Buenos dias

Well hi fellow Darwinites, seeing as you’ve gone to the trouble of locating and reading this issue of GRIND, I thought you might want to hear about a little story I like to call, ‘That one time I went to Mexico with my mum and sister’. Yeah, that’s what I thought, but sounds like fun no?

Well where’s better to start than the beginning. I know what your thinking: why, out of all the places there are to travel, did you pick Mexico? I mean it’s just around the corner right? Yeah the corner of the PACIFIC OCEAN, Well the answer is simple my friends, I didn’t. Now I’m not complaining, it was a very exciting and interesting trip. I mean who wouldn’t want to catch 15 different planes in one month? Someone who gets motion sickness on a merry-go-round I guess, oh that’s right that would be me! I can think of nothing better to do then spend 12 hours emptying the contents of my stomach onto an aeroplane floor, although I did enjoy watching my mother trying to ask a non English speaking man working in a pharmacy about anti-motion sickness pills, once we got there. He caught on eventually, after a small game of charades. Then landing in Acapulco (Mexico) after being lost in LA and nearly missing our flight because we couldn’t find my sister and getting to the baggage claim only to find out that my bag was still in Mexico city.

That was probably the worst part of the trip, that and having to get up at 6 the next morning after getting to sleep at 2am and then driving for 4 hours to Taxco all the while having to repeat everything we said to the elderly couple travelling with us.

Still, not complaining, of course.

Well, by now you’ve guessed that has to be one of the worst starts to a holiday in the history of forever, well maybe not but it has to be in the top 30. It was all up hill from there though, I assure you.

There were a lot of fun times after that, including beaches, fat tourists in tiny bathers and a fair bit of Tequila, for my sister and mum of course, not me. There was an awful lot to see there though, ruins, restaurants, donkeys, it had everything. All over the streets there were people selling necklaces, silver, ponchos, t-shirts, sombreros, mini porcelain cacti, oh and that stereotype about Mexico and cacti is not a joke people, they are everywhere. It’s against the law to cut any of them down though, so no luck bringing any back, doubt we would have got them past American airport security though. Man those guys; my suitcase will never be the same again. So anyway, it was quite interesting hearing about some new laws that have just come into place in Mexico, women’s rights laws. A man can now be sent to jail for whistling at a woman, they have completely separate buses set up for women only and if a single woman is pregnant and has an idea of who the father is and he refuses a paternity test he is required by law to pay child support. Pretty extreme huh? Well I figure, seeing as the women in that country have been so poorly treated for so many years they deserve a little help.

So the rest of the trip was filled with more sightseeing, more planes, more fat people in bikinis and speedos. Then finally home again, home again.

Personally I brought home lots of new thoughts and out looks on life, as well as cheap porcelain cacti and mini sombreros. Mexico is filled with poverty stricken families and people; around every corner there’s another blind lady or new mother or injured worker, trying to make a few pesos by selling things they’ve made. Think about the poverty you see on the streets here with our Indigenous community but times it by 10, that’s Mexico. The Mayan people went through the same horrors but at the hands of the Spaniards. Not trying to dampen this otherwise light and hilariously amusing article (don’t deny it) I just want people to open their eyes to things like this. Seeing how bad things over there are has made me see what is happening there, a bit clearer. We personally did not experience any gang activity or kids in wife beaters riding lawnmowers around as my friends assured me I would, but I guess that stuff is kept away from the tourism hot spots.

So anyway, that is my trip. I hope you enjoyed reading about it, as much as I enjoyed the experience. I’m guessing the ‘fun factor’ is about equal here.