With Italian food covered for now, we move on to other fare. There's Mexican, and its corrollary Texican - slash - TexMex, to consider. Jay's palate doesn't like being singed, so the milder spiciness suits him fine. His favorite Mexican dish is Chile Relleno, a wondrous concoction prepared with roasted chile peppers and cheese. Tangy, but not painful. He also likes tamales, enchiladas, and of course tacos in their many guises.

Jay visited actual Mexico in person once, decades ago. He dined like royalty in a small place in Reynosa, Mexico, where no one spoke a word of English. Jay's learned some Spanish since then, but on the trip south, south, south from Fort Worth, Texas, his traveling partner, a professor of mathematical-type stuff and a long time friend, assured him there'd be no need for Jay to cram Spanish skills along the way, as university classes were still fresh in his mind. They drove on, and when they got to Mexico, the first test of the good professor's Spanish was a road sign that said (forgive any misspelling after all these years), "No estacionarse." Jay, who was driving, asked frantically, "What does that mean? Is this a one-way street?" The professor shrugged a "don't know." Fortunately it only meant no parking, though cars were parked all around the sign.

After several days and many other great episodes, Jay and his friend dined in the nicest restaurant they'd seen in Reynosa. Jay spotted it the night before, observing that a block-long line of well dressed Mexican families were lined up outside, waiting for tables. Jay and his friend went early, to avoid the rush. The waiter brought the menu, and Jay asked his professor friend to translate. Unfortunately, Professor Math didn't know Mexican food, and asked the waiter if he spoke English. Nope, sorry.

Undaunted, Jay looked through the menu and pointed to everything he recognized. He'd learned the word "dos," two, and repeated "dos" for each item he pointed out. The waiter jotted furiously on a pad, saying things and asking questions. Jay nodded, though he understood none of it. After much gesturing and smiling all around, the waiter went off, presumably to the kitchen. In a few minutes the feast began. Dozens of dishes, all of them delectable though Jay knows not to this day what they might have been, accompanied by an inexhaustible supply of tortillas, salsas and garnishes. And bottled water - Jay'd seen a truck unloading the huge jugs of water the day before.

Jay and the Prof are both what we call here in the South "big eaters." They consume mass quantities of food, the more if it's good, and even more if they've starved all day in anticipation of a fancy meal, as they did in Reynosa. Even so, it turned out that everything Jay pointed to on the menu was in fact a "family" meal intended for several people. After a while, Jay and the Prof asked, no, begged, the waiter to stop bringing food. With some difficulty they finally succeeded in getting him to desist. Then the Prof got worried. "Oh, no," he worried, "we've run up a huge bill and we won't have enough money and we'll be imprisoned in a foreign land, never to be heard from again."

A while later, the Prof agonizing the whole time, the waiter presented the bill. Translated from pesos to dollars, it was little more than a couple of Happy Meals on the other side of the Rio Grande. Sighs of relief. Jay and his friend left an enormous tip, and smiled all the way back to the hotel.