I'll get the first question out of the way, because I'm sure you're all thinking it if you haven't asked me already - "Tim, why the fuck would you wanna go to Israel? You're gonna die there. Dying's not fun, is it?" There are two answers to this:
1. It was Bitch (Jess)'s idea, and I'll travel anywhere, so we had ourselves a plan.
2. Anyone who does a little research will realize that Israel is probably one of the places you're LEAST likely to die in the world while visiting. Unless Iran unleashed thermonuclear war on Israel during our time there, we weren't in any danger. The Israelis know everyone hates their asses so security is uber-tight, plus they've kicked the bejesus out of all their neighbors a couple of times already anyway, so they all know better.
Now that we have that outta the way, we can get onto the trip.
The plan for the trip was as follows - fly to Seattle for 1 night to catch European flight; fly to Amsterdam through Iceland, stay in Amsterdam one night; take train to Cologne, Germany with 6 hour layover in Brussels to check it out (on Christmas Eve), stay one night; fly Cologne-Tel Aviv, Israel on Christmas Day, stay 2 nights; fly to Eilat (Southern Israel), stay 1 night; cross the border into Jordan and stay in Wadi Rum and Petra, each for one night; get back to the border and stay another night in Eilat; take the bus to Jerusalem and stay 2 nights; fly overnight to Stockholm, Sweden through Riga and stay one night. At this point, Jess would fly back to Boston, and I would fly to Vienna to stay 3 nights, then one in Salzburg before a night in Sweden and the long trip back home.
Ambitious aren't we?
I made the mistake of listening to Jess the night before and we left drank a big bottle of Rev while packing like he did. What the fuck was I thinking? Hello 3:30am bedtime. Up at 6, sleepy day of work, then met Bitch at the Flying Beaver for a few drinks before we went to the airport. Both of us nearly fell asleep at the bar, but we survived. Got the full body scan at the airport again (heeeey) and bought some hummus at the airport bar, since I figured I'd have to eat it in Israel anyway. Shit's pretty good. After somehow briefly convincing Jamie that we were actually in Honolulu on a connecting flight (which was funny), we made our way to Seattle. Where we promptly passed out without even drinking the beer we bought. Off to a dopey start.
First leg of the Europe flight (7 hours) was completely full, but not too bad. A flight attendant that had worked for Iceland Air for 46 years (!?!) was working her very last shift on our flight. Jess thought it was irrelevant of course, because the only things relevant to him are the Habs, being a nerd, and arguing with me...but I thought it was kinda cool. After connecting so quick we didn't even have time to go to the bathroom or grab water, we got onto the next flight and...waited forever for it to be de-iced. Unsurprisingly with our luck, we couldn't use the can or get food/water during that time, so we were dying. Once service finally started, I basically stampeded to the bathroom, then promptly got back and ordered 2 huge sandwiches and 2 bottles of water. Yeah yeah, make your jokes assclowns.
Upon arrival in Amsterdam, we quickly took the train into the city, where we proceeded to get ripped off by a cabbie pretty much immediately. He managed to take us to the wrong hotel, AND charge us 15 euros (20 Canadian) for a three minute ride. Dammit. We were both too tired to protest much, which makes it our fault. It actually didn't work out so bad though...we walked the extra 2km to the correct hotel, and got a nice view of the Amsterdam city centre. And to make it better, my bag was WAY lighter than Bitch's and he has a bum shoulder to boot, so he suffered the whole way. His suffering amuses me.
It was pretty cold and windy outside, but nothing unbearable. Check-in was followed quickly by red bulls and a lot of walking around. And bars. The first bar was a Brit Pub, which was pretty shitty overall. But the bartender chicky had HUGE cans, so it wasn't a total loss. After that we sauntered up to the famous Red Light District, which was...amusing.
It's sooo commercialized. Kids, couples, grandparents, you name it...all walking through an area full of erotic clubs, pubs, and windows with prostitutes hanging out. Some ugly, some decent, and a couple super-hot. One kid was ogling one of them and she shut the curtain on him, which made us laugh. We checked out a pub down there, which was pretty dead. We walked in and see coasters, ads, posters, and everything else identifying one kind of beer. So we went in and ordered Stella, which made the barlady laugh. She just pointed at the coasters. Guess we only had one choice. Oops. I seem to do that a lot for some reason.
On the way out, we stopped at a smoke shop, where Jess was hoping to get some mushrooms. All we ended up getting was some shitty energy drink that didn't work, because he didn't ask about the shrooms. He said that they probably didn't sell them anyway, which amused me because there was a gigantic stuffed Toadstool (of Mario fame) on top of the TV which seemed to indicate they did indeed sell them. Jess didn't even see Toadstool somehow, which is crazy because he was HUGE, so he went shroomless (totally not a word) for the night.
