Mexico: My Top 20 Red Hot Tips!

1. Befriend a maxin', chill girl who is fluent in Spanish and can hang with the locals.
2. Stay in a posada. You will make lots of cool friends. I recommend Casa Vilasanta.
3. Commit the phrases "Eres casado?", "Tienis novia?", and "Tienis hijos?" to memory. Trust me.
4. Take every opportunity to dance even if it means looking freaktastic onstage.
5. Never turn down a free shot of tequila (this does not apply strictly to Mexico).
6. Take a bus to a distillery in the town of Tequila and learn how to professionally taste tequila.
7. Do not turn your back on your camera. Ever.
8. Never turn down a shot a flambe.
9. Do not talk yourself out of attending at least one La Luche Libre match. You won't regret it.
10. If it's your birthday and everyone else has gone to bed, take a birthday shot anyway (thanks for trying, Josh!).
11. Never pass up an opportunity to speak French, even if it's spoken very poorly.
12. Make friends with the front desk people. The front desk people at the cooler hostels are especially nice. Ahem. (Melissa, we need to talk!)
13. Take every opportunity to speak Spanish, even if you royally suck at it.
14. Travel with an awesome person and you will never get lost (Amy, you rock!).
15. Take the night bus for long trips. Don't sit in the back.
16. Kindly ditch the people who judge you (this does not apply strictly to Mexico).
17. Girlfriends + long bus rides + tequila + Squirt = rockin' good times.
18. Yes, there are places to party on a Sunday night!
19. Mezcal is an arguably safe alternative to tequila.
20. Yes, Virginia, there are tall Mexicans!

Goodness Gracious Me!

As you may know, I visited the southern portion of this great state this past week. I am happy to report that I lived through the experience, but not without sacrificing a small percentage of my soul to the great wasteland that is Columbus, GA and it's surrounding areas. I did not do it willingly; it was stolen from me. Fortunately, the way soul-stealing works (at least with me) is as soon as the buildings of Atlanta are visible from the freeway, the portion that was stolen is immediately returned back to me and all is well. The suffering is undone. I do not completely understand how it works, but I am thankful nonetheless.

Despite this painful process, I did try to enjoy what I could while I was ensnared in the thickets of hell on earth. I took some pictures. I make some funnies. I did some laughs. I tried to focus on the good things surrounding me: cows, peachtrees, grass, summer thunderstorms, heat lightning, fireflies, and vegetable gardens. But I could not entirely escape the insufferable boredom that accompanies these beautiful things. As soon as I stuck my head out of the window to breathe in a lungful of that precious polluted air, I felt real comfort and joy.

Black Bottom Coffee = Liquid Crack Cocaine

As you may or may not know, I am putting my things into storage and traveling for as long as I can until I either run out of people to exploit for their dwellings or money or both or whatever. This prospect has so far been more exciting to those with which it has been discussed until tonight when I talked it all over with a friend over a nice steaming cup of liquid crack. She happens to be going on a similar adventure in Mexico except her trip, God bless her, actually involves learning things and sounds quite productive. Like, the kind of productive you can be totally immersed in another culture, forced to acclimate as best as you can and be as resourceful as possible. So now we're trying to meet up somewhere in Mexico, sometime in August, for some kind of profound experience that also includes tequila tours and .... Like, what else is there to do? Am I going to have to read the internets again to find out? Maybe I could teach yoga to the locals by day and perform in a mariache band at night. Unless mariache bands are so totally gringo that they only exist in U.S. restaurants just like queso dip. When I found out that queso dip is really just melted American cheese, it felt like such a letdown. I don't want to be the clueless American who goes to Mexico expecting THE BEST queso dip and mariache bands only to find that they are illusions of Mexican culture that exist only to satisfy the American quest for something exotic-yet-palatable. Does yoga exist in Mexico? Am I displaying my cultural ignorance by asking that question? Am I too self-aware? When did this become not fun? Why is blogging so much work? Is this really work? I can type like I'm cracked out on speed so it almost seems like nothing at all. If I could get paid to do this but be lots more interesting while doing it, that would be totally rad and that's it I'm going to be a travel journalist I just have to keep thinking slightly faster than I can type and everything will come out fine I can add the punctuation in later it's a good thing that my spelling is pretty right on that will be much less work to do later when I edit ok goodnight.