringo, half soaked and running through the streets of Mexico city under what might be the most feminine umbrella you have ever seen. A word about latin culture for those who don't know. The men have this thing called machismo. We all know what that is as all men have it at times (most men anyway), well traditionally, Latin men have it in spades and watching an otherwise manly looking gringo under this umbrella elicited more than a few awkward glances and smiles because any self-respecting Latino wouldn't be caught dead anywhere near this umbrella. But, I am certainly not Latino so no problems there. So after getting ridiculed by my euro-friends at the hostel, we start the tour. We get information about cantinas on the way to the first one. Its a walking tour for obvious reasons, our guide, Alessandro, is a really good guy and took care in showing us a wide cross section of cantinas. The first we visited had the swinging wooden doors in the front (like the old western movies) and from that moment I knew it was going to be a good night. We tasted Mezcal, which is a Mexican traditional drink similar to tequila. We visited four cantinas and had different Mezcal and cervezas at each one. The highlights included visiting an old cantina that is collectively owned by the workers, a cantina where toreros (bullfighters) used to frequent but that has fallen on hard times, and the "fancy" cantina that had preserved the bullet of Pancho Villa in its ceiling when he came in guns blazing to prove a point to the rich people who go there. This was extra cool, I have a picture of the bullet, but it was the last cantina before the wrestling started and honestly, by that time the Mezcal and cervezas were making focusing my camera difficult. What happened next could have been the deal breaker for my wrestling experience but I will write about that in part two which will focus solely on wrestling (it deserves its own email, not to be shared with cantina stories) Ill write again soon, I just don't want to waste this beautiful day here in Oaxaca.

-Jameso Villa

Various Photos

OK, I wrote some blogs but had trouble posting them. I have them in a journal and will do so when the internet is more reliable and cheaper. As of now I am in Utila diving and have some pictures I would like to share of an octopus I found at my dive shop. be well and check back often, as I will put more stuff up.

James stops drinking... the tranny hooker story.

