May 10
 

From the deck.  Or the patio.  Or whatever you want to call it.  I sat out here and drank Corona.  It's the beer of choice in Mexico.  Once again, somewhere in the transfer between camera, Photoshop and computer, the colors got shitted.  Imagine it a lot more vibrant than this.
 
 

I'm back!
 

If I was even a little bit more savvy about shit (and if the scanner was still sitting here at my computer), I would scan all of the journal stuff I wrote when I was away.   Instead, I will transcribe it for you.  Which might be better, because my handwriting got pretty shitty towards the end.  So, without further ado, here is my trip to Mexico.
 

4/30/01
Day 1 (part 1, NY to Miami)

At Kennedy @ 6:15 for a 9:15 flight.

"Unhand that chatchki" (which I'm sure is spelled with a ''tch")

Part 2: (part 2, Miami Int'l)

English is a language minority.  Palm trees.  Very cloudy skies.  Signs about foot & mouth.  Immigration, agricultural.

The airport is dark & damp.

I realized that I am no longer afraid to fly.  I guess I outgrew it or maybe because I'm older, it just isn't as horrible.  Or, I'm just not as afraid to die.

This airport isn't what I expected.  I was thinking Don Johnson, chicks in bikinis and white heels.

Mom:  "Were you expecting Mariachi?"

Me:  "Yes, Mariachi and flamenco dancers!"
 

Hopefully, on the way back, we will get to see more of the airport, the cool part with the drug dealers and the whores and the people trying to seek political asylum in a loud, drunken way.

Miami to Cancun:

Given papers to fill out in flight, declaring stuff*.   I'll save it for leaving, maybe I'll try and smuggle out some monkeys in my ass.

All of the forms as for a passport number, which I do not have.

Hopefully, my chewed up birth certificate will do,  If not I may be spending some time in the airport.  Or jail.

Not that Mexican jail doesn't sound fun.  Because it does.  Oh yes.

Declaring stuff:

"Get bent, fucker!"  or "You're never take me alive, polizia!!"
 

CANCUN!!

The airport in Mexico was just as I imagined--crowded, smelly (food smelly, sausagy and those fried cinnamon things, what are they called?  churra?  Did I totally make that up?)

We had to go through Immigration, 2 separate lines (for those of us reading back) for them who have passport and the unluckies who don't.  As it turned out, my line was substantially shorter--wait, not shorter, but quicker moving.  I get up there, the surly guy doesn't even glance at my birth cert. or drivers license, stamps my thing and off I go, with a 90 day permit to hang out in Mexico.

Got everything, got our bags which were not, amazingly enough, lost or left or sent onto other places.  It was pretty disconcerting to find them just tossed onto the floor, but, whatever.

We get our bags and walk off in the direction ot the bus/taxi signs and are immediately accosted by a guy who pretends to be interested in helping us get where we're going, but is actually trying to get us in to look at a timeshare.

The clincher for me?  When he said:

"YOU LOOK LIKE SOMEONE WHO CAN DRINK A LOT OF BEER!!"

My mother looked at me, I at her, and I responded:

"Who the hell told you??"

Finally we get away from him, and hunt down our bus and we get outside and get loaded into the van and set off.

CANCUN FACT:

2 out of every 5 cars on the road are old VW beetles.

It is beautiful here--turquoise water.

We are in a huge hotel.  Noisy, all inclusive.  Our room has a deck facing the Caribbean Sea and the swimming pools.

We ate at a buffet.   Unsurprisingly, the best Mexican food I've had along with amazing wine and coffee*

The sand is powdery and white, the water blue and unlike anything I've ever seen.

NONE of my phone cards work here.

Lastly:  In the lobby, right now, a band is playing "Margaritaville" en espanol.
 

PS:  Yes, I went to the gym.  You don't even know from hot until you've spent a half hour on the Stairmaster (uhh...Los Climbos di starios?)   in Cancun, average humidity, 470%.
 