Onto the next pub. Little busier, and some chick seemed to want to have a staring contest with Jess, which was pretty funny. We ended up hitting two or three more pubs that night. I liked it because every place had a different vibe, and there was a lot to choose from. Amsterdam is a lot more walkable than I thought it was...I expected a huge city, but the downtown core is pretty small compared to a place like London or Berlin.I know Ive been thee before, but I obviously went the wrong way or something, because I never found any of this stuff.
Finally, after being awake for 33 hours, I hit a wall and it was sleepy time. Jess said I was asleep about 3 seconds after laying down, which is funny because normally it takes me a while to get to sleep no matter what. He got like 3 hours sleep, then somehow woke up and watched the Habs game on his phone. They lost too, which makes it even better (for me at least). Weirdo.
The next day was Brussels and Cologne. I woke up at 5am, starving and dying for water. Jess had been up for 3 hours already and was starving as well, but nothing around the hotel was open in the middle of the night. And it was fucking cold outside. After getting ripped off by the vending machine (I always make other people go first if I'm with someone using a vending machine...if they get ripped off, I save my money! Thanks Jess!), we waited it out until it was time to head to the train station. Magically this cabride was 15 euros as well, despite being twice as long. The canals are pretty cool in the morning, by the way.
Upon arrival in Brussels, we had to ditch our packs so we could walk around for a few hours. The manned luggage service was closed, so we were forced to use lockers. No big deal, except...the lockers kept spitting out all the change we put in them. BUT they were spitting out tickets and locking our bags up. What the hell? We opened and closed them a few times just to make sure we weren't being Punk'd, then left for town happy to save 3.5 Euros. Weird. I was expecting our shit to be gone when we got back for sure, but alas, it was all there.
We arrived in Brussels on the wrong day, in many ways. Christmas Eve might seem like a cool time to visit a town in theory, but it didn't really play out like that. First off, they had a crazy snowstorm the night before and the roads were nuts. Our cabbie kept stopping to help people push their cars up hills because they were stuck.
(Side note - I'm going 207 km/h on this train between Vienna and Salzburg right now, and it's tripping me the fuck out. Trying to look out the window at anything just makes me dizzy)
We finally got out of the cab right down near Grand Place, and slid/stumbled through the snow and ice into it. They had a gigantic Christmas tree and a whole manger set up in the middle, complete with real sheep. Kinda cool for Christmas shit. The funny part was the tree was full of snow, and it seemed like every time someone tried to take a picture near it, the wind would pick up and either dump snow on their heads, or it would blow by so fast the picture would be just a white blur. Between that and a few people slipping and falling, we were pretty entertained.
Bitch had one order of business in Brussels - to go to the Delirium Cafe. It's a bar with like 2000 different types of beer or something, so obviously I was down. He had been talking about it since we had set out in Seattle. He was hyped as we tried to find it...without success at first, because Brussels can be hard to navigate, even with a map. Finally, we found the Holy Grail. Jess starts jumping up and down like a 4 year old, runs over to it...and stops dead. And almost bursts into tears. He then says, with a hilarious pouty look on his face:
"It doesn't look like it's open. FUCK, it's not! What the fuck!"
After I stopped laughing, I walked over and saw the sign myself. You see, it's not just that it was closed. The sign, which made me laugh even harder, said:
CLOSED ON CHRISTMAS EVE
Delirium Cafe is closed exactly one day out of the entire year. And it just happened to be the day we were there. Basically, Delirium Cafe bitchslapped Jess somethin fierce. Which had me laughing for DAYS. Sure, I'd like to see 2000 beers too, but this place was actually important to him, and he got brutally denied...like I do by pretty much every woman on the planet. Fair enough. Either way, it was fucking funny.
Luckily, Brussels has a lot of places that can (at least somewhat) make up for Delirium being closed. First stop - De Bier Tempel, which I came to the last time I was here. It's a store that sells like 1000 different types of beer or something. And assorted Delirium stuff, which made Bitch happy. You see, all Jess was really in the market for at the Delirium Cafe was some of their memorabilia. They have a mascot, which is - get this - a big pink elephant. Jess came all this way to shop for a PINK ELEPHANT.
I'll let you get the laughing out of your system before we continue.
So, while he tried to decide between a pink stuffed elephant, a pink blanket, and a pink t-shirt, I walked around and silently yelled at the beers I had bought here last time which induced one of the worst hangovers of my life. The worst part was that he didn't even end up buying anything. He's like a woman in a mall - they like the first thing they see, but they have to walk all over the mall five more times before they just come back and buy the first thing anyway. There's a reason I call him Bitch people!
