twenty-two march: a few notes on vacation.
When the plane started to descend through the clouds, I almost started to laugh--from above they were brilliant white, poofed up like cotton, big pillars stretching upward into the sky. I remember being five or six years old, flying with my mother to visit family in Chicago, staring out the window and when she said we were almost there, all I could see was clouds, and I thought, but where do you put the city in all of these clouds? It felt like that again for a second, unreal.
Also I was just very tired. The week before we left was a nightmare, at work at least, and the anxiety seeped through to everything else, finally latching on to the trip itself, specifically the flight. The night before, I mostly didn't sleep--the weather report showed thunderstorms in Cancun all afternoon, we'd be stuck at JFK, or the flight would be cancelled, something something it all goes horribly wrong. Nothing, as it turned out, went horribly wrong, but I didn't even start to relax until well after we'd checked in.
Two years of Duolingo Spanish have paid off to the point where I can mutter to myself, as I dig around in my totebag in the hallway, "hay dos llaves en mi bolsa y no puedo encontrar nada." Not sure that the "nada" is correct there, though.
(I am not trying to speak Spanish to anyone outside of my immediate family. People who work at resorts have to put up with all sorts of nonsense, they don't need to put up with mine.)
There's a weird double-vision thing that happens--either your bathing suit is a cute little sundress-style thing or it's a sad old-lady skirt suit and you're a sad old lady. Likewise, maybe you look cool and beach-tousled, or more likely you actually look like a wet rat, or as my mother would say, the wreck of the Hesperus.
The birds are different here, which of course they are, birds are different everywhere. But they have such good names! Royal terns and palm warblers and magnificent frigatebirds. (Also brown jays and boat-tailed grackles--those two fight over crumb-picking territory at the pool all day long. Yesterday we saw a grackle successfully gain entry to a sugar-packet bowl at breakfast only to fly off with a Splenda packet. He was back a few minutes later, voicing serious displeasure.) I am not yet tired of pointing at a bird in the sky and exclaiming, what a magnificent frigatebird!
We are not in a spring-break-woo-girls kind of resort. We are more in a middle-aged-people-with-timeshares kind of resort. This is okay, it's also a people-with-kids kind of resort. The middle-aged-people-with-timeshares crowd is fascinating, though. Yesterday morning, a woman at the pool kept saying "I've waited three years to see this sunrise!" I did not ask her to elaborate, I am not that social a person. But when the Pool Concierge showed up to set up her chairs, I learned that she has been coming to this location twice a year for fifteen years, but didn't come for three years because of Covid, and she's missed it. She brought with her a gift for Eduardo's daughter, Eduardo who works over at the activities center, because she remembered that Eduardo's daughter's birthday is close to her own and her own is this week. She also had a long talk with Hernan the Pool Concierge about music--this lady from Winnipeg, who I'd guess is about ten years older than me, is really into Bad Bunny, originally on a tip from one of the bartenders here. She asked Hernan what he's listening to these days, had him say the name into her phone while she recorded so that she could look it up later. (She also talked a lot about how cold it is in Winnipeg, all winter long, and how much she needs this vacation.)
When Matt came over to the pool chairs, I told him about the lady from Winnipeg who really likes Bad Bunny. Now the news alerts on my phone keep tossing me stories about Bad Bunny--never let Google try to convince you that the phone isn't listening all the time.
Monday morning, we did an iguana feeding activity. The resort has a teeny-tiny Mayan ruin right on site, hotel guests can just go up there any time, but once a week they also do an iguana feeding. About twenty-five people showed up for the activity; the guy running the iguana feeding, Antonio from the Fun Team, made us all sign waivers, and one couple was a little resistant, like, what is it that we're signing? Antonio was all, well, you might get eaten by a crocodile, come just sign your life away, I have a bucket of melon and pineapple for the iguanas, can we just get started?
Antonio's instructions on how to feed the iguanas was simple--I have a bucket of melon and pineapple, he said, you can come take pieces. The pieces are quite large, so I recommend breaking them into pieces. When you see an iguana, take a piece and toss it near the iguana. Try not to hit the iguana. Do not stick your hand out with the food in it, they can't see the difference between your hand and the melon, they will bite you with sharp teeth and then you will bleed and leave a bad review, please avoid this.
He then explained that the iguanas are wild animals. Some days they like to come out on the rocks and some days they do not. Some days, as he put it, they are friendly and hungry, and other days they are not. I do not control the iguanas, he explained. I cannot make them be friendly or hungry. I can give you the fruit, but the iguanas will do what they want. Please do not leave a bad review if they are not friendly or hungry. Also today it is a little cloudy, they don't always like that, again I remind you that we do not control the iguanas.
Finally he said, I am only here for the iguana feeding. The activity today is iguana feeding. Please do not ask me questions about the ruin, I do not know anything about the ruin. A woman once got very angry at me, he said, because she asked a question about the ruin and I could not answer. If I knew about Mayan ruins, I would work at Chichen Itza and make much more money. Our activity today is iguanas.
The ruins are nice, if small, and there was one iguana. He was a big guy, pretty calm, mostly uninterested in the melon and pineapple. Everyone crowded around and took pictures, the rock around him was covered in bits of fruit, he ate a few pieces but mostly stared at all of us and blinked a lot. It seemed to me that everyone enjoyed the experience, except maybe the iguana? It's hard to tell. I hope no one leaves Antonio a bad review.