I flew into Mexico city insanely hungover as I had been to Disneyland the night before and got completely wasted at a corporate party with a lechy Indian who wanted me to be the surrogate mother for his baby and sign off all rights for the child in exchange for a US visa. Thanks but no thanks. I departed Huntington Beach, California at 3am in an Uber driven by an extremely handsome black man with whom I spoke about the fundamentals of life - live in the moment, have gratitude and be compassionate. He said he has a cousin in prison and he’s trying to help him to think like this and it was a really nice chat for the hour that I was actually planning on sleeping through (Ok, fine, you win). He dropped me off at the wrong terminal (my fault) so I had to tiredly trudge for about 10 minutes to get to the right one. I checked in using the machine and then failed to pick up my ticket for my bag so when I went to the bag drop off they were like 'No you haven’t got any bags on your reservation' and I was like 'YES I haaaavveeeugh because I’ve just checked it in with the machine over thererrrugh' and she was like ‘Well the machine would have given you a ticket and sometimes, ma’am, you just have to pay extra to have bags’and I was like ‘Well, no, it’s not a case of me paying extra for bags because I’ve ALREADY checked in my bags, LOVE, help me out’
I went back to the original machine and the ladies there helped me out and found my bag ticket on the floor and it was all fine and I went through security and into departures expecting to have a lovely browse of duty free but everything was closed. So I waited and waited and waited because I had got to the airport super early because I was so worried that because of my fuckedness I would miss the plane. FINALLY at 6am a bar was open. The hilarity of airports: only in an airport can you have an alcoholic drink at 6am and not be judged. Trying to make the choice of ‘what drink do I want?’ at 6am was tough because I was so tired and so not up for drinking however I am still not completely cool flying sober that I just had to have a drink so I plonked myself at the bar and ordered a pint of Santa Monica.
A few minutes into the pint, a lady came up to the bar next to me. She was of similar age and she also ordered a pint. As we were the only ones in the extremely brightly lit bar both having pints at silly o’clock I gave her a nod, a smile and raised my glass for an air-cheers to which she responded positively. She also ordered a shot of Jameson’s so I thought 'fuck it, I can match that, good call! 'And ordered a Makers’ Mark (the best whiskey ever) and I asked her where she was flying to. We got talking and it turns out she once shaved her head and moved to Spain to teach English. Cool, loads in common. I got her contact details and finished her pint when she ran off to catch her plane (In the words of Alan Patridge: "Cashback!") I love the synchronicity of that. I was then adequately fucked for the flight and glided onto the plane and had a whale of a time listening to my Annie Mac playlist dancing in my seat.
Of course when I landed I was EL PARCHIDO. Yes. The flight always dehydrates you doesn’t it. Especially if you’re a drunken wreck to begin with. OK time to navigate the most densely populated city in the Western Hemisphere, hanging, parched and in another language. I got a licensed taxi which came in the form of a MASSIVE TRUCK and I gave the driver the address. He didn’t bloody know where it was did he? Fine. He asked if I had a map. Nope! So with my sat nav which wasn’t connected to the Internet and our combined Spanglish he got me to my hotel and I collapsed into the white sheets already in love with the altitude (it fucks your appetite; great diet).
After four days of solace in my hotel room gasping for air, where I only really visited the outside world in short, sharp bursts due to the ABSOLUTE MADNESS of the city: the dry heat, altitude, no air, 20 million people, mostly men who catcall and call you 'Guera' (which means white skin) every five seconds and a language barrier, Alison arrived.
I had previously asked her if she was up for a couple of days of ‘rehab’ at the hotel, which means staying in, talking about stuff like whether or not we have already inhabited all the planets and earth is the final test for humans, not drinking alcohol and reading our books before bed followed by a great skincare routine, to which she had replied “Does the pope shit in the woods?” Great. Cool. Can't wait.
However on arrival, we both kinda felt like having a cheeky bebida and so we went and had a few mezcal shots and a lovely wine fizz before heading to a corner shop, Oxxo, to actually purchase a bottle of something to then bring home to bed and catch up.
