Mexican Minutes

Here I am, blogging from the beach. Well the lobby actually. While lovely and charming in every other regard, our hotel doesn't have wireless access in the rooms. Y'all should feel extra special that I felt compelled to trek out to the lobby to bring you this little sneak peek into the trip so far. The lobby, as far as lobbies go, is pretty nice. It's an open air plan so I'm enjoying ocean breezes and a poolside view while I write this. But still, it's not as convenient as say writing from the balcony of my room. In my underoos.

Anyway ... the important thing here is that I'm in MEXICO!

A couple of interesting things about Mexico and me.

First, some of you know that I speak Spanish. This was a side effect of serving an LDS mission in Chile. Don't feel bad if you didn't know that I speak Spanish, it is a fact that I don't share readily. There are ample opportunities to hablar in my neighborhood, but I avoid it like the plague. It just isn't something I feel comfortable doing. But oddly enough, here in Mexico I'm proclaiming my Spanish skills far and wide. I am surprising myself at every turn as I chat up vendors and cabana boys in Spanish. In fact, the whole South America - Spanish thing is really taking me back to my mission experience. But in a good way, a reminiscent way. Not in a "get me the hell out of here right this minute" way.

Second weird thing about me in Mexico is my fixation with the time. In my normal life I don't care very much about the time. None of my clocks (except my VCR) say the right time. I don't wear a watch. I don't think I've been on time (whenever that is) to work in years. And I'm generally not too stressed if I'm late arriving at certain places. I just don't get all worked up about the time. You'd think that I would be thriving here in Mexico but I find myself wanting to know what time it is all of the time. Heaven forbid I don't know the exact hour and minute while I'm laying on the beach!

The fixation started on Saturday night when we got into our hotel and I couldn't figure out if my cell phone clock had updated with the time change or not. Was Cancun on Central Time? Do they do Daylight Savings? Does that make it one hour or two? There was no clock in the room to compare with, and so I had to count backwards to see if the pieces fit together. We'd arrived at 7 pm, and my clock said it was 10 pm ... had it really taken us 3 hours to get through customs, listen to the sales pitch offered to all naive tourists, and take a long shuttle ride? It seemed like 3 hours was too long, but where was the proof? (Let me also note that I was SERIOUSLY sleep deprived since I'd gone to bed at 5:30am the day before ... which is another story all of it's own.)

I felt like one of those time-deprived psychology experiments. I kept asking Camie what time she thought it was. Of course this did not drive her crazy at all. After going on at length about what time I suspected it was she threw up her hands, brushed the sand off and went and asked someone. We found out that my clock was one hour faster than the local time.

You would have thought that knowing the time would have made me calm down. But it didn't. Instead I started in telling her what we'd been doing at various times during the day. "That means we were on the beach by 9AM! We had gotten up at 6AM. We went to dinner at 5:30PM. We might as well have joined the Senior Tours Bus and gotten the early bird special." I cried.

Fortunately, we did not make that mistake today. Today it was out of bed at 9AM, on the beach at 10AM, and dinner at 8. Like normal people.

Also on the agenda for tonight is dancing. One great thing about Mexico is that MTV plays actual videos. We've been glued to it! It's got me totally ready to shake my bon bon. I can't remember the last time I saw a music video, let alone five or six in a row. Way to go Mexico!

Just for your information, Mustard is having a blast. I'll post pictures when we return on Wednesday. But the boy is all over the place.

Until then ... hasta! (see that Spanish? I just can't stop myself!)