After some lunch, we ended up down in the market area, which was fucking hilarious. After doing shots of jager out of chemistry beakers (awesome) and Jess drinking some hot wine they sell on the street, we happened upon the most slippery spot in Brussels. Hell, in THE WORLD. Everyone that walked through this one area slipped. Most fell. So what did we do? We camped out there, with Jess videotaping the whole thing, while people slipped and fell. I know how immature that is, but come on...strangers falling down is fucking funny, I don't care what you say. Especially after beaker jagers.
After a while of that hilarity, it was about time to go back to the train station to catch our train to Cologne So we went in search of a taxi. Seems like a pretty simple thing in a large city, right?
Nyet. Not on Christmas Eve.
After multiple hotels telling us "dere arr no taxeeees today" we became a bit concerned. Finally one hotel lady (coincidentally at the last hotel I stayed at where I was here) directed us to the metro and told us where to go. We arrived with a few minutes to spare. Crisis averted. Or was it?
We went down to the Thalys (train company) tracks, to find out our train had been delayed...indefinitely. No one would tell us anything about the situation, which was annoying. Jess called it before we even got there though - he saw they were giving out free coffee and said "companies never give out free shit unless they fucked something up". Sure enough, Jess was right (fuck I hate typing that). The problem was that it was fucking COLD down there, and we pretty much had to stay there because the other screens didn't update very fast and we could miss the thing if we waited up above in the main station. So we suffered. And it fucking sucked.
At one point I was so cold that I actually went and got a cup of coffee. The second cup in my entire life. The first was when my train to Barcelona was delayed in 2004 and someone bought a cup for me. So I kept up two trends at least - I only drink coffee when waiting for a late train in Europe, and I don't pay for it. I can live with that. Unfortunately there was no sugar left so the coffee tasted like Chernobyl soil. Oh well.
Finally after about 2 hours, they let us on the fucking train. We didn't arrive in Cologne until after 10pm, which sucked since we had to be up at 5am to go to the airport. Our hotel was right up the street from the station luckily, but it was insanely cold and windy outside. We ended up taking the wrong exit out of the train station, which put us face to face with the biggest, craziest church I think I've ever seen. It was too dark to get a pic, but it was MASSIVE. I wish we had the time and patience to explore it, but we were all out of both at that point, so onto the hotel we went.
Stay tuned for the following: (seemingly) killer Germans, all the strangeness of Israel, being strip searched (!), cat fights, being ripped off in a bunch of countries, modern bedouins, me hiking 5km uphill and Jess riding a donkey, craters, the Dead Sea, the worst fortress ever, fucking stupid Shabbat, Penguins, and much much more.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
Mexico City, Finale
I'm on a flight between Stockholm, Sweden and Vienna, Austria, so I figured it'd be a good time to finish a story about...Mexico City. Yeah, it's weird. Deal with it. The faster I get this done, the faster I can get onto writing about this trip, which was pretty epic and strange at the same time. Okay peeps...last part in the series.
So after the excitement of the Dutch upset over Brazil, it was time to head back to the old DF. The busride entailed some truly horrible movies being dubbed into Spanish, but all was good otherwise. We arrived into Mex City's south bus station, after going through some really nice suburbs like Xochimilco. After a long cabride where the driver didn't know where to go but I somehow did, we arrived at our fancy hotel, directly across the street from El Angel, the Monumento de Indepencia, and 3 blocks from the sleazy Zona Rosa.
After settling in, we headed off to our one goal of the day - the Archeological Museum that was closed the last time we tried to go to it. We took an unmarked taxi this time, supposedly the safest cabs in the city because no one knows they're cabs, so they won't rob them. Or something. All it turned out to be was ridiculously overpriced. Folks, when a Dodge Aries is the best you can do it a city, something's not right. This was precisely the type of thing that made Mex City so...strange. Awesome, but strange. Even stranger was getting charged MORE for the ride back, even though it was the exact same trip!
The museum was fucking unreal. I'd studied for months for this trip, and I learned more in 2 hours about the history of Mexico and Aztec culture than I had in all previous attempts. Again though, Mexican weirdness reared it's ugly head. They have these uber-expensive audioguides for the museum, because everything says that all the descriptions are in Spanish and to fully appreciate the museum, you should understand it in your own language or something. And, to guilt you even more, they have physically handicapped children selling the damn things. Some kid with a hook for one had and a pair of tongs for the other (seriously) fleeced me for 15 bucks for the fucking guide, and...guess what?
All the descriptions are in Spanish AND english on all the signs in the place. Fucking tards these days.
Either way though, Milo and I thought it was awesome. It's not as big as I thought, nowhere near the size of the British Museum or anything like that, but it's laid out well and had a ton of cool shit to see. It's amazing how stupid the Aztecs were when it came to the Spanish Conquest - basically, despite everyone else telling him how terrible of an idea it was, Moctezuma the 2nd thought the Spanish were cool and befriended them...and then the Spanish slaughtered the fuck out of them. He basically handed his entire empire to them, after showing incredible guile and intellect in the decimation of all the other empires in the area. Very strange.
