Monterrey PT. 2/3: The Guy Who Ate Breakfast With El Chapo
He felt safer in Sinaloa than he did in Chicago
This is part 2 of a series on my month working in Monterrey. You can read part 1 here.
A guy who ate breakfast with El Chapo, a girl living like Jennifer Lopez in the movie Hustlers, and a guy who stood on the toilet to shit. My time in Monterrey was full of characters and part 2 is dedicated to them.
Working as a hostel receptionist you meet a wide variety of people ranging from interesting to straight up crazy. My month in New Orleans had no shortage of personalities including crazy brad and a guy who brought his pet chameleon “Rango” on my bar crawl*. So, when I got to Monterrey I was excited to meet the cast of Hostel Takeover season 2 and season 2 did not disappoint.
Breakfast with El Chapo
Bill was a Canadien retiree who looked to be about 70. He was very chatty and whenever I was working reception he would stop by and share some of his travel stories.
Bill had sold his business to Microsoft at the age of 35 when they made him an “offer he couldn’t refuse” and he’d been retired and traveling ever since. He loved to stay in hostels and even owned a hostel in Flagstaff, Arizona for 10 years.
He currently lived in Mazatlán, a resort town on the west coast of Mexico, where for $250 a month he was able to rent an apartment one block from the ocean. According to Bill, Mazatlán was one of the last remaining resort towns that hadn’t been “taken over by gringos.”
Mazatlán is in the state of Sinaloa which is on the U.S. State Department’s no go list for Mexico. When I asked Bill if he felt safe living there he responded “I feel a lot safer there than I do in Chicago”.
I laughed awkwardly.
Apparently, despite the cartel presence, Mazatlán is very safe for tourists as long as they don’t go into the smaller surrounding villages.
Elaborating Bill told me “You can’t go into the small villages alone, you have to go with a local because there are spotters everywhere. They don’t like unexpected visitors. And when you drive into the village you have to have the windows down, no sunglasses and no hat so they can see your face.”
He gave me all these instructions very casually as if he was telling me how to catch the local bus. He added that he always enjoyed visiting the villages with locals he’d befriended.
He also informed me that when high ranking cartel members eat out in town, they come in to the restaurant and close the restaurant down with everyone in it. No new patrons can enter and if you’re already eating then you can’t leave until they do. They make you put your phone in a bag so you don’t call anyone or take any videos. Situations like this were not uncommon in Mazatlán and it was under these circumstances that Bill had eaten breakfast with El Chapo not once but three times. Bill was not intimidated by these interactions mentioning “I never minded it because I got free breakfast.” Apparently the cartel pays for everyone’s meal for putting them through the trouble.
Bill also informed me that he was confident the man they had arrested and put in prison was not really El Chapo but a body double. I don’t know if that’s word on the street in Mazatlán or just Bill’s conjecture but given all he’d described I wouldn’t be surprised it turned out to be true.
Camping in the Paris Airport
I checked in a guest named Michelle who was from South Carolina and was spending a year traveling on a budget of only $5000. I was impressed by her ability to travel so cheaply so I asked her a few questions about her year and the more she revealed to me the more I was perplexed.
She had been working as an Au Pair in Spain for five months and then had traveled around Europe. She mentioned to me that she had written a book which of course peaked my interest as I like to write. I commented “wow that must have taken a lot of time” to which she responded “not really I wrote it in four days”.
Michelle explained to me that she had written the book while living in the Paris airport. She didn’t want to spend money on a hotel while killing time before her next flight so she had spent four days camping in the airport adding “It wasn’t bad though, the red cross provided me with a ton of free meals.”
Here’s the thing. The red cross has an aid station inside the Paris airport because a lot of refugees come to Paris seeking asylum and end up living in the Paris airport while waiting for their papers to be processed. The red cross supplies them with food and healthcare and looks after them because many of them come with nothing. There was even a movie made about an Iranian refugee who lived in the airport for 18 years. So, in theory if you were really trying to travel on a budget you could take advantage of that situation and live in the Paris airport for free but most people wouldn’t. Michelle was not most people.
Tristan: “So what was it like living with the other refugees?”
Michelle: “It was ok, I kept getting into fights with them though.”
Tristan: “Why did you get into fights with them?”
Michelle: “Oh I kept trying to film them and take pictures of them and they didn’t like that”
Tristan: …
Michelle: “Yeah but then on my last day I rubbed it in that I could leave and they couldn’t”.
Tristan: …
Tristan: “So about that book you wrote”
Michelle said all this to me with absolutely zero self awareness of how insane it all sounded. I had started the conversation looking for budget travel tips and I guess I got some but I don’t think I will be mooching of the red cross anytime soon.
A Real Life Hustler
I started chatting with Isabella in the common area of the hostel. She was from Mexico City and had come to Monterrey for a date with a guy. The date hadn’t gone well but Isabella still had two days in Monterrey and was killing time at the hostel.
