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Archive for September, 2009

September 24th, 2009

Namaste Grill

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Looking Into the Courtyard of Namaste

Join Mary and Bruce as they sample a brand new restaurant in town, Namaste Grill, and the chance meetings that charmed the day.

We’d been walking by the work in progress, the Namaste Grill, for several weeks as young Edgar was doing all sorts of grunt work from painting the walls to taking delivery of kitchen equipment and he had already given us a tour of the place once but now on this foray by, he wanted us to see the wall hangings and paintings which are quite beautiful and very, well, Indian. We were told that they are pieces done by artist Rosalba Peraza Rios and they are for sale. We’d marked September 19^{th Full of It psp} their grand opening date on our calendar.

Saturday the 19^th dawns brightly like pretty much any other day down here and because we are working stiffs, again, and this is Saturday, we sleep in until nearly 9! After checking our emails we have a hearty fruit and toast breakfast, and for me the ubiquitous sardines in Chipotle sauce for dessert. Yumm!

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We grab our bags and head to the gym. After our righteous workouts we walk to Lulu’s for lunch and they have run out of food! Again we bump into the one immutable law of México: The only thing you can count on is that you can’t count on anything.

We skip the Lulu’s part of our Saturday and walk up to Walmart for our big weekly grocery shopping and we split a 25P clubhouse type sandwich from the deli. It’s okay but a far cry from the pollo asado, roast chicken with pasta soup that I usually get at Lulu’s for 20P. Trigger Man divx

We get our shopping done and cross the four lanes of Paseo Montejo and I plop on a bench with all our groceries and admire the scenery while Mary flags a taximetro. We don’t mind walking all this way unloaded but now that we are actually making money we are willing to pay the 20P, $1.50 to taxi back home instead of knocking our brains out like we used to.

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Back home I fire up the laptop and tune in my beloved MN Twins who are actually, with their recent win streak, back in the pennant race and hosting the Tigers who are leading the division. I am rewarded by a come-from-behind win over the Tiger ace Verlander who is undone, despite a masterful effort, by a “dome double” in the 8

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It’s time to head up to Namaste’s, only two blocks away on Calle 47, just beyond el remate de Paseo Montejo, the top of Paseo. We arrive at the door right at 7 the posted time and we meet half the owner team, a very pretty, very busy woman. Mary greets her in Espanol and she stutters back a response and then blurts, “Do you speak English?” We answer in the affirmative. “Oh thank God!” She says. She explains that they are still preparing the food and to please come back at 8.

It’s La Noche Mexicana, Mérida’s Saturday night party and people are setting up booths at El Remate and Santa Ana parque right in front of us is filling with people and the Mercado is gearing up for action so we just figure we’ll hang out there and people watch for the hour. Mary and I sit on a yo y tu cement chair and watch a group of young people warm up for Brazilian folk music dance. As we’re sitting down a local man sitting on a bench just behind us says, “Hi” Whats Eating Gilbert Grape dvd

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Turns out our new friends, Enrique and Mary (not Marie) are newly arrived to Mérida and are almost exactly our ages, with two boys and one girl almost the exact same ages as our kids and Enrique is retired from the car business, as I am, having worked at a GM plant at their former home just outside of DF (México City). We are practicing our Spanish and Enrique is practicing his English which is good enough that he uses the word “rancor” in perfect context, when our old friends Lorcan and Lexi appear on the scene. Resident Evil: Apocalypse hd

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These are two of our favorite people in Mérida and we haven’t seen them for awhile. We introduce them to Enrique and Mary and their little nieta, granddaughter. We exchange numbers and emails and say a hearty, “Mucho gusto!” Good to meet you our new friends and the four of us march on down to Namaste. Lorcan and I are hungry and we never have caught onto the 9 or 10:00 dinner hour that is the norm down here.

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We find Namaste packed but for some reason nobody has claimed the most desirable place to sit, the courtyard, so we quickly lay claim to a couple two-tops and I hunt down a spare chair out of the kitchen adjacent to us, and it is a madhouse in there. We meet the other half of the ownership team, Craig, a New Jerseyian who tells us he’d jump out the window if he could reach it. He sends our buddy, Edgar to our table with some appetizers of jicama strips and dip, and he takes our order which is one of everything. They had 4 entrees listed on their chalk board with a bread appetizer, naan con ajo.

