AN HONEST PERSON AND A GOOD RESTAURANT IN MEXICALI ED LUBIN


A few past issues of "The Desert Sage" have contained reports on trips to Mexico, which included some negative experience caused by the behavior of a citizen of that country. Allow me to belatedly report a positive one:

Two years ago last Thanksgiving. I was there on a trip put together and led by Gene Olsen, to climb Pico Risco from the west. Afterward, we celebrated the holiday with a superb dinner in camp at picturesque Laguna Hanson.

The next day all of us stopped for parting lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Mexicali (there are many). The food was good and priced quite reasonably. The extremely spacious, clean restaurant, located in a large shopping center on a main highway used for travelling north or south through that sprawling city, has an imposing entrance, somewhat resembling an imperial palace.

After lunch, two friends and I decided to do some shopping in a super mercado a few hundred yards away (purchasing food, including freshly prepared chicken for dinner at Pescadores road head that night). At the check stand when I reached for my wallet, normally kept in a rear pant pocket, it was missing. There was about $130.00 in it--a considerable sum based on the exchange rate for the peso at the time: enough to support the average Mexican for a while.

With swarms of shoppers in the huge store, recovering my wallet there seemed unlikely: so, as a last hope, I returned to the restaurant and asked the waiter if it had been found. He told of finding it on the floor behind where I had been seated: searching for and handing it to someone in our group to return to me. With different destinations, how Julie King and I met on the highway so I could retrieve my wallet, is another story.

This is the largest Chinese restaurant I have seen outside of Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles, and it was similarly crowded at the time. The waiter, Jerry Lee (granted not a typical Mexican name in this instance--his forebears probably imigrated to work in the mines or on the railroad) could have easily kept my wallet and, if asked, told me that it bad not been found. No country has a monopoly on honest, decent people--or on the other kind.

The restaurant: Imperial Palace, Blvd. B. Juarez, KM 5, Mecicali, BC, Mex. Tels 61-7391/61-83-91

1/20/90

Located on west side of highway indicated as "Justo Sierra" on some AAA maps of Mexicali; around 2/3 mile north of where Mex. 2 intersects Mex. 5 from east. Justo Sierra is highway used,for returning to U.S. EL
 
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