This started out to be a report on a bar that nobody ever has anything good to say about, and it took on a life of its own. So I’ll post it as a bar report and let the moderator(s) figure out what to do with it.

La Golondrina Viajera (aka Centro Botanico)

It’s been a while since anybody posted anything about small ZN bars. I couldn’t find anything about this bar on this site, so I thought I would start a thread. I’ve had some fun times here, but this place has to be taken on its own terms. If you are looking for an immaculately clean, classy place with gorgeous young hard bodies who speak English, move on to the next bar. Even if that’s an OR search rather than an AND search.

This bar is at the southwest corner of the alley, across the alley from Rio Rosa’s. Physically it is a dump. I have occasionally encountered a cockroach crawling on the wall. An encyclopedic post on another site awarded it the honor of being the sleaziest bar in the Zona and then rescinded the honor in the same paragraph. It’s still true that when you take a leak, you’re separated from the bar by a wall that is only about chest high. So you can survey the bar while you’re doing your thing, and anybody who wants to can see your face. Give them a big smile.

So what do I like about this place? I’ve always found it to be a friendly place. The beers are cheap. The fichas are 50 pesos. There are cheaper places, but that’s not a bad price. I’m partial to Mexican women who are too old to plausibly be my granddaughter and who have won their battle with anorexia.

Maybe I should say something about me here. I’m in my mid 50’s, could stand to lose a few pounds, and I look about as whitebread as it gets. My Spanish is passable, in part because I can get away with butchering the language in ways that would get me laughed out of the country if I looker more Latin.

I walked in there on a whim on a Tuesday, about ten months ago, around 2PM. There were maybe 10 customers. I sat down at a booth and ordered a beer (Dos Equis, I think). Some guy was cooking three different kinds of appetizers and giving them away free. A falling-down drunk who appeared to be in his sixties was trying to dance with the waitress. She was dancing with him, propping him up, and trying to get him to sit down at the same time. Surprisingly, there was another gringo in the bar, a middle-aged guy with a ruddy face. He walked up to me and asked me if I spoke English. When I said yes, he walked out of the bar without another word. A woman came in, sat in the booth opposite me, and started talking to herself. The conversation started off quietly, but after a while she started crying, then screaming. It was pretty clear that she was hearing internal voices. The poor Loquita wasn’t doing anything to bother me other than making noise, but after a while I moved to the bar to get away from her.

So I sat at the bar, watching the clientele, drinking my beer, thinking about a song recorded by Bert Jansch in the 60’s called Nobody’s Bar which I believe was inspired by a bar in Greenwich Village. I was feeling amused, relaxed, and oddly contented. A somewhat chubby woman in her 40’s was in front of the bar. She was taking beer bottles out of a carton halfway across the room and putting them on the bar for the bartender to put in the refrigerator, a few bottles at a time. Every round trip she walked right by me. About the fifth trip I smiled at her, and she smiled back. A dentist might have perceived her smile as a business opportunity, but I found it charming. This rapidly turned into a ritual. She would walk across the room, return with a few more bottles, and we would smile at each other. After about ten more round trips, I explained that while I didn’t want to interfere with her work, I would be happy to buy her a drink. She said yes and sat down. After a few minutes, we moved to a booth. We spent the next few hours drinking, chatting, and—to the best of my limited ability—dancing. She told me the Loquita was something of a fixture—she frequently, came in, sat at a booth, sometimes ate one or two of the free appetizers, and left. She told me chunks of her own life story—about crossing the border with her husband as a newly married teenager in the 70’s, picking fruit in the central valley, working in a factory in Tijuana, raising her kids, her husband’s illness. She said her husband had died two years earlier and had worked at the bar for the ten years before that.

