Vamos a la Playa

So I am now going to take a shot at this blogging bussiness. Michael is really the family blogger but I figure it is not fun if you all don't get to hear what I think about as well. So here goes, sorry if I am not as witty as Michael. Yesterday we traveled from Cancun to Play Del Carmen. I was a little nervous that Playa was going to be like Cancun, i.e. lots of tall resort hotel with angry gaurds asking to see your bracelet if you tried to sit on their beach chairs. Thankfully though, it is not at all like that. While still definately a tourist trap,Playa del Carmen is alot more friendly and accesesible feeling. The beach is easily accessible and lined with restaurants and bars offering all maner of beach seatting arrangemetns from hammocks to large sofa like loungers where, should you desire, you could louge about Roman style and drink margaritas or other fruity concoctions to your hearts content. We checked into our Residencia, which as it turns out is just a really nice hotel. We have our own room and bathroom, and probably best of all, an air conditioner (we--the couple who just moved to Tucson, AZ--have decided that it is way too hot to live in the Yucatan). It was a bit of an adventure to find the hotel. We were told the street name and address and a few landmarks to look for. One of these landmarks was a taxi stand, Piña Loca. When we found this and inquired about the address, the drivers told us very frankly that the street did not exist. Hunh. So then we asked a young woman selling massages and other beauty treatments and she was more helpful in that she agreed that on the map it looked like it might exist but really had no idea where it was. So, as it turns out, it was right there, directly behind the big group of taxi drivers, who spend their whole day hanging out on a street whose name not only they apparently don't know, but believe firmly does not exist. The only negative about the hotel is that we are not going to have access to a kitchen which stressed me out a first, given that eatting out every day for three weeks is going to get expensive. We have decided to be creative and are going to rent a little refrigerator and make small cold meals from our room. In the evening we ate Gelato for dinner and spent an hour or so people watching on the main tourist strip. We had a lively debate about weather you could identify Americans soley on their shoes or not. My theory that tennis shoes and socks equaled Amercian was blown by an elderly European man wearing white running shoes. Today we wandered into the interior of the city to find our school and get away from the touristy gaudiness of the beach area. We successfully found a gym that I saw a billboard for on the way in that promises kickboxing and spinning classes if we can find out when it is open. We also were successful in finding a Walmart. As it turns out Walmart in Mexico is a lot like Walmart in the US: cheap and pretty chaotic.