Nick keeps saying this isn’t the real Mexico, whatever that means. Tijuana sure seems real enough to me, and really different from anything I knew in America. But when I try to explain that to him, he just rolls his icy blue eyes and says something pitying, like “We have GOT to get you out of here”.

Whenever he’s in a bad mood he dismisses Tijuana as “the asshole of North America”. I know exactly how he feels. I get tired of the throat-burning haze too, and the overflowing trash heaps, and the stinking piles of feral dogpoop. I wince at the plywood-and-cardboard shacks that shouldn’t even house animals, let alone entire families. I slip money to the same heartbreaking beggars that he stoically ignores — when he isn’t looking, of course.

But still, Tijuana isn’t an unrelieved carpet of misery that unrolls in front of the border fence. To me it’s more like hell leavened with some heaven, a border city that’s messy with details, the kind of place I describe as complicated when I scribble in my secret notebook. Depending on which way you look — or even how you’re feeling — you can always focus on something better, rather than all the somethings worse. You just have to try.

The stained glass ceiling of the central bus station in downtown Tijuana. Nick told me the name of the designing architect, some famous Mexican, but I can’t remember now. Anyway, it took my breath away, how the lazy afternoon light filtered through the multicolored prismatic ceiling. I’ve never seen a roomful of weary travelers toting their lives in suitcases and plastic bags and cardboard boxes look so beautiful.

See what I’m talking about? Look up — beauty. Look down — well, not so much.

La Bola — The Ball — is the local nickname for the Imax theater attached to the Centro Cultural Tijuana. We haven’t actually seen a movie there yet, but I almost don’t care. It’s so fun just to stare at its magnificent shape. It morphs in my imagination, from a humongous Flintstonian boulder, to a crash-landed planet, to a bowling ball of the gods. Who couldn’t love a landmark like that?

This office building is everything that’s right or wrong with Tijuana, I can’t decide which. Sometimes I only see ten stories of yuck, a towering eyesore painted in garishly bright purple and yellow. Then I feel a pang of sympathy for all the people who endure its visual affront every day. Other times I think it’s super-cool that buildings can look like something out of a videogame, boxy and pixilated and two-toned.

Leave it to Nick to discover that he can park in their employee-only lot and never get towed. Not like I’m complaining. It saves my calf muscles the extra 10 minutes of teetering from the Zona Rio parking ramp into downtown on his favorite wedgie heels.

Avenida Revolucion — “La Revo” if you want to be hip — is the most-visited street in the most-visited city in the world. And you know it the second your strappy sandals hit the avenue.

“Cheaper than Wal-Mart!” come the shouts. “Senorita! Hey tall girl! Cheap-o-rama!” Loud nortec music thumps from a record store, clashing with the rock-and-roll from the Hard Rock Cafe, known for the backend of a pink Cadillac hanging out of its facade. Tourists jostle down the sidewalks, hugging their purses tight, crowding past the Jai Alai Palace, farmacias selling without prescriptions, the 100-year-old tables of Tia Juana Tilly’s. Get your Virgin of Guadalupe soap on a rope, joss sticks, Subway sandwich with a pulque on the side, bright Mayan sarapes that are actually made in China instead of Mexico, postcards of the border fence, Havana Room Fine Cigars, squid steaming on an open grill, whatever happens inside Aztec Massage.

And on almost every corner, a donkey painted to look like a zebra.

Heaven? Hell? Flip a 20-peso coin.

This is the entry to the industrial park where the ghost-shell of Korea Textile S.A. is located, the small maquiladora whose archive I just finished digitizing. Each factory parcel in the industrial park has a flagpole for the company flag. Nick says every flagpole was rippling back in the 1980s, when China was still waking up from its revolutionary slumber and India was just a place where you couldn’t get a good steak. Now there are 25 flagpoles and only 3 company flags.

I’m always struck by its sparse beauty, but that’s only when I’m thinking about what I’m seeing, not what I’m not seeing — all the shuttered maquiladoras, the jobs they stole from America now stolen to China, and the hardships suffered by Mexican workers who don’t get unemployment or food stamps or job retraining.

Two bottles of the namesake microbrew of Tijuana. Nick thinks it’s a horrible name for a beer — even though we always order it because it’s local, not Budweiser or Corona. He argues that Tijuana is associated with seedy tourism and illegal immigration and scary drugwar violence and god only knows what else. Why would anyone want to link a beer’s marketing to that? But there’s no explaining civic pride, I guess.

Nick usually limits himself to one beer when we’re out. He doesn’t want anyone mistaking him for a drunken tourist, a victim waiting to be victimized.

I’m limited to two beers. Just enough to get me into bed easy, not so much that I forget what to do when I get there. Ha!

Night is the dangerous time in Tijuana. Well okay, the more dangerous time. Anything can happen after the sun goes down into the Pacific. People turn into gunshot corpses. Cars vanish from parking spots. Cops turn ugly instead of innocuous. That’s why Nick keeps pounding “situational awareness” into my head. It’s okay to stroll Avenida Revolucion after dark, BUT…

But how can you stay paranoid when this is your nighttime destination? The bestest slurpee and popsicle stand ever! They start with ice made from San Diego tap water, so you know it’s safe. Then they mix in fresh-squeezed fruit juices, like lemon and papaya and tamarind. The result is a taste orgasm on your tongue.

This is what the night should always be like, not something you flee to home.

Superstitious Mexicans never look directly at me. They’re afraid of my crooked wandering eye. So this is a picture of what it feels like to be el ojo malo — the evil eye.

But they’re still happy to take my money, like this hawk-faced woman who runs the local panaderia. She makes amazing sweetbread in her little bakery. I love to surprise Nick with their sugary delight when he gets home from his fieldwork. Mmmmm.

Fernando. Rosela. Roselita. Mitsy.

A daddy and mommy, and a daughter named after Mom, and their dog. And they’re proud enough of their little family to pimp themselves in a back window decal. Isn’t that the cutest thing ever?

All of Tijuana is like that. There are so many touching glimpses of family pride and togetherness and affection, everywhere you look. Maybe that’s what holds this city together when it’s trying to fall apart.

Believe it or not, I’ll miss our street in Colonia Aviacion. I’m so used to walking its uneven potholed tilt, north to the border fence, south to the American-style stripmall. I’m even used to the jets scraping overhead as they thunder down to the airport or away from it. And I know almost everyone in the neighborhood by sight, even if my Spanish and my evil eye limit our conversations to the “Buenos dias!” and “Buenas noches!” greetings cast across the gravel.

Hasta luego, Tijuana. I’ll see you whenever Nick and I return from the real Mexico.