Tourist Season Again!

Author: Doug Bower

It is tourist season here in Guanajuato. The streets are once again crawling with pasty-white-legged gringos looking for a good time and wanting to blow a tremendous amount of money.

Here is where I come in as your humble, sincere, and most observant columnist. I would like to offer a few of today's observations on the 2005 Guanajuato Tourist Season.

Tourism—here is how it is supposed to work:

You spend many hours at your job and work lots of overtime to save up enough money to take the family to Mexico. You look at endless travel brochures, watch every special on the Discovery channel that has the name Mexico in it, and even start telling the boys down at Gipper's where you are taking the family this summer.

The summer vacation arrives. You are excited beyond your ability to express. You pack. You put the kids and wife on a plane and fly to Mexico. Your much-dreamed-of vacation has finally begun.

Everyone is sworn to be on his or her best and most humble behavior as a guest in someone else's country. And, that is, after all, what you are, as you all agree—a guest.

You would not go to Grandma's house and fart loudly in front of Granny and all her old crony sisters—of course not. You would excuse yourself and go to the bathroom. You would try using toilet paper as a muffler, mashing it ever so gently unto your delicate rectal tissues, so as not to gross out all the old folks as they are trying to eat their nice bread pudding when they are actually farting themselves but saying nothing.

You are a guest and you will not act in someone else's home as you would in your own. This, you know, applies to being in someone else's country as well.

Tourism—here is how it actually works:

The kids scream nonstop on the streets of Mexico because they cannot have a Happy Meal; the right cartoons are not on the NON-existent television set in a hotel room that resembles someone's bedroom from the 1700's; there are no playgrounds or theme parks. There is only a bunch of Baroque buildings that they think is a salad dressing when you try explaining to them the word, Baroque.

Their behavior escalates. They pitch a fit a minute, over what? They really don't know since there is nothing to demand to have and for you to deny them. They don't want to be in Mexico because there is nothing to do.

They begin hitting their parents and the parents tolerate this behavior. This typical American child behavior is seen all the time in America. When the child doesn't get what he or she wants they beat up Mom.

The local Mexicans look with horror-stricken faces and yet settle quickly into a kind of facial expression,

"Oh that's America for you."

The mother and father somehow find something to do with the children. I think they get some Actifed for children and drug them, and put them down for naps. Then the pair goes off to a park to have a knockdown drag-out, verbal donnybrook on a very public park bench with all of Mexico listening and watching.

The local Mexicans look with horror-stricken faces and yet settle quickly into a kind of facial expression,

"Oh that's America for you."

The sweet and loving American family finally gets their act together with one another. "It had to be culture shock, or the altitude," they reason. So, off they go to a restaurant.

In the restaurant, the father begins screaming,

"I know somebody here's got to speak that there English and I wants'em at this here table right now!"

The local Mexicans look with horror-stricken faces and yet settle quickly into a kind of facial expression,

"Oh that's America for you."

And that is today's report of the beginning of Guanajuato's 2005 Tourist Season.