Rosarito Beach, Mexico — Rosarito Beach, Mexico
As an economy major, Vince Barile has a head for numbers, so when the San Diego State student walked into the biggest spring break bar here and found barely two dozen revelers, he made a quick calculation. He ordered two beers to better get his personal party started.
The dejected 23-year-old offered an instant thesis, too, to explain the limp scene: "The war. The economy. The weather." Indeed, on the latter, the winds gusting off the deserted beach ensured that his beers would stay cold, so with a shrug he accepted a third frosty bottle from the barkeep at Papas & Beer, the famed party bar. Spring break in wartime requires certain adjustments, and Barile's attitude represented a fitting theme for this year's revelry: Escape as best you can and keep your expectations limited to what's sitting right in front of you.
Spring break, of course, is the recess for colleges and universities spread out over the five weeks leading up to Easter Sunday, and it's often a raunchy, boozy rite in resort towns like this one, where the economy, the night life and civic patience have been tailored to college-age hedonism. The 2003 edition of the party south of the border, though, has been chilled somewhat, and not just by the blustery Baja weather.
"A lot of [students] are just going home for spring break. A lot are heading for Vegas or someplace inside the U.S.," Barile said as he sat last week in the sparse crowd. "I heard all these rumors that if you came down here without a passport, you wouldn't be able to get back in the country. And a lot of parents probably didn't want their kids leaving the U.S. with everything going on."
The leading spring break destinations in the U.S., including Panama City Beach, Fla., report business as usual this season, but the war with Iraq prompted many students to nix their flights to Jamaica or distant Cancun, Mexico. "Since Sept. 11, the destinations that would require air flight have taken a hit, and with the war now, I'm sure that's a factor," said Jayna Leach, director of sales and marketing for the Panama City Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau.
About 95% of the 425,000 college students who stream into Panama City arrive by car, and this year the early indications are that 2003 will match the previous year. There has been one difference, Leach said: "I'm not sure if it's the war or if it's an awareness campaign we have going about responsible behavior, but it has not been as rowdy as past years. It's been busy but a little more subdued."
In Rosarito and Ensenada, two well-known Mexican beach towns that can be reached quickly by car from Southern California, this year's spring break has been an uneven affair. The organized tours are still taking busloads of students to town, but business in bars has been off 30% or so, according to informal estimates by glum locals. Still, for the students who have ventured out, the horrors of CNN reality back home only primed them for intense diversions.
Many of the students stay at the Hotel Corona Plaza, a gleaming gold and white beachfront tower where the music of Eminem and Nelly blasts in the sunny lobby at nightclub volume. On an afternoon last week, awaiting their bus back to Cal State Fullerton, many of the groggy students flopped on couches or flipped through the new scrapbooks provided by their digital cameras. One of them, a thoughtful 21-year-old exchange student from England named Sara Kerley, was asked about the war. She smiled wanly.
"It's great not to have it there. It's been wonderful, I honestly haven't thought about it for four days, until today." Kerley is in Fullerton's American studies program, and before Rosarito, her days had been packed with CNN, calls home and lectures that veered again and again to Baghdad and Basra. "I'm doing a course on architecture, and we still seem to mention it every single day. You can't seem to escape it even in courses that seem completely unrelated."
Outside, the idling bus that would take Kerley back to Fullerton and CNN and reports of collateral damage was waiting. The coach's driver, Dave Rock, rubbed his unshaven jaw when asked if the desert war 8,000 miles away matters at all -- or even should matter -- to young people seeking the beaches of Rosarito. Rock was a Cal State Fullerton student himself in wartime. He left the campus in 1967 to join the Army and expected to see combat in Vietnam during his two-year stint but never did. At the time he was disappointed.
"These kids, they're the same age as the troops," Rock said. "They talk about the war on the bus; I hear them on the way down and back. They're interested, but it doesn't concern them as much as it did us. There's no draft. They talk about the war, but I don't know if they really think about it. "
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'Not the place'
