Above, the spinach and strawberry salad, with iced cafe de la olla on the left, at Cielo, a mellow and crisply designed little restaurant in downtown Tijuana, on Calle 11. I met up last week with my friend Acido Espumo a.k.a. Wonka, a Tijuana native, to check out a bit of the "Tijuana para los de Tijuana" scene, or, 'TJ for TJ people.' This is where we landed for lunch.
Cielo is part of the "hip new Tijuana" phenomenon that sprung up with the worldwide recognition of Nortec Collective and other Tijuana musicians, artists, and writers who have been redefining the city since the early 2000s. After lunch here -- finishing with a nice chicken breast and a potato mash, and a lemony cold desert -- we checked out some of the bars on Calle 6, headed by the newest hot spot, La Mezcalera, and the old stand-by, El Dandy del Sur.
It was too early to party, though, and, sadly, Tijuana felt deadened by its current state of terrifying internal warfare. So after a few beers, Wonka drove me back to la linea.
Crossing north by foot at the busiest international border in the world is always a head-trip. It's almost anti-climactic when there aren't a lot of pedestrians. Sometimes the U.S. customs agents can tell if you've done this, oh, a few hundred times in your life, and they just wave you through. You stick any bag through a scanner, pass through a door, and, 'Welcome to America.'
Here I do not have a car or a cell phone. So from the San Diego Trolley terminus I walked about two miles to my mom's house in San Ysidro, getting completely lost along the way. Hybridity is tiring.
* Looking at my archives, I've posted so much about TJ over the years. Here are some hits: "ERRE pulls out of Tijuana retrospective," "Mapping the bloodshed in Tijuana," "Tijuana nights," "End nears for binational border gatherings," "Leaving Tijuana: Everyone is doing it," "'Literally Hell': The deadly prison riots in Tijuana," "Wednesday night cantina-hopping in Tijuana."
** Tijuas, amor para siempre.