Mexico

It's now been a little over a month since Sheldon and me got back from our ten day trip to Mexico, and boy was it a trip! I figured since now my brain and body have kinda had a chance to relax from the trip I could put my thoughts together and talk about our time down there.

Day one-
We headed to the airport around I think it was like six in the morning o something like that. Needless to say it was pretty dang early. Sheldon's flight left like 4 hours after mine, but because I had a layover in Arizona, and his flight was direct we got there at the same time, maybe a few minute difference. Flying on my own is really kinda lame. I don't mind being by myself on some occasions, but not way up in the sky where I can't really do anything. One of the many lame things about flying is that your bags have to be under 50 pounds for them to only cost the minimal like 25 bucks. My bag was right on the dot 54 pounds which for some lame reason automatically brings the cost of the bag up to I think it was like 75 bucks. Super gay. The guy at the booth that I got my tickets from bumped me up to first class for 75 bucks and my bag was free. So either way I paid the stupid money but on the 4 hour flight from Arizona to Mexico I was by myself. Which contrary to the above statement of how I dislike flying that way turned out to be actually really nice. Lots of stretching room, I had my own bathroom, and my own flight attendant that was really nice, and I'm pretty sure I have flown with her before. We finally get to Mexico and our first great fun time happens. We get lost in a big foreign airport and have no idea where the other person is. Luckily we both speak Spanish fluently and we managed to find out that we were only 10 minutes away from each other on a bus. We got our bus ticket and headed on our way to Puebla which is the city that we stayed in for the first 4 days. The city was really nice and smallish. We got to our hotel by way of crazy taxi driver man that instead of taking us the way that would of been much easier and only taken ten minutes took almost an hour. Great times. We got to our hotel and they took us up to our rooms and let us in. Funny thing is they had to do that every time we wanted to go to our rooms because the key card system was broken. Hilarious. Also our rooms were rather amazing! not. It actually wasn't that bad. Nice comfy beds, they really were nice beds, T.V. that had a grand total of 5 channels and the best part of all of it a bathroom with a rear view look into the bathroom of the room behind us. Also the shower was designed for a 4 foot tall midget. So funny! We got our stuff settled in and decided to hit the town for the evening. Really nice little town that had a man in the center singing and smoking. He was from Spain which was really cool. We grabbed a bite to eat and checked out some of the sights till it started raining and we decided to head back and get some sleep, before our next day adventure to the pyramids. O so we thought.
Day two- Day two was a Saturday and it was the day that we were going to get our car and head out to see the pyramids. We get to the rental spot pick up our car and try and head out. Luckily for us we had a GPS that was all in Spanish and didn't work, so we got lost. Which was hilarious! Most of the roads that we took were right next to the ones that we wanted to take and it was just too funny. Sheldon's reaction to most of the drive was rather hilarious. So we decided that since we had no idea what we were doing that we would go visit some old member friends of Sheldon's and see if any of them could help us figure out the best way to get there. We met with two member families that were actually really awesome. They both made fun of my accent( I went to Spain on my mission and learn Castellano) we ate some great hot food and moved on to the next place. Also great people who owned a little restaurant. We ate some great home cooked food and sat and talked. To be honest it really felt like I was back on my mission for the first couple days that we were there. It felt like a pday with my comp and we were just out seeing the sights and sounds of our area. It was really fun and I really enjoyed it. It made me miss my friends over in my mission quite a lot. That's how we ended that day and drove our little white beast back to our hotel.
Day 3
- Sunday morning we decided to sleep in some instead of going to a church down there mainly because we didn't know what time it was at, and figured we could just drive up the area and say hi to them after church was done. We drove up to the church and found out that they were just about ready to finish up the last meetings for the day so we decided to hang around till it was over. This branch/ward was pretty sweet! Tons of really funny people and really genuine members. We got invited to a dinner with one of Sheldon's gossip buddies and we were set for food that evening. We saw a fiesta thing going on in the center on the way up to the capilla so we decided to go hang out there till our time to head over for dinner. They were having some pretty cool stuff going on down there. Mexican boxing which is now one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Lots of little shops and such and we started buying some gifts there. Little cool side note. The city itself is actually about 10 miles away from an active volcano that I guess erupts like 2 times a year. I got some sweet pictures of it smoking about and looking like it was ready to go. That night at the members house Sheldon and me talked with the family a bit about things that had been going on in the last 7 years( time since Sheldon has been back)and then we got to eating dinner. Which was awesome! tasty tortillas! The husband was a truck driver so we sat him down and had him give us the best route to get to the pyramids and the best route to get to Puerto Escondido which was the beach that we will be heading to in a couple days. We got lost on our way home which had quickly become a norm for our trip and got home finally and went to bed.
Day4-
We got up a little earlier than normal today so we could spend a good amount of time wandering through the pyramids. We had our route and we weren't going to get lost this time! When we got into the city that had the pyramid you could see them from where we were and it was still a good distance away. These things were huge! We got to the area and started to walk about checking out some of the smaller ones that had been destroyed and what not. Then we got to some that I had always wanted to see since my mission. I read a book in my mission that I now own called The Book Of Mormon On Trial. It's a really great book and I read it over and over all the time. Part of what they talk about is some of the areas in Latin America that were areas in which the Lamanites and Nephites lives and things and one of the structures they have found were believed to be were Jacob and his 12 sons lived for a time. The setup in The Book of Mormon more o less states that Jacob was in the middle surrounded by his twelve sons. Well when you get to the area there is one in the middle of a field with 12 smaller ones surrounding the area. In all reality it is really cool to think what it would be like for them, and to know what the real meaning of most of these pyramids was. We spent some time dinking around there and then we headed over to the gigantic one that you are able to climb. Man I don't know how they did that every day. They must of been huge! the stairs were crazy but the view from the top was amazing. You could see for miles around. What made this seeing for miles around soo hard was the fact that we had both died from the climb up! Holy Crap! The Mayans had to have huge legs! Those steps were some serious stairs that just got smaller and smaller the higher you got. It was worth the climb though. Although the climb down was kinda scary, for a few reasons. Number 1. I love jumping down stairs and have injured myself many times doing so, and these stairs would of not only killed me if I fell, but I would of been a huge spectacle for everyone there. Number 2. There was like a billion of them, so I held my jumping till the very end of the stairs. Also as we were coming down we passed a kid that was apparently also scared of falling to his death on the stairs because he was literally crawling down the stairs. Did I stop to help him? Did I make sure he was ok? Nope sure didn't, I got past him a little ways stopped and took a picture. Twas hilarious. We walked around for a little bit longer than hopped back into our most awesome car and headed to a different area of pyramids.