In the shop however, when we requested tequila, the shop wench, who we have named “Gabby”, said the only tequila they had was this fucking weird bottle of what looked like sunflower oil. Everything must be weird here so naturally we bought it. She was like “be careful, very strong!” and pointed to the percentage (24%) at which we scoffed, reminded her we were Soy De Inglaterra and also purchased a few cans of Jack Daniels mixed with soda water and a couple of cans of “Paris by night” purely for the comedic value of the name. She bid us a good evening with a hearty chuckle and we giggled all the way back to the hotel because the shop experience was hilarious after spotting goods such as a lolly which looked like it was made from Wotsits but with a clowns face (OK THEN) and a chocolate bar called “Carlos V”.
Paris by night turned out to be this fucking rank energy drink shit and after the Jack Daniels’ were finished, we slurped the oil in bed before energetically venturing out into the streets (ignoring all prior warnings of not to go out in this area at night) We stopped next to an empty car park (lovely!) and met a pair of Mexican boys who had a dog. Alison chatted shit to them in Spanish and I sat on the pavement and cuddled the dog which was like a massive muscley boxer type dog who just kept trying to push me over.
I woke up covered in dog hair and feeling incredibly fantastic! (Yes! Got away with it!) Unbelievable Jeff! And had another shot of ‘the oil’ for good measure.
We got up and went to ‘Mercado Gerardo’ as it was now called because during my 4 days of solace one of my ventures to the outside world involved me going for dinner at the nearby market (San Juan). This is a market which, by the way, has an extensive porn selection. I had to smile to myself as I watched an old man perusing the plastic wrapped porn DVDs, picking up one which had a very graphic image on the front of cum squirting out of an arsehole and reading the back as if it was a Stephen King novel. I would love to know what was written on the back. Like who does the marketing and cover design for backstreet porn producers? What do they write? What is the USP? Also, in my opinion, spoiler alert having that image on the front! Surely save that for the actual film and put something a little more teasy on the front? Maybe that isn’t the highlight of the movie. Maybe that’s NOTHING and there’s way more obscene shit to come (pun intended). Or, maybe it’s just 90 minutes of cum squirting out of arseholes so that was the only appropriate image to put on the front anyway.
So I was at the market having dinner and a very kind Mexican waiter, Gerardo, took care of me and said if need any help etc. he would be the man. So I was super excited for him to meet my Amiga de Inglaterra having told him about her. We were also super excited to have breakfast there and sample the delicious foods.
However, on arrival it was a different story because the oil hangover had decided to hit me like a fucking train. We ordered some eggs in a green sauce with a tortilla because every meal here is a tortilla or taco in a different form. You know, burrito = closed taco. Taco = basically an open burrito. Quesdilla = basically a folded up taco. Chilalques = taco cut into triangles and fried with stuff on. Costra = cheese pretending to be a taco. Torta = big sandwich. So the wet egg meal was like tortillas covered in spicy green wet with scrambled egg on top. It was lovely to see Gerardo, don’t get me wrong, but when Alison was telling him about the oil and he was saying oh god dont drink that shit it will make you go blind, I could feel the vomit rising in my throat. I took myself to the banos, which required walking past all the food stalls frying all kinds of weird meats and all the men hollering and got to the bright pink toilets which are designed for small people aren’t they because everyone in Mexico is like 4 foot tall. So I was there all dressed in black with my sunglasses on like a tall FBI agent, bending over, dry-wretching and then returning to standing but as the toilet stalls only come to shoulder height, for anyone watching it would have been like an agent’s head popping up over the pink toilet walls, disappearing down to dry heave and then rising again looking worse and worse each time. Oh lol.
I gave up on the fruitless puking and returned to breakfast. Gerardo happily chirped on asking us questions about our plans for today but in my head i just wanted to be like “I’m going to have to stop you there, Gerardo, mate, because every time you talk, I feel sick” So we promptly asked for la cuenta and made a dash back to the hotel to get into the bed and die.
Later in the afternoon we decided to pop back to Oxxo to treat Gabby to a debrief of the night and the satisfaction of 'You were right, Gabby, babes' and she welcomed us with a lot of lols. It was a right leg slapper. Friends for life.
