I added Lunch to the title, as I do not want to bait and switch you reader into thinking there is a surfin story here. A couple years ago I discovered that I liked eating the Burritos at Surfin Burrito at Kilometer 9.5 on the hotel road. Such was always washed down with at least one large Margarita (no salt) and usually a few added shots of rock gut tequila. Then came the realization that I met people there. 95% fellow tourists, though if you search hard in my 2017-23 stories you wil find an occasional resident!l
Now it is all about the conversations. Every day I try to arrive at 11:30 and get a seat on the outside bench. Sometimes I have to maneuver for a couple seatings until I am in the center position and can welcome guests to either side of me. (Increase the odds of a catch by 100%!) I really am like a spider at her trap. I offer menus and advise on selection. I offer tour guide information. I do feel terrible that I do not tell them ahead of time that the wait for food could be 45 minutes +. The hostess often does divulge this information when things are very bad. They claim that the problem is when only 1 cook shows up for the shift. I do tell guests who engage me in conversation while they are filling out the order form, to fill out the form first and submit it asap.
This is my first year trying to cut back on drinking alcohol. It has been a real success. By that I mean, not just a reduced intake but the establishment of a routine with less that I really enjoyable and I can live with. I’ll do a seperate page on this topic. I am alone on my bike trips, no more anywhere than Cancun. Now of course my daughter in Claremont California should take exception to my sayng that I am alone there and indeed I am not. But at lest there I ride with a riding group that speaks english and hang out daily for lunch at Back Abby and dinner at numerous restaurants. In Cancun I live alone. I am connected physically to a hostel but only occasionally see the other usually short term residents in the court yard.
Above is my first selfie of the people I talk to. I will remember lots more that I talked to before I finally started remembering and forgetting to ask for a selfie. I have this great line: My wife is afraid that I am lonely so would you mind if I took a selfie with you to show her that I do talk to people. These two young ladies live in NYC. They grew up there, The older one works for civil service for the city or state. They were in an all inclusive hotel a fair way further out on the Hotel Road and had walked to Surfin Burrito and fallen into the Tom trap. They were very much the super shy Chinese. Always mouth covered with any type of laugh. Dressed like you often see the young in Korea. Always the little girl. Before they had stopped, I had even seen a young Asian with the same kind of jumper and a toy animal attached to one of the shoulder straps. Hard to imagine how they start dating but I guess the naive young boys fit right in. The key fits the lock. I asked, DID not offer, if they were drinking alcohol and that was very funny and completely not possible. Got me thinking about other conversations where we have noted that the Asian students work themselves to death, put themselves under tremendous pressure. I have often been thinking that we need to help the Asians to loosen up and learn more how to think instead of just learning the material. But maybe I should be thinking more how we can get US students to be a little more concerned about their school progress!
I was able to tell them about the busses and offer to show them how to ride them. After lunch, we each had our money in our hand. We crossed the road from Surfin and when the bus came each of them got on in front of me and paid and I did like wise. I thought we were going back to their hotel. The older one understood the idea of keeping her phone out and tracking the progress. I tried to make sure she had actually put in a destination so that she would know how many Ks there were left to travel. There seemed to be some confusion on this issue. She pointed out to me that there was their hotel and we flew by. Turns out they were on our way to swim? with the Dolphins? at one of the main plazas. We got out. I remember to take this selfie. Then they went off and I crossed the street to take the bus back to my apartment. They came running after me. They wanted to take a selfie for their memory. We did so, parted, and I road the bus home a happy socializer. The next day, they even did a fly by for a few seconds to say hello.
This is the image that got me in the most trouble with Kim. I told her I had finally started remembering to take selfies and she of course did not want to hear any more of me taking pictures of young woman scantily dressed. My guests here are from Columbia. Grandma and grand daughter. Grand daughter had excellent english. She worked hard to translate everything I said so grandma could follow alone. They are staying across the street from Surfin in the Hostel, presumably in a private room. The young girl goes out as night dancing and Granma sleeps! The Dancer says she is about to become a flight attendant. She seemed short? and next she plans to be a piolet. I did check and she does drive a car and a motor cycle!
