Sheldon's Road Trip

Here We Go Again - Food in Buenos Aires

2011-07-31T08:54:00.000-07:00

Somebody once told me that this blog tends to read like a food blog at times rather than a travel blog. What can I say? I love food. My increasing waistline is a living testament to this. Since I don’t really have anything else to talk about at the moment with respect to my stay in Argentina, I decided to take some photos of food and do an entry on that topic.

In order to prolong my trip here, and because I know what I like and how I like it, I tend to eat the vast majority of my meals at home. Without significant cooking skills, this leads me to eat rather simple items. This was especially true in the beginning while I was getting used to my kitchen and the items that I could find in the grocery stores.

If you know anything about me and you know anything about Argentina, you know how this starts. Steak. I think I had steak every day during my first three weeks here. That’s slowed down a little bit to about four or five times a week, but I’m still eating lots of steak. My favorite cut is the Ojo de Bife (Rib Eye) because it’s tender, tasty and you can eat the whole thing. I’ve never had anything left on my plate after a meal. My back-up cut is the Bife de Chorizo (New York Strip), which also is fantastic. I have tried the Bife de Angosto, which is another strip steak, though one that has an attached bone. It’s cheaper than the others but not as good and probably not even cheaper once you factor in the weight of the bone.

Another staple in my diet has been dulce de leche. Dulce de leche is a spreadable caramel food that is often used here for baking or a topping for other sweet items. Personally, I like to put it on toast with a little butter.

I have also had my fair share of empanadas. Empanadas here remind me of mini-calzones. They are stuffed pastries that can be filled with nearly anything. Empanadas de carne probably are the most popular but the best empanadas that I’ve had have been cebolla y queso (onion and cheese). At one restaurant that I had empanadas, the cebolla y queson empanada had various types of cheese, including blue cheese. I’m getting hungry just writing about it.

Empanadas at home got a whole lot better after I discovered an American-type hot sauce that is sold here at the feria de San Telmo on Sundays. The sauce is called La Boca Roja and is made by two American ex-pats. They are musicians and make a jalapeño-based hot sauce on the side for funds. Finding them has made a lot of the foods that I’ve had here better.

Another Argentine specialty that I’ve fallen in love with here are alfajors. Alfajors are made all over the world but they’re a little different from place-to-place. In Argentina, they tend to be two square cookies with dulce de leche in the middle and dipped in chocolate. Here, they have alfajores negros and alfajores blancos. The chocolate ones are the best.

From time-to-time, however, I’ve tried to get some traditional U.S. food into my system as well. I’ve made some American friends here who have taught me where to find the best taco ingredients, including American cheddar cheese, so I’ve recently gone into the taco-making business. There are also some restaurants that cater to the American taste bud. I’ve had good, not great but good, hot wings at a local bar called the Casa Bar. (Note: Having returned to CasaBar and having the wings several more times, I'd like to revise my initial review of "good" to "Best hot wings in Latin America.") Also, a few miles away in Palermo Soho, there is an American breakfast restaurant that has all kinds of American favorites. It’s called Randall’s and I’ve only been there once. On that occasion, I had french toast and real, American bacon. Bacon, sweet bacon. They also have biscuits and sausage gravy on the menu as well as hot wings, cobb salads and waffles so I expect to be back several more times during the course of my visit.

Okay, now I’m hungry so I’m going to go eat something. I’ll try to come up with something different to write about next week.

Buenos Aires - Initial Thoughts - Recoleta, Weather

2011-07-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, maybe I should talk a little bit about how and where I’m living in Buenos Aires. I have a one-bedroom apartment on Calle Azacuenaga in the Recoleta neighborhood of the city. If you haven’t done it yet, say “Azacuenaga” a few times. It’s really fun to say.

View from my bedroom window.

For the uninitiated, Recoleta is a pretty nice part of Buenos Aires, located in the northeast part of the city. It’s relatively nice and rather clean. Clean in the sense that there is much less dog poop on the sidewalks and those said sidewalks are much less cracked and dilapidated. There are lots of cafés in the neighborhood and the architecture of this area in particular is one of the reasons that Buenos Aires has a reputation as being the most European city in South America.

In order to save money, and because I know what I like, I cook at home for the majority of my meals. The location of my apartment is ideal for this because there is a tiny grocery store a few doors down from my apartment, a mid-size grocer across the street, and two large grocery stores within two blocks of my apartment. They are all great for certain things, though my favorite place to go for steaks still is the Carrefour on Avenida de Santa Fe, which is about a half-mile from home.

My kitchen. Small but
functional.

Grocery prices here, at least in relation to grocery prices in the United States, depend completely on what you are seeking. Of course, Argentina is famous for its delicious and cheap beef. The steaks here are just as good as I recall from my trip here in 2009, but they are also more expensive. After using NASA scientists to do the peso/kilo to dollar/pound conversions, I’ve been able to determine that my favorite steaks (Ojo de Bife) come in at around $4.95/lb. That’s about 30% higher than two years ago but still gives me a big hunk of some of the best steak that I’ve ever had for under $3.

If you’re seeking other items, however, it’s best to keep an open eye at the prices. First of all, and clearly, items that I was used to in the United States, especially name brands, are much more expensive in Buenos Aires. For example, a 1.5-liter bottle of Coke Zero costs around $2.10. (For comparison, a 2-liter bottle in the U.S. costs around $1.29.) A large bottle of Tabasco sauce here runs about $17. This is all fine, though, because generally, there are Argentine substitutes for these products that are much cheaper and sometimes even better. I’ve become a big fan of Ser and H20, diet fruit-flavored sodas that cost about $1.30 for a 1.5-liter bottle.

My tiny living room.

The weather here has taken some getting used to because I’m not accustomed to winter in July. Still, winter in Buenos Aires isn’t as bad as winter back home. This week has been very mild, with highs around 18 C (64 F) and lows around 10 C (50 F). Next week, however, is supposed to go back to more normal winter temperatures for the area with highs around 12 C (54 F) and lows around 4 C (39 F).

The cold limits the time that I want to spend outside walking around, but it doesn’t stop me. I’ve been around to several neighborhoods in the city, in part because I was trying to find a location for my next apartment beginning at the end of August. After looking around at prices and neighborhoods, I’ve decided to stay in Recoleta, at least for the time being. I still find it to have the best bang for the buck in Buenos Aires.

That’s enough thoughts for now. I’ll choose some other topics for next week’s entry.

Twenty-Four Hour, Four Country World Tour

2011-07-10T13:37:00.000-07:00

It seems kind of weird adding to this blog from Buenos Aires. Generally, this has been a “travel blog” and when I am in one place for a long time, it doesn’t really feel like traveling anymore. Especially when I’m not doing much along the lines of touristy stuff or taking many photos. For example, when I spent two months in Madrid last summer, I don’t think I had a single post for this blog. Nevertheless, I am going to try to update this blog weekly or so, just so it doesn’t get too stale.

The first entry from this adventure should be about the 24-hour world tour that was my flight here. In addition to all of the time required, it covered four flights, five airports and four countries. It started on USAir from Raleigh to Philadelphia and then Air Canada from Philadelphia to Toronto to Santiago (Chile) to Buenos Aires. The whole trip seemed doomed to fail from even before the beginning. Four of the five days before my trip began, Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires had been closed due to an ash cloud from a Chilean volcano that had been affecting air traffic both in South America and Australia. It was scheduled to reopen the afternoon that I left the States and I could only hope that it would remain open the next day when I arrived.

On top of the troubling air above my destination, not literally on top, I received an e-mail while I was on my way to the airport that all customer service personnel for Air Canada within Canada were going on strike on the day of my flight. The e-mail strongly recommended printing tickets and checking in at home prior to getting to the airport. It would have been very helpful advice had I received before I was in the car to the airport. Thanks for your help, Air Canada!!!

In Raleigh, I was able to get tickets printed to Philadelphia and to Toronto. I was going to be on my own after that. Since it was in Toronto where I would not be able to find any help, I was a little concerned. In Philadelphia, however, I was able to get the rest of my tickets printed from Air Canada customer service since the strike only affected those workers actually (not) working in Canada.

Now, my luck on international flights has been pretty hit-and-miss. Sometimes, I have entertainment options, sometimes I have a big screen in the middle of the cabin with a movie playing in a foreign language, sometimes I get the dulcet tones of the person snoring next to me and nothing else. On my flight from Toronto to Santiago, I hit the proverbial jackpot. I had lots of movies and television shows from which to choose. My seat was in the very back row, so I couldn’t recline, but a few Tylenol PM and a well-timed valium made sure that I got plenty of sleep on the flight. The only downside of the entire flight was at around 1:00 am, when I noticed on the flight map that we were flying over North Carolina and I considered the fact that twelve hours after my voyage began, I was flying over where it started. It was a little disheartening. The things we do for cheap flights . . .

Getting off of the plane in Santiago, I saw a Burger King and a Dunkin’ Donuts and immediately became famished. The airplane food was okay . . . but it was airplane food. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any Chilean currency and there didn’t seem to be any reason to track any down in the mere 45-minutes that I would be in the airport. I checked the flight board and saw that flights were, in fact, going to Buenos Aires. The ash cloud had lifted!!! I re-boarded the plane and made my way to Argentina.

Immigration and customs in Ezeiza Airport is pretty easy. After paying the entrance fee of $140 to get past immigration, I found customs to be pretty much non-existent. I had hired a car to pick me up at the airport and take me to my apartment in Recoleta. It gave me about 45-minutes to practice my Spanish just before moving into my new home.

That’s enough for now. I’ll talk about other things in the next post.

One Final Farewell to Europe

2011-06-18T20:05:00.000-07:00

I’m sitting at (my new) home in Buenos Aires, but I don’t think it’s time to talk about Argentina yet. That’s because I still have one last entry about Ireland to write. I think that I’ve put it off this long, I returned from Ireland two weeks ago, because I don’t really have a lot to write about with respect to my final two days in Dublin. But, of course, why should that stop me?

I got up on my last morning in London and headed back to Victoria Station, where I’m pretty sure I ended up at some point on every one of my days in London on this trip. This time around, the purpose of the visit was to catch a train to Gatwick Airport. The trip took about thirty minutes and cost about twenty pounds. That seemed kind of expensive to me until I saw a sign at a shop around the corner from my hotel that advertised direct cab rides to Gatwick for fifty-eight pounds. After that, twenty pounds seemed like a bargain.

Once again, I flew Ryanair. Once again, I kept all of the bad reviews in mind but didn’t have a single problem and enjoyed the cheap flight. My favorite moment was when we were waiting at the gate and people were lining up to get on the plane, since the seats are first come, first served. The line was so long that it was keeping some of the passengers from getting into the gate area. One of the Ryanair employees asked everybody in line to sit down since seats in the gate area were one of the few things for which Ryanair didn’t charge extra. I laughed, but I didn’t get out of line.

I got back to Dublin and retraced my steps from about ten days prior in order to get to my hotel, which was a block down the street from the hotel I had stayed in upon my arrival to Dublin on my first visit. This time, I finally crapped out. I had liked all of my hotels on this stay, but this one didn’t do it for me. The water pressure in the shower sucked (which is the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do). It was on the fifth floor without an elevator. There was no wifi. It was too hot. Oh well, it was only a couple of days.

Now, the reason I don’t have a lot to say about Dublin this time around is that I had figured out what I liked on my first trip to Dublin. I ended up going back to the same bars and restaurants that I liked the most on my first trip. One new place that I went to was The Brazen Head because I had read that it was officially Ireland’s oldest pub, opened since 1198. It was a pretty cool place but looked like pretty much any other pub on the inside and, like everything else in Dublin, was mighty expensive.

Other than that, there’s not much to write about on these final two days in Dublin. My last meal in Dublin was at a place called Flannigan’s (if I remember correctly) on O’Connell Street. For the first time in Ireland, I finally got a beef & Guinness pie. It was the best thing I had eaten on the entire trip. The sauce was thick and beefy and it came with mashed potatoes and pureed vegetables. I shouldn’t dwell, but if I hadn’t known that I was coming to Argentina for some fine, fine beef, I’d have promised myself to eat nothing but beef & Guinness pie for the rest of my life.

That’s pretty much all I want to write about. The trip home was pretty uneventful, which is always what I am looking for on an overseas trip. No delays, no cancellations, no excitement whatsoever. I got back to the States and I was only nine days away from Argentina (where I am at the moment). For the next several entries – Buenos Aires.

Old English Friends

2011-06-08T12:51:00.000-07:00

Returning from Bath, we got off the bus in London at Victoria Station at around 6:15 pm. This was convenient because I was supposed to meet up with my English Friend at a bar in the station at 7:00 pm. If you don’t recall my English Friend and want background information, go back and look at the entries between Mexico and Panama. Otherwise, feel free to carry on.

At around seven, I headed upstairs to Witherspoon’s (I think that’s what it was called) and she was already sitting there with a drink. That’s why she’s my friend. We had a couple of drinks there, where the only excitement came right before we left when my English Friend couldn’t differentiate the men’s room from the women’s room. I would have thought that the trough within might give it away but I don’t think she figured it out until she started getting incredulous looks from guys standing at the door. Then they started looking at me and shrugging, but I had no real explanation, so I just shrugged back.

After Witherspoon’s, we hopped on the Underground and headed out to Soho. (I think it was Soho. My friend told me it was Soho. What do I know?) We stopped by a bar that was mostly empty and had another drink. Then we were getting hungry, so we went to that most English of restaurants, TGIFridays. Okay, so it wasn’t the greatest of cultural experiences, but it was close. If I remember correctly, we made it a truly continental experience by drinking Budweiser. Don’t say anything; it was the biggest beer they had.

After dinner, we headed back to Victoria Station so my friend could catch a train home. It seemed odd for me to see her stop drinking while still conscious but I guess not everybody can be on vacation all of the time.

The next day, I finally broke down and took a ride on the London Eye. The London Eye is a large observation wheel across the Thames from Big Ben and Parliament that provides great views of the city. It’s one of the most popular tourist attractions in London but I had avoided it on all of my other trips to London. I enjoyed the big wheel in Singapore, though, so I thought I’d give it a try. From the time I bought the ticket, it took about an hour to get through the line and embark.

The entire trip on the London Eye took about thirty minutes. To be honest, the views were disappointing. Because of the turns of the Thames and the height of the skyscrapers, much of the city remained hidden from view. It was crowded and people were elbowing each other to get photos. It was a beautiful day, though, and I’m at least glad that next time I go to London, I won’t have to have an internal debate as to whether to visit the London Eye. I’ve already done it.

That evening, I met with another old friend. This was a woman that I had met in Buenos Aires. The last time I saw her was in November 2009 in the rain at Kentucky Pizza in the Palermo neighborhood and we said that we’d get together for a drink. Eighteen months and 7,000 miles later, we finally got together for that drink. I’ve been known to go to great lengths to meet somebody for a beer, but this was a little extreme even for me. I had grilled camembert cheese with tomato chutney and German beer. Once again, it wasn’t the ideal English experience but it at least it was in an English pub and not in a TGIFridays.

After dinner, I walked back the four or five blocks to my hotel. Nobody believes me when I say that Sheldon is an English name, but on my way back to Paddington, I happened along Sheldon Square. I didn’t see it the last time that I was in London, so I’m going to assume that it was named in my honor since my last visit. Thank you, London!!!

That was pretty much it for me and London on this trip. My main reasons for the re-visit were to see some friends and visit Stonehenge. Since I did both, I guess it was a successful trip. In the morning, I was heading back to Dublin, which I’ll talk about in the next entry.

London to Stonehenge to Bath to London

2011-06-07T12:21:00.000-07:00

It was time to take off from Liverpool and head to London. I knew the way to the Liverpool Coach Station from the hotel because I had walked there a few days before. In the morning, when I left, for some reason I wasn’t counting on the rain. Also, I wasn’t counting on taking a wrong turn. What should have been a fifteen-minute walk to the station turned out to be a thirty-five minute trek in the rain. I still got there in plenty of time, though, and grabbed some breakfast before hopping on the bus.

The busses in Great Britain (I used National Express again) aren’t as comfortable as they are in Mexico, but they’re close. They definitely top Greyhound in the U.S. Anyway, the trip took about four-and-a-half hours, with a short stop in Milton Keynes, and dropped us off at the Victoria Coach Station. From there, it was a short walk to the Victoria Station and then an eight-stop Underground ride to Paddington Station, close to where my hotel was located.

The weather was kind of crappy in London and I had a big day planned the next day so I didn’t do a whole lot that first evening. I walked from Paddington down to Oxford Street and then over to Wigmore Court Hotel, where my travel adventures started way back in September 2009. I grabbed some dinner and a drink or two and headed back for the night.

The next day was the third of the three things that I looked most forward to seeing on this trip – Stonehenge. I was picked up at my hotel at 7:15 am and taken to Victoria Coach Station in order to catch a bus out to the ruins. It took about ninety minutes and we arrived shortly before 11:00 am. Entering the site, the first thing that I noticed is that the ruins are a little underwhelming. It was a similar feeling that I had when I arrived at the pyramids. I was just looking at a bunch of stones that always looked much bigger on television than they did in person. The entrance fee included an audio guide that talks about the history of the site, but most of the history lesson involved the fact that nobody really knows all that much about the site. It wasn’t built by the Druids. They know that. They don’t know a hell of a lot more. My guess – aliens.

The area surrounding Stonehenge, on the other hand, was truly beautiful. Lots of green and hills and sheep. It looked like a place that would make a marvelous park if it weren’t for that annoying collection of rocks in the middle of it. It was easy to see why the area could inspire so many writers and poets. I could have stayed there on one of the benches and hung out for a while (the weather was improving although it was a little cool), but it was time to go to Bath.

We got on the bus after about 45 minutes at Stonehenge and went to Bath. Bath is famous for its architecture and the beauty of the surrounding area and, of course, the famous Roman baths that are located therein. When we first arrived, I was hungry, so I skipped past the Roman baths at first and headed to a pub for some lunch. I had cottage pie, which was great but was served with french fries on the side. Since cottage pie is mostly mashed potatoes, it seemed like an odd combination, but I went with it. The beer was good.

After walking around town for a little bit, I finally made my way over to the Roman baths. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it was pretty interesting. I went from room-to-room looking at the remnants of the Roman architecture that remained. I saw the various baths and learned about how the Romans started out in the hot baths and worked their way into baths of decreasing warmth until they finished in a cold bath. I suppose it was worth the price of admission but Roman history is only of passing interest to me.

Afterwards, we got back on the bus to head back to London on a trip that ended up taking nearly four hours because of an accident on the M4 and bad traffic, generally. Once back, it was time to meet up with my English Friend from my Central America trip. I’ll get to that next time.

Liverpool's Cathedrals and Bars

2011-06-06T11:11:00.000-07:00

When I originally scheduled my trip, I knew I was going to both London and Liverpool. Also, I knew that Manchester United and Barcelona were playing in the finals of the UEFA Champions League while I was in England. Also, I knew that Manchester United fans are asses. (No offense to my Manchester United fans. I’m talking about all of them but [fill in your name here].) For these reasons, I decided to be in Liverpool for the final. Liverpool fans are losers too (except you if you’re a Liverpool fan) but at least they hate Manyoo and would be rooting for Barcelona in the finals.

Anyway, all of that is to say that I was in Liverpool for the UEFA Champions League final. I was rooting for Barcelona so I had lots of friends in Liverpool. I went to a nearby bar to watch the first half but it was crowded and full of the scary, rowdy, young, barfing Liverpool fans that got England football clubs banned from European competition for five years once upon a time. For the second half, I moved back to my hotel and watched in the hotel bar. It also was full of drunken people rooting against Manchester United but there was a little less rowdiness and a little less barfing. Barcelona won the match 3-1 so a good time was had by all. All, that is, except the Manchester United fans, but that was okay because they’d never show their faces in Liverpool anyway.

It was still raining on the morning of the next day. I woke up a little late and after breakfast, I went back to Albert Dock to do some souvenir shopping. I found a couple half-liters of Guinness on the way back to my hotel and then it was time to meet a friend of another friend of mine. They had worked together in Uganda and though she wasn’t a native of Liverpool, she knew her way around.