It’s about 10° cooler here in the courtyard and people are wandering about checking the place out and Lorcan and Lexi know everyone. George a buddy of theirs and a former ship’s captain (?) joins us. Our food comes and we dig in sampling all the plates. Lexi and I are the only enthusiastic meat eaters, Lorcan is a former vegan gone vegetarian and Mary is a vegan wannabe. As we’re eating Lorcan is telling tales in that Irish brogue that I love to listen to. They’re from Ottawa but by way of Ireland for Lorcan. Lexi and I take care of the curried chicken cubes and we all sample each of the plates: Pollo Tikki Masala, the creamy, curried chicken dish that is a favorite of Indian cuisine; Spicy Cabbage; Berejena (eggplant) and Saang Paneer; all of these complemented very nicely by basmati rice. I try to be sure not to be a hog with the chicken as I know that Lexi, slender gal that she is, has the appetite of a NFL Linebacker. The food is terrific, everything is authentic and the only thing lacking is beer and liquor which will be coming in about 6 months we are told.

Just as we are finishing up who shows up but our good friend Dave the Brit with Brenda. They were a bit of an item a few months and I’m thinking that it looks like they may be again, as I hail them.

They make their way to our table and Brenda practically gets out of breath telling the unlikely story of how they reconnected again: Something to do with Dave’s buddy Varone’s dog getting lost (while in Dave’s care), getting hit by a car and getting nursed back to health by Brenda and their chance meeting at Sharon’s house. While I am getting all this Mary, Lorcan, Lexi, and George are chatting with a courtyard full of people. We’ve settled our check and since the only chairs in the joint are ours, we give them up for Dave and Brenda and with goodbyes to everyone we are out of there. That was fun.

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Thanks for visiting gentle reader. Bruce and Mary are really enjoying getting out and about, investigating all things Merida, now that they actually have an income. Life in Paradise just keeps getting better and better. Join Bruce soon as he describes just what a day in the life is, these days, in Mérida. Hasta Pronto!

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September 13th, 2009

Fitness, Mexican Style

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Bruce Doing Bench Presses at California Gym

All parts of Bruce and Mary’s lives have evolved in this escape to México. Some aspects have morphed out of all recognition. Living in a mansion for free? Working from their laptops poolside? Bruce and Mary could not have envisioned this, a couple of years ago. But one part of their lives has remained relatively the same: The commitment to living a fit lifestyle.

In my old life I was a certified fitness trainer and karate instructor. I gave up the karate instruction four years ago when we moved from Alexandria to St. Cloud, MN but my commitment to fitness never wavered. In fact Mary and I belonged to two gyms; mine was in the Twin Cities where after a god-awful 86 mile commute I’d check into my place of employ at 8am. Mary’s gym was in Sartell, a mile from our home.

My fitness routine, in my old life, was pretty intense. I’d always work out during the lunch hour, which I would recommend highly to anyone who can fit it into their schedule. With the endorphins released by a righteous midday work-out, you can turn the crappiest morning into a highly productive afternoon. Mary would try to do the same but her job made it more difficult to do on a regular basis.

My resistance (weight lifting) regimen was defined by what is called a 5 day split. What that means is that I would work a separate muscle group(s) every one of the five weekdays so that every week every muscle had been thoroughly stressed. To illustrate, like most gym rats Monday was chest day for me and I’d also do abdominals. Typically I’d do two exercises of 3-4 sets of 20 repetitions for abs and then for chest I’d do 3 exercises of 4 sets of 6-10 reps, usually taking my sets to failure, meaning I would complete as many reps as I could, not ending the set until I could not physically complete another rep. Tuesdays I would work shoulders and traps (trapezious

) in the same fashion and by the end of the week all muscles had been exercised.

Even before my heart attack cardio was important to me but afterwards I gave it even more priority. After every lifting session I would do 20 minutes of intense cardio on an elliptical machine (no impact which makes it a great machine for us old farts) getting my heart rate up to about 85% of my heart rate max.

On the cold and inclement weekends, Mary and I would go to her gym and we would both lift and then the elliptical for both us. My lifting would be not so intense on weekends; I would vary body parts, depending upon what I thought needed work. In the short MN outdoor season we would take to a beautiful bike path built on an old RR bed that winds through woods and marshes. We would put in about an hour of rollerblading for me and bicycling for Mary which would cover about 10-12 miles.

That was then, this is now. With my ICUC work schedule I cannot get to the gym everyday and now, being just a little bit older, I don’t want to. My goals have changed, I have got it through my thick head that at age 56 I am not going to get any stronger (I know now that I hit my strength peak 4 yrs ago just prior to the heart attack and I am not going to get there again) I just want to hold onto the strength I have.

