Missives from Mexico, Part the First

Wow, it looks like Sweeps Week for the Larsens has turned into a blood bath of events. Depending on how much downtime I have at work--and right now, I must admit, it looks pretty good--I hope to be able to shoehorn as much as possible into my blog. In the interest of kicking things off, I would like to present a couple of cell phone pics snapped in Mexico:

Here, Brandi shows off her chicken enchilada smile, courtesy of a tiny, open air restaurant we found next to an only-slightly-larger hotel in Playa del Carmen, which everyone insists on calling just Playa. We drove into town to get a measure of its famous fifth avenue, called Quinta for reasons obvious to the bilingual, and I accidentally got off the highway a touch too far north of the city. We drove through a neighborhood that looked impoverished, and by that I mean, filled with trash. I think you can chart a direct graph of neighborhoods in Riviera Maya, correlating "Ghetto-ness" on the x-axis to the rising amounts of trash per square yard on the y-axis. I worried that the guidebooks had exaggerated very badly the tourist appeal of this quaint town by the water, but, it turns out, it puts on its best face as it gets closer to the two mile long strip of shops and hucksters. The restaurant we found was at the northern end, which we dutifully walked after stocking up on tacos con pollo, sopes and enchiladas. Brandi ordered in Spanish, which she did pretty much everywhere we went, because I did not study and get very shy trying to convey my thoughts through flailing. My hero.

Image two also comes from my iPhone, and was also taken at Playa, but about four days afterwards. It is probably the most flattering shot of my body that has ever been taken, somehow completely downplaying the lunch belly I doubtlessly acquired when we returned to the exact same restaurant (Saturday before we left was a kind of "best of Mexico" that played a little hectically). Pictures just do not do justice to the many colors of the sky, water and land, which, if printed, would exhaust the blue toner in your color laser printer almost immediately. It's beautiful. It's also hot. Temperatures while we were there topped out at 90 degrees F. I noticed you could always tell the natives because they walked around with umbrellas during the day to shield themselves from the sun, which just put the beatdown on you. Yesterday, I had several people tell me they could see I wore sunglasses, and knew what shape they were. Since air conditioning costs so much, and the temperatures vary so little, most of the architecture takes a passive cooling approach, which basically means they're umbrellas shielding you from the sun and rain. Lots of them use palapas, or bundles of grass, including the roofs of most of the buildings in the Grand Mayan resort where we stayed. We had a bit of trouble finding the lobby because, we learned, it had burned down, and they were either temporarily "improving" it or "improv-ing" it by putting up an air conditioned white tent we were supposed to just know to head towards when we drove through the elaborate front gate. You see a lot of relief in photos we took of ourselves in the water, not least of which because the sea, or lagoons, or whatever water-based goodness we've stuck ourselves in, cools us off and keeps our brains from baking.

Also, as you're looking at the picture, take note of the lump on the left side of my body. That is the shape of my shoes, which I've removed, tied together, and hung from my key clip to keep dry. That's the kind of ingenuity you can do when you're not baking your brains.

More later.