I met up with my new friend and we walked around town for a little bit. I was told that she was quite a drinker but she had other things to do in the evening so she couldn’t drink but so much on this day. We started off by heading to a couple of cathedrals. I don’t remember their names, but there was a protestant cathedral designed by a Catholic and a Catholic cathedral designed by a protestant. The Anglican cathedral apparently is the second largest Anglican cathedral in the world behind an Anglican cathedral in New York. The Catholic cathedral is very unique looking from the outside. It sort of looks like a teepee, round and with a smaller diameter in the middle. Both were impressive, if you like the cathedral-thing, and both are on the same street. I had heard that it was the only street in the world with two cathedrals, but I have no independent knowledge regarding that piece of trivia.

We also went to a few pubs. Beer is good. One of the pubs has a bathroom that is listed on England’s version of the National Registry. (I don’t recall its proper name.) The bar isn’t listed, but the men’s room is. I urinated in it anyway. My new friend was really cool and it was nice to have somebody who could teach me more about Liverpool and England, generally. (I don't have many pictures from this particular day so I've included a photo of the Liverpool Coach Station. Your welcome.)

After we split up, I got some fish and chips, but not just ordinary fish and chips. These came covered in brown gravy and were freakin’ awesome. But, of course, I was drunk, so that can’t be discounted when assigning value to my opinion. Afterwards, I took a nap (passed out) for about four hours. The rest of the night was quiet as I had to leave early the next morning to catch a bus to London. That’ll be in the next entry.

Magical Mystery Tour!!!

2011-06-05T11:07:00.000-07:00

When I headed out for Great Britain, there were three things to which I was most looking forward. (I may have mentioned this before.) The first was Blarney Castle. The second was doing a Beatles tour in Liverpool. I’ll get to the third in a later entry.

As you can probably imagine, there are lots of Beatles tours in Liverpool. There were some that lasted all day and cost over $150. While those include a lot of interesting things, I didn’t want to spend that much money and I found one that cost about 80% less, took two hours, and covered pretty much everything that I needed to see. (I still had another full day in Liverpool in case I wanted to go out and see more.) The trip I decided on was the Magical Mystery Tour, which is a bus tour to various Beatle-related spots throughout Liverpool, with stops at a handful of them. It starts at the Albert Dock, so I went there to catch the bus.

Our guide was funny and very knowledgeable. He was in some Beatles-related movie and knew Paul McCartney. At least, I reckon he knows Paul McCartney. He showed all of us a photo on his iPhone with him and Paul. So, he had that going for him.

We went by a lot of cool places – at least cool as far as I was concerned. We went by the birth homes of Ringo Starr and George Harrison. We also went by one of the homes in which Paul McCartney lived and in which he and John Lennon wrote over 100 songs. Another house we went to was the one in which John Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi. We went to Penny Lane but there were no pretty nurses selling puppies from a tray on the roundabout. Very strange. And we went to the red gates of Strawberry Fields. At the end of the tour, we went to the Cavern Club. I went in and wound my way down the stone steps to the bar/stage below. It was extremely crowded, even at 5:00 pm, and smelled of stale beer. I used the facilities but left before I got a drink. I went back to my hotel, which was located just around the corner.

Now, I’d like to say a word or two about my hotel. I stayed at a new Day’s Inn in Liverpool City Centre. It has been open for less than three months. I’m not sure what it was before it was a Day’s Inn but I’m pretty sure it was not a hotel. My room number was M6. To get to room M6 (on the mezzanine level), I had to go up three flights of stairs to the second floor (yeah, try explaining that) and then walk along the second floor corridor to another set of stairs and then go down two flights of stairs to rooms M6-M10. There was a lift option to get up to the second floor but none to get back down to the mezzanine level, at least the part of the mezzanine level on which my room was located. Inside my room was one of the best hotel televisions I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, there was no remote control to go with it. I called to ask if I could get a remote for the television, but all they told me was that the last guest must have accidentally taken it. I couldn’t care less what happened to it. I ain’t a cop. I just wanted a remote control. Nope. Okay.

Later that evening was the UEFA Champions League match between Manchester United and Barcelona. I’ll go on from there in the next post.

Pilgrimage to Liverpool

2011-06-04T11:06:00.000-07:00

We landed at John Lennon International Airport and I wasn’t sure if we’d have to deal with immigration and/or customs. We were going from one EU country to another but some countries are pickier about such things than others. Anyway, we didn’t have to worry with any of that.

I knew that National Express ran a bus to the Liverpool Coach Center and that taking it would be cheaper than a cab, so that was my plan. As I walked around the airport, though, I was having all kinds of difficulty finding where to catch the bus. There were other buses heading to the Liverpool City Centre but I had no idea where those were going to drop me off. I saw the cab fares posted on the wall and they weren’t outrageously expensive so I decided to break a cardinal rule of mine and for only the second time ever in Europe, I used a cab. I’ll get over it.

I got to my hotel and it was already starting to get dark. And crappy. The weather was pretty damn crappy. I walked around the city center for a little while and then went to get something to eat. In order to get something different, I went to a 1950s US diner. The food was meh. What I found interesting was that there were tons of American flags in the restaurant and they all had fifty stars, even though we didn’t have fifty states until midway through 1959. So, I guess it was a late-1959 diner. And there were only three songs that were playing over and over again and one of them came out in 1960. If I was going to open a 1950s US diner, I’d pay attention to these little details. But, then, I probably wouldn’t open it in Liverpool, so there you go.

I went out and got a drink before heading back to my hotel. There are tons of bars in the Liverpool City Centre. Even in my first hours in Liverpool, I was able to take notice of what would become my most lasting memory of Liverpool. That is, of course, the rowdy, drunken, scary people all over the place. There were people pissing on the sides of buildings and throwing up on the streets and yelling and random people on the sidewalks. I’m not saying that I’ve never done any of these things but it was the first time I’ve ever been in a city where the behavior has been so prevalent.

No biggie. I’m used to drunken people. Often, I’m drunken people. I’ll move on. In the morning, I went to breakfast at the hotel and it was bad but filling. The sausages were pretty good. And I figured that since I was in England, I should have baked beans for breakfast. Oh, the English . . .

After breakfast, I headed out to the Albert Dock. The Tate Museum is in that area but I wasn’t really in an art museum mood. Instead, I went to the museum in which I was really interested – the Beatle Story. Needless to say, though I’ll say it anyway, it’s a Beatle museum. It had some really cool exhibits, mostly from the early days, like instruments from the Quarrymen days and relics from the Casbah and Cavern clubs. There were also brief exhibits for each of the Fab Four during their post-Beatle years. My favorite exhibit from that section was a glassed-off room that had John Lennon’s white piano, a guitar and a pair of Lennon’s glasses.

The Beatle museum, however, was just a lead up for one of the things on this trip to which I was most looking forward – the Magical Mystery Tour. Yes, I’m a Beatle freak and this trip to Liverpool was a pilgrimage of sorts. I’ll move on to that in the next entry.

Poison Gardens and English Markets

2011-05-30T01:55:00.000-07:00

Before leaving Blarney Castle completely, I want to mention that after coming down from the castle (which took considerably less time than going down), I came across the castle’s poison garden. I’m not sure of the origin of the poison garden and I’m aware that there are similar gardens elsewhere, but it was the first one that I had ever seen and I thought it was pretty cool.

I left the castle and headed back to Blarney to catch the bus back into Cork. The roads were being cordoned off for something. There was a stage set up and people were just beginning to line up on the side of the road. I’m not sure if there was some sort of parade or if it was the finishing line of a race. Truth is, I just didn’t care that much. I was hungry and I wanted to get back into Cork.

Somewhere along the line, something happened to my ankle. I’m not sure what is was or where it happened, but my ankle started to get really sore. I’m thinking that maybe it’s just stress on the Achilles but I’m a lawyer, not a doctor, so I’m just guessing. Anyway, it was making walking around for long periods of time mighty painful, so I decided to try to cut down on the walking. Soaking my foot for a while in the bathtub helped, but only for a short period of time. Okay, enough about me.

That evening, I tried to walk around and take some more photos but the weather still wasn’t great for it. I toyed with the idea of going to the Butter Museum down the street because I had never been to a butter museum before, but then I decided that there were two reasons that I had never been to a butter museum. First of all, I had never seen a butter museum. Secondly, I’m just not that into butter. Nevermind.

I got up fairly early on Friday. In the afternoon, I was going to fly to Liverpool and I didn’t have to check out of my hotel until noon, so I decided to go out to the English Market. It was good enough for Queen Elizabeth II when she visited Cork the previous week, so I figured it was good enough for me. I had general directions, and it was pretty close to my hotel, so I headed out in search of the landmark. After about forty minutes, I gave up. I couldn’t find it. I decided to head home. Much as was the case with the Dublin castle, on my way home, I happened along the English Market. Go figure.

The English Market is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a market. Lots of butcher shops within with some pretty, pretty meat products. Lots of fresh produce. Also, there were a few stands selling prepared food. I, being hungry, decided to indulge. I had a sausage sandwich on a sub roll with onions, peppers and mustard. Nothing like ballpark fare for breakfast.

I returned to the hotel and packed up. I walked back to the bus station and got a ticket for a bus to the airport. Because of the time I had to check out, I got to the airport about four hours early. The baggage check didn’t open for two more hours, so I downloaded Angry Birds and just killed time that way. I checked my bag and went to the bar near the gate for some Murphy’s. While I was there, I started reading reviews about Ryanair, which was the airline I was taking because their prices were so cheap. The reviews were nearly universal – Ryanair sucks. A grand total of two out of ten on the website at which I was looking. I was nervous but it turned out not to be too bad a flight. The only problem was the other passengers, many of which, I’d be willing to bet, had never been on a plane before. People were walking around the cabin throughout the flight and as we were taxiing to the gate after we landed. US Marshals would have gunned these people down. If I was packing . . .

That ended my Irish adventures for the time being. I’ll be back in Dublin for a few days at the end of the trip. Next up in the blog will be Liverpool.

County Cork and a Load of Blarney

2011-05-28T23:04:00.000-07:00

I got up early on Wednesday in order to get to the bus station and head out of Dublin. Somehow, I managed to get lost on my way to the station but I still got there in plenty of time. The trip took about four-and-a-half hours and there was a stop in the middle for about fifteen minutes for food and toilets.

I got into Cork and, once again, it was pretty easy to find the hotel from the bus station. The station is in the middle of town, close to St. Patrick Street, which is the main retail part of the city, and there were signs directing me to the hotel.

The weather in Cork was similar to the weather in Dublin. I’ve never seen the weather anywhere in the world change so often in a single day. We would go from heavily overcast to sunny to rainy. Sometimes it would rain while the sun was out. It would change from the time I left my room to the time I walked out of the hotel doors. The one thing that was constant was the wind. In the hotel rooms, I could hear it howling and it would cool me through my clothes whenever I tried to walk through it.

I walked around and took some photos but the weather wasn’t particularly cooperative. I grabbed a late lunch and then returned to the hotel. Between the cold and the previous night’s insomnia, I decided that it was time to take a nap. I got up around eight and went out for some beer and some dinner. It was another relatively quiet night as I watched some television and wrote.

There were three things in particular that I was looking forward to seeing on this trip to Great Britain. The first one was Blarney Castle so I would have a chance to kiss the Blarney Stone. I’m not sure why. It’s not that attractive. I’d be kissing something that has been kissed by millions of other people, even though it’s probably not the first time I could make that claim. Nevertheless, I was really looking forward to this part of my trip.

I got up and went to the bus station to get a ticket to Blarney. From Cork, the buses run pretty much every hour and a round-trip ticket costs around $8. After buying the ticket, I had some time to kill until the next bus so I grabbed a sausage and egg sandwich and waited for the bus. The trip took about thirty minutes and dropped us off a short walk from the Blarney Castle complex. It was strange because even though the castle is a huge structure on top of a hill, you still have to follow the signs to find the entrance to the complex because everything is hidden behind the trees leading up to the castle.

It costs ten euros to get into the complex and from there, it is maybe a quarter-mile walk to the castle. As you come around one of the bends, the castle jumps out at you as large structures tend to do. As far as castles go, I don’t suppose that it’s the most impressive structure, but since we don’t have castles in the United States, I found it quite interesting. Still, the weather was constantly changing and as it started to sprinkle, I decided to head straight to the entrance to get inside.

Inside the castle, there was a long line, predictably, leading up the steps to the top, where the Blarney Stone is located. It was dark and dank inside the castle with a few plaques explaining how the castle had changed over the years. The trip to the top of the castle went up narrow, steep stone steps. (Say that five times fast.) It probably would have been a pain in the ass to go up quickly, but we were only going up a step or two at a time because of the line of people in front of us, so it was quite a leisurely trip. Once at the top, the line winded around about a quarter of the way along the castle wall the to the Blarney Stone. I had made it this far, so of course I had to kiss it. While we waited, though, there were some great views from the top of the castle.

Kissing the Blarney Stone isn’t as simple as it sounds. It requires you to lie down on your back; lean half of your body over the edge of the castle roof; bend over backwards from the middle back; and kiss the bottom white stone of a broken wall. It’s safe enough but it did cause all of the blood to rush to my head which made the next forty or so seconds fun as I felt like I had just finished off an ounce of jerk chicken. Anyway, I don’t know if I’ve been granted the gift of gab as promised by all of the legends, but at least it was something else that I can now cross off my list of things to do.

That’s it for now. I should be able to finish up Blarney and Cork in the next entry.

Dublin Down

2011-05-27T14:33:00.000-07:00

My next day in Dublin, my second, was also to be my final day in Dublin for a while. I’m also planning to spend my final two days on this trip in Dublin, though, so I’ll be back.

I got up early and decided at first to just walk around the city and see what I could learn. Along the way, I stopped by a shopping center for some coffee and walked through a few parks in/near the heart of the city. I also noticed a few things. One thing is that any woman with an Irish accent is hot. I don’t care what she looks like. She’s just hot. Once she starts speaking Gaelic, that all changes, but as long as it’s English with an Irish accent, she’s hot. Another thing that I learned is that almost every store/shop front in Dublin makes the place look like an Irish pub from the outside because of the font and size of the lettering and the dark windows. Dentist offices, hardware stores, cheese shops; they all look like Irish pubs from the outside. One more thing I learned is that it seems to stay light outside mighty late here. We still have nearly a month until the longest day of the year here and at 10:00 pm, it’s still not completely dark. Sort of reminds me of Madrid.

I walked around and through the Trinity College campus. It wasn’t huge, as far as I could tell, and I didn’t bother to do the complete tour. I strolled around and took some photos and then headed over to Grafton Street to see if there was anything going on. It reminded me a lot of the Temple Bar area, which also was close by. For lunch, I got off of my Irish food kick and stopped by the Hard Rock Café for some wings. They were my first wings since Panama and made me happy.

After winging it, I started to search for the Dublin Castle. I knew its general vicinity but didn’t know exactly where it was. After walking around for an hour, I happened along a sign identifying the pedestrian entrance to the castle. Evidently, I had walked past it a few times over the two days I was there and never even realized it. Better late than never, I figured, and I went in. It had started to rain, so it gave me a place to hide from the weather. I took some photos but since the clouds were so heavy, they couldn’t help but be dark.

Early in the evening, I walked towards the neighborhood of the bus station because I knew that I was going to have to find that early in the morning in order to catch my bus for Cork. Not too far away, I saw a restaurant that looked pretty Irish and had relatively affordable prices. I opted for Bangers and Mash and wasn’t disappointed at all. I generally like spicy sausages, but the mild bangers in onion gravy kick some serious butt. I wolfed it down with a few beers and returned to my hotel. It was becoming painfully obvious to me, though, that I wasn’t going to be able to go out and eat and drink beer at every meal. Dublin is pretty damned expensive.

I watched Sky News on television and brought home some Murphy’s. I had hoped to get to bed early because I had an early bus out of town, but that didn’t work out well as insomnia took hold. I’d like to blame it on jet lag but this seemed like good old-fashioned insomnia to me. I finally went to sleep around 3:30 am.

I’ll pick up the trip to Cork in the next entry.

Guinness - It's More Than Just a Book of World Records

2011-05-26T14:32:00.000-07:00

The plane didn’t crash and security didn’t escort us from the airport to make room for the Obamas so it was time to find my way into the city of Dublin. Immigration and customs was a breeze and I was able to change some money and buy a bus ticket into Dublin City Centre from a booth in the baggage claim area.

I had looked up the bus stop closest to my hotel in Dublin and I had looked up directions from Google Maps and looked at the walk from the photos on Google Maps. It was the first time that I had tried it and I’ll do it every time from now on. Even though I had written down the directions from the bus stop to my hotel, I never even took them out of my pocket because having followed the direction photos on Google Maps it was like I had already been there. It was pretty cool.

It was too early to check into my hotel, but I was able to drop off my bags and peruse the brochures at the hotel to find something to do for a handful of hours. Needless to say, once I saw a brochure with a picture of beer on it, my mind was made up. Yes, I decided to go to the Guinness Storehouse.

The Guinness Storehouse was about a twenty-minute walk from my hotel, under perfect circumstances. Circumstances weren’t exactly perfect, however. As it turned out, President Obama had decided to stalk me all the way to Dublin. Consequently, many of the roads that I wanted to use in getting to the Guinness Storehouse had been blocked off for his visit. I managed to get through the maze of police barricades but then it turned out that my directions to the Storehouse weren’t as good as my Google Maps directions and, all-in-all, it took about an hour to get there. Meh . . . I had time to kill anyway.

I wrote about the Heineken Museum when I went to Amsterdam. The Guinness Storehouse wasn’t much different other than the fact that the beer was much darker. And better. You got to see some hops, you got to see some barley, you got to see some water and you heard about the “special” yeast that Guinness uses. There were old advertisements and bottles (always my second-favorite part of these tours) and free beer at the end (my favorite part of these tours). My beer was cold. It was good. I was happy.

After the Guinness Storehouse, I made my way back to the hotel in order to check-in. My trip took me through the Temple Bar area and by this time the crowds waiting for Obama were getting huge. There were thousands of people, many of which were carrying around American flags and wearing Obama gear. I even heard some people chanting “USA! USA!” After all of my travels, I have to say that it was a little refreshing to see people with an American flag in one hand without having a lighter in the other.

After I checked into my hotel, I went upstairs and took a nap. I was pretty much dead on my feet at this point. I woke up around six and went back out to get a beer or two and some Irish food. After stopping at a few places for a few Guinnesses (Guinnii?), I stopped into a restaurant for some Irish Stew. I got a pretty good stew with potatoes, carrots and onions and a large-ass lamb shank in it.

That was pretty much it for excitement for my first day in Ireland. I’ll get to the second day next time.

Destination Dublin

2011-05-25T16:11:00.000-07:00

I’m back on the road again, so it seems like an appropriate time to start writing about it again. This trip is much shorter than any of the others, lasting only a tad under two weeks. Also, it is primarily covering only a handful of cities in two countries – Ireland and England. The plan is to spend four nights in Ireland, six in England, and then finish with two more back in Ireland. First stop: Dublin.

The first part of the trip, as always, was the trip there and, as always, involved adventures in air travel. This season’s contestant was US Airways. Let’s see how it did.

The first flight was from Raleigh to Philadelphia. I got to the airport early, like I always do, and checked in easily and quickly, like I always do in Raleigh. Getting there early paid off in this case, for a change, because I was hungry and the Five Guys at RDU Airport has finally opened. I do love me some Five Guys. So, there was that and there’s always wifi at RDU and plenty of places to plug in my computer. As far as waits go, it’s a pleasant place to do it.

The flight to Philadelphia was also painless. I got my aisle seat and my Coke Zero and I was happy. The time in Philadelphia, though, was a little less pleasant, albeit not horrible. There is no wifi at the Philadelphia airport and it’s always crowded, so finding a place to plug things in takes a little work. Fortunately, however, I arrived this time when shops were open, so I did get some Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I do love me some Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. Getting something to eat was a little more difficult, however, despite being necessary since I had a six-hour layover. For some reason, the entire population of Philadelphia was in the airport, sitting in the airport bars and restaurants. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t blame them for wanting to leave Philadelphia, but I wish some of them would have taken the train or driven. Eventually, though, I got some food and got on the plane.

Getting onto the plane to Dublin turned out to be chaos. Our plane was changed so we were moved from a 767 to a much smaller plane. This resulted in a lot of people being moved around to different seats, including several people being separated from their dearly beloveds. I wasn’t moved, but that wasn’t a good thing. As it turned out, my 16E, which was an aisle seat on the original 767, was now a middle seat. On a full flight. Crap!!! When I got to my seat, somebody already was sitting there. He wanted to sit next to his wife, so whatever, I decided to take his seat. It couldn’t be worse. Well, it wasn’t any better. It was another middle seat. When I got to that seat, sure enough, somebody else was sitting in it in order to sit next to HIS wife. Okay, where are you supposed to be sitting, buddy? I took his seat and I ended up in a window seat.

