Please don't put the paper in the toilet.

Welcome back to Mexico.
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For this trip, I have returned back to my old favorite, Mexico.  This time, though, I am on the Caribbean coast, about an hour south of Cancun and several of my students who are inevitably "going wild", in a town called Playa Del Carmen, or the beach of Carmen, whoever he is.  I have my suspiscions.

Stepping off the airport bus in Playa, and walking torwards my hostel, I was hit by the familiar scent that is unique, I think, to Mexico.  The smell of laundry detergent mixed with the faint smell of trash, combined with something frying; taken alone, I don´t like any of these, but put together, somehow, they work, and breathing this all in, I am of course flooded by flashbacks of my previous times in Mexico: the summer of study abroad in Central Mexico and the infamous "Many Toilets of Mexico" photo collage, and the Green Tortoise bus trip to Baja that started this whole travel all the time by myself thing.

"Gringos don´t stay here. Gringos stay in the hotels by the beach"

Muy Tranquilo.
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Lately, I have begun to wonder if I am constantly living in both the past and the present, simultaneously.  For example, when I was packing for this trip, I pulled out from storage all my summer clothes, including the ones I wore on my Europe adventure last summer.  It was like being reunited with old friends, these skirts and shirts that got me through the 110 degree Marrakesh heat and survived a laundry disaster with a pair of black socks I bought in the 19th androissement in Paris.  This sort of duality seems to be happening quite a bit these days; perhaps I should worry.

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So, let´s see, it is Sunday, Santa Semana, and I´ve been here since Thursday.  Checking in to my hostel, the owner was surprised that I was an American.  "Gringos don´t stay here.  Gringos stay in the hotels by the beach,¨ he explained, and the guy hanging out near the desk chimed in, ¨Yeah, since I´ve been here I´ve met Canadians, Brazilians, Dutch, Israeli, but no Americans.¨  I think I took a kind of perverse satisfaction out of this.  As an aside, this hostel is half populated by Israelis, and the majority of the books in the give one, get one pile are in Hebrew. Everyone else seems to be a native Spanish speaker, so out of all the hostels I´ve stayed in, I think this one is the most ¨foreign¨as in very few of us are native English speakers.  This didn´t happen in Europe . . .not even in Croatia.

Friday I spent the day wandering around 5th avenue, which is the mostly pedestrian avenue that runs for 15 blocks, parallel to the Caribbean.  Despite the overwhelmingly anglicized shops, signs and prices (in the past, I haven´t eaten at or bought anything at a shop where the menu or the prices are in English and dollars), Playa seems to be primarily a vacation destination for Mexicans: I guess the Americans get Cancun. I don´t know if that´s a consolation prize or a punishment.