After that illuminating experience, it was back to crazy Mexicans. Lisette agreed to come meet up with us to go out to the Zona Rosa. She said she'd be there at 9. At 7:15, Milo and I went down into the lobby to grab some stuff from the store...and there she was, sitting and listening to her ipod. Milo asked why she was so early, and she said she had already been there for an hour. Instead of asking for our room number or just texting Milo...she was just gonna hang out there for close to 3 hours until we came down. Soooo weird. But she was cute, so Milo was still willing to look past this obvious foreshadowing of crazy.
The night basically alternated between really fun and really weird. Lisette was funny and engaging for a while, putting up with me teasing the shit out of her for his spastic Italian-like hand movements while she talked while teaching me a shit ton of Spanish and telling us stories about her family. The weird started when Milo wasn't paying attention to his smoke, and literally lit some girl's ass on fire. He put the cherry of his smoke against her jeans for so long it basically burrned a hole, upon which she finally noticed, screamed, and jumped up. Milo was embarrassed as hell, but the chick didn't seem to care at all. She saw gringos, so it was go time. Uh oh.
This chick didn't speak a lick of English, but her friend Erika did. She had studied English in Montreal for 2 years (who studies English in Montreal?). After a few minutes of conversing with her, the entire band of oddities moved to our table. This included ass-on-fire, a huge Mexican dude close to my size, a little tiny gay dude, and another Mexican chick that refused to interact with us for some reason. Erika translated while ass-on-fire (who was probably 40 and not attractive in the least) offered her services as a wife to me and Milo. Lisette put the damper on it for Milo immediately, which made me her central target, unfortunately.
Interspersed amongst all the crazy were the leeches, At LEAST 30 different women or children wandering into the bar and trying to sell us everything from gum to pens to dolls to smokes. You can only feel bad for poor little cute kids for so long - then you want to throw them all in a bag and toss them off a bridge like kittens. Hey, it's how my dad got rid of excess kittens in Saskatchewan in the 30's. Don't blame me for the stunniningly awful mental picture, it's all dad's fault dammit.
Back at the party, Erika did an awesome job of boosting my ego while explaining that the woman didn't care who the gringo husband was, but she wanted a white man to marry so she could leave Mexico. Yeah okay...sign me up. What the fuck? I politely declined, which led to badgering questions like "You think she's ugly?" (YES!) "Do you have a girlfriend or something?" (Time to lie! YES!) "Are you gay?" (No, assholes, she's just a sea donkey!) Eventually ass-on-fire gave up, and I just started talking to Erika for what turned out to be a long time. She was pretty cool, actually. Other than asking me to hug the gay dude a bunch of times because it was supposedly his birthday or something, which was obviously met with "Keep that thing away from me", the night was going well....until the bill came, and the arguing started.
The waitresses (they kept switching) rang up something like 45 beers and 8 plates of food for the 3 of us. In 3 hours. This is amusing because: None of us ate a thing; Lisette had 3 beers; and Milo and I were both still relatively sober. We certainly didn't have 42 dos Equis between us (depsite doorknob insisting on being called "Roberto dos Equis" all night. Freak). We got into a huge scrap with two of the waitresses, which luckily came down to Lisette losing her shit until all the food was gone and we were down to 31 beers. Still way too many, but whatever. I was fucking done with the Zona Rosa at this point, so I headed back to the hotel, which Milo and Lisette trailing behind. Back at the hotel, the weirdness began again.
Once we were back in the room, Milo said something to Lisette that made her completely lose her shit somehow. Neither of us had any idea what she was mad at, but she cursed us both up and down and stormed out. Milo chased after her, which led her to go and talk to a bunch of cops for some reason. Even Milo's smart enough to know that fucking with that combination is trip suicide, so he came back upstairs and passed out. I sat up drinking for a bit, then passed out too.
The next day turned out to a be a big bummer. I found out that I either lost my camera or someone stole it from our room, which really sucked. Milo's camera didn't work for the entire trip, so all of our shit was on mine, and I had forgotten the cable so I never got the chance to upload any of the shit I had on there, which was a lot of cool stuff. The square during the Mexico game, all of Milo's retarded pics with cops, all the pics of Taxco and Puebla...all gone. I was fucking pissed (and kinda hungover).
It was our last day in the DF, and we still hadn't been to the Pyramids yet, so Milo inquired about a tour through the hotel. He ended up taking it, but I was not in the mood to be a tourist anymore. I was fucking done with Mexico at that point, so I just chilled. And I'm soooo glad I did. Rob Milo can't go one single day without something seriously nuts happening to him, and this tour was no exception.