The last time I took a window seat on a long flight, it was a red-eye from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. and I had a little bit of a panic attack. The claustrophobia got to me. I’ve refused window seats ever since. This time, though, I had to suck it up. I had a few moments of discomfort at the beginning of the flight, but it settled with a handful of Tylenol PM. It turned out to work to my benefit since it’s a lot easier to sleep in a window seat and I did get about three hours of sleep on the six-and-a-half hour flight. I’ll take it.

As soon as we got into the air, the pilot told us that he was going to try to cut off some time in order to get us into Dublin a half-hour or so early because Barrack Obama was scheduled to arrive at the airport around the same time that we were scheduled and the pilot was afraid that they’d shut down the airport and we would have to land at another airport if Obama beat us there. He was true to his word and we arrived a little early, but not without incident. The winds in Dublin were pretty bad, with gusts of over 30 MPH. After the landing gear came out and we were approaching the runway, you could look out the window at the wings and see that we were definitely fighting to be level. This wasn’t lost on anybody on the plane as we heard a steadily increasing number of gasps as we got closer to touching down. As the plane landed, you could hear a collective sigh that sucked all of the air out of the cabin and a flight attendant came on the intercom and said, “Well, how about that, then. Welcome to Dublin.”

We were safe. We were ahead of Obama. All was well. It was time to make it into the city. I’ll get to that later.

The End of the Road . . . For Now

2011-04-18T14:59:00.000-07:00

The rest of my two-month long trip consisted of my final two days in Panama City. I was running out of things to do, people to do them with and interest in doing them. In fact, I had more interest in finding a place to watch the Manchester United – Chelsea Champions League rematch than anything else. (By the way, I took no photos from the final two days so I’m just going to put up random photos from the trip. Lord knows, I have tons from which to choose.)

It was Monday morning and I decided to walk towards downtown Panama City. I didn’t really have any directions, but I figured that just walking towards the big buildings would get me there. That’s always worked in the past.

Lo and behold, I ended up back in the same building that I was in the day before – the one with the Hard Rock Cafe. I wasn’t interested in that again but it also was in a mall so I thought I’d take a look around. I got there shortly before ten and nothing was opened until ten but the casino. Nevertheless, it had free wifi so I just hung out for a little bit. I also checked out the food court and saw that it had a lot of televisions showing sports. I decided that in a jam, I could watch the next day’s match there. After getting some coffee and breakfast, I went back to the hotel.

Later in the day, I texted the last two friends that I had left in Panama City about getting some lunch. By the time I got a response, it was pouring outside. We decided to wait until the weather cleared but it never did. Ultimately, we opted for ignoring the weather and going to Hooters for some wings. We ordered fifty, expecting the tiny wings that I’m used to getting at Hooters in the U.S. Instead, we got the hugest chicken wings that I’ve ever received in a restaurant. And we got fifty of them. We got through about half of them. I brought the rest back to my hotel and said goodbye to my final friends in town. At long last, I was the last man standing.

That night, I did nothing but eat leftover hot wings for dinner and watch some television. In the morning, I went and got breakfast and some provisions for the long trip to begin that evening. I also tucked away some valium for easy access before my flights. In the early afternoon, I headed back towards downtown and stopped at Bennigan’s Bar & Grill, thinking it would be a good place to watch the Chelsea match. Their food was so-so, their televisions were good but I didn’t have any sound, so I watched the first half there and then walked a little bit down the road to the mall to catch the second half. At this point, it was close to 4:00 pm and I had an 8:30 pm flight, so I walked back to my hotel, grabbed my stuff and caught a cab in the rain to the airport.

The Panama City airport wasn’t too bad; at least it was much better than the reviews that I had read about it had led me to expect. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let me bring any water on board the plane. I took my valium and slept pretty much throughout the flight to Miami. I arrived in Miami at around 2:00 am and ended up hanging out in front of the US Air counter until it opened at 4:30 am to get my ticket and transfer my luggage. From there, it was another valium, another nap on another plane, this time to Charlotte, and then another plane to Raleigh.

This is how the trip ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper. My next trip will be to Washington and maybe New York in a couple of weeks. I don’t know if there’ll be another big trip before I move to Buenos Aires in June, but I’ll update this site occasionally in the meantime. It’s been fun.

On My Own (Sorta) in Panama City

2011-04-17T06:35:00.000-07:00

By Sunday, April 10, the organized portion of the trip was over. I was still in Panama City, and would be for a few days, but I had to figure out things to do on my own.

Actually, I wasn’t completely on my own. Some people from the group were still milling around so I usually had people with whom I could do things. On Sunday, I was toying with the idea of going to Casco Viejo (the old town) because that was the only thing in the world other than the Panama Canal that I knew about in Panama City. While I was toying with the idea, I ran into some people downstairs who were toying with the same idea. Once we realized that Casco Viejo was within walking distance (about 35 minutes), a group of six of us decided to head down there together.

We had to walk through some of the dirtier parts of Panama City to get to Casco Viejo. Once we got close, however, things cleaned up quite a bit. Just before we got there, we crossed a bridge from which we were able to get great views of the Panama City skyline. The views would have been much better if the weather had cooperated, it was raining off and on all morning, but they were impressive, nonetheless.

Once we got to Casco Viejo, we ducked into a restaurant for some coffee and to escape the rain. Once the rain passed, we walked around for a bit. My Australian and English friends from the prior legs of the trip (remember them?) had told me that there wasn’t much to the Old Town and that I shouldn’t expect much. All-in-all, I suppose they were right, though I do think that I enjoyed it a little more than they did, despite the weather. I did some last minute souvenir shopping and then we walked into downtown. (For the record, that’s where I stopped taking photographs on this trip.)

By the time we got into downtown, we were starting to get hungry and my long-time roommate from this trip still needed to buy a t-shirt from Panama. We decided to kill two birds with one stone and stop by the Hard Rock Café. (Believe it or not, this was the first time in my life that I had ever been to a Hard Rock Café.) (Sorry for the “é” in Hard Rock Café, but my autocorrect is adding it on it’s own and I don’t feel like correcting the autocorrect any more.) I had some buffalo wings that were the hottest on the menu but still weren’t very hot. Or very good, for that matter. But the beer made them passable.

After lunch, I returned to our hotel to get my stuff and move to my new hotel, which coincidentally was only about two blocks away. Finally in a room by myself, I turned on the television and air conditioning, watched ten minutes of the final round of the Masters and then fell fast asleep.

That night, those of us who remained in town went to a so-so restaurant where I had some spicy shrimp and more Balboa. Afterwards, I said goodbye to the two guys with whom I had shared rooms with throughout most of the trip since they were leaving in the morning and I went back to my hotel to try to figure out what to do with my last day-and-a-half in Panama City. What I ended up doing will be in the next post, but don’t expect anything exciting.

Panama City and the Big Ditch

2011-04-16T05:42:00.000-07:00

I’d like to say that I was excited about going to Panama City since it is supposed to be the most cosmopolitan city in Central America but I have to say that after over two months of traveling in this part of the world, I was looking forward most to having the trip come to an end.

We left really early from Santa Catalina in order to get to Panama City early enough for people who were planning to fly out the next day to see the Panama Canal in the afternoon. At least we tried to leave really early. Our van got a flat tire on the way to pick us up and came a little over an hour late. Still, our connecting bus waited for us and we were able to get to Panama City by 2:00 pm.

We decided to meet a little later and head to the Panama Canal. We went to the Miraflores locks and museum in what was light rain at the time we left. We arrived, paid the $8 entry fee and went up to the observation deck. At that point, Hurricane Miraflores hit and we kept going back and forth between torrential jungle downpours and semi-sun. I took some photos and had some lunch – a semi-decent hot dog and a beer – but I can’t say that I was overwhelmed by the experience. Not quite underwhelmed, but pretty much just whelmed.

After the observation deck, we went downstairs and watched the ten-minute Panama Canal movie, in English, and then we went to the Panama Canal museum. Once again, whelmed. The movie and the museum both spent way too much time and money showing off what the Panamanian government hopes to accomplish with the canal by 2014 (additional locks), and not enough time on the history of the canal and its impact on international trade. But, whatever.

That night, the final farewell dinner of the trip was planned. If you recall, I’ve never attended these in the past and I was undecided about attending this one until the final minute. In the end, I decided to attend, I think mostly because I didn’t think it was going to be nearly as painful saying goodbye at this point. Like I said, I was pretty ready for the trip to end.

We went to an Argentine restaurant and I was expecting some great steak. I was pretty amazed when I arrived and I found that the only types of meat on the menu were Panamanian and American. I had good steak – the American steak – but it still was a far cry from the Argentine beef I enjoyed in 2009 and I plan on enjoying in a few months.

After dinner, about half of the group went out for post-dinner drinks. I was up for the dinner but I really wasn’t interested in the post-game show. Too many guys, not enough girls, and I knew that the people that I liked in the group would be around for another day or two and that we would all end up seeing each other again – at least the ones that I cared about seeing again. I called it a night and contemplated what I was going to do the next three days in Panama City. Meanwhile, there was the cliché last night hook-up within the group, but it didn’t involve me so there’s no point in my going into it here. Rather, I’ll wait until the next entry and continue to talk about myself. I like doing that.

Chillaxation in Santa Catalina

2011-04-13T19:59:00.000-07:00

As I sit in Miami International Airport at 3:00 am, waiting for the US Airways counter to open so my Central American trip can officially come to an end, it seems like a good time to continue writing about the final week of my trip. If I remember correctly, I’m up to Santa Catalina, so let’s talk about that.

We left Bastimentos via water taxi at around 9:00 am to the mainland. I got a little wet and my ass was sore in the hour it took us to get there, but that was just the beginning of the trip. We took a couple of buses and a private van and ended up in Santa Catalina early in the afternoon.

Santa Catalina is the smallest town we visited throughout the trip. In fact, it’s kind of hard to call it a town. It’s a series of surf huts along a beautiful beach on the Pacific coast of Panama. We stayed at one or the other Surf Oasis(es) and checked into our hut. For the first time on the trip, I was roomed with somebody different – a Canadian man in (I think) his seventies. I fell asleep almost immediately and was awakened by my new Canadian roommate at 4:20 pm because he said it was time to start drinking. Obedient to my elders to the end, I relented and he ended up buying drinks and cigarettes over the course of the next eight hours. He was toasted, but at least he was a nice, happy drunk. Around midnight, I took him back to the room and he ended up getting up around 6:00 pm the next day/evening. This was the most interesting part of the trip to Santa Catalina, but this isn’t his blog, it’s my blog, so I’m going to go back to writing about me.

Actually, there’s not that much to write about with respect to me. I drank with my new Canadian roommate that night, had some dinner, and went to bed. The next morning, I went to breakfast and then I walked into “town” for some provisions with a few other people from the group. The walk was up a gravel road and took about forty minutes. Once we got to “town,” we could see that there really wasn’t much to it. There was one main strip with empty stores and a few surf shops. The people I went with stopped by a restaurant for some juice while I just grabbed my provisions at the little minimart in town and then I went back to the shack by myself.

View from my hammock

I’d like to tell you that I went swimming, but the waves were too strong for me to be interested. I’d like to tell you that I went surfing, but that would just be a boldface lie. For the most part, I spent the rest of the day sitting on the hammock outside of my hut and watching people, crabs, and listening to the almonds from the tree directly in front of our house fall on top of our tin roof and then roll onto the beach in front of us. It turned out to be pretty much nothing but a day of pure chillaxation. Not the most exciting way to end a trip, but not the worst way, either.

There’s absolutely nothing exciting to report about Santa Catalina but it was very beautiful. Perhaps I’ve been jaded by all of the beautiful beaches I’ve seen since visiting Hoi An in Vietnam in November, but I felt like I was taking it for granted and that bothered me.

The night was short because we were meeting at 6:00 am the next morning in order to head to Panama City, the final stop on the Central American tour. I’ll start on Panama’s capital in the next entry.

Coffee and Bad Music in Boquete

2011-04-12T20:58:00.000-07:00

After Bocas del Toro, it was time for one last trip into the mountains. For this, we went to Boquete.

There’s not really a lot to Boquete. I learned that it was 100 years old because there was a centennial celebration planned the weekend after we were there. There were a couple of pool halls, numerous restaurants and some hotels. We stayed in a hostel in the center of town. Surrounding the town are numerous coffee plantations that make the best coffee in Panama.

After our arrival, we went to a bar next door to the hostel and I had some so-so wings. More importantly, I found a place to watch the Champions League match between Manchester United and Chelsea the next day. In the evening, we went to a pool hall and shot some pool and drank 75-cent beers. Yes, you heard me right, 75-cent beers. It was the cheapest beer that I’ve had since Cambodia. The highlight of the evening, though, was when my new Australian friend and I put about four dollars into the juke box and played the worst songs we could find for about an hour-and-a-half. We had some ABBA and Elvis Presley and stuff from the 70s that we figured would piss people off. Ultimately, all it did was chase away all of the locals. There were also some tourists who came in midway and thought that the music we were playing was what was popular these days in Panama. Sorry, Panama.

American, French & Italian

The next day, we took a tour of a coffee plantation. This probably won’t mean anything to you, but the plantation we visited grows seven types of Arabica coffee beans and Geisha coffee beans, which evidently produce coffee that cost hundreds of dollars per pound. I ain’t ever had coffee that good, but that’s what they sell it for. We did get to go through the entire process of turning the coffee beans into coffee and did get to sample some of the Arabica coffee blend. All-in-all, it was pretty interesting and the coffee was good, so it was a nice way to spend an overcast/rainy morning. (For the record, all of the photos that I took in Boquete, and in this entry, are from the coffee plantation tour.)

When we got back, we took our coffee tour guide’s recommendation and went to a place for lunch where I had fried chicken and rice and beans. Very popular in Central America, it would appear. After that, I went back to Baru (the bar next door to the hostel) for some beer and some fútbol. It was all good until the match ended and the bar started playing Journey Live on the television. Hell, maybe the crap we were playing on the jukebox the night before actually is popular in Panama these days.

The scroon in action.

That night, we went to a Peruvian restaurant called Machu Picchu (because all of the Peruvian restaurants in Central America are called Machu Picchu) and I had some seafood. It was pretty good, but nothing to write home about – although, it’s apparently enough to blog about.

The next morning, we were leaving at 8:00 am, so we had a little time for breakfast. I walked down the road to the Shalom Bakery and had a bagel with cream cheese (something I hadn’t had for quite a while) and some coffee and then we were off to the surf beaches of Santa Catalina. I don’t really have a ton to say about Santa Catalina, either, but I’ll do that in the next post.

Reunited And It Feels So Good

2011-04-11T19:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, where was I. I think the last time I wrote, I was up to Bocas del Toro waiting to see if my English friend was going to show up. She did. (I have no photos for the next few days except for a few I took from my hotel room balcony and some pictures of beer, so that’s what you get.)

I got up around eight in the morning, grabbed some coffee and worked on my blogs for a little while. I was debating taking a water taxi into town and then there was a knock on my door. She made it. She had a harrowing experience getting from Panama City to Bocas de Toro. I could go into detail here, but she could write her own blog if she wanted to do so. Anyway, she finally got there and she was soaking wet since it had started raining while she was on the water taxi to Bastimentos. I greeted her with some jerk chicken that was left over from the night before and I think all of her ills were cured. Well, many of them, anyway.

Some other folks stopped by our room to say hello to my English friend. A small group of us went back to Roots for lunch and some $1 Panamanian beers. I really wasn’t in shape for conversation, but somehow, I managed. After lunch, we went back to the room and chillaxed until we went into town to schedule some dives (not for me) for the next day and hung around for dinner and a few drinks. We also got some provisions that we brought back to Bastimentos. The rest of the night was spent drinking and stuff with us and a few other friends. Actually, the night ended up ending kind of early.

The next day, I took a water taxi into Bocas del Toro to meet up with the people diving. We went out to lunch and then a few of us went to a local bar with a pool table for some more $1 beers. Before too long, it was down to me and my English friend sitting there for a few hours continuing to drink. Ah . . . just like old times. Afterwards, we walked around Bocas looking for anybody we might know. We didn’t find anyone, so we grabbed some wine and hopped a water taxi to Bastimentos. As soon as we got to our hotel, another boat pulled up beside us. Everybody else was heading into town for dinner, so we just jumped from one boat into another and went back into town.

After dinner, we went back to the pool bar that we were at earlier. My English friend, who still had the bottle of wine that she had bought earlier, stole a corkscrew and we ended up splitting her bottle of wine outside, talking with a few others who would occasionally come out to join us. Our Quebecois friend made friends with the Quebecois owner of the bar and he gave us a round of shots at the end of the night. If you’ve been following the blog at all, you could probably see what’s coming next. God knows I saw it coming. As soon as my English friend took the shot, I could see her mouth beginning to water. I practically carried her to the balcony so she could throw up in a bush instead of on our fellow travelers.

Soon thereafter, after my English friend tried to get some jerk chicken from a homeless guy who refused to accept a kiss from her, we hopped a water taxi and returned to the hotel. We had a nightcap and that was the end of the night. In the morning, I was taking off for Boquete and my English friend was staying behind, so I had to say goodbye all over again. It was good to be reunited for a few days during the last leg of the trip but it was over and it was time to move on to the final week of the trip. We’ll continue on that note in the next entry.

Hellacious Border Crossing into Panama

2011-04-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

After Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, it was time to leave Costa Rica behind for good and cross into Panama. This turned out to be one of the longest, most painful border crossings I’ve ever endured.

The infamous Bridge of Death.

The bus ride to the border wasn’t so bad. It was only like an hour-and-a-half long and we got there still thinking that we might get to our destination in Panama in time for a normal-hour lunch. We got our stamps out of Costa Rica pretty quickly and all was going well. Then we loaded up for our trip into Panama. This required crossing the Bridge of Death. The Bridge of Death is a long bridge crossing a river from Costa Rica into Panama. It is held up by steel beams and held together by horizontal, rickety boards that don’t feel like they are able to support a human being’s weight. In between the boards are gaps in which you can see down to the river. There are vertical boards as well for large trucks to use when they cross. I crossed with all my stuff, probably around fifty pounds of it, on my back or in my arms and I had to concentrate with all of my might on each step to make sure that I wouldn’t fall into the river. The whole trek probably only took three or four minutes but it seemed like an hour.

Once across the bridge, the ordeal was just beginning. We ended up standing in line for over ninety minutes in the hot, midday Panamanian sun while the folks at the border tried to figure out what to do with a group of eleven tourists trying to come into Panama. In retrospect, we probably would have gotten through much quicker had we just gone through immigration individually, but instead we sweated through the process until, finally, we were allowed into the country.

After the border crossing, things got much easier. Ostensibly, we were heading to Bocas del Toro, an island on the Caribbean coast of Panama. We drove about ninety minutes to the closest part of the mainland to the island but when we arrived, we learned that we instead were staying on a different island – Bastimentos. Don’t get me wrong, Bastimentos is a charming little island, but there’s not really much to do there. We checked in to the hotel and, after a while, my new Australian friend and I walked around looking for something to do or eat. We did come across this bar/restaurant at the end of a pier that looked reasonable. We went there for lunch and some $1 beers (Balboa) and it was a good enough time. But there really wasn’t much else to do or see. There was a beach that I later heard was beautiful close by but I thought I’d have time for that later. I didn’t. After lunch, I headed back to the hotel. I had a double room to myself, for now, because my English friend was going to make an appearance and I had an extra bed for her to crash in.

Shortly after dark, we took a water taxi to the island of Bocas del Toro. It isn’t a huge island, but it still was considerably more bustling than Bastimentos. We had dinner there, I finally had ceviche and it was delicious, and then we stopped off for supplies before returning to Bastimentos. (I wish I had a picture of the ceviche but it was too dark in the restaurant for my iPhone to take a photo.)

That night was jerk chicken night on my balcony along with a bottle of Argentine malbec wine. I still hadn’t heard from my English friend, but that wasn’t too surprising. I was hoping that she was getting into town late and that I would meet up with her the next morning. Was I right? We’ll find out in the next post.

