Mexiblog

Being a computer/blogging geek, I took my laptop on vacation with me and wrote an extended entry while we were there. Here it be:

Day One – No Gracias

We’re staying at the Pueblo Bonito Mazatlan, a timeshare resort hotel, and check-in here was an exercise in the old Hard Sell. We’re staying as guests of an owner, and at check-in there’s a critical question the desk clerk asks you: “Are you the owner or a guest?” This question is critical because it marks the difference between you getting your room key and “Enjoy your stay” and being free to get started on your vacation versus being steered as part of the check-in process to a “guest services” desk situated in a corner of the lobby where you do not get your room key. We fucked up: we said “guest.”

We speak very little Spanish. I speak just enough to get myself in trouble when I used to go to Tijuana during my drinking days, and while Beth spoke Spanish fluently when she lived in Cadaques, Spain fifteen years ago, Cadaques Spanish isn’t quite the same Spanish they speak in Mexico. They’re different dialects from the same root, so many of the words and phrases mean what you think they mean -- and many of them don’t. Everyone we’ve encountered here so far speaks English well, but with varying degrees of accent. The ladies at the Guest Services desk spoke heavily accented English, with the end result of us only understanding about every third word they said.

So. We get the steer over to the Guest Services desk, where a Guest Services lady starts jabbering at us. Fast. In heavily accented English. That we can barely understand. And so we stood there, smiling and nodding, vaguely bewildered, wondering what the hell all the jabbering was about and why she wasn’t giving us our room key, and it slowly dawned on me that this was a sales pitch. She was just too friendly and too smiley and too enthusiastic, and I finally tipped to it when we she asked what room we were in and then exclaimed “Ooooh, you are very lucky, that’s one of the nicest rooms here! You must know someone very important!” She was trying to get us to sign up for a tour and sales presentation at their brand new resort a few miles away but we gave her the “No gracias, no espeakedy Espanol” slip and finally managed to get up to the room.

In truth, maybe the Guest Services lady wasn’t totally snowing us about how nice the room is. It’s one of the smaller ones here, but the view is killer. Our balcony looks right out on the beach and with the door open we went to sleep listening to the surf each night. Not bad, all in all.

Here’s Zoe sulkily pretending to read so I can take her picture to demonstrate the fabulousness of the view.

After checking in and unpacking, we commenced with the Sun Worship. We staked out chairs at the pool and soaked up the rays for awhile, then went for a walk on the beach. Walking along the beach, we quickly learned to employ a Spanish phrase we had to use almost constantly in near self-defense: “No gracias.” In a roughly 50 yard walk up and down the beach, we were approached roughly every 10 yards by locals selling 1) hats, 2) blankets, 3) marionettes, 4) silver jewelry, 5) more silver jewelry, 6) scarves, 7) shirts, and 8) kites. We also learned you had to keep moving, because when we did stop so I could buy Beth and Zoe bracelets, all the other vendors surrounded us like a pack of hyenas and we practically had to fight our way back out.

We closed the day with dinner at the palapa by the pool, and then it was off to bed early for the travel-induced coma.

Plan for tomorrow: surf, sand, siesta.

---

Day Two – It’s Official

Not a whole lot of surf and sand today after all – instead it was pool and pulmonia with just a soupçon of surf at the end.

First, we slept in late. Really late. Really really late. I just can’t get my internal clock right down here, thanks to two recent time-shifting events. First is Daylight Saving Time. The clocks moved up an hour three nights ago, which just happened to also be a night when I couldn’t sleep. Lately I’ve gotten into the habit of staying up until about 3:00 a.m., but moving the clock Saturday night sort of caught me by surprise when I noticed that it was 4:15 a.m., not the 3:15 a.m. my internal clock was expecting. Then it took me another half hour or so to get around to going to bed, and then I found that I wasn’t really tired anymore and I just laid there staring at the ceiling. So when the sky started getting light around 5:30 I just gave up and got up and I ended up staying up until about midnight the next night. So the clocks changed and I lost a day of sleep and then we left for Mexico.

Then when we flew down here to Mazatlan we crossed into the Mountain time zone and lost another hour and didn’t realize it, so it was another hour later. So with the clock change and then the time change, I was walking around with my internal clock totally fucked up and two hours off. So when my already normally lazy ass decided it was time to wake up at 9:00 this morning, it was really already 11:00 local time. Fortunately, I was on vacation in Mexico at the time, so I just rolled over and went back to sleep until noon. I didn’t really want that buffet breakfast anyway.