So here is our Mexican fitness routine: M-F, religiously, as part of my morning routine, I go up on the sundeck for my cardio. I do my karate katas (forms) and basic techniques. This 20 minute routine gets my heart-rate up to about 80% of my heart-rate max. Then I cool down by stretching my lower body which is, in my old age, where I am really losing my ROM, range of motion. Mary after her shift is done at noon, often jumps rope which any rope jumper knows, is a helluva cardio work-out.

Mary Doing Squats at California Gym

Every Saturday we head to our Mérida gym California Gym or if we have bused to the beach we visit Shapes gym. The drop-in fee at California for the two of us is 100P, about $7.50 and only 60P for Shapes which is a newer and nicer gym. California is a real old fashioned big boys gym which is frequented by roid

boys and I am impressed that Mary is not uncomfortable there. They have a ton of old fashioned machines and free weights but nothing in the way of modern cardio equipment.

Lately we have been getting to the beach pretty frequently on our Saturdays off, in fact just yesterday we bused out and met our friend Jaromey at the gym. We got to Shapes about an hour before our meeting with Jaromey and I did my usual once a week routine. This consists of working chest first and I did four working sets of bench presses. I superset those with heavy shrugs Honeydripper ipod . Then it’s on to incline benches for chest again and decline crunches for abs. The next muscle groups are back and shoulders and I do one set of pullups (ten) and 3 sets of pulldowns which I superset with standing Arnold presses for shoulders. I’m in the midst of this when Jaromey makes the scene and I can actually make conversation for the first time at this point in my total body work out. My old five day split was intense but short. I spent about 25 minutes lifting. This new, once per week, total body workout takes an hour and until today when I have finally figured out a pace, I have been absolutely spent and pretty much brain dead at this point of the workout.

I help Mary point out some things to Jaromey who wants to concentrate on chest and shoulders and triceps. As they do their thing I finish up with bis and tris The Invisible film

, biceps and triceps by doing preacher curls and dips download No Reservations movie . I don’t do any lower body lifting anymore, relying on my karate to keep my legs in shape, as I have a hip problem. We wrap up our gym session and head to La Esquina for our protein fix, tacos al pastor for me with beers of course for Mary and me and then comes the best part of our weekly workout on the beach, beers and dips in the ocean en la playa

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Thanks for visiting gentle reader. If you have any fitness questions please ask away. This is one of the few areas in which Bruce actually knows what he is talking about. Hasta la vista……Baby! Inland Empire release download Kids in America

September 7th, 2009

Celestun and the Ria Celestun Biosphere

Flamingo City

Since Bruce and Mary have become gainfully employed, again, working for ICUC from their poolside they have decided to take advantage of their new-found wealth and explore the Yucatan. A few weeks ago they had the pleasure of spending the weekend in Campeche. This adventure is to Celestun, an important breeding ground for Caribbean flamingos.

It’s Saturday and we do sleep in a little but then we get in gear and we’re out the door about 9:15 heading to La Chocolat for their buffet breakfast. We figure we’ll be dealing with the 11:00 Celestun bus out of the Noreste Terminal de Autobuses but breakfast goes quickly and at Mary’s suggestion we take a taxi to the bus depot. We arrive to stand in line at the only ticket window that issues tix to Celestun. It’s 9:50 and the 10:00 bus is loading so naturally the gal at the window takes this time to take a break and even the locals in front of us get pissed and start raising hell with the other ticket takers. It’s about 5 to 10 when she shows up all smiles and chatting with her cohorts but we do get our tix and I even get a chance to visit the baňo (it’s free!) just before we take off on this 2 ½ hour bus ride.

We cruise out of Mérida via Avenida Canuk and we’re picking up travelers all along the way, we’re beginning to understand how this 60m trip can take 2 ½ hrs. We cruise through the little pueblos of Caucel, Ucu, Hunucma, Umon, Tetiz, Kinchil and then finally we get some open road but we’re still picking up folks at their driveways in this forsaken low scrub jungle. Finally We arrive at the tiny ADO terminal in Celestun and as we’re walking to the beach a couple blocks away, a hawker for a tour approaches us speaking rather good English. He explains that his tour is 2 Cheaper by the Dozen 2 film ½ Species II full movie hrs and the cost is 250P each for 4 and 200P for six. We tell him “mas tarde”.

We continue towards the beach and the first hotel we see is the Hotel Sol y Mar and it is a colorful, rather eclectic place with an open air lounge and bar protected by blue hanging tarps. One of the young gals manning the cocina serving the lounge but fronting the street hollers for the manager, a pretty, heavy-set 30-something named Delori and she shows us a non a/c room for 200P and allows that it will be loud with the music from the zocalo this evening. Then she shows us an a/c room for 350P further from the action that is spartan but clean and we figure for the extra $7.50 we’ll take it. We make sure everything works, the fan, a/c, lights and then we dump our stuff and change and stop down at the office to pay.

