Puerto Vallarta Vacation

Bernie and I spent a fun-filled week in Puerto Vallarta from February 26 to March 6 with a group of our friends. This will be part travelogue and part random observations from a week in Mexico. I realize that it’s not practical to generalize a whole country based on my experience as a tourist in just one city, but I imagine that some of the things I saw and experienced are fairly common throughout Mexico. For starters, the extreme poverty was evident almost everywhere we went. We didn’t stay at a huge, posh, all-inclusive resort…our guest house was certainly beautiful and very comfortable, but when we stepped outside the front door, we were on a typical street in old Puerto Vallarta. Most of the worn down apartment buildings in our neighborhood had rooftop decks with minimal furnishings, clotheslines heavy with the day’s laundry, no screens on the windows, and exposed power lines hanging close to the buildings, sometimes within several inches of the window or balcony.

The roads in the old part of the city are made of stones, and they don’t get a whole lot of upkeep. Off the few main streets, cars drive very slowly, sidestepping the uneven rocks and potholes. Plus, the city is built into the hills, so some of the streets are very steep and partly washed out from rainstorms. There are very few traffic lights or stop signs in the intersections, but drivers seem to do a good job of staying alert and avoiding fender benders. As a pedestrian, you really need to watch the traffic carefully and keep your eyes on the ground so you don’t twist your ankle on the stones, step off the sidewalk and drop anywhere from 6 inches to 3 feet down to the adjacent street, or step into a random hole where street work is being done….and appears not to be wrapping up for quite a long time.

Building codes seem to be pretty relaxed in Mexico as well. We saw one very large hotel that we were told was damaged in a hurricane years ago and now sits open like a skeleton and will probably remain that way for a while. We saw other buildings that are in grave need of repairs, and they probably aren’t getting improvements anytime soon. In one hotel where we went to have drinks on the rooftop bar, we all got in the elevator, the doors closed, and the elevator didn’t move. The doors didn’t open. We pressed the emergency alarm until the building staff came to let us out of our hotbox/deathtrap about 20 minutes later. OK, I’m exaggerating, it felt like we were in there for a reeeeally long time, but I think it was about 3 or 4 minutes before we were rescued. But it was a very small elevator, and the lights went off a couple minutes into our entrapment. And we heard from some friends a couple days later that the same thing happened to them in that elevator. We happily opted to take the stairwell, but let me tell you, that has its safety flaws as well. It climbs along an outside wall of the building, and in places, there is a “safety” wall that’s only about 3 feet high….no railing, no windows, no cushy lawn to fall on down below. Remember, we took that staircase down from a rooftop bar, so thankfully we all stayed upright and made it back to ground level afterwards. :-)

Now, despite the poor quality of the streets themselves, I was impressed at the wavy stone pattern built into many of the sidewalks. I couldn’t help wondering why they would go to so much trouble to add such a nice, artistic pattern to each sidewalk, when they could simply do old fashioned sidewalk squares. Maybe there’s a story there that I don’t know about.

Many of the people we met were very nice and were grateful to have so many tourists shopping in their stores, eating in their restaurants, and relaxing in their bars. However, due to the tremendous poverty of so many citizens, tourists are met with a barrage of aggressive, relentless vendors. They are relatively polite, but you see shopkeepers standing outside stores and restaurants eagerly encouraging you to come in. There are taxi drivers everywhere, and often they will pull up next to you by the sidewalk and ask if you want a ride somewhere. This can happen 5 or 6 times in the span of a 5 block walk down the street. And the beach is prime real estate for vendors who are trying to sell everything from crafts to blankets to sunglasses to skewers of shrimp. A different vendor comes by your group on the beach about every minute or two. A simple “No, Gracias” or a shake of the head is enough to keep them moving along to the next group. I wonder how much money a person tends to make in a typical day like that. What really sticks in my mind is seeing very young children walking around selling things…sometimes at 10:00 at night. That has to be a difficult life for sure.

