Mexico- Where vegetarian means CHEESE

Well though a short trip, it was by no means an uneventful one. I have battled the DTC buses of Delhi and the local trains of Mumbai, so I was a little irritated with the hype about security concerns in Mexico. Ok ok....i was going to be right at the border and the drug mafia in Mexico is super active, but not letting non Mexicans step out the office premise without a "Sentry" was bit of an overkill :)
Anyways...that's not how the trip became eventful. I always maintain that something up there constantly conspires against me. I got up at 4 AM on a Sunday morning to catch a flight to Dallas. Oh did I forget to mention that I was not travelling to Mexico City or.....which are the other big cities of Mexico??. I was travelling to a place called Nuevo Laredo. Its on the Texas border, next to a place called Laredo. In Spanish "nuevo" means new or renewed.
So in order to get there, I was to fly from San Diego to Dallas and from there in a small 50 seater plane to Laredo. From there I was supposed to be "exported" to Mexico everyday in the morning and "imported" back into US every evening, with strict instructions in between parent company and client company that I would be safe within the client premise and not brought to risk by virtue of team lunches or dinners outside the office facility :)
Anyways, as my luck would have it my flight from Dallas to Laredo got CANCELLED cuz that tiny winy plane would not be able to survive the winds!!!! I hung around at the airport through the day, through the evening and then through most part of the night before giving up to the fact that I would not be able to make it to that 9 AM meeting. They could have told me that they would not find space on any of the next flights, and I could have gone to see Dallas city!!!
I was back at the airport at 9AM the next day (no i was not on the street at night, I caught up on my long needed sleep and some really bad french onion soup and baked potato (whoever said room service is better than dial up food!!)).
There was no airport for immigration check, so on the way to office we stopped by at the immigration office of Mexico with the "Sentry" as the interpreter, got the Visa stamped and were on our way to Mexico. Strangely enough the country reminds you of India. The streets are narrow, there are numerous mushroom shops on the street side and best of all honking cars :)
Not that I was dying to eat out in Mexico, but still one important part of any country are its eating habits, so I was in for a culture shock (that's really an exaggeration....I am done with the eating habit shocks :) ). It took 2 full minutes to get it translated into Spanish that i do not eat any "meat", "fish" or "egg" and after that the reaction was that of shock ("what does she eat then?") Anyways for 3 days I survived on salad for lunch. Dinner was the scary part, when I went out with hard core non vegetarian Americans!!! (on the US side of the border). Managed like the usual by ordering a bunch of side dishes. What was killing was anything which fell in the vegetarian category was dipped and soaked in cheese (there goes the calorie control from lunch!!!!)

The second time I felt like India was of course when I was returning from Mexico to the US side of the border one fine evening. Waiting in the van to cross the border was a 2.5 hr long ordeal. So we decided to walk across the border the next day. The sentry did not need to show his passport, so he could take a shorter route and wait for us at the US side of the border. 3 of us walked across the border and waited in a well formed line awaiting our turn to cross over to the immigration officer. And there comes this wave of 100 some people and just like that there is no line!! how much closer do you think it gets to India :)

Once on the US side of the border, my colleagues had a tough time waiting for the van to arrive. Its not like people would have been waiting on the other side with the trademark Texas guns ready to mug US citizens crossing the border. Anyways, who am I to judge. They must be having their reasons for being paranoid!!

My return journey was relatively calm except for the sprint between flights....I had half an hour between my flight to Dallas and the next one to San Diego. Thank God I caught the flight, else I would have never gone back to Laredo ever again!!!

More from Spanish land after the next visit.

Till then....hasta la vista!!!