Wednesday, May 17, 2000
Jana on the roof of the Hotel Acosta
View from hotel rooftop
We like Parral. It’s different from anyplace else in Mexico
that we’ve been. Population of about 80,000, and prosperous without
relying on tourism. We even saw some help-wanted signs in town. I
think it was a much better place to stay than Chihuahua. After
breakfast, we walked around town for a few hours.
Hidalgo de Parral town square
One thing you don't want to get when you're in Mexico is
"turista," also known as "Montezuma's revenge," also known as the
"Aztec two-step." (I'm talking about gastrointestinal upset if
you've not caught that yet.) Turista seems like an uncommonly bad
name for a restaurant.
Consequently, we chose not to eat here.
We took a taxi to the bus station and found that there were no
buses heading south until 5:00 p.m. We took our chances by taking a
local bus to Jiminez, where a busier road might mean more through
traffic. We enjoyed that short trip, which stopped in a few tiny
villages along the way. Riding the buses in Mexico became a sort of
entertainment in itself.
Killing time at the Parral bus station
We hung out in Jiminez for a couple of hours, mostly at the
Pollo Feliz (Happy Chicken), where we munched on quesadillas and
drank Tecate until time to catch the bus to Torreon.
The bus stopped just outside Torreon at a truck stop for about
20 minutes for a break. According to their international icons for
the sexes outside the sanitarios, men wear hats and women carry
umbrellas. The toilets here were especially disgusting, and like
most public toilets in Mexico, there were no toilet seats. I was
fortunate that I never needed to sit on a public toilet on this
trip, but the possibility made me come up with this great idea -
inflatable, disposable toilet seats!
They call these sanitarios?
We arrived at Torreon about 9:00 p.m. new local time and caught
a cab to Hotel Pasada del Sol. A fairly nice hotel by our
standards, but there were a few busloads of high school students
staying there. We had supper in the hotel restaurant, and a table
full of girls kept eyeing me. They weren’t even trying to be sneaky
about it. Jana finally turned around and glared at them and said,
"hey, mi esposo," and they giggled nervously and turned back
around! Then they sang some songs and suckered a man at the next
table into paying for their sodas when they left - Girls!
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