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