South of the Border

Finally got to San Diego last night. I'm always excited to be in a new city, to see different scenes and experience different culture. Our hotel is located in the downtown business district and there is very little for me to see in the dark other than those tall office buildings.

DC and I decided we should get into a little mischief, so we drove to Tijuana for Club Extasis. It was 11pm here and 2am back in the East Coast, we were kinda beat since we were unable to sleep during the six hours long flight. (Why do people like to turn on their headlight even though they are not reading?) But the thought of hot naked latino male strippers had us pumped. We searched for maps and found out that the club is literally right across the border, but we can't find any direction or physical map to bring with us, but we figured we would find the way without any problems. (Only Google had a map of Tijuana) Fast forward to us driving all aroung the place half and hour later almost giving up.

This is my first time in Mexico, although I'm sure Tijuana is far different than the other parts of the country. While we were lost, I get to see some part of it and got a feeling why people wants to come to the States.

Anyway, we were driving around in circles and I decided to go out and ask people. DC was kinda scared, he didn't really want me to get out of the car. But I did, and nobody knew where it was... Finally I went to a cab driver and offered him money to lead the way. He was a nice fellow, lead us there and only asked for $5. I would have paid him $20, but I gave him $10 instead. I was starving at this point, haven't ate for 14 hours and thank god there was a hot dog stand right across from the club (I was hoping for authentic street vendor food), but that hod dog is probably one of the best I've ever tasted, you can add your own mushroom for free.

The club was quite big, and when we get there the stripping is already in progress. Cute, muscled latino hunk taking their clothes off to a huge mixed crowd. The dancers don't really know how to dance and you can tell they are straight because they like showing off to the girls too much but that's beside the point. It's a fun atmosphere which took quite a bit of sleaze out of it. Althought there is a huge maze backroom that is for men only. People are probably having sex back there. Of course, I wouldn't miss this great opportunity to check it out. There is a long narrow hallway where people pass each other by very, very slowly like the rush hour bumper to bumper traffic, playing grab ass and there is another part of it that is divided into 15-20 small room and I don't know what goes on in there. It's too dark and I'm scared... haha.

After the show is done, DC and I decided it is time to go. So we tried to drive back to San Diego. Well while we were looking for our way, we realized we were in the wrong lane (The street signs in San Diego and Tijuana couldn't have been smaller) so we made a late sudden turn. Suddenly there were flashing lights and sirens and a cop car is tailing us pulling us over. Three cops, two of them a lot more handsome than the strippers in Extasis, walked over and start asking us questions like where we were going, where we went, if we were drinking that kind of stuff. Then they asked DC to come out of the vehicle, patted him down and took all the contents in his pockets out. One of the cuter cops came to the passenger side and I started talking to him in my limited Spanish trying to play the dumb lost tourist, hoping he'll let us go. Another cop asked me to go out of the car and did the same to me as he did DC. The searched our car and didn't find any drugs. And as he examined the documentation of the rental car, he told us that we do not have Mexican car insurance and that it is illegal and a "Big" deal. The rental car documentation did state that we will need special written permission to drive to Mexico, but we didn't know. So they say we will need to follow them to the police station and the car will need to be towed. (How can we foolow you and be towed at the same time?) Another one chimed in and say that we will need to pay a $450 dollar fine. (Dollars not Pesos?) I have heard stories about things like these so we already know what comes next and I was trying not to laugh the whole time. So he asked us to get back into our car and turn off the lights, and he'll let us off with a warning for all the money we are carrying becuase we were such nice guys. And of course, we handed it to them and there's when we realize that when they hand us back the content in our pockets, they had already taken $20 out of each of us.

Thank god before we leave for Mexico, we decided it would be safer to leave all our credit card and ATM cards in the hotel room. We only brought $80 cash each and our IDs to get back to US. I wasn't really upset about it, it would make for great stories and memories. It's practically hilarious for me. I was worried that DC would be more upset, but then he's pretty well off so this is really chump change for him. I remember one time we went to this place where we have to put our belonging into small security boxes and when we were leaving someone has mistakenly switched the content of the box and he took it as a sign... haha. Finally he got his stuff back but he was quite upset. But I guess he was ok. It is certainly a night to remember and we did have quite an adventure.