the following is not incredibly work friendly but it´s also only about tranny hookers at the end. i think typing tranny hookers is fun and although tranny hookers don´t play a huge role in this story, i thought tranny hookers needed to be in the title. the girl above is NOT a tranny hooker. she is some girl in nicaragua who was representing the sandinista government at a rally i went to last night, my friend was on stage and got the pics for me. pretty amazing night. almost met the president but got to see him up close. that will be the next post. it was amazing. Before I went on a rant last post I was talking about the dirtbag bomb that went off at Tranquilo Backpackers... so let´s continue from there. Basically, I walked in, open minded but not feeling a huge desire to socialize too much with these people. I got my room (everything in Costa Rica is a lot more expensive than the rest of CA) and decided to stick with plan A. Plan A had been hatched days before when I found out I would arrive in San Jose late at night and therefor be unable to leave San Jose immediately (highly recommended). Plan A involved casinos and me, this is really all you need to know. Problem with this night was that I didn´t have a plan for losing my money. I was in high spirits since I finally had arrived and was ready to begin my trip. This created a false sense of ¨i can´t possibly lose all this money¨... this turned out to be very untrue. I brought an undisclosed amount of USD´s to the Horseshoe Casino a few blocks from my hostel. Took a cab due to the cash I was carrying and realize that i live in the tranny red light district of San Jose. At first glance they look like women, until you look again or hear them cat call you... then you realize that although they have clearly had some top surgery, they are not women. The cab driver makes some jokes about them then asks if I want one, I respectfully decline and ask if a lot of gringos ¨frequent¨the ladyboys. He says yup. I head to the casino thinking nothing of it. I walk in and realize it´s all Americans. They were incredibly obnoxious and since I usually enjoy being the only incredibly obnoxious American in a given place at a given time, I got a bad vibe but continued anyway. The positive to all these obnoxious Americans was a very live craps game. I rolled the dice, did ok, and started to really put down the free drinks. This is where the problems began. I leave the craps table for some game I don´t even know but am convinced by some other gringos (from some eurocountry) that it´s a lucrative game (they never are). Lose a little no big deal. Sit down at a rummy 21 table. Learn how to play that. Pretty much blackjack with more ways to lose. At this rummy table is the only Costa Ricans in the place along with an expat American from Texas who redefines obnoxious. He is a regular here and if there is anyone to blame for what happens next (beside the obvious: me) it would be him. He says, wanna do a shot? I say, !!! they give shots here (not standard casino practice as far as I know) he says yeah, 2 shots of jager. I dont need to tell the rest but basically I lost all the cash I had on me. Decide since i have no money on my person I can walk back. This is not the best idea but I was drunk and not thinking so clearly. Got approached by about 6 tranny hookers, told them how pretty they were but no thanks, this is definitely the best way to handle tranny hookers. You compliment them but clearly show no interest and they leave you alone and dont beat you up (I dont know if tranny hookers beat people up but some of them were way more jacked that I could ever be) So I returned back to the hostel, got the rest of my cash from my safe, talked with some people about why I was leaving again so soon. They say, bad idea, you are just going to lose it. I say yeah prolly but I could also win it all back (drunk logic). Now, as I have cash on me I take a taxi back. Takes even less time to blow through this cash. Not going into details about how much I went through because it´s disgusting and stupid and the details dont matter. The good byproduct of this is, I am spending off the money I would have used on booze (would have been the biggest expense on the trip) to feed street kids. This is really good and I have meet some really great kids because of it. I will write a post about that sometime in the future. So I walk back to my hostel, it´s about 230 am. I realize that I hate the hostel, it smells like mold (forgot to mention that before) in my dorm and I am done with it. Go online and find out a bus leaves to Nicaragua at 3am. I hurry, get my stuff, tell the girl at the desk I am going to try to catch a bus but might return, she give me back my deposit in dollars and rips me off for half my deposit (5$) I dont realize this till the next day. I take a quick taxi to the bus station. The bus was full but I buy a ticket for hte next afternoon. Return back to the hostel completely defeated and ready to crash. Girl lets me in but when I try to go to my dorm bed. She asks what I am doing because I am no longer a guest .... I do the scooby doo ¨HUHHHH!!?!?!?¨ I politely tell her I told her that I may return, she says she took me out of the system and I would need to pay again. I say its the principle of the matter. At this point she thinks since she already took my deposit and I didn´t notice, she can milk antoher 14$ outta me. Knowing I have no other option at 4am. I dont remember what I said but it was basically polite and rude at the same time. I then proved my thick-headedness (to her surprise)by walking out with all my stuff into the tranny hooker infested night. I walk down the street a short distance to another hostel I saw. I open the gate and am given a free peep show of a tranny hooker... how to put this.... orally satisfying a gringo customer. They pretend like they were doing anything but lets face it, they were caught pants down. I avert my eyes say sorry and run to the door looking directly forward. THe new hostel people are really nice and put me in a really clean dorm room with one other person who is not there. I figure this person is out at the bar for a late night and think nothing of it. I head to the bathroom, drink a gallon of tap water (they said it was safe, I was too drunk and thirsty to care ) and head to bed. As I am standing by the door putting my toothbrush away, the door opens and there is gringo john stareing at me. He says nothing, but his jaw literally falls open at the prospect of seeing the guy who just interrupted his tranny bj as his new roommate. I felt really bad for him because I got the feeling he was smashed, in another country and didn´t think he´d ever have to acknowledge this embarrassing event again (which i guess he didnt´but seeing me 10 mins later must not have been the ideal situation for him). He did an about face and walked away. It was really awkward and I dont know how many seconds this took to transpire but the grin was bubbling to the surface on my smug drunk face. He turned and I laughed to myself, hit the lights, climbed up into the bunk and pretended I didn´t hear him when he came back into the room a few minutes later. I fell asleep wondering about how I get myself into these situations and realize that had I just went to bed or payed the extra money at the other hostel, I wouldn´t have had this experience. Definitely bring them upon myself, but I still haven't decided if this is a good thing or not.... hasta la proxima

Tranny Hookers Coming...

I swear. I have been uber busy with various philanthropic endeavors and have had limited access to my files although I do have access to the internet. This will be sussed out tomorrow with a grand post on tranny hookers and how I lost a brickload of money (lost not being the operative word here). I know some of you actually are looking foward to the amusing yet depressing story I will soon pen.. so to keep you satiated. I include a picture I took from my chicken bus today (notice the decrepit state of the surely once grand building). Plus another of a dog in the street. Because why not.

Central America 6-30-08 ´to 7-27-08.

