Don't Like 'Em? Egg 'Em

President Bush once got a shoe thrown at him. Mexico's President Felipe Calderón recently received a more culinary assault.

Armed with cartons and baskets of eggs, Mexico City legislators launched a breakfast-worthy offensive on Calderón for having raised the tax on food basics like bread, beans and... eggs. Congressmen—inspired by generations of ticked-off teenagers or low-grade vandals—actually egged the president of Mexico when he made a visit to a ritzy neighborhood, ironically, to promote the fact that he didn't raise the price of milk.

If you read Spanish, check out the story here.

The Trash

This is a story about what happens to the refuse and rotten leftovers.

The trash is not normal here in Mexico City. Or rather, the trash looks the same as it might anywhere, but its collection is a tale of mystery and intrigue.

Trash trucks roam the streets—painted green beneath the muck—and men right atop the pile and on the bumper, jumping down when the truck makes stops. But they don't pick trash up off the street. No, they have an emissary: a man who rings a skull-sized bell with all his might so that residents may run out—pajamas and house slippers be damned—to daintily turn in their garbage bags.

I did this running in my first home in Mexico City. I spent mornings on edge listening for that trash bell and, when I heard its call, went into Speedy Gonzalez overdrive to gather my bags and run them down the street, literally. The trash truck isn't patient.

But my apartment for the last year and a half is situated in the back of a building on a major thoroughfare where, go figure, the trash truck doesn't pass. By the time I hear the bell on the block behind me, I know I won't make it before the truck rumbles away. So I would put my trash out on the street, assuming—wrongly—that another, perhaps quieter, trash truck would pick it up. Hey, other people piled their trash on the curb as well, so I thought it was safe to assume...

But it wasn't. Some city worker might get around to picking up the trash—or then again he might not. At least not before the rats burrow in and make an art project of your banana peels, onion skins, paper towels, juice boxes and wine bottles all over the front walk.

Sick and tired of my trash and others' decorating the sidewalk outside my building, I asked around. Among the solutions proposed by neighbors: Put an altar to the Virgin Mary out front—then no one will throw their trash there. Huh. Also: Hire a trash man. Hmm. That sounded more reasonable.

I found a man on the street, a man who might euphemistically be called a freelance trash agent. He agreed to come by.

Scruffy and mustachioed, with bright eyes and a wide smile, my trash agent arrives with his oil-drum push cart promptly at 9 a.m. on Thursdays, accompanied by his lovely red-haired wife. They ring my bell and I grab the bags piled on my back porch and hand them over. While I wait, the woman sweeps the stoop with her birch-branch broom, and I tip them $2 for their effort.

They are industrious, my trash agents, and do more than pick up bags. Taking note of my dying Christmas tree—its needles already faded to a dull sage and drooping—my trash agent offered to take my tree immediately. "But I have to take down the ornaments," I protested and asked if he could come back tomorrow. He replied that no, not tomorrow: His cart was empty today.

Wasting no time, my trash agent and his wife bustled into my living room and helped take down every ornament and light strand in what must be a record 3 minutes then hauled off my Canadian pine to its final resting place.

Their world remains a mystery to me—I don't know where they bring the trash or for what mafia they work. But the trash, you see—and trash agents in particular—are not to be taken for granted.