I flew eleven hours to watch ninety minutes of football, which my wife pointed out was a poor ratio even by my standards. I’d also, in a fit of preparation, learned to say soy vegetariano from a video, repeating it on the plane until the man beside me asked, gently, whether I was praying. I am a vegetarian. I was going to Mexico, a country I understood to run on roast meat. I had filed the whole trip under Problems to Be Managed, packed accordingly, and braced for a week of polite hunger.