We enjoyed many delicious meals at the restaurants in town – Margarita Grill, Coexist Café, Gaby’s, Le Bistro Café. A lot of restaurants specialize in Mexican cuisine (of course) but generally offer other options as well. In the middle of our week, we did a day trip called “Diana’s Tour”. We boarded a catamaran and spent the day cruising along the coastline, stopped to do a little snorkeling, stopped for a drink on a secluded beach, and then spent a couple of hours on a resort beach where we had lunch before cruising back to Old Puerto Vallarta. The day was filled with music, drinks, food, and the sighting of a few whales lounging in the water just offshore. We remarked on the lack of regulations -- so different than what you would find in the United States. Before we boarded the catamaran, Captain Diana was handing out Dramamine to anyone who desired some...no waiver to sign or anything. And later that morning, she was giving “Space Cookies” (it’s like a "special" brownie) to a small group of passengers. We also noticed that the passenger load was way over the posted capacity. Oh well…everyone had fun, no one got hurt, and we all made it back to port safely.

Speaking of easy-to-obtain drugs, we saw a Farmacia or a Super Farmacia on practically every street corner in Puerto Vallarta! I can’t get over the fact that anyone can just walk in off the street and purchase pretty much any drugs over the counter. Of course, when I went into a Farmacia, I bought an ice cream bar. :-)

Bernie and I, as well as our group of friends, all really enjoyed our vacation in Puerto Vallarta. The weather was consistently sunny and warm, the prices were reasonable, we felt relatively safe walking around the neighborhood, we didn’t get sick from any of the food or water, and the beach was quite nice. In fact, I was impressed by the fact that there were no shells, stones, or seaweed anywhere along the Blue Chairs / Green Chairs Beach by the hotels. Just soft, white sand. It was wonderful, and I’m excited to go back!

Merging as a Metaphor

On my morning drive to work, there is an entrance ramp onto the highway where lots of cars need to merge from three lanes down to one in a relatively short distance. It occurs to me that there are two main types of people merging, and I think it probably says a lot about how they conduct themselves in other areas of their life as well. The first type is someone who pays attention to the rest of the cars on the road and will gladly adjust speed to allow other people to merge. They realize that if we work together with care and coordination, then it can be a painless process so that we can all continue merrily on our way to our destination. The other type of people, however, are the ones who put their own needs first and don’t always let other people in. They want to be the first in line, or the fastest driver, or would like to force people to move aside for them, or think that everything is a competition, or spitefully close up a free space for someone else… What do you think? Is it merely a section of highway or is it indicative of how a person lives his life?

Foreign Correspondence

It's been a while since I've found time to post on here, but I'm back with some thoughts on letter-writing. :) It’s a shame that people don’t put the same amount of time and care into correspondence as they did in the past. I sort of miss the days when people wrote letters back and forth to each other. I do still send lots of birthday and holiday cards, but admittedly, it’s much faster and easier to keep in touch on a regular basis with people through email. What I’m noticing lately is that people are doing so much more communicating via text messaging. I agree that it has its benefits, but what I don’t like is when I take the time to craft a lengthy email to someone and then I get a brief response back from their smartphone. It makes me wonder if they really soaked up all of the words, thoughts, and sentiments that I took the time to put together just for them.

I sometimes reminisce fondly of that intoxicating frame of mind from many years ago when I would eagerly await a letter in the mail (or wonder what treasures might be dropped off by the mailman) and bounce into the house from the mailbox upon receiving something fun and/or unexpected from a friend. Nothing quite compares to the whole experience from anticipation to ripping open an envelope and reading carefully sculpted thoughts...written with a pen! ...and then sitting down at some point afterwards to write a response to that valued friend. Sure, email captures some of that same rush, but it's just not quite the same.

