San Pancho Vida

Hollywood Stars (Not)

Here at San Pancho Vida, we just had another contest. Don't feel bad if you didn't know about it. Neither did I.

The idea for it came to me while I was in Los Angeles visiting my son for his birthday, which trip was a delight as always. He was kind enough to pick me up at the airport last Thursday and drive me to my hotel in West Hollywood during LA rush hour traffic. That's okay, we had time to talk. But for several days, while he worked, I was on my own and had reason to ride in taxicabs.

Which brings me to the contest and the winners: 

Winners! Grouchiest Taxi Cab Drivers in the Western Hemisphere!! Los Angeles taxi drivers! And there isn't even a close second, in my opinion.

OMG, I've never met a surlier batch of people in my life. This is cumulative opinion, not just from this last trip which was my fourth four-or-five-day visit to the City of Angels Except for the Cab Drivers.

You may know if you're a regular reader that one of my favorite pastimes during my travels is chatting with taxi drivers. I learn so much from them, about the local economy and opinions, about the reality of their lives and the trajectory of their children's, about the history, attractions, and changes they've witnessed in their cities and towns.

In giant bustling Mexico City, I talked endlessly with cabdrivers, many of whom were as educated about their city as museum docents. It usually only took a "buenas tardes" to start the conversation. If that didn't do it, I'd ask one more question...and the floodgates would open. This has been my experience in Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende, in Zihuatanejo and other towns and cities in Mexico. In New York City, in Seattle, in and out of Phoenix, in Vancouver, B.C., in San Francisco. It's been true in small towns and big ones. It was even sort of true in Montreal and was certainly so in Boston and its surrounds.

So what's up with Los Angeles? It was as if every time I got in a taxi, the driver totally resented my presence. And his job. And the traffic. And apparently the world.

To be fair, my son and I traveled with two youngish taxi drivers one night to go see an improv show. One of them was polite. The other was almost friendly. And the Armenian man who drove me to the airport early Monday morning talked to me for five minutes (of the forty) and removed my suitcase from the trunk with barely a grumble.

Taxi-grouches are distinct from other people I met in LA in public-interaction occupations. The hotel's valet staff who call cabs and such go out of their way to be helpful and personal. The housekeepers are so nice you want to take them to lunch. The people behind cash registers are plenty friendly. Waiters and waitresses (probably all aspiring actors) are gorgeous and fun. The good news in my mind is that I don't come away believing that this grumpy rudeness is endemic to the whole population of LA.

The other good news is, I got to see the stars on Hollywood Boulevard. Not any live ones, just the ones that are in the sidewalk. That was fun. Some of them we boomers grew up watching: Lucille Ball, Gene Autry, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Lassie, Andy Griffith. Donald Duck and Tinker Bell. The list is long.

Of course, the stars march through time. I noticed many current names. Los Angeles taxi drivers don't have one. I checked. Maybe that's why they're so sulky. After all, if the Rugrats get a star...

✮    ✮    ✮    ✮    ✮    ✮    ✮

Hurricane Report with Rant

I received a very concerned email from a dear friend in Seattle on Wednesday, saying he’d heard on the local news that Puerto Vallarta had been hit by a hurricane with winds of 100 mph, asking if I was okay, whether there had been damage to the town or to the house. He asked me to contact him if I could or have my son call if I’d been able to reach him. It was a sweet and caring message.

That email pissed me off no end.

What the f*&# has happened to news reporting in the U.S.A.? How is it possible that this kind of raw misinformation is disseminated daily by people whose charge it is to inform the American public?

Yes, there was a hurricane, Jova by name. Yes, it was off the west coast of Mexico. Yes, there was a hurricane warning from the National Hurricane Center for an area from Manzanillo, which is some 200 miles south of Puerto Vallarta, to Cabo Corrientes, which is immediately south of Puerto Vallarta. And yes, we were all aware of it.

In fact, many of us had been visiting the NOAA website and other serious and real weather advisors for days. In truth, we expected at least tropical storm winds in our area just north of Vallarta, and maybe worse, depending upon the path the hurricane tracked. We had battened down the hatches, brought in ice and water and food, refreshed flashlight batteries and found the candles.

During this period of preparation, I googled Hurricane Jova several times to see what was being said in the stateside news. In many of the newspapers around the country, a single newswire article was repeated, stating that the hurricane was headed for Puerto Vallarta. The article, two short paragraphs, didn’t mention Manzanillo, or the fact that the storm was many miles south of PV. It didn’t mention that the storm track consensus showed Jova heading east at that point, not north, and that the probability of its veering off west then north then due east into Vallarta was astronomical.

My conjecture is that the reporter who wrote that piece once spent spring break getting drunk in Vallarta and knows nothing whatsoever other than that about Mexico, except perhaps that tourists are being murdered left and right by drug gangs, another piece of American press bullshit.

This situation would only be another eye-roller were it not for the fact that inaccurate reportage continued to the point of frightening and worrying friends and family, even after the storm had passed without impacting the Vallarta area.

In all fairness, it’s as bad here in Mexico. My wonderful helper Lidia came to me last Friday saying she’d heard on the news that the approaching hurricane would be worse than Kenna, the Category 5 storm that did extensive damage in Puerto Vallarta in 2002. I showed her on the internet what I’d found and kept her informed about what we could expect. She talked to me about the tendency for the news in Mexico to exaggerate and catastrophize. Believe me, I could relate.

Jova dumped a lot of rain on Manzanillo, Barra de Navidad and Melaque before it made landfall slightly north of there as a Category 2. It pooped out quickly, but not before causing flooding of villages and crops inland. Five people were killed, all water related deaths. 

That's what really happened.

As for us, we did have a very eerie and beautiful sunset the night before Jova made landfall, from the clouds spun off the hurricane.

 

We received less than an inch of rain and a few wind gusts of maybe 12 mph. I took this photo on Wednesday afternoon, as we had our hurricane watch and played Mexican Train dominoes on the terrace:

And this one, of the palm trees not being whipped by the wind.

The cushions to protect the stained glass windows, the tape, the rope holding the lanterns are all put away now. It was a good rehearsal. We all got plenty of practice reading and analyzing the National Hurricane Center website. Which is where I'll go and hope you do, too, the next time.