mexico in sizeable chunklets

So. Mexico.

I’ll break it down into sizeable KFC Pops chunks for general consumption.

Mexicans cannot say the letter ‘V’.
First seen where a dude was singing Madonna’s ‘Like A Birgin,’, to the woman who told me I could buy bodka at the Seben Eleben, to the guy on the pier trying to sell us a snorkeling adbenture. Pity Spanish speakers don’t drive more Bolbo’s or are named Bibian.

We snorkeled with turtles, we chased a shark over a reef, and we snorkeled in a fresh mineral water cave.
The cave even beat the shark and the turtles. Wetsuits, flashlights and fucking terrified, you swim through these little caverns with stalactites and stalagmites everywhere, and it’s dark and hectic. It was an amazing experience.
Mexico City is sinking
It was built on shady sinking soil. As a result you can see that some of the more historical buildings are all a bit higgledy piggledy – the place is becoming a sinkhole. It’s still the biggest city on Earth, as far as I know, and it just rolls on for hours and hours. It’s a toilet, and yet it’s got some beautiful buildings if you venture into the right places. It’s also freezing. Elevated at 2300 metres above sea level, we froze at night. It’s a crazy place.
Cancun is overrated oberrated.
We realised this the more we ventured south from the place. The Caribbean seaboard is beautiful. The sea is a mixture of Listerine and electric turquoise. However it’s difficult to get to the beach in Cancun and it’s way way way commercial.

Seems like it only takes two tequilas to get me hammered these days.
Discovered that drinking it with an orange slice rather than lime makes for chunder avoidance.
One of the best quesadillas I had was on the street.
Not on it, but at a street vendor. The food is yummy, and amazingly enough, I managed to avoid eating 8000 million types of bean. I am obsessed with salsa.
The most spoken Spanish phrase used there was ‘No grazias.’
I picked up a bit, and most people in the smaller towns no habla ingles. But people try to sell you shit at least every hour on the hour, so you end up mostly saying ‘No thanks.’
Cozumel Island, the town at least, might as well be in Florida
There are lots of yanks. And Canadians. Everywhere. However, sitting at a New Orleans chain called ‘Fat Tuesdays,’ I realised that the yanks have bought America to Mexico. You can buy anything in US dollars in Mexico – in fact they expect you to. And seem to prefer it.
The Aztec and Mayan Ruins
We climbed the third largest pyramid in the world in Teotihuacan, and swam at a beach in Tulum surrounded by ruins. Surreal.

We went to an international music festival
The BPM festival comprised DJs from across the globe who played some sharp beats in clubs on the beach. The chick on acid who was trying to grab people’s testicles as she slid passed while walking like an Egyptian. Was interesting.
One of the best days was hiring a scooter and going around Cozumel.
The thing backfired every five seconds, and I was scared after breaking open my knee on a scooter in Thailand, but it was awesome to find deserted beaches, blowholes and little places on the bike at our leisure, out of the crazy Yank-filled town.
It was expensive, but it was completely worth every cent and every second.

meghiko

So I’m preparing for my trip. Packing for extreme cold and extreme heat. Spectrumic extreme.

1) Bought out my trusty backpack – and considering whacking a Saffa flag on it so that the Mexicans don’t confuse me for American;

2) Lying in the hammock on my balcony in my bikini to get my skin accustomed to vitamin D again;

3) Am on Level 2 of my intensive Spanish course. And sound like a flaming retard. It’s Spain Spanish, so everything is ‘th th th th’, and frankly, it’s sounds fucking ridiculous. Argentinian Spanish was certainly softer, and Mexican Spanish I hear is slower and they don’t do the ‘th’ with every z, or c or s they see. Crisis. Anyway, it’s coming along;

4) Done the obligatory Streetview.

I took to Mexican Streetview on Google Maps to check out some of the towns we’ll be staying in, now that we’ve booked.
I’ve conjured images of this place that is Mexico, in my mind. As one does.

I mean, if you’ve never been to France, the stereotypes of men walking around in stripes with handlebar moustaches and carrying a baguette in their armpit. Under the Eiffel Tower may come to mind. Russia, you think of vodka and factory workers. (Jokes, but in the 80s, very much so.)

Excuse my blatant naivety – and I blame the Lonely Planet and all other cliché images that have been fed to me through the medium of sight – but I pictured Mexico, before Streetview, as flat desserts, lots of cactuses, and floating sombreros. And Americans wasted on tequila, and taco shells.

