Fear itself

On my third day here I decided to challenge myself and face my fear directly. Driving in Mexico. I was scared of driving here because the drivers here are very aggressive, the roads and signage are different than in the US (i.e., they don't make sense), there are glorietas galore (roundabouts, which do not exist where I'm from), I had never driven in Mexico before (actually, I had once, but most of my drive was spent sitting in line to cross the border), and then there was the time I went to Tijuana with my family and when we came back our car was gone, and then the other time we were in Tijuana and the streets were so flooded that water seeped into our car reaching up to my shins, so besides those anxieties, I was perfectly capable of hitting the Mexican road in a strange new car. Heh.

I was supposed to drive to a party, so at 2pm I attempted to punch the address into the GPS that came with the car, to no avail. The address was not recognized. By the way, that GPS is evil. I thought, well, no problem, I'll just look up the cross streets on my handy little tourist map. Besides, I had allowed myself plenty of time to get to the party, which started at 3pm, so I thought that I would take my time going through the city and taking in my new surroundings. One hour later, I ended up on a strange kind of road, a periferico, where it was impossible to ever make a left turn, for kilometers and kilometers and kilometers. After being stuck on that road for a long time, I decided to take my chances and make a left turn. I eased into the median, noticing, as I did so, that the buses that passed through the devoted bus lanes in the middle of the road got awful close to my car as they wooshed past.

Then, I heard the unfamiliar yet unmistakable siren of a policeman trying to get my attention. He was a motorcycle cop. Feeling surprisingly relieved and, further, justified in my choice to make an illegal left turn, I calmly completed my turn and pulled over on a side street. I had never been stopped by a police officer in my life, and always guessed that if I ever had the misfortune I would undoubtedly burst into tears. I hate breaking the rules, and I especially hate getting caught doing so because on the rare occasions I do break the rules I feel like I have a good reason for it. I showed the officer my identification, explained to him that I was a gringa who had just arrived in the city, on my way to a party full of other gringos, and that I was hopelessly lost (which he could see for himself when I showed him the address for the party). After tsking at my ignorance of the city, at my predicament on the strange and scary periferico road, at my close call with the fast-moving buses, at my being a clueless girl left to fend for herself in his sprawling city, he showed me on the map where I actually was, where I wanted to be, and explained to me how I could get there. He proceeded to elaborate on the general layout of the city's roadways and explained that he would not be writing me up that day. Honestly, I wasn't even worried about being written up, I was just glad to know where I was and where I needed to go.

I pulled away, feeling refreshed from my brief driving break (I had been going for 1.5 hours straight at that point). By the way, there was extremely heavy traffic that Saturday, so everything took about 5 times as long as it would have without traffic. I went in the opposite direction on the damned periferico, missed my turn at a diabolical roundabout, and had to take the road to the very end, where it u-turned at a university (no need to break the law there), until I was finally able to swing around to where I was supposed to be. Kind of. Once I got to the road where the party had been going on for some 2 hours now, I couldn't find the appropriate street number. So I did the old-fashioned thing, stopping at a convenience store to ask for directions (rather than performing an illegal maneuver just to get the attention of a friendly cop who could tell me where I needed to go), and finally got to the general neighborhood. After that it was just a matter of circling around to look for parking and convincing the guards I was a legit party-goer and not a delinquent. No sweat.

That was my ordeal. It helped make me stronger, although it did not completely cure me of my Mexico driving jitters. But I'm proud to say that I know my way around better, that I manage to stay more calm when I drive now, and that my GPS is still evil and cannot be totally trusted (it spends a lot of time banished to the center console of my car). I'm glad I got through that ordeal early on in my stay. After that, everything else is a piece of cake.