To cap a busy holiday, my friend Pepe and I went hunting for a place
to sit and have a beer tonight in el cento. Pepe picked a dive bar of
the main tourist drag and we went in. I asked him, “is this a cantina?"
And he looked around and said, “it’s an almost cantina.(casi-cantina)"
I asked for further explanation of what made this place a casi
cantina-First of all, there were women here and even a kid. He called
this place a “cantina familiar" (family cantina). An authentic Mexican
cantina is characterized as a bar with these characteristics:
- only men. If there’s women present, generally they’re selling something.
- high levels of drunkenness
- higher levels of machismo
- high levels of conviviality. Apparently its not uncommon for patrons to buy a beer for a stranger
Anyway, we had a few beers, talked about life, the difficulties of
being a “practicante" (intern), the office, etc, good times. My Spanish
always improves after two beers. We called it a night after being the
last patrons, (really? Before ?) and headed back to our respective
colonias.
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