Heat and Humidity in Puerto Viejo

2011-04-09T22:12:00.000-07:00

The fourth leg began with a trip from San Jose to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. This trip involved about five hours of riding on public buses and ended on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

Puerto Viejo de Talamanca is a seaside town that has much more of an island-feel to it. We kept referring to “the island” even though that reference was incorrect. There’s a single ATM, a few supermarkets, several restaurants and bars and several shops for diving, snorkeling and the like. On the afternoon that we arrived, we got a rundown of the activities that were available in Puerto Viejo and then sort of went our separate ways. I got some money, stopped by the biggest supermarket and then went to lunch with a few friends. I had already determined that friends in this group would be hard to come by because of the small group size and the various personalities (diplomatic?) of several of the new members.

In the evening, there was a group dinner but I avoided that and took refuge in a bottle of wine and the internet at the hotel. The most memorable point of the evening was when the new creepy Canadian dude in the group was carried in and dropped off in his room (across the hallway from mine) at one in the morning and I listened to, “Is this your roommate?” as his roommates tried to disown him.

In case you're wondering, this is Rikki.

The next day, the entire group went out for a tour of the nearby jungle and wildlife. It was Rikki’s Tour, coincidentally led by a guy named Rikki, and we saw some spiders and learned a lot about the vegetation in this part of Costa Rica. We also saw some Howler Monkeys, but I’ve seen so many Howler Monkeys on this trip that I’ve become sort of jaded. The tour was a lot of fun, though, except for when I stood on an anthill and noticed that my feet were getting eaten alive. Other than that, though, I enjoyed it.

After the tour, I walked around town a little bit, though I expected to do more of that the following day, and went to dinner with a couple of people at a restaurant that turned out to be pretty good. Later in the evening, I enjoyed some jerk chicken and that was pretty much the second day.

The new gang. You know you're scared.

On the third day, I had decided that I was going to walk around town and see if there was anything else it had to offer. I started at around ten a.m. thinking that it would still be cool and I would enjoy the walk. I was wrong. After about forty minutes, it was already in the mid-80s, with humidity in the 80s, so I was hot, sweaty and tired quickly. I went back to the hotel and lied down in a hammock when my new Australian friend (not to be confused with the Australian friend that has been written about at length in this section of the blog) came by and asked if I wanted to go with her and scooter around the island. It sounded good to me, so that’s what we did. Well, almost. We ended up getting a four-wheeler and going around the island on that. It was a lot of fun. We went to the beach for a little while. We also stopped by a restaurant and got more chorizo sausage than two people should ever be served (part of it ended up being my breakfast the next day). We had decided to start a gang – the Pasty Devils – but could find no other members in the current group.

That night, we went out on a group dinner and ended up going back to the same place to which I had been the night before. I had something different and it was a fairly tame evening. (This final leg of the journey was proving to be much more tame than the previous three.)

That was pretty much it for Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. It was three days worthy of only a single, albeit longer than normal, entry. Fun, but boring at times – and very hot and humid. From there, it was off to Bocas del Toro, where I’ll pick up in the next entry.

The Way to San Jose

2011-04-05T21:15:00.000-07:00

On March 28, we made our way into San Jose. We were there a couple days in which we ended the third leg and started the final leg of this trip. I wish I could tell you something about San Jose but I really didn’t see much of it.

When we arrived in San Jose, I got a room to myself for the first time the entire trip. It turned out to be the executive suite, at least by the standards to which I’ve become accustomed. I had my own bathroom and it was the only room in the hotel that had a balcony – and it was a damned good-sized balcony. It also had a queen-sized bed. After my arrival, somebody (sometimes up to three people – but not in a good way) was in the bed pretty much non-stop until I checked out. So much for having a room to myself.

By the time we arrived, it was almost dark. Also, just after arriving, we learned that somebody from the new group was almost mugged at gunpoint less than two blocks away from the hotel. Okay, I get it – not a good neighborhood. The people from the present group were going to a farewell dinner at a Chilean restaurant but I have skipped the farewell dinners all along on this trip and didn’t see any reason not to skip this one. Instead, I walked a couple blocks away and lived the dream – I had Taco Bell in Central America. Something else to scratch off the bucket list. As I ate, I sat in my room and watched television for a little while.

After the group returned to the hotel, I went downstairs and met up with everybody. Since I had the big balcony, the party eventually moved into my room with the usual suspects. My English friend had the upper-half of a bunk bed with an older woman with a snoring problem so when she passed out (not an uncommon occurrence for her), we just dropped her in my bed and then I hung out with my Australian friend until around 4:00 am, when she left and I fell asleep.

I woke up around 8:30 am and my English friend had left. Around 10:30, I finally made it out of bed and downstairs. There, I found my Australian friend asleep on the couch and my English friend drinking coffee. Their trip ended here in San Jose, so they had already checked out of the hotel. Since my bed was empty, I let my Australian friend come up to my room so she could sleep up there. She had a headache, so we plied her with more medicine than anyone should ever take for a headache. She was out for a while. Meanwhile, my English friend and I had some jerk chicken and beer (and possibly rum) and went and brought back some lunch. Around this point, my English friend was tired again and also went to sleep on my bed. For a while, I was there as well, lying at the foot of the bed. My Australian friend finally came to and the two of us went to the bus station to pick up tickets for the two of them to go to Panama City. We had to make two trips because we needed my English friend’s passport and that ended up in my pocket.

After we returned, we had a dinner with both the old group and the new group. My English friend was still passed out and we couldn’t wake her so we just let her sleep. After dinner (tortellini carbonara that was delicious), we returned to the hotel only to find our English friend in a panic because she thought that she was late for her bus and couldn’t find her passport. Soon, we were able to quell her fears and then my best friends for the past month were on their way out of Costa Rica and my life, at least temporarily for one of them.

So you see, I didn’t really get a chance to see all that much of San Jose. Just a few blocks around my hotel and a little bit more of the city as we took a taxi to and from dinner. The third leg had ended and the fourth leg had begun and I wasn’t all that excited about the members of the final leg. We’ll start on that in the next post.

White-Water Rafting in La Fortuna

2011-04-04T09:22:00.000-07:00

Next up after Monteverde was La Fortuna and it was another great time in Costa Rica.

We arrived in La Fortuna, like we arrived in a lot of places, after a long, arduous drive across Costa Rica. Upon arrival, we checked into our hotel and then went to a tour shop to try and plan our activities for the next day and a half. The activity that most people were interested in was white-water rafting. I’m not big on water and it was expensive, but I opted in anticipating that it would be fun and safe enough.

We went to get some food after our meeting at the tour shop and there were a few beers downed. (My favorite Costa Rican beer turned out to be Pilsen, though I ended up with an Imperial t-shirt because it has a much cooler logo.) We went back to the bar at the hotel and had a few more drinks until everybody met for dinner. Not being able to pass them up when I see them on a menu, I had some hot wings and more beer. On the way back to the hotel, we purchased some wine and, ultimately, we ended up with the usual suspects back in the girls’ room passing away the evening. It was all pretty mellow until one person in the group decided to hurl an empty glass of wine off of the balcony, at which point everybody sobered up immediately. End of party.

The next morning, we went white-water rafting and it was amazing. (I wish I had photos but I couldn’t bring my camera and the tour shop wanted way too much money for the photos that it took.) A few people were disappointed because we spent too much time stuck on rocks and the water level was a little low, but it was my first time and I really enjoyed it. I went into the water twice unexpectedly – the first time was when my English friend decided to dive in and horse-collar me into the water backwards and upside down; and the second time was when I fell out of the raft and got pinned in between a large rock and the raft. I never let go of the rope on the raft, so I wasn’t in danger, but as the raft kept moving perilously across my chest and got closer to my neck, it was a tad daunting. Even that experience turned out to be fun, though.

We mostly separated after the rafting trip and then met later to go to a hot springs resort. This turned out to be rather disappointing, in part because the hot water was wreaking havoc on the sunburn that I had incurred during the white-water rafting earlier in the day. I just wasn’t feeling it and it really wasn’t my type of place. I only went because I knew the group only had two more nights together, but in retrospect, I should have just avoided it completely. The food was okay, though. And at least it wasn’t my clothes that were stolen.

After the hot springs, I went to bed. It wasn’t in a good mood and I was ready to head out of Dodge. We weren’t leaving until around noon, though, so in the morning, after flooding my room with the shower, I headed over to a Costa Rican coffee place and got the specialty, which ended up being poured through a little bag and finished as one of the best coffees that I’ve ever had. I bought some souvenirs at a nearby shop and then went back to the hotel to prepare to head to San Jose, where the third leg of the trip was to end and the final leg was to begin. We’ll talk about that later.

Ziplining in Monteverde

2011-04-02T22:02:00.000-07:00

The next day in Monteverde was the day to which most people in the group were looking forward. It was ziplining day in the Cloud Forest. At least, I think it was the Cloud Forest. We were told it was the Cloud Forest but I didn’t see many clouds.

As I stated in my prior post, I had to get up early and get ready for the adventure. It took a 45-minute van ride to get to the area in which we were going to do the ziplining. After getting our tickets, we got harnessed up and then went out to where the fun was to begin, where we received instructions on how not to die or lose any fingers. Always good advice.

The ziplining consisted of thirteen platforms connected with steel cables at various heights and angles. We were harnessed to the cables and just rode along at various speeds, depending on the angle of the lines, from platform to platform. It was far from a high-impact workout, but some of the zips over the rainforest were pretty fun, especially the longer, faster trips. I don’t have a particular fear of heights, though I do have a healthy respect for gravity. The whole trip, however, was pretty fun and there was no real sense of danger at any point along the way. (I wish I had photos to share but I was afraid to bring my camera and dropping it in the rainforest.)

At the very end of the ziplining, we had a Tarzan Swing. Basically, this was getting harnessed onto a rope and holding on while jumping from a platform about 40-feet off the ground and then swinging until people at the bottom were able to stop you. Generally, your body tells you that jumping from this height is a bad idea but once you’ve seen a few people do it, it’s difficult to be but so frightened. As I swung across the forest and returned near the platform, all I could do is look at the person next in line and say, “Awesome.”

After the ziplining, a group of us did a walking tour of the park and the hanging bridges. This was a little disappointing since there were very few photo opportunities. There were a thousand shades of green in the rainforest but very little of any interest on the trek. The hanging bridges were interesting, I suppose, but not particularly comfortable for me.

After the trek, we went out to a pizza place for lunch that had surprisingly good pizza and pasta (I had Pasta Mexicano) and then I returned to the hotel for a little nap. That evening, a handful of us went for a night tour of the rainforest that was pretty fun. The highlights for me had to be the armadillo and sloth that we were able to see during the walk, as well as a handful of tarantulas, though rather small tarantulas. Unfortunately, again, there are no photos since my iPhone doesn’t really perform well at night.

After the walk, a few of us had dinner at a sushi restaurant and then went out for a few drinks. Upon my return, I had another run-in with my English roommate (It’s always the fucking Englishmen!) and I went to the girls’ room with the “bad kids” for a few drinks, though not nearly as many as the night before. I ended up crashing there again on the spare bed and getting up early again for our next trip, this time to La Fortuna. I’ll pick it up there in the next entry.

Monteverde - Easy Come, Easy Go

2011-04-01T21:31:00.000-07:00

After Ometepe Island it was time to move on to Costa Rica and Monteverde where I intended to test my boundaries. I ended up testing even more than that.

We left early, as we always seem to do, from Ometepe Island in order to catch a ferry and then a bus or two to the Costa Rican border. The trip was painless enough, though getting through Nicaraguan immigration was a little bit of a pain in the butt. To counter that, getting into Costa Rica was pretty freaking easy. It was so easy, in fact, that one of the people in our group got in without even getting her passport stamped. About thirty minutes after we left the border towards Monteverde, we were stopped by police who wanted to check our passports. The person in our group who didn’t have a Costa Rican entry stamp and a few random Dutch were forced off the bus in order to return to the border and go through the immigration process. Over the next half-hour, we ended up getting stopped two more times by the Costa Rican police for passport checks. It seems to me that they could save a lot of money and just check people’s passports at the border like every other country does, but who am I to say?

We arrived in Monteverde late in the afternoon and just hung around until it was time for dinner. We took cabs to a restaurant in a nearby town and I had a steak with chimichuri that just made me miss Argentina that much more. I also had my first Pilsen, which has turned out to be my favorite Costa Rican beer. After dinner, we went back to the hotel to drink because we still had quite a bit Flora de Caña rum leftover from Ometepe.

There was a table and some chairs outside of my room at the hotel, and it was still quite early, so the usual suspects gathered outside of my room to drink. At around 10:15 pm, one of my roommates, the Englishman – it’s ALWAYS the fucking Englishmen – came out to shout at us that we were too noisy and he was trying to sleep. Then he slammed the door. It didn’t quite close, so he had to come back to close it again. It didn’t help that he came out in his underwear and he is about 60 years old and 70 pounds overweight. This produced images that none of us will forget no matter how hard we try.

Being the nice people that we are, we moved the party into the girls’ room next door. Eventually, the “bad kids” left in the order in which they traditionally leave and two of us were left outside drinking and smoking cigarettes. As she was passing out, I saw one of my friends in an unconventional way (don’t worry that you don’t understand the reference – this is just to remind myself of the incident in the future) and the two remaining characters in this drama spent a few hours outside enjoying the rum and each other’s company.

Afterwards, instead of facing the wrath of my overweight-scantily clad-anger management needing roommate, I crashed in the girls’ room since they had an extra bed in there. After seeing some other things that I won’t soon forget and a quick game of Easy Come, Easy Go (again, probably not what you’re thinking but it’s still a reference I’ll remember in the future), I fell asleep around 3 am. We had a big day of ziplining the next day, so I had to get up at six and head over to my room to shower and get ready for that. That’s what I really wanted to write about regarding Monteverde, anyway, so I’ll get to that in the next post.

(It occurs to me as I write this that I probably have no photos to go along with this article. I’ll go ahead and apologize now and maybe I’ll just throw up some random photos from the trip to make up for it.)

Sheldon Day on Ometepe Island

2011-03-31T19:21:00.000-07:00

Well, Ometepe Island was the next stop on our trip through Nicaragua. The high point of this trip was supposed to be a nine-hour hike up a volcano. That was only going to be a high point for those who were interested in such things. I am not interested in such things. It appeared that I would get a full day to myself while others were off trying to sacrifice virgins. That was going to be the high point for me. (The day to myself thing, not the trying to sacrifice virgins thing.)

As we’ve become accustomed to on this trip, we took buses and boats to get to our next destination – Ometepe Island, in Lake Nicaragua, the largest lake in Central America. When we arrived, we first made a beeline to the ATM and then to the local convenience store where our tour guide suggested that we buy large bottles of Flora de Caña, which is evidently the pride of Nicaragua. I had never tried it before, and I’m not a huge rum fan, but I followed the advice and bought a bottle of my own before we headed to our hotel which was about a 30-minute van ride away. (For the record, it may have been the best advice I have ever received.)

By the time we arrived at the hotel, it was already starting to get dark and we were preparing for dinner. By preparing for dinner, I mean drinking rum. There were a lot of large bottles of rum floating about and people were drinking freely. We went to dinner and were entertained by a group of local teenagers performing traditional Ometepe-dances. Some of the dancing looked a little uncomfortably like the forbidden dance, but it was a good show and we appreciated it.

Afterwards, the rum continued to flow. I seem to recall some Jerk Chicken being involved. Sadly, it didn’t even end when my English friend vomited all over my front porch. Well, it sort of did for her, but not for my Australian friend and myself (if you’ve been reading this blog at all, you should be noticing a trend by now) as we even hit the rum that I was hiding out for the following night, going through about 1/3 of a fifth on our own. The night ended at around 3 am or so. It’s really hard to remember. It was probably the drunkest I had been during the entire trip, and that is saying quite a bit.

I got up the next morning around 10 am and found the grossest porch that I have ever seen in my life. My English friend, being a vegetarian, left french fries in virtually every stage of the digestive process on my front porch the night before. There was also some cigarette butts and loose change intermingled. I don’t think those came out of her but I can’t say that with a hundred percent certainty. I walked over to the restaurant and got some coffee. Afterwards, I returned to bed. At around noon, I heard the cleaning people arrive at my front porch and heard one of them say, “¡Dios Mio!” Out of embarrassment, I stayed in my room until they finished cleaning the porch, which took about an hour.

During the afternoon, I pretty much just chillaxed. I played on the internet, I napped, I walked around a little bit. Early in the afternoon, people started to return from island tours and volcano climbing and not one of them could tell me a story to make me even remotely jealous. Every now and then, Sheldon Days are the best days on the trip.

That night, we had a barbeque. I had some fish, some steak and some chicken. There also was some rum floating around, but not nearly as much as there was the night before. This was probably a good thing. We had yet another early morning the next day and most people called it an early night. I got some coffee in the morning and then we were off to cross the border to Costa Rica on our way to Monteverde.

Exit Honduras, Enter Nicaragua

2011-03-30T22:04:00.000-07:00

I have to apologize at this point but I realize that I’m not taking nearly as many photos as I was earlier in the trip. I should still have a couple photos for each of the next several entries but not as many as usual.

Anyhows, on March 19, we headed to Comayagua. There really wasn’t much to do in Comayagua and there wasn’t really much reason to be there except that it was a halfway point between Roatan Island and Granada. We had left from Roatan Island at 5:30 in the morning and were fortunate enough to see an English Premier League match on the ferry ride on the way off the island. Other than that, the trip was pretty uneventful and we got to our hotel shortly after noon. After lunch, we walked around for a while. Meanwhile, I took a picture of a church in the center of town just to have a photo to post on this site. You’re welcome.

We were going to meet for dinner at a Chinese restaurant later in the evening. We didn’t realize at the time, though, that there was a Wendy’s just around the corner from our hotel. We had a few Wendy’s virgins in the group so some of us went there and ruined our appetites. Especially me, since I needed a Baconator from the time I walked in.

I went to the Chinese restaurant anyway and just had a few beers. This was going to be a short night anyway, though, since we had a 12-hour trip across the Honduras/Nicaragua border the next day.

We got up early the next morning and started on our way to Nicaragua. The most important part was finding a volunteer to bring our Honduran jerk chicken into Nicaragua. As it turned out, the border between Honduras and Nicaragua was pretty damn simple and the chicken smuggling wasn’t a big deal.

From the border, we headed towards Granada. One of the most interesting events during the trip was when the bus stopped for a while to let a herd of cattle get by. It reminded me a lot of North Carolina.

Upon arriving in Granada, we went to find an ATM to get some bona fide Nicaraguan currency – Cordobas. Afterwards, we headed to a bar where I had some hot wings, which I find myself getting every time they’re available. There’s only so many rice and beans a man can take. We headed to an Irish pub, afterwards, and drank until they closed and returned to our hotel.

The outdoors things to do in Granada turned out to be pretty lame and not many people went out to do much. My Australian friend and I went out to get a three-hour breakfast and I had one of the most interesting omelettes that I’ve ever eaten. It was a bacon and cheese omelette with entire strips of bacon inside the eggs. It was the first omelette I can ever remember eating that required a knife. Afterwards, we met some friends for a drink and then I retired back to the hotel to write for a while.

Later in the evening, I went out and met a group of friends for some drinks. I had a few but was getting bored. The constant drinking thing was starting to get tedious. I left for about forty minutes and then met back with the group. Unfortunately, though, I wasn’t feeling it. After my Australian friend offended me, my English friend stopped by and made me feel better. Nevertheless, by that time, I had taken a few over-the-counter valium and was ready just to go to bed. The rest of the group went salsa dancing but I couldn’t have cared less. I slept the sleep of the dead and when I awoke, I was ready for the next day’s trip to Ometepe Island. On Ometepe Island, I was going to have a Sheldon day and I was really looking forward to it. I’ll get into that next time.

Finally, Some Physical Activity

2011-03-29T21:46:00.001-07:00

The day after St. Patrick’s Day turned out to be one of my favorite days of the trip up to that point. It was much different from the others, but after spending several days mostly in bars drinking, it was good to get some activity under my belt.

The day started by me being awoken by my English friend throwing up at around 7:15 am outside the window near the bed in which I was sleeping. Having grown nearly immune to hangovers during this trip, I was feeling good but wasn’t able to go back to sleep.

I was supposed to meet a group of people at around ten to go to a nearby beach and rent some jetskis. I had never been on a jetski before so I was looking forward to it. We took a water taxi to the beach only to find out that it cost US$65 per person for a half-hour of jetskiing. I didn’t want to do it that badly. Instead, a Canadian friend and I were approached by somebody who wanted to know if we wanted to kayak. That sounded fun. We asked the cost and it was US$25 combined for two to three hours. That was much more in our price range so we decided to do that. We kayaked around the bay for about an hour-and-a-half and had a lot of fun. When we finished, we met up with the jetskiers for a drink.