She told me she worked in a restaurant and then went on to describe what does not seem like a normal restaurant. Her job? Getting people so drunk that the restaurant can charge them for really expensive alcohol without them remembering.
She claimed to work at an upscale place in Mexico City and when someone came in she would sit down at their table and ask if she could join them for a drink. I found this amusing because if I was at a nice dinner I would not want some rando sitting with me but I guess a lot of the clients are groups of men who are happy to have a pretty waitress to chat with.
She would charm them and continue to drink with them until they were wasted. She even admitted to me that most of the time she was sober. She would either fake doing shots or the other waiters would bring her drinks without any alcohol in them. Once people were really hammered the restaurant would charge a super expensive bottle of champaign to their credit card and she would get a cut. The patrons were so drunk they wouldn’t dispute it the next day because they didn’t remember what happened. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Hustlers with Jennifer Lopez but that is literally the plot of the movie.
When I asked her if she felt bad for charging people so much she said no. She viewed it as an exchange. She was selling her looks and charm and in return the patrons were “buying” alcohol. I put “buying” in quotations because I think someone being so hammered they can’t swipe their own credit card is a loose interpretation of the word.
Most of the clients are groups of men but Isabella would occasionally flirt with women as well. She described an evening in which a guy told her his wife was in charge of the credit card so she in turn flirted with the wife, got the wife super drunk and proceeded to charge her for the expensive shit. Isabella insisted that the patrons always had a good time.
She refused to tell us what restaurant she worked at but she did show me photos of her all dressed up at work so I believe that she was telling the truth. I also clarified a few times that this was indeed a “restaurant” and not a strip club or a night club. She maintained that it was just a restaurant. If so, it sounds like one weird restaurant to me.
An Argentinian Prince
He wasn’t really a prince, just an actor playing one.
In Monterrey there was no staff bunk room so I lived in a shared 6-bed dorm room with other guests. Thomas moved into the bunk under mine for the second half of my month in Monterrey and quickly became my favorite roommate.
He was an Argentinian actor traveling around Mexico to perform El Principito (The Little Prince) for school children. He had gone to a casting agency in Argentina to audition and they assigned him El Principito and sent him to Mexico. His theatre company found schools in Mexico that wanted to hire him to do a performance so he would spend a few weeks in each city making his way through the local elementary schools. Every few weeks he would pack up, take the bus to a new city, and start the whole thing over again with the local schools. He’d travelled all over Mexico this way.
He wanted to have more serious roles when he returned to Argentina but for now he was content to travel around Mexico performing for kids. He would spend his free time cooking, watching Modern Family, or smoking weed on the roof of the hostel.
I found his lifestyle fascinating. Traveling by bus to visit elementary schools gave him a unique lens into life in Mexico. I wanted to include him here because he was one of the friendliest guests I met in the hostel. He even brought me coffee in bed one day which was a real luxury after months of having to climb up and down from the top bunk for everything.
The Guy Who Shit Standing
To clarify he shit squatting with his feet on the toilet seat but either way at no point in the bathroom process should your feet be on the toilet seat.
One morning I was sitting at the breakfast table with Juan (the owner of the hostel) and a few other hostel employees. A guest who had checked in the night before, Diego, sheepishly approached Juan to explain that he had broken a toilet and would pay for it.
We asked him what happened and we received a much more thorough explanation than we bargained for.
Diego told us that at home in Guadalajara he uses a squatty potty whenever he poops. For those of you who are uninitiated, a squatty potty is a stool that you put your feet on and apparently it allows you to poop in a more optimal position. Now this may come as a surprise but our $13 a night hostel did not provide squatty potties for the guests. So, in order to shit comfortably, Diego had taken it upon himself to squat with his feet on the toilet seat. His foot slipped into the toilet bowl and he fell off the toilet and broke the toilet tank lid.
Now this was already more information than anyone at the breakfast table needed to know but Diego continued. He insisted on re-enacting what had happened. Using one of the kitchen stools he squatted and then recreated falling off and taking the tank lid with him. This is a sketch I made of Diego squatting on a kitchen stool to help you visualize.
Watching him recreate what had happened is the hardest I have laughed in years. The whole table was in stitches. We told him it was fine, we would fix the toilet and he checked out later that day.
Now, I need to give credit where credit is due. Diego did immediately tell us that he had broken the toilet and offered to pay for it. That is really going above and beyond given the circumstances. However, I just can’t imagine making the decision to squat on a hostel toilet just because I didn’t have access to my squatty potty. But his story and watching him show us what happened was worth the price of 50 broken toilets.
Those were some of the most memorable guests at My Family in Monterrey. Stay tuned for Monterrey PT. 3/3: The Mexican Cha Cha Slide.
*When I asked the guy in New Orleans with the pet chameleon why he brought him out to the bar he informed me it was to pick up chicks. And he was not wrong, Rango was a total chick magnet. I expected a less basic answer considering this guy was a total trip but I guess at the end of the day everyone just wants to get laid.