Jpatrickm

Today was a long day. I started doing some freelance web design work at the company where my roommate works to help out with a quick project. It is the first time I’ve gone into an office to work in almost a year. I’ll be there through the weekend so it should be a nice change to my otherwise monotonous work-from-home routine.

One of the great things about San Diego is it’s proximity to Mexico. I think this is great because I enjoy diversity and experiencing different cultures. Although I’ve lived here for 6 months now I hadn’t yet ventured south, but it’s been on my list of things to do since moving. Well today after work, my roommate and I decided to jump on the train downtown and head south. It’s $5 dollars round trip and about a 25 minute ride right to the border crossing. We walked through customs to the other side and weaved our way through the taxi cabs, street vendors and children pick-pocketers to the Avenue Revolucion, the main drag in downtown Tijuana. It’s basically Las Vegas and New Orleans mixed into one only in Spanish. Of course all of the street vendors and store owners working the crowds have learned english, that’s where the money is. We walked around for about an hour or so and headed back across the border. There wasn’t much going on for a Wednesday evening and I wasn’t in the mood to belly up to the bar for some tequila.

One of the other nice things about being so close to Mexico is that there are pharmacies on every corner and medicine is much cheaper. There are also very few drugs where you actually need to have a prescription. And even if you did need a prescription, there are “doctors” standing in the street who will actually write you one for anything you need. It’s quite amazing. I priced out a few of the medicines I’ve previously taken and found that one that cost me about $300 per month in the US, that my insurance company would not even cover, would cost me about $10 for double the pills in Mexico. Another one that cost about $40 US was $4 dollars in Mexico. Both could be bought over the counter there but required a prescription in the US. Our healthcare system here in America is seriously flawed. We are the greatest superpower in the world and I have to go to a cabaret bar town across the border in Mexico to get medicines I can’t afford in the US. In so many ways we are a pathetic nation.

Here is a quick photo crossing the border into Mexico. Not a very exciting picture, but the last thing I wanted to look like was a tourist with a nice camera in a crowd.