It’s Not Melrose, It’s TJ : A Shop ‘n’ Rock Weekend in a Changing Tijuana, Mexico

Like almost everyone we know, we were exhausted and ripe for getting out of town, overdue for a serendipitous, stimulating, spirit-lifting journey. Thus, we were easy marks for what’s been billed as the “new” Tijuana.

Once denigrated as nothing more than a pinata-lined border town leading to Ensenada, La Paz and Cabo San Lucas, Tijuana has attracted international investors who’ve helped turn it into one of Mexico’s largest cities. Foreign-owned factories ( maquiladoras ) have spawned outlets selling bargain-priced styles by Ralph Lauren, Benetton and Guess. And, last we heard, a Mexican yuppie class was tooling around town in BMWs equipped with cellular phones.

We figured TJ might be a place to actually spend a weekend, not just a day across the border.

As much as we’d prefer to say we were coerced into visiting Tijuana, which is now a rambunctious city of an estimated 2 million inhabitants, the truth is we were enticed--by the promise of designer outlets and nightclubs full of exotic, young trendsetters.

We love to shop. We love to dance. We love to believe we’re exotic, young and trendy--when we’re not inspecting the corners of our eyes for crow’s feet, dining on Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine straight from the box and curling up with Al Green (Beth Ann) or Mozart (Jeannine).

We were tailor-made for this assignment. But to make it work, we knew we’d have to abide by a couple of seemingly simple ground rules: We would make the best of the situation even if the new Tijuana seemed much like the old, and we would report the actual, possibly discomforting details of our trip.

Both of us had traveled to Tijuana in the distant past and memories of those trips were not exactly luring us back: Donkeys painted with black stripes sadly posing as zebras for photos with sombrero-renting tourists. Beggars angling for enough change to finance a meal or two.Forlorn youngsters hustling tiny packs of Chiclets. Crusty, old men rounding up audiences for transvestite revues.

As it turned out, the most astute plan we laid was to spend Friday night in San Diego. We chose The Catamaran Resort Hotel on Mission Bay (3999 Mission Blvd., San Diego 92109), where a comfortable, landlocked room goes for $120 or a mini-suite with a water view can be had for $175.

The Catamaran provided a peaceful, soothing and welcome rest stop before we hit TJ, even if we arrived too late to even think about enjoying the complimentary, moonlight cruise. Instead, a late dinner of lime and cilantro-flavored crab cakes revived Beth Ann while Jeannine headed straight for bed so she could make it to the Catamaran gym by 6 the next morning. She found it spare but equipped with an authentic StairMaster and LifeCycle, no small considerations for an addicted exercise connoisseur.

At breakfast, on a sun-drenched patio looking out on Mission Bay, the food was fresh, delicately seasoned and imaginative, but the service was pitifully slow and amateurish. We helped ourselves to cups from a service area--five minutes after pots holding our beverages arrived--and then watched a guy get soaked by a liter of orange juice spilled by a waitress straight out of “In Living Color.”

To get to Tijuana, we dropped Jeannine’s car at the parking garage at the trolley station at 12th and Imperial in San Diego. From there, we took a $1.50 ride to San Ysidro, hopped off the trolley and followed crowds heading for two heavily rusted turnstiles.

For the next ten minutes we were trapped in a slow-paced throng of border crossers as we inched our way up a concrete maze reminiscent of the winding entry planks at Disneyland’s Space Mountain. We both packed too much and hadn’t had the foresight to bring luggage carts, which could have turned our climb into a cakewalk.

Once you cross into Tijuana, the price of almost everything is negotiable: cabs, food, clothing, club cover charges, souvenirs.

At a nearby enclave of perhaps 30 taxis, we studied the drivers carefully and chose one who looked healthy and well dressed. Throughout the weekend, we realized how wise--and critical--our pickiness had been. We frequently saw cabbies drinking from bottles nestled inside brown paper bags and realized we needed to be as keen-witted as possible, both in whom we hired to drive us around and how much we paid for their services.

We had been warned to negotiate the fare before getting in, so we haggled. Our clean-cut cabbie wanted $8--we agreed on $6 and gave him a $1 tip--for the five-minute ride to La Villa de Zaragoza, 1120 Avenida Madero, near the city’s Jai Alai Palace.

We selected this hotel because a Tijuana brochure listed it among the city’s “first-class” establishments and because it was within walking distance of Avenida Revolucion, the focal point for shopping and club action.

La Villa de Zaragoza reminded us of an important lesson on many levels: the term “first class” means something radically different in the First World than it does in the Third. But at $36.65 for a single room and $46.35 for a double, we couldn’t really complain. After all, the hotel was right across the street from the Ralph Lauren outlet at Seventh and Avenida Madero.