He left at 3pm, and was due back around 8:30 or so. I was just chillin, watchin TV and writing. At 6:15, Milo comes through the door, freaking out, trying to tell me an entire story in 4 seconds. While it was hilarious to see him that animated, none of that compared to the actual story. I swear this kid has such a big travel horseshoe so far up his ass, nothing can hurt him. He's fucking unbreakable. I would never, EVER believe this story if I didn't get stone cold proof it a little while later. But it's Milo, so the unbelievable is just on the regular for him.
This is Milo's explanation of the tour, paraphrased. So...he sets out on the tour in a bus. There's himself, a few other tourists, and some german dudes in Mex City for a physics convention. I'll let your imagination fill in how cool these kids likely were. After traveling through, by far, the worst slums Milo had seen yet in the DF, they get dropped off at a gate outside Teotihuacan (the Pyramids), but are told by the tour leader to meet up at a DIFFERENT gate to be picked up in 2 hours. Besides the fact that the tour didn't even include a fucking TOUR OF THE PYRAMIDS, he was supposed to meet the bus at some unknown location a couple of km's away to get home, for some odd reason. Crazy? I thought so.
So, he walks around the the German cast of the Big Bang Theory for a while, then they go to the appointed gate. No tour bus. No...anyone. And the gates to the site are about to close for the night. Him and the nerds understandably panic, and debate what to do. Milo thinks they should go back to the original gate, but it's over 2km away and the Germans think waiting is the best thing to do. 20 minutes later? Still no one, and the gates are shutting. They're being told they have to go out...into the slums. Obviously not the brightest of ideas.
While they're all arguing about what to do, a Dodge Aries (again!) pulls up beside them with a sketchy Mexican behind the wheel, who explains to them that all the buses are gone and they're basically fucked...unless they give him 500 pesos for a ride back into town. Despite how creepy this dude is, they don't see any other choice. Rob chips in 200 and conveniently gets dropped off back at our hotel, where he bursts in and tells me this story way too fast.
Now, this is Milo...he leads a ridiculous life, but this all seemed pretty fucked up, even for him. Ditched in the slums by a tour from a nice hotel? A sketchy Mexican gives them a pretty good price to get back to town, and drops him right at the hotel? Unscathed? Hmm. Let's just say Timmy was a tad skeptical...for an hour or so, until the phone rang.
"Can I speak to a Robert Milo, por favor?"
"Uh, sure."
*Milo on the phone* "Hello, this is Rob. No, no I'm okay. Yes, I couldn't find the driver so I hitched a ride back to the hotel. Really. No, seriously, that's what me and the Germans did. YES, honestly. WHAT? The tour bus is still there? WHY? Looking for...oh shit. Oh my god. Tell them I'm okay and to call off the search, we're good. The police? Oh my god. I'm so sorry. Holy shit. No, I'm leaving tomorrow, I don't think I need a free tour. Just tell them I'm really sorry. Holy. Shit. Uh, sorry for swearing. Bye."
Basically, the gate meetup was mixed up, and when Rob and the Germans didn't show up, the tour driver called the cops because the hood is so sketchy. They had spent the last 2 hours looking for him and the guys, while the rest of the tour (that apparently met at the right gate) waited impatiently on the bus, unable to go home, while everyone freaked out.
Yeah, wow. This kinda shit only happens to Milo.
After all that drama, Milo called up Lisette, who had apparently calmed down, and he took off with her for the night. Turns out she flipped because Milo asked me to leave the hotel room for an hour so he could bone her, but before I could even respond, she apparently wigged out because "she's worth more than an hour's worth of time" and that it was disrespectful or some shit. Who knows with her. Anyway, Milo ended up taking the metro down to the Zocalo at midnight, where he was the only gringo and it scared the shit out of him. And he wondered why I wanted nothing to do with the metro.
The next day, we met up, packed up, and flew home. Other than ridiculous boarding procedures in the Mex City airport, the day was pretty unventful. Milo got picked up at the airport by his mom and sis, and instead of going all the way home just to come all the way back in a few hours, I just got a hotel room near the airport. The post-script of the trip is where things truly get nutty though.
TWO WEEKS LATER
Milo sends me a FB message that just says "call me NOW". Uh, okay. The first 5 words out of Milo's mouth sent me into shock and hysterical laughter immediately -
"Dude, she says she's pregnant!!!"
After I stopped laughing, I asked what the fuck he was talking about. He said she called him and said she was pregnant, and asked him what he was going to do about it. Milo didn't believe a god damned word coming out of her mouth, so he spit out the absolute best response I've ever heard to that statement:
"No you're not. You just want money, don't you?"
