Trapped in Mexico

Astra Heights tried to warn us... are you SURE you want to go play one night in Monterrey Mexico?

Hell yes! we said, it's gonna be sweet. And it was. Kind of. Sort of. And everything went smoothly until we.. entered Mexico. Two full hours were immediately eaten up getting tourist permits, vehicle permits, and insurance:



With our huge piles of documentation we headed two hours south to Monterrey




and somehow managed to find El Garage, which is sort of a cross between a rock club, a psychedelic art gallery, and an Aztec ruin.




It was close to the super-pumping dance club part of town, which, by 10 or 11pm, started getting extremely full of decked out, partying Mexican youth. We walked around with flyers trying to siphon as much traffic as we could over to El Garage, and started pretty late.


Astra Heights went on around 11:30, we went around 12:30, and Monte Negro around... god, I don't even know what time it was by then. But I do know that we all sweated a LOT, cause it was fucking hot as crap.



Luckily we had a safe place to stay (and park the gear) at our friend Chetes's house. Instead of giving us directions to get there, he suggested we hire a cab, give him the address, and follow. Which turned out to be the right idea. Let me tell you about getting around in Monterrey, Mexico. There are a number of challenges to getting anywhere by car:

1. All the streets are named after notable people with really long names, like "Manuel Ruiz Garcia Vesquelaveda Boulevard", which makes it hard to remember anything for more than a few seconds.

2. The names on the street signs usually differ from the maps by one or two words.


3. Most major streets get a completely different name every few miles. Apparently they have more notable people than they have streets.

4. Left turns will often involve a right exit, and vice versa.

5. By the time you get a sign telling you which way your turn is, there's usually a curb or barrier preventing you from going that way (this is not a joke, this happened ALL the time)

6. Many maneuvers are based on u-turns, but they put signs pointing you ahead to where the u-turn is. The result of this is that there are signs all over the city pointing in the exact opposite direction of the place they are directing you to.


7. They seem to have a problem with people running red lights. Naturally, nobody slows down for a yellow light, so they added a green flashing light before the yellow (a warning warning?) And where that still didn't work, they just added stop signs too. So you frequently come up to an intersection with a green light AND a stop sign. We never did figure out the right way to handle that one.

8. Here and there the police flag you down and make up some reason to extort a bribe from you (in our case, not having a front license plate) We fell for this the first time, then learned that we just shouldn't stop. (This isn't technically a navigational problem, but it is really distracting)

In addition, and perhaps because of, all this, when people give you directions they go on and on forever, involve lots of hand gestures, and are basically impossible to make sense of, much less follow:



Which is why it took us another two hours just to find our way out of town and back to the road to Nuevo Laredo. There was much debate over which border crossing to go to. The "Colombia" crossing, 20 miles out of the way, was rumored to be much faster. But there was another rumor it closed early on Sundays. But what did "closed" mean exactly? That we couldn't cross, or we just couldn't return our car permit? Did we really have to return our car permit? What happens if we didn't? They did authorize our credit card for some kind of "deposit" when we got it, so we figured we'd better return it. So we went to the main crossing in Laredo and did that, then got lost in another cramped neighborhood for a while, and finally found the line to cross, which was REALLY REALLY long, stunk of exhaust, and was crawling with vendors walking between the cars selling large crucifixes. I'm not making that up. That's all anybody was selling: Jesus on the cross, anywhere from one to 5 feet long. Apparently such a thing is useful when crossing the border into the U.S.

We decided to try one of the other bridges, so we wiggled our way through town, part of which was severely flooded.



Eventually we found two other crossings. Both closed. By this point, as you can imagine, the tension level was quite high. We had actually gotten quite giddy and excited at the prospect of finding a crossing, which brought us all together as a happy team, cracking jokes and whooping it up. But once we were confronted with red cones and barriers, the shit fell apart. Cat was screaming "this is bullshit!!" over and over; Pipe was sweating bullets and basically having an ulcer while he drove; Rob was furiously wrangling his laptop in an attempt to get maps, information, anything; and Johnny sat stock still in the back, eyes wide as frisbees, wondering what the hell he had signed up for when he joined this band, and wondering if he'd rather get mugged and left on the street, or get thrown in Mexican prison for not having a front license plate.