Maxigumee

The flight to Mexico wasn’t too bad. The first plane we took was really, really tiny and you basically had to duck down to fit through it. The second plane was much bigger, but still had a kind of ghetto-esque feel to it. There was this ancient American Airlines instructional video that they showed instead of having the flight attendants show you how to strap on your junk. I thought that was kind of corny…. The customs was a lot easier than I had expected. I was imagining something along the lines of clothing removal and anal examinations, but all we really had to do was press a button and walk out the door.

We were greeted at the outside of the airport by this Mexican professor guy…. I think his name was Fernando…. and this other Mexican professor guy named…. Miguel. They could hardly speak English and we could hardly speak Spanish so most of our conversation was confined to small talk. For the five-hour car ride from the airport in Cancun to Chetumal where we’re staying for now. It was a little bit torturous as the conversation dragged on from small business to the hurricanes, to the environment, until eventually the guy, out of topics, just started just pointing out every resort we passed along the way. “Uh, there’s another resort. And another one.”

As we were driving along the single, two-laned expressway, I was struck by how much poverty we saw along the way, the shacks and mounds of rubble that seemed to be everywhere. I knew that Mexico was basically third-world dirt poor, but I really wasn’t expecting that. At first, I thought that people were just working at these rubble heaps, like it was their job to clean them up after the hurricane or something…. But as we kept driving, I began to wonder, these people live here? There are some pretty hard core ghetto places in Mexico. I basically wanted to jump out of the car every five minutes and take a picture.

As much as my mother and I really love the dirty reality of the real Mexico, our hosts seemed to think otherwise. Maybe that’s why in the first two days we were there, the only restaurants we were taken to were Italian. As you can probably imagine, I was extremely sick of pizza by then, but when we told our hosts that we’d like to try Mexican food, they looked at us like we were nuts.

Yesterday, after several hours sitting in a college and a lunch at some random pizza place, my mother and I decided we needed a little excitement. We left the group of college professors and went on a little exploration of Chetumal. It’s interesting…. if we were in America, this whole place would seem like a broke-down, dirt-cheap, crappy, ghetto “bad” neighborhood. But here, this kind of stuff is totally normal. Sure, there are packs of stray dogs walking everywhere and people get their hair cut in the open-air, but that’s just normal here. The dogs are like squirrels here.

On our little walk along the main street and then off into some smaller roads, my mother and I stopped at this secluded, weird little open-air bar. We went into its rickety, oh-so-against-all-American-building-codes tree house and ordered two beers (yay for low drinking ages!). The guy not only brought up two bottles of “Sol,” but about five plates of what looked like his leftover dinner. There was a small plate of refried black beans, a plate of chopped up hot dogs covered in a spicy sauce, a plate of unsalted tortilla chips, some other unidentifiable spicy dip, and, because something about my little-white-boy appearance must scream Italian, the guy placed a place of cold spaghetti in front of me. My mother was slightly more adventurous and tried nearly everything at the table (except the shady-looking cold spaghetti), but I, not wanting to risk getting dysentery, opted for the plain tortilla chips instead. Want to know why Mexico rocks? We got ALL of this stuff for about two American dollars. And we were eating in a tree house. That’s pretty awesome.

After that, we walked tiredly back to the hotel and tried, for about the seven-hundred-millionth time to call home. There is some universal force that just does not want my mother and I to be able to stay in contact with anybody. When we tried calling home, we either got an error message in Spanish or a busy signal. When we tried to e-mail home, the computer crashed. Finally, just about ten minutes before we were supposed to get picked up for dinner, my mother was able to get through on a collect call at one of the public phones.

At dinner, we found out why people kept taking us to Italian restaurants. You know how when you’re in Spanish class, you learn that people in Mexico basically eat beans all the time? Bean this and bean that, bean dip, bean tacos, their houses might even be made out of beans. Well, the bean thing, along with everything else you’ve learned about Mexico, is a LIE. When we got the little taco shack along the water, we found out that the only thing on the menu that didn’t contain meat was baked potato. It then occurred to me why people had kept mentioning salads to me at the Italian restaurants. “This place has salad. Good? You like salad? There are many salads here.” Those stupid guidebooks that told us that Mexico is basically PURE vegetarian….. those guidebooks are evil.

After dinner, my mother, this other Mexican guy named Alfredo, this American woman who works at the university, and I went to this little student party at one of those textbook-famous Latin-American discos. I felt like kind of a party-crasher since I was hanging out with a bunch of teachers and a student party. I was dead tired most of the time, and I just sat with my eyes closed, drifting in and out of half-sleep, until we left and went back to the hotel.

I took tons of pictures, but since there’s only really slow internet in the lobby of our hotel, I won’t really be unable to upload the hundreds of photos until I get back to America. For now, you can get teased by the photo at the top of this entry. We’re heading back up to Playa de Carmen today, a slightly more touristy beach town. I hope there’s maybe a tad more vegetarian options there.