From Vancouver to Mexico

Few days ago I was leaving Vancouver, Canada in an attempt to return to my home in Monterrey, Mexico. the plan was to go all the way through the West Coast as a Busker (a street musician). Seattle was my first stop. I crossed the Canadian border with my guitar and $100 in my pocket, hoping to earn enough money to get to my next stop: Portland.

A cousin of mine contacted me with Pisto, a friend of her’s from college who moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft. Almost everyone around the area of Redmond works for the company.

Buskers forums on the Internet said that Seattle was a friendly city for buskers, so I came to the city with optimism. One of the most recommended spots to play was the legendary Pike Place Market, right on the seashore. The market is extremely picturesque, full of tourists that want to buy a coffee at the first Starbucks or watch a worker of the Fish Market throwing a huge fish to his companion 5 meters away.

What I didn’t contemplated when I decided to make this trip is that January is the worst season to play in the streets: on one side, the temperatures around 5 degrees Celsius, accompanied by moisture and cold wind of the Pacific is not the ideal scenario for having your bare fingers playing a guitar with steel strings. To some extent the same cold also makes it difficult for people to want to look into their wallets for a couple of dollars for an amateur street musician. Still, despite the cold, there is always a crazy seattlelite in shorts or skirt.

Nevertheless, I also learned that magic happens in the streets: like the time a wedding photographer recognised a song I was singing in spanish, and left for a brief moment the couple she was photographing, and gave me my first $5 bill. “Someone dedicated that song to me when I traveled to Mexico”, she said with a big smile.

On other occasion, a redhead girl with green eyes stopped walking to listen to me untill the end of the song, and started to talk to me as if I knew her. She commented that she occasionally went with some friends to sing in the streets, so invited her to sing " Stand by Me " with me. The duet was a hit with some applauses at the end of the song.

When we said goodbye, she wrote on a paper a sign to help me getting more money: "spaceship crashed ... need money for repairs" . The note did not helped much, but I kept it in my guitar case: it would be the first of the street souvenirs of my trip.