A Mexican Arrival Ceremony for the Press Corps...

Published December 24, 2015

It's all glamor, music, rope tricks and tables heaving with Tequila....it is when you travel with the presidential entourage, this is....AND you're landing in Guadalajara.

We clambered off our air conditioned buses - don't yell we PAY for the buses - and approached the Crowne Plaza lobby to find a mid-day sensory overload of the most pleasing kind. While we, the traveling horde, blinked disbelievingly, we found to our left on the vast tile lobby floor an all-woman Mariachi band dressed in sleek white slacks, matching jackets blouses and leather shoes.

Before the ladies, who strummed and sang so well, stood a single rope-tricking sentry in deepest gray. The woman wielded the rope with a dexterity and authority that wound have made any 19th Century Texas cow-hand whistle with professional and personal admiration. To our right, we found three table-clothed fold out table heaving with Mexico's most famous distilled export - Tequila.

Tequila was born here. And I mean here, in Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco. It's plant, the agave or maguey, dates to the Aztecs. Contrary to common belief, agave isn't a cactus but a type of lily first used for food and fiber. But someone extracted the sap, fermented it and created pulque, an alcoholic beverage the Conquistadors found and Cortez wrote about to King Carlos V (must have been to praise its medicinal qualities).

Pulque became Tequila when it was first mass produced in the territory that would become Jalisco. (The city Tequila took its name in 1656).

Today's "modern" Tequila was first mass produced in the early 1800s right here in Guadalajara.

Well, as you can see from the attached video - shot by my traveling videographer Bryan Cole - the Tequila that greeted us came in every shape, size and bottle design.

Suppose they want White House travelers' to loosen their wallets and buy some? Buy the time we turned to ask the Mariachis, they were gone. The rope lady was still there and her look was unmistakable. Buy some. Now.

This last part is fiction. The video speaks for itself and, now that I think of it, probably should have all along.

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URL

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/a-mexican-arrival-ceremony-for-the-press-corps