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SHE SAID…
April 27, 2003
That’s it. The holidays of
Passover and Easter are over for another year. So-called
“Spring Breakers” have taken off the wet
T-shirts they wore to the contests in all the bars around
town, put on some dry clothes again and assumed a semblance
of civility once more… Youngsters have gone back
to school, their parents have gone back to work, and
the municipal authorities are wondering what went wrong
with their best-laid plans to implement the highly-touted
“La Vía Pública No Es Barra Libre”
program. In English, the name of that program means
“The Public Street Is Not An Open Bar”.
There were banners hung all over town and on every vertical
surface near and along the Malecon promoting the concept.
Thousands of flyers were handed out …all to no
avail.
During the peak of the two Easter
holiday weeks in Vallarta, I went for my usual ice cream
and double espresso at the “Once Upon A Time…”
ice cream shop - which has become my favorite place
for people-watching - and coffee of course. I watched
as a huge, new, glistening black pick-up truck with
three youngsters in the front cab and six others in
the back, raced by. Everyone races around that curve,
including and especially the buses. I believe they think
it’s one of the more important curves on the Indy
500 track… Anyways, all the fellows in that pick-up
truck were drinking beer, the driver too. Right behind
them came a police car with its siren blaring. The truck
pulled over and stopped right in front of the shop.
The police car did as well. The officer got out and
walked over to speak to the driver of the pick-up. As
he was doing that, another police car drove up, parked
behind the first, and its officer got out to speak to
the driver of the pick-up too. The first officer made
way for the second and went to chat with the fellows
in the back of the truck. He tried to explain the regulation
to them while -all the while- the youngsters kept on
pulling out more bottles of beer from the cooler in
the back of the vehicle, opening them, and drinking
from them as they “chatted” with the police
officer. To the small crowd that gathered to watch the
event it was obvious that the youngsters were making
fun of the two police officers.
After some information had been taken
down by the cops, the pick-up truck left as did the
first patrol car and its driver. I called out to the
second officer just as he was getting back into his
vehicle. I said, “I thought the new regulation
states that you would pour out the beer in the bottles
of those who were drinking in public…” He
answered me, “Oh, no. That’s only if they’re
walking with glasses or open bottles of beer. These
guys were riding in the truck.” He told me that
he had confiscated the driver licenses of two of the
passengers in the front cab, and if ever they would
be stopped again down the road, their truck would be
confiscated. The Mexicans who were standing near me
began to laugh. Once the police officer had left, they
turned to me and asked, “Do you believe that?
I bet the cops made a deal to meet with the driver of
the truck a couple of blocks down from here …where
they can “arrange” things…”
Arnulfo Guzman, my co-worker at the
Tribuna de la Bahía, had a two-page photo spread
in Sunday’s paper entitled “Vallarta’s
Anti-Alcohol Program Fails”. He wrote: “With
the “Drinks To Take Out” shops packed with
hundreds and hundreds of vacationers, the “La
Vía Pública No Es Barra Libre” program
has proven to be an outright failure.” In Tuesday’s
paper, he devoted an entire page to photos of those
nubile young things competing in “wet T-shirt
contests”… So there you have it. The not-so-religious
aspect of the holy weeks of Easter in Vallarta.
Another thing I’ve never understood is the beach
clean-ups that take place every year just prior to what
the local tourism industry calls the “national”
holidays (i.e. Mexican). These are always and inevitably
followed by an incredible amount of garbage left all
along the beaches. My question is why those same beaches
aren’t cleaned prior to the “foreigners’”
holidays. Don’t we deserve cleaned up beaches
too?
Did any of you who subscribe to PVNet
(internet server) notice the new system they’ve
got going? It detects what it deems to be “spam”,
deletes the contents, then forwards all the messages
to you, the end user. I don’t know how legal that
is, but I do know that it has taken many innocuous messages
sent to me by friends of mine, established that they
were “spam” according to their criteria
and now there ain’t nothing there when I try to
open them. That’s not nice.
I noticed that we had a letter from
a reader who still has to listen to that same irritating
message that I hear every time I pick up my phone, the
one from that insufferable voice that is still telling
me to “marque asterisco ochenta y seis para recuperar
sus mensajes” …after nearly three months!
As if we still didn’t know how to pick up the
messages in our voice mail. When I began writing this
week’s column, I wrote that I’d love to
know when TelMex is going to get rid of it, if ever.
Well, now that I have to send it in to the PV Mirror,
I have to inform you all that …guess what? The
message is GONE! Yippeeyeay!
At this point, I would like to address
our faithful readers - the year round foreign residents
in this town - who are sometimes miffed at the fact
that we reprint articles in the Tribune. (This is a
reminder I touch upon more or less regularly.) Although
we realize that these folks are the backbone of Vallarta's
foreign community, the ones that help support the local
economy all year round including during the "low"
seasons, the Tribune was conceived as - and continues
to be - a publication whose primary market is made up
of foreign tourists. By this I mean those visitors who
come to our town for one or two weeks of fun and relaxation.
Many of them want to find out all they can about Puerto
Vallarta while they're here, what we can offer them
in terms of entertainment, food, culture, etc., what
we (foreign residents) are like, how we function here,
and so on. That's probably why the "Letters to
the Editor" section is so popular. And although
we foreigners, expatriates, etc. who live here think
we already know all there is to know about PV, these
tourists don't and that is why we reprint articles dealing
with topics of general interest. Like what? Well, like
those dealing with national and sometimes international
holidays, those that deal with the multitude of topics
particular and specific to the Bay of Banderas area
and those that deal with typically Mexican subjects,
like chocolate and Tequila... for example.
Consequently, dear resident readers,
please bear with us. We try our best to offer you as
much "fresh" reading material as possible
every week. But remember our visitors, they are the
reason why Puerto Vallarta has grown so much over the
last decade and hopefully will continue to do so for
many, many years to come.
Have a wonderful week, please
don’t forget your sun block (the girls at the
Tribune all came back looking like lobsters last week),
take care of each other, be grateful for all you have
and if you have a little extra, consider sharing it
with the less fortunate. Most of all, this Wednesday
and every day of the year, be good to your children.
They are our future and you are their teachers. As a
friend of mine used to tell me when my kids were little:
“After you’ve yelled at them all morning
to hurry up and get ready to leave for school, remember
to tell them you love them!”
Hasta luego.
pvmomto3@hotmail.com
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