Thursday, February 07, 2008

¡Viva Mexico! Day Three: Are we still in America?

Well day three of our Mexican adventure started with Margaret and me feeling like we could venture more than ten feet from a toilet. We decided to throw caution to the wind and head into the nearby town of Playa del Carmen (where we would be more than 15 miles from a decent toilet). We wanted to see the beach there (hence 'playa' in the town name) but on a more pragmatic point, we were in dire need of groceries and Playa has, wonder of wonders, a WAL-MART! This was one of the ways that we knew that the Yucatan Peninsula had been discovered by the Americans. When we stepped off the plane in the Cancun airport, we were confronted by signs for Outback Steakhouse, Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville, Olive Garden, and Hard Rock Cafe. There were McDonald's and Burger Kings everywhere. And there were tons of morbidly obese tourists.

Anyway, we took the bus into Playa and while on the bus there was a couple who were either 1) sloppily kissing one another, 2) gazing into one another's eyes, or 3) restraining themselves from ripping off their clothes and having sex right on the spot. The reason I bring this up will be evident in a future post.

When the peepshow was over and the bus arrived in Playa, we got out right at this amazing church. Unfortunately it was one of the few things in the downtown area that was authentic. We headed to Wal-Mart to buy sunscreen, since it had been seized by the Department of Homeland Security (Hello! Don't they know it's not sunscreen that kills people... it's the SUN that does that!). After getting some beach supplies we headed to the beach and sunned for a while. Our beach experience came to a close when the family next to us had a baby that pooped her pants and the mother just stripped her down and rinsed her off in the ocean right in front of us! I prefer my trips to the ocean WITHOUT e. coli, thank you. Upon seeing that, we decided that it was time to go buy our groceries. To make our American experience more complete, we stopped at McDonald's on the way back to the grocery store. I got a vanilla milkshake, which turned out to be the perfect thing to get, as my stomach couldn't have handled much more than that.

At the grocery store, we went crazy, getting all these cool Mexican fruits and vegetables... including a papaya the size of a small watermelon (which unfortunately turned out to be completely overripe and inedible), interesting Crystal Light (although it's called Clight in Mexico) flavors that you can't find in the US like piña colada, horchata, and guaraña. (We made the guaraña while we were there and still don't know what it was, but it was good. I hope it wasn't something like ground lizards or something). We saved the bread purchases for the final stretch, as they looked so good. To buy bread in the bakery, you grabbed a big platter and some tongs and just picked out what you wanted. We got a bunch of rolls, some little breads, treats, a couple of cakes, and a cookie-thing. When I brought it up to the counter, she counted out all the things and put the price tag on the purchase... 21 pesos! WHA? We were dumbfounded that all that bread cost $2, which prompted Margaret to go back and buy a bunch more bread. After checking out and being too heavy-laden to get back to the bus stop we decided to just take a taxi back to the resort, where we spent the rest of the day by the pool recovering from our excursion. It was GLORIOUS!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Guarana is a type of berry, I think. They also make soda out of it. I drank tons of it in Brazil. We thought we were curing ourselves of our Diet Coke addiction... until I got home and found out it has caffeine.