 

Cancun-Day Two

Someone needs to explain to me what a 5 cent centavo equals in USD.  Negative 50 cents??
 
 

PM:

I am sitting on the patio, drinking a beer and listening to commotion from the pool.  There was a stingray in the water and peacocks wandering around.  People are either very, very sunburned or very, very tan, not often both.

There are guys who walk up and down the beaches selling crap:  sarongs, serapes (sp?), littler marionettes, silver.

The people who work and live here are astonishingly beautiful.

We took the (extremely crowded and hot) bus to an outdoor market, where, if you make eye contact--or even if you don't, people approach you and try and get you into their little store to buy whatever they're selling (Sarongs, called "pareo" here, they have, in spades).  I was impressed with the X rated pottery but did not buy any.  I gathered my mother would not be at all amused.

Drinks are included, (and pushed, mightily), but they're like casino drinks-- 1/108th of a shot in each.  If getting drunk was what you had in mind (which it's NOT (with my mom? boring...)  your best bet would be wine (skip the sangria here, it's AWFUL) or beer.
 
 

Day 3

Hours at the beach.  I suspect I am going to be flamingly sunburned when I step out of the shower in a little bit.

Please note:  Both cameras I brought with me are screwy.  I was able to take 24 pictures on my digital camera (which holds 100+ images) and none on the advantix, which I think I broke.

In any event, my mom pussed out of jet skiing, today and I don't know what we're going to do this afternoon.  I would be okay with going back down into the water (not the pool, as it is activity central, and I'm trying to to be insulted by the guy:

Hotel Guy:  Walking up beach:  50 feet behind me:

"Come on!! Play beach volley ball! you know you want to play!! play!! come on!! YOU!! You would be good at it!! you too!! YOU!! coME ON!!"

10 feet away:  to the people behind me:

"BEACH...VOLLEY BALL!!! C'MON!!! PLAY!!! YOU WANT TO PLAY!!"

To me:

"BEA--oh...no.. you don't want to play.."

To the people 5 feet to the side of me:

"YOU! VOLLEYBALL!!!"

etc.
 

That Night:

had lunch and took the bus to the mall like old pros--we were quick with whipping out the $5 pesos.  Two beautiful indoor (well, one indoor) malls.  things here are at once very much like the US and not at all like it.

One unusual thing:  none of the coffee here is brewed.  It's all instant, with the exception of the Mexican coffee we'd had the first night, which was something altogether different.

MEXICO IS BEAUTIFUL!!

And yes, I am sunburned, my shoulders and chest.
 
 

Last Day:

Got snorkeling masks, etc., and went snorkeling in the water (as opposed to in the air, I guess).  Incredible--schools of fish--invisible if you are actually standing in the water, looking around.  If I knew more about fish, I might know what I was seeing, unfortunately, I don't.  Some were certainly big enough to catch and eat.

Here is the artist's rendition:

(Note:  I drew some shitty pictures of fish here.  You are better off never seeing them.  Trust me.  Just visualize some cool fish, that I drew all retardedly, and you'd have the idea)

It was very very cool.
 

The chambermaid moves my monkeys every day.    They hug and hold hands and stuff, it's pretty funny;

 
 
 

I have a dark ring of tan around my neck and then a white line from reading on the beach.  It looks ridiculous.
 
 

Got on a bus attempting to find the oft mentioned Mayan ruins--even though the concierge told my mother that they were "not so good".  I dubbed them "The Crappy Ruins" and after a half mile walk along a boiling hot highway/road, we discovered no ruins.

Crossing the street we came to the public beach.  The water a deep, amazing turquoise.  I'll say it again, Mexico is beautiful.

We started walking back towards the bus stop (in front of a massive Hyatt Hotel and as we were moseying along, I started noticing lizards--huge, they'd dash for the bushes unless we stayed very silent.