After our drink, my Canadian friend and I went back to the beach to swim. It was one of the best swimming experiences I’ve ever had. The water was warm and calm and you could go out quite a distance without the water getting more than about five feet deep. I practiced my breaststroke for a half-hour or so and was really happy with how well I did.

We ended up walking back to our hotel and decided to meet for lunch. Instead of lunch, however, we stopped by a smoothie place and I had a chocolate and banana smoothie. It made me very, very happy. Then, I went souvenir shopping and bought a few things, including a beer t-shirt. I don’t recall the name of the Honduran beer off the top of my head, but I remember it wasn’t my favorite – I just liked the t-shirt.

Later on, a group of us went out for dinner. We stopped by the floating bar that we tried to board the night before and we were much more successful this time, seeing as there was no US$30 cover charge to worry about. There wasn’t much interest in staying out late for a second night so we returned to the hotel kind of early. When we got there, my Australian friend was standing outside smoking a cigar. Seriously, she was smoking a cigar. We decided that her efforts were a waste of lung capacity, so we brought out some jerk chicken and went for a walkabout. There was a little paranoia as my Australian friend took off back for the hotel near the end of the walkabout. Afterwards, nobody was in the mood for a long, long night, so we called it a relatively early night and went to bed. Also, we had a 5:30 am trip off to Comayagua the next day, so there really wasn’t much point in staying up anyway.

There wasn’t be much to Comayagua, but I’ll get into that in the next entry as well as our border crossing into Nicaragua.

St. Patty's Day - Honduran Style

2011-03-26T03:14:00.000-07:00

It took a few buses and a ferry, but we made it to Roatan Island, off the northern coast of Honduras, late in the afternoon on March 16. By the time we arrived, it was already pretty late and there wasn’t much time for anything but dinner. We went to a pizza place that had wifi and I learned that somebody had been buying women’s fashions with my credit card. With that knowledge, I took out some money for the next few days and cancelled my card. Fortunately, I travel with a spare, so I won’t run out of money but it’s going to be a pain in the ass trying to replace the card while I’m traveling. (By the way, I don't have any pictures of these particular days so I'm just shooting up random photos of the recent past.)

The next morning, there were some people snorkeling and diving, or at least trying to do some of these things. The weather was pretty crappy, though, so I don’t think they got the full experience. I, on the other hand, went to get some breakfast at a place that had wifi and worked on my credit card issues.

After breakfast, I started looking for partners-in-crime. It was St. Patrick’s Day and I wouldn’t have felt right if I had neglected my Irish ancestors by ignoring such a holy day. I ran into some friends and had some lunch and then started looking for the usual suspects. I found them at the dive shop and, lo and behold, there was a bar upstairs of the shop. We went up around 1:00 pm and had a few beers. And a few more. And maybe another one; I don’t remember. Then people from the group came by and were heading to a Thai restaurant that was located across the street. We followed them over there, but the menu wasn’t appealing and the prices were steep so the three of us left and went to a bar a few doors down for some vegetarian nachos and more beer. One of the girls got sick, albeit discreetly, and we left before too long.

Despite traveling with the walking wounded, we decided to stop by another bar on the way home because it was advertising green beer and Cuban cigars for $6. Needless to say, this probably wasn’t a good idea– the sick girl turned into Linda Blair and started vomiting green – but it was good for a memory or two. We went back to the hotel to drop off the sick girl, who had to break into her room so she could get to bed.

After dropping off the sick Australian, my English friend and I decided to head out to a floating bar in which we heard there was some jerk chicken available. We had to take a water taxi to get to it and when we arrived, we learned there was a $30 cover charge. Umm, nevermind. We went back to the island on the same water taxi.

We walked around a little more and found out that much of the group was in a bar next door to the Thai restaurant, performing karaoke. We went in and had some more drinks and it was a lot of fun. I sang Wonderwall with a little group, just for the record.

While all this was going on, my English friend found a jerk chicken salesman. As I write this, I can see the stupidity of what I did, but three of us got into a van with a few salesmen and went for a ride. I tried to keep a close eye on where we were at all times (I always have an escape route in mind) but we ended up stopping at a house about 100 yards from our hotel, so we were in a good place. We had some jerk chicken and then called it a night. All-in-all, it wasn’t as memorable as my traditional Thai Thanksgiving, but I did enjoy my traditional Honduran St. Patty’s Day.

Now I'm Hiding In Honduras

2011-03-25T07:43:00.000-07:00

March 14 was yet another early morning as we prepared for yet another border crossing. This time, we were headed to Copan, Honduras.

It took us about four hours to get to the Guatemalan/Honduran border. Once we got there, though, things went about as smoothly as possible. We all handed over our passports to the tour leader, waited about forty-five minutes, and then went on our merry way into Honduras. Copan was only about a 20-minute drive from the border.

We got to the hotel and checked in. It was a short downhill walk to the center of town and we headed in that direction for some lunch. I had a bacon, avocado and cream cheese sandwich that was a little too heavy on the avocado and a little too light on the bacon. Afterwards, a few of us walked around town to scope out a place to watch the next day’s Champions League match between Manchester United and Marseille.

That evening, we went out to dinner at a meat-oriented restaurant. As good as it smelled, I ended up having a steak that was so-so. The most memorable part of the meal turned out to be the heated discussion at the other table between my best friend on the trip and the tour leader. After about five minutes of complete awkwardness, we met up outside and went out for a few drinks. We ended up closing three bars before returning to the hotel, where we had to crawl through a small door in the gate to get in.

The next morning was cultural day in Copan. The most noted site in Copan is an ancient Mayan city. I’ve been going to ruins pretty consistently throughout this trip, but since Copan is the final Mayan ruin site on our trek, I didn’t want to miss it. I had heard great things about Copan, but I was a little disappointed. Perhaps I’m just a little ruined-out, but Copan’s Mayan site struck me as more of the same, just on a smaller scale. Much of it has degenerated and, although restoration is in process, there really hadn’t been enough of it done for the site to intrigue me but so much. Still, I took lots of photos because that’s what I do. (The rest of the photos for this entry are all from the ruins.)

After the ruins, I met up with the usual suspects and we went out to watch the Manchester United/Marseille match. The place at which we wanted to watch the match was closed so we went back to the restaurant at which we had dinner the night before, having remembered that it had a big screen television. As fate would have it, we ended up watching the match between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich. (Go Inter!!!) Also, as fate would have it, happy hour started at 2:00 pm, so we nibbled at some food and went through, oh I don’t know, six or seven bottles of wine. I figured we had drank too many when one of the girls with me and I started harmonizing to the CCR CD that was playing in the background. Good times, good times.

As we were walking back to the hotel, there were some musicians playing on one of the corners of the main square. I took my English friend home, once again crawling through the small door in the gate, and then went back to find my other friend. When I got back to where I left her, however, she had disappeared. It only took a few minutes to find her and, after speaking for a while with a drunk manicurist, we returned to the hotel. This time, however, even the small door was locked. My friend decided to scale the 12-foot high fence to get in. Just as she reached the summit, a guy from the hotel came out, yelling “No, no, no!!!” By this time, obviously, it was too late. My friend climbed down and the guy from the hotel unlocked the gate for me. Another fitting end to an evening of alcohol and merriment. The next day, we headed to Roatan Island, where I’ll pick up in the next installment.

Antigua and Two Days at Mono Loco

2011-03-24T07:37:00.000-07:00

On March 12, we returned to Antigua. I’d love to tell you about all of the cultural things I did in Antigua, but I really spent most of my two days there drinking.

We left San Jorge La Laguna around 6:30 in the morning for a four-hour trek back on the chicken buses to Antigua. Once again, the buses were packed with people and once the trip was over, we were glad for the experience, but also glad for the experience to end. An English friend and I had one main goal, to get back to Antigua in time to catch the FA Cup match between Manchester United and Arsenal. We managed to get back just in time, drop our bags off at our hotel, and have a quick walk back to Mono Loco to catch the match.

We started drinking beer and I had more of the best hot wings that I’ve had in Central America. After the Manchester United/Arsenal match, I noticed that Carolina was playing Clemson in the semifinals of the ACC Tournament, so we had to stay around for that match and continue drinking. Then there were more sports and more beer and we ended up getting back to the hotel around 6:00 pm. We decided to separate for about forty-five minutes and then meet up for dinner. We ended up meeting up with a few more people and after a few more drinks, we actually turned out to have an early evening.

The next day was our final day in the second-leg of my four-leg journey. Some people were leaving the group while others were joining it. We were supposed to meet at 2:30 for a farewell lunch but fate interfered. And by fate, I mean one-liter bottles of Dorada Ice.

I got up pretty early and decided to walk around Antigua and take pictures of the pretty little town beside the volcanoes. I had been up and doing this for about 45 minutes when I finally went to the main church in Antigua to take photos. Lo and behold, who should I run into except my English friend who was sitting on a bench outside of the church. It was only about thirty minutes before the ACC Tournament final between North Carolina and Duke, so we went back to Mono Loco. We split a vegetarian burrito (that I think ended up making both of us sick) and more liters of beer. We hung out for about four hours and then went back to the hotel to meet up with the departing group for the farewell lunch. Between buying souvenirs and taking photos, though, we ended up being late and missing the lunch. Once we realized this, we just went back to Mono Loco for more beer.

We returned to the hotel just in time for the 6:00 meeting with the members of the third-leg of the tour. By this time, however, my English friend had had a few more beers than she should have. On our way to the meeting, she was pointing at people and saying “Jesuscristo” for some bizarre reason. Just before the meeting, she passed out in my lap, leaving me to introduce her to everybody as we went around the room introducing ourselves. It was pretty funny and I’m sure she made a truly unique first impression on the new folks.

We ended up going to the welcome dinner, but I had no appetite and ended up just having a few drinks. Later in the evening, I had to carry my English friend home. On the way, she hit a curb and almost face-planted on the sidewalk. Fortunately, she ended up with just a minor scratch on her knee. After taking her home, I went out for a little while longer, but it was destined to be another early night since we were hopping on an early-morning bus to Copan, Honduras. I’ll pick it up there in the next entry.

Homestay in San Jorge and Maximón

2011-03-23T07:30:00.000-07:00

On the tenth of March, we rolled into San Jorge La Laguna for a two-night homestay with a local family. When we arrived into town, one of the first things we were told was that it had been requested that we not drink anything while we were in town in order to keep from influencing the local children with our evil Western ways. Fair enough, but with virtually nothing to do in this tiny town of a few thousand, that didn’t leave a whole lot of options.

Almost immediately, we were introduced to our host family and my roommate and I went to see the digs. We were met by the mother (Mercedes) of the family who greeted us and showed us to our room. We were one of the fortunate people who actually had running water throughout our stay as most homes in the area had water only on every other day. After our meeting, a few of us walked down to the lake (Lake Atitlan). It was only two or three kilometers but it was all downhill. Easy enough, but that meant that the return trip would be all uphill. There wasn’t much to see at the lake, at least the part of the lake to which the path took us, but I got plenty of exercise returning to the town on the uphill trek.

Soon after we returned to the town, it was getting close to time for dinner. Upon our return, we met Alejandro, the father of the family, and he invited us to the dining area for some coffee. My roommate and I spoke with Alejandro for about an hour. He told us about the neighboring villages around the lake and the recent civil war, which appears to have left the villages around the lake very divided. He also had several questions about the United States and Canada.

After coffee, it was time for dinner. By this time, we had met the entire family, which also included two teenaged daughters, an eight-year-old son and an infant daughter. For dinner, I was expecting some sort of traditional Guatemalan meal. Instead, we had fried chicken and french fries. For all I know, that may actually be an authentic Guatemalan meal but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It was really good, though, and came with a bunch of tortillas.

After dinner, my roommate and I walked around a little, but like I said, there’s really nothing to do in San Jorge La Laguna. We ended up going back to the room and playing some chess before going to bed.

We got up early the next day to visit a series of villages around Lake Atitlan. I don’t recall the names of all of the villages but they were all named after saints (San Marco, San Sebastian, etc.). I can’t say that they were too exciting but there were some interesting excursions. We went to a bakery that is owned by the grandmother of our tour guide and were serenaded by a group of children that are being taught music by one of our tour guide’s uncles.

The most interesting thing about the lake tour, though, was Maximón. Maximón is a mannequin (for lack of a better term) that was created by the Spanish and is treated as a god by his village. Every year he moves to a different home within the village and the locals bring him food, cigarettes, rum and various other offerings. He is supposed to eat, smoke and drink the offerings but I’m pretty sure the family that is taking care of him at any given time is helping him out a little bit. He shares a room with Jesus and Death, making it a very peculiar holy trinity.

After the tour, we ended up in Panajachel, another village along Lake Atitlan, where a friend and I stopped for a few beers before returning to the dry San Jorge. When we arrived, there was a procession going on for some saint on another who was being carried around, nailed onto a cross. After the procession, we had dinner with our family once again, this time consisting of a pasta dish with chicken (with bones), peas and peppers. Again, it was good and we called it an early night.

The next morning, we had breakfast with our family (scrambled eggs with peppers and onions) and met together early for another chicken bus expedition back to Antigua. I’ll pick up on Antigua in another post.

Chicken Busing Out of Antigua

2011-03-22T07:53:00.000-07:00

After our quiet time at Rio Dulce, it was time to move on. The next trip started on to Antigua, where we stayed for only one night (we were coming back a few nights later) and then on to a homestay with a Guatemalan family in San Jorge La Laguna.

The trip to Antigua took seven hours, but as I recall (or rather don’t recall), it wasn’t particularly memorable. It included a stop at a restaurant somewhere along the way and, since the restaurant didn’t look particularly good, I moved on to Pollo Campero. Fried chicken always is a good idea.

Ultimately, we got to Antigua. It was already getting late in the day, about 5:30 pm, and we had a little walking tour of the part of the city in which we were staying. The hotel was only a few blocks from the city’s historical center and, thus, the walking tour was pretty brief. I took out some Guatemalan Quitzales and then we moved onto a sports bar, the Mono Loco, for dinner. (Mono Loco will feature prominently in a future post, I’m certain.) I had the best hot wings that I’ve had in Central America and they had a Champions League match on the big screen television.

There’s a girl in my group who is a huge Manchester United fan and we hung around the Mono Loco after everybody left to watch the rest of the match. Not much happened afterwards so we went back to the hotel, finished off the Jerk Chicken from the night before and that was the end of the night. (While we were walking back to the hotel, we were a little lost and we were stopped by somebody who gave us directions to our hotel and warned us that the neighborhood was dangerous. Another girl in the group was assaulted nearby (she was okay), so the warning turned out to be true. Again, that’s another story, though, for another person’s blog.)

The next day was chicken bus day for us in Guatemala. We had about a six-hour trek to San Jorge La Laguna and we took various chicken buses to get to our destination. Chicken buses are privately-owned buses, generally old school buses from the United States and Canada, that are used to transport people in Guatemala from city-to-city. If you remember when you were younger, each of the seats in the school bus could hold up to three children. Well, in Guatemala, the seats hold three adults. Uncomfortably. We were packed into the buses like sardines, with every third person’s ass cheek hanging in the aisle, while the daredevil bus drivers took the hard turns of the Guatemalan mountain roads at speeds that would make Jeff Gordon cringe. This caused the entire ride to be like a roller coaster and meant that you learned to be rather intimate with the people sitting closest to you.

Don’t get me wrong, the chicken bus actually was pretty fun. If nothing else, it is an experience that one definitely should take advantage of while in Guatemala.

After six chicken buses and a stop along the way for some breakfast and some shopping, we arrived in San Jorge La Fortuna.

This seems like a pretty good stopping point, so I’ll pick up San Jorge in another entry.

Sweet River Chronicles

2011-03-21T07:48:00.000-07:00

The next day, we headed to an island on the Rio Dulce, once again via both bus and motorboat. Don’t ask me the name of the island because I couldn’t tell you. The Rio Dulce sits on the shore of Lake Izabal and our island was connected to the rest of the world only by motorboat.

We arrived fairly early to the island and we checked into our huts. These huts were more impressive than those in Tulum because we actually had electricity, though bathrooms were again shared. We arrive pretty early so we had time to do some activities during the day. A group of us went to Livingston, a tourist town on the banks of Lake Izabal and had a brief tour of the lake. We had lunch in Livingston and had some time to walk around the town, but there really wasn’t that much to it, to be perfectly honest.

When we returned to the island, we headed upstairs of the restaurant/lobby of the island hotel because there was a pool table upstairs. The “bad kids” drank beer and shot some pool as the night went on. Eventually, the party went outside and we continued to drink until we realized, untimely, that the bar had been closed. By this time, we really wanted some more alcohol, but I had run out of vodka the night before in Flores. One woman in the group had some leftover Mezcal and we started drinking that, which led to another woman throwing up on my leg. That was the end of the Mezcal and the drinking for the night. We tried to come up with a way to get more alcohol, but our efforts proved fruitless. Eventually, we decided to call it a night.

The next day, we headed out pretty early and went to visit a nearby hot waterfall. This was my first experience with such a waterfall. The water coming in from the nearby creek was cold but the water coming down from the waterfall was actually very warm. This made for very comfortable swimming conditions and I went into the water as far as my limited swimming abilities allowed. It felt good to get into the fresh, warm water and the proverbial good time was had by all.

After the waterfall, we returned to the island and there wasn’t a whole lot of activity going on there. A couple of us watched the Barcelona/Arsenal match on the television upstairs and then I retired back to my hut to work on this blog. (I still haven’t found sufficient internet connections to post anything, but that means there will be many posts in rapid succession once such a connection is found.)

At night, we returned to the billiards table and shot some more pool. After declaring myself Mexican champion (as well as Chinese champion back in October), my partner and I earned the right to call ourselves Guatemalan champions as well.

As happy hour ended, we loaded up on beers to make sure we didn’t run out of alcohol once again. In addition, we were able to find some more Jerk Chicken on the island. For the second night in a row, it turned into a long drinking night, this time with Jerk Chicken and without anyone throwing up on me. Who could ask for anything more?

There wasn’t really much to do on the island but drink, so that’s what we did mostly, but we would make up for that in a few days when we hit the dry town. But that story is still a few entries away.

Flores/Tikal/Welcome to Guatemala

2011-03-20T07:45:00.000-07:00

On March 5, we made our way to Flores, which is an island in Lake Peten Itza. The trip started with a trek to the border as we crossed from Belize into Guatemala. Getting through immigration and customs was pretty simple and we headed into Flores. (The highlight of Flores was Tikal, so all the pictures with this post are from that Mayan site.)

We arrived in Flores, checked into our hotel and went to lunch. Afterwards, somebody in the “bad kids” group discovered a bar with a happy hour that started within minutes of our discovery so we went there and had a few drinks. Afterwards, while others went swimming, I went onto my computer, since I was able to plug into the next-door hotel’s internet, and I played on my computer. At around six, we went out for another drink. We got back at 6:30 for a meeting with the rest of the group. In the meantime, I left my computer plugged in while we drank.

Sometime within the thirty minutes that we were gone, somebody had removed window panes from our window and broken into our room. As far as anybody could tell, the only thing that was missing was my roommate’s computer. The thieves nearly had to step on my computer in order to get to my roommate’s computer, but mine was left untouched. In addition, things were taken out of my small backpack but nothing was missing, despite the fact that I had about $200 in a small baggie at the bottom of my bag. The only justification that I can think of is that my roommate’s computer is small and was easy to hide by the thieves. At the end of the day, though, nothing of mine was stolen and I considered myself to be very fortunate.

The next day, we headed to Tikal. Tikal is a very interesting Mayan site. Unlike many of the Mayan ruins that we had visited throughout Mexico and Belize, much of Tikal has been reconstructed only to a very limited degree. It is a very large complex but many of the temples and other structures are in various states of disrepair. Still, the structures that are still standing are quite impressive. We also got to see some exotic birds. I found it interesting that the Australians in our group seemed to be very intrigued by woodpeckers and hummingbirds since those are so common in the United States. I was much more interested in the Toucans myself.

Come to think of it, maybe we went to Tikal the day before our room was broken into. That must have been the case because after our room was ransacked, I requested to be moved to another room. Since there were no more rooms available in the hotel, we were moved to the hotel next door. This turned out to be quite an upgrade. My roommate and I ended up getting a room with large beds, comfortable pillows and air-conditioning. We also had a huge balcony. The “bad kids” decided to take advantage of the balcony by buying beer and heading upstairs to drink. When the beer ran out, we emptied out the vodka that I had been carrying around since Mexico. For the record, vodka goes better with Gatorade than it does with Orange Crush.

