I just ate the heftiest lunch ever, at this taco place in Playa del Carmen called El Fogon. About three years ago, I dragged a hapless guy I met in a bar over to the other El Fogon branch, off in the then-wilds of Av 30 and C 28–I remembered it being very tasty, and the random guy being a little out of his depth. So I was looking forward to lunch, by myself, without the responsibility of a co-eater (hey, that’s what you get for striking up a conversation with me in a bar, dude).

Except I couldn’t find the place. But I could smell it. I wandered around two square blocks, navigating purely by the smell of grilled meat. When I got there, I was ravenous, and promptly ordered the “Taco Loco,” which looked giant and had a lot of meats and cheese in it.

It arrived, a hulking thing in a flour tortilla. Improbably, it was garnished with a bit of pork chop and a wiggly, chewy piece of barely grilled bacon. When I saw the all-meat garnish, I actually thought, “Ha, that’s crazy!” And only then remembered precisely what I’d ordered. I guess they warned me, right?

After that, I stopped in to look at a hotel. I explained what I was doing, and asked to see a room. The guy just could not get his head around it. I wasn’t selling anything. He didn’t have to pay anything. Somehow I made enough money to do this job… He’d never heard of Rough Guides, or Lonely Planet, or Frommer’s or Fodor’s or any of the other names I pulled out. It just didn’t make any sense to him. Every time I thought we were making a breakthrough, he’d end up saying something like, “So it’s like the Yellow Pages?”

Finally, he kind of gave up, and we talked about my job a little more, how I got paid, and so on. Then he said, “Your job…it’s kind of like making a movie.”

I laughed, and said, “Oh yeah–I wish my life were that glamorous!”

No, he explained–he meant, really making a movie. He’d lived in California for a long time, and he’d seen up close just how boring and awful the process of making a movie can be, all the waiting around and redoing things, all for a tiny bit of film. My job, it sounded like, was a lot like that.

He got it.