Ever wonder what happened to the Beetles?

Have you ever thought about it? (and I am not talking about John, Paul, George, and Ringo). I hadn't really thougth too much about it. When I was little there were a lot of Volkswagon Beetles driving around. Everyone liked them. They were small and economical and let's face it, kinda cool. As I grew older, there were less and less of them around. They grew scarce (the "punch buggy" game). Eventually, you just never saw them (and it wasn't becuase they were blocked by the Escalades and Suburbans). I guess they stopped making them in the US. (Little known fact, the first car I bought was a VW beetle convertible...my father and I had a plan to rebuild a car. I bought a second one, and countless parts. Who knew I wasn't really going to be excited about working on cars. Needless to say, the plan failed and it never ran.) Anyway, I digress. I came to Mexico and realize that there are thousands of beetles driving around...literally thousands. I guess the Meixcan's liked them for the same reason some of us did. Many (maybe most) are being used as taxi's...even weirder to me than just seeing them. Can you imagine that a huge part of the taxi fleet is VW bugs? Of course they have made some modifications..they took out the passenger seat to allow access to the back seat. I did see four people climb out of one. Let's not forget that some of them have been tricked out...sort of in a "Pimp My Ride" kind of way.

Don't think that the title of this post isn't also culturally connected. I came to Taxco today. A small city clinging to the side of a mountain. A very cool place, by the way. Anyway, a delicacy here is eating beetles...some times live, some times ground up in to a paste. Either way, you have to try it. I would have tried the live ones if I had found them, but I had to settle for ground up beetles as a filling for my tacos. Yum.