This city was called I believe Chula but I can't remember. It was said by legend and the Spanish Conquistadors that came through, that they made the Mayans build a Catholic church for ever pyramid there was in this city. Well there are over 250 Catholic churches in this small city. If that is true that is honestly amazing. I really would love to go down there and did around to find them. What we were really going to see is one of the even bigger pyramids over there. This thing was huge. You are only allowed to see the very top of it, because that is all they have uncovered up to this point. Uncovering the rest of this thing would mean demolishing like 5 o 6 miles of the town. This thing goes on for miles underneath the town and is just crazy huge. It really was cool to see this thing and see how these people lived and such. We decided to just go look around the city after this for a while and it was a pretty fun day. We grabbed dinner and headed home for the night.

Day 5
This was probably the day that I will remember for the rest of my life, mainly because we almost died o killed our car multiple times on this trip. We were about to embark on a 9 hour drive that we had no idea what it was like. We were in for the trip of our lives lol. The main road was super nice and easy. The biggest part of the trip was going to be the trip through the mountains. We got to the bottom of that looked at what we were going through, braced ourselves and headed on. The roads were just nice and easy for the first little part but once we got to the top and after the Mexican Guard stopped us the roads started getting a lot worse. Oh and they were made of dirt. Oh and there was potholes everywhere, oh and when I say potholes I meant craters in the road. The top of the mountain pass was so high, that when you get to the top of the mountain before you head down you reach a sign that says zona de nubes, which means cloud zone. So for the rest of the drive we were driving through the clouds. We stopped at the top to take a break and take some pictures but when we got out we noticed that our car was leaking, so we decided to get back in and hope it wasn't going to die on us and we would be stuck at the top of a mountain. As we started up again going through the clouds it started to rain on us as well which was probably nice because it was cooling our little car down. The downside to this rain is that it slowly turned from rain into a tropical storm of death. We almost had died several times on this trip from being run off the road to people pulling in front of us on the mountain and so forth, but this storm was the best, for a few reasons. 1. It turned the small potholes into bigger ones. 2. Those potholes were filled with water so they looked a lot less deep then they actually were. 3. Did I mention that we launched our car? after we took flight for a few seconds Sheldon and me looked at one another and started laughing to keep from crying lol. We kinda thought this road would never end for a while because it really wasn't ever ending. It started getting dark and we started to worry, when all the sudden we saw the ocean! We were so stoked! We finally had gotten to the town, which was also flooding..GREAT! we found the hostel that we were going to be spending the next few days, and the place was awesome! So much better than the hotel we were staying at before. We were starving so we decided to deal with the floods and go find some food. We ate went home got ready for bed and slept. I woke up during the night cause I had to go to the bathroom and I was super hot. So I walk into the bathroom and sit there for a second looking at the ceiling. There was something not normal just chillen there. We had geckos running around all over the place, I even caught a baby one and had figured it was just gonna be another gecko, so I turned on the light and holy crap! It was a huge scorpion! This thing had to be at least 6 inches long. So you can imagine that as I'm sitting here trying to take a leak while watching this thing to make sure it didn't decide to do a freak accident jump down was quite the experience. The thing which was later named Harold moved as I shut the door into our closet. An even better place for it to be. With our clothes. I told Sheldon the next day. He freaked I laughed. Great way to start the morning.

