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We took a trolley car into Juarez, Mexico today. The trolley makes a one-hour loop around the city, starting and ending in El Paso, Texas. The trolley stops at certain merchants who pay fees to the trolley company. Ann did a little shopping at one stop on the tour. As the proprietor said, "If you're looking for Mexican junk, we've got the best junk in town!" To truly appreciate what he was saying it's necessary to have visited Mexico. Ann found a nice green wrap-around shawl.
We then went to Chihuahua Charlie's for lunch, another stop on the tour. Charlie's treated us like royalty giving us the tastiest meal we've had to date. With such a favorable exchange rate, a feast can be had for a very cheap price. They provided us with soups, appetizers, and after-dinner drinks for the cost of a simple dinner. They provided us with some fresh bread, shaped like thumb-sized loaves, with sesame seeds on top and stuffed with cream cheese. Hot bread, warm cream cheese, cooked sesame seeds - Yum! I told the waiter that I really loved the bread and he brought us a big fresh batch to take with us as we left.
The best part of Chihuahua Charlie's was a caricature sketch artist who drew a picture of Ann and me. We placed a video snapshot of this picture on the main page of this web site. Click on the small picture to get a larger blowup of the sketch.
When you view the picture you will notice that I am wearing a hat. Some of you also noticed that I was wearing a hat in our pictures taken in Tombstone, Arizona. Combined with my comments about being fitted for an expensive hat in Durango, some of you are wondering whether I bought that expensive hat. The hat in the caricature sketch is a straw cowboy/gambler style hat I found in San Juan last year. The hat in the Tombstone pictures is a crushable wool hat I found in a Tombstone shop. Neither of these hats compares to the quality or fit of the custom hat from O'Farrell Hats but $600 is a lot for a hat.
Ok, back to Juarez. We left Chihuahua Charlie's and walked to the next trolley stop. We really wanted to just get on the trolley but we had a few minutes to kill so we went into the shop. It was a factory for leather goods, including all kinds of boots. The owner convinced me that the trolley would wait while I tried on a pair of boots. I didn't want any boots but I tried on one anyway. In order to get the boot on my foot we had to put a plastic bag over my foot (for slickness) and we had to connect metal hoops to the sides of the boot for leverage. The boot fit all right but we were only trying it on my smaller foot. (The varied size of my two feet is an interesting subject that I won't delve into here.)
During the fitting of the boot, Ann and I became aware that the proprietor was lying about the trolley's schedule to keep us in his shop. We had missed the trolley. I got mad at the shop owner and told him that he had lied to keep us in his shop. His price on the boots suddenly went from $125 to $90, which is probably a good price on boots, but we walked out of his store looking for the trolley that we had already missed. He called us back into the store and told us that he would personally drive us to the next trolley stop where we could catch it for the trip back into El Paso. They loaded the two of us, plus an elderly couple (whom they had also lied to), into an old car that was falling apart and had virtually no gas. There was much confusion about who was going to drive but finally the proprietor himself got into the driver's seat. The man putting us into the car told us that we should "only give the man a couple of dollars for driving" us to the next trolley stop. Yeah, right. We did barely catch our (Continued on page 2)
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