A few hours later we had to move to another hotel. Hotel Isabel. We got an Uber because we were hanging and paranoid, even thought it was only a 7 minute walk. The Uber took longer because there’s so much traffic here it’s like stop START stop START stop so then it was Alison’s turn to feel sick. We got dropped off and we were like OK, so it’s here soooomewheeeere. We dumped our bags on the street and Alison went into a pharmacy to ask if they knew were the hotel was and they pointed straight in front of us to the MASSIVE sign that said Hotel Isabel. Oh we are wonderfully cretinous at times.
We were welcomed into what was basically Arundel Castle. A massive old hotel with an enormous room for us so spread all our stuff over and a balcony overlooking a pumping street with some sound system playing banger after banger, which was nice.
Every shop must compete in playing the loudest music with a huge sound system on the street so add that into the general hecticness of the city too.
We noticed that all the streets here have a theme of what's for sale. You can go down music street: all musical instrument shops. Or sink street: all selling sinks. Or chicken street: all hacking up chicken carcases. Or light switch street, tap street, phone case street, Christmas street, medical street, you get the picture. You can also get anything you want from the street - need socks? Fine. How about a magnifying glass? No problem. Biro? Got it. Actually there is a stall at the market that just sells clocks and it’s hilarious that the clock vendor just has to stand there and listen to the alarms all going off at different times each day haha.
On Isabel street there was a lovely coffee shop. Every shop must come with a brightly painted ceramic piggy bank with a PINGING expression (like it's the one drinking all the coffee for sale) on the counter and when we were waiting for our coffee I could have sworn the pig blinked.
We ventured out at night in search of a cheesy snack but alas the only cheesy snack we could find was a fried cheesy log from Seven Eleven which satisfied Alison but then I was hungry and in search of a taco (I'd only been in Mexico four days so by then was still into the novelty of tacos, it's a different story now) and when looking at the board to see the meat options on a tacqueria, we noticed there was Ojo - which in Spanish, is eye. Eye tacos. EYE TACOS? WHAT? Oh what's that underneath? HEAD. HEAD TACOS. What the fuck. OK it's fine no I'll just have straight up meat shaved off the turning doner kebab meat carousel please, at least it's not offal.
During one of our visits to Mercado Gerardo when the puke wasn't rising in our throats, I decided to seek out some Chiccharon, being a foodie and all that. And so we asked friendly super helpful G to direct us to some in the market. He ushered me to a butcher at the back of the market and spoke to him in Spanish. He told me twenty pesos, OK? I said sure yes great (That's like 80p) and was handed A MASSIVE transparent plastic bag of CRISPY PIG BACK. So then I had to walk around a lovely area all day carrying this massive 'bag-o-back' periodically breaking bits of back off for a lovey backy snack. Mmm back snack. We finished the bag, shamefully, and made a note to selves that we would be vegan in the forthcoming days...
We checked out of Isabel and made our way to our hostel where we were going to spend 4 weeks working in exchange for accommodation. On arrival they showed us the staff dorm and it was a stinking weed pit covered in filth and super hungover people sleeping in a stench behind towels in their bunk beds. We’ve been in hostels in different countries. We’ve worked in them too. Lots of them and this was far worse than any we had seen before. Especially after we had been in our lovely spacious castle we were not prepared to enter into this pit of despair. Where the hell would we have made our shrines?
We pondered it all day and traipsed the area wondering how to tell the owner that it was A SHIT DEAL so eventually we booked ourselves an air bnb around the corner. We went back, Alison did the deed of telling him we were leaving (thank you again) and we got in an Uber to our first Air bnb.
Rosa her name was. Good reviews she had. Pretty sure we chose her because one of the reviews said “I often felt like I lived alone” and at that we were sold. Yes we are super compassionate people but we also DON’T WANT TO TALK TO ANYONE WE JUST WANT TO GET INTO THE BED AND DISCUSS EXISTENTIALISM AND HAVE EINSTEIN HAIR AND BE MAD.
On arrival it was all good. We were so excited to just get to use a kitchen and cook ourselves some eggs and spinach. The gaff was like a Mexican council house, you know, spacious, baron and cold but with lots of posh looking furniture that was blatantly bought on credit. We cooked our dinner and sat at the table to eat and then she emerged. In Spanish to Alison, “How long have you been in Mexico? Where did you buy those eggs? Does your friend speak Spanish? Alright Rosa, what is this? Who wants to be a millionaire? You're not Chris Tarrant. What kind of coherence is that anyway. Do you want egg shop recommendations?
