Our Mexican Adventure

[in Merida on 11/4/2005]

Unlike Villahermosa, our money went a long way in Merida. Our pet-friendly hotel had a pretty courtyard and pool, quiet and spacious room, and was in the heart of downtown — all for $44. If you find youself in Merida, we highly recommend the Dorlores Alba hotel.

We spent only one night in Merida as we were anxious to move onto our next and final destination of Playa del Carmen. However, we really enjoyed what little of Merida we actually saw, and we will be back. We spent most of our evening making good use of the wireless internet network at the Italian Coffee Company. We’ll post more about Merida when we return.

By popular request, we finally got our pictures onto our online gallery. If you haven’t seen them yet, check out:

http://www.bekas.org/gallery/OurMexicanAdventure

[in Villahermosa on 11/3/2005]

We weren’t expecting much, but after 3 pleasant days in Veracruz, Villahermosa came as a bit of a shock. It’s a sprawling, wealthy, congested, suburban-like oil town. That may not sound so bad to those of you live in and enjoy Schaumburg-esque towns. But basically, driving through the horrible traffic and trying to find a hotel that wasn’t too snotty to accept our cats really sucked.

We can usually find a moderate non-chain hotel in the downtown areas that are friendly and will accept our cats. But Villahermosa’s downtown area is rumored to be seedy, so we decided to avoid it. You don’t get a lot of bang for your buck in Villahermosa, and all we could find was a $28 room. We decided that the bed in that room was officially the worst we had ever slept in — worse than the bed in the $10 room at our London hostel back in our backpacking days. Not that it mattered; the horrible karaoke at the bar next door kept us up most of the night.
Villahermosa gets its’ wealth from the oil business, and gets a decent dose of American businessmen (yes, it’s sexist, but really there aren’t many women in the oil business). We walked into a restaurant and were surprised to be handed menus in English. We were even more surprised to find chicken wings, burgers and ribs on the menu. The restaurant turned out to be a chain owned by an enterprising Mexican from Monterrey. The chicken wings really hit the spot!

[in Veracruz during 10/30/2005-11/2/2005]

We are finally catching up on our blog entries. Sorry for the delay.

We ended up spending 3 days in Veracruz. On our 2nd day, we walked several miles exploring the city. Seeking refuge from the strong winds along the coast (which also kept us from hanging at the beach), we ducked into a posh Veracruz neighborhood. We found quite a few homes we wouldn’t mind living in! Soon after passing a gourmet food store, we found a drive-thru coffee shop. We walked up and got 2 frozen cappuchinos. Yum!

Veracruz is a party town and their Carnaval is known as the wildest in Mexico. John and I are definitely coming back for that experience! We were too tired to do much partying during this trip. But we couldn’t pass up the Blue Monkey Bar & Grill on Halloween. We’d been seeing something called Michelada under the Cervezas section of many Mexican menus. We had never heard of this beer (a beer John hasn’t heard of ?!), but John decided to give it a go. Libby ordered a Diabla, also under the Cervezas section, in honor of Halloween. Well, to our surprise, these drinks were NOT beers. They both tasted tomato/vegetable juice-like, and of course, we both hate tomato and vegetable juices. Oh well, lesson learned. Dos Sols, por favor!

After 2 non-beach friendly days, we finally got lucky on Wednesday. The beaches in Veracruz have brown, coarse sand and the settings aren’t especially picturesque. But hey, it’s November and we’re in swimsuits at the beach. Esta bien!

Sorry for the silence the past few days… had some trouble getting to an Internet cafe. Tonight we worked on putting some photos online. We hope you enjoy them.

Our Mexican Adventure