Day 6
Today was a day that I had been looking forward to for the whole trip! Today is the day that we would spend at the beach. We didn't get up till around noon mainly because we really didn't have anything that we had to do by a certain time, O so we thought. We got up went downstairs and they had breakfast already made up for us, and dang it was good. The first day we had Marlin tacos. Marlin is a tasty fish! We found out later that day that we were also the only people in the hostel for that entire week. Which was pretty cool. We told them about our little friend that we had with us for the night and they went quickly upstairs to deal with it. We headed down to the beach and just decided to chill for the day and get to know the beach. The area was beautiful and the water was crystal clear. I threw on my gear and headed to the water. I was amazed to find out that as soon as I set foot in maybe a foot of water there were fish everywhere. I stayed mainly by the rocks because that is were they all seemed to congregate. In like a reef setting just with rock instead of reef. It was super cool there were some tiny little guys and some huge fish. I stayed pretty close to the rocks most of the day, trying to get some pics of some of the fish, but I did go out probably about 60 feet o so off the beach were the water started to get pretty deep. As long as I stayed by the rocks I could see the bottom, but as soon as you strayed maybe 10 feet away it got really hard to see anything but black and every now and then a fish fly by. Kinda creepy and I didn't have a light so I stayed by the rocks. The farther I went out though the bigger the fish got. It was really cool. I spent most of my day doing that. I loved it. We went back, dropped our stuff off, showered and decided to take a nap for the next little while. The beach takes a lot out of you. We got up probably around 8 o 9 and went to find another restaurant. We found this neat little place that had some really good food. They also gave you bug spray at your table, which I thought was rather dang funny. Once we got back to our room that night there were a ton of geckos just all over the place and also a huge butterfly was just chillen on our wall. We got some sweet pictures of them all. I noticed something was on the door handle and I went to try and find a light to see what it was before I put my hand on it. Which I'm glad I did, because there was another one of those huge scorpions on the handle. We sat there for a second blowing on it waiting for it to move which it did by trying to run into the room. I smacked it away screamed like a girl and ran into the room. I hate those things.

Day 7
The people that we stayed with that ran the hostel were really nice. The staff was also pretty dang awesome. They took really good care of us. We went back to the beach today to do a little bit of surfing. I haven't been surfing in a long time. Mainly because I do not live in California anymore were I surfed and bogey boarded all the time. So this was gonna be an adventure. Our man Raul was our instructor that day and he had already taught like 8 classes. He taught us some stuff on the beach then we jumped into the water and started getting thrown into waves while he said, Rama, Rama, Arriba! which means paddle, paddle, up! Now we did this on a different part of the coast were there weren't as many rocks. There was a giant log in the middle of the water but hey obstacles on your first day of surfing after a few years is the only way to go. especially if it involves the possibility of sudden death. Loved it. It only took us both a few times of crashing into the water, me getting hit in the head with the board to get the hang of it. Raul was rather impressed with the two white boys as he called us. He said that he usually had to take everyone back in to teach them all over again what to do, but he said we picked it up quick which made me pretty proud of us. The only thing I wish I was in more shape for was the swim back park after every time we made it to shore. You see this is how it is. You stand up on the board, surf for a bit, fall off and then you have to get back on and paddle back out there. This was ok for the first few times, but after that our arms were dead. It was pretty dang awesome though, we decided that after that lesson we were gonna go take a nap for the rest of the day. That night we were in for a treat. We went with our Hostal lady to a lagoon that was like 10 miles away from where we had been staying. We got in a boat and went out to the middle of the lagoon. Now this is at night in Mexico in the rain, because apparently in Mexico at night the country knows nothing else is acceptable for weather but onslaughts of rain and rain and still more rain. So I was getting ready for the cold night ahead because believe it o not my body consists of maybe 2% body fat and can be out in the water on a cold night for maybe a minute before I become a human chatter box. What we were out there to see would of been totally worth it to me. You see there is a certain time of year that these glow shrimp come up form the bottoms of the ocean and into these lagoons to breed. They are about 4 inches longish, and what is so cool is that they make the water a turquoise blue when they are spooked o they move. So the moment we jumped in the water the whole area around our bodies went that color. It was amazing! So cool to see, and on top of that the water in the lagoon was like 80 degrees which was just heaven to my body! We spent a couple hours playing with the shrimp turning everything blue and then we headed back to our hostel to rest up for our long journey the next day.

Day 8,9
These days were spent with hilarious travels that included many flights of planes a 10 hour drive thought windy mountains that almost caused us extreme discomfort of the barfy nature and lots of shopping for gifts. All in all it was a really fun great trip that I rather enjoyed.