Day eight

Thursday November 6

I did speak about our ever increasing agenda the other day, and I can say now that during the course of today, four shows get added. All of which adds to my social media activity throughout the day. Seriously. I’m doing some of it on my phone from the back of the car as we make our way to and from places. As well as keeping up forward publicity for shows coming up, there are also accounts of what we’ve done, thankyous to promoters and venues to keep on top of and just keeping up with messages coming in from all over the place as people follow along with our progress. And the six hour time difference between here and the UK, we sometimes wake to a whole flurry of messages that have come in during our night. So no, again, like I said, I am not keeping up with Diary and don’t even attempt to. Just making Diary notes is enough, and yeah, you can add that to the to-do listing I mentioned a minute ago. Eventually we stop even trying to keep up with Diary notes in here and instead just do an end-of-the-day recorded voice memo thing to ourselves.

Once I’ve got on top of all that this morning we have a rehearsal to iron out some of the wrinkles in our new songs. When Richard hears 101 Ways To Fly for the first time, he is right on it. Guys, you have to get that one into your set, he says. We’ll take that for an endorsement. Then we’re done for all obligations for the day and it’s time to head out to something special Maja has arranged. Full body massages at a spa to just give ourselves a lovely relax day. 

It doesn’t quite work out like that as we have an adventure just getting to the place. The old Google map route has instructed us to take a train somewhere, walk a little while then take a bus the rest of the way. Right. Those buses. Or at least this bus that we’re about to go and find. Yes, find. We’ve seen them travelling around and we’ve seen people waiting for them. Mexico does have some lovely buses and we’ll get to those later on today. This particular variety isn’t so lovely. They’re a little bigger than minibuses, look about a hundred years old and are seemingly held together by sellotape. The signs denoting their destination literally are held to the inside of the windscreen by sellotape. They’re made from roughly cut or torn cardboard, are hand written, and they are mostly ineligible to us. But to be fair, even if we could read them, we’d have little idea what that actually meant or what kind of route such a bus would be taking. They also don’t have officially designated bus stops. Instead, people just seem to happen to know where they will stop and we’ve seen queues, or rather gatherings just at junctions as people all but simply wait in the middle of the road for a bus they just know will be along sometime soon. Or not so soon. We never ask or figure out if these stops are in some way designated, or if those buses just drive along and stop whenever they see anyone waiting, as long as they’re waiting actively enough. Are we acting actively enough? We have no idea because there’s no sign of any bus coming and no-one else waiting. The other thing is, we’ve just kind of arbitrarily stopped at this road junction because the map made a mild shrug and said we might as well wait here. Traffic comes thick, smoke comes with it thicker, and none of it is particularly fast. Because there’s just so damn much of it. We wait and wait and wait. And when we think we’ve done enough of that we wait some more. Eventually we give in and decide we’re going to have to hail a taxi. For which we have to wait and wait and wait, get all that done, and then wait some more. There are loads of them, but also loads of people wanting and having got them. Maybe because their arbitrary buses didn’t come either. That’s what I’m going to call them I think. Arbybusses. 

So yeah, we do get a taxi. We have to, otherwise we’d still be there. Which actually did feel like it was almost going to happen. With that we’re finally back on our way, but arriving a little late because none of the above had been factored into travel plans. But it’s still a fun little adventure because the driver’s very polite and kind with us, and sympathetic to our bus stop non drama and, to be really honest, both of us are really quite happy and relieved we didn’t have to travel on one of those buses. Seriously. I think it’s a Mexico experience we’re quite happy not to have. Also on the way, now we have a whole new ETA, I’m able to call the spa and let them know we are actually coming and when and they’re all good with that.

As for how we get there, this really isn’t like London where the taxi drivers know every nook, cranny and turn. Come on. This place is just vast beyond and I will not hold it against any taxi driver who doesn’t know where every little place is. So this adds just that little more to the adventure as I have to take the lead and guide him myself.

