Oh God, we’re going to be stabbed or kidnapped, probably killed. Certainly robbed. This is what I get for being cheap.  

These were my thoughts as I sat in the back of a scruffy taxi several nights ago in Mexico City. Beside me sat my eleven-year-old son Quinn and in the front sat my husband Rob next to the taxi driver. A few moments before, back at the bus terminal, we could have taken one of the safe ‘securidad’ authorized taxis to our friends’ place. But no. Those taxis were more expensive, and besides, we’d already taken regular taxis off the street in Mexico City and they were perfectly fine. As were all the taxis we’d just been taking the past month in Oaxaca, along with all the local buses. The vast majority of Mexico, I was always saying to friends, is safe. Being afraid of a place like San Miguel de Allende, or anywhere in Oaxaca, is like being afraid of Ithaca, New York, or Brattleboro, Vermont, just because there are murders in East L.A. It’s buying into the media’s ridiculous hysteria of a dangerous Mexico.  

But perhaps Mexico City was a different story. Especially since this twenty-year-old taxi driver, who claimed he knew exactly where our destination was—Polanco, a nice neighbourhood half an hour away—obviously didn’t have a clue where it was. Or maybe he did know but it was irrelevant since his real goal was to take us to an ATM at gun point. After leaving the bus terminal, he’d driven three minutes down a main thoroughfare, did a U-turn, drove back the same way, then called someone on his phone as he roared down the road. Next he stopped at a gas station and this is where I got suspicious. I didn’t see him get any gas, although Rob thought he had actually stuck the gas hose in for ten seconds. Rob didn’t seem worried in the least. Then again, he wasn’t a seasoned traveller like I was. And he hadn’t read about Mexico City Taxi Driver Kidnappings. Rob is laidback. I am too, usually, but not when a taxi driver in a dodgy taxi is making frantic phone calls while driving—probably to his criminal conspirators—and now, Jesus Christ!—actually talking  to a scary-looking guy in a black car at the gas station.  

“What the hell is going on?” I said to Rob. “This doesn’t look good. Why is he talking to that guy? Does he know him? Are they friends? His friend just happens to be at the same gas station at the same time?”  

“I’m sure he’s just asking the guy for directions, relax,” said Rob.  

How could I relax in this situation? And now that we were back on the road, the scary guy in the black car was following us. After five minutes, our driver turned off and careened into a dark alley. Really dark. Deserted. He stopped the car and got on his phone again. The guy in the black car was still behind us in the alley. I was planning our escape, my heart pounding. “Should we get out now? I whispered. “Just leave our bags in the trunk and run for it?” Quinn seemed to think this whole thing was funny and hugely exciting. Rob just thought it was funny, which I found incredibly naïve. When the taxi driver got off the phone I pointed at the guy in the black car behind us and said, “Tu amigo?” Your friend? That would show him I was onto him. He answered no, but I didn’t catch the rest. My Spanish isn’t that great and he was mumbling, probably not wanting to give away the illicit details of the imminent crime.  

Then we were driving again, back onto a highway, then another, then another, for many miles. The guy in the black car was still behind us. I knew it was the same guy because I kept asking Quinn, and Quinn is a car geek. He knows the make and model of every car ever made. All I recognized was the car was black and old-ish. After that I wouldn’t have had a clue.  

“Rob, this is bad. We're still being followed. And why is he on the phone again?”  

“He must be getting directions. Do you really think if he was going to rob us he’d have wasted this much gas? If he was going to kill us he’d have done it already.”  

“Oh, you do have a point.”  

Half an hour later we were still driving, but we’d now lost the guy in the black car. Earlier, I’d recognized a sign for the anthropology museum so knew we were close to the right neighbourhood, but twenty minutes had gone by since then. We really were lost. The guy didn’t have a clue where he was going. On the bright side, I was starting to relax about him murdering us. Then, things started looking familiar. Suddenly, I recognized our friends’ street. “Aqui!” This is it! The taxi driver looked positively gleeful.  

We got out and collected our bags and I considered kissing the pavement. I was so relieved not to be dead in an alley, and so grateful to the sweet young taxi driver who’d gone to so much trouble to find the place—even eliciting the help of a random stranger at a gas station (who was that nice guy in the black car?)—that I paid the driver more than what the authorized taxi would have cost. He looked confused when I told him to keep the change, then flashed me a huge grin.  

