San Diego to Tijuana
Beer bravado, bubbles and OMG did I hear right? Someone offered us their daughter!
A few days ago I wrote about the beach party in San Diego where about 100 of us were treated to a private performance by the Beach Boys at the 1995 IBM Business Partner conference.
A group of us took a few days off for R&R while we were there, to enjoy a part of the world we hadn’t been to before.
One night we went Downtown and visited a few bars. Rowan, one of my colleagues at the time, likes to remind me of a bit of a standoff I had with a couple of pilots in one of those bars.
I don’t recall the name of the bar, but we had a few MGDs, which my Aussie counterpart liked to drink, having spent some of his OE years working in ski fields in Canada. New Zealand is so far from anywhere, that we Kiwis (he was born in NZ and only became an Aussie in his late 20s) tend to travel overseas on working holidays for a few years. It’s called our Overseas Experience, or OE. Many don’t come back or stay away for 10 or more years, before coming home to raise their families in one of the safest countries in the world. Don’t be surprised if you go to a bar in Britain and hear Kiwis singing songs, performing hakas, or even loudly singing classic Kiwi television commercials with gusto, like this one as the evening winds on.
I dislike aggression other than in a competitive way in sports, although I’m there to stand up for friends and family, or my country. There were a couple of young pilots in the San Diego bar we had relaxed in, who were harassing some girls in the bar in what I felt was a sleazy way. The girls were clearly not interested and the guys weren’t getting the message. They were over-the-top macho and acted like they were better than everyone else in the bar. It wasn’t on and I decided to drop them down a peg. It was immature and out of character for me, but sadly I have to admit that I enjoyed it too, because they were rude and obnoxious. I wasn’t acting like the bullies I remember from my days at Kelston Boys High School. I was dealing with the bullies.
My brother was a commercial pilot and I had several hours in jump seats with him, so I knew a lot about flying, albeit secondhand. I started off pacing them with my NLP training, asking them questions that I knew the answers to, boosting their egos. Then the more they built themselves up, the more I started pulling them to bits. I sniped at them and they started getting annoyed and aggressive, but I could tell it was for show, so I continued, and let them know that if they wanted to make something of it, they had better find some help because they would be on the losing side. As they left the bar with their tails between their legs, I felt a mix of adrenalin and endorphins. I’ve never done that before or since.
Anyway, no blood was spilled and we moved on and enjoyed some music in a blues bar. I’m excited btw, that Elton John is coming back to New Zealand after saying that he was retired from touring the world, and was only going to do random gigs performing songs he wanted to sing, rather than hits the audience wanted him to sing over again a million times.
Our lodgings were at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina. It seems IBM liked those types of hotels. They had to have hotels that either had a large convention center or were within easy walking distance of one,
One sunny Sunday morning, my colleagues and I went for a walk along the Spanish Landing. There were stalls and all sorts of entertainment going on.
A guy was doing free caricatures of people and picked on my mate Rowan. He drew Rowan’s face and told him that he was surrounding him with bubbles of love. Rowan let him draw the picture but made it clear that bubbles of love from another guy were not really something he was into, and maybe he should keep the bubbles to himself. Any bubbles of love coming his way would be from his wife. Rowan still cops a little ribbing about those bubbles of love from me, and I’m sure that he has kept the image somewhere as a keepsake. It got me laughing. I guess you had to be there. This whole trip turned out to be full of little experiences.
On Sunday, we took a trip to Tijuana. It was less than an hour’s bus ride from our hotel and we were in another country. We had no idea what we were in for. Walking through customs was easy and it was lucky we hadn’t taken a car because the queues were huge.
As soon as we came down the stairs from Border Control in Mexico, we had kids pouncing on us wanting to sell us things. It reminded me of arriving in places like Las Palmas on a cruise ship as a kid. And then we came upon a flea market.
You could buy pretty much anything. There were loads of clothes, leather bags and belts, hats, and lots of leather jackets. Someone had warned us that often Mexican leather jackets were tanned with urine. I wasn’t sure if that was true or not, but it turns out that it is true. Your factoid for today is that urine is very good for tanning and softening leather and more ‘natural’ than a lot of the chemicals used in factories. Experienced travelers just advise you to wash them thoroughly before wearing them. I wonder what might come up when you arrive home at the airport and the drug dogs are wandering around smelling people’s luggage?
We found a bar to stop at and have lunch, we ordered and climbed a couple of flights of concrete steps to a covered balcony that looked down over the market, and being a weekend, it was very busy and noisy. Nek minit, as we say in New Zealand, a Mariachi band arrived on our balcony, playing for tips. It felt like we had gone to sleep and woken in a spaghetti western movie. The food was average at best, the music was loud, and the frio cervesas were muy bueno.
Carlos Santana is my favorite guitarist of all time. I have a 1 1/2 meter poster of him holding his Les Paul, looking down on me in my music room.
His father used to play in a Mariachi band and dreamed of his son doing the same. Carlos did play with his father at times during his youth, and this form of music was where his musical roots came from. There is no doubt that whatever music he plays, the Latino rhythms and scales come to the fore. His father wasn’t impressed when he wanted to go to the USA and play rock music.
Carlos doesn’t forget his roots and periodically goes back to Mexico to support local music.
Oh and btw, and in case you have read any of the terribly bad taste stories that go out on social media including YouTube, Carlos has had some health issues, but rumors of his death are totally untrue. He is still alive. In fact, he performed in the House of Blues several nights this month of November 2022 and has tour dates booked for the next 2 years. I am hoping he will be back in Auckland again. If so, I’ll be there.
As to bad taste, on our way out of Mexico through the same flea market, Jeff remarked as a joke, “Nobody has offered me their daughter, yet.” When, no kidding, this sleazy guy came out from a stall and called us over. “Amigos, mi hija es muy bonita!” and asked us if we wanted to have her for a short period of time.
Suddenly it was no longer a joke and we were confronted with the fact that children and young women are farmed out as prostitutes to tourists in Mexico, as they are in many poor countries.
It was upsetting and the party atmosphere turned sour as we took it in, and let the guy know what we thought. We were disgusted and horrified at both the situation and to be fair, at ourselves, that we had previously joked about it, not for a minute expecting to see the ugly side of people’s characters and a glimpse of the underbelly of Tijuana. Some of us have daughters, and we were gutted to be confronted with this reality and helpless to do anything about it.
Being a fan of tequila, the only thing I bought in Mexico to take home was a bottle of Mescal. The limit of alcohol to bring into the US from Mexico at the time was 1 liter, and I took that home to New Zealand for a special occasion. It was smooth and didn’t last long after my return. I put it in my suitcase, rather than carry it on the plane. While out shopping, back in San Diego I came across a bottle of wine from a vineyard called Cappel, my surname, and I tried to take that on the plane as hand luggage as a souvenir. For some reason, the guy at Customs told me I couldn’t bring non-duty-free alcohol on the plane and confiscated it. I wasn’t impressed with that.
We visited other locations in San Diego including a naval aircraft museum, which was very interesting. Sadly, again I don’t know where the photos are.
Footnote: Things didn’t get better for the IBM Sure One PoS range, and IBM dropped it altogether, bought back unsold inventory from me and my dealers, and refunded our customers for systems they had purchased. I still have a bottle of the Sure One beer I had labeled for the launch, in my wine cellar, an IBM Business Partner lapel badge, and some great memories.