Naturally she can’t make change for 400P and goes next door but is back in a minute. We immediately walk to the beach and right away see a little shelter in front of one of the many seaside bars and it is manned by our tour hawking friend and we realize that this is the center for the 4 tour boats that are in the queue and he is trying to fill them all in order. However, Delori had said the price should be 150P. I ask the guy about this and he says yea sure if they get 8 people on a boat. We say count us in and he says it will be about 20-30 minutes so we order a couple of beers for 50P total and nurse them as we take in the beautiful coastline and perfect weather, low 90s and a breeze. Just as we are finishing up our beers the tour operator comes by, “Estan Listo?”, Ready? Si we say and wander up to the shelter.

There are two local couples with small kids and we pay the 200P each as do the others, I am careful to observe. Manuel, our tour guide and operator, introduces himself and hopes that he doen’t have to translate into English eyeing the two obvious gringos and Mary assures him that we speak un poco. Mary does do a helluva job of translating for me and really doesn’t miss anything important. I am at the point where I understand about 2 words out of every sentence but evidently I need three. Gotta work on that.

We put out in a 8 passenger canopied fiberglass skiff powered by a 60hp Mercury tiller steered outboard. We speed south along the coast to round the point and access the vast ria sytem. It is exhilarating to be speeding along in a boat with my non-existant hair streaming back, I can’t remember when I have boated last.

About 15 minutes into our cruise we slow around a sandy point where numerous cormorants and pelicans are putzing around. We put in across this minor inlet and take a short hike to see a dead forest of Manglares, Mangroves killed by a salt onslaught of some unnamed hurricane.

The Dead Forest

Back to the water we finally round the point and enter the main ria flow. Immediately we are rewarded by a flock of flamingos doing their thing, constantly feeding on the microscopic shrimp and algae that give them their color. A little bit later we are lucky enough to see a nearly all gray adolescent (newly hatched are pure white). We slow and everyone snaps a zillion pix, I am lucky enough with my basic camera to catch some running flamingos and one in flight at about 3 feet above the water (pretty blurry, though) and I am surprised to see how they lay out and look like a 727 in flight. I wish I had the long lens digital camera the wealthy yuppie couple in front of us have. He takes nearly as many pix of Flamingos as of his 4 yr old pouty mouthed boy. They seriously need to have another kid, for his sake.

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Blurry Picture of Flamingo Flying

Kites Soaring and Roosting

We travel several kilometers into the ria network and it is weird to know that I could probably wade across some of these rivers that are at times, a ½ mile wide. We travel inland as far as a Kite nesting area and that is as much fun for me as the Flamingos. Hundreds of huge Kites are roosting and soaring and diving and just plain hovering on the sea breezes.

We turn around and head back but by way of a channel thru manglares which are populated by cocodrillos

, crocodiles but we are not lucky enough to see any of these. We see plenty of casas de termitas nested in the crooks of manglares and some are big as doghouses. We emerge into the open ria and put up at a well kept dock to experience the Ojo de Agua, the Eye of Water. About 50 meters inland from the dock is a small cenote system fueled by springs that you can actually see bubbling up to the surface of these approximately 8 foot deep cenotes. In contrast to the ria these cenotes are crystal clear. I step down the ladder to about chest deep and that is about all I want as it is muy frio! I clamber back up and join the others in the boat. This is the end of the tour and now it is full speed back to our origin.

Looking for Crocodiles

Of course nothing goes smoothly on these ventures. After rounding the point, Manuel idles the outboard to reposition all of us closer to the stern to reduce the pounding against the surf for the yuppie couple and their sleeping child sitting at the front. Of course the motor dies, and doesn’t start. He tries everything, finally resorting to stripping the motor housing to the point he can hand start it with a rope. As he is struggling with this and we are being driven by the surf he jokes that maybe we can swim to shore. Mary is the only one to laugh and the yuppie gal shouts, “no con ninos!” Not with babies! The motor is finally hand-started but he cannot put in where we started at the the tour shack but has to put in about a couple hundred meters shy.

We deboat and Mary and the other couple tip Manuel for a helluva job, it’s not his fault for the mechanical problems, I doubt he even owns the boat, but the yuppie couple leaves in a huff.

