bus climbing the hill

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If I could show you just one thing I see from the bus, just one narrow staircase leading up to some family's home on the hill toward Otay, climbing up the Postal colonia hillside, if I could show you that stairway with painted white railing, the steps painted red, wall powder blue, if I could picture you just that one small detail, and explain it in Spanish, I would be happy.

But I can only scribble in my pocket notebook while I ride home Tuesday night, and then type it, finally Thursday evening. 

I can only scribble it. 

You must come see it to see it. 

The satellite dish on the hillside, the retaining walls, rushing streets,teetering houses one after another like some third world vision of cubist reality, dozens of cubes, rectangles, pastel greens and peach coral beige white yellow, all beckoning to me to tell you see me here, foreigner. 

Pablo Picasso never saw this Tijuana.  Never.  You can.  I do. 

The tangy smell of roast meat and chili sauce floats in the bus window.  The "unisex" beauty salons slip past in amongst a thousand and one tiny corner stores and hole-in-the-wall neighborhood shops.  When I get home Tuesday night after scribbling these notes, my beloved will make us dinner and ask me to go down to the corner and buy us a couple cokes.  Ah, Mexico, just a few steps away a local little store for "abarrotes" (don't call them groserias heh heh heh) and the cokes there at the corner are only five pesos - forty-five cents a can.  Did you know the coke tastes better in Mexico?  It's true.  That's why we're all addicted to it here....

Meanwhile I keep scribbling as the beer outlets go by and we climb higher and higher up the hill, until a screaming RED CROSS cruz roja ambulance twists pasts us and we all stop, then go ahead, beyond more houses, into and around twisting streets that climb up up up from Postal into Otay, while the late Spring sun of California sinks into the early evening clouds.  This is the golden hour that cinematographers love, and the grungy lumped hillsides of Tijuana take on a strangely beautiful air of el dorado.  Turn the last corner and top out onto the long, wide mesa de Otay.  This is the beginning of it all: the great, huge, flat space called Otay.  From here, on the very edgiest of the mesa, Calzada Tecnologica stretches east, east, east past the university and beyond the huge Otay glorieta that you cannot even tell is a traffic circle, into the new factory zones along Boulevard Industrial, and at last, at the mouth of mountains, into a canyon just past the slums at the end of the earth, cars of rich people and growling busses enter the supertollhighway to Tecate....

I wish I could show it to you... in all its splendour, dust, sunshine and electric night.  All its delicious tacos.  All its middle class houses and poor shacks.  Its streetmarkets where you can already buy Troy and VanHelsing... EEEEEEE PIRATESSSSSSSSSSSSS

Someday, now that I am working across the line in Chula Vista, I will buy more film and take more pictures.  Someday farther down the line I will take video.  But until then, my armchair traveler, you must read only my words.  OR you can get up from your computer and come down the freeway from Los Angeles, or take the trolley from San Diego.  Have a real adventure and take the city busses or route taxis, once you get here... even if it's just the noisy busses across the river into downtown "CENTRO TERCERA CENTRO TERCERA" the men will be calling at the traffic circle after the sea of yellow taxis and island of tacos.  Get on, pay your fifty cents (U.S.) or five and a half pesos, and go downtown.  Then walk down Constitución or Niños Heroes, instead of sticking to Revolución.  See some of the "quote REAL unquote" downtown....

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not apo strophe remember

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