Travelogue, Part Three

There's always an element of risk when you have a wedding in Mexico. 'Si Senor' is just the spanish equivalent of Jamaica's 'no problem', meaning that upon hearing it there's about a 40-60 chance that what has been agreed upon and guaranteed will even come close to happening.

Luckily, my brother and his new bride are incredibly easy going and don't subscribe to the U.S. philosophy that your wedding is the most important goddamn thing in the world and your one chance in life to show everyone you've ever met how much money your family can scrape together to spend on important stuff like table centerpieces and tuxedo rentals. Like I said, it's lucky my brother wasn't stressed about any of this because I got the feeling that the person in charge of the reception woke up about noon and said, "Oh shit! That person that gave me that money a couple of months ago probably wants something in return for it. I'd better get down to the local 7-11 and throw something together!".

(Let me just be perfectly clear at this point that I still had a great time. The guests all still had a great time, and more importantly, my brother and his wife had a great time. The only reason I bring any of this stuff up is because I find the sound of my own typing to be soothing.)

After about a two hour delay, during which we all began to get cranky from lack of food, the 'appetizers' arrived. These consisted of a pineapple for each table, stuck with toothpicks to make it look like HellRaiser and covered in pieces of hot dog, an odd mystery cheese and jarred olives. Yummy! And then came the buffet. First up, shrimp. Good, you can't screw up the shrimp down here. Oh wait a minute, you can if you cook it until it's black and cover it in some sort of mole sauce without shelling it. Turns out you can really screw up shrimp. I stand corrected. Then is what I assume is potato salad because there's an uholy amount of it. It's literally a mountain of salad on a plate but due to faulty lighting, I'm unable to get a read on what's in it. Upon tasting it, I was puzzled to find out it was in fact tuna salad, not mexican style or anything, just your run of the mill sandwich spread. Ok, two for two. Finally, the only other items I tried were a black bean and cheese mixture (not bad) and some chicken, apparently cooked the same way as the shrimp. The wedding cake had not arrived yet and actually hadn't by the time my mother wanted to go back to the hotel at around ten o'clock (I was told that it did show up shortly after that and was delicious. bummer).

The other two notable aspects to the evening were that every local in town seemed to show up and help themselves and that most of the dogs in the area were present.

And here's where I've got to give my brother, his wife, and the 20 or so friends of theirs that showed up some credit. They all had a blast. No one gave a shit about minutia like having the perfect food or making sure every stupid little planned thing went off perfectly. They all collectively shrugged their shoulders, realized they were on a beach in Baja Mexico and had a blast. And as easy going as I like to think I am, I have to say I can't guarantee I would've been so level-headed about it all (at least not the dogs anyway, but I'm really not that much of a pet person).

So now with the planned festivities out of the way, we could now get down to the business of hardcore relaxation and drinking myself stupid. Next time, I learn of my own mortality with the kind assistance of a mango daquari, 2 margaritas and 10-12 Dos Equis special lagers.