You never know who you will meet on your morning walk.
This burro is grazing by the side of the road, and, moments earlier, posed for a photo with a young man and his girl friend, who then snapped this photo of Scott in reciprocity. The burro decides he isn’t pleased with us and kicks his hind hooves, warning me to stay the proper distance away.
He is a sturdy burro and in Nicaragua he would be hooked to a cart pulling sand and cement bags to a construction job.
Where you are born in this world makes a difference. You can overcome a bad birthplace, but, if I were a donkey, I would be perfectly pleased calling Tulum, Mexico home.
People call this boy an ass, but he has his world by the tail.
Today, the exchange rate is nineteen pesos to a dollar.
Along the Hotel Zone strip, ATM’s, when they are working, dispense pesos or dollars. If you need money, you walk, bike, or drive to a little pitched roof shack on the main road not far from the Hemingway Eco Cottages.
At the bottom of the front barred window in the shack is a little slot through which the girl behind the window pushes me a small cardboard box just big enough for my dollars. I push the box back through the slot to her and wait. Inside, she has a calculator, a money box, a chair, papers and a pen balanced on her right ear. She counts out pesos, puts them in the cardboard box along with a printed receipt on top of the money, and slides the box back out to me.
The U.S. dollar is strong today so the exchange rate is nineteen to one. The weakest currency is the Canadian dollar. The strongest currencies are the British pound and the Euro. In this money game, the more pesos I get for my dollars, the cheaper vacation I get.
When the girl in the booth sees me, I get a bright smile from her.
I always leave her a tip and she hasn’t made one mistake.
Is handling money all day and not getting to keep any the same as walking in the desert with a canteen and not being able to drink
Sales receipts are prosaic.
On most there are times and dates, food ordered and its price, balances due and how the bill was paid. There is a spot for taxes and gratuities. There can be series of numbers indicating stock numbers of merchandise, re-order times, discounts, adjustments, credits.
On this restaurant receipt, at the bottom, is the phrase, ” Keep Tulum weird. ”
This is weird for a number of reasons. Weird, according to the Oxford dictionary, should really be spelled wierd to follow the rule – i before e except after c. Wierd has been spelled wrong so many years that both spellings are acceptable.Weird is also pronounced – wird, so we have a screwy English language where how a word sounds is not how it is spelled.
“Have a good day” is often at the bottom of sales tickets
” We appreciate your business is sometimes at the bottom of sales receipts.
In Tulum,” Keep Tulum Weird ” is totally acceptable.
The creator of this receipt is probably a seventy year old hippie living an an airstream trailer in a fenced off lot on the beach bought in the fifties for several thousand dollars. He would sell but can’t move because his cat, Mister T, likes to nap on an old couch under the airstream awning, on top of a Pittsburg Pirates World Series Blanket.
For all its weirdness, Tulum is becoming very comfortable.
There is color here.
The beach is a blinding white slightly curving belt of sand holding the blue sea and green jungle loosely around the waist. The sky is a blue un-fenced playground for white soft clouds sailing like yachts. Sunlight is intense and filters through the rustling leaves of a green canopy. Shops, bars and restaurants wear colorful pinks,turquoise, yellow, magenta, red. Bright birds pause on dark brown wood fences. Tourists wear straw hats,purple sarongs,black thongs.
Food is colorful too. For breakfast there is white pineapple,orange and green cantaloupe,green apples,red papaya ,pinkish watermelon. Eggs are deep yellow and brown bread is baked locally.
Stiff brown coffee, the color of Mayan skin, tops off one’s morning meal.
Somehow, this breakfast looks and tastes better than a McDonald’s egg McMuffin.
Somehow,if you aren’t a prisoner, you shouldn’t be eating prison food.
The location of this old Mayan city was well chosen.
It is a place Mayan elite lived for the best part of the year,entertained visitors, enjoyed food and drink on porches as their sun sank into the Caribbean sea. There were simple platforms built on the grounds upon which slaves and servants lived in thatched communal homes. There are altars that still overlook cliffs where offerings would have been made to the Mayan Gods.
Most of the old city has crumbled and front porches have been claimed by iguanas, prehistoric reptiles that survived the dinosaur extermination.The iguanas bask on the stone floors in palaces off limits to tourists, their coloring matching that of the stones around them perfectly. They run oddly with their tails swinging left to right and legs moving like robot legs, surprisingly quick, tongues testing the air as they move towards food or away from danger.
The pyramids still standing here tell the story of this ancient Mayan culture.
On top of the wide base have been stacked smaller and smaller blocks. At the top of the pyramid is a single living unit for the head of the society. There is no agonizing discussion of equality and fairness. All major decisions come from the top of the pyramid and all below the top support the King until they can’t and the pyramid crumbles.
It is strange to walk in one of history’s graveyards.
We have better toys today but we play in the same sandbox the ancients played in.
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