This shop, which sells familiar $28 Lauren polo shirts for $19.99, is one of the best shopping reasons to come to Tijuana--if you’re enamored of preppy basics. Lauren’s high fashion items are not sold in this shop, but men’s suits, neckties, shirts and cologne are. A smaller selection of women’s wear, including classic cotton knit dresses and turtleneck sweaters, is provided at the back of the shop.

Oliver Gildersleeve, who manages databases for the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, was having a pair of pants shortened while we were in the store. He raved about the deals: “This exact, same pair of pants costs $165 in the Palo Alto Ralph Lauren shop. Here it’s $77 regularly priced, but it’s 20% off that price today. I’ve bought two suits and five pairs of slacks here. My wife buys the polo shirts and sends them to her family in Denmark, because in Denmark they’re twice as much as they are in Palo Alto.”

In the same mini-plaza as the Ralph Lauren outlet is the Ellesse Shop, which offered a small collection of Calvin Klein merchandise, such as sweatshirts for $35. While these items struck us as genuine designer-label goods, the store also carried poorly executed counterfeits. We saw tank tops with the hot Cross Colors and Stussy insignias for $8 apiece--and also noticed that they had Hanes labels stitched inside.

Around the corner, on Avenida Revolucion, we encountered the ‘90s version of our worst memories: donkeys, beggars, barefoot Chiclet-bearing kids and street hawks relentlessly hammering the tourists to inspect a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pinata or escape behind the black curtains for tawdry sex shows.

Sights such as these were the opposite of what we imagined we’d find in the new TJ. But there were a few indications that Tijuana is, in fact, on the move. Guess has opened two of the city’s most attractive stores (at 540 and 1105 Avenida Revolucion). They provide more Guess merchandise than we’ve typically found in their U.S. counterparts. However, bargain hunters will be disappointed if they go to the shops searching for amazing deals. They’re more likely to find stretch jeans at prices similar to those on sale at The Broadway (about $45).

In some TJ shops, the prices for goods are actually higher those in the U.S. At the gift shop of the Hard Rock Cafe (520 Avenida Revolucion), for instance, a standard, black or white Hard Rock T-shirt sells for $14 (50 cents less than the price in Los Angeles), but other T-shirts there go for $1.50 to $4.50 more than those sold in L.A.

Our favorite Tijuana store--and the only one in which we did any serious shopping--was Benetton, at the corner of Sixth and Avenida Revolucion. This giant outlet shop has two entire floors devoted to deeply discounted merchandise. When we were there just after Labor Day, the downstairs offered spring and summer ’92 merchandise and the upstairs stocked fall and winter ’91 goods.

Never before had either of us seen such a bountiful selection of Benetton styles, since most Benetton shops--at least those we’ve visited in the U.S., Canada and Italy--have been on the small side. Jeannine picked up a beautiful pair of $50 printed leggings marked down to $10. They were in perfect condition, although not everything there was.

We trudged up and down Revolucion looking for other spots to recommend (and somehow we missed the Quicksilver surfwear outlet), but we really couldn’t see many distinctions among the dozens of shops offering famous perfumes, cosmetics and leather goods at cut-rate prices. But if you look carefully and know what you’re buying, you can find low prices on imitation Rolex watches, Italian-style purses, fake Chanel jewelry and many familiar brands of toiletries.

If it’s wrinkle-smoothing Retin-A or the hair-restorer Minoxidil you want--without a prescription--we found both widely available in pharmacies as well as department stores. We noticed a 30-gram tube of Johnson & Johnson Retin-A in .05% strength selling for less than $7 and a two-ounce bottle of Rogaine (or Minoxidil) selling for $6.

Prescription drugs such as Retin-A, Minoxidil, AZT and pain killers are sold over the counter in Mexico. And you can legally return to the U.S. with them. According to John Miller, a public affairs specialist with the U.S. Department of Customs, “If it’s legal to sell the drug in Mexico and there is no FDA prohibition on the drug in the United States, then it’s admissible to bring the drug into the United States in personal use quantities, even if it has been purchased in Mexico without a prescription.”

In the afternoon we headed back to our hotel for a nap. After dinner, we changed into our evening clothes. We hit Revolucion once again, this time in search of night life rather than bargains.

If this strip, which extends basically from First through Eighth streets, is bustling with shoppers during the day, it is positively electric with club-hoppers at night. Between 9 and 11 p.m., the main drag goes from calmosa to muy caliente as clubs draw in thousands of twentysomethings--and hundreds of kids who look far younger.

Clubs line both sides of the street, making it a sizzling boulevard for grazers, dancers, drinkers and onlookers alike. Tijuana’s night spots are distinguished mostly by their music, which ranges from techno-rave to classic American top-40 to heavy metal.

Beer was cheap in many of the places we visited and few of them were collecting cover charges. Best of all, we found a refreshing lack of the hipper-than-thou attitude we’ve come to associate with L.A. clubs. Guess it just can’t coexist with stage diving, a spectacle in which fearless showoffs throw themselves from a balcony into the arms of the crowd below.

