New friends

So it’s just kind of funny how much of an “upper class bubble” (as I called it before) I’m in here considering what I was expecting when I came. I say this with renewed wonder after the recent events of last weekend. My roommates and I went out for our last dinner before two of the girls had to leave the next day. We were trying to find this one restaurant that she had seen before, but we couldn’t find it so we just picked another lovely garden terrace-ish place. It looked so expensive so we were surprised to see things on the menu cheaper than cheap places in America. Así es en México. That’s Mexico for you.

Anyways we were the only ones in the restaurant until a few minutes later three guys we had seen loitering outside came in a few tables away. One of them eventually came over and used a pick up line on one of my roommates. I guess it worked because we let them pull their table up to ours and buy our drinks. We soon realized these guys were like no one we had never met before. We were mostly tipped off when they offered to pay all the airline charges in order for two of my roommates to stay longer, when they invited us to Puerto Vallarta on their private jet, and when we learned they could park wherever they wanted because one of their mother’s was the French consul…..

Ashley, who had one more day in Mexico, and I exchanged phone numbers with them and agreed to do something the next night, salsa dancing we had thought. I wasn’t too excited about doing something with these guys we didn’t know, but Ashley had a "good feeling" about them and I really wanted to go Salsa dancing (at this point I had been in Mexico for 9 weeks and still hadn’t gone…) and they said they could take us to a really nice place.

So the next night a bunch of us piled into their chauffer-driven SUV and tried to figure out whether we should’ve been more worried/curious/excited when they insisted on taking us to a “pre-party” at one of their friends’ houses. They told us the house’s name: Hacienda Benazuza (yes, it had a name!). It turns out it is one of the most well known party places in Guadalajara. It has a banquet hall on its grounds, which that night was rented to the graduating class of the University of Guadalajara, as well as a house of the owner, which is where they took us.

The night’s highlights at this house involved jet skiing on a man made lake, Jacuzzi, bathing suits that the guys had bought so that we could go in the Jacuzzi, make-up to put on afterwards, an original Dalí in the living room, lions and jaguars, free alcohol. We never made it to salsa dancing-I guess the “pre-party” turned into The Party-but they and their chauffeurs kindly drove us home when we wished.

How did I end up there- in the complete opposite (literal and metaphorical) place of where I was hoping/expecting to? It felt so nice to be paid for, to have a chauffer, to have free drinks, to probably have whatever we wanted that night, to not have to think about anything except having fun….Ugh. It all seems like luxuries and extravagances that I have put my nose up at ever since I learned about the way the majority of the world’s people live. But what was I supposed to do? Refuse their hospitality (was it even hospitality?)? Not enjoy myself, even though I had decided just a few weeks ago that this should be my focus for the rest of the trip? Not take the chance to make some Mexican friends (which the lack thereof I have been lamenting about…)?

Ay, the questions of life……

*The last pic is of my friend--with the this-is-crazy-I-don't-know-what-to-think-or-do look.