This week took me to Tijuana for a conference with the American Citizens Services group from all over Mission Mexico. I traveled with my boss Pete and our senior local staff employee, Mari Esther. We traveled on Tuesday late morning and returned on Friday afternoon. The conference was fun and beneficial – always good to see how other missions within Mexico do things and to see how we can harmonize our procedures. We spent all day in session, but I managed to work in lunch with my old friend Sarah who works in the Tijuana Consulate (she TDY’d in Juarez many moons ago) and got a chance to say hi to Mike and Katie, with whom we worked in Tel Aviv. Tijuana impressed me as being pretty hip overall, much more so than what I expected. Tuesday night, Pete convinced Mari Esther and me to go to the old part of downtown where we had our photo made on a zonkey (a donkey painted to look like a zebra) and have a Cesar’s salad at the Hotel Cesar where the salad supposedly originated. Fun!
Last Sunday we went to Lake Chapala with Cindy and Raoul for an arts and crafts festival – it was a lot of fun and only an hour’s drive. Here’s a shot of John buying some tequila from a local brewer.
Buying tequila in Chapala.
Saturday back in Guadalajara, John and I went to an early matinee to see “Interstellar” which was lots of fun. We had the VIP theatre to ourselves, which was nice. Afterward we went to La Docena for a beer and sandwich (a delicious fish and oyster poorboy for me). On the way home, we stopped to enjoy a 12-man mariachi band – only to realize that we knew the Consulate family who had hired them. We gladly joined them for a few songs – it was really fun!
Mariachi!
Today we stayed in. John taught me to play Imperial Settlers, which was fun!