Attire was ultra-casual everywhere we went. So were the “doormen” whose jobs were to pull people in off the streets--sometimes literally--rather than keep them out of the clubs.

We heard this repeated more times than we care to remember: “Hey, girlie! Two-for-one drinks, right in here! Hey, girlie! C’mon, for you, everything is free.” But in no time at all, the refrain simply melted into the music pounding out of mega-sound systems and into the street. We were repeatedly pushed and grabbed and followed down the street by hustlers apparently willing to do almost anything to get customers into their clubs. Catching onto the game, we realized it could be beat if we walked fast and ignored the taunts and touches.

The first club we checked out was Red Square with its pre-Communist downfall theme, at the corner of Revolucion and Sixth. Outside, all we could see were flashing lights and all we could hear was the heaviest metal music, blaring nonstop. We walked up a long flight of stairs and were seated near the dance floor decorated with exposed pipes and a spiral metal staircase. The decor was sparse and black, save for a mural with the word “Mobka” on it.

If the hustlers outside were pushy, the waiters here were positively relentless. A new one came by every other minute and asked if we wanted more drinks. No food was sold at Red Square. The beer was about $2, as it was other places we visited. Mixed drinks were available, but everywhere we went, it seemed that the majority of the patrons (mostly male, mostly military at Red Square; those shaved heads are dead giveaways) were sticking with brewskis.

At 9:30, it was still too early for dancing--and too loud for talking--so we decided to leave. Our next stop was Bananas-Ranas (pronounced Bananaramas by gringos), on Revolucion not far from the Hard Rock.

This restaurant/dance hall offers Mexican food and techno/rave tunes--think of disco music on speed and you’ve got it--just inside a patio that has an ancient school bus parked on it.

Buckets, maracas, sombreros, rolling pins and other objects so weird that even we were hard pressed to identify them dangled from the ceiling like pinatas. Waiters peddling shots of tequila banged around the room and across the dance floor, blowing loud whistles and making this joint the nuttiest stop of the whole trip.

Two small dance floors were crowded with Mexicans and Americans sweating it up number after number. Everybody was dressed in jeans, short skirts, tank tops and T-shirts.

Along with a middle-aged couple, we certainly didn’t look like we belonged here--especially when the Nirvana hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was played and a circle of baby-faced men started slam dancing.

When the music cranked even louder, we drifted out on the patio and found 26-year-old Juliette Jamieson and 35-year-old Walt Kasha in the middle of dinner. They’d come to TJ from Hermosa Beach via San Diego.

“She’s always wanted to come to look for blankets and silver jewelry “ Kasha explained. “We were at Sea World and we just figured, let’s go there. Some people we met going across the border told us to come to Bananas-Ranas.”

“It’s festive,” added Jamieson and Kasha agreed: “You can really let loose. Any troubles you had are left on the other side of the border.”

We left them in their burrito’d bliss and headed down the strip to the Hard Rock Cafe, at 520 Avenida Revolucion, where the music was live and the bar scene was even livelier. Although this Hard Rock is not owned by the same group that owns the Hard Rock Cafe in L.A., prices and menu items were similar: hamburgers, chicken, guacamole and chips, hot fudge sundaes, most things under $10.

At 10:30, the band was playing cover tunes while we ordered guacamole and chips and stared at an autographed pair of Debbie Gibson’s sneakers. The relatively gentle crowd here was skewed a little older (mostly folks in their 20s through 30s) and the place was definitely a singles hangout. The bathroom--one of the nicer public facilities we encountered--had the words “Heavy Metal Rules” scratched into the door.

As we headed back up Revolucion, things had definitely picked up. Some shops and street vendors were still selling their stuff into the night and the clubs were reaching full-tilt swing.

We found Tilly’s Fifth Avenue at 901 on the avenue to be one of the few places actually demanding a cover charge ($3), but that didn’t deter the crush of folks inside eating Mexican food and dancing to new jack swing music. Nearby, Tequila Sunrise (918 Avenida Revolucion) and Acropolis Rock House a few doors away were definitely rocking.

At Scandal, 937 Avenida Revolucion, the smoke machine was working overtime and spilling out the windows into the street below. By 11 p.m., none of the clubbies we saw looked remotely tired, but as we headed back to our hotel, we remembered that back in our own club-crawling days we rarely tired either.

If we learned anything from our night and day on the town, it was that we are no longer enthusiastic, perpetual motion daredevils, eager to immerse ourselves in any brand of culture shock just for the hell of it.

The next morning, we left Tijuana and paraded through a U.S. border control station, declaring what little we’d bought before heading back to L.A. We felt relief--and gratitude--that among the worst things we would have to confront when we got home were crow’s feet, Lean Cuisine and perhaps another night with Al or Wolfgang.