I arrived in San Jose, Costa Rica a couple of days ago amidst positive circumstances. My layover in Atlanta was to be 7 hours (the price to pay for cheap tickets) but the fine folks at DELTA overbooked the flight from Newark to ATL and asked if anyone could afford to arrive in ATL a little later. Being the experienced traveler Ive become, I knew free $ when I hear it. They offered me a 200$ DELTA voucher and a 7$ food voucher to arrive in ATL an hour or so later. This served to break up my hellish layover so I took it more for the 7$ than the ticket voucher. I spent the layover in ATL trying to get 100´s for the 20´s the ATM gave me in about 50 airport businesses. Starbucks proved most helpful while TGIFriday´s were d-bags. I ended up protesting Fridays on this account and landed in teh bar of a seafood chain that made delicious (if not expensive) bloody marys. I wouldn´t have had so much food and drink had I not had the false sense of entitlement that the 7$ food voucher gave me, ended up being an expensive layover. The flight itself was uneventful save for a decidedly bitchy stewardess who proved to be the only capable person at perpetually incompetent clusterF%$k that is DELTA. I arrived in San Jose and got bent over for a 22$ cab ride to my hostel. Not only that but my driver (despite his lucrative racket) couldn´t even find the hostel and I was relegated to what he knew, mainly a sh!thole with the unfortunate misnomer of ¨Tranquilo Backpackers Hostel.¨ For those of you too dimwitted to figure it out, tranquilo = tranquil IE: calm, peaceful, what have you. It was heralded in my travel guide as a laid back place with a cool vibe. Great! What this translates to in my world is this... I enter the gate and get the impression that fraudulent-dirty-hippy-white-dreadlocked bomb exploded in this place. it was chock full of human d-bags posed as worldly travelers. I was dressed half well for 1 reason. When I travel to Latin Countries, I try to appear respectable. This is because it seems insulting for someone who can afford to not work and gallivant across the globe to appear as they don´t respect the places where they´re traveling to enough to make any effort not to look dirty. Anyone who knows me knows I´m all about ¨doing you¨ which is to say ¨be yourself and don't cater to the whims or expectations of others.¨ This does not fully apply in poor countries. If you want to look homeless in NYC, be my guest, I will more than likely make a snide remark to myself or who I´m with but that's the extent of my concern for you or your dress. To understand what I´m saying it´s required you understand a basic truth in Latin America. A majority of people in these countries are what we would call ¨working poor¨... there is a small middle class, a huge impoverished class and a tiny upper class (with nearly all the wealth). Even for the working poor, there is a very evident pride among the people. Even after working crazy hours to barely put the rice and beans on teh table, they get get out the irons and the bleach and put on clothes that give them some semblance or self worth in a society that has largely turned its back on them. I am not being presumptuous in this observation. I take advantage of my white privilege to make a sincere effort to speak with people from all walks of life on my trips and have heard varying degrees of what I just stated. I just learned from a taxista in Nicaragua that they call backpackers ¨Johnnies¨because we walk everywhere (Johnnie Walker). These conversations over the years have led me to my current line of thinking. If you dress like these fake dirty hippies, you end up resembling the masses of the tragic children that beg in the streets for food or money to buy something to take the pain away. I think this is an insult to these kids who did nothing but be born into abject poverty. Ok enough ranting. Transvestite hooker story is on the way... check back manana.

Sorry I suck at updates.

I promise to be better with these posts now that work is over and I am in Central America. The picture (mi hermano, mi mama y yo) is from my cousin´s wedding my last night in the states. I am posting it here mostly because I want to show some friends the bowtie look for consideration for my best friends wedding (isn´ñt that a movie?) but mainly because my brother´s hair looks like he got into a fight with a carwash. My last trip was the school trip... long story short, it was too hectic to post, and apparently it wasn´t even as hectic as the other educational trips they have been on. I hestitated to post information on that trip due to the fact that there are privacy issues with the students and even though I wouldn´t have used names, it still is a slippery slope. I just wanted to throw up a quick post to let you all know the blog will be back with posts every few days (more or less) depending on what trouble I get into. Thus far, 2 days in, after a fight with a dishonest hostal employee and several fruitless taxi trips to random places at 3am in San Jose, I arrived at a new hostal to experience an embarrassing (for once not my embarrassment) run in with a transvestite Costa Rican hooker and her gringo-john. Pretty much has been the norm for my trips. Im going to do a full post later today or early tomorrow. Keep coming back and I promise the stories will be worth it :) the hooker story is worth the trip back alone.