I last had a dental cleaning a few weeks before the dawn of the Great Recession.  When you’re done working full-time, $300 each for a cleaning and exam feels like too much.  But that seems to be the going rate, unless you go to Kat’s brother, where it’s $330.  We no longer have tennis buddies who give us a break on pricing.  And we no longer have dental insurance, so any procedure involving teeth is going to be costly.  But Kat had read about dental tourism, and we found a well reviewed dentist in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico.  We booked an appointment and holy moly!  It was just like going to a US dentist, except that perhaps the hygienist was not sufficiently confident of her English to conclude her work with a lecture about daily flossing. She spoke these two words over and over:  “Open wide!”  Ah, when two people get cleaned, x-rayed, and examined for $200, you want to visit Mexico more often.

The eye people were a bit scarier:  I had little confidence in them, but the finished product was amazing.  I now see things I had forgotten about.   Repeat:  I see things I had forgotten that once I could see …. Like the mortar in a brick building.   If you haven’t noticed that in a while, it’s time to get your glasses changed.  Plus they built me some prescription shades using the frames of my 25 year old Serengeti Drivers, those big old brown aviators.  The total tab came to $385, but try getting three pairs of progressive, plastic lens specs with reasonably fashionable frames anywhere north of the border for that.  You might be able to get three pair, but you’d come out looking like Vince Lombardi, circa 1966, in those old style bi-focals.

We enjoyed a couple of big, better than average Margaritas as well.  Kat got some good pictures of this bar’s interior, but like so many other places, there is no street sign.  It is the bar with no name.  We ate average enchiladas and tacos at La Café de la No Llamo, even drank the water, and nobody got sick.  I bought a $70 Hoss Cartwright straw hat for $25, and left knowing I’d paid too much.

And there were these street dancers!  I asked a local having her spectacles adjusted at our shop about them.  She told me that they only visit Nogales in March and April.  Then I asked:  “In Espanol, how do you say ‘brain damage’?”

She grinned, and pronounced, slowly and clearly, “Dano cerebral!“