Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Mexcaltitan is supposed to be the Venice of Mexico, because during the months of September, October, and November, the streets fill with water and residents row themselves from place to place in little boats. The first thing we noticed as we walked through the town to our hotel was that there was no water in the streets. There are narrow concrete sidewalks skirting the houses and dirt in the middle, but it was completely dry. That was kind of a disappointment - the Venice of Italy is Venice all year round - but we were soon distracted by the second thing we noticed. Shrimp.

There were layers of shrimp in the shell, and a few fish, drying in the sun on almost every sidewalk. They were pink, so they must have been cooked, and they were just lying there. Everywhere. After we checked into the hotel and explored our room, we went back out to have a look around. Most of the time we walked in the middle of the dirt roads because the sidewalks all had shrimp on them. There are no cars on the island, so this was no problem.

Eventually we saw a guy messing with some of the shrimp. We crept up to watch, and we saw him eat one. When he noticed us looking, he waved us over. His name was Jorge. He gave us each a shrimp and showed us how to eat it: pull off the head, legs, and tail and pinch off some of the shell covering the back (the shell on the sides is fused to the shrimp flesh) and eat. "Cacahuates," he said. (Peanuts.) It was good. Chewy, from being dried in the sun, with a pleasant crackliness from the remaining bits of shell. When we smiled and said we liked them, he gave us a whole handful.

After we ate them, we were still hungry and went and found a restaurant for lunch. The restaurant had big open brick arches onto the lagoon on two sides and the breeze was nice. (Mexcaltitan is very, very hot, so whenever I felt a breeze, I stopped everything so I could appreciate it to the fullest.) Michael sat down and took out his little bottle of Purell with Aloe. Michael, the man who had just eaten a handful of seafood that had been lying on the sidewalk in the sun for hours, the man who'd tried a few and then said, "I'm going to eat the head!" was now sanitizing his hands before eating in a restaurant. He is so cute.

Service was very, very slow. It turned out that our waitress was also the chef and she was running around trying to cook for and serve two large parties besides us. But really, enjoying the breeze and watching birds fishing in the lagoon and sipping a cold Fresca, what was the hurry? I have been in one or two restaurants whose walls were painted to look like the genuine crumbling concrete walls and water views of this one. It's worth sitting in the real thing for as long as possible.

Our room turned out to have a bit of a flaw - some kind of leak in the bathroom that caused a large puddle to form on the main room's floor. Michael fixed the leak, but the island is so humid that the puddle never, ever dried. It didn't matter too much because the room was large enough that we could easily avoid the puddle. But still, it's an interesting effect of our staying in problem-ridden, rock-bottom-budget accomodations for the past few weeks that we just shrugged it off and didn't even ask for a mop, let alone complain to the management.

To give another example of how humid the island is: Michael washed two of his t-shirts in the sink and hung them outside on the clotheslines stretched across the common patio. There was a nice breeze coming off the lagoon, and it was pleasant to sit out there, but those t-shirts were still damp twenty-four hours later.

Everyone on the island is just so nice. To be fair Mexcaltitan is, like Mazatlan, somewhat dirty and crumbling, but it upsets me to write that because unlike Mazatlan, it's so much more than that. It has beauty and charm and as I mentioned, the people are incredibly nice. Michael loves greeting people and so every few feet he was saying "Buenos Dias" or "Buenas Tardes" or "Buenas Noches" and everyone always responded. Once he went out while I was napping and noticed a sea of shrimp through a doorway. He asked if he could take a photo and found himself invited in for ceviche. They took him up to the roof and showed him even more shrimp and out back to where a group of women were cleaning raw shrimp and where shrimp were cooking in a giant cauldron. We found out later it was a cooperativo, and that most the island's shrimp pass through there.

But we really got into the shrimp when we met Francisco. We were walking through town looking for water and approached a group of young guys. We started out our Gringo and Costello routine and had managed to get across that we were looking for "abarrotes" which means provisions/groceries. Then one of the guys asked us, "Whadayou guys wanna buy?" in a regular old American accent. I think we both gasped and took a step back. It's not that we were surprised he spoke English, though we hadn't met a fluent English speaker yet, besides our guides at ESSA and the pearl farm. It's that once he opened his mouth he was so clearly a regular American kid. I kind of got the feeling he liked doing that to people. Anyway, he helped us find some water and we talked for a bit, and he promised to come by the hotel the next day to take us around a little.

***I'm sure you're all checking Michael's photo blog regularly, but make extra sure to check for his Mexcaltitan photos because they are extra special, like the island itself. (awww)

 

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Michael was upset that I took a bite out of the back shrimp empanada before he could shoot it.

Still more shrimp.

Kids

La Camichina Restaurant

Eating shrimp ceviche

Making shrimp ceviche

Boiling shrimp

Cleaning shrimp

Shrimp on the roof

Lots of shrimp

Shrimp in front of the Ruta Azteca hotel

Shrimp

More shrimp.