After talking to her for a bit, she admitted she was totally drunk in Veracruz, the city of the coast we were gonna go to but went to Taxco instead. But insisted she was pregnant. He told her to stop being fucking crazy and hung up on her. She called back 2 nights later and said it again, and she was totally drunk again. He called her on it again, and questioned the shit out of her, with her providing less-then-credible answers to all of it. She had already lied about one kid (initially she said she had none, but eventually admitted to Milo that she had a 5 year old a few days before we left), and Milo knew she was full of shit. After he denied her, she deleted us both on facebook and never talked to us again...but I looked at her FB a few days ago (6 months later), and magically she's not pregnant.
The moral of the story? Don't fuck Mexicans without a rubber, retards!
Overall, Mexico City was not how I imagined it at all. It was a fucking beautiful city, full of cool neighborhoods, interesting sights, and crazy people. I never felt unsafe once, despite the city's crazy rep. Especially in the centro, which always had a ton of people around and it never felt strange. It was a truly strange destination overall though, full of contradictions and backwardsness (totally not a word) that always kept you on your toes. In addition to that, I never would have imagined the variety and awesomeness of Central Mexico, especially Taxco. Taxco might be the most uniquely cool place I've ever been, and I've been to a few places (like right now, since I'm typing this in a pub in Brno, Czech Republic, with a hot bartender chicky sitting in front of me smoking and not understanding a word I say to her).
Next up on the Mexican front, Guadalajara. Who wants to come?
So after the excitement of the Dutch upset over Brazil, it was time to head back to the old DF. The busride entailed some truly horrible movies being dubbed into Spanish, but all was good otherwise. We arrived into Mex City's south bus station, after going through some really nice suburbs like Xochimilco. After a long cabride where the driver didn't know where to go but I somehow did, we arrived at our fancy hotel, directly across the street from El Angel, the Monumento de Indepencia, and 3 blocks from the sleazy Zona Rosa.
After settling in, we headed off to our one goal of the day - the Archeological Museum that was closed the last time we tried to go to it. We took an unmarked taxi this time, supposedly the safest cabs in the city because no one knows they're cabs, so they won't rob them. Or something. All it turned out to be was ridiculously overpriced. Folks, when a Dodge Aries is the best you can do it a city, something's not right. This was precisely the type of thing that made Mex City so...strange. Awesome, but strange. Even stranger was getting charged MORE for the ride back, even though it was the exact same trip!
The museum was fucking unreal. I'd studied for months for this trip, and I learned more in 2 hours about the history of Mexico and Aztec culture than I had in all previous attempts. Again though, Mexican weirdness reared it's ugly head. They have these uber-expensive audioguides for the museum, because everything says that all the descriptions are in Spanish and to fully appreciate the museum, you should understand it in your own language or something. And, to guilt you even more, they have physically handicapped children selling the damn things. Some kid with a hook for one had and a pair of tongs for the other (seriously) fleeced me for 15 bucks for the fucking guide, and...guess what?
All the descriptions are in Spanish AND english on all the signs in the place. Fucking tards these days.
Either way though, Milo and I thought it was awesome. It's not as big as I thought, nowhere near the size of the British Museum or anything like that, but it's laid out well and had a ton of cool shit to see. It's amazing how stupid the Aztecs were when it came to the Spanish Conquest - basically, despite everyone else telling him how terrible of an idea it was, Moctezuma the 2nd thought the Spanish were cool and befriended them...and then the Spanish slaughtered the fuck out of them. He basically handed his entire empire to them, after showing incredible guile and intellect in the decimation of all the other empires in the area. Very strange.
After that illuminating experience, it was back to crazy Mexicans. Lisette agreed to come meet up with us to go out to the Zona Rosa. She said she'd be there at 9. At 7:15, Milo and I went down into the lobby to grab some stuff from the store...and there she was, sitting and listening to her ipod. Milo asked why she was so early, and she said she had already been there for an hour. Instead of asking for our room number or just texting Milo...she was just gonna hang out there for close to 3 hours until we came down. Soooo weird. But she was cute, so Milo was still willing to look past this obvious foreshadowing of crazy.
The night basically alternated between really fun and really weird. Lisette was funny and engaging for a while, putting up with me teasing the shit out of her for his spastic Italian-like hand movements while she talked while teaching me a shit ton of Spanish and telling us stories about her family. The weird started when Milo wasn't paying attention to his smoke, and literally lit some girl's ass on fire. He put the cherry of his smoke against her jeans for so long it basically burrned a hole, upon which she finally noticed, screamed, and jumped up. Milo was embarrassed as hell, but the chick didn't seem to care at all. She saw gringos, so it was go time. Uh oh.
