The words “The End of the World” were engraved on the backs of my eyelids. I was so nervous. I never thought South Sacramento could be so damn far away. After being dropped of by the parents, I met up with Ashley to get a ride to Fresno. Her brother got into the driver’s seat.
“You wanna get there safe or you wanna get there fast?” he said. Then we were off, rap music blaring from the speakers. We arrived at Sabrina’s house a few hours later, almost at midnight. It was one of those really cheerful and unpretentious houses with yellow walls and clutter everywhere, the kind that’s been lived in by a big family. I spent the night there, and in the morning Ashley, Sabrina and I all headed out to Tijuana, with Sabrina’s friend Eddie driving. After a quick sandwich break, we stopped in San Diego while we arranged all our plans. One last look at the Pacific Ocean, and we were off to Mexico.
Right next to the border there’s a bunch of outlet stores and upscale Mexican restaurants. The Nike store contrasts a little too harshly with the huge concrete wall that divides the US from Mexico. A whole line of cars kept cutting over the median and jumping the line to cross the border. There were tons and tons of cars, half with Mexican plates and Calderon stickers and the other half in shiny SUVS with California plates. Apparently driving across the border through the checkpoint does not constitute legal immigration. So, since I didn’t pick up any papers at the border, I was an illegal immigrant to Mexico. This would cause some problems later.
When we got onto the Tijuana streets, Eddie had no idea where to go. Edwin’s grandfather gave him directions to read over the phone, but they weren’t exactly what you’d call complete. Eddie wound up driving around in circles in Tijuana for over an hour, passing the same police officer three times and accidentally ending up on a freeway heading towards Rosarito. Edwin’s grandfather had stepped out of the house, and Edwin told us to wait for him to come back for better directions.
“Maybe he just went out for milk,” said Sabrina.
“Yeah, milk in San Diego.”
Eventually we parked and waited for a little green car to drive by and lead us down some sharp curved and unlit streets to a little yellow house with bars on the windows and a big iron gate. The house had cement floors and pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe on every single possible square foot of wall space. I met up with more people from the group, and we clustered in a small group of rooms with all of our luggage. I had to share a bed with Rebecca, and when I lifted the curtains to get a view out the window, I got a mouth full of cobwebs.
Eddie drove the three of us to the airport at about 6AM. While we four were in a cozy heated car with satellite radio, the other people all had to climb into the back of a truck with their luggage. Huddled under a blanket, they took photographs and smiled wry smiles at us.
“Is there even a back to that truck?”
“I think it’s just a piece of a board.”
“Are they gonna fall out?”
“Not if the board does its job.”
Apparently even the police offers here ride in the back of trucks like that, so there was no worries about breaking any laws.
At the airport we all worried about the weight limit of only 44 lbs, which turned out to not even matter, and sorted all of our things. Eddie said goodbye, and we headed to the first of many checkpoints. We hung around lost at the check-in station while we figured out where in the hell we were supposed to go, then we all checked in together. A Latin lover was sorting the baggage, and upon seeing that my bag was so full that the zipper wouldn’t budge, he just shrugged and gave up. They checked our bags straight to Havana.
Mexico City’s airport is huge and busy. First we had to buy visas, which were in the opposite direction from where we were heading, then we headed back, then upstairs and in a huge line. I easily got my ticket (the guy didn’t even look at my passport), but for some reason it was not so easy for the others. Two of the others were denied boarding passes for being illegal immigrants to Mexico, one was sent off the pay a fine for not saying he was born in Guatemala, and we all ended up walking across the airport with heavy luggage at least five times. A big group of people got separated and wound up almost missing the last shuttle to leave for Cancun.
Cancun hits you like a giant wave crashing down on you. It’s like when you get out of a hot shower in an enclosed space, and the mirrors are all steamed up and the air is heavy, except in Cancun it’s like that all the time. Havana is too. I worried about taking cold showers, but frankly cold showers sound pretty damn refreshing right now. They made us climb the ladder down to the tarmac and fill out the forms we were supposed to get in Tijuana, then headed back to the bus to get back on the same plane and sit in the same seats.
I almost died of a massive coronary at the Havana airport. A man was waiting for us right after we got off the plane with a big sign that said UC DAVIS. He took us to the immigration booths, where I had to present all my papers to an official in communist khaki. He kept asking me questions, half in English and half in Spanish, and I started to get really obscenely nervous.
“Look forward.”
“What?”
“Look at the door.”
I looked around wildly. “I don’t understand.”
Only later did I get it that there was a tiny camera next to the door behind him. Somewhere in some Cuban database there is a photo of me looking genuinely terrified. He interrogated me for like five minutes, asking where I was coming from, the address I was staying at, how long I was staying, who I was traveling with. It was harsh. I came out all shaken, then went over to the baggage carousel to get my luggage. I kept looking over at the wandering guards and their dogs, and then at an office with a picture of Che Guevara in it. My bag was the last one out, and the rest of the group had already left. Again, I had this look of genuine terror on my face when the last bag slumped onto the metal strips. My luggage tags had a bunch of marks on them. The last one out the room, I got stopped by Cuban officials who wanted to know every single electronic appliance I was carrying with me. The man was very nice and he spoke English, perhaps taking pity on me now that I looked like I was about to cry. I didn’t know exactly how to say “iPod charger” in Spanish.
After all that, I went around the corner and the group was there waiting. I then had to sign something in order to get a copy of my socialist healthcare policy.
From the plane I noticed that there weren’t a whole lot of lights on for a major city. There were no street lights the entire drive there, and very few cars on the road. Most of the ones I saw weren’t the picturesque 1950s relics, but semi-modern imports that you’d find just the same on American highways. There were lots of murals and plaster busts of Jose Marti on every corner.
The first thing I saw on TV in Casa was Anthony LaPaglia’s face on some subtitled NBC courtroom drama. Apparently there’s some American impact here.