Bordeaux and Palmiers

At Christmastime, I went to Mexico for the first time with my family. My uncle loves to go on golfing vacations, so he booked our two families (eight cousins) at the Isla Navidad resort.

After all of my solo-traveling, it was nice to stay with my family again. I am so used to budget travel, hostels, sleeping in a bed that’s too small (and I’m 5′3), that being in a place with a swim-up bar was pretty sweet. For awhile.

OK, so I’ve been spoiled by my own mode of travel. But what’s a girl to do? After a few days of lazing by the pool and reading American fashion magazines, I got bored.

I got ten pesos (a dollar) and set out on the boat that would take me from the island resort to the Barra right across the water. The differences between the resort and the town were drastically different: I’m sure that some of the jewelery stands in Barra had to do with the fact that the resort was right across the way, but the town didn’t seem any better off than any other small Mexican town in the country. The people went right on living their lives, oblivious (perhaps happily) of the almost all-American resort that was right across the bay.

I wandered around the town, happy to hear the rapid-fire rhythm of Spanish surrounding me, pulsating in the tiny town. I saw the Church, the life-sized nativity scene still posed for the Christmas season, even though the humidity made it feel more like summertime than December. I sampled some typical street food: eighty-cent chicken tacos that dripped as I walked, perfectly spicy and tasty. I watched whole families set up for work: children helped their parents set up the restaurant for the day or threaded tiny beads on string to sell as necklaces to the tourists.

I’m so used to Europe; I feel as though I am a part of it. No matter where I go, I always find some little niche that feels like home to me. Even if I can’t understand the language or I am not familiar with the particular culture of a place, I can at least find some semblance of a pub or brasserie and sit down with the draught beer or tiny coffee that every country in Western Europe offers. Mexico was completely foreign to me: much closer to my native America than to my newly adopted Europe, and as America had been becoming a more and more distant dream for me the longer I stayed away, it was hard to find anything in Mexico that grounded me, that could become a safe haven from which I could watch the rest of the world and try to understand it.

As I headed back towards the boat which would bring me to the resort, I stopped outside a dingy-looking building that advertised itself as a bar called “Piper Lover.” I peered in, and then I committed, carefully climbing the rickety stairs to see what I would find.

A group of American ex-pats sat, as I imagine they do everywhere in the world, over a table full of pint glasses and beer bottles, smoking and laughing and talking as rock music played just a little bit too loudly in the background.

I smiled and turned away, back towards the boat. It wasn’t for me, that American living. That self-proclamation: “Here I am! I’m in your country, but I’m different!” But I found comfort in the fact that there were Americans living here, trying, perhaps, to know Mexico as well as I now know France.