Our hostel in Guadalajara offered several different tours including a trip to a couple of Tequila factories (with free samples) and a trip to a nearby lake where it sounded like the primary activity was buying souvenirs.

The option that caught our attention was an evening expedition to the weekly Lucha Libre exhibition in Guadalajara.

The price was only $200 MX (about $15 US) each and included bus transportation to the venue, a free beer on the bus (I always make out on that deal since Shawn does not drink) and supposedly transportation back to our hotel.

If I had any reservations about this outing it was my concern that we would find ourselves on a bus full of old gringos (like me) who were whooping it up on vacation in Guadalajara. Boy, was I wrong.

As it turned out, if I had not been along Shawn would have been the oldest person in the crowd. The vast majority of our felllow Lucha fans were young Mexicans in their twenties. The crowd had a college student vibe even though a party like this on a Tuesday evening seemed a bit much, even for the college crowd.

The tour itself was very poorly run. If you were twenty something and hammered for the entire evening you probably would not have noticed the sloppy organization and unsafe transportation process where the buses only had seating for about 1/3 of the passengers since much of the seating space had to be dedicated to the on-board bar and DJ station. The DJ could have been replaced by a USB memory stick with a few songs. There was no getting around the fact that the bar was obviously considered an essential part of the process.

The only non-Mexicans, besides us, was a group of Australian guys who, in true Aussie fashion, had already gotten a head start on the competitive drinking part of the evening's festivities before the bus ever left the assembly point that just happened to be a bar. Im sure those Aussie guys where writing emails home telling their mates about how cheap beer is in Mexico.

In Australia I made my own beer because the commercial product was so expensive but here, in Mexico, I can't make home brew as cheap as the excellent Mexican beers.

A couple of last minute additions to the crowd only paid $150 MX for the evening so I guess our hostel got $50MX out of the deal. That is not very much for their trouble.

When we went to the Lucha Libre in La Paz 5 years ago it was in a much smaller outdoor arena where you had to walk around to the refreshment sellers and took your life in your hands walking around the hazardous arena in the dark.

The venue in Guadalajara was a large indoor arena that could probably hold 2000-3000 people. It was not filled to capacity the evening we were there.

The first disappointment of the evening was when they made me check my camera. There were lots of people in the venue with phones and I even saw a couple of women who had managed to smuggle cameras in.

The guy who made me give up my camera, to the lady who checks them, was very polite and explained in very broken English that it was a secure place to leave my camera. They were not being nearly as polite to the younger attendees.

It really pisses me off when someone treats me with the respect that they feel they should extended to older people.

The refreshment distribution system was much more organized in Guadalajara than it was in La Paz.

There were lots of guys walking around with 5 gallon buckets full of ice and bottled beer. They served up two beers in one big cup (no glass projectiles allowed) and once one guy had become my beer vendor the rest left me alone. I think the cups were different, for each vendor, and that is how they marked their turf. The beer was incredibly cheap for such an event. In the states a single beer would cost $10-$20 depending on the venue. Here in Guadalajara they charged less than $5 US for two beers and the service was very attentive.

There were also many different options in the snack department. One guy sold popcorn and was offering the Mexican customers the option of having some hot sauce poured over their popcorn. He never offered it to the gringos. We could have asked but it did not look that appetizing.

Mexicans call popcorn "palomitos" which translates as "little doves". The name makes sense until they cover it with red hot sauce.

They also pour hot sauce over potato chips just before serving them and once customer seated near us even had some sliced hot dogs thrown into his potato chips in addition to he hot sauce. I guess those are papas Primere classe.

Another vendor was hawking Styrofoam trays with fried pork skin broken into bite size pieces. He carried a small bucked full of hot sauce with a ladle in it . I would have been up for trying those except that bucket with the hot sauce just looked like a bout of intestinal distress going somewhere to happen. So we took a pass on the chichirones.

The weirdest snack was being sold buy a guy carrying around a big tray of various flavors of glazed donuts. Apparently the Mexicans also found the idea of beer and donuts weird because his inventory did not decrease that much during the evening.

The seats were those contoured plywood seats that were attached together in rows. They used to be very common in school auditoriums, in the US, when I was a kid. The ones in the Lucha Libre venue looked like they could have been the same ones I used as a kid.

In keeping with our friend Grady's Mexican motto of "Safety Third" the row of seats next to the one we were in started rocking backwards because the front feet were not tied to the concrete floor. Those seats are not designed to be free standing are are not stable if they are not bolted down.