Went to another 2 malls.  In each, at least 75% were T shirt/crappy souvenir stores.  The shirts here are penis obsessed:

"I MAY BE SHY, BUT I HAVE A BIG DICK!!!!! CANCUN, MEXICO!"
 
 

Last Night:
 

"Gourmet Dinner:  at the buffet!! Read:  5 meal selection! drink was kept filled, again, with mom who, at 3 glasses is like "Ohhh, Antonio!! (fill in Spanish name of choice, more often than not, it was Jesus) someone will have to CARRY ME to my room!!"

Not flirtatiously, just friendly.  3 glasses?  Whatever.  I believe that even the wine they serve here is low alcohol.

In any event, after the gourmet dinner (well done steak! my favorite!) there was a comedy show, and if there was any doubt of America's reach on the rest of the world, it was shattered for me when the guy in the show came out (both last night and today) and kept shouting "WAzZZUUUPPP".

The comedy show was only made funny to me by my asking (and it won't be funny at all now)

"Pardon me, but where is the libretto for this performance?"
 

Home, Etc.:

That's where my hand written stuff ended.  Our flight home was uneventful.  Taking the bus back to the airport, we drove past one of the many, many bar/club type places in the downtown area.  There was a sign:

3D FOAM PARTY!
 

A 3D Foam Party? Shit yeah!!  Where do I sign up?  The thing about Cancun is this:  it is a place for couples.  It is a place for college kids.  It is a place to go when you have decided to drink yourself to death (and believe me, it would be easy, easy, and cheap and unless you got rolled after dark, you'd leave a luscious and tan corpse).   It is not really the place to go with your mom if you're even remotely interested in going out after dark.  Which I wasn't.  Because I was with my mom.  Had I been there with someone else, the 3D Foam Party might have been something I'd look into.

Though, to be perfectly honest, I do not think that I, Dana, married 30 year old Connecticut resident in a one piece bathing suit, passed over by the Volley Ball Fun Commission and my mom, are exactly what they're thinking of when 3D foam fun comes to mind.

The next sign I noticed was more ominous.

BEWARE:  CROCODILES IN WATER! DO NOT SWIM!

Crocodiles?  I pointed it out to my mom.  She pointed it out to the driver.  He laughed.  "Not so many.  Only a few!"  "Only a few, CROCODILES?"  I replied.  "Si.  Not so many".  Not reassuring, but, well, we were leaving, and we'd never gone swimming in that water.  I'd noticed a few days earlier that there HAD been people swimming there: tourists, not locals.  That's got to be some bad publicity when a family of Canadians, (our hotel was agog in Canadians, so I'm just using them as a what if)  hot from being on the bus, decide to drop trou and go for a swim and find themselves, well, EATEN, and the news team from Miami comes swooping down and everyone stands around the severed limbs tittering and gagging from the smell of hot, gnawed foot in the Cancun humidity, and the headlines read "GO TO CANCUN AND GET EATEN!"  (which, really, would be both good in that pervy 18 year old guy  "Dude, sweet! Hot sluts!!" way and bad in the "Jesus christ, I'm not letting my family swim in Mexican Crocodile water!!" way)
 

So there you go.  This entry has taken me three days to write.  My sunburned shoulder has peeled, twice.  I've been to the gynecologist AND the dentist.  I've unpacked and not sampled any of the tequila I brought back.  And I'll write a little more soon.
 
 
 

By far, my favorite picture of Cancun.  Taken, obviously, from the sky.
 
 
 
 

long, long ago |    home   |  email   |   tomorrow
 
 
 
 
 

It seems to me, you and me
Are being chased by something.
What it is has anybody here apprehended?
It seems to me, you and me
Are terrified of nothing,
When nothing is the reason we are here.
Oh, nothing at all.
And if I cry to you, will you laugh me down?
But I'm asking you to turn around.
Rise and fall turn the wheel 'cause all life
Is really just circle.