Honeymooon Post: Tuesday

Hello faithful viewers of April’s blog! This is Nathan (her husband) guest posting about the third day of our honeymoon. I am not as eloquent as my english-major wife so I don’t want a careless reader to assume that the hero of this blog has come down with a bad case of sterile and bland writing. A simple glance at the title should remove any doubt that I wrote this post. Anyway, I hope you will still be able to enjoy my take on the honeymoon.

On Tuesday, April and I decided to read and relax on the beach. I packed the copy of “The Time Machine” by H. G. Wells (another author with a marvelous skill for creatively titling his works) and an overpriced bottle of water into our duffle bag and went with April to the “touristy booth” in the hotel lobby. The nice lady was there and told us about all the beaches we could visit. Our decision was simplified greatly when we saw that one of the fliers for the local beaches had a “one free drink!” coupon. Grabbing the flier, we hailed a taxi (actually several taxi drivers hailed us as soon as we left the hotel) and headed to San Francisco beach.

As a side note, you learn very quickly that nothing is free in Mexico. From men carrying your bag at the airport to random singers on ferries to ice cream men who basically grab you and put parrots on your head, everyone expects a tip from you. This causes you to be on edge all the time when you are supposed to be relaxing. You start second guessing kind gestures and start worrying when someone begins to bag your groceries.

So when we arrived at the beach we were not surprised by the multitude of salesmen that called out to us from every direction. We did enter one store to buy a pair of flip-flops that were originally priced at $15, but were probably only worth $1. We were able to get them for $12 which was better than we had expected. After making the purchase, we sought refuge from the storefront salesmen by setting up on the beach.

Unfortunately, the salesmen have grown wise to such people and proceed to grab as many things from their store as possible, going from person to person asking if they want “mother-in-law repellent” or some other overused humorous reference to their ware. After every single person on the beach says “No, I don’t think so...” they go back to their store and grab something else.

One young salesman in particular (we will call him Juan) was quite bad at selling things and resorted to small talk. He came up to us while we were reading and asked where we were from, what our favorite sports team was, if I was a quarterback on the football team, and all sorts of random questions. It was painful to answer because you knew that he was going to sell you something eventually and was just dragging it out. He eventually left when we were not interested in his collection of ceramic skulls.

After the salesman wave finally ended, we were able to enjoy our books and the ocean. We ordered a coconut that looked a lot better than it tasted and some other food that tasted a lot better than it looked. We also noticed some inflatable toys on the water that looked like a lot of fun, but after we swam all the way out to them, a man in a kayak told us that the toys belonged to the beach next to ours and we couldn’t play on them. This when we decided to just bury each other in sand instead!

While I was in the process of burying April, Juan came over and started talking to us again and started helping me dig. I was secretly afraid that would have to give him a tip for helping me bury my wife or just for general camaraderie, but we escaped with just a promise to visit his mother’s store.

This was a promise that he held us to. When we were on our way to get a taxi, Juan showed up and herded us into his family store. His sister was quite excited to have customers and showed April all of the “handcrafted jewelry” in the store while Juan tried to sell me hundreds of dollars worth of “Aliens” paraphernalia. I was too weirded out by the cups displaying a couple engaged in cunninglus to be a very good customer. We managed to escape yet again without buying anything by promising to visit the store again someday--much to the chagrin of Juan and his sister.

[April Insert: Nathan failed to write about the part where I buried him in the sand.  To compensate for this blunder, here is a picture of the event.]