The above is from the same day, just the next shift. Very interesting. Two 50-60? year old ladies maybe from Minnisota, certainly from the US. I talked mainly to the one you can’t really see behind me. I was not in my later “let me take a selfie” mode so I just took this stelf one. The one I talked to owns a condo and comes from almost 6 months. She just leaves it vacant in the summer. I asked her about restaurants and she gave me Krudo, about 5.5K on the Road. I went and really enjoyed it. It is a keeper. My guess is that this lady would be a great one for a night of drinking and dancing but I would never be able to keep up.
This is a great couple!! We will call him Brazil and she Opera. They are down from Georgia. He was a talker beyond anything I have seen! Asked me questions like my recommendations for staying married. All kinds of stuff. He is SUPER into traveling. To pay for this trips, he was working at a German Hostel over the Xmas holidays. Before and after the 2 week job he travelled to another 4 places in Europe. Loved Istanbul for like a day! The are both at Columbia? university in Georgia. His father is Brazilian but I think he has spent most of this time with his mother in the US, just visited to father in Brazil. He is studding public relations! She Opera.
She has a boy friend back home. Not clear how Brazil is doing on this trip. They both praised his mother to the sky. The young lady grew up in a hard home. She ended up addicted to cocaine, is in remission and has a chip. Not sure what that means? We assume through Brazil, Opera met Brazil’s mother and found her to be a whole new kind of parent, adult. One that asked you what you thought, one that encouraged you. I was asking people a lot about how they learned critical thinking. Opera reported that many of the courses she was force to take were worthless. She just read the books in order to find the paragraph that contained the answer that the teacher wanted.
Brazil said that his mother really taught him critical thinking and encouraged curiosity and travel. He really is off to see the world. And ask people who he meets what they think. That really is unique. No idea if he retains the info.
I have lots more information and people to get back to but I thought I would jump in and do today, Wednesday. January 17, the last at Surfin. This trip I have been downloading images a day at a time from google now that I have a google pixel phone! So above are a couple from Newfoundland! Now of course they could be from somewhere else in the Maritimes but I think I have this right. I think they just got in last night? It took them 3 days to get here. Their original flight was direct but was canceled due to bad weather and they spent a lot of time flying from one Canadian city to another to finally get here at 12 mid night last night!.
They spent that first night in downtown Cancun. I am not sure with all my knowledge of the area I could pull off a midnight hotel acquisition. We will call her Doc as she is an MD. He sells insurance for maybe Met life, I will call him insurance. Doc said that one of the disagreements they have about travel is that she likes to have the first night booked and he likes to just arrive, get the lay of the land and wing it. One of his first lines when we met was that he was struggling with the money and the language. I started to give him my formula, 500 Pecos is 25$ and you work from that. Doc jumped in and said they might have to switch in their minds to conversion to US dollars but they were from Canada and of course that changes the equation. Only a little but still a change.
After I asked Doc what she did, I did poke her about was she really an MD. Yes. She mentioned a lot about whole medicines, maybe some practice in what we might call non-traditional aspects. I did not follow up. It started to rain and they had to move to the table further under the canopy. They offered for me to come with them but I did not jump at it. I only had a little food to finish and I have never had trouble with rain at Surfin. But maye the wind was different Wednesday? I was really getting wet and had to finish up, pack up, pay and leave.
I did poke back in at their new seats and give Doc my business card and ask her to email me. At that time she said her practice focused some on stress. My idea was to get any info she had about alternative ideas for liver. They had picked up a new set of seat mates that made me wish I had followed them out of the rain but life is life, you just do the best you can.
I hand out the cards as often as I can and have a 100% hit rate, no one in Cancun wrote to me! Claremont, the father who noticed my Claremont Senior Bicycle Shirt, did give me his information right there and I have friended him on facebook but even he has not responded to that!. I have not checked in the last couple days.