That was pretty much it for Flores. Other than Tikal and being robbed (or at least my roommate being robbed), there wasn’t really much to report. The next day, we were heading to an island on the Rio Dulce and that is where I’ll pick up next time.

Xunan Tunich and Jerk Chicken

2011-03-19T07:39:00.000-07:00

I wasn’t expecting much from San Ignacio but I ended up having one of the most unexpectedly fun nights of my trip.

I woke up early in the morning and I had absolutely no plans. It seemed like it was going to be a wasted day in Belize. The other “bad kids” were going caving and I was pretty much on my own. I stopped in a place across the street from the hotel to grab some breakfast, however, and ran into some other people from my group who were planning to head to the Mayan ceremonial center at Xunan Tunich and I decided to tag along.

We took the public bus to Xunan Tunich and walked about a mile to the Mayan site. Compared to other Mayan sites that I have visited on this leg of my journey, Xunan Tunich is very small. There are a handful of excavated temples, however, and a small group of folks and I climbed to the top of the tallest one on the complex and we were able to get fantastic views of the surrounding area. It provided a truly unique perspective on how these Mayan sites, located in the rain forest, were able to be completely swallowed up by the surrounding jungle. The Belize government did a great job of maintaining the site but you could see the jungle closing in from all directions. After visiting the site, we stopped for a beer at a nearby bar and then returned to San Ignacio via public bus.

I went to lunch with a couple of people with whom I went to Xunan Tunich at an Italian place about which I had read some great reviews. The food was actually pretty average but it did provide the line of the trip thus far. The owner of the restaurant was a tanned Englishman with a strong cockney accent. He also was our server as the restaurant was kind of deserted. As we were paying, an older, flighty woman in our group told the man, “You’re English is quite good.” The other person there and I sort of looked at each other as if to say “Seriously? You said that.” At that point, the owner responded, “It should be, I’m English.” I couldn’t do anything but lay my forehead on the table and bust out laughing. I think I may have offended the person who made the comment, but I couldn’t help myself. Oh, there are some in every group.

After lunch, I ran into the rest of the “bad kid” group. They were all exhausted but filled with adrenaline from their day of caving. After waiting around for an hour for everybody to shower, we headed to a nearby bar for a drink. Then we had another. And another. Eventually, we moved the party to a table in the back that was outside because there was some smoking involved. If you recall, in an earlier post, I made reference to a group search for Jerk Chicken. Well, after about beer number ten, the bartender came over to us with a spring roll of Jerk Chicken . . .

. . . Eventually, we finished our Jerk Chicken and went back to our hotel. I had a seat on the couch in the lobby and a girl from the “bad kid” group sat next to me. Within about two minutes, her head was on my shoulder, her hand was on my stomach and she was fast asleep. I was a bit tired myself and I sat there for about an hour with her slipping in and out of consciousness. After a while, however, I had to piss and my arm had fallen asleep. I slipped out from under her, went to the bathroom and returned to find her sprawled out on the couch in a fetal position. I got her up and walked her to her room so she could go to bed and then went to my own room and had one of the better sleeps that I had experienced in a while. I think that this is what solidified our designation as the “bad kids.”

Convenience Store Hopping in Caye Caulker

2011-03-18T07:35:00.000-07:00

The next day in Caye Caulker was destined to be a Sheldon Day. Most of the other folks on the tour were going snorkeling and I was going to stay around town.

There’s really nothing much to Caye Caulker. Like I said in my earlier post, none of the streets are paved and there are virtually no vehicles on the island except for golf carts and bicycles. I went out to breakfast with some friends and then decided to explore as much as exploration was possible in Caye Caulker. I walked the streets for a couple of hours, stopping in to several shops to see if anything was worth buying (it wasn’t) and stopping off here and there for a drink. Close to our hotel, next to the graveyard that we had to walk through to get to our hotel, was a restaurant at which I stopped for some lunch. It had internet access, so I played on the internet, had some fish and chips and some beer. That was the highlight of the day. I went back to the hotel and wrote a little bit before the others returned from snorkeling.

In the group, somehow I’ve been linked in with the “bad kid” group. (Okay, it’s not “somehow.” I know how.) The rest of the people just sort of look at us with disapproving glances and then we respond by doing pretty much whatever we want. When the group returned, we went out to dinner. Sadly, two of the “bad kid” group were diving the Blue Hole at 5:00 in the morning, so they went straight to bed after dinner. That left two of us to do something I’ve never done before – convenience store hop. There’s really not enough bars to go bar hopping in Caye Caulker, and walking with open containers is not a problem there, so a friend and I went from convenience store to convenience store, buying beer whenever we ran out, and walking the streets of Caye Caulker at night. That lasted until about midnight when the last of the convenience stores closed. The highlight of the walk was watching a crab try to cross the street while, at first, we started gawking at the crab and then a group of tourists joined us. We got back to the hotel about 12:30 when we got shushed by another hotel guest. We ended up going out to the pier and hanging out for an hour or so before going to bed.

The next day, the group was stuck in Caye Caulker until around 4:00 pm and few people really wanted to do any of the water activities so the day was pretty much like the day before except I had people to hang out with. It was hot and we were bored so we just went from restaurant to restaurant and sitting in each one for an hour and a half. The highlight of this day was going back to the restaurant in which I had eaten lunch the day before and ordering a mango colada while we played on the internet. The mango colada was one of the best drinks that I’ve had on the entire trip.

We took a boat ride off of the island and then hopped on a local bus to San Ignacio, going through Belize’s new capital, Belmopan, on the way. By the time we arrived, there was time for little more than dinner as there were plenty of activities planned for the next day – our only full day in San Ignacio – so that was pretty much it.

Sorry there wasn’t any more excitement than that on which to report with respect to Caye Caulker, but excitement didn’t really seem to be on call there. I’ll get into my day – and night – in San Ignacio in the next entry.

Belize is Alright With Me

2011-03-05T17:17:00.000-08:00

Tulum was the end of the Mexican leg of this trip. From Tulum, we took buses and boats across the border into Belize and Caye Caulker. Belize was to provide me a few days of being able to be by myself.

The trip into Belize started at mid-morning. After breakfast, we headed into our final comfortable Mexican bus to head to the border. The bus took us to a port where we were stamped out of Mexico. Then, for the next hour or so, I suppose I was a man without a country. When we stopped, we went through immigration and customs in Belize, where I got to declare my water bottle filled with vodka. It’s a long story. From there, we hopped on another boat to Caye Caulker.

There’s really not a lot to Caye Caulker. It’s about eight kilometers long and even at its widest parts is less than two kilometers wide. It’s strictly a tourist trap, but does have its charm. There are no paved roads on Caye Caulker and the only motor vehicles that you see are related to construction on the island. People get around by golf cart and bicycle to some extent, but walking will get you pretty much everywhere.

On the first night, we went out to dinner and then a few of us went out to get some drinks. It was just a few of us going out since the group with which I’m currently traveling isn’t exactly the party crowd. Anyway, we went to a reggae bar and had some Belizean beer. I like the taste of the Belizean beer (Belikin), but it makes me feel a little cheated because it comes in heavy bottles that only hold 284 milliliters, so you never get as much as you think you’re getting. People usually hold up the empty bottles to their mouths thinking there will be more because of the weight of the bottle only to have their little beer-guzzling hearts broken.

Back to the reggae bar . . . downstairs, there were swing set seats at the bar. After a few beers, we headed upstairs to see what that was like. It was a pretty cool area, with tables and hammocks and a loungy-type area, lots of rasta folks and tourists and a distinct tinge of marijuana in the air. The upstairs closed around eleven and we moved back downstairs for a little more beer, some dancing and then we wound up closing the bar at midnight.

After the reggae bar closed, three women and I headed to a night club that was open until 2 am or so and the night’s goal had changed as everybody started looking to score some jerk chicken. (Okay, we weren’t looking for jerk chicken, but this is a family blog, so let’s just call it jerk chicken.) Assuming that the rasta guys were the best sources, the women went into search mode and I drank some more. The entire ordeal turned out to be a lot more trouble than it should have been since there were people all over Caye Caulker willing to sell jerk chicken to anybody that was interested. It took so long to score in the club that I finally decided it wasn’t worth it and at 1:30, I just headed home. (Oddly enough, somebody tried to sell me some jerk chicken on my walk home. By this point, though, I was no longer interested.) The ladies did eventually find what they were looking for and ended up getting back to the hotel around 3:00 am. There were some ordeals involved in that adventure, but that’s another story for another person’s blog. As for me, the night was over and a new day beckoned.

Tulum Carnival 2011

2011-03-03T15:53:00.000-08:00

Our second day in Tulum turned out to be much more productive than our first day, thanks in part to an early start to the day and in part to beautiful weather.

The group from the Italian restaurant the night before had decided to meet at 9:00 am to head over to the ruins of Tulum. I ended up getting up early, around 6:30 am, shortly after sunrise. I showered and went out to the beach, where I laid on a beach chair and watched and listened to the tide as I occasionally dozed off. At 8:00 am, the electricity in the hotel returned and I made it up to the restaurant for breakfast. Okay, coffee. We ended up heading out to the ruins at around quarter after nine.

I really don’t have too much information on the ruins of Tulum. After visiting places like Palenque and Chichen Itza in the prior week, the ruins of Tulum really pale in comparison. Their main claim to fame appears to come from the fact that they are right on the shore and include a public beach. We didn’t have a guide and the information plaques were not particularly helpful. We stayed for around an hour, took some pictures and headed back to the hotel.

In the afternoon, I stopped at the hotel bar for a few drinks and some lunch. Afterwards, I went and did some work for my soccer blog and got caught up on the internet. By mid-afternoon, the weather was still pretty good and the wind had died down along the beach, so it was finally time for me to get into the water. Since I don’t swim, the beach is the only place I really indulge and I had a good time although I did cut my toes up in the beginning because of some rocks hidden close to shore. All-in-all, it was fun.

That night, after dinner, we found out that there was a carnival in town, Tulum’s annual carnival. A few of us decided to check it out. There were a lot of rides (mostly for kids), food stands and lots of stalls with vendors selling stuff. We had some hamburguesas and tacos for dinner and then rode a couple of rides. My favorite, though I don’t recall the name of it, was the kind in which you get strapped down and then turned upside down about 40 feet in the air. The best part of it was that there was a moth sitting on the bar holding me in shortly before we started and he was still there when the ride was over. He was a true badass. We finished at the carnival by sharing a bag of churros and then we returned to the hotel.

At the hotel, we stopped at the bar for a nightcap(s). All was going well – meaning we weren’t attacked by snakes this time – until near the end of the night when we tried to pay the bill. Actually, we tried to pay part of the bill so one person to go to bed while a few of us wanted to stay and drink some more. The person in charge must have thought that we were arguing about the amount of the bill because when we tried to pay one person’s portion, he got really frustrated. Eventually, he told us not to pay and to just have a great holiday, though he was still obviously frustrated because I think he still thought we were trying to get out of the bill. Finally, we just settled up the entire bill, grabbed a couple more beers and mozied down to the beach where a friend and I just drank and talked. We ended up staying down there until about an hour after the electricity was turned off, making our quest to find our cabañas in the dark quite daunting. Fortunately, my trusty iPhone turned into a flashlight and saved the day. Is there anything the iPhone can’t do?

Tulum - Where Sheldon Got His Groove Back

2011-03-02T15:47:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, February 27, our first leg of the trip had ended and our second leg began in earnest. It started with us meeting around ten in the morning for a bus trip to Tulum, which is only about an hour-and-a-half away from Playa del Carmen. Even though we stayed in a secluded area with no electricity, Tulum turned out to be pretty fun. Mostly, I think, because Tulum is where Sheldon got his grove back as I was finally able to shake the funk that had surrounded me for the better part of the previous week.

It was around noon by the time we got to the “resort” in which we were staying in Tulum. I made it to our cabaña to find that it was breezy, with a good view of the ocean once you stepped out the front door, and had absolutely no electricity. That wasn’t a huge deal since I really didn’t plan to spend any time in there at night until it was time to go to sleep, but it made it so I had to make other plans to recharge all of the electronics that I had brought with me. This planning was made a tad bit more difficult by the fact that Papaya Playa, where we stayed, has absolutely no electricity from 12:20 am to 8:00 am. This turned out to be only a minor problem, however.

When we arrived at Papaya Playa, the weather was gorgeous. It was about 80 degrees with big puffy clouds and a good breezed coming in off the water. After putting my things away and getting settled I came back to the front of the resort to get some lunch before heading to the beach. I ordered quesadillas, which seemed simple enough, but I and the girls that I was eating with all ended up waiting about 90 minutes to get our food. One girl was told about midway into the wait that there was no chicken so she had to change her chicken sandwich order. When the food came, it turned out there was enough chicken for others, just not for her. Odd.

While we waited, the weather started to take a turn for the worse. We had a few brief torrential downpours and the winds from the beach got stronger and stronger. By the time we got our food, which was good but not worth a ninety-minute wait, spending the entire afternoon on the beach stopped sounding like such a great idea.

I ended up farting around for a while, hoping for the weather to break, but it never really did. At around five o’clock, I headed to the little bar with the swing-set seats. After a few drinks, a few friends came over and joined me and I started to feel better and it was around this time that the funk fever started to break. The highlight at the bar was when a snake, maybe a meter long, came crawling under me and the girl who was sitting next to me. While we weren’t in mortal danger, we lifted our feet up to avoid the little bugger while the bartender, who was obviously not a professional snake hander, gradually got rid of the snake.

The group of holdovers from the prior leg of the trip, six of us, went into the city to find someplace for dinner. Problematically, we didn’t know where to get dropped off so we went to the supermarket and decided to walk around that area. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of restaurants around, especially anything Mexican, but we ended up having pizza that was actually quite good at a nearby Italian restaurant. After dinner, we returned to the hotel bar and I had a few drinks with a couple of girls that I am traveling with and ended up talking to a girl from England about soccer for about an hour. I made it to bed just before the electricity went off in the hotel. I’ll get into the second day of the Tulum trip in the next entry.

Chichen Itza / Playa del Carmen

2011-02-27T22:56:00.000-08:00

The bus ride from Merida to Playa del Carmen was rather painful but it also included one of the highlights of the trip, including the part that I was looking forward to most in my entire Mexican/Central American adventure – Chichen Itza.

We had a private van from Merida to Playa del Carmen, so that was pretty cool. At least comfort-wise, the trip wasn’t so terrible. On the way to Playa del Carmen, about an hour-and-a-half out of Merida is Chichen Itza. Chichen Itza recently was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World and is the largest archaeological city of the Mayan civilization in the Yucatan Peninsula. It was a pilgrimage site for the Mayans for over 1,000 years and is one of the most visited places in all of Mexico.

The most famous icon of Chichen Itza is the Pyramid of Kukulcan or El Castillo. This is the pyramid/temple near the center of the facility that was built for the feathered, serpent god Kukulcan. It is busiest during the spring and winter solstice when the sunlight plays optical tricks with the pyramid and gives the appearance of a large serpent coming down the pyramid. With the exception of only the Great Pyramid in Egypt, it is the most iconic pyramid in the world.

Another famous icon at Chichen Itza is the Great Ballcourt. I’m still not sure what the game was, but it involved putting a ball through a hoop – a little like the Charlotte Bobcats but presumably with better accuracy. With respect to the game that was played on the court, this is the largest and impressive court of its kind in the entire Mayan archaeological world. I seem to recall hearing/reading that the game was played to the death at Chichen Itza but there currently are other schools of thought on the matter, such as the “death” being metaphorical rather than literal. I guess there is hope for the Bobcats yet.

There are lots of other structures at Chichen Itza such as the Temple of the Jaguars, the Platform of the Skulls, the Platform of Venus and the Sacred Cenote, which isn’t so much a structure as a gigantic sinkhole in which people were sacrificed after being doped up with liquor made from peyote, among other things. Listing these things isn’t so much important as it is a way for me to elongate the paragraph in order to provide enough space to include another photo. I have so many photos from Chichen Itza that it seems wasteful not to include at least three in this entry, so hopefully this paragraph is long enough now.

Leaving Chichen Itza, the rest of the trip to Playa del Carmen was a three-hour painful ride. I won’t go into why because it’s not important. I just write this so I’ll remember it when I look back at this entry. I’ll know what I’m talking about.

I’m not going to waste an entry on Playa del Carmen. I didn’t even bother to take many pictures. It’s got a nice beach, which I strolled for a while, but the town as far as I could tell is just a tacky resort town full of tourists and bars and restaurants and is most useful as a spring break hangout.

There is one thing worth mentioning from here, though. At a restaurant around the corner from my hotel, I stopped for some tacos and beer. I ordered Tacos de Mexicano. I received a bowl filled with a stew of chorizo, beef, onions and other tasty treats and six corn tortillas. It also came with guacamole, hot sauce, pico de gallo with jalapenos and other goodies. Once assembled, they were the best tacos I have ever eaten in my life and I was a big taco fan to begin with. The one pleasure that I’ll leave with from Playa del Carmen will be my memories of those tacos. God bless you tacos!!!

Tomorrow morning, we are off from Playa del Carmen to Tulum for a little more Mayan history and a little more adventure. See you there.

Merida

2011-02-26T17:04:00.000-08:00

We arrived early in Merida and arrived at the hotel at around 7:00. Fortunately, most of the rooms were ready and we got to put our things up and get some breakfast at the hotel, which for me meant coffee.

We were out early on a tour of the area surrounding Merida. First up was stopping by and seeing some churches and other stuff. Then we went to a place where we were put onto little horse-drawn carriages (I’ll call it a carriage for lack of a better word. Actually, it was more like a palette with slightly-padded seats that were run on tracks) to go to various cenotes in the area. These were fresh-water swimming holes that were pretty deep, so I didn’t go in, and were pretty crowded with tourists. My favorite part was at one of them when we ran into some young American girls who tried to have the following conversation with us:

American Girl 1: Are you guys from Europe?

American Girl 2: Isn’t the Loch Ness Monster in Europe?

American Girl 1: Yeah, like Sweden?

American tourists. God, you gotta love them.

After the swimming we returned to where we hopped on the Carriages of Doom because there also was a restaurant there. I ordered a steak and waited. And waited. And waited. About 75 minutes after I ordered the steak, it arrived. It was good, especially with the hot sauce that I added, and everybody got to watch me eat it. Good times.

After lunch, we went on a little driving tour around the city of Merida. I didn’t take pictures because I thought that I might get out on my own to see the city and would take some better pictures that way but that was never to happen. Also, the back of the van was particularly warm and we were starting to have a mutiny, so the van ride ended a bit prematurely.

When we returned, a girl on the trip and I went out and grabbed some beers and came back to the hotel to shoot some pool. Returning to old form, I sucked until around the third beer, improved, and probably would have started sucking again around beer six, but we were cut short before reaching that point in order to go to dinner. I don’t want to brag, but I was pretty impressive. So impressive that the girl I was playing with ended up sleeping with somebody else. But, then, that’s pretty much the story of my life.

The next day was pretty much a waste and I don’t want to do a whole entry on it so I’ll try to sum it up here. We took a two-hour bus ride to a beach on the Gulf of Mexico. It wasn’t an ugly beach, but it was more of a fisherman’s beach than a tourist beach. From there, we went on a 2.5-hour tour to see flamingos in the wild. We saw about 30. We also had a five-minute stop to see a petrified forest and a ten-minute stop to go swimming in another cenote. Afterwards, we returned to the beach for lunch, which I skipped, and there was more swimming while we staggered our returns to the city on the two-hour buses. Had I known what the day had in store, I would have just stayed in the city and roamed around on my own. Poor due diligence on my part. Oh, well. Traveling in groups has some good days and some bad days. This was one of the bad ones.

Dinner ended up being Burger King as a substantial part of the group had eaten enough corn/bean products for a week and decided to do something beefy. This leg of the trip ends on Saturday and we will be inundated with new blood as several people on the current leg leave and several new members join. I’ve liked the group that I’m with, overall, but I’m ready for a little change, as well.

That’s where I’m at now, as I write this on Friday morning. In an hour or so, we are taking off for Playa del Carmen with a stop at Chichen Itza on the way. That’s what I’ve been looking forward to most on this trip so hopefully the tone of these entries will improve shortly.

