To The East

I'm tired, sore, and slightly-peeling from a hectic weekend on the Atlantic coast, where I was also without internet. Since my buddy Brian requested I "Update more!", I've decided to unload the extra post I penned in-between passing out on the breathtaking beaches there.

Speaking of which, there's a reason Red chooses this area to escape to in the Shawshank Redemption: the twin cities of Ixtapa and Zihuatanejo are easily among the most beautiful sights I will ever take in, and luckily they have yet to be discovered by American tourists. I feel especially lucky to have experienced a beach town as charming as Zihuatanejo, where the water is warmer than it gets in my shower back in Morelia and various exotic animals and people alike laze about the street, too tired to move from all the humidity. For example, it took me and Eric half of our breakfast to realize these parrots were relaxing next to us in an outdoor restaurant:



However, the influence of our filthy capitalism can certainly be felt in the sleek private resorts that line the beaches in Ixtapa, all of which now feature countless perpetually-grimacing security guards who stalk the private beaches like pit bulls outside of a crack house. We somehow aggravated all of these professional party-poopers by hanging out in hotel-owned beach chairs and keeping to ourselves. Not to have a hippie moment or anything, but commodifying the beach crosses a threshold of cynical profit-mongering I'm just not comfortable with. I mean, do we really have to discover the market value of a sunset before we finally say enough's enough with this shit?

One said security guard, named German, kept asking us to leave only to give up every time when we acted like we couldn't understand him. Eventually we agreed to start buying the hotel's over-priced drinks, but we quickly outfoxed him by filing up our empty cups with Rum and Coke when he wasn't looking. We had a wonderful time at his expense, letting the towering waves toss us around and relaxing in the sweltering heat. It wasn't until we encountered German later that night, at a bus stop getting ready for a ten-hour shift driving a taxi, that I felt bad for giving the poor guy so much grief.



Quickly, we moved on from sad German to a club called Senior Frog's, which was full of girls dancing on the bars which doubled as stages, and where waitresses with whistles walked around offering people shots. I just followed Eric because he was on the prowl, and we ended up talking with a group of really pretty girls who kept acting bored with us but wouldn't let us leave them alone. When I was just about to give up hope of dancing with aloof girl named Laurena, she lured me onto the dance floor with a coy gesture.

Eventually John was dancing with her friend, Eric somehow had two girls dancing with him at the same time, and Angelo was laughing at the lot of us pretending like we knew what we were doing. It only got better when Eric and he girls (each on one of his arms) ended up on stage with every gay guy in the club when "YMCA" came on, and being the sport that he is, he went with the choreography. The good-natured party vibe of the club fizzled a bit when a certain girl not only took her blouse off while dancing on one of the tables, but did so *in front of her mom, who was chaperoning her.* When Mexican girls let their hair down, they don't mess around.



We found out what hotel our lady friends were staying at so the next day we headed back out to Ixtapa to use their room number to avoid getting hassled by the beach rent-a-cops. However, those same girls happened to be out on the beach when we passed by, so we spent some time swimming with them (more wading; they were too terrified of sharks to go very far out) and getting as many of their free drinks as possible.

We met up with Zander and Ethan (who is a fellow Los Gaton *and* Berkeleyan) and headed to Ixtapa to meet up with Laurena and Co., but they ended up skipping out on us and leaving us to wander the streets in search of a (semi-affordable) good time. Such a thing did not exist, unfortunately, and we ended up returning to Zihautanejo where argued over what else to do for the rest of the night until we all decided to pack it up. It was kind of a cheap way to close out the trip, but we are all so exhausted by then that I think it was kind of inevitable. In fact, I'm still paying the price for such a deliriously fun weekend, feeling the wrath of Montezuma's Revenge and the scorching hand of the sun.