Support the Troops AND the Soldiers

Have you noticed how the media always refer to men and women in the military as “the troops”? I find it disconcerting that at some point several years ago, we stopped hearing references to soldiers, and instead we hear about a “troop” who died, or a “troop” who was deployed to service. Do you suppose that was purposeful syntax to distance us from the human pain and suffering of war? When I hear a news item saying that 15 troops died, for example, it sounds less severe than hearing that 15 soldiers died or “15 human beings died”. In a case like that, that’s exactly what happened – 15 lives were lost – but a word like troops brings to mind images of random, faceless shapes in uniforms so that the statistics can remain generic and tidy. But to the friends and family members who lose a dear member of their life, it’s extremely personal and horrific. I know that casualties are a natural by-product of wars, but we should never lose sight of the fact that wars are fought by human beings, and human lives are damaged and lost in every war regardless of how the media relays that information to us.

Workaholics Are an Interesting Breed

I’m always surprised and very impressed with people who work extremely hard and put in an excessive amount of hours working at their job day after day with a relentlessness that most people would have trouble maintaining. It’s great when true passion is the driving force behind these work habits, and hopefully a lot of these people manage to balance out the other areas of their life to a point that works well for them. I can’t help but wonder about a couple of things though…For a person who works 10 or 12 hours a day and/or takes a lot of work home, when does he find time to take care of all the other details of daily life? And how does that person ever get enough sleep to function well? The other thing that perplexes me is people who have back-to-back meetings at work all day long with hardly any breathing room in between (this is common among managers in my office). How can that be efficient and productive in the long run? People usually need time to process discussions and notes from meetings that they attend, not to mention the follow-up task lists that are commonly generated from business meetings. When I have a lot of meetings filling my calendar, I get a little anxious about finding time to accomplish everything during the precious time in between. I work hard and take a lot of pride in the work that I do, but I wouldn't classify myself as a workaholic. I’ll leave that to the folks who really want to mold the majority of their life around their work.

Take advantage of your senses

We go through our lives on auto-pilot much of the time, don’t we? The people, sights, and sounds around us really blend into the background after a while. Sure, we notice a bright, colorful sunset, an unusual aroma, or an abrupt, unexpected sound, but how much of life passes by unnoticed in our day-to-day routines? I made an effort to really observe things around me for a couple of weeks, and although it wasn’t earth-shattering, it made me aware of how easy it is to ignore my surroundings. Here’s what I did: I spent a few days periodically looking at all of the colors around me. I know it sounds simple, but I had to keep reminding myself to LOOK at them. As a result, I noticed a more colorful world than what usually rushes past me in a blur. Even in a Wisconsin winter, I started to see more colors than the usual whites, grays, and browns. Then I spent a few days making note of shapes, and I found myself seeing so many basic shapes in nature and shapes in buildings where I had been a hundred times before but had never really looked around completely. My world felt much more 3-dimensional than usual. After that, I made an effort to listen to sounds as much as possible. Of course, it’s natural to ignore & filter out a lot of sounds in order to concentrate throughout the course of the day, but just listen to the world outside of your usual bubble sometimes, and it can be very calming. My last experiment was to take in textures of objects that I encounter on a regular basis. Again, it really expanded my observational experience and enriched my days. Try this, or any similar experiment on your own, and hopefully you will notice and appreciate so much that normally slips right by you.

Drop Everything

These days, with so many of us working in office cubicles and having a multitude of projects and “urgent” issues to address, I’ve noticed that we’re constantly interrupting each other less politely than we did in the past. There are times when I’m concentrating on my work, and someone will walk up to my cubicle and just start talking or asking questions without checking first to see if it’s ok to interrupt me. I sometimes do the same to other people, and I’m afraid it’s just become the norm. What ever happened to asking, “Do you have a minute?” or “I have a question. Is this a good time for you?” It’s too bad, because we often waste time trying to regain our concentration, and it’s difficult to complete a complex project when our time is chopped into so many small chunks. (Of course, this is also due to business meetings, telephone calls, and our own shifts in attention span in a typical day, and that’s not likely to change.) Conversational styles have shifted as well, and we are so much more likely to interrupt other people in a group (sometimes rudely) rather than wait for an appropriate pause in the conversation. For those of us who need a little extra time to compose our thoughts or who really enjoy crafting our words, it can be frustrating.