Then we noticed the house rules sellotaped onto a glass chest of drawers in the living room. These were great. They included:
“Do not harness the house doors” “No meetings” and “Silence after midnight” lol who’s been having meetings that have pissed you off so much it’s now a main rule? And if you ask me, all doors must be harnessed. No Problem. Who knows what they are capable of. Pass me the reins.
We slept and then made our way to our new Air bnb. A lovely girl called Nallely (or Dale don dale for jokes) we were sucked in to the advert as it had a gym in the building, free to use, plus doormen, a great water feature (which we at first thought was a pool) and was very modern and lovely and central AND cheap! So we booked it for loads of nights.
It was there we met the first centipede...
A few minutes into the pint, a lady came up to the bar next to me. She was of similar age and she also ordered a pint. As we were the only ones in the extremely brightly lit bar both having pints at silly o’clock I gave her a nod, a smile and raised my glass for an air-cheers to which she responded positively. She also ordered a shot of Jameson’s so I thought 'fuck it, I can match that, good call! 'And ordered a Makers’ Mark (the best whiskey ever) and I asked her where she was flying to. We got talking and it turns out she once shaved her head and moved to Spain to teach English. Cool, loads in common. I got her contact details and finished her pint when she ran off to catch her plane (In the words of Alan Patridge: "Cashback!") I love the synchronicity of that. I was then adequately fucked for the flight and glided onto the plane and had a whale of a time listening to my Annie Mac playlist dancing in my seat.
Of course when I landed I was EL PARCHIDO. Yes. The flight always dehydrates you doesn’t it. Especially if you’re a drunken wreck to begin with. OK time to navigate the most densely populated city in the Western Hemisphere, hanging, parched and in another language. I got a licensed taxi which came in the form of a MASSIVE TRUCK and I gave the driver the address. He didn’t bloody know where it was did he? Fine. He asked if I had a map. Nope! So with my sat nav which wasn’t connected to the Internet and our combined Spanglish he got me to my hotel and I collapsed into the white sheets already in love with the altitude (it fucks your appetite; great diet).
After four days of solace in my hotel room gasping for air, where I only really visited the outside world in short, sharp bursts due to the ABSOLUTE MADNESS of the city: the dry heat, altitude, no air, 20 million people, mostly men who catcall and call you 'Guera' (which means white skin) every five seconds and a language barrier, Alison arrived.
I had previously asked her if she was up for a couple of days of ‘rehab’ at the hotel, which means staying in, talking about stuff like whether or not we have already inhabited all the planets and earth is the final test for humans, not drinking alcohol and reading our books before bed followed by a great skincare routine, to which she had replied “Does the pope shit in the woods?” Great. Cool. Can't wait.
However on arrival, we both kinda felt like having a cheeky bebida and so we went and had a few mezcal shots and a lovely wine fizz before heading to a corner shop, Oxxo, to actually purchase a bottle of something to then bring home to bed and catch up.
In the shop however, when we requested tequila, the shop wench, who we have named “Gabby”, said the only tequila they had was this fucking weird bottle of what looked like sunflower oil. Everything must be weird here so naturally we bought it. She was like “be careful, very strong!” and pointed to the percentage (24%) at which we scoffed, reminded her we were Soy De Inglaterra and also purchased a few cans of Jack Daniels mixed with soda water and a couple of cans of “Paris by night” purely for the comedic value of the name. She bid us a good evening with a hearty chuckle and we giggled all the way back to the hotel because the shop experience was hilarious after spotting goods such as a lolly which looked like it was made from Wotsits but with a clowns face (OK THEN) and a chocolate bar called “Carlos V”.
Paris by night turned out to be this fucking rank energy drink shit and after the Jack Daniels’ were finished, we slurped the oil in bed before energetically venturing out into the streets (ignoring all prior warnings of not to go out in this area at night) We stopped next to an empty car park (lovely!) and met a pair of Mexican boys who had a dog. Alison chatted shit to them in Spanish and I sat on the pavement and cuddled the dog which was like a massive muscley boxer type dog who just kept trying to push me over.
