People Do The Nicest Things!

Last week I was in Mexico with the goal of bringing back one souvenir – a beautiful tequila bottle, Clase Azul. Personally, I wasn’t as interested in the tequila as I was in the bottle itself (the bottle is perfect to be used as home décor as a candle holder or vase). Unfortunately this happens to be expensive tequila, so I had to buy it in Mexico.

We get to our hotel in Tulum (La Zebra) and sitting on the bar is a 3 foot tall Clase Azul bottle. I make a B-line for it and immediately started haggling with the bartender for it. He starts at $5,000 pesos, which is utterly ridiculous. I go in at $1,000 pesos which is equally ridiculous. We go back and forth. The price is a bit high, so I decide to wait it out – always a good strategy when negotiating.

Mind you the 3' tall bottle is empty, but the small (1' tall) bottle is full which actually makes it harder to travel with because you can’t carry it through TSA, and checking all that tequila seems dangerous.

So I’m on a mission. We go into several tequila shops and none of them have it (but tequila tasting isn’t that bad of a job in the mean time). We finally find a small bottle, but it is $150 USD(!) and full, so not only is it very expensive, but it is going to be impossible to carry on... we walk away.

Now in the 4 days we had been there we had made very good friends with the restaurant staff, and they all knew about my love of the Clase Azul tequila bottle. When we got back the day of the tequila tasting/shopping the bartender, Roberto, called me into the restaurant saying that he had a surprise for me.

The bar manager called Clase Azul to see if they could send me a large 3' tall bottle. But they said no, it was a promotional item. So she decided she would do an extra favor for me. She had a bottle of Clase Azul at home, she poured the tequila out into another bottle and brought the empty bottle in to the restaurant for me and gave it to me for free!

When was the last time a stranger went out of their way to bring you something from home? To quote my friend, “the extra mile is never crowded.” But with people on the extra mile like the staff at La Zebra you don’t need it to be.