Alright, we were nearing the airport. This meant we were nearing a customs checkpoint. This meant that I'd finally have to scarf down the rest of my narcotics before I jumped onto a plane. This meant I was now awaiting the inevitable onset of withdrawals.
God, I hoped the excitement of exploring a new country would overshadow the malicious troll that lived in my stomach. He loves to kick the shit out of my bowels, and I knew he would soon be awakening from slumber thanks to a sudden lack of heroin.
Our arrival in the airport signified a couple things. First, that we were, without a doubt, traveling. I took this opportunity to teach Shrimp some thrifty tactics by showing her how to save hundreds of dollars by switching to Geico - er, Garbage-co. Plunging my arm into a garbage can, I pulled out some decadent half-eaten leftovers that some rich capitalistic dinghead had deemed unfit for human consumption and worthy only of dumpster consumption. (consdumption? ye.)
Shrimp, of course, was endowed with beginner's luck, because her first trek into a garbage pit netted her a package of fresh sushi. Awesome.
Waiting for our flight (read: waiting impatiently for my withdrawals to start so I could get them over with,) a few things happened. First, we got a call from Shrimp's sister. Right. Amidst my rapid inhaling of substances, the mentoring of a previously clean citizen as to the ways of dumpster diving, and drooling over the thought of sunbathing and swimming in crystal clear waves of tequila, we had forgotten the massive abomination we'd left swirling in her toilet. Heh. Well, there's not much she could do now, unless she expected us to use our Go-Go-Gadget Plungers from twenty miles away and pray for eagle-eye accuracy. Shrimp's voice as she succumbed to her sister's rage was a stark contrast to the grin she wore on her face as we snickered.
Second, I started getting a bit stressed. Lingering memories of unflushed poop and fears of withdrawal were making me nervous. Twenty minutes before our flight, I decided to go for a last smoke. Nobody had ever told me that it's a universally understood that you have to be in your seat and belted up fifteen minutes before the fucking flight's scheduled to leave. As I returned to the waiting room, I found a flight attendant screaming at me.
"MR. FORD, YOU'VE MISSED YOUR FLIGHT." Huh. It sure looked like it - the room was totally vacant.
"Are you kidding?" I looked at my watch. "This flight's not even scheduled to leave for another fifteen minutes."
"WELL, YOU'VE MISSED IT," she reiterated, clearly misplacing my confusion with idiocy.
"WELL, YOU'VE MISSED IT," she reiterated, clearly misplacing my confusion with idiocy.
"This really doesn't make sense. I paid for the four thirty flight. It should be, y'know, four thirty before I've missed it." Makes sense, no? I know it's customary to be at least ten minutes early for scheduled trips, but this was a bit absurd.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MR. FORD. RUN! RUN!"
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MR. FORD. RUN! RUN!"
"What?"
"RUN!" She screamed, flailing her arms like an inflated tube man outside an auto dealer, in the general direction of the pathway that led to the plane. "RUN, MR. FORD, YOU'RE HOLDING THE WHOLE FLIGHT UP!"
"Uh... okay?" I thought I'd missed my flight. Whatever. I ran. The door to the plane was closing as I sprinted towards it, but thanks to the wonderful world of wireless word transmission, the attendant inside had heard of my folly and opened it for me. Sweet. I held up a hundred people's flight to Mexico because I was too faithful and had assumed that flights wouldn't consider leaving until they were scheduled to. Shit, I don't think I've ever heard of a plane leaving on time, let alone early.
The flight was short. I think. I'm pretty sure I slept off a wicked hangover. I woke up in a different country with much browner people.
We slid through customs easily, much to my irritation. I found out I could have smuggled pounds of heroin with me if I'd wanted to and weaned myself off instead of jumping headfirst into a cold, turkeyish, opiate-free world. Oh well.
We left the airport's air conditioning and arrived in the parking lot's sweltering heat. We promptly flagged a taxi and got ripped off, learning our first lesson: never pay for anything in American cash, because Mexicans assume (and rightly so, except in our case) that we are all stupid and rich and don't care enough about finances to perform simple conversion calculations in our heads before passing over dollar bills worth a hundred times their face value in pesos.
We were dropped off in downtown Cancun. "No," we said politely (and very Gringo-ish,) "we don't want to go to the resort village." Gringopolis, as we thus called it, didn't strike our fancy. We left Canada to get away from the blathering ramble of rich white club-goers, not to do the same thing with a different background. If I wanted to do that, I'd just sit in a basement with a heater, drinking tequila and staring at a Coor's Light poster with some nice beaches strapped to the wall under a floodlight.
Nay, downtown Cancun it was. The place's beauty was so authentic, so rustic, and so... different, that it defies description. In this blog entry, at least, mostly because this entry's getting way too drawn out. The most blatant gringos in town, we wandered until we found the dingy hostel we'd looked up prior to our arrival so we could drop our stuff off. Guard dogs bellowed at us from behind barbed wire fences; concrete walls adorned with shards of broken glass to fend off burglars dared us to scale them. My appreciation of expensive alarm systems was shattered in moments.
Our hostel looked like a red brick with windows. If there hadn't been palm trees dancing out front, I probably would have wanted to stay somewhere else. We made our way to the front gate - but this wasn't a cute little white gate that swings open to make way for a bubbly old lady to take your hand and guide you into her B&B so she can make you dinner and tuck you in to bed. This gate took up a quarter of the entire building, looked like it was built to keep security guards safe in prisons, and sure as hell didn't have any intercom buttons. We stood stupidly for a moment before a bent over fat dude basically crawled to the gate, slid a key into the obnoxious lock, and slid the even more obnoxious gate open to let us in.
We somehow found out through rapid miscommunications that we owed him a hundred pesos (five bucks a person. Not bad. Not bad at all) and made our way upstairs to check out the facilities. The bathroom wasn't really a room, nor did it really have a bath. There was a toilet with no seat, half a sink, and a spigot-looking thing that jutted out from the ceiling that one would assume constituted a shower. There was a communal kitchen with food that had been left by travelers from what looked like decades ago. Our room had blue walls, decorated not with pictures but cracks in the cement. Our window was barred. If not for the crisp white sheets on our beds, it probably would have looked like a prison.
AWESOME.
It was everything I wanted it to be.
Cheap, authentic, and Mexican as fuck. We weighed the risks of leaving or valuables in the hostel vs. bringing them with us on the streets, decided that we were likely going to get robbed at both places so it didn't much matter, and then promptly set off into the world of Cancun so I could replace my heroin addiction with alcoholism.
