Saturday

Recently a new museum opened in the capital building at the end of Monterrey's impressive Grand Plaza. It is a municipal history museum, and I imagine it's filled with old photos from when Monterrey was a dusty little waypoint surrounded by agricultural fields and livestock pastures. Sunshine attended the lecture-ridden opening night celebration with bigwigs like the Governor. I stayed home because I had just seen the governor the previous night at the MARCO. When Sunshine returned, we decided to order a pizza: it was late and cooking would've been an evil sink of time and energy. Sunshine called Big Slice, always exciting because we never know what language we'll need to use (Gianna is Italian Canadian, maybe, and speaks French, Italian, Greek, German and English; other telephone answerers speak whatever's left), plus giving directions here is difficult even after regularly doing it over the last twenty months. The pizza always shows up in a taxi because while Big Slice delivers, it employs no drivers. This costs an extra two, three bucks on top of the pizza price. That night, when the cabbie rang, I was already compiling small bills and change--cabbies can rarely break a big bill. I noticed that his cab was gliding down the road as he walked up the walk. I thought it was being driven, but it wasn't. Luckily, the faded blue pickup it hit was just as proletarian as the cab, and not one of the prissily maintained SUVs crammed nose to ass up and down the street: one of those things would have gone off in a noisy, flashing, beeping fit the second it was touched. And then there would have been police called even if, as was the case, there was absolutely no damage (except some cabbie pride). [Cavin]