At 5:30, she told me she was done working for the day and could leave. So we left, and went to another bar. I’m not sure what the point was, unless she was trying to save me money on fichas. We walked the two blocks to El Diamante, and had two more beers there. I explained that I had a room at the Leyva, that I had to drive back to LA in the early morning and was going to need to get some sleep before that, and that I would like her to accompany me. She asked me if $100 was too much. Enamored with her hard-nosed negotiating style, I told her $100 was fine. We walked down Constitution to the Leyva. Along the way we stopped at Dos Indios for another beer. By the time we arrived at the Leyva we were—and I mean no disrespect to houseplants when I say this—thoroughly potted. Just for good measure, we bought a six-pack and took it to the room with us.

As soon as I closed the door of the room at the Leyva, she walked to the center of the room and without ceremony undressed completely. Her body was far from perfect and I was pretty drunk, but I found it remarkably arousing. We jumped into the shower and dove into the bed. Later, as we were semi-sleeping, she backed up against me and did the spoon thing. If you’ve ever been in a happy long-term relationship, even if it ultimately didn’t work out, you know what I’m talking about. For lack of a better word, it was sweet.

All too soon my cell phone alarm went off, and I had to leave to grab a taxi to get to the border before the AM crunch to get to LA to do whatever the hell it was I had to do that morning. I asked her if she wanted to stay in the room and she said yes. As I left, she had to get up to lock the door. The last thing I saw of her was her nude, chubby body standing at the door as I left. The evening was chilly, she felt so warm, and I wanted to jump back in bed with her. But I had to be in LA the next morning, although I can’t for the life of me remember why, so off I went.

I’ve been back to La Golondrina Viajera several times since. I haven’t been actively looking for her. My experience is that in TJ, the reality of the second time is rarely as good as the memory of the first time. I’ve never seen her again. I’ve had a few other nice experiences there. If anybody cares, maybe I’ll post about them someday.

Denouement: several days later, I was walking along a hiking trail near where I live. Behind me was a 20-something white couple, engaged in the kind of dysfunctional exchange with which many of us, sadly, are familiar. The guy was begging the girl to go some place with him, and the girl was explaining to him in a horrible whining voice why she couldn’t because she was just too busy. I couldn’t stand listening to this. I tried walking faster to put some distance between them and me, but that didn’t seem to work. So I tried walking slower to let them pass me and that didn’t work either. Then I thought of the poor Loquita in La Golondrina Viajera, and I figured that if she had to put up with voices screaming at her every day, I could put up with this for another 20 minutes. In an odd way, I felt like she had sacrificed her sanity to save mine.

Very nice story...I truly enjoyed it. I would encourage you to write more of this place and your adventures.

Yet another Golondrina Viajera post on this board. Yet another Bert Jansch reference. Really Ratablanca, I would think you could take on some fresher subject matter!!

Seriously, what a wonderful post! Echoes of the kind of quality writing we rarely ever see in the Mexico sector of this site or any site anymore. I suspect your chica retired on the $100 plus fichas plus sweet memories you tendered.

Thanks for the kind words. This may have been the first post I ever made where I was trying to actually contribute something rather than merely pump the assembled multitude for information, so the feedback is truly appreciated.

I was first motivated to go into the Golondrina Viajera by a post I saw three or four years ago. I can’t remember if it was on this forum or the other one, and a recent search on both turned up nothing. The author of the post, like me, seemed to enjoy going into places where many gringos don’t. He also seemed to share my taste for women with a few extra pounds and a few extra years on them. Despite all this, he wrote a post dismissing the GV as not worth anyone’s time. So I figured I had to see the place for myself some day, but it took me a while to get around to it.

The first time I walked into the Golondrina Viajera was on one of my odder trips to TJ. I had been in a relationship with a Mexican woman, a civilian, for about a year. She was from the center of the country and while she had traveled extensively in Mexico, she had never been to Baja California. She knew I had spent some time in TJ, although for obvious reasons I never told her exactly where or how I spent my time there. So when she told me she wanted me to see Tijuana and Ensenada, it seemed wise to be able to pretend that I was familiar with some respectable places in the Zona Rio. Since I wasn’t, some reconnaissance was in order. So one Thursday morning I drove to the border, walked to the Zona Rio, and made certain that I could find Cien Años, Ochoa’s, and a nice hotel. I think I settled on the Lucerna, although I don’t recall for certain.

