Settling into Puerto Escondido

Treno, the hotel dog is checking out our view

Our new room is gorgeous, still no AC but gorgeous. It’s on the third floor with a view of the ocean in the distance. It has windows on three sides, so it gets a nice breeze. The swimming pool helps. After we hop in the pool, and then stand under the fan or out on the porch, usually we cool off. It also has a private kitchenette. The owners of the school live below us and he said Joe could use his work-out equipment in the garage, so that’s a bonus.

We went back to the Stair-Master beach yesterday. I’m happy to say that it wasn’t as difficult as the first day! A cute little waitress convinced us to try her favorite dish; deep-fried shrimp tacos. Let’s see, I ate banana bread for breakfast, fried tacos for lunch and then for dinner we had pizza again. Thank goodness for the stairs.

After the beach we thought, Hey, let’s try to find the grocery store. It took us awhile, but we found it and we found air-conditioning… Eureka! It’s the first time Joe was willing to wander aimlessly around a grocery store without complaint J We have a small grocery store near our place, but it’s actually more of a bar. On the sidewalk outside they have big screen TVs and chairs full of people watching sports. It helps that you can buy beer in the store and drink outside. Really, it’s brilliant. That store is always packed.

Today was more of the same; frappaccino, Spanish language school, I bought a whole loaf of banana bread, down to the beach to buy beach-towels from a sweet lady selling clothes and beach toys in a lean-to shack, and crossing over to a different beach to lay like beached whales for 3 hours while eating shrimp tacos. The people watching was exceptional today. All of the tiny beach restaurants are crammed together like sardines. Entire families are together at their restaurant, from infants to grandparents. The teens are the servers, the parents are the cooks, the grandparents are bossing everyone around, and the children are playing hide-and-seek. It’s nothing to see an 18 year-old waitress take someone’s order with a baby on her hip. 

Today the waitress had an ingenious way of getting her little girl to stay out of the way; she put her in a big hammock with a bag of chips, tied off the opening, and walked away to take food orders. It was like a playpen for the beach. The toddler crawled around inside of it and entertained herself without getting covered in sand and dirt.

We went over to check out our next hotel and loved it… it has an AC! Yahoo! I’m very excited, but by then I’ll probably have acclimated.

Our favorite beach waitress

We had a fantastic dinner at El Nene. One of the guys behind the bar is Italian and he recommended the barracuda with white wine, garlic and capers. Wow was that good. Joe had a skirt steak with a side of thinly sliced chili poblanos with a cream sauce. The wine selection down here is quite good. I had a glass of Carmenere from Chile. In general the food is good here. I’m trying to let go of the fish tacos mentality. I assumed that would be the specialty here, as it was in Playa del Carmen. Fish here seems to be served cooked whole or in filets But for tacos, shrimp is the popular item here, and octopus or even iguana. The maid was telling us that they make really good iguana here, but she doesn’t like the bugs and worms… okay now that’s just gross, sorry. We have come to accept that the shrimp tacos are deep fried, regardless of what they may say.

We met a couple from London. They are on a one-year trip of Latin America. They started in Cuba and then came to Mexico. They’ll stop a couple of more times and then head into Guatemala. I think that’s amazing for someone in their thirties. How in the world do they get that much time off of work? And to be able to afford it? Another couple, who’re very young, just arrived and they don’t know how long they’ll stay… maybe until Christmas!