This chick didn't speak a lick of English, but her friend Erika did. She had studied English in Montreal for 2 years (who studies English in Montreal?). After a few minutes of conversing with her, the entire band of oddities moved to our table. This included ass-on-fire, a huge Mexican dude close to my size, a little tiny gay dude, and another Mexican chick that refused to interact with us for some reason. Erika translated while ass-on-fire (who was probably 40 and not attractive in the least) offered her services as a wife to me and Milo. Lisette put the damper on it for Milo immediately, which made me her central target, unfortunately.
Interspersed amongst all the crazy were the leeches, At LEAST 30 different women or children wandering into the bar and trying to sell us everything from gum to pens to dolls to smokes. You can only feel bad for poor little cute kids for so long - then you want to throw them all in a bag and toss them off a bridge like kittens. Hey, it's how my dad got rid of excess kittens in Saskatchewan in the 30's. Don't blame me for the stunniningly awful mental picture, it's all dad's fault dammit.
Back at the party, Erika did an awesome job of boosting my ego while explaining that the woman didn't care who the gringo husband was, but she wanted a white man to marry so she could leave Mexico. Yeah okay...sign me up. What the fuck? I politely declined, which led to badgering questions like "You think she's ugly?" (YES!) "Do you have a girlfriend or something?" (Time to lie! YES!) "Are you gay?" (No, assholes, she's just a sea donkey!) Eventually ass-on-fire gave up, and I just started talking to Erika for what turned out to be a long time. She was pretty cool, actually. Other than asking me to hug the gay dude a bunch of times because it was supposedly his birthday or something, which was obviously met with "Keep that thing away from me", the night was going well....until the bill came, and the arguing started.
The waitresses (they kept switching) rang up something like 45 beers and 8 plates of food for the 3 of us. In 3 hours. This is amusing because: None of us ate a thing; Lisette had 3 beers; and Milo and I were both still relatively sober. We certainly didn't have 42 dos Equis between us (depsite doorknob insisting on being called "Roberto dos Equis" all night. Freak). We got into a huge scrap with two of the waitresses, which luckily came down to Lisette losing her shit until all the food was gone and we were down to 31 beers. Still way too many, but whatever. I was fucking done with the Zona Rosa at this point, so I headed back to the hotel, which Milo and Lisette trailing behind. Back at the hotel, the weirdness began again.
Once we were back in the room, Milo said something to Lisette that made her completely lose her shit somehow. Neither of us had any idea what she was mad at, but she cursed us both up and down and stormed out. Milo chased after her, which led her to go and talk to a bunch of cops for some reason. Even Milo's smart enough to know that fucking with that combination is trip suicide, so he came back upstairs and passed out. I sat up drinking for a bit, then passed out too.
The next day turned out to a be a big bummer. I found out that I either lost my camera or someone stole it from our room, which really sucked. Milo's camera didn't work for the entire trip, so all of our shit was on mine, and I had forgotten the cable so I never got the chance to upload any of the shit I had on there, which was a lot of cool stuff. The square during the Mexico game, all of Milo's retarded pics with cops, all the pics of Taxco and Puebla...all gone. I was fucking pissed (and kinda hungover).
It was our last day in the DF, and we still hadn't been to the Pyramids yet, so Milo inquired about a tour through the hotel. He ended up taking it, but I was not in the mood to be a tourist anymore. I was fucking done with Mexico at that point, so I just chilled. And I'm soooo glad I did. Rob Milo can't go one single day without something seriously nuts happening to him, and this tour was no exception.
He left at 3pm, and was due back around 8:30 or so. I was just chillin, watchin TV and writing. At 6:15, Milo comes through the door, freaking out, trying to tell me an entire story in 4 seconds. While it was hilarious to see him that animated, none of that compared to the actual story. I swear this kid has such a big travel horseshoe so far up his ass, nothing can hurt him. He's fucking unbreakable. I would never, EVER believe this story if I didn't get stone cold proof it a little while later. But it's Milo, so the unbelievable is just on the regular for him.
This is Milo's explanation of the tour, paraphrased. So...he sets out on the tour in a bus. There's himself, a few other tourists, and some german dudes in Mex City for a physics convention. I'll let your imagination fill in how cool these kids likely were. After traveling through, by far, the worst slums Milo had seen yet in the DF, they get dropped off at a gate outside Teotihuacan (the Pyramids), but are told by the tour leader to meet up at a DIFFERENT gate to be picked up in 2 hours. Besides the fact that the tour didn't even include a fucking TOUR OF THE PYRAMIDS, he was supposed to meet the bus at some unknown location a couple of km's away to get home, for some odd reason. Crazy? I thought so.
