Memories: April 6th, 2014

I am feeling very nostalgic today, how nostalgic, very nostalgic, bands that don't exist anymore whose members I once saw live at a gig or two some five or ten years, maybe even twenty, then looking at pictures and quizzes that bring up mostly bad memories... I hate going back that far in time but the nostalgia even though it brings pain and sorrow it also brings back curious afterthoughts.

One of those examples that comes real quick is that old Trojan Horse at the San Ysidro International Border. The thing was built out of wood, which kind I don't know, with enough open spaces in between every carved piece of wood to be able to look inside the horse in case people tried to play funny with the thing and hide something inside of it like a bomb although more “official” sources would come to say that this is because of the transparency on the exchange between the two nations. This horse, with wheels, was parked exactly in the middle of the delimitation of both countries with one head looking towards the US and the other head looking towards Mexico. Figured it out yet? Yeah, the thing had two heads which I think meant something about the continuous interconnectivity we had and the duality we face in this specific region, the dualism face here has built a whole different concept which is foreign to the outsiders and in turn is chauvinistic in its existence trying to justify itself. This horse was there from the late 90s up until the early 2000s I believe. I do wonder where the horse is though...

 

 

What about crossing the border? Meh, once you do it once and get through the whole rush of going to a different country it gets old and tedious. Important fact about this is that the San Ysidro International Border is the most used border in the world, Wikipedia would go on to state that annually 350 million people cross it, so you can get a slight idea of how boring it is to be there for up to four hours, sometimes even more, during a slow day and at best one hour while back in the early 90s you could cross mostly relatively easy but yet again thirty minutes was the average wait time back in the day. Speaking of that I remembered being part of a group that ICBC, that is the Institute of Culture of Baja California, that let people borrow books while they were crossing the border which the idea of giving them something to do, something that would educate and nurture them the intellectual way, and it worked like a charm yet again because you are sitting for hours while waiting to cross and I recall people coming out of their cars, which is pretty common too, to get another book or asks us if we could sell them the book, no, no we couldn't because they weren't ours but it was still mighty fine of them to tell us this as it meant that the project was working fine.