I woke up covered in dog hair and feeling incredibly fantastic! (Yes! Got away with it!) Unbelievable Jeff! And had another shot of ‘the oil’ for good measure.
We got up and went to ‘Mercado Gerardo’ as it was now called because during my 4 days of solace one of my ventures to the outside world involved me going for dinner at the nearby market (San Juan). This is a market which, by the way, has an extensive porn selection. I had to smile to myself as I watched an old man perusing the plastic wrapped porn DVDs, picking up one which had a very graphic image on the front of cum squirting out of an arsehole and reading the back as if it was a Stephen King novel. I would love to know what was written on the back. Like who does the marketing and cover design for backstreet porn producers? What do they write? What is the USP? Also, in my opinion, spoiler alert having that image on the front! Surely save that for the actual film and put something a little more teasy on the front? Maybe that isn’t the highlight of the movie. Maybe that’s NOTHING and there’s way more obscene shit to come (pun intended). Or, maybe it’s just 90 minutes of cum squirting out of arseholes so that was the only appropriate image to put on the front anyway.
So I was at the market having dinner and a very kind Mexican waiter, Gerardo, took care of me and said if need any help etc. he would be the man. So I was super excited for him to meet my Amiga de Inglaterra having told him about her. We were also super excited to have breakfast there and sample the delicious foods.
However, on arrival it was a different story because the oil hangover had decided to hit me like a fucking train. We ordered some eggs in a green sauce with a tortilla because every meal here is a tortilla or taco in a different form. You know, burrito = closed taco. Taco = basically an open burrito. Quesdilla = basically a folded up taco. Chilalques = taco cut into triangles and fried with stuff on. Costra = cheese pretending to be a taco. Torta = big sandwich. So the wet egg meal was like tortillas covered in spicy green wet with scrambled egg on top. It was lovely to see Gerardo, don’t get me wrong, but when Alison was telling him about the oil and he was saying oh god dont drink that shit it will make you go blind, I could feel the vomit rising in my throat. I took myself to the banos, which required walking past all the food stalls frying all kinds of weird meats and all the men hollering and got to the bright pink toilets which are designed for small people aren’t they because everyone in Mexico is like 4 foot tall. So I was there all dressed in black with my sunglasses on like a tall FBI agent, bending over, dry-wretching and then returning to standing but as the toilet stalls only come to shoulder height, for anyone watching it would have been like an agent’s head popping up over the pink toilet walls, disappearing down to dry heave and then rising again looking worse and worse each time. Oh lol.
I gave up on the fruitless puking and returned to breakfast. Gerardo happily chirped on asking us questions about our plans for today but in my head i just wanted to be like “I’m going to have to stop you there, Gerardo, mate, because every time you talk, I feel sick” So we promptly asked for la cuenta and made a dash back to the hotel to get into the bed and die.
Later in the afternoon we decided to pop back to Oxxo to treat Gabby to a debrief of the night and the satisfaction of 'You were right, Gabby, babes' and she welcomed us with a lot of lols. It was a right leg slapper. Friends for life.
A few hours later we had to move to another hotel. Hotel Isabel. We got an Uber because we were hanging and paranoid, even thought it was only a 7 minute walk. The Uber took longer because there’s so much traffic here it’s like stop START stop START stop so then it was Alison’s turn to feel sick. We got dropped off and we were like OK, so it’s here soooomewheeeere. We dumped our bags on the street and Alison went into a pharmacy to ask if they knew were the hotel was and they pointed straight in front of us to the MASSIVE sign that said Hotel Isabel. Oh we are wonderfully cretinous at times.
We were welcomed into what was basically Arundel Castle. A massive old hotel with an enormous room for us so spread all our stuff over and a balcony overlooking a pumping street with some sound system playing banger after banger, which was nice.
Every shop must compete in playing the loudest music with a huge sound system on the street so add that into the general hecticness of the city too.