So, he walks around the the German cast of the Big Bang Theory for a while, then they go to the appointed gate. No tour bus. No...anyone. And the gates to the site are about to close for the night. Him and the nerds understandably panic, and debate what to do. Milo thinks they should go back to the original gate, but it's over 2km away and the Germans think waiting is the best thing to do. 20 minutes later? Still no one, and the gates are shutting. They're being told they have to go out...into the slums. Obviously not the brightest of ideas.
While they're all arguing about what to do, a Dodge Aries (again!) pulls up beside them with a sketchy Mexican behind the wheel, who explains to them that all the buses are gone and they're basically fucked...unless they give him 500 pesos for a ride back into town. Despite how creepy this dude is, they don't see any other choice. Rob chips in 200 and conveniently gets dropped off back at our hotel, where he bursts in and tells me this story way too fast.
Now, this is Milo...he leads a ridiculous life, but this all seemed pretty fucked up, even for him. Ditched in the slums by a tour from a nice hotel? A sketchy Mexican gives them a pretty good price to get back to town, and drops him right at the hotel? Unscathed? Hmm. Let's just say Timmy was a tad skeptical...for an hour or so, until the phone rang.
"Can I speak to a Robert Milo, por favor?"
"Uh, sure."
*Milo on the phone* "Hello, this is Rob. No, no I'm okay. Yes, I couldn't find the driver so I hitched a ride back to the hotel. Really. No, seriously, that's what me and the Germans did. YES, honestly. WHAT? The tour bus is still there? WHY? Looking for...oh shit. Oh my god. Tell them I'm okay and to call off the search, we're good. The police? Oh my god. I'm so sorry. Holy shit. No, I'm leaving tomorrow, I don't think I need a free tour. Just tell them I'm really sorry. Holy. Shit. Uh, sorry for swearing. Bye."
Basically, the gate meetup was mixed up, and when Rob and the Germans didn't show up, the tour driver called the cops because the hood is so sketchy. They had spent the last 2 hours looking for him and the guys, while the rest of the tour (that apparently met at the right gate) waited impatiently on the bus, unable to go home, while everyone freaked out.
Yeah, wow. This kinda shit only happens to Milo.
After all that drama, Milo called up Lisette, who had apparently calmed down, and he took off with her for the night. Turns out she flipped because Milo asked me to leave the hotel room for an hour so he could bone her, but before I could even respond, she apparently wigged out because "she's worth more than an hour's worth of time" and that it was disrespectful or some shit. Who knows with her. Anyway, Milo ended up taking the metro down to the Zocalo at midnight, where he was the only gringo and it scared the shit out of him. And he wondered why I wanted nothing to do with the metro.
The next day, we met up, packed up, and flew home. Other than ridiculous boarding procedures in the Mex City airport, the day was pretty unventful. Milo got picked up at the airport by his mom and sis, and instead of going all the way home just to come all the way back in a few hours, I just got a hotel room near the airport. The post-script of the trip is where things truly get nutty though.
TWO WEEKS LATER
Milo sends me a FB message that just says "call me NOW". Uh, okay. The first 5 words out of Milo's mouth sent me into shock and hysterical laughter immediately -
"Dude, she says she's pregnant!!!"
After I stopped laughing, I asked what the fuck he was talking about. He said she called him and said she was pregnant, and asked him what he was going to do about it. Milo didn't believe a god damned word coming out of her mouth, so he spit out the absolute best response I've ever heard to that statement:
"No you're not. You just want money, don't you?"
After talking to her for a bit, she admitted she was totally drunk in Veracruz, the city of the coast we were gonna go to but went to Taxco instead. But insisted she was pregnant. He told her to stop being fucking crazy and hung up on her. She called back 2 nights later and said it again, and she was totally drunk again. He called her on it again, and questioned the shit out of her, with her providing less-then-credible answers to all of it. She had already lied about one kid (initially she said she had none, but eventually admitted to Milo that she had a 5 year old a few days before we left), and Milo knew she was full of shit. After he denied her, she deleted us both on facebook and never talked to us again...but I looked at her FB a few days ago (6 months later), and magically she's not pregnant.
The moral of the story? Don't fuck Mexicans without a rubber, retards!
Overall, Mexico City was not how I imagined it at all. It was a fucking beautiful city, full of cool neighborhoods, interesting sights, and crazy people. I never felt unsafe once, despite the city's crazy rep. Especially in the centro, which always had a ton of people around and it never felt strange. It was a truly strange destination overall though, full of contradictions and backwardsness (totally not a word) that always kept you on your toes. In addition to that, I never would have imagined the variety and awesomeness of Central Mexico, especially Taxco. Taxco might be the most uniquely cool place I've ever been, and I've been to a few places (like right now, since I'm typing this in a pub in Brno, Czech Republic, with a hot bartender chicky sitting in front of me smoking and not understanding a word I say to her).
Next up on the Mexican front, Guadalajara. Who wants to come?
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