Mi ultimo dia. (11 Feb)

I’m going to try and keep this short.  It’s been taxing writing as much as I have as often as I have.  Sure, if I’d kept it to 500 words I’d be fine, maybe even 1000, but regularly writing 2000+ words (which I’m sure I did fairly often) is a bit exhausting, as I’m sure reading it regularly was.  You’d want to be getting paid for that sort of thing.

My last day was quite sedate.  I got up at 0700 after my harrowing night at El Nido and La Mosca and caught a ride with my housemate to the hospital.  He was supposed to be working 3 shifts today because they needed someone to fill in for other doctors.  This prospect had pleased my housemate because he felt he was becoming depressed and doing unhealthy things because he wasn’t working enough.  He also liked that it would help him pay off his substantial credit card debt.

I liked that he’d be working the night shift because it meant I’d have a quiet last night that I had more control of.  He’d be at work, out of trouble and then, as he’d planned, he’d come back at 0530 the next morning and take me across the border.  Perfect.

We got into the hospital and I went to theatre and hung out there.  I didn’t really go into any operations that day; I was supposed to meet my contact at 1100 for some reason unknown to me.  There were only a few operations on in the morning; an amputation of a diabetics gangrenous leg, which I had wanted to see, but was told to watch from outside as the room would be contaminated.  The leg had, among other bacteria, psuedomonas, which is a tricky bugger to treat.  There were some gastric sleeves being done, but I’d seen my fill of those.

I watched the leg get amputated and practiced my spanish with one of the nurses who was standing outside, handing surgical equipment into the theatre as it was needed.  I also spent time talking to my good friend Edgar.  He’d spent the morning asking me a lot of questions about english.  We’d discussed a lot of pronunciation issues that Mexican’s have and tried to work on them.  Issues like:

Duck vs. Dog
Tree vs. Three
Tuesday vs. Thursday
Bicker vs. Vicar

We didn’t actually discuss the last one, but I couldn’t remember the ‘b’ vs. ‘v’ issue we’d had.  In the average Mexican mouth, which I don’t mean to be offensive, I just mean that it would take an exceptionally conscientious Mexican to pronounce those words clearly, each of those words sounds the same.  In fact, not only do they sould the same when Mexican’s say them, they sound the same, to many Mexicans, when we say them.  I had to repeat the words four or five times for Edgar so he could really hear the difference, and I’m still not sure he got it.  It was fun though.

Edgar made plans to pick me up at 1900 to take me to some bar for my last night.  I went out to find my contact, who was not in their office.  Someone made some phone calls for me and told me to go and wait, my contact would be along soon.  I must had waited an hour and a half before they turned up.  Fortunately all sorts of people kept popping into the doctor’s lounge and having a chat.  It turns out they were doing this because there was supposed to be a party for me to say good bye.  This was delayed.  My contact had tried to organise a Kangaroo shaped cake for me, which would have been fun, but it didn’t come through.  Instead they ordered two big pizzas from Domino’s and two boxes of barbecued chicken wings.  For the longest time, I was the only person eating the pizza.  Everyone sat around chatting, but no-one would eat.

After that there was some paperwork to finalise and then I said good-bye.  I went from my contact’s office to the cafeteria to say good-bye to the staff their that had treated me so well.  I turned up and the girl at the counter said “¿Caldo tlalpeño?”, I thought she was talking about the recipe that I had been promised, so I agreed… it turned out she meant that they were serving it today.  I didn’t really need to eat, so I just asked for a small one; they brought me a big one anyway.  So I sat and chatted some more.

Once I’d finished up at the hospital I made my way home.  Once I got in, my housemate asked me if I wanted to go get drunk tonight.  I said no way, I needed to sleep.  My housemate was going out with a friend of his, who had come in from the town they both grew up in.  I was worried by the idea of my housemate going out and getting hammered, because it put my morning’s plans at risk.  Damn it! Why wasn’t he at work?

His friend, the one we went to the strip club with, had decided he needed to do a shift to get some more money and told my housemate to give him the shift.  I don’t know how that works, but their friendship comes across as a very big brother/little brother type of friendship.  The friend takes good care of my housemate and, I suppose, in return, sometimes my housemate must take a few hits.  This was one of those hits.

I told my housemate that I’d be going to some bar to drink tequila with my friend Edgar, I wouldn’t be out late though.  I thought about inviting him, but I didn’t really feel it was my place to do that.  It was Edgar’s car and Edgar’s idea, so I didn’t feel I had the right to rope others in.  I went out to wait on the street at 1900.  I told my housemate if Edgar didn’t show in 15 minutes, we’d go and get something to eat.  Edgar showed.  I went inside and said bye to my housemate and then took off.

Edgar told me we needed to go to his house first; he needed to drop some stuff off.  Edgar lived in a less well-to-do neighbourhood, but he had a pleasant house.  We went inside and he introduced me to his brother, who was there with his girlfriend.  He showed me his room and his guitar.  He offered me an oat-cookie.  I didn’t really want an oat-cookie, but I’d been feeling bad about giving Edgar the impression that there was a lot of Mexican things I didn’t like.  I had told him I wasn’t a fan of Horchata, I wasn’t crazy about a drink made from hibiscus flowers they called Jamaica, other things that I can’t really remember.  I looked at the cookies, they looked kind of like Anzac bikkies… but they’d been cooked too long and weren’t overly appetizing.  I took one and bit into it; it was dry and chewy.  Edgar looked at me expectantly.  He asked me what I thought.

“It’s good” I said, trying to sound as pleasantly surprised as possible to account for how skeptical my face probably looked before.  I decided to add a small negative to make the enthusiasm sound more legitimate (this is how you lie well, in my opinion).

“It’s a little dry, but yeah, I like it”.  Edgar was satisfied with my response and we moved on.  He gave me his guitar to play around with and so I did.  Fumbling with songs that I was trying to remember.  He asked if I could sing and play at the same time, which if you call what I can do singing and what I do playing… then yes.  So I gave that a shot and Edgar seemed suitably impressed.  I handed him the guitar and asked him to show me his chops.

Edgar likes metal.  Edgar practices metal scales and riffs.  Edgar showed me some arpeggios that he made to build his speed and he also showed me how to cut the strings with the pick (he used a fat, hard plastic plectrum, which I never would use).  He was fast and good at what he did.  He also showed me he can play finger-picking styles (for when he’s in church).  I felt like a chump, but it’s not as though I’ve ever been a serious guitarist, so I’ll let myself off.  I asked Edgar if he could sing as well.  He declined, he said he didn’t like to sing.

While we were doing all this, Edgar brought out a bottle of orange liquid and offered me some.  He said it was good and that I should try it.  The bottle looked like something that bikers might drink from, but I was game to try anything.  He poured me some; I sniffed it and then took a sip.  It had a fruity flavour up-front, but not too sweet; you felt the alcohol evaporating in your mouth but there was no ‘hard liquor’ burn down your throat.  It was very pleasant.  I asked what it was made from and Edgar didn’t know.  We drank and played some more.

Eventually we left and got some hotdogs.  Edgar took me to this street vendor and told me they were the best hotdogs in Mexicali.  The sausages were cooked with a strip of bacon wrapped around them.  You added fried onions, a little bit of frijoles, mustard, mayonnaise and tomato sauce; they came with french fries too.  Edgar may have been right about the best hotdogs in Mexicali; they were pretty damn good.  It was more about the condiments than the meat itself, but it was a fine meal.

We never got to the tequila bar.  It hit about 2200 and Edgar dropped me home.  I went to bed and continued the story in the next post.

See you there.

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