Thursday

We ate Italian again tonight. While we were sitting in a classically quaint hole-in-the-wall kitchenette-type restaurant with that Formica-and-linoleum touch, I realized that when I move home it will probably be Mexitailian food that I will miss most. They make a chili de arbol sauce that is just wonderful. Also, tonight's place--I didn't get the name, but there was a Picasso harlequin on the sign, oddly--had the best damn cappuccino that I have had in Monterrey. We seemed to be the only real customers in the place. Family of the owners seemed to occupy two of the other four tables. One of the reasons for this might be that we were eating so early: arriving at five till eight, we had to wait on the street until the place opened. Wandering down the block we found a dark little corridor of market where the last several days' worth of rain still pooled, but most of the stalls were closed up behind steel garage-type shutters. We were trying to do business between the cracks of México's social hours, I guess; stuck in the borders between day and night. Dinner conversation did not touch on the news much, but it is worth noting that over the last weeks there have been several instances of connected execution-style killings reported to be narco violence trickling down the highway from the borderland war. The Governor of Nuevo Leon has asked to install army checkpoints on the interstate highway. Several days ago, about fifteen armed men opened fire on a car containing five people, killing one. The purported target of that attack lost an alleged relation to two gunmen outside a Monterrey carwash yesterday morning. The mood here is still fairly unconcerned: this is pretty much only happening among the narcos. Allegedly. [Cavin]