Monterrey: Part III

It was Thursday evening and I was in Monterrey, Mexico, waiting for my friend Diecinueve to arrive. I wasn't sure what, exactly, we were going to do, but I was famished and a bit stir crazy. Pretty much anything would have been just fine.

Seeing her for the first time was... less weird than I might have guessed. I can't remember the last time that I had seen someone for a few hours and then, 32 months later, had her knock on my hotel room door to pick me up. There's a first time for everything, right?

She had a project that she was working on at school, and when she picked me up I asked her how it went, and she said that she had a horrible day. I thought she meant, like, "My car's tail light went out" or "I lost my Foursquare mayorship to the local coffee shop today" horrible. In fact, she explained that her best friend had a family tragedy and it was much more horrible than I'd anticipated.

In spite of that news, she took me out to get a sandwich. We went to a place that I would not have associated with Monterrey or Mexico, generally. It was called something like "Peace, Love" and it had a modern hippy/crunchy vibe, with several 60's-esque sayings decorating the place... all in English. Kinda weird.

Also kinda weird? The insane gender ratio. I think that I was one of three or four non-employees who were male, and there must have been three or four dozen chicas there. It was bizarre, and I wondered whether those kinds of places existed in Seattle. Because I like those kinds of places, for some reason.

The sandwich was also quite good.

As we sat and I ate (she was not hungry, but she made sure to point out that she would have bought both a sandwich and a salad; big talker!) and I tried not to stare at the forest of femininity around me, we planned the rest of the night.

She was dressed nicely, and I liked her outfit, but she was aghast at the notion that she'd go out in such an ensemble. I wasn't going to argue with her about how she should dress, but it seemed a bit "Mr. Rogers-changing-into-a-sweater" to me. We needed to go back to her place, then, so she could change, and we were going to meet some of her friends at a bar after that.

There was, naturally, an unexpected snag.

She was driving us back to her place, when she informed me that one of her (five? six?) housemates was home. OK. Fine. It seemed that with that many housemates, the odds would be slim that none would be home. She clarified that one roomie, in particular, was there. And this person did not allow men in the house.


Uh... OK.


Culturally influence? Chemically imbalanced? I am not sure, but Diecinueve dropped me back off at my hotel and picked me up later. No big deal. Just one of the oddities of my trip.


The bar we went to was busy. It wasn't crazy-busy, but it was bustling. I liked the atmosphere, in spite of the fact that there were actually some men in the establishment, unlike the sandwich place.

Speaking of dudes, four of Diecinueve's friends were there, and three of them were dudes. I was introduced to her female friend, Rudolfa, and Rudolfa's friend. The other two guys seemed nice enough but I never talked to them nor got their names. We shared a bottle of rum, though, so I feel like we have a bond that only alcohol can form (a different bond than I've made with women in the past due to alcohol, just for the record).

Rudolfa seemed like a very nice person. I sat between her and Diecinueve at our table and she, like Diecinueve, was very cute. She had long dark hair, big brown eyes, nice legs and... something on the end of her nose.

"Something on the end of her nose?" you might ask. "Yes," I would reply. "Like a zit?" "No." "A birthmark?" "No." "A squirrel?" "Not exactly."

She had, like, a scrape. A scab. Something. I didn't know quite what it was, to be honest, in spite of both Rudolfa and Diecinueve trying to explain it to me. Whether it was a language thing or an alcohol thing, I just couldn't grok how she came to have such an abrasion. I kept getting one-sentence explanations from Rudolfa that were amusing but not entirely elucidating. A couple of my favorites:

"It was his birthday." (Pointing to her friend.)
"It's the climate in Monterrey!"
"I woke up last weekend and a squirrel was nibbling on my nose."

OK. I made one of those up.  (Or did I?)

In addition to the pleasant conversation and the rum and the hot Mexican chicks sitting on either side of me, I had one other encounter of note.

Possibly due to the aforementioned rum, I had to use the little boys' room. It was an odd setup, with a sink outside the entrance to both the female and male restrooms. The bathroom itself was a single room without a sink inside... anyway, I went in, locked the door, and did my business.

There was a knock on the door and I could see, through the frosted glass, that someone was waiting to get in. I'm not sure why a knock on a locked bathroom door (when I'd been in there for about 27 seconds) was perceived to be helpful (other than denying me the luxuriant urination session that I usually indulge in), but the reason I'm telling this mini-story is because of what happened when I opened the door.

First: an aside. An aside about expectations. When I go to see a movie, I try to keep expectations low (so I don't have Star Wars Prequels anger). When I talk to someone I don't know, I assume that they are well intentioned simpletons (so I don't get disappointed when they say "irregardless" or use "literally" incorrectly with no self-awareness). When I get out of bed in the morning, I remind myself that a lot is probably going to go wrong (just kidding on that; I don't actually start thinking until about 25 minutes after I get out of bed).

I learned to temper my expectations not through a long spiritual journey or in one of the innumerable post-secondary classes I'm still paying student loans on, but through a post-Nerf basketball session at a friend's house where I took a big swig of iced tea that I thought was apple juice. It tasted like ass--not because it was bad iced tea, but because I was expecting the sweet payoff of apple juice.

Expectations being at odds with reality can lead to disappointing things (like the end of my trip to Monterrey, in my next blog post, or the Obama administration) or to funny things (like the Obama administration).

In THIS case, I opened the door and saw a guy whose eyes were about ten inches lower than mine. He stepped aside so I could get to the sink, and I prepared to descend the step to the sink area.

I prepared to descend that step not because I remember its presence but because I saw a guy whose eyes were ten inches lower than mine and I assumed I was elevated.

Nope. He was just a short dude.

The expectation of that (imaginary) step, helped along, perhaps, by the oft-aforementioned rum, led me to lose my balance and almost sprawl onto the floor. While I'm sure that a common sink area outside of a pair of bathrooms in a Mexican bar has a squeaky-clean floor, I preferred not to end up with a Rudolfa-like nose injury, and I was able to regain my balance, wash my hands, and make it back to the table.

All without laughing at the really short guy that caused me the trouble.

We finished our drinks without further incident. Rudolfa gave me a stuffed chili (like a felt and fabric-stuffed one; not a cheese and goat stuffed one) for some reason upon my return. Diecinueve and I made loose plans regarding Friday and Saturday, and she dropped me back off at my hotel.

The first two days of my trip had gone off well. Not without a hitch, but without a kidnapping and without a major letdown.

That would, unfortunately, change. Next time, you'll learn whether I was kidnapped and beheaded or let down by the rest of my trip. I'm sure the uncertainty is maddening!