Having taken care of business, there I was in TJ with a few hours to spare. I had a beer in Bar Javi’s, walked over to Agua Caliente and headed north. I had another beer in West Fargo, and kept walking toward the Zona. With no plan in mind, I remembered the post about the Golondrina Viajera and decided to check it out. I walked in, sat at the bar, and ordered a beer.

When I arrived, the place was just about empty. As I sat there, a few customers straggled in, and a few others looked in the door and thought better of it. A 30-something with a light complexion and decent figure walked in and sat down next to me. She didn’t say anything, just sat there. Her hair was blonde that day. She was reasonably cute.

Strange as it may sound, I was in no hurry to initiate any contact because I was—for that particular brief period of my life—enjoying my monogamous existence. (It can happen to the best of us from time to time, I suppose.) On the other hand, it seemed rude not to buy her a drink, and I did find her attractive. So I said something to the affect of “no quiero molestarte pero me gustaria comprarte algo a tomar.” (I don’t want to bother you, but I would like to buy you a drink). That got me a big smile. We chatted through several drinks. She brought up the hotel on her second or the third drink. I declined, and I told her why. Naturally, this made her try that much harder to change my mind. When I asked her what she would have charged, she gave me a very serious look and told me that she would trust me to pay whatever I thought was fair afterwards. It was a pleasant conversation. I gave her a small tip ($5 I think) when I left.

I still had some time, so I walked across the alley to the Nuevo Rio Rosa. For me, that has always been a place of titillation but never consummation. On this particular trip, that suited me just fine. I sat in one of the booths next to the stage. A Mexican in his mid-30’s was in the next booth. We started chatting in what was effectively Spanglish. He told me he thought the young lady currently dancing on the stage was pretty. I told him I agreed, but that she was too flaca for me, that I preferred gorditas. He found this amusing.

A few minutes later, a plump but pretty chica wandereded by. My new friend told her that his friend the American liked gorditas. So she walked up to me, lifted her dress above her neck, and asked me if I liked her. I did indeed, particularly as she was wearing absolutely nothing under the dress. She told me that I would like her friends too. She walked away and returned momentarily with two other chicas that could easily have been the other two thirds of a set of triplets. The three of them lifted up their dresses and danced in front of my booth for a minute or two. None of them were wearing anything under their dresses. It was delightful. They walked away giggling, then returned a few minutes later and did an encore. I finished my beer, took a taxi to the border, drove back home, and had a big grin on my face the whole way.

"My experience is that in TJ, the reality of the second time is rarely as good as the memory of the first time"

eloquent expression of a feeling I've experienced much too often

About a year ago, I had some time on my hands for a few weeks and was spending two or three days a week in TJ. My final day came, and I knew it would probably be some months before I returned, so I wanted to draw it out. I had spent the previous night visiting what seemed like half the bars in the zona. I woke up in the late morning, spent two hours with a favorite SG, popped twice, went for a long walk, had a nice lunch in the Cervezeria de Tijuana on Fundadores, had a few beers along Revo, walked back to the zona, and did another SG.

By now it was about 6PM. The smart thing to do would have been to take a nap in my room at the Leyva, but I didn't want to waste any more of the remaining time I had in TJ than I had to. So I went to the GV. Not with any specific intent--I was sated--but in the way you might play a computer game or flip on the TV late at night even though you are too tired to do anything, just because you don't feel like going to bed.

I sat at a table and ordered a beer. I was tired, and I started to doze off. The mesera, a middle-aged woman who serves as a mother hen to the drunks who frequent this place (myself included), asked me if I was okay. I said yes, I was a little sleepy but I was fine. She gave me a friendly soft punch on the shoulder and said something in Spanish to the effect that sleeping shrimp are at the mercy of the current. If I recall correctly it rhymed (dormiente/corriente?). Anybody know this saying? Sage advice.

