think i'll have another glass of mexican wine

for spring break, brad and i decided to go down to mexico to do some diving (and in the process, get our advanced open water certification). while other places might have been more appealling, we opted for cancun for a few reasons - it's cheaper to fly there over spring break, cheaper to stay, and ... cheaper.

so!

we had an absolutely wonderful time. we stayed in a hostel off of the hotel strip (which is the typical cancun, spring break destination).

[length side note/rant: the few times we did wander down there, we were, in general, disgusted with it. no one actually lives there - it is literally all hotels and americans and people living in the city are bussed in to work there. and the americans who stay there (in general..some probably aren't this way) pay with american money, speak only in english, and never leave the strip. and they say they went to mexico.]

our hostel was mostly open-air, as was nearly everything else. filled, as per usual hostel, with interesting people, including an absolutely crazy insane woman in our dorm room. if i was a writer, she would get an entire chapter.

the actual city of cancun was lovely - great great food (of course), really nice people, and lots of look at. in our wanderings, we stumbled across some great places.



[playground]


[school]


[empty bar]


[palm trees on the hotel strip]


[hurricane wilma left some parts of the hotel strip completely abandoned]


and really, the best part of it, was that practically everywhere we went, we were the only white people around. we made friends with our waiters and laughed and smiled awkwardly and (mostly my, brad's spanish is much better) tried to communicate. drank good mexican beer. had great margaritas. enjoyed nopal tacos. enjoyed the warmth (albeit cloudy).

the diving in cancun is relatively good - nothing spectacular, but really perfect for us since we were mostly looking to complete our advanced certifications. [in case you're curious - it involves five dives: night, wreck, deep, navigation, and a dive of choice (ours was drift, more by necessity than choice). we'd done the night dive over the summer on the cape, so had four dives while we were there.] we saw some pretty cool things - a green eel, a few rays, nurse sharks, barracudas (so scary looking), and of course tons of varieties of fish ... none of which i can name.

brad brought his camera case (yay!) and even managed to get a few pictures. underwater photography is definitely a shoot-as-many-as-you-can-and-hope-maybe-one-perhaps-will-turn-out sort of process. he did a good job though:



[the wreck]




[the best of the lot]


[why do my eyes look so weird?]


[nurse shark]


our last day, we went down to tulum, a little city about a two-hours bus ride south of cancun. it retrospect, we probably shouldn't have - it ended up being quite expensive in the end, but we did see the mayan ruins of the area. the tulum ruins are right on the coast - it was a port/guard city. and really, really cool. i love visiting these sorts of ancient places ... the air somehow feels different there ... it's hard to explain, but walking around this town is amazing - thinking about the fact that many, many people lived their lives here and had their own customs and beliefs and now ... it is full of tour guides and people.









[there were iguanas everywhere!]






it was so nice to take a break from the craziness that has been senior year thus far, and will only continue until the end of may. i really love going to mexico, even if it was just to this incredibly touristy city.

(i don't know why all the pictures are so small ... i'll work on getting them full size)