Guadalajara Airport

Scribbled whilst waiting for a plane :

In the airport in Guadalajara, watching one of my favorite combinations of people.

There are full on cowboys - Vaqueros with clean hats, big leather belts, handle-bar mustaches, and snakeskin boots, craggy faces weatherbeaten.

Casual businessmen with nylon jackets atop crisply collard button-downs.  Shoes are like the cowboy boots but without tops.

Families, los niños in bright oranges and pinks and blues, teens in super tight hip jeans or athletic gear and ball caps.  Soft shoes, stylish but understated, like they are from Buenos Aires or Barcelona.

Old men with walking sticks.

Incredibly curvy women with heels adding danger, teetering, catchable if they fall?

Policemen and soldiers are more similar in GDL, both carrying bigger guns around than the average airport security in the US.  Polished, poker faced.

As the announcements play en español and then english, loud and distorted over 4 inch JBLs I dream of a future when I am fluent.  I'm resist the urge to use my phone until Houston, where the WiFi won't cost me 99 cents a minute.  The advertising overhead is almost obscene in its incongruity - a blonde girl in skintight clothes showing a lot of skin and some impossibly expensive jewelry floats over the heads of paisans in denim and palm sombreros.

{Earlier I saw a sign on a catholic church for classes on the rhythm method of "family planning" next door to a bodega selling ice cold Corona and red hot Cosmopolitan covers to sunburnt gringos}

A man is selling paintings even here, in the airport - next to the duty free store peddling tequila and marlboros which cost more than his works of art.

This incongruity, the gap between have & have not, the English and the Spanish, the foreign and the local could really twist a man up.  I do feel like a clumsy invader - maybe its the curse of having grown up in a tourist country watching the fat burnt people rudely ignoring the conservative vibe of the locals, drinking and wearing next to nothing in public.  I don't want to be that guy.  It would be a mistake though to just sit here feeling guilty (Black Gringo?!?)  The people have as much agency as I.

So - I'm stealing a word from the english-spanish dictionary and making it mine.  Instead of the turista feo, I will be a sabandija - a creepy crawly, a scuttling quiet wierdo, clever and happy in my strange skin, slowly finding my places and my place in the culture.  Just like in Seattle...

Go here to watch the space in between (pun intended)
Teleritmo!

See you soon.  Hasta luego