A Girl...

Like Sands through the Hourglass

Mornings were bright sun on white sheets and white walls and white tile, and being warm all over, and apple-cinnamon crepes and cheese enchiladas and (horrid) sushi and creampuffs shaped like swans all on one plate.

Afternoons were strawberry daiquiries garnished with pineapple wedges, and hourly sunscreen rubdowns, and sitting cross-legged in the one-foot-deep end of the pool while eating chips and salsa and guac and reading Gone with the Wind AT THE SAME TIME.

Evenings were 2-for-1 happy hours and hotel karaoke and taxi rides during which Simon broke out enough high school Spanish to not only get us from here to there to the other place and back again but also to tell one lucky driver the story about when his sister Mel was seven years old and she picked out a live lobster from the tank at a schmancy seafood restaurant and the waiter pulled it out for her and let it crawl around on the table and she named it "Junior" and then they took him away and the next time she saw her leettle friend he was candy apple red and dead as a dead duck and she cried and cried. I also picked up a few new phrases: brazos pequeños and viva el amor and ¿Quanto questa, María?

Nights were lapping waves and chirping crickets, waves and crickets, waves and crickets.

(One night--3:36 a.m. to be exact--was the bathroom horror of too many cigars--everything coming up and out the color of sangria and of oxidized guacamole, and for once it wasn't me.)

Weekdays were sunning by the pool, drinking our calories, and afternoon naps; weekends were homemade chuppas, hugs, and so much good (free!) food.

The balance of simply everything perched on the thin peak of perfection throughout our stay. There was just enough of this, never too much of that. We had plenty of togetherness time (in big groups and with each other) and plenty of alone time (with each other and with each other, nudge nudge), and in a strange alignment of the planets, I never found myself wanting to be anywhere than exactly where I was at any given moment, unless you count Minute 8 in our fifteen-minute walk from the hotel off the main drag to a seafood restaurant someone's cabby had promised was muy fabuloso, although he probably said it in Spanish and not Italian. (This place, as I said, was off the main drag, and even though our group was eleven strong, we were half middle-aged Midwesterners and half pussy-ass Californians and were were all "dressy casual," i.e., begging to be robbed by banditos, obvs, and by the time we had arrived at the restaurant (fluorescent lights, people. FLUORESCENT LIGHTS) I had my fingers crossed and my eyes closed because if the street thugs didn't kill me, the food probably would. Turns out, the food was, as I said out loud while still in the restaurant (because I lack the most basic of social graces), "delicious if no one gets sick." And even though one person did get sick (he had conch cocktail drenched in "sauce" (ketchup) and some sort of spicy chile fish platter (which the waiter warned him against)), I still think it went pretty well; given enough butter, everything is palatable, and I was smart enough to order the one item off the menu that was "wrapped in bacon" and you can't go wrong wrapped in bacon. By the end of the night, the waiter was setting up tequila "poppers" (tequila and 7-Up, shaken, slammed, and then shot) for the groom, buying a round of drinks for the whole table (piña coladas in glasses as big as my head), and turning on salsa music over the big soccer game (think Superbowl) so we could dance between the folding tables. While we ate, the waitresses passed around the seven-month-old baby in our party, who, incidentally, has totally kicked it on tour with Colin Meloy's baby, Hank.)

(And while we're sorta kinda talking about food, I feel the need to remark on a little phenomenon I like to call Vacationer's Oversight, the thought process by which something that offends my delicate gustatorial sensibilities--say, salsa chopped so coarsely that every time I take a bite of this here burrito*, I get wholly intact (as in nonchopped) cilantro leaves and a full two inches of stem stuck in my chicklet teeth--I am likely to call it "authentic" and "traditional" when it happens in Mexico but "annoying" and "awful" and "WRONG" when it happens at the taqueria around the corner in good old Berkeley, which is, incidentally, staffed by real, live Mexicans, from Mexico and everything. In conclusion of this lengthy aside, going on vacation has made me generous and tolerable toward other cultures and countries and absolutely unable to cope with the kind of crap I have to put up with in this Land of the Free, Home of the Cold and the Work and the Forecasts of Rain and Unchopped Cilantro.)

Monday night, after our midday nap and more terrible sushi and more not-terrible 2-for-1 happy hour drinks (best time to order bottled water) and then shrimp linguine via room service, we slipped down to the deserted pool at 9:30 p.m. and stroked around under the almost-full moon between sips from a Bourbonfull flask before the security guard told us the piscine was cerrado. (The jacuzzi was open but peopled with two middle-aged Mexican women who looked at us through suspicious crocodile eyes hovering just above the waterline--suspicious because they knew that we knew they had spent the previous two days with their genitals pressed up against the jets. Who wants to jacuzzi in company like that? And besides, when it's warm enough to swim in the big pool at night to the accompaniment of lapping waves and chirping crickets, there is no better choice.)

So it was a good trip. A relaxing trip. A trip to look back on fondly and to remember when planning future trips. Y'all should really look into finding some friends who are getting married in Mexico. Thank me later in the form of adding me to the guest list.

*What does it say that not twenty-four hours after I get back from Mexico my first meal out is a burrito?

[Ed note: I wrote this entry in stolen moments over the day at work, thinking I could go home and fiddle with photos this evening and then upload the whole thing, la dee dah, all put-together-like, for your multimedia viewing pleasure. But then I remembered that we've been having "issues" with our [stolen] wireless, which means that the guy we've been siphoning off of has in the last two weeks changed the name of his connection three times (although it's obviously still him; dude, we know who you are; you live in our backyard and we are friends and we have discussed our use of your wireless, remember?) and finally firewalled it, or whatever you call it that makes the little masterlock appear in the corner of the networking window. So this is what it's come to. No pictures until I can get a freaking break at work. Mark your calendars for 2008.]