Our Mexican Adventure

Valentine’s Day. Roses, heart-shaped chocolate boxes, racy red lingerie, broken hearts, depression. Gotta love it. This year, Hallmark will not profit from us. No greeting cards, roses, or lovey-dovey gifts for us. Just lots of quality time together. Aw!

So, how does one celebrate El Dia del Amor in Mexico? Let me count the ways. The options are endless, but we’ll bore you with how we chose to celebrate ours.

We started off the morning with a tasty breakfast of waffles with Nutella and bananas. Strangely enough, it took a move to Mexico for us to come to appreciate the wonders of Nutella, which originated in Italy. We then moved on to a beach restaurant where we took seats in the sun and sand, enjoyed chips and salsa and 2 for 1 Coronas, and immersed ourselves in our books. $6 for 6 Coronas and chips. Gotta love happy hour!

When the cloud cover started to make us shiver, we returned home, where John expertly grilled up some arrachera (marinated skirt steak). This combined with grilled onions, fresh tortillas, our array of salsas, some mood lighting and the sounds of Shakira (Hey, it’s the most romantic music we have.) made for an excellent Valentine’s dinner. We’re now getting ready to head out in search of some good red wine. We had intended to have wine with dinner, but couldn’t find our new corkscrew. Yes, we are really roughing it here in Mexico.

Come to think of it, this is pretty much a typical “vacation day” for us here. We’ll enthrall you with one of our typical “working days” in Mexico at some other time.

We realize that it’s been a while since we last posted, and we have actually done things worthy of posting (unlike today). But we’ll get around to posting that stuff on one of our working days.

Last week was a sad week for us, but the arrival last Friday of our friends, Nikki and Mahesh, pulled us out of our slumps. They were only here for a few days and wanted to do diving, diving and more diving. Libby, although certified and having 15 or so dives under her belt, wasn’t feeling up to joining them. But John jumped at the chance to finally get some scuba diving in.

The first day was spent ocean diving south of Playa del Carmen. Although the water was extremely choppy, our group was still allowed to head out. The first site was called “Tortugas” (or “Turtles” for you gringos!). Normally, one can see 10-15 turtles on a dive – we only spotted 4. The second site was called “Barracuda Reef”, a reef with many curves to manuever through. Although we didn’t see many barracudas, we did spot a gigantic eel taking a siesta. We’ll have to try these dives again under calmer waters for a chance to see more marine life.

The following day, our diving posse spent the day exploring some nearby cenotes. Cenote diving is similar to cave diving, with the exception that you are never “very far” from safety. The two dives began at a site called “Dos Ojos” (or “Two Eyes”). The location gets its name from the two similar entrances to the cenote located close to each other. With our flashlights in hand, we played follow the leader through the water filled tunnels, exploring the various stalagmites and stalactites. During the second dive, we stopped at an air-filled dome called “The Bat Cave”. Cenote diving is amazing; we definitely recommend it!

Special thanks to Dave, Karl, Alex, Luis, and Oscar at Abyss Dive Shop for the wonderful experience.

In addition to diving, we also introduced our foodie friends to the many culinary pleasures that Playa has to offer — brownies at Ah Cacao, oh so tender arrachera (grilled, marinated steak) at HC de Monterrey, mojitos and noodles at Babe’s and yummy tacos al pastor. They were impressed, and are already planning their next trip to Playa.

Hanging with Mahesh and Nikki put us back into tourist mode, and we are now planning a few trips. Today, we snuck into Dreams Tulum Resort, an all-inclusive, to spy for our friends Catherine and Brian, who plan to get married there in April. Should be a wonderful wedding. Congratulations on your engagement, guys!

On Monday, we plan to return to Merida where we stayed for one night before initially arriving in Playa del Carmen. We really liked the city and wanted to spend more time there, but at the time, we were anxious to make it to our final destination. Now that our camera is broken and Merida has the closest Canon repair center, we have the perfect excuse to go back. We also hope to finally make it to Akumal for some snorkelling sometime next week.

On Sunday, January 22nd, our sweet kitty, Billie, passed away. She was such a loving and special kitty. We sorely miss her and always will.

She was only 10 years old, but had had a malignant mammary gland tumor removed in May of 2005. She recovered very quickly from the surgery, and until a couple of weeks ago, had been very healthy and happy. We don’t know if the cancer had anything to do with the illness she had before she died. We had been in and out of the veterinary clinic almost daily in the 2 weeks before her death. The vet here isn’t quite sure what happened to her, probably a respiratory infection and probably viral. They don’t really have all the tests available here that they do in the states, and when they do, it takes a long time to get results. However, the outcome is unlikely to have been any different in the states.

This has been a sad and difficult week for us, but we are comforted by the fact that she did not have a long period of suffering and is at peace now. We love you, Billie!

“Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”-Mark Twain

It looks like we are close to getting our cable Internet service installed. We’re not talking “manaña” close, we’re talking so-close-we-can-almost-feel-it-close. To get this far, we spent the past few weeks going back and forth between the cable company and our property management company to make sure that everyone had the approvals they needed. Mexicans like their documentation! This afternoon, the cable was installed into our unit, but the installers didn’t bring a modem and the office is closed during the weekend. ¡Ay, ay, ay! But never fear, they say they’ll be back on Monday with our cable modem in tow. Victory is near! Once connected, we hope to be able to post a little more frequently. Stay tuned.

While we’re discussing our woes with regards to cable installation, we’d like to take this time to point out some oddities we’ve identified about this brand new building in which our apartment is located. For starters, our cable installers had to drill a hole in the wall and run an exposed cable along our living room wall to the far corner of the room. This building has what appears to be conduits installed for cable — the problem is that there is no way for the cable guys to hook up to it from the outside. Can we say, “Design flaw?”

Ok, here’s another gem. The stairwell lighting is controlled by 2 switches, one on the top of the stairwell, one on the bottom. Unlike your typical 3-way switch, the switch that is used to turn off the lights must be used to turn them back on. This seems to defeat the purpose of having 2 switches. Actually, this is worse than just having one.

Yes, they get worse. Outside our unit, there is a switch that looks like it is used for controlling the stairwell lights. If you look closely (in the dark, see previous paragraph), you’ll see a small raised circle to indicate that this is a doorbell, not a light switch. Luckily, this oddity will only be annoying until the lock is put on the front gate, preventing visitors from even getting to our door to ring the bell in the first place.

On the bright side, both of us have taken some additional Spanish classes. Unlike our classes in the U.S., the teachers here speak Spanish almost 100% of the time. Since we live in a tourist area, we actually don’t get to hear or speak Spanish as much as we’d like, so we actually enjoy getting practice listening to and responding in Spanish. Libby learned a cool game in class, kind of like the game Taboo, where one student tries to get another student to guess a Spanish sentence, fully conjugated in the correct verb tense, while both students speak only Spanish. We plan on using this little game to practice our Spanish outside of the classroom.

In the 2 1/2 months that we’ve been in Playa del Carmen, we’ve yet to complete a single dive. Luckily, our friends Nikki and Mahesh are coming into town to get us off our lazy beach-bumming butts and do some SCUBA diving. They’ll be here towards the end of January. If we get our non-functioning camera fixed by then (that should be fun!), we’ll try to take some underwater pictures. We’re curious to find out how the reefs are doing since the onslaught of hurricanes last year.

That’s all for now. Just a reminder, if you haven’t already, sign up for new posting notifications at the right on our Main page.

¡Hasta luego!

When we last caught up, half of our family was sick, but after doctors visits and medications kicked in, we were able to join our friends Lynette and Kevin in touristy pursuits. Unfortunately, our friend Brian was only in town for a few days and had to return to San Francisco on Tuesday morning.

Aside from some time well spent on the beach, we also made some excursions outside of Playa. An afternoon trip was made to Tulum, the site of an old coastal Mayan city, about 45 minutes south of Playa. Although the ruins there are not the most impressive in the area, its location on a cliff overlooking the blue ocean makes it quite scenic. With its manicured green lawns and strategically placed palm trees, we almost thought we made a wrong turn and ended up on a golf course. Those Mayans were damn good landscapers.

We also made a full day trip to the ruin sites of Ek-Balam and Chichén Itzá and the town of Valladolid. Archaeologists only began excavating Ek-Balam in 1998. Excavations take a LONG time, so this site is considered very new and there’s still much more to be discovered there. We felt almost like it was our own private discovery since there were few other people there and it had none of the typical tourist diversions. We carefully climbed the steep stairs of the “Acropolis” (about 100 feet high), which housed various temples. From the top, we enjoyed a view of nothing but jungle for miles and miles. Afterwards, we headed back to our newly cleaned car, and paid the enterprising local kids 20 pesos ($2 USD). Being vertically challenged, they must not have noticed our still dirty roof.

Lynette had wanted to see a real Mexican town, as opposed to the tourist town of Playa del Carmen, so we stopped off in Valladolid for lunch. We had a great lunch in the courtyard of El Mesón del Marqués hotel, walked through the zócalo (main town square) and took the requisite picture of an old Spanish church.

Next we headed for Chichén Itzá, which is the most thoroughly excavated of the great Mayan cities. We were disappointed to find that visitors were not being allowed to climb the steep and tall pyramid called El Castillo. We have since discovered that a few days prior to our arrival, an elderly woman fell to her death while descending its stairs, so the chances of anyone climbing it in the future are slim. Nevertheless, we saw all the wonders of Chichén Itzá — temples, cenotes, the Ball Court (a stadium used to play a Mayan ball game), a bathhouse, thousands of columns formerly holding up thatched roofs, and locals (possibly the descendants of the very Mayans who once lived here) hawking souvenirs with their ritualistic chant of “1 dollar, 1 dollar”.

After a long day of playing tourist, we drove back to Playa del Carmen, and indulged in the comfort food and mojitos at Babe’s restaurant. It’s good to live in Playa.