Then onto the massage experience itself. We don’t have to go into that too much here. I get ushered into my room, Maja gets ushered into hers and we meet back where we started an hour or so later. We have absolutely no intention of going out into the street and trying to find one of those bus things, but really, after our adventure of getting here and all relaxed up after that massage, we quite fancy a walk in the Mexican sun. We do that for a while, happily wandering the streets as they slowly morph from leafy suburban to concreted city. A while of this and we decide it’s time to take a train…somewhere. There’s a train station, let’s go in there. And in we go, through the ticket gate across a decent sized concourse with little corridors, we guess, leading to other platforms for other routes, and then up onto the raised platform to stand behind some kind of wall with sporadic doors inserted, which will open when our train arrives. We’ve not gone total random, but randomish enough. We’re simply getting one train or another in somewhat the direction of the city centre. We’ll get off when we decide to, have a meander, and then we’re quite confident we’ll be able to navigate the city centre train system to get back home. This is our first proper time out in the wilds of Mexico on our own and we feel we really have got right into the wilds. The amount of choice of where to go is dizzying. Behind us is all the usual array of coloured lineal routes one would expect while on such a platform. After about five minutes, the sound of an engine is heard, people start to move towards the doors and they open to reveal…a bus. Oh wow. OK. We’ve been seeing these around the place. They’re all pretty brand new and modern looking, some in two sections for bendability, and they run under electric cables with that train type antennae perched on the roof to attach to the cables. However, they don’t run on tracks. They really are buses, not trams. So the driver, I assume, just has to steer properly to make sure they don’t slip away from the cables above. And now we discover that you get on one by coming to these full on train station looking things. 

So yeah, we just ride this fun thing for a while in the vague direction of somewhere we vaguely know, then get off somewhere near one of those tall buildings we vaguely recognise just from traveling around in the car. And from pictures. We also have to make sure we get off before the bus heads into the desert hinterlands or whatever emptiness it disappears into after this stop.

It’s food time really, so we enter a modern looking shopping centre type thing, go up the stairs and find a large American style brightly lit hamburger place called Chillis. There we claim a place at the bar where, above the heads of the staff and on the wall is a large TV showing what seems like a rolling selection of baseball, American football and basketball. Here, we get happily chatting to one of the bar staff called Rodrigo. He’s so taken by our little tales of where we’re from and what we’re doing here that he signs up to our Spotify. He’s totally into getting our songs onto the system in here right now, but something is going wrong with his phone’s internet or bluetooth connection so unfortunately he isn’t able to. Maybe it’s his way of saying sorry I have no idea, but shortly after this he gives us free pina coladas. 

Which kinda makes up for one little thing we’ve discovered which is that you pretty much always have to tip, so the price is never the price. But come on. Just about everything here is a fraction of what we’d pay for it in London. One example. The beef tacos we’re introduced to and which become a favourite of ours cost 30 pesos each, so about £1.30. Two is enough, three and you’re stuffed. When we return to London and discover a taco place in Camden, we have to try it. We can’t see the size of what they’re freshly preparing but we decide to just play along. They’re £4.50 each and come out seriously small. We have three each and still feel hungry. 

To simplify all that, £2.60 pretty much did it for us in the Mexico place, while like for like, London’s £13.50 at more than five times the price was barely a snack. I’m going to extrapolate a little here and say that you’d have to go to at least £20 or possibly more to feel like you’d had a full meal at the London place. Which really makes it almost ten times more expensive.

As we’re chilling in Chillis, a mildly concerned Richard calls, He asks where we are and if we’re OK and wants to make sure we’re definitely not lost and know how to get back. We tell him no, we’re not lost. We think. We’re all good and have just found a place for dinner and we’re sure we’ll be able to find our way home when that time arrives.

We do indeed manage to do all that. And I think it’s with a little sense of triumph that we get off our local train a few hours later and confidently walk all the way back home. I also like to think that when we do walk through the door, Richard’s as relieved as if we’d been two dogs who’d got lost on a walk out and about and had somehow made their way home again. You know, that actually happened to me once. No. I wasn’t the dog, I was walking it. For someone I was just staying with at the time. Managed to totally lose the dog and had to give up and go back to my mate’s place. Thankfully he wasn’t there at the time. And much more equally thankfully, before he got back, so did the dog. I would say that’s a story for another time, but I think I’ve pretty much just told it. Minus all the existential panic and anxiety of the moment of losing, the time when I actually realised the moment of losing had actually happened, and of course all the time between then and the moment of finding again.