Modelos, with a side of Cries

I love going to Mexico.

I love the friendly faces, the warm smiles and the hospitality of a people with a rich heritage.

I love the food.

The spicier, the better . . .

I love Coronas. And lest not forget, Pacificos.

I get that I stay on a resort most of the time. We go to Cabo every few years and given how quickly we can get to Cancun, Playa del Carmen has quickly become one of our favorite vacation spots.

When I go there, I make every effort to torture these very people I just said I love with my high school level Spanish.

They are sweet about it though, and by the time I leave, I am stumbling a little less and not relying as much on my comfort phrase of "Yo hablo un poco" (I speak a little).

So I take my love for my Mexican friends VERY SERIOUSLY.

And I get mad - really really mad - when I see anyone from my own country resorting to any type of behavior which might be indicative of an ugly American.

Not the nice American, which I believe that most of us are and strive to be.

By nature, I am an overtipper. I always develop a story about the people I meet as we go about the mundane aspects of our life. For example, the tired looking waitress who appears like she is going to drop to the ground from exhaustion but never stops smiling as she refills my coffee.

(Single mom, husband was an alcoholic and used to get "mean". She finally got tough, said she's had it and that she and the kids deserved better. She looks especially tired because one of the kids wasn't feeling well last night and was blowing chunks all night).

The sweet looking Afghani taxi driver who is driving me home from the airport after a long business trip.

(He moved here from Afghanistan in the 70's. He used to be a professor back home and fled to the United States post-Taliban rule, trying to make ends meet for his family. His wife makes a mean kabob and he still misses the home he once knew . . .)

It's pretty bad. I don't know how, but John can usually tell when I seem especially taken with a person and based on that, he will usually say, "Let me handle this one," lest I walk away giving them a 200% tip.

He also has the uncanny ability to ask me how much I tipped someone and know when I am lying. "So what did you tip?" he will ask.

"Oh you know . . . like, 20," I say, avoiding eye contact.

"20?" He looks suspicious.

"Yes . . . give or take a (cough) a few," coughing into my hands.

"A few how many?" not deterred by my sudden appearance of a cold.

"I tipped her 28 dollars."

"What? 28 is not 20!"

"She looked like she needed new shoes. Leave me alone." And I will walk off in a huff.

Now, let me be clear. John is also a generous tipper - so he is not trying to be cheap. He is just trying to make sure we can pay our mortgage next month given the fact that I want to give away our salaries.

Last week, John and I went to Mexico for our 5 year anniversary for 4 days. We hadn't had a break in a while and needed some time to relax and just re-prioritize each other.

The first night we got there, I hadn't eaten much at dinner and got hungry around 10 PM. I tried to dial room service, but our phone wasn't working. I opened the door to see if there was any wait staff around so I could torture them for my request for "una hamburgesa con queso."

I was in luck.

Across the hall - a waiter was bringing up four Modelos for the couple in the room across from us. He knocked on the door to deliver the beers.

I watched in astonishment as the guy he was delivering the beers opened the door, took the tray and literally slammed the door in the face of the waiter.

The waiter jumped back a few feet, clearly startled, and actually motioned as if to protect his face. It was quite startling to watch honestly.

I looked at his tag and saw that his name was Victor. I explained our situation to him and asked him if he could help me out and get us some food and drinks.

And then I asked him if he wanted me to go knock on the door of the asshole who had just slammed the door in his face.

"No, no es necesario, Senorita. It must be windy."

Listen, Victor. The only thing blowing any wind is the asshole of that dumbshit who just slammed the door in your face. You and I both knew that.

I was ready to go kick some ass.

John poked his head out the door. As if some Sixth Sense was drawing him out at the sign of me gearing up for a bitch fight.

(I swear, this inner Jersey thing I have unleashed is not going to end well . . .)

"What's going on? What was that noise?" he asked.

"The wind," said Victor.

"An asshole in that room!" I said, at the exact same time, pointing at the door in front of me.

Victor promised to get my order - he was probably more scared of me at this point than the dumbshit in the other room.

When I got back to our room, I cried.

There was something about watching a grown man being treated with such utter disrespect by another human being. There was something about the motion of him holding up his hands to his face as he jumped back from the sudden and screeching slam of the door.

There was something about watching another person literally take something out of the hands of another person and turn their back without a "Thank You" while also then being a subsequent obnoxious asswipe.

I just felt really down. I cried and I cried. John looked at me like I was a nut, but he gave me some space, because if nothing else . . .

I am the nut that he married.

I sat down and got the hotel stationary and wrote a three page letter to the assholes in the room across from us. I wanted to tell them exactly how I felt and how they were the ones who gave traveling Americans a bad name. That poor Victor really didn't deserve that crap and that if they didn't want to tip him, the least they could do was treat him like a fellow human being.

Three effing pages.

I wrote three freaking pages.

As I got up to go deliver my message to the vermin across the hallway (Don't ever disrespect my friend, Victor!), John looked over at me and said,

"Why don't you hold off on delivering that them tomorrow?"

"Because I won't then," I replied.

"Maybe that's the point," he said.

And so I started crying again. I wasn't doing any good for the world crying about the injustices against humanity from my room at a luxe resort and I certainly wouldn't be helping the world by starting a fight with a douchebag drinking Modelos across the hall.

But God, it felt so right.

I put the pad away. I think John may have crumpled up the note and threw it away.

Heck, maybe Victor swiped it when he delivered our food.

