si vivo cien años, cien años pienso en ti (cancún, day 1)
"Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you."
I spent almost every day of the summer of 2019 with one of my old coworkers, a Chicana girl from Texas a few years my senior. We spoke mostly English, though she rubbed off on me enough for my Chilean roommates to pick up on my mexicanismos later that fall and poke fun at me for them. Now that I’m finally in Mexico for the first time, it feels ironic that I’ve long since lost my Mexican touch. The accent I’ve developed over the years is hard to place, but it marks me unmistakably as an outsider, not that I needed any more of those.
My friend texted me today asking for a “picturesque beach photo”, but I haven’t even seen the beach yet. True to my nature I made a beeline for downtown this morning with an eye to graze on street food and explore open-air markets. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived in suburbia almost my entire life, but I can never resist the pull of cities and urban areas, even with some of the world’s most beautiful beaches a stone’s throw away.
Outside of the hotel zone Cancún is pretty dilapidated. We visited two open-air markets this morning (one very touristy, the other less so), and between our destinations we stumbled over crumbling sidewalks past buildings swallowed by vegetation in every state of decay. Pedestrian-friendly infrastructure is nonexistent; many times I watched small children cross wide roads, only narrowly missing oncoming traffic.
What little public transit exists in Cancún is extremely user-unfriendly. There is a bus that operates between the hotel zone and downtown, but the routes aren’t published anywhere on the Internet or on Google Maps and the stops themselves have no identifiable signage. We’ve had to rely on locals for crumbs of information. I don’t mind asking strangers for help, though as someone who likes to have everything figured out it can be frustrating simply not knowing what your stop is called or where the bus is going. I’ve heard people say you’ll be fine in Cancún if you don’t know Spanish. The occasional local does speak English, but they are rare and I certainly would struggle without my Spanish.
I didn’t find much to do or see at the markets we visited, especially the touristy one. All the vendors were selling the same things and fending off pushy salespeople tired me out. The other market was better — I saw chapulines (grasshoppers), chicharrones, and all sorts of unfamiliar fruits for sale, but the stench of the butcher shop made me nauseous. I generally consider myself a pretty adventurous eater but the first day of a weeklong family vacation does not strike me as the ideal time to get food poisoning.
That said, the food has been good so far. For breakfast my family split 4 tamales (oaxaqueño c/ salsa roja, rajas con queso, salsa verde con puerco y pollo) from a street vendor. The man who sold them to me couldn’t help but laugh at us. We must have been some sight, my family staring blankly while fumbling with foreign bills as I tried to translate from Spanish to Chinese/English and back.
We had lunch at this place called La costeñita, comida económica which I think specializes in food from Acapulco (note: putting “cheap food” in your name is a sure way to get my business). A lady was making sopes and quesadillas by hand near the entrance. We ordered almost everything on the menu: chilaquiles con huevos, 5 different sopes, a quesadilla, a pozole blanco (a clear chicken soup with pieces of chicken, pork, and large kernels of hominy in it), a large plate of cecina de res, all washed down with a liter of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Mexican food doesn’t rank highly on my favorite cuisines, but everything I had there was among the best I’ve ever had.
The first and only other pozole I’ve had was my coworker’s mom’s, actually—a pozole rojo she made for us when she came to visit. This restaurant only had pozole blanco and verde, and I think I prefer the clear broth over the red version, though I’d certainly appreciate both more if it weren’t so hot outside.
Before coming back to the airbnb for a midday break we stopped at a Walmart to grocery shop. This particular Walmart had both a tortillería (a machine making tortillas to order) and a nopales stand where two ladies were cleaning and cutting prickly pear cacti and packing the pieces into bags. I try my best to shop local especially when I’m abroad but I find it fascinating seeing all the differences between the foreign products and the American ones I’m used to. I could spend a whole day in that Walmart without getting bored, poring over the octagonal nutritional warnings and the cartoon-less cereal boxes. My family doesn’t quite share my enthusiasm for such details.
This (below) is my favorite photo so far. Oh, to be napping in the sun under flowers, dreaming of better days… It reminds me of this Mexican classic.
Si vivo cien años, cien años pienso en ti.
(I am writing all these Cancún posts on my phone, so as usual if you spot any typos please let me know. I hope you like them! Normally I’d wait until getting home to write these but I have time this trip and don’t want to forget anything.)