When we finally got up, more Sun Worship was on the agenda. Briefly, that entailed precisely positioning a chaise lounge for maximum sun exposure, greasing up with tanning lotion, and then going back to sleep. I like being on vacation.

For our 3pm lunch we decided to take a cab into town and try El Shrimp Bucket, recommended to us by former coworkers of Beth’s as being “the best food in Mazatlan.” Well, I’m here to tell you: not so much. It wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t “the best.” It also wasn’t cheap. I can remember partying in Tijuana and Ensenada in the 80’s and eating like a king for less than $5. Now, here, $5 gets you two Pacifico beers. Mini Pacifico beers.

During the cab ride to the Shrimp Bucket we passed no less than five “Official Senor Frog” stores. This place is lousy with Senor Frog’s, and they’re all the “Official” one. But if they’re all official, which one is really official? It’s all too confusing. No Senor Frogs for me.

Zoe has made a few new friends in our short time here. One of them is a little girl from Salt Lake City, and we had her up to our room for a few hours tonight. We let them call room service to place our dinner order. Zoe is an old hand at calling Room Service and did it with even more gusto than usual as she peppered her conversation with the bits of Spanish she’s learned so far: lots of “gracias” and “si” and “de nada” – and who cares if the usages aren’t quite right.

Lesson del dia: Don’t remove your contact lenses with fingers that not long before were holding jalapeno peppers. Ow.

---

Thoughts at 4:00 a.m.:

Woke up and raced to the toilet. Ahh, here it comes, the local version of Montezuma’s revenge. Oh well. As I finish up by downing a dose of Immodium AD it occurs to me that I may be defeating the purpose by washing it down with tap water.

---

Day Three – Leap of Faith

Perfect vacation-type day today: lots of nothing. Lounging by the pool, escaping from the skin scorching noon sun to lounge in the room for a bit, then back to lounging by the pool in the afternoon. Vacation math: “lounging” is a variable in every equation.

I’m making fine progress on my vacation reading list: 102 Minutes and Million Dollar Baby down, working on Sahara now, with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy queued up behind it. That’s all I brought with me. I may need more books before we leave.

Tonight we took a leap of faith in our fellow man: we let Zoe go to dinner with her new friend’s family. They were going out to dinner in town somewhere but hadn’t decided where, and they would be back by 10:00. That’s all we knew. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it but decided to let Zoe go anyway, figuring that A) I want her to have fun, B) I want her to feel independent, and most importantly, C) I figured that as a fellow parent of a 9-year old girl, the friend’s mother wouldn’t do anything we wouldn’t do.

But when they hadn’t returned by 10:30, Beth and I were both getting worried and realizing that we knew nothing about these people – not even their last name. All we knew were the mom and daughter’s names, their room number, that they’re from “near Salt Lake City” and that the daughter plays softball. And that was it. And now our daughter was gone in a foreign country with them and we didn’t even know which direction they had gone.

Tensions started running a bit high.

They finally got back at 11:00: the kids were having fun dancing, so they ended up staying later than planned. Oops. We were relieved -- and also resolved not to let her run free with strangers in foreign lands again.

No vacation is complete without adrenaline, right? Well… Maybe wrong.

---

Day... Four? Five? I'm losing track, we’re on Mexico time. - Activity Girl strikes back

We went out on an excursion, an “all-inclusive” trip to Deer Island. We saw no deer, but then we weren’t looking at the land anyway. We boarded a motorized sailboat that took us south past our hotel, circled “Bird Island” and “Seal Rock” and then anchored for the day at Deer Island.

Bird Island is just that – an island, with birds. It’s really just a rocky outcropping maybe 100 yards around about a mile offshore that is covered with two things: birds and their shit. The whole thing is white like Christmas morning with bird shit. It was remarkable, really. And I was happy that we kept our distance.

Seal Rock was also aptly described: it’s a rock with seals. Here’s Zoe with Seal Rock in the background. Yes, the whole thing is that big.

At Deer Island we played in the water and had lunch. Zoe and I did some snorkeling and kayaking...

...and then we braved the banana boat ride.

