- Hurricane Wilma did a number on the entire Riviera Maya, but most of it has bounced back. It appears that our resort was fairly hard hit, since no building looked like it had been built more than a few months ago. This made for some ups and downs. On the upside, it was nice to come back to your room at night and see new sod on the ground or lighting along the path that wasn't there when you left for the bar earlier in the afternoon. On the downside, we went for a day and a half without water due to some unexplained construction glitch and the beach seemed severely eroded. You win some, you lose some.
- I'm too old for the "real" MTV-style Spring Break. Sitting on the beach, drinking at 2 p.m., not thinking at all about the law - that, I can handle. However, how on earth am I supposed to talk to a girl from the University of Iowa who introduced herself to me by announcing with pride that she had suffered from alcohol poisoning three times? Why would I want to?
- At the airport on the way back here, I saw a fair number of women and girls with hair braided at those storefront braiding parlors that seem to exist wherever Americans go to get some sun in March. I have never seen anyone who looks good in those tight braids. Really now, leave the cornrows to Ludacris.
- Americans are the most prolific complainers in the Western world. Our resort had a fair number of Canadians and Spaniards as a handy means of comparison. Whenever someone was yelling to the front desk attendant about how he had lost his shorts, whenever someone got in a sputtering, furious rage with a low-level functionary regarding the inability to eat at the restaurant of his choice, whenever someone promised to "dedicate his entire life to shutting this place down," it was an American. There are many reasons for foreigners to hate America, and they're not all about Iraq.
- Don't let your drunk friends challenge your cab driver to race other cars on the road. He will.
- "Mas tequila." Always a good idea. Well, usually.
Yeah. But no Germans right? I'm in the middle of a book about the sociology and geography (anthropology to us Americans) of tourism. It's written by a Swede. And frankly, the Europeans don't think very much of German tourists. All that yelling and bad manners and overweightness and big spending ways that you and I associate with the worst of American tourists -- the Europeans think Germans. Perhaps it's our German roots.
My favorite line from an interview by the author is a Swede telling a loud German tourist something like "You've already lost two World Wars. Why don't you give it a rest?"