We noticed that all the streets here have a theme of what's for sale. You can go down music street: all musical instrument shops. Or sink street: all selling sinks. Or chicken street: all hacking up chicken carcases. Or light switch street, tap street, phone case street, Christmas street, medical street, you get the picture. You can also get anything you want from the street - need socks? Fine. How about a magnifying glass? No problem. Biro? Got it. Actually there is a stall at the market that just sells clocks and it’s hilarious that the clock vendor just has to stand there and listen to the alarms all going off at different times each day haha.
On Isabel street there was a lovely coffee shop. Every shop must come with a brightly painted ceramic piggy bank with a PINGING expression (like it's the one drinking all the coffee for sale) on the counter and when we were waiting for our coffee I could have sworn the pig blinked.
We ventured out at night in search of a cheesy snack but alas the only cheesy snack we could find was a fried cheesy log from Seven Eleven which satisfied Alison but then I was hungry and in search of a taco (I'd only been in Mexico four days so by then was still into the novelty of tacos, it's a different story now) and when looking at the board to see the meat options on a tacqueria, we noticed there was Ojo - which in Spanish, is eye. Eye tacos. EYE TACOS? WHAT? Oh what's that underneath? HEAD. HEAD TACOS. What the fuck. OK it's fine no I'll just have straight up meat shaved off the turning doner kebab meat carousel please, at least it's not offal.
During one of our visits to Mercado Gerardo when the puke wasn't rising in our throats, I decided to seek out some Chiccharon, being a foodie and all that. And so we asked friendly super helpful G to direct us to some in the market. He ushered me to a butcher at the back of the market and spoke to him in Spanish. He told me twenty pesos, OK? I said sure yes great (That's like 80p) and was handed A MASSIVE transparent plastic bag of CRISPY PIG BACK. So then I had to walk around a lovely area all day carrying this massive 'bag-o-back' periodically breaking bits of back off for a lovey backy snack. Mmm back snack. We finished the bag, shamefully, and made a note to selves that we would be vegan in the forthcoming days...
We checked out of Isabel and made our way to our hostel where we were going to spend 4 weeks working in exchange for accommodation. On arrival they showed us the staff dorm and it was a stinking weed pit covered in filth and super hungover people sleeping in a stench behind towels in their bunk beds. We’ve been in hostels in different countries. We’ve worked in them too. Lots of them and this was far worse than any we had seen before. Especially after we had been in our lovely spacious castle we were not prepared to enter into this pit of despair. Where the hell would we have made our shrines?
We pondered it all day and traipsed the area wondering how to tell the owner that it was A SHIT DEAL so eventually we booked ourselves an air bnb around the corner. We went back, Alison did the deed of telling him we were leaving (thank you again) and we got in an Uber to our first Air bnb.
Rosa her name was. Good reviews she had. Pretty sure we chose her because one of the reviews said “I often felt like I lived alone” and at that we were sold. Yes we are super compassionate people but we also DON’T WANT TO TALK TO ANYONE WE JUST WANT TO GET INTO THE BED AND DISCUSS EXISTENTIALISM AND HAVE EINSTEIN HAIR AND BE MAD.
On arrival it was all good. We were so excited to just get to use a kitchen and cook ourselves some eggs and spinach. The gaff was like a Mexican council house, you know, spacious, baron and cold but with lots of posh looking furniture that was blatantly bought on credit. We cooked our dinner and sat at the table to eat and then she emerged. In Spanish to Alison, “How long have you been in Mexico? Where did you buy those eggs? Does your friend speak Spanish? Alright Rosa, what is this? Who wants to be a millionaire? You're not Chris Tarrant. What kind of coherence is that anyway. Do you want egg shop recommendations?
Then we noticed the house rules sellotaped onto a glass chest of drawers in the living room. These were great. They included:
“Do not harness the house doors” “No meetings” and “Silence after midnight” lol who’s been having meetings that have pissed you off so much it’s now a main rule? And if you ask me, all doors must be harnessed. No Problem. Who knows what they are capable of. Pass me the reins.
We slept and then made our way to our new Air bnb. A lovely girl called Nallely (or Dale don dale for jokes) we were sucked in to the advert as it had a gym in the building, free to use, plus doormen, a great water feature (which we at first thought was a pool) and was very modern and lovely and central AND cheap! So we booked it for loads of nights.
It was there we met the first centipede...
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