Palenque

2011-02-25T19:43:00.000-08:00

Well, the worst part of the Bad Time came to a conclusion just in time because it was time to visit Palenque. Palenque is an ancient Mayan city that was active between 100 b.c. and 800 a.d. Palenque disappeared into the jungle after that but is now being excavated, although, to date, archaeologists estimate that only about five percent of the site has been unearthed.

We hired a local guide at the gate to give us some insight to the site and he was pretty helpful. When you first enter the site, you come upon the Palace and the Temple of the Inscriptions. The buildings sit in a complex with other temples that are in greater states of disrepair. The Palace and Temple of Inscriptions, however, are breathtaking. Palenque is perhaps most notable in that it was the first Mayan site in which archaeologists were able to locate the remains of Mayan rulers. In 1952, Alberto Ruz Lhuillier found a passageway to the sarcophagus of Pakal the Great, who ruled Palenque for 68 years during the seventh century. The sarcophagus was found in the Temple of the Inscriptions and is currently housed in the Palenque museum, which is on-site.

We climbed up to the top of the Palace and continued on our way through the site, past the aqueduct. The other impressive area at Palenque is the Temple of the Cross complex, which includes the Temple of the Cross, Temple of the Sun and Temple of the Foliated Cross. We climbed to the top of each one. I’m not sure exactly why. Nice views, I guess. There were remnants of art in each of the buildings but not enough to justify climbing to the top of a temple in a rainforest in order to see them. Nevertheless, the Bad Time was over and I was enjoying myself.

After visiting a few other structures at Palenque, we made our way over to the museum. It’s not a large museum and there aren’t a lot of pieces in it. The prize piece has to be the sarcophagus of Pakal the Great, which is housed in its own air-conditioned room. There are also various pieces of jewelry, masks, pottery and other items that have been recovered from the site. The museum as a whole is nothing spectacular in its own right, but it’s worth a visit if you’re already there.

After Mayan ruins, it was time for some fútbol. It was Tuesday and the Champions League was in action so a Canadian Chelsea supporter and I went looking for a television on which to watch the match. First, we stopped for the best tacos I’ve ever eaten. Then, I got to use my mad Spanish skills to find a restaurant that had a television and would allow us to watch whatever match was on. It turned out to be Real Madrid and Lyon, which finished 1-1.

That evening, we boarded another overnight bus, this time from Palenque to Merida. Unlike the overnight bus a few nights before, I took my sleeping tablets before the ride. I also took another sleeping tablet that my French Canadian roommate had given me. He is my new hero. I have to say that even though the seats barely reclined on this overnight bus, I had the best sleep I’ve had the entire time I’ve been in Mexico. Thank you, modern science!!!

The Bad Time - Mexican Edition

2011-02-24T17:03:00.001-08:00

The Bad Time always comes. It’s cyclical and I never know when it’s going to hit, but I can usually sense it coming within a few days of its arrival. When it first hits me, generally, I can fight it off if I try hard enough and if I can find people with whom I can ride the waves. Eventually, though, the Bad Time becomes too overwhelming to ignore. Usually, it waits until I am having a good time and then it is triggered by something, often something meaningless, and I become debilitatingly depressed.

This time, the Bad Time hit me in San Cristobal. After going to a wine bar and having probably a bottle or so of wine, we went to a club for some dancing and additional drinks. I didn’t drink at this club, but I was still having a good time. Then, the Bad Time came on like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. I was by myself, outside of the club, for about ten minutes and couldn’t overcome the feelings of sadness and loneliness that for some reason choose random moments to appear. This happens to me with less frequency than it used to, and I have a lot of experience with it, but it frightens me when it happens because I know that I’m not functioning with a fully rational mind when it happens. It often hits me while I’m drinking. (I know, right? Alcohol-induced depression. Who would have thought such a thing possible?) As I’ve always done in these situations, I went “Darkman” as a friend of mine used to call it. I just left. Went home. No good-byes. No nothing. I just bolted.

It wasn’t easy to get to sleep but eventually I did. The next day was a free day in San Cristobal, so that made the Bad Time easier. The last thing I want to do during the Bad Time is to be around anybody. I just want to be alone. I walked around San Cristobal and stopped in a couple of shops and restaurants, but I couldn’t eat because there is no appetite during the Bad Time. I took some pictures but eventually went back to the hotel because, for the first time during the entire trip, we had a thunderstorm. Even the weather was going through the Bad Time. (I did get to happen through this random parade, though, going through the Zocalo. I thought that was pretty cool.)

That evening people went out to a Thai restaurant to get some dinner. I blew that off, grabbed a bottle of wine and hung out by myself for a change. I can’t say for sure that it helped at all but it didn’t seem to make anything worse.

The next day we headed to Palenque. On the way, we were going to stop at a couple of waterfalls for some swimming. This was a horrible thing to do during the Bad Time. There was just no way to get away from people and the Bad Time was at its worst. I just listened to my iPod for about four hours until we got to Agua Azul, which was the only waterfall we ended up visiting. I walked with the group until it got to the place where everybody was going to swim. Then, I walked away and avoided the group for the next three-and-a-half hours. The Bad Time was ruining the day and there was no way for me to avoid it.

At night, I tried to come out to dinner with the group. I hadn’t eaten in a few days, and I still wasn’t hungry, but I thought I’d give company a shot. Once again, I had no dinner, but I did have some beer and ended up drinking myself into a better mood. The night didn’t end well, but I felt like I was recovering at least. Anyway, I think the worst part of this episode of the Bad Time has passed.

San Cristobal

2011-02-23T19:22:00.000-08:00

After Oaxaca, it was time to head to San Cristobal. This required a thirteen-hour bus ride to which nobody was really looking forward. The trip was made easier by the fact that we were taking a fancified bus with nearly totally reclining seats for our sleeping pleasure and that was supposed to make all of the difference. As a little insurance, I packed along a little happy juice (vodka and pineapple juice) for the trip.

On the bus, we were able to watch movies, television shows, etc. I watched Despicable Me for the third time, and for the second time in Spanish. It’s a good film. Anyway, it was closing in on midnight and I still wasn’t sleepy. The girl sitting next to me and I decided to have a little happy juice. The only problem was that I couldn’t find my happy juice can. My friend got on her hands and knees looking under our seats for the happy juice. (She’s my new hero.) Ultimately, I found it a few rows up in the aisle. I grabbed the can and we shared some happy juice, though not much. It was enough for her as she went right to sleep. I, on the other hand, kept trying until around 2 am, when I finally surrendered to the Tylenol PM. That finally put me out, though only for about four hours. We swung into San Cristobal early in the morning and I was pretty tired.

We stopped for breakfast and then went to a nearby tourist office for options of things to do. The only thing that sounded interesting to me was a trip to Sumidero Canyon, taking place later in the afternoon. I went back to the hotel and got a little sleep before heading back.

The ride to Sumidero Canyon took about 45-minutes, if I remember correctly, and we all hopped on a small boat to get on the river going through the canyon. I don’t remember the name of the river, and the entire tour was in Spanish, so I was only picking up bits and pieces, but it went right through the heart of the ancient Mayan culture and Spanish conquest.

The highlight of the Sumidero Canyon is the scenery, I suppose. Lots of cliffs. We saw some alligators and some monkeys. We saw Catholic shrines. We saw jungle. Yeah, lots of cliffs and jungle. I think that pretty much sums up what we saw.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the trip through the Sumidero Canyon. I just don’t have the words in me at the moment to describe it very well. Fortunately, pictures are worth a thousand words and all of the photos in this entry are from the Sumidero Canyon.

After the canyon, I hung out at the hotel for a little while and then we headed over to a San Cristobal wine bar. I was excited because the bar had an Argentine malbec wine and those are my favorites. In addition to wine, we received free tapas with every bottle of wine that we bought. We went through a lot of tapas and a lot of wine. Afterwards, we went to a club for some dancing and additional drinking. That is where the bad time started. I’ll talk about the bad time in the next entry.

Oaxaca

2011-02-22T20:58:00.000-08:00

Next up after Puebla, we went to Oaxaca. This required a 5-hour bus ride starting at mid-morning and lasting until mid-afternoon in Oaxaca. Of course, 5-hour bus rides suck, but I passed the time talking with one of my new friends and listening to my iPod. All-in-all, I’ve had much worse travel experiences.

Like I said, we arrived about mid-afternoon. We took about a 15-minute chill period and then met back up in the lobby to have a walking tour of the historic district of the town and then get some food. The walk was pretty interesting. Oaxaca City isn’t a tiny town but we were going through a relatively lightly inhabited part of the city. I took a few pictures as we made our way to the zocalo. There we stopped for dinner and I encountered suspect number one of two of what has caused me so much pain ever since. We stopped at a restaurant and I had chile rellenos. They were filled with beef and I downed them with various types of Mexican beers and they were de-licious.

After dinner, a group of us went out to a bar for additional Mexican beers. It was a good time and it lasted until around 1 am. Upon leaving, I stopped at a little street stand and ordered suspect number two of my troubles. It was a hamburger with a piece of beef, a tiny slice of ham, pineapple (yes, pineapple) and an assortment of other toxins. I must say that it was delicious as well and a new friend of mine and I sang Monty Python songs while walking back to the hotel.

Early the next morning, Montezuma had his revenge and he’s been having it ever since (about four days now). I’m just going to leave it at that.

The next day, we had breakfast and went out for an all-day tour of things around Oaxaca City. We first visited a petrified waterfall. This required a thirty-minute bus ride followed by a 45-minute trek up a hill in the back of a pick-up truck through very bumpy terrain. (This, of course, did great things for my stomach.) Once we got to the top of the mountain, we had some great views of the petrified waterfall, something I had never even heard of before, and the surrounding mountains. There were some ponds and a few people went swimming in there, but I just took some photos and negotiated with my sore, sore belly.

Following this, we went to a mezcal factory and saw how the famous Mexican liquor with the worm at the bottom of the bottle is made. We also tried several various types of mezcal and I think this may have helped to kill some of the bacteria in my system.

From the mezcal factory, we went to the Arbol del Tule. This tree, right outside of Oaxaca City, has the largest base of any tree in the world. One local guide told us that it required nineteen people to stretch their arms in order to surround it. Legend has it that the tree is fourteen hundred years old. When it’s all said and done, though, it’s just a huge fucking tree.

At night, we ordered pizza delivery – some of the worst pizza I’ve ever eaten, though the hot sauce was good – and played a card game involving civilians, mafia and policemen. The next day, we remained in Oaxaca, while we waited for our overnight bus to San Cristobal, but I can’t say there’s anything exciting to report. We hung around various markets in Oaxaca and then went back to the hotel to drink beer, buy vodka for the bus ride, and wait to catch the bus. I guess that’ll be an appropriate place to pick up the next entry, so I’ll see you then.

Recovery in Cholula

2011-02-21T21:41:00.000-08:00

The plan for the group’s final day in Puebla was to visit the nearby town of Cholula, known for its pyramid with the Nuestra Señora de los Remedios on top, and all of its other churches; as well as to visit the nearby volcanoes. That plan, however, began at 8:00 am, and having only gotten home from drinking at 6:00 am, my plan differed somewhat.

My plan involved this: sleep. Sleep until I could sleep no longer sleep or until the pain went away. Sleep until I recovered from being run over by the overnight tequila truck. Sleep until my newly-crushed soul had time to start mending and the fire between my temples began to turn into mere embers. I slept until 11:00 am.

As you know, after a night of drinking, nothing is better than some grease. I walked around to the zocalo and thought about going to McDonald’s or KFC for some traditional U.S.-style grease, but at the last minute I decided to keep with the Mexican-food only (up to this time) diet and I stopped by a restaurant and had an omelette with chorizo and refried beans. It was actually much better than it sounds. After replenishing my grease reserves, I went back to the hotel.

It had become too late to visit both the volcanoes and Cholula, but the hotel could set-up a tour of Cholula at 1:30, so I decided to do that. As I expected, and as I mentioned above, the top thing to do/see in Cholula was to climb to the top of the Great Pyramid of Cholula and visit Nuestra Señora de los Remedios sanctuary at the top. Even though it is pretty hard to even determine that there is a pyramid there, because it appears to be a hill from a distance because of the overgrowth, it is still a popular attraction.

Cholula is legendary as a town in which the Spaniards, after learning of an ambush by the locals, crushed the locals, decided to build churches on top of all of the local landmarks and that now there are 365 churches in Cholula, one for each day of the year. In reality, there are something between 35-45 churches in Cholula, depending on what you count as a church, I suppose. Nevertheless, there are many impressive and unique churches around the city and it was worth a visit. We also visited some artisan shops and tried some mezcal, but the rest of the trip to Cholula wasn’t very exciting.

I returned to the hotel around 5:00 and I decided that a nap was probably a good idea. After I slept for about an hour or so, a group of us went to Vittorio’s, an Italian restaurant near the zocalo that once held (if it doesn’t currently hold) the record for the largest pizza ever made. Nevertheless, I still went with Mexican food as the menu featured tacos de arrachera with pico de gallo and guacamole. The food was very good, but I only put down a couple of beers as I was still recovering from the all-night tequila bar the night before.

At night, I worked on my blogs for a little while and then called it an early night because we were catching a five-hour bus in the morning for Oaxaca. I’ll get into that in the next entry.

¡Lucha Libre en Puebla!

2011-02-20T20:50:00.000-08:00

After having a few drinks with some friends in the Plaza de la Constitucion, it was time to go back and get ready for the night’s activities. Those activities were to include street food, rasslin’ and drinking, so a good time was expected.

Most of the group headed out to Lucha Libre in Puebla. Lucha libre, as you know if you’ve ever watched Telemundo, is Mexican professional wrestling. But before heading into the event, we needed to get some dinner, so we stopped at a local street vendor to get some food. At the stand, the woman behind the grill was making cemita pueblas (if I’m not mistaken, but I may be), Mexican sandwiches commonly cooked by street vendors here. The most popular sandwich appeared to be the milanesa sandwiches on bread, but I opted for chorizo on tortillas because I do love me some chorizo. The sandwich/taco came with chorizo, quesillo, potatoes and cactus. There may have been other things on it as well, but that’s primarily what I recall. After doing my happy dance, I scarfed down the sandwich and moved on.

Across the street was the stadium for the Lucha Libre. In Puebla, I understand that the atmosphere at the event is much more mild than it is in Mexico City, but that everything is much more intimate in Puebla because it is held in a tiny arena. About half (seven) of us bought tickets for the close-up section of the stadium and we got seats four rows from the ring. After entering the arena, but before we had even gotten to our seats, we had been stopped by a vendor to buy beer. She didn’t have change for a 100-peso note, so I had to get my change in more beer. Already, I was beginning to suspect it was going to be a long, but good, night.

The wrestling show was a lot of fun and it was great to sit so close to the action. The action wasn’t significantly different from the action at an American wrestling match. Lots of jumps from the top ropes and people being thrown around the ring and commotion on the floor outside of the ring. There were crowd favorites and one thing that I found interesting is that fans of either wrestler or teams of wrestlers would sit on either side of the stadium in the upper decks. The wrestlers would play to their audience and insult the other side of the room. It was odd for me to see wrestlers standing on the top ropes and flipping off the other side’s fans. Do we get away with that in the United States? (I’ve only been once in the U.S. and that was over twenty-five years ago, so I don’t remember.) Anyway, there was also a hell of a lot of beer, which made it that much more fun.

After wrestling, the downstairs group decided to go to a tequila bar. As you can imagine, there was a lot more beer and . . . wait for it . . . tequila. I had a shot of tequila and told the rest of the group that it would be “just this once.” I told them this for all six or seven of my shots if I remember correctly. I also recall dancing more than I have in a long, long time – perhaps the longest I’ve ever danced without knocking somebody down and stepping on her. We decided to stay until the tour leader broke his record of longest time at this bar with a group, which was 4:30 am. We left at 4:32, but then decided to re-enter. Don’t ask me why. (Incidentally, the photo for this paragraph is from the trough in the men's room at the bar. Like everything I've encountered in Mexico, it's full of limes. I found that interesting.)

We left around 5:30 am and a couple people stopped off for street vendor hamburgers. While this happened a couple women in our group disappeared. We looked around for them for about 20-minutes, couldn’t find them, and went back to the hotel. We arrived around 6:00 and they were there, so all ended well. We all knew that it was going to make for a painful final day in Puebla, but it was a great time.

On to Puebla!!!

2011-02-19T21:24:00.000-08:00

After several days in Mexico City, I was ready to move on and up next was Puebla. Puebla is the fourth largest city in Mexico and is most famous, historically-speaking, for being the site of General Ignacio Zaragoza’s defeat of the French army on May 5, 1862 that gave birth to Cinco de Mayo, which Estadounidenses have celebrated ever since by drinking Corona and perpetuating some of their favorite stereotypes. (Of course, the French took back Puebla soon afterwards, but nobody here seems to remember the date on which that happened.) That being said, the only things that I really knew about Puebla were that its soccer team has the same logo and sponsor as D.C. United and that I needed to try some Mole Poblano.

The bus ride from Mexico City to Puebla took a little under two hours, though that is not factoring in the forty minutes or so in which we waited at the bus station. We arrived around noon and checked in to the hotel. We stayed at the Hotel Victoria, which isn’t the cleanest or nicest hotel on the planet but is located very near Puebla’s Zocalo, or city center. My room also had a little balcony that actually provided a nice view into the Zocalo.

After checking in, we did a little orientation walk around the center of Puebla. We went to the Zocalo and it was similar in outlay, if not scale, to that of Mexico City. It was Valentine’s Day so there were balloons and flowers and people selling the aforementioned everywhere. On one side of the square (as in Mexico City, called the Plaza de la Revolucion) are the city government buildings and on the other side is the cathedral, which was built in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Once again, the weather was unbelievably gorgeous and it allowed us to take lots of photos of the picturesque plaza.

By this time, it was time to eat and we went to a little restaurant a few blocks away from the Zocalo for lunch. Because we didn’t have much time in Puebla, I knew that if there was Mole Poblano on the menu, I was going to get it here because I couldn’t leave Pueblo without trying it. Sure enough, it was on the menu and I ordered it. What came out was a plate with a large chicken leg smothered in mole sauce and some refried beans. Like the mole negro that I had tried in Mexico City, the Mole Poblano was sweeter than I was anticipating, but it was much better than the mole negro sauce that I had tried before. It went well with the chicken and the beer and a good time was had by all.

After lunch, I went back to the hotel to work on my soccer blog for a while and a few friends were going to text me when they had finished shopping so we could grab a few drinks before the night’s festivities – which included street food and wrestling. After a couple hours, I heard back from them and found them sitting on a balcony overlooking the Plaza de la Constitucion, sipping on some margaritas and I decided to partake. I had a few and have come to the realization that Mexican food and drink contain significantly more lime than I’m used to. I’m not saying that it kept me from having a second one. I’m just making a comment.

This entry seems a little short but I think the story of the Cemitas and the Lucha Libre may take a little while, so I’m going to hold off on those until the next time. See you then.

Mexican Food

2011-02-18T16:36:00.000-08:00

Thus far with respect to Mexico City, I’ve written primarily about the places I went and the things that I saw. In this entry, I think I want to talk about food and some other passing thoughts regarding Mexico City.

As I write this, I have been in Mexico for a week. Thus far, I can say with pride that I haven’t eaten anything but Mexican food. I almost broke down today and grabbed a hamburger because I was extremely hungover and needed some greasy comfort food, but instead I grabbed an omlette with chorizo and refried beans. I’m getting ahead of myself, though.

I heard a lot of talk before I came here about how authentic Mexican food was very different from the Tex-Mex stuff that I get in the United States. I have to say that I have found that to be very true. There are not very many of the ground beef and cheddar dishes that are common at Taco Bell here in Mexico that I’ve seen. I have had a lot of tacos here in Mexico City. Some look similar to what I’m used to, meat and toppings in a folded-over corn tortilla. (I’ve seen a thousand tortillas in Mexico thus far and I don’t think I’ve seen a flour one – all corn. The smell of frying corn tortillas is everywhere in Mexico City.) Other tacos have been wrapped up like a mini-burrito but with the same fillings as the others.

My favorite tacos so far have been Tacos de Arranchera, which is tacos with flank steak. The meat has been marinated and the typical toppings provided have been pico de gallo and onions as well as a white cheese that I don’t find too flavorful, but the cheese flavor isn’t necessary with all of the other flavors going on in the food.

