Here & there: Viva la revelation

Churros, undated | Photo courtesy Wikimedia, licensed under CC0, St. George News

FEATURE — Have you ever gone to Tijuana, Mexico on a Monday afternoon for some churros? Yeah, me neither. Until last Monday that is.

Tijuana, Mexico, Nov. 19, 2015 | Photo by Aliaksei Skreidzeleu via Scopio, St. George News

It didn’t exactly start out as a churro adventure. It started out as six o’clock dinner reservations at a five-star – at the price of three – restaurant in the heart of Tijuana and got hijacked into a churro adventure.

Thanks to three intersecting things: 1) me miscalculating how long it would take us to cross the border; 2) the fact that my twelve-year old is currently nursing a broken foot in a walking cast; and 3) the same twelve-year old’s only motivating factor to walk more than a couple of blocks in said cast apparently is churros.

We cleared “la linea” after a short walk over the main pedestrian bridge, a brief flash of our passports to a Mexican border official in the sparse immigration control building, and a dollar per person baño stop through the big silver turnstiles. I must note that these may have been the cleanest public facilities I’ve used in years.

Outside the bathrooms, two dozen taxis in various colors and states of disrepair awaited border crossers. An English-speaking front man ushered our party of five to a small, four door sedan with two missing hubcaps.

Francisco, a young-faced driver with thick, black hair, would take us to el centro. I tried climbing into the front seat, double buckling with my husband, but was waved off quickly: “he’ll get in big trouble,” the front man explained. Already my idea of Tijuana being fast and loose was running into American style safety logic. Who knew?

Instead, I was told to climb into the backseat sardine style with my sister and my two mostly teenage boys and no seatbelts. So, maybe not so American style safety after all.

The drive to el centro was less than ten minutes; my legs had barely started tingling when Francisco dropped us off just west of Plaza Santa Cecilia, home of the mariachis, and south of the large, silver Tijuana Arch.

The arch, which is roughly a third of the size of our American version in St. Louis, was built to celebrate the new millennium and could be seen almost from anywhere else in the city. Which we’d need to orient ourselves later after churros.

We walked south down Avenida Revolución as callers invited us into farmacias, bars and tiendas hawking huarache sandals and rows of shot glasses. We were some of the only tourists at three o’clock on a Monday and as such garnered more attention than we wanted.

After a couple of blocks on the uneven sidewalks and the two-foot-high sloping curbs, my youngest and his broken foot were tiring quickly.

I tried to distract him with the little known Tijuana facts billowing above us from every street lamp.

“Hey, did you know that the Caesar Salad was actually invented in Tijuana?”

“Hey, did you know that crepes were also invented in Tijuana?”

“Hey, did you know that Tijuana is the world leader of medical device manufacturing?”

He didn’t miss a beat in his reply, “Hey, did you know all I really want right now are some churros?!”

Churro cart, undated, location unknown | Photo by Tiago Gomes via Scopio, St. George News

So, I found a churro spot. One and a half miles away. Not exactly anywhere. That required us to zigzag across the city. With uneven sidewalks (where there were sidewalks) and two-foot-high sloping curbs, with swerving minibuses, with sporadic jackhammering and raw chicken meat discarded randomly, and wafts of pungent things from the seafood markets on every other block. But it was for churros, and so he – and we – walked.

My sister and my boys ate their body weight in churros at the little shop we’d crossed the city for. Churros dipped in chocolate and caramel and sweetened condensed milk. They were delicious. And after that, no one had any room for dinner, five stars or three.

I cancelled our dinner reservations, and we caught a local minibus back to el centro and another one back to la linea.

And there we found a line at the line. It was slow moving and flanked by small children selling chicklets and playing ukuleles with one string, with mothers carrying babies and selling cheap necklaces, and a one-legged man selling plastic lanyards.

And with them, another little-known Tijuana fact: the line at the line is also currently flanked by three dozen or so refugees. Huddled under a blue and yellow flag in camping chairs and piles of mismatched suitcases, toddlers and babies snuggled in their laps.

They looked like they were waiting for their chance to cross into America. But they didn’t look like they were going anywhere anytime soon.

Ninety minutes later when it was our turn to regain entry to the U.S., I asked the agent swiping our passports about the people I’d seen: “Are the people sitting outside – are they Ukrainian refugees?” His response: “Do they look like Ukrainian refugees?”

I nodded; he nodded back. And then we stared at each other in silence until he waved me through back to my side of the border.

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2022, all rights reserved.

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