Columnist John Katsilometes: Feeling foreign in Cuernavaca

Monday, May 8, 2000 | 8:57 a.m.

John Katsilometes is the Sun assistant features editor. His column appears Mondays. Reach him at kats@lasvegassun.com or 259-2327.

We don't have a lot in common, Larry and I. He's a man of the world, a Canadian who was raised in Cuba and worked in Manilla as a high-ranking executive for Johnson & Johnson.

To Larry, Q-Tips are a big deal. The advent of aloe vera hand lotion helped pay for his pool.

Larry's retired and lives in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Interesting place, Cuernavaca, a tightly packed city roughly 50 rough miles southeast of Mexico City. It's primarily a tourism destination, mostly among Mexicans. When Mexico City residents want to "get away" they trudge down to Cuernavaca, drinking watered-down margaritas at Carlos y Charlie's and sweatily dancing the samba till the wee hours.

Larry and his magnanimous Filipino wife, Gigi (whom I came to adoringly refer to as Madam Marcos), welcomed my wife and me to their Cuernavaca estate with a few easy-to-ascertain rules: Tip the help (a staff of a half-dozen devotees oversees the property), don't wear shoes on the bedroom carpet (it's just been professionally cleaned) and don't drink water out of the tap. All well-to-do Cuernavacans drink distilled water. Some refuse to even brush their teeth with the demonic local liquid.

Larry is a hate-Las-Vegas person. As we settled into the couch after a tortuous flight and bus ride from Las Vegas to L.A. to Mexico City and finally Cuernavaca, Larry rifled a question at me.

"Why would you want to live in Las Vegas?" he said.

So brazen and direct was the question that I braced in self-defense. I countered, "Um, my work brought me there ... it's a good quality of life ... I'm close personal friends with Wayne Newton."

Unimpressed, Larry asked about the climate in Las Vegas. Climate is a big deal to Larry, right up there with Q-Tips, and I regretfully accentuated the negative by saying, "There's quite a bit of air pollution and it gets up to 118 degrees."

"A-ha! It's 118 degrees in Las Vegas!" Larry announced. "The climate in Cuernavaca is the best in the world!"

Oh, a competition? From that moment through the remainder of the week Larry and Gigi were a tag-team Cuernavaca Chamber of Commerce. We were led to "El Centro," the city's financial district, where we bought all sorts of local handcrafted items such as silver crucifixes, ceramic wind chimes and wooden armadillos. We golfed at Cuernavaca's finest country club, Las Tapachinas, and ate at what Larry and Gigi said was the finest restaurant in the country, Las Mananitas, where the owner asked if I was going to write about Cuernavaca.

"How can I not?" I answered. Gigi nodded approvingly.

We visited the Cuernavaca equivalent of the county fair, where terrified children spun around at 8 Gs on rickety carnival rides. We attended an outdoor Easter party hosted by the city's matriarch, a woman wearing giant white glasses who looked like Elton John's mother.

What a trip.

We returned exhausted from the Cuernavaca odyssey. I'll always remember walking through McCarran Airport and spying a simple, un-appreciated local fixture:

A water fountain.

It was good to be home.

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