Well, I haven’t seen anything of the sort as yet. Puerto Morelos, a town south of Cancun that we’re staying in for a good few days, looks like this:
Those are quite the potholes, is this Maputo or Puerto Morelos? On the Caribbean? The dude looks interestingly machismo in the right corner:

Ah finally. Shrubbery cascading off a post-modernist Spanish looking thing in Cancun:

So not exactly a Club Med brochure, in other words.

Am nervous now.
Because it reminds of some of the more third world holidays I’ve taken. Which is fine and completely expected, but no doubt, the Brit and I are in for quite an adWENture.

What I know is this:

1) If you love the unpredictable and chaotic – then Mexico is for you! [sic]. The Lonely Planet has forewarned us of the guaranteeable fuck ups. I mean, I’ve already booked a wheelchair purely by ignorant accident on our internal flight. So there you go.

2) Swine Flu started in Mexico. N1H1.com. There’s malaria in some parts, cholera, all sorts of nasty shit to potentially avoid. Not tapeworms though. Which is incidentally how I managed to pick up the Brit in the first place. Back in April. And they say romance is dead.

Do I take a mask to street parties when hammered on margaritas?

3) Half the population of America will be around. It’s going to be a loud holiday.

4) We’ll be snorkeling the reefs of Cozumel, some of the most renowned and beautiful reefs on the planet. Baracudas and rays included. Will shit myself, but hang on closely to my snorkel buddy.

5) The tequila is made from agave and worms. And you sip it like an aperitif.

6) We can climb the Mayan temples and venture into jungles on the same day.


Shew hey.

This time next week I’ll be in England. Never have I been so excited to be in the midst of dreary rain, cold, dark mornings, bitter cold in my life. I can’t wait to see him again. Also to experience a Brit Christmas is going to be something completely new.

booking spanish wheelchairs & other strange occurences

Had a bit of an eccentric day yesterday.

You gotta understand though – there are always peaks and troughs.
An example of a peak in the past would be the day I bought a piano by accident.
Or when I named my pet rat Chad Jean-Gilles North Dakota Craig O’Toast.
Or when I got a rat. As a pet. At 26. To begin with.

Yesterday was a good indication of the dysfunction.

In that you eat a sandwich in the traffic with protracted mastication.

Or you bark like a Dobermann at the dude at your window who insists on asking you 3 times if you’ll buy a patio dust cover.

Or you book and pay for flights to Mexico via the UK.

I’ve been invited to Christmas in Dorset. This should be rather amusing.

Flights across the world momentarily bankrupt me for the remainder of this month.

Dropped half a house mortgage on air travel yesterday.

In a wild panic try and book the cheapest internal flights in Mexico to Cancun. On a Spanish website that won’t translate, so you have to whack random paragraphs into the Translate tool manually.

And then you book and pay for a wheelchair. By accident.

What.
And couldn’t deduct it from my total pay. I pressed ¿Pago? like 8000 times.

So one of us windowlickers will be using the chair, that’s for fucking certain. It took me and hour and a half to book flights and I manage to book a fucking wheelchair as well.

So I’m broke but very excited.

Saw the most beautiful piece of fuckberry pie in our building yesterday. He's friendly and cheerful too. Very very nice to look at.

Had a lot of very mind numbing work to do yesterday, and as a result, that makes me eccentric. Crazily-manual data loggings for too long a period, can ensure that my creativity somehow oozes itself out elsewhere. And mostly I just break into song or play a sonata during lunch.

Yeah it’s weird. No one said it would be easy.

Anyway, two of us decided that we’re going to turn our Irish colleague into one of our client’s company mascots because he has such a startlingly amazing mo.

No really, don’t bother competing this Movember. He’s Lord Kitchener. Simply sensational to look at.

We decided we’d make him famous through corporate mascotting and viral advertising, we’d give him a catch-phrase, make Facebook groups like ‘If 1 Million People Join This Group We’ll Turn [Kitchener] Into Acme Inc’s Logo Boy’, and we’d all retire rich and I’d buy a yacht and set sail around the Mediterranean eating tapas and brinjal.

Then I had dinner in Parkhurst with all my Engaged Girls. Bless, it’s quite heartwarming to see how happy they are.

I ate a Basil Mania, had a gin and Fanta, and thought:

God. It’s been an eccentric day.

PS: My mate phoned from a hotel in Pretoria:
'There it is! No ways!'
'There is what?'
'The Bible in the top drawer.'