“How did you know he wasn’t going to do something horrible?” I asked Rob after the driver drove off.  

“Because I could see him texting his girlfriend. He kept sending her heart emoticons and she was sending them back. You don’t send hearts in the middle of criminal activity.”  

The moral? Don’t be too hard on Mexico. Or its lovely citizens.

by Laurie Gough

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For more on Mexico, see my previous post, Ten Things You Probably Don’t Know About San Miguel de Allende  

Stay tuned for my upcoming post on our adventures in the state of Oaxaca.  

  

 

Set in the high desert mountains of Mexico nowhere near the ocean, the city of San Miguel de Allende is to Mexico what Burlington, Vermont is to the U.S.

With maybe a bit of New Orleans thrown in for extra fun.

I lived in San Miguel for nine months over two winters and got to know the place pretty well. But every time I visit, like just recently for the San Miguel Writers’ Conference, I learn something new about this city that everyone describes as ‘magical’ (I know! So cliché!)

I do know that 10% of San Miguel’s 80,000 residents are expats from the U.S., Canada, Europe and elsewhere, people who’ve left their lives behind to immerse themselves year-round in San Miguel’s cultural offerings and perfect climate. But I always thought that most of those expats (with the exception of myself and maybe 50 others) were retired. I was wrong.

The city that once lured Diego and Frida, the muralists Orozco and Siqueiros, portrait photographers and Beats (Neal Cassidy died mysteriously on the town’s train tracks), continues to entice artists, writers and musicians from the world over. And they’re not all over 60.

Which brings me to my first Ten Things You Probably Don’t Know About San Miguel:

1) Although in the daytime you might feel like you’re in a commercial for relaxed-fit jeans from Sears, once it gets dark, all the young people—gringos and Mexicans alike—come out from hiding. (Nobody knows what they do in the day.) At night, they flood the bars, pubs, nightclubs, cafes and the town’s central square, the Jardin. Typically they’re American or German twenty or thirty-somethings, disillusioned with the politics and stiffness of their own countries. It reminds me of what Paris of the 20s must have been like, an underground world pulsing with creativity, full of writers, artists, musicians, dancers and photographers. In San Miguel, you can rent a pretty place to live for less than $400 a month, eat fresh yummy tacos for under two dollars, and talk to your friends over Mexican coffee about how screwed up the rest of the world is. It’s the ideal place for this.

2) San Miguel is safe at night. I often left bars at 2 a.m. (see #1) and never had a problem walking home through the streets at night. At that hour, if you’re a woman alone, the taxi drivers can be creepy (although always polite in the day), but walking at night is fine and actually, totally enjoyable.

3) You can buy fantastic clothes at the Tuesday Market for two dollars. There are endless rows of tables filled with piles of new clothes that didn’t sell in the U.S.

4) The best thing you might ever eat in your life can also be found at the Tuesday Market and it’s called a gordita. It’s a thick corn tortilla filled with stuffings and salsas of your choice, then grilled. They’re about $1.50.

5) Gorditas make you fat. The word ‘gordita’ actually means ‘fat’ in Spanish. The term is also used affectionately for a cute chubby girl—probably one who eats a lot of gorditas.

6) You can take zumba classes every morning of the week with a kick-ass local instructor who all the local women swoon after (even though he’s gay.) Classes are two dollars.

7) And if you’re really into exercising you can run through the park every morning with the locals and then run up 514 steps (Choro Steps) for a view of the whole city.

8) You can get free wireless internet all day long at the local Starbucks. (I know it’s Starbucks but it’s the most beautiful one you’ve ever seen, in a 300-year-old high ceiling colonial building. The gringos protested its arrival, but the locals all wanted it.)

9) Houses in San Miguel are cheap to buy right now since so many Americans are flooding the market trying to sell the second homes they can no longer afford.

10) Even though it’s a cliché, San Miguel really is magical.

11) Bonus addition to the list: Because San Miguel is such a writers' and artists' mecca, it hosts really cool workshops, like the 2016 Summer Writing Workshops (where American novelist Diana Spechler will teach Writing A Page-Turner, Playwright Merridith Allen will teach Writing the Play that Moves You, and I, Laurie Gough, will teach The Art of Memoir and Travel Writing. Come join us in San Miguel this summer! It will be fun!)

***Read Laurie's latest book*** Stolen Child: A Mother's Journey To Rescue Her Son from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

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