Beth was not Activity Girl... [Ahem, note from wife: I kayaked with you and did not read but instead chatted with fellow tour guests. Further, I was the one who took pictures of you and Zoe doing stuff. Duhhhhhh. Though I did consume several Pacifico’s.] [Editor’s Note: Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. My blog, my reality. Read ‘em and weep.] ...on this particular excursion, being content with simply drinking the “all-included” Pacifico beers and reading a trashy novel under the umbrellas provided. But we did manage to lure her out to the shore for a picture with Zoe.

And then… Well, then we kept being on vacation and right now I’m tired of writing about it because, hey, I’m on vacation. To make it short and sweet, the rest of the day went like this: sail back to the hotel, lay in the sun, then lay in the sun some more.

---

Day... Five, maybe? - Vacation is like Camp

Today was all about arts and crafts. There’s a pottery cart here at the resort, staffed by my man Silvano. You grab a pre-made clay something-or-other – an iguana, maybe, or perhaps a toucan – and pull up a chair and you paint your pottery something-or-other. It is the biggest time-sucker I’ve ever experienced (after the Internets, that is). You can (and will) spend simply hours working on your project.

Zoe did a toucan, while I worked on a lizard. I worked harder on this thing than I’ve probably ever worked on anything in my life. I painted. I repainted. I repainted some more. I painted this stupid lizard probably every color Silvano provided because I kept not being happy with my color combinations. By the time I was finally satisfied, both Beth and Zoe were making “obsessive compulsive” cracks and everyone else at the table with us thought I was insane. But the proof is, as they say, in the pudding. The next day, after Silvano had glazed and fired my little lizard, everyone was “oooohing” and “ahhhhing” over it and using it as a model for their own as they copied me. I’m sure people mocked Picasso too.

And this shit is addictive, too. The next day we were out there again, painting our little hearts out. I did a sea turtle that was getting rave reviews as I worked on it. Personally, I thought the shell pattern and color scheme I went with was a little too Rastafarian for the rest of the turtle, but I’m just the artist. We artistes, we’re always our own worst critics.

Later that night as we browsed through the local shops we saw basket after basket of already-painted toucans and lizards and whatnot identical to what we were painting with Silvano, all going for something like 37 pesos apiece. My man Silvanao has quite racket going on at poolside there – we paid him 50 pesos for each piece for the privilege of painting them ourselves. Talk about stupid gringos...

$50 worth of $20 pottery

Observation du jour: There’s nothing like getting a deep tan to highlight for you just how gray your chest hair is getting.

---

Day Who Knows – Money, money, money

I’m having a hard time getting my head around the currency here. It’s not as hard as I’m making it, I just know it, but I still find myself confused. I think what’s killing me is the way I keep unconsciously comparing it to US currency. Maybe it’s just me, but I just naturally assume that the Mexican peso is the equivalent unit of measurement to the US dollar; that’s what makes sense to me. I know that the peso isn’t equal cash-wise to the dollar, but it seems to me that as a basic unit of measurement it should be about the same.

It’s not.

The key to Mexican currency, the key which keeps eluding my brain, even though I know it intellectually, is this: The peso is roughly the same as a US dime as a unit of measurement. All discussion of value, all denominations of money go from there. So if you ask someone in the US “How much is that carton of milk?” they’d answer “It’s a dollar.” But here in Mexico, they’d answer “It’s ten dimes.”

I just can’t get my head around that. All prices, all currency, is figured in terms of dimes. Whafuck? Prices in the supermarket: dimes. The various coins and bills of Mexican currency: dimes. It makes my head hurt.

I got money out of an ATM machine the other night and ended up with a giant stack of 200 peso bills. (The stack was “giant” because the ATM, being in Mexico, gave its instructions in Spanish, and I somehow withdrew $400 when I was only going for $40. But pay attention, that’s not imporant right now.) I keep thinking they’re two hundred dollar bills because they say “200” on them. But they’re the equivalent of twenties – they’re 200 dimes, not dollars.

Consequently, prices are crazy down here. I saw a billboard advertising a condo for something like 147 million pesos. Gulp. But, hey, the picture looked nice.

