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SHE SAID…
May 11, 2003
On May 3rd of last year, I found
out, discovered, by fluke, that Vallarta’s big
annual fiesta in honor of the Día de la Santa
Cruz was held one block away from my house, at the Church
of Santa Cruz. (Duh… did I feel stupid!) This
year I remembered the date so my friends and I spent
a good part of the evening amidst the hundreds of folks
gathered there for the yearly street party in honor
of the Holy Cross - and the masons of this town. It
is also the Día de los Albaniles. There were
seven of us, ranging in age from 7 to yours truly who
is considered by many to be “very, very old”.
The party started around 7 or 8 o’clock
with stalls of all sorts being set up along Aguacate
Street, trampolines and “flying chair” type
of rides for the little ones and a huge stage right
at the intersection with Venustiano Carranza. From there,
the music blared until the not-so-wee hours of the morning.
The atmosphere was great, you could hear the laughter
and yelps of glee from the children everywhere and the
appetizing smells from the various grills made our mouths
water as we tried to walk around. I say tried because
walking was not an easy task considering the number
of people around.
You could buy plastic ware and cooking
pots, little toys for the youngsters, tacos and refreshments,
cotton candy of course …and you could also play
the “lotería”! That was another new
one for me. For those of you who are unfamiliar with
the “lotería” (none of us knew what
it was) it is a game similar to bingo, but instead of
tokens, you get grains of corn and the idea is to fill
up the entire card, not just a straight line. In addition,
instead of letters and numbers, the cards are filled
with illustrations. Large versions of each illustration
are shown and called out to the players so that even
children who haven’t learned to read yet may play.
The card cost $5 pesos and you could win anything from
a set of plastic pitchers to a beautiful fruit basket.
Like many others there, we found out that it was a very
addicting game. We played and played and I told the
ladies who were running the game that they should charge
more than 5 pesos as they were also offering Spanish
lessons to the foreigners there at the same time…
We played until the fireworks began. What a beautiful
show that was! Some in our group had never seen the
dazzling spinning fireworks wheels so popular here.
The children’s excitement was contagious. Everyone
was dancing to the music while yelling and applauding
as the screaming, spinning wheels worked their way up
to the very top of the scaffold for the final fireworks
that shot straight up to explode above our heads in
a shower of multicolored sparks. The fiesta went on
way past our departure. One more reason why I love this
place so much.
I’ve loved this town for many,
many years, but the feeling does not always extend to
the way in which some companies, establishments or institutions
operate here. A number of years ago, I wrote about what
happened to me with the service offered by the UPS company
here in Mexico. I won’t repeat the story, suffice
it to say that it takes 5 hours for a parcel to arrive
in Guadalajara from Toronto, Canada, and then anywhere
from 4 to 10 days for it to arrive all the way to Vallarta
- which is four to five hours away from the state capital
by car. (The reason for this, as explained to me by
a truly nice young lady at the UPS office in Guadalajara,
is that ALL parcels must go to Mexico City first, by
truck, then they are sent back out to the various points
in the country - by truck - and the driver has no cell
phone or CB radio or any means by which he could be
contacted or tracked…)
At the time, after telling the UPS
representatives in various cities and countries what
I thought of their service at the time (and having received
a full refund of the shipping costs - though that didn’t
assuage our client’s anger at the delay UPS had
caused) I swore I would never ever use their service
in this country again. By the way, in case you’re
curious, FedEx will deliver here, but you may never
know about it… The parcel arrives at a little
warehouse in Colonia Versalles and no one will call
you to tell you that it’s there. Sometimes they’ll
deliver it to your house, sometimes they won’t.
So if you don’t know that someone has sent you
something via FedEx, you may never find out. In any
case, we’ve been with DHL ever since the UPS fiasco.
We never had a problem with DHL ...until
last week. When we drove to their office (it was a Saturday
and they don’t pick up on Saturdays), we were
told that there were no envelopes and of course everything
must go into a DHL envelope. So what were we supposed
to do? The young lady at the reception desk told us
that we should go to a stationery store and see if we
could buy DHL envelopes there… We went home. Still
in awe, I called to speak to one of the supervisors.
I asked him when he thought they might receive some
envelopes so that folks might be able to send stuff
out. He didn’t know. Neither do we.
You’re not going to believe
this, but that woman is back. You know, the one from
TelMex who insists on telling us -in that oh-so-sexy
voice- that we have to “marque asterisco ochenta
y seis para recuperar sus mensajes” whenever we
pick up the telephone receiver. But she only does that
once in a while now, appearing out of nowhere, then
she disappears again for another few days. I can’t
figure out what the story is there.
I hope everyone out there enjoyed
a most wonderful Mother’s Day. Now we’ll
have to wait another few days for the next holiday which
I believe is Wednesday, May 15th here in Mexico - Teachers’
Day. Canadians will have to wait to Monday, May 19th,
to celebrate Victoria Day, the day that residents of
Québec call La Fête de Dollard. I understand
that they didn’t want to celebrate the birthday
of a British sovereign, but I still haven’t figured
out why they would name a holiday after Dollard des
Ormeaux considering that it was proven that the “gentleman”
was a rather shady fellow, a womanizer and other unsavory
things of that sort…
Take good care of yourselves and
each other, dear readers. Hasta luego.
pvmomto3@hotmail.com
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