Saturday, September 10, 2011

Cruisecation: Day Seven

Day six, so boring.  I mean, so fun to do, so boring to read about.  Day seven, so much things!

Ok so we had signed up to go to Chichen Itza because it's one of the Seven Wonders of the World.  Rad, right?  Except that once we got on the bus, the driver is all, Sad face, Chichen Itza is closed today for political reasons.  I mean, we could drive the three hours there just to see if it's open...  And everyone was like, Grumble grumble but I paid for Chichen Itza grumble, but in the end we went to Tulum instead and it worked out better, at least for me.


Because it was HOT, you guys.  And I am very fat and I generate heat from the inside, and it seems that the fatter I get, the lower my tolerance for being hot gets, so I am always TOO HOT TO LIVE.  So while the ruins at Tulum were no Chichen Itza, they were pretty ruinous (and contained, as advertised, muchas iguanas)


AND were immediately adjacent to this:


Like, you come around a corner and BEACH.  Some of us pulled off our clothes while we raced to the water, since we had opted for swimsuits instead of underwear (too hot), and some of us just went in in our clothes, and we were all of us immediately less crabby.


Chichen Itza is very inland and, one imagines, breezeless.  We will go back one day when I am not so pregnant and it is not so August, maybe.  I predict that it, like Tulum (and Greece), will not be Turkey, which is to say we will not be allowed to CLIMB on the ruins and will be disappointed.



We had a few minutes to wander around the market before our bus took off, and boo and I bought sister-skeletons.  The guy wanted $30 each but was willing to give us two for $50.  We talked him down to giving us both skeletons for $31.

Señor Bones is an avid reader

The ferry from Tulum back to Cozumel played an endless loop of internet-style cat photos, three Irish lasses singing Enya, and a commercial for a '100% monogamy' fragrance that seemed to borrow in all seriousness from Eric Zoolander's 'moisture is the essence of wetness' commercial.

I hadn't been hungry in days, but slothing sweatily around ruins and, more importantly, being off the boat for the day will give you an appetite.  Behold my roasted butternut squash, white bean and arugula salad with lime vinaigrette!


Behold my foccacia bread salad with buffalo mozzarella!


But whither the fruit soups today?  Alas.  Behold instead my insanely delicious and filling spinach and ricotta pasta with pesto and marinara!


And my mile-high lemon meringue tart!


Mom and dad had found a bottle of champagne in their room, which we thought might be due to the Chichen Itza mix-up, but was instead to compensate for the buttons on dad's suit that the laundry people chipped.  So we had a champagne party.

the towel-pig drank mine

And then maybe we went for second-dinner at the trough for tempura and cobbler before heading to Blue Planet: The Most Unexplainably Terrible Show On Earth.


I can't even...it was cheesy but not on purpose?  The dancing was terrible?  The singing was operatic and also terrible?  It was made up entirely of singing and dancing, and was therefore completely terrible?  A girl came out and sang 'What A Wonderful World,' a song that never needs to be sung again unless it's going to be roughed up a bit, AND changed the first line to 'I see trees that are green' which is somehow even more banal than the original 'trees of green'?  Another girl came out in increasingly hideous but all eerily similar Renaissance Fair gowns?  Both guy-singers were skeevy?  They ruined Higher Ground for me?

And then we all went for a night-swim and laughed about how terrible it had been.

3 comments:

Katie, Interrobangs Anonymous said...

Museum nerd-out warning:

First, I'm digital hand slapping you for even *wanting* to climb on ruins. For shame, for shame.

Second, the founder of my old museum was the white dude who excavated Chichen Itza and almost as cool as the ruins itself are these amazing watercolor paintings his wife did of everything they found. The reason they've been able to reconstruct areas and study Chichen Itza as indepthly as they have is because of her mad art skillz.

I also need foccacia bread salad and ricotta pasta.

P.S. Did you know that many musical experts think Louis Armstrong didn't sing "What a Wonderful World?" They suspect an impersonator.

blackbird said...

We did Tulum in April and the guy standing next to me passed out in the heat. Not last April. April 20 years ago.
Were you even BORN then?
Anywho, am very pleased with Senor Skeleton.

Later!

aleta said...

omg duude! dude! At our glorious destination wedding in Playacar, I totally went to Tulum with m'folks and m'friends--I been there yo!

Check it out, this is my sister and I posing under the directive "hey look! we're on vacation!" I'm pretty sure you & I have stood *on the same spot* now. Eeee!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ameadowlark/6140236741/in/photostream