I also tried mole, I believe for the first time. Mole is probably the most famous of the Mexican dishes and there are several varieties that are found all over the country. The primary ingredients are chiles and chocolate, but it’s not necessarily either very spicy or sweet. The most famous is Mole Poblano, which is mole from Puebla, but I’ll write about that when I get to the Puebla entries. In Mexico City, I tried enchiladas with mole negro. This was my first experience with mole and I found that the mole that I tried was a little sweeter than I liked. Specifically, the chocolate flavor was a little too obvious.

I tried a few other Mexican dishes as well. I must admit, though, that the majority of the meals that I had in Mexico City were pretty generic because of where I ate them. In Mexico City, there are two restaurant chains that are on almost every corner – VIPS and Sanborn’s. I ate at VIPS twice in Mexico City and Sanborn’s once. These chain restaurants are sort of Mexican versions of Denny’s and Chili’s. They are a step above the fast food joints but not places in which you would expect to find fine cuisine, either. I ate at these places while I was travelling alone, figuring that I would have better meals when somebody with some local experience directed me towards more authentic cuisine. Even after that happened, though, I have to say that nothing I ate in Mexico City blew me away. I still expect that to happen, though, before I leave Mexico and enter Belize.

Depending on who you ask, Mexico City is either the largest or second-largest city in the world and the largest city that I’ve ever visited. That becomes obvious when I look at all of the places that I visited and the things that I saw in and around the city and realize that I saw only a very small fraction of the city. In the north, there is much poverty and I know there are some dangerous parts of the city. I didn’t see any of that. I think that five days in Mexico City probably were enough for me, but I’d definitely recommend paying it a visit. Now, it’s on to Puebla.

Mexico City - Finally to Teotihuacan

2011-02-17T16:28:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, I met the group with which I would be travelling through Mexico. I could tell right off that this could be a fun group. It consists of people from several countries around the world and varies widely in age. As I write this, I’ve witnessed everybody drink at least a little bit after only two days, so I have high hopes. On our final day in Mexico City, we did a lot of sightseeing so I think I’ll just talk about that in this entry.

We hopped on a bus early in the morning with a local guide to visit the Basilica de Guadalupe. I’ve read that this is the holiest religious site in North America and it houses the shroud of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I won’t go into the whole story about the Mexican man who became a saint in 2002 (I think) but one of the miracles involved in his story (I believe from the 16^th century) involves the Virgin Mary casting her likeness onto a shroud that is displayed in the Basilica de Guadalupe. There also are several statues and posters of Pope John Paul II, who visited the Basilica in 2002.

Since it was Sunday when we visited, mass was being held at the site. There actually are two churches at the site, the original one which Mary requested to be built in the 16^th century and a more recent one which I believe dates back to the 1970s. I’m not really one who goes in for all of the religious history or mythology, depending on your views, but witnessing people to react to something that is supremely important to them is always a very humbling experience.

Later in the day, we went to Teotihuacan, which is outside of Mexico City, about an hour drive to the north. Teotihuacan is best known as the site of the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. I found these to be much more interesting than the pyramids in Egypt that I visited around this time last year. One reason for this likely is that you are permitted to climb the Pyramid of the Sun, which we did. On a difficulty level, with ten being walking along the towers of the Great Wall of China, I’d place this around a six. It was a little steep, but not too bad. The lower part was probably more difficult than the higher part, but I made it to the top in about fifteen minutes and took some photos of the Teotihuacan site from there.

From the Pyramid of the Sun, we went to the Pyramid of the Moon. The Pyramid of the Moon is smaller than the Sun, but also impressive. Having climbed to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun, I didn’t feel the need to prove myself by climbing the Pyramid of the Moon, and you’re not allowed to climb to the top anyway, so I just stood at the base and marveled at the structure from there.

Finally, at night, we went back (for me) to Plaza Garibaldi-Mariachi in order to get some dinner and listen to mariachi music. The whole atmosphere was pretty mild, I suppose because it was a Sunday night, and the food was good enough. It’s one of those things that you have to do in Mexico City when you’re here, but I can’t say that it’s necessarily my cup of tea.

That’s pretty much it for what I did in Mexico City. I think I’ll have another entry about the food and some passing thoughts before moving on to writing about Puebla.

Still Running Around The Same Barrio In Mexico City

2011-02-13T21:10:00.000-08:00

After sightseeing in the morning of my first day in Mexico City, I went to get something to eat. As I normally do, I have been going to get something to eat quite frequently. I think I’ll talk about food in another entry, though, so I’ll skip past that for now.

The rest of my first day wasn’t particularly exciting. On Saturday, I transfer to another hotel and meet people with whom I will be travelling. Since I was anticipating a hike across town, dragging eight weeks worth of baggage with me, I decided to locate my destination early. I looked it up on Google Maps and as fate would have it, my new hotel is only about 3/8 of a mile away from my current hotel. ¡Que suerte! Later on, I got some food, but again, I’ll talk about that later.

Upon doing a little research, I found that there were still plenty of sightseeing opportunities in my general vicinity. I wanted to take a few photos of Torre Latinamericano, a famous skyscraper in Mexico City, so I went back out into the neighborhood in which I was the previous day. On my way there, however, my eyes were caught by some older structures on Avenida Hidalgo, so I went in that direction and took some photos. Once I walked a little further, I realized that I had gotten close to Plaza Garibaldi-Mariachi, a famous square that is full of mariachi groups on weekend evenings. Even though this was a Friday morning, I decided to head over to the Plaza just in case I didn’t get another chance. I saw a lot of mariachi performers sitting around with their instruments, but as I expected, nothing much was going on.

I turned around and headed back towards Torre Latinamericano. On my way, just before I got to the Palacio de Bellas Artes that I wrote about in an earlier post, I found a pedestrian street with lots of stores and street vendors and I felt the need to check it out. It wasn’t as bustling as, say, Avenida Florida in Buenos Aires, but again, this was a Friday morning, so I wasn’t expecting it to be going full blast. I walked down about five or six blocks and I saw that the street let out at the Plaza de la Constitución. How did I miss this the previous day? I must have walked right by it. No problem, though. I walked back down the pedestrian street and I was able to get my photos of Torre Latinamerico from there.

I returned towards my hotel down the Paseo de la Reforma but when I got to the street on which my hotel was located, I kept going. I had discovered that further down the Paseo de la Reforma was one of the main icons of Mexico City, the Angel de la Independencia, or “El Angel.” It was only about a fifteen-minute walk from where I had eaten dinner the night before, but at that time I hadn’t realized that I was so close. By the time I got to it, I was hungry so I stopped and had my first (though far from my last) tacos in Mexico. At El Angel, I took some photos, but because of the strength of the sun right overhead, the pictures are a little dark. I hope to return at night and take some better photos when it is lit up.

Okay, that’s it for now. As I write this, it’s Saturday and I’m getting ready to check out of one hotel and walk to another. Then, some more sightseeing this afternoon before meeting people at the new hotel this evening. I’ll be back.

Seeing The Sights In Mexico City

2011-02-12T19:53:00.000-08:00

On my first morning in Mexico City, I started out by consulting an online Mexico City tourist map to try and determine where my hotel was located in relation to the bigger tourist attractions in Mexico City. It turned out I was pretty darn close.

I could see the Paseo de la Reforma from my hotel room window. The Paseo de la Reforma is pretty famous in its own right but, more importantly for me, it links to many of the attractions that I wanted to see. During my first walk down the Paseo de la Reforma, however, I was on a quest. I needed some coffee. Fortunately, there are as many Starbucks in Mexico City as there are in Washington, D.C. At the point where the Paseo de la Reforma meets Avenida Juarez, I stopped at a Starbucks for some coffee and to leer at the architecture in the neighborhood. I have to say that I am really impressed with the architecture in this city.

I knew that if I turned right onto Avenida Juarez, I would eventually end up at the Plaza de la Constitución or Zócalo. Even though that was my primary goal of the morning, I saw a structure down the left side down Avenida Juarez and I went in that direction instead. The structure that I saw turned out to be the Museo de la Revelución. I didn’t go in, thinking that I may get back to it later but there were other things that I wanted to see. Nevertheless, I found the building in which it was housed to be fascinating.

After strolling around for a while and taking some photos, I turned around and headed towards the Zócalo, knowing full well that there would be other things to see on the way. Not too long after re-crossing the Paseo de la Reforma and heading down Avenida Juarez, I came across a little park. I don’t know the name of it, but there were numerous little statues throughout the park and several vendors selling touristic goods. (When I walked back through the park in the afternoon, the number of vendors had quadrupled.) As I walked through the park, I discovered even more interesting architecture and statues. It was a great place to sit and rest for fifteen minutes before heading on down the Avenida.

A little beyond the park is the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts), which is yet another example of the brilliant architecture in this part of the city. I took some photos of the façade, but I don’t know if there’s enough room in this entry to post all of the photos that I’d like to add. Make sure to check out my Mexico City photo update on Facebook whenever I get around to updating it.

Eventually, I made my way down to the Zócalo. The Zócalo is one of the largest public squares in the world. It was pretty deserted while I was there, so I kind of felt like I was walking around in a large, empty parking lot. The Zócalo is bounded by La Catedral (Metropolitan Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary), the oldest and largest cathedral in the Western Hemisphere, and the Palacio Nacional, the executive seat of power in Mexico. The entire areas brought back memories of Tiananmen Square, even though I was in Tiananmen Square on National Day so there were about a million less people in the Zócalo while I was there.

Adding to the majesty of the experience was the fact that the weather was absolutely perfect. The temperature was in the mid-70s and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I have no idea how this will compare to the rest of my trip in Mexico City, but I am really enjoying the start.

On The Road To Mexico City

2011-02-11T19:12:00.000-08:00

It’s been a few months, but I guess it’s about time to get this going again. I’m on the road, so I might as well get back into the swing. (By the way this first entry is about the flight to Mexico City and there are no accompanying photos. I’ll put up some random Mexico City photos to make up for it.)

This trip started just like all of the others – by getting on a plane. I was flying from Raleigh to Orlando to Mexico City. While I was waiting for my flight in Raleigh, we had a little bit of excitement – or I guess it was silence, the opposite of excitement. There was a ceremony outside in which the body of a soldier killed in Afghanistan was presented to the soldier’s brother for the funeral. It drew quite a crowd over to the windows and the entire terminal was silent in his honor. Otherwise, the trip to Orlando was rather routine.

In Orlando, I couldn’t find my flight on the Delta screens even though my flight had a Delta flight number. I looked for a while and then went to get some help. Delta Dude acknowledged that my flight did indeed have a Delta flight number, but he told me that it wasn’t a Delta flight. He told me that it likely was an Aero Mexico flight and that I should check out the Aero Mexico gates. Since Aero Mexico just has the one gate, it shouldn’t have been too difficult to figure out. I got to the Aero Mexico gate and my flight was posted on the board. At least, I assumed it was my flight since it had the same departure time, same departure airport and same destination as my own flight. All I had to do was ask the person at the counter, right? Well, nobody was at the counter, but my flight wasn’t for three hours, so I waited. A few hours later, there still was nobody at the counter. Now, I was starting to get a little concerned. Forty-five minutes before my plane was supposed to depart, the sign at the gate said that the plane was boarding. Nevertheless, I held on to my faith that I was in the right place. About five minutes later, somebody finally came to the counter. I went to make sure I was at the right place, and I was. Whew!!! I checked in and the lady behind the counter told me that I may or may not have luggage when I get off the plane in Mexico City because I checked in so late. In my mind, I cursed her because the only reason I checked in so late is because the stupid airline had left the gate counter unattended until just before the flight. From my mouth, though, came the word “gracias.”

Aero Mexico isn’t the frilliest of airlines, but it got me to Mexico City more or less on time. I went to baggage claim to see if my bag was there. The one thing I had going in my favor is that I knew that if my luggage was there, it would be out quickly because it would have been one of the last bags on the plane. Unbelievably, because my luck with luggage almost never runs this way, my bag came right off and I was able to leave the airport without trying to come up with enough Spanish to file a baggage claim (though I was able to do it when my luggage was lost in Madrid).

Immigration and customs were easy. I went to the taxi counter and purchased a ticket for a cab to my hotel. I got in the cab and the cab driver and I spoke with each other in Spanglish (about 80% Spanish) throughout the 30-minute trip. It was my first time in a Spanish-speaking country since July and I was pretty happy that still I was able to communicate. My teachers in Argentina and Spain would have been proud.

That’s it for now. In the next entry, I’ll write about Mexico City, itself.

Chili Crabs and Durian

2010-12-19T21:04:00.000-08:00

My last day in Singapore was pretty uneventful. I went here and there and ate this and that. There wasn’t anything unique on my agenda so I won’t bother to write about it. Instead, I’ll write about the evening and the food, because that was the true highlight.

On my first night in Singapore, if you recall, I went out with some old friends and some new friends and we had discussed meeting on my last night for some Singaporean chili crabs. As it turned out, everybody had to cancel except for Angie, a new friend that I had met a few days before. She had found a place that was supposed to have great chili crabs and we decided to go to the place she had found.

The place she found was Melben Seafood. When we got there, which I think was around 6:00 pm, there already was a long line of people waiting to get in. Somebody came over to show us a menu and to take our order and then we proceeded to wait in line for about an hour, I believe. All we ordered was a chili crab, a vegetable that I don’t recall but it was green with chilis, and rice. After we got through the line and were seated at our table, it still took about 45 minutes to get our food. The wait wasn’t that bad because it still was relatively early for dinner and I learned a lot from Angie since she’s from Singapore.

The food came and it was worth the wait. The crab came with (I believe fried) bread to dip in the sauce. The crab itself was floating in a thick, sweet, savory sauce that was a little, though not very, spicy. The sauce was like a mixture of tomato sauce and chili sauce and was good with the crab, with the rice and with the bread. It was a little pricey at S$40 per crab but with the rice, the vegetables and the bread, it turned out that the one crab was plenty of food, so the total cost wasn’t horrible. Because I love food as much as I do, I have to say that the chili crab may have been the highlight of my trip to Singapore.

After dinner, we walked back to the subway/mall for dessert. And for dessert we had durian pancakes. If you don’t know durian, let me describe it a little bit for you. The first thing you notice is that it’s quite pungent. I’ve read that it smells like rotting flesh, but I think that’s an insult to zombies. It’s strong enough that it is banned on the Singapore subway system because of the aroma. Nevertheless, I was game. I got a durian pancake and took a bite. It was sweet but did have a strange taste, at least to my palate. It sort of reminded me of potatoes, onions and sour milk all glopped together and put onto a pancake. In order to get the pancake, we had to stand in line for about 15 minutes so it is very popular, but it is a taste that I have yet to acquire. It wasn’t horrible, though, just a little strange to me, so I continued to eat it. Before I finished, I had to go to the bathroom. I don’t think carrying food with you into a bathroom is a particularly good idea, so I scarfed down the last third of the durian pancake before I went in. For a split second, it almost came back up. That would have been bad, and thankfully it didn’t happen, though it would have been a suitable end to my durian adventure.

After dessert, I went back to my hotel. I had to get up early in the morning and head to the Singapore airport for my flight to Los Angeles via Manila so an early evening was in order. I’ll pick up there in the next post.

Eating at the Hawking Centers

2010-12-18T14:31:00.001-08:00

On my second full day in Singapore, I was mostly concerned with something that I’m often mostly concerned with, food. In speaking with my friends the night before, I learned some stuff about the hawking stations in Singapore. I don’t know if what I learned was true, but I heard that there used to be stalls on the streets selling food all over town and the city wanted to get them off the street but not put them out of business. The solution was to build these centers and move the food stores into those.

There are a couple of huge hawking centers in Chinatown and I decided that I’d walk to Chinatown and get some food. The weather was overcast, with occasional sprinkles, but at least that kept the temperature down, so it wasn’t a bad walk, even though it was about 45 minutes each way. On the way, I passed some temples and, of course, malls, but the walk wasn’t particularly interesting.

Once I got to Chinatown, I started looking for the Maxwell Road Food Centre. At Maxwell Road, there are over 100 food stalls selling almost every type of Asian food imaginable. There were several sticky rice places, and some of them quite busy, but I wasn’t in the mood for sticky rice. Instead, I found another place that looked pretty busy (I heard that the busier the place, the better the food would be) and ordered spicy duck noodle soup. I love spicy Asian food and this was the spiciest that I had eaten since I was in southern China, so I was very happy about it. Overall, I definitely think that it was worth the walk.

After lunch, I walked around a little bit and walked to a market nearby my hotel to get some souvenirs. I also went to Bugis Street to use the free wifi. My only other goal of the day, however, was to head to the zoo to see the Night Safari.

The Night Safari in Singapore isn’t so much a safari as it is a combination floor show and tram ride around the zoo in the dark. I left from my hotel around 6:30 and it unexpectedly took me about two hours to get to the Night Safari, the entrance of which is next door to the Singapore Zoo. I had to transfer once I got onto the subway and then take a 45-minute bus ride from the final subway stop to the Night Safari. (Note: Since my iPhone doesn’t have a flash, I have no good pictures of the Night Safari so all of my pictures are from earlier in the day.)

Once I arrived at the Night Safari, I waited for about 20-minutes for a show featuring lots of the nocturnal animals. The highlight of the show was listening to the MC tell people in about a dozen different languages not to use flash photography during the show. Of course, some people still did.

After the show, I went to the tram for the 30-minute ride around the park to see all of the night animals. Of course, we saw all of the usual suspects – elephants, tigers, lions, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, etc. The whole trip is in the rain forest, so we probably were surrounded by unbelievable beauty, but of course it was night so it was difficult to make out much of the beauty. All-in-all, it wasn’t a bad trip, but in retrospect, I probably would have been better off if I had just gone in the daylight and see the Singapore Zoo that way.

It took another hour-and-a-half to get back to my hotel and by this time it was getting kind of late so I called it an evening. The next day was chili crab and durian day and we’ll get into that in the next post.

Going Up and Around in Singapore

2010-12-16T11:45:00.000-08:00

Before I arrived in Singapore, friends who had recently been in Singapore told me about several things that I had to see and/or do while I was in town. The two things that I heard about most often were the Singapore Flyer and the Night Safari. On my first full day in Singapore, I decided to go to the Singapore Flyer.

For those who don’t know, the Singapore Flyer is a huge ferris wheel. Well, it’s a little more than that. According to plaques and signs all around the wheel, it proclaims itself to be the world’s largest observation wheel. I can’t say that I have any evidence to the contrary.

Looking at the map of Singapore that I had, it appeared that the Flyer was about two miles away from my hotel, so I decided to walk to the Flyer to get a better look around the city. Normally, it would only have taken about forty minutes, but Singapore is quite warm. In addition, it’s really humid. I think that each day that I was in Singapore, if it wasn’t raining, it was about 90 degrees with humidity hovering about 80 percent. It was fairly uncomfortable if you were out in it for a while. Fortunately, however, as I mentioned in an earlier post, Singapore is about 60% malls, so whenever you get too hot, you can drop in and get some ice coffee or just otherwise cool off. Also, for the first time since I hit town, it wasn’t raining. With this in mind, it took me around an hour to get to the Flyer in the heat.

When I arrived, I purchased a ticket for the wheel. I don’t recall how much it was, but I recall that it was kind of expensive, just like everything else in Singapore. Also, it wasn’t very busy. Each of the cages on the Flyer has a capacity of 28 people, but I didn’t see more than five or six in any of them. I got on and went around. The entire trip took about a half hour. It actually was pretty interesting. You are provided with great views of Singapore as well as being able to look into Malaysia and Indonesia, though those views from the Flyer weren’t nearly as impressive. There is some really interesting architecture in Singapore but I think the thing that caught my attention the most was the floating soccer field, a picture of which I believe I put in my last post. Another thing that jumps out at you is all of the cranes, signifying all of the construction that is still going on in Singapore, even in a time in which it has slowed in most other places.

After the Flyer, I went to a mall for some free wifi and then went back to my hotel to take a nap. The big event for the evening was to meet up with a friend that I used to work with and her husband. I hadn’t seen her since we both quit our jobs within a week or so of each other and was looking forward to catching up. I met up with her husband first and then we all met up in a restaurant/bar section of Orchard Street, where I had been the night before with other friends. In addition to catching up, we tried a lot of different foods at dinner and then went for a beer, during which I learned a lot about Singapore and reaffirmed my belief that quitting my job was the best thing that I had ever done for my own peace of mind. I had a great time and we discussed meeting up again before I left Singapore. That never happened, but it was great to see them nonetheless.

That was pretty much it for the first day. Next up was Chinatown and the Night Safari. We’ll get to those next time.