After legging it back to our hotel we clean up and we are hungry, it is 4 and we haven’t eaten since breakfast. We order a couple Estrellas cervesas because they are only 10P but we discover that is because they are ponies. But they are 190mg which is more that half of the 20P beers, so I don’t feel cheated. I light my cohiba while relaxing at a comfortable spot in the open air lounge and wait for our light snacks, 3 ham and cheese burritas for me and a couple cheese stuffed empanadas for Mary. Our 4 ponies and food comes to 84P about $6.30.

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Bruce in the Lounge of the Hotel Sol y Mar

It is unbelievably hot even though we are unbelievably relaxed. Mary is in a hammock and I have my feet up sitting in the rare, comfortable wrought iron chair and I am finishing up the last of my cigar.

We decide to go up the a/c’ed room just to cool down. We crank it up and lie down, I hear Mary snoring and I almost do have an afternoon nap, which never happens and doesn’t happen this time but we are both refreshed to be returned to a non sweating state, if but for a moment.

As we are leaving to explore I notice for the first time a sign pointing to the upper, third, level that says “Ricu’s bar”. Mary had asked about it earlier and was told it wasn’t open. We go up for a look/see and we find a beautiful brand new facility with a bar to the side and and sheltered area at the front overlooking the street. We see one of the staffers moving tables and chairs for a birthday party later and we ask if we can drink beers and watch the sunset as this roof top bar faces the gulf, dead west, and the sun is only about half a dozen diameters from setting. She, like all these wonderful people, gives us a look of “are you crazy?”, and says “Claro que si!” of course! The same answer I got when I had asked (right in front of a non-smoking sign) if I could smoke my cigar. We walk a couple blocks to a c-store and buy a 6 of Tecate.

Arriving back we find that we are screwed by clouds that are squatting on the horizon but that is a small price for the great view and the people watching. We even see the yuppie couple walking down below us. Mary hails them and they exchange pleasantries.

With our six pack exhausted and the evening settling in we are suddenly inspired by one of the ubiquitous and loud, loudspeaker-equipped trucks that regularly promote everything from pizza, to political candidates to, in this case, the world cup qualifying game between México and Costa Rica. We remember what a gas our son Joey had in Chile when he wandered into a packed bar watching the Chilean futbol team in a world competition.

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The message is over-amplified to distortion so we can’t catch the name of the place but we figure it has to be along this beach street which is packed with restaurants and joints. We walk several blocks and seeing into many residences, men are gathered around their tvs in great anticipation. We begin to wonder though, if we’re going the right way. We pass a shirtless and well built young man washing his car in his carport and Mary figures – he looks like an athlete, he’ll know where to go. Sure enough he knows exactly where to go, to La Ria Restaurant and Bar and for the first time in México we get correct directions. We walk the 4 blocks the other direction, turn the corner to the beach and there it is, a large bar totally open to the west, a parking lot and a building from the beach with only a short cement wall to delineate it from the parking lot.

There is a huge projection screen dispaying the current futbol game with a 150 DB sound system blaring excited announcers’ play by play. We sit down, the only patrons so far, and proceed to be ignored by the staffers. We quickly discover they are still setting up so we just grab a table right in front of the screen and relax watching Brazil and someone else, we can’t figure out the countries’ Spanish initials, for example The USA is EUA. They have a countdown on the screen that shows it is about 25 minutes until game time so we just relax and enjoy the breeze, it is cooling down nicely.

Finally more staff arrive and we are waited on. We order a couple beers and Mary has a guacamole and chips thing for her meal and I decide to have my first hamburgesa down here. It turns out to be a a cheeseburger with a slin slice of ham cradled in there and it is very good or would be if they hadn’t been so kind as to garnish it for me with the typical watered down stuff that passes for ketchup down here. I also get a little tub for my American styled FFs, and it’s not so bad that I don’t dip my fries in it. Mary is reminded of the joke, “The food here is terrible!” “Yes, and such small portions.”

A few more locals wander in and the game finally begins. At first Costa Rica is controlling the pelota, ball and threatens a couple times, but then México starts asserting its dominance and they score on a long kick through defenders across the net and by the diving goaltender into the far corner. The crowd erupts! But it is a disappointingly small crowd, the servers outnumber the patrons. We watch until it is 3-0 and head back to the hotel. It is 10:30 and we are spent. We turn on the a/c and talk about the day. We had a lot of fun and we will strongly recommend a Celestun visit to all our friends and family. Then, exhausted, it is lights out for us.

Thanks for visiting gentle reader. As usual, Bruce welcomes any and all commentary.

Hasta Pronto!

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