Pammie meets Antonio and Gala from Egypt while in Mexico

After our orientation meeting I met up with Antonio and Gala, two Mexican theatre students I met in Egypt while they were on holiday from working in London at the time. They came to my hotel. In Johannesburg on the way to Tanzania my flight had been delayed by about 4 hours so I spent the time looking through the airport and thought an ostrich egg would make a great gift for Gala. So I had hauled this huge fragile thing around with me in my back pack (it took all the space) from JNB-DAR-BULY-DAR-JNB-NYC-MIA-MEX, gingerly placing it under each air line seat, making sure it didn’t get crushed and thus ultimately wind up giving her a package full of smashed egg shell fragments. I triumphantly gave Gala the ostrich egg, relieved to finally be rid of the dreaded thing, which was wrapped in like 20 metres of bubble wrap. She unwrapped it and immediately ignored the egg and began popping the bubbles. Antonio, who looks a little like Salvador Dali with bleached hair and the same moustache, stared at the ostrich egg, observed it with a trained eye while held at a distance with outstretched arm, then brought it back close up, shook it, put his eye to the hole where they had extracted the egg, and when they finally guessed what it was, they said, but...why? And put it in their backpack without a word. Gala is a vegetarian and doesn’t seem pleased at the idea that I killed a baby ostrich so she could have a present. I can’t believe I tiptoed across the planet with that naffen thing and they aren’t thrilled with it. I would have been stoked. But what the heck, they're actors, what do they know.

Pammie sharing a sheesha pipe with Gala and Antonio in Egypt

Anyway they took me on the metro and then a pesero (a small fat and bubbly cartoon-like bus bouncing along on small tires called a fish bowl because of the huge windows displaying many more people smashed into it than there should be) to a bar and we had a few drinks, I had margaritas, and we ate some little Mexican snacks, sopes, for dinner. Not to be confused with sopas, which is soup. Sopes are little tortillas spread with refried beans with salsa and cheese on top.

Mexicans only really eat two meals a day, one big breakfast in the morning around 8 or 9 am, then their main meal at around 2 or 3 pm, and then a snack in the evening. Not a bad set up, and good for me too when I travel alone. I tend not to eat dinner when I travel because I don’t like being out and about at night, but, the meals must be evenly spaced and snacks can be critical to the success of avoiding a cranky pammie. So we talked in the bar for a while, then they took me back home. We took the metro which is very efficient and just as good as the one in Paris, with trains running every few minutes and the network of lines spider webbing throughout the city. It is much cheaper to use than the Paris metro, and a ticket will take you anywhere you want, without zone restrictions. I think the tickets were only about 10 cents each. Like the Paris metros (the trains are made in France, too), they are packed with people including encamped homeless people and travelling musicians playing for handouts. The metros here also have vendors walking from carriage to carriage hollering out that they are selling pens, candy, pirate CD’s, etc.

Gala and Antonio wanted to meet up again the next evening to walk around the Zocalo or main plaza so we could eat street food there, but it was raining the next evening, so I never called. I cannot stand to use the telephone and it took me two days to get the nerve to call Antonio the first time. Gala also loves food and wanted to take me especially to the little street food stalls. It was amazing how much weight she had lost since I’d seen her in Egypt 9 months ago, and when I commented on it, she said she’d had to lose weight because she couldn’t get any theatre roles unless she was skinny. In Egypt she was normal sized, if not with a bit of puppy fat, from stealing food from the restaurant in London where she worked, she said. She was very good looking then, and wore no makeup. Now she was very thin with lots of make up and she looked terrible, like a witch. Guess that's the theatre!