I tried to make up for the rudeness of the guy across the hall by promising Victor our firstborn (Sorry, Shaila, it seemed like the right thing to do) and ended up just telling John to tip him enough to cover my shame over what had just happened.

And for all the three pages of that letter that went unsaid.

"Men are respectable only as they respect”-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

XOXO,

Kiran

Ketchup in Your Face

The other night, John, Shaila, Nico and I packed ourselves off and headed out for a night on the town.

It was going to be a pumping Friday night.

Our family lives in a town in Northern Virginia called Ashburn. It's a really family oriented area - lots of neighborhoods, trails, parks and family friendly restaurants and an overall tolerance for whiny kids, temper tantrums and crying babies.

Its a fraternity of very tired but also, very empathetic parents.

So we head over to this restaurant called Glory Days. While it touts itself as a "sports bar" and does, in fact, boast lots of flat screen televisions and does have a bar area, given that it is located where we live, the most popular dish on the menu is likely to be Chicken Nuggets.

So I am sorry. It's more like a bar in sheep's clothing. With a side of ketchup.

We ask to be seated outside, because it's a nice night and I want to make sure we can actually converse as a family. Putting John in front of any television broadcasting any kind of sports - it could even be competitive hot dog eating - is like putting cocaine in front of a coke whore.

So we sit down outside, amidst lots of other families with loud kids and cranky babies.

(BTW, I don't usually say things like "coke whore", but I have been watching Housewives of New Jersey and feel that it has a certain ring to it now. I don't think we have many in Ashburn, however, so I only use the term sparingly).

There are two girls sitting outside amidst the landscape of families, drinking some beers, at the table next to ours. I almost feel sorry for them, because they have the option to go wherever they want and they chose to come to a place where instead of picking up hot guys, they got to hear Shaila singing "Barney" songs.

So, we are sitting there, having a relatively pleasant dinner when Shaila realizes she has been eating her fries without Ketchup and this this was not acceptable. Our waitress was nowhere to be seen, so I thought it would be alright to ask the two girls who were nursing their beers if I could use their ignored bottle of Heinz.

I walked over to their table.

"Do you guys mind if I grab this?" pointing to their ketchup. "We don't have one at our table." I indicated our ketchup-less table.

One of the girls seemed really sweet and was saying, "Sure" while nodding her head. However, her response was trumped by the one from her little friend sitting next to her, who nodded her head while simultaneously shooing me from the table.

Now, I am not one for shooing. Nor do I like being shooed. But I was sure that maybe I had misunderstood something.

So I walk back over to the table where John looks at me and says, "Did she just shoo you?"

"Yeah, I think so. That was weird."

If I was any kind of Housewife from Jersey, I would have already flipped a table over and called her a coke whore (pronounced - whoo-aw), but I am classy like that, so I refrained. Barely

As we sit and enjoy our dinner, now a little more calm with a bottle of ketchup (Thank you very much, Heinz family), I overhear part of the blonde's conversation. She tells her friends she is going to get some hot guys to meet them out and to just watch her in action . . .

She picks up her phone.

"Hey, it's me," she tells her little cell phone lover.

"So me and my friend . . . of course she's hot!" (Hmm... hot is a relative term). "We are heading out after this - yeah, we're at a bar right now," she says, twirling her hair as a mozzarella stick goes flying past her head.

Not by my kid.

Thank you very much.

Again, restaurant - not bar. Not when the majority of the clientèle still is a prime audience for the Sprout network.

"Oh - and just so you know," she added before she hangs up the phone, "I don't have to work until 11 tomorrow morning, so I can like, 'totally' hang out."

Hooker.

Anyway. I sit back and enjoy my dinner with my kids and just pray that my daughter never chooses to ho herself out at a family restaurant when all of a sudden I hear my son coughing.

John and I both turn to see Nico spitting up on his French Fry and get up to make sure he's ok. He's not. Next thing, we know, he hurls all over.

I mean, he does, but the thing is - it's baby puke. Like - he is not even 1 year old yet - and while it's not fun that it just happened - you know, it happens.

As John tries to pat and comfort our son and I try to clean up the mess and calm Shaila down, I look over at the table next to us. The girl who just offered sexual favors on her cell phone in the middle of a crowded family restaurant looks over at my baby boy and says, "Oh, how disgusting!"

Ok. I get it. I'm not asking you to eat it. Bitch.

Anyway, I guess her friend realized how it came off and asks (or maybe she actually was genuinely concerned - like most human beings would be), "Is he ok?"

"No. Thank you for very much for asking, but he was choking," still in disbelief that her friend continues to stare at my son like he is a leper and shake her little bleached blonde bimbo ass head.

We clean up the mess, get the check, tip our server and apologize for the trouble. The staff is super sweet as we prepare to go. Shaila looks over at the table next to us. I think she is somehow both drawn to and repelled by this young woman.

Kind of like how I am with Houswives of NJ.

"Come on honey, let's go," I prod her along, trying to move her out to the parking lot.

She won't budge.

She just wants to keep staring at this woman who was so stingy with her ketchup.

See? My daughter has been learning about sharing.

And then I do something that is not so nice. It was my opportunity to show my daughter how sweet and peaceful I could be, letting the anger roll off of me all Zen like.

But instead, I turned around, pick Shaila up and say, quite loudly,

"No, honey. We don't hang out near the trash while its waiting to get picked up."

Great parenting.

Someone's been watching too much Bravo.

Peace out, homeys.

XOXO,
Kiran