• 286 Guadalajara food/services

    From MICHAEL LOO@1:123/140 to ALL on Thursday, April 25, 2019 10:09:56
    Lilli wanted breakfast, but the hotel breakfast was $14, about
    what a filet mignon or 5 beers cost there, so I said, go for it,
    but I'm going back to the room for an early siesta. She said,
    wait for me, and the hotel missed on an exorbitant breakfast, of
    which Lilli would no doubt have had coffee and a scone.

    We walked down Colon and found her a coffee shop, where she
    ordered an Americano and a muffin (pointing to a chocolate one in
    the display case, indicating "I want that one"). Apparently, it
    was just a model, because the girl checked out back and returned
    with the offer of blueberry or banana. Lilli chose blueberry, and
    the barista? showed her one, and instead of giving it to her sort
    of half said and half pantomimed that she would warm it up.

    The coffee was okay. Eventually the muffin came out - it was an artificially-flavored thing with blue dots; it was also frozen
    inside. A culinary wonder of the negative sort.

    There was stuff to do - during one of her faint spells, Lilli had
    dropped her phone and mashed up the screen; luckily there was a
    plaza de tecnologia two blocks from the hotel, and we went only to
    find that the stall she'd picked out from the Internet writeups had
    been been closed by the authorities for some kind of fraud or
    malfeasance: luckily this was a whole mall of Apple experts, so no
    problem. We found a booth about twenty feet away that said something
    like reparaciones telefonicos, so with a bit of show-and-tell and
    acting and a pencil and pad, we determined that they could do it, it
    would be ready within the hour, and the cost would be 500 pesos, a suspiciously round number, but as it's 100 bucks less than at the
    Apple store stateside, why not. I felt the need for lots of beer
    in the interim, after having experienced a coffee shop and an
    electronics mall, two of my least favorite things, so we wandered
    off trying to find the well-regarded Birrieria Nueve Esquinas, whose
    specialty is goat stew, probably the only dish of this region that
    stands out for excellence. We went to where we thought it was, which
    turned out to be two or three blocks over. Some old beggar who spoke
    quite good English pointed us in the right direction, and I gave him
    a 5 peso tip (25c us, or between $1 or 2 in buying power). The
    original stall still exists, seating maybe 10 to 20, but there's a
    guy whose job seems to be to point patrons to the annex across Colon,
    which seats maybe 80 more. It's okay, farther from the mariachis. We
    got the table farthest from the noise and next to the rest room.

    On arrival we were presented with some very peculiar hard fried
    tortilla chips, along with a decent salsa, the pickled onions that
    this area seems to be fond of, and another very sour thin guacamole
    with lots of tomatillos in it.

    I ordered a Negra Modelo, and Lilli chimed in and asked for a claro
    (it's really called Especial). Seems that the waiter figured she was correcting me and so brought only the Especial, and I sat there
    parching. Fifteen minutes later I flagged down someone and got me a
    Negra.

    Being a cheapskate at times, despite my paying, Lilli just got an
    order of quesadillas, which were plain as plain, so she ate two out
    of the three, which I counted as a triumph. I'd suggested, what about
    tacos of birria (goat stew), and she reacted as if I'd asked her to
    eat fish eyeballs in liver sauce; she said even the thought was
    disgusting. It's so weird sometimes that we travel together.

    I thought of getting them myself, but chicharrones were on the list,
    so I ordered those; they came with refried black beans and a strange
    side that explained why those chips here are fried so hard - they were smothered in salsa roja and topped with sour cream - at the beginning
    of the meal, you have these crunchy things in sauce, and by the time
    you're ready to fill up the interstices, it has crumbled and degenerated
    into this agreeably gooey mess. I ate it all. The black beans were great
    but covered in an extremely salty cotija-like substance, which I scraped
    off. The chicharrones themselves were 20 or so bits of pork such as you
    get one per can of pork and beans, in salsa roja - quite delicious, and
    I didn't have to eat 400 ounces of beans to get to them.

    The mariachis eventually found us despite our trying to make ourselves
    as small as possible - two okay trumpeters, a senile guitarist who
    played two chords over and over at random, whether they went with
    the melody or not. And three violin destroyers, the likes of which I
    have not heard since elementary school. At the end one of the violins
    came over for a tip, and I told him in my Spanish that is as bad as his playing that I hated the music and he'd best skedaddle. He skedaddled.
    I remarked to Lilli that that must be why they didn't provide knives at
    the table, otherwise there might have been six fewer mariachis in town!

    I asked Lilli to use the rest room, which I had scouted out and found
    fine; she said she'd be okay.

    Back to the tech center, where it took the staff another 10 minutes or
    so to figure out how to charge a Visa card. In this time, I noted that
    the rest rooms were right next to us. so please consider going. No, it's
    only a couple blocks to the hotel. Guess what happened in the hotel lobby.
    No, don't.
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