One thing I have noticed in some of the small bars along the alley--there are chicas who stick their noses in, scope out the scene, and either stay or move on. I don't know whether these are SG's, SW's, BG's, BW's (is there such a thing?), or debutantes out for a cheap thrill. Well, maybe not the last.

One of these chicas came in to the GV as I was sitting there. She was my type insofar as I have one--late 30's or maybe 40's, curvy/plump but not fat, morena, dark hair. She asked me to buy her a drink. Normally I would have done so, but I felt like just chilling with a few beers, so I declined. She may have sensed that I was somewhat conflicted about saying no, or perhaps it was just a slow evening, because she left the bar, came back in 10 minutes, and asked me again. I declined again, she left again, came back again, and sat two tables away from me, facing me. I was far from recharged, but it seemed like it might happen someday, and I did find her attractive. So after a few minutes of the two of us staring at each other I invited her for a drink. There wasn't room for two on the same side at my table, so we moved to another one closer to the entrance.

We did the things that normally go on in a ficha bar that's not a diddle bar: chatted about this and that, danced a little (although about all I can ever manage is a clumsy-looking two-step), cuddled. I told her, as I almost always do, to feel free to correct my Spanish, and she actually did it a few times, which I appreciated. She told me that she had several kids, all grown, and that she lived with her daughter and her son-in-law and took care of two baby grandchildren. At some point she asked where I was staying. I told her the Leyva. I didn't invite her but she headed it off anyway by telling me she would love to go to my room with me but couldn't because she had to go home and take care of the grandchildren. A decent, face-saving gambit in a place like the zona, where truth is always elusive and usually irrelevant. The atmosphere was pleasant, mellow. The ficha drinks were disappearing unusually slowly. I was enjoying myself.

Then, suddenly, some guy who looked to be about 20 darted in off the street, looked around the bar, spotted her, grabbed her hand, yanked her to her feet, and dragged her out of the bar. My reflexes were slow, but as I started to instinctively get up the mesera came up behind me and gently but firmly pushed me back into my chair. It all happened in just a few seconds.

The following conversation subsequently ensued between me and the mesera: "Quien fue eso? [Who was that?]" "Su yerno. Es maleducado. [Her son-in-law. His manners, upbringing, and general deportment leave something to be desired.]" Then, stupidly, "Ella va a regresar? [Is she coming back?]" "No. [What do you think, you gabacho idiot?]"

Various thoughts occurred to my befuddled brain over the next few minutes, in the following order. (1) The mesera seemed pretty unconcerned, so the fichera was probably not in any danger. (2) Whoever it was--son-in-law, novio, husband, whatever--I had no business interfering. (3) Had I actually managed to stagger to my feet, no good would have come of it, so the mesera had done me a huge favor. (4) This kind of stuff probably doesn't happen in places where they have security guards. Maybe I should be spending more time in places like Adelita's or Chicago. (5) No.

So what did I do? I stayed and drank a few more beers. Rationalizing that I would have bought at least two more fichas, I gave the mesera a $10 tip when I left. Of course, I had been tipping her all evening as well. She normally has a severe look, but that got a big smile. She earned it.

I returned to my room at the Leyva and slept for a few hours. The sequel has nothing to do with the GV, but I'll summarize it anyway. I woke up shortly after midnight, and decided to grab one beer and maybe do a SG before heading back to civilization. I took a quick walk down the alley and nothing looked good. They were all too young and skinny for me. Then somebody called my name. There was another former favorite SG who I hadn't seen in at least three years, looking better than ever to these eyes. As we walked back to the Leyva, she tried to fill me in on the intervening years. She had crossed, spent two years on the other side, returned because of some really serious family problem. She said something about a crazy coyote and a car accident and about how she had been learning about physical therapy and now knew how to give a really great massage and wanted to show me. I never quite understood it all because she was talking a mile a minute in colloquial Spanish. I told myself that when we got to the room I would have her repeat it for me slowly. Oddly, when we actually got to the room, I got distracted and that never happened. I finally left for the border around 5AM. Only in TJ.

(Message edited by ratablanca on September 10, 2007)