Category: uncategorized

Delayed report due to unexpected circumstances.

After my first trip to Mexico was a disaster of unbelievable proportions, I finally returned to our southern cousin after 8 long years for a vacation! I flew into Cancun on Monday and then slowly made my way down the Yucatan peninsula (Puerto Morelos -> Playa de Carmen -> Tulum) and then flew out of Tulum on Sunday.

• Price differentials are weird here. On one hand, it’s easy to find very high quality accommodation for 50 USD / night. On the other hand, the “typical” trip to Cancun/Tulum features stays at 500 – 1k / night hotels. Since I know that a lot of you seriously question my own judgement on this matter, my standard for “very high quality” is whether I would feel happy taking [redacted] there, which was ironically inversely correlated with the price of the place I stayed in this particular trip. I didn’t stay at any of the high end ones this time (bad planning strikes again! Would have if I had my act together!), but I did visit Casa Malca (an old home of Pablo Escobar) for a day on recommendation of a recruiter at Anthropic. And wow, now I kind of the allure of this kind of life. Walk out of your room and go to a really nice beach. Cold plunges. Excellent food and drinks. Clean restrooms. Guests and staff are all very attractive and immaculately dressed. One could do worse than read “Journey to the West” while sipping on margs by the ocean all day.
• I can’t actually tell what the proper pricing is. Here’s an example. I ate at a taco place with a sign which offered 60 MXN (3 USD) for 5 tacos. I read this as 60 MXN / taco if you buy 5 tacos and decided to order their whole menu to try everything. The waitress didn’t really understand me, but came back to me and gestured enough at the menu that I eventually understood that I had actually ordered like 20 tacos and that I should probably reconsider. But before you make fun of me too hard, right before I stopped at this taco place, I wandered into an area that was clearly designed for westerners that charged 25 USD per meal. I was so hungry that I almost ate there but then figured that Tulum was probably not the best place for Thai or Japanese food. So then I walked about 50 feet and literally — I mean literally — turned the corner and came to this taco place which didn’t have anyone on staff who speaks English and charged like 10x less. Also I ended up eating 14 tacos and then taking another 3 to go, so maybe 20 tacos wouldn’t have been so bad after all. Oops.
• Bring cash, ideally from your bank in the US. A lot of places don’t accept credit card and the ones that do will upcharge you 5-10%. The internet is extremely spotty, so a lot of the times the credit card machines can’t connect to wifi. ATMs rip you off to an insane degree. My favorite memory of this was going to a hotel, in which their pesos ATM was broken (accidental I’m sure), so you had to first withdraw USD and then convert it. I paid a huge ATM fee, then a huge conversion fee to go from pesos -> USD (despite the fact that my account is in USD), and then another huge conversion fee to go from USD -> pesos. All told, I think I lost like 1/3 of the money in the process. Oops.
• Unlike my Europe trek, in which no plan was absolutely the best plan, Mexico probably could have used a little bit of planning. So one example of this is that my first hotel was actually 30 minutes south of Cancun (I didn’t look at the geography very carefully before booking). This wouldn’t even have mattered except that I also didn’t think of the idea of just heading south until after I arrived. This basically meant that my Yucatan trip technically did not include “Cancun”, or even the hotel zone of “Cancun” which is not all that close to the actual city (but really close to the airport!). Oops.
• I didn’t like the food very much. [redacted] tells me this is a “skill issue” and she’s almost certainly right. That being said, the al pastor tacos at the taco stand were really not that good — much worse than the Mexican food truck right outside my apartment. And this isn’t a quirk of memory. I ate an Al Pastor burrito as I (originally) wrote this piece. The best Chinese restaurants will often have very low reviews on Yelp, mostly given by non-Chinese clientele who way that “it’s worse than Panda Express” (this is actually a quote from a Yelp review at one of my favorite restaurants, which is only rated 3 stars). But for Mexican food? I’m the gringo this time. It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me. 

They say that the music you like says a lot about you as a person. For example, my twenty-three year old brother likes peaceful piano ballads while my eight-year-old sister prefers heavy death metal.

When I was a child, my father bought himself the newly released iPhone 1 and handed down his old iPod to me. It only had a few songs on it, so I got quite familiar with what is now called listening on repeat. But they were good songs — worth listening to repeatedly!

A haunting cover of “Star of the County Down” sung by an artist I cannot remember and have never heard again. Classics like 1234 by Feist, 500 miles by the Hooters, or Another Brick In the Wall (Pt. 2) by Pink Floyd. To this day I still haven’t heard Pt. 1.

But my favorite song was Gigolo by Nick Cannon.

You see, these were the days before I had free use of a computer and when navigating a dictionary required a fine-grained understanding of binary search, which I did not yet have. So it took me a decade before I eventually found out that the word gigolo actually meant: male prostitute. I suppose, like many things in my life, it was partially prophetic. But honestly, I consider myself quite fortunate to have survived childhood relatively unscathed honestly. For a kid that grew up singing “I’m a gigolo—spending lots of dough,” it really could have gone another way.

As someone who spent two decades under the California sun, I was curious to see how I’d hold up in a New England winter. The answer is very well; I actually like the cold.

Perhaps this feeling will fade with time. I can easily imagine myself tiring of monotonous grey skies and numb fingertips, longing instead for a warm sunny day perfect for strolling around in a t-shirt and shorts. But I can also imagine being an old man, when even a slight breeze chills me to my bones, standing in the cold, winter air and laughing that I am still alive.

lavender lightning; dijon mustard; the pin tailed whydah; violin plots; an extraordinary dragonfruit; brightly colored socks (mismatched); clicky mechanical keyboards; colorful galaxies far away; a mobius strip; clear, deep, flowing water; Gris; the geometry of Monument Valley; the Wave; a cool breeze and shade on a hundred degree day; lighthearted piano music (fast); my little sister; fluffy sunscreen; well-formed creases; a long stretch of road on foot; firm pillows; wide open spaces; high places with sheer drops; splashes of color; the perfect purple orchid; a baby waterfall

I once heard that “the historian [is] a necromancer who summons bygone events out of nowhere.” Funny how that always stuck with me after all these years. Had I any real guts in college, I would have studied history, but I feared too much the scorn of others.

So I’m not a necromancer, just a memorymancer. I summon moments from my past and demand they stand judgement. Maybe one day, I’ll be strong enough to summon something more.