---

Day No Freakin’ Idea, Just Have Another Drink – To Market, to market

Off to the open air mercado this morning, where you can get everything from produce to tourist crap to eggs to meat. It was a far cry from the antiseptic supermarkets we have back home, but I liked the atmosphere and third-world feel of it. On the other hand, after watching a guy in one of the fish stalls climbing with filthy boots onto the counter he was using to filet the fish he was selling, I saw the advantage to antiseptic shopping environments after all.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped for lunch at my kind of place. Beth has more refined sensibilities than I and prefers restaurants with the finer things, like clean floors and recognizable food and a clientele that doesn’t scare you. Me, I like dives, and the taco stand we ate at – Taco Luna -- was a dive. It was open air, the menu was painted on the wall, the cook was smoking a cigarette and stacking tortillas at a back table, and the senora running the place was pouring tequila shots for two twenty-something American guys in matching cowboy hats as we sat down. It was perfect.

Lunch was... Well, about what you’d expect. Zoe had quesadilla she didn’t finish, Beth took the safest route she could find and had a ham and cheese sandwich that she didn't finish, and I had marlin and carne asada tacos and went back for seconds. The condiments on the table were three varieties of hot sauce served in plastic picnic bowls with plastic spoons. The yellow sauce had a hair in it, so of course that was the good one. It was so hot that I figure it burned off whatever bacteria might have been on the hair, and it boiled all my tastebuds off my tongue. So basically, I thought lunch was pretty damned good. An hour later, back at the hotel, when my stomach was churning, I knew it had been good. Ahhh...

We finished off the day with more of the usual vacation routine: fun in the sun. Beth and I read our books at the pool for awhile, and then Zoe and I rented a jetski and raced around in the ocean for half an hour. Then back in the pool and back in the sun and that’s how we finished out the day.

Plan for tomorrow: fly home. We’re a little sad that our vacation is almost over, but we’re also ready to be home. Zoe misses her cats so much she had a crying fit over it, and I’m itching to get back to my motorcycle. Besides, we have much planning to do – we have to figure out how we can live here in Mexico full-time. And I have to figure out how to talk Beth into it.

---

The Last Day – Homeward Bound

Air travel is air travel, regardless of the country you’re in, going to, or leaving. The airports are crowded with clots of confused-looking people, there are lines everywhere just for the sake of having lines, and there is always just a single metal detector for everyone to pass through. And of course someone always beeps when they go through and holds up the rest of the line. Today that person was me.

After I set off the big metal detector the security guard scanned me with a hand-held scanner, sweeping it up and down each leg, across my torso, and up and around each arm. The scanner beeped three times: once at each ankle, and again at my left hip. It occurred to me that these were the places I would carry a pistol in a concealed holster and that I was about to get intimately acquainted with the inside of a Mexican prison. Then the guard said one thing, and one thing only: “Okay, you can go.”

Ah, Mexico...

I’m on the flight from La Paz to LAX as I write this, sitting in seat 19C on Aero California flight #146. On the ceiling in the aisle two rows ahead of me there is a yellow button. It’s the only ceiling button I can see anywhere on the plane -- yellow or otherwise -- and I’ve never seen a button like this on any other plane I’ve been on. There is no sign to indicate what this button does. It’s just there. And I’m experiencing an incredible urge to get up and go push it. Will I? And will it do something horrible? I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. If this makes it onto the internet and you’re reading it now, I guess it’s safe to assume that either I didn’t push it, or it didn’t do something horrible if I did.

[Later: It didn’t do anything horrible. In fact, it didn’t do anything at all. It didn’t even move when I pushed it -- it was just a yellow button-shaped thing sticking out of the ceiling. And I’m such a pussy that I didn’t push it until after we had landed. I am ashamed.]

And what is it with people in the middle seat – like the woman sitting next to me now -- who wait until you put your tray table down, get a glass of pineapple juice, open a bag of pretzels, set up your laptop computer and start typing before they decide they have to get up and go to the bathroom RIGHT NOW? It’s a two-hour flight, bitch, just fucking hold your water already. And next time try using any one of the 37 bathrooms you passed on your way to the plane with your little pea-sized bladder. And maybe don’t drink three glasses of water if you’re in the middle seat and have to pee every 30 seconds.

Right there, that's reason #345,993 why I hate people.

Sigh… I’m already slipping out of vacation mode. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

We'll always have Mazatlan...

Posted by Chuck at April 12, 2005 09:17 AM