The quality of the performers was definitely a notch above those we saw at the somewhat backwater venue we visited in La Paz. But the quality of the luchadores has very little to do with how much fun you will have at Lucha Libre. Like my Mom used to say "The people make the party".

In La Paz the safety considerations were definitely given a back seat to whatever would thrill the crowd. The luchadores threw each other over the ropes and into the ringside seats. They even used canned hair spray and cigarette lighters to send flames up past, and frequently through, the overhead electric wires. I think that was the evening Grady came up with is legendary "safety third" comment.

We arrived around 9:00 PM and several events had obviously already taken place. When we went to Lucha Libre in La Paz we were there for the entire evening and the first few matches were definitely amateur hour. I guess the tour operators had figured out that limiting their customers' exposure to the better, later events was a good idea.

The Luchadores come in two types. The technicos are the good guys and the Rudos are the bad guys. The whole show is a modern extension of the morality plays of the past where the battle between good and evil is acted out for the amusement of the audience. Most of the audience seemed to cheer on the technicos but most of the women in the audience decided on who they cheered for based on who was the most buffed out luchadore.

When the Luchadores enter the ring a group of provocatively dressed young women walk out on the entry ramp and stand there for decoration while the wrestlers come out in their capes and masks and spring over the ropes and into the ring where they parade around and pose standing on the ropes to the applause or boos (depending on whether they are technicos or rudos) of the crowd.

We started referring to "las bonitas" as the skank parade. They looked as much like a bunch of hookers as anything you might see in Las Vegas.

The sound system was awful and we could not understand anything that was being said about the wrestlers. It was almost like they used the announcer job at the arena as a training job for people who aspire to working the drive thorough at McDonald's.

The matches we saw were tag team matches with up to 4 guys on a team.

The highlight of the evening was a match that had an old fat guy as one of the members of the technico team. The crowd knew the guy and was very enthusiastic about his leaps and collisions with the other wrestlers. They called him "porky" and chanted his name whenever he landed on one of his opponents. He seemed to function as the equivalent of a rodeo clown in the US. He really knew how to work the crowd and had a very enthusiastic following.

When we got back to the hostel I went on line and found some photos of him. One is at the top of this blog post.

Until I started googling "Super Porky Lucha Libre" I did not realize that we were seeing a major star of the art form.

The cheers that are used at Lucha Libre are interesting. One popular one is "ole,ole,ole,ole' that is chanted the same way it is at soccer matches and originally came from bull fights. Shawn said it was also what the Peruvians chanted at the Metallica concert he attended in Lima.

The other popular cheer (or jeer) was directed at specific Rudos and went something like this, "chinga tu madre" which loosely translated means ":F__K your mother". Even the little kids yell it with great enthusiasm. That is, after all, the sort of thing that must be shouted with enthusiasm and conviction. The Luchadores yelled it back. Everyone seemed to find it amusing.

The audience member in front of us called over a guy who was selling luchadore masks and questioned him about whether or not he had the mask of a particular favorite luchadore of his. The vendor said he had it in his shop so the prospective customer proceeded to try on a couple of the ones the vendor had with him to figure out what size he needed. Then he gave the vendor his contact information so he could get in touch to complete the deal. It was very interesting to watch the exchange between the two of them. Neither saw any irony of a man in his late thirties putting so much effort into the purchase of a wrestler's mask. The negotiations were as serious as if the customer had been trying to decide which ipad to buy.

If you are ever tempted to try on luchadore masks at an event give some thought to whether or not you have any head lice shampoo on hand.

When the event was over we exited the arena and retrieved my camera. We were told by one of the tour organizers to stand against a wall and wait. We did see the Australian guys stumbling out and looking like the Mexicans had made short work of them. That was the last we saw of anyone from our tour.

Shawn said he saw one of our buses up the street but I was unwilling to walk that far in a dark neighborhood in that part of town so we caught a cab back to the hostel. I guess the bus just took off without us.

In retrospect we figured we were probably better off taking a cab because the hazardous situation with all the standing passengers was bad enough when everyone was sober. I had visions of us being in the middle of an Australian projectile vomiting competition on the trip back.

My advice to anyone who travels to Guadalajara would be to make sure you go to the Lucha Libre event on Tuesday evening but I think you could do it cheaper and more conveniently using cabs. Leave your camera behind. The tour operator picked us up an hour early from our hostel which got us to the assembly point an hour before the bar opened. That is another reason to organize your own tour.

Lucha Libre is a uniquely Mexican experience where the audience is as much fun to watch as the wrestlers. Don't miss it. Descriptions don't do it justice.

Here is a link to a youtube video of Super Porky in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TMXoUViygs