Ha llegado el "norte"

I woke up this morning freezing. Last night a huge northern cold front hit us in the Yucatan. When I say cold front I mean weather in the 70s...but cold nonetheless. People here say, "ha llegado el norte", or quite literally, "the north has arrived". Which I think is funny. But the cold front comes each year and stays for about 3 days, so we should all still be a go for my trip back to the Caribbean this weekend.

Exactly a week from today I will be leaving on my excursion through the Inner Mayan World. I'll be sleeping in a hammock on the seashores of Old Mexico by night, and treking through the jungle to see rarely visited Mayan cities. I'll be seeing some of the tallest Mayan pyramids and scuba diving in their ancient cenotes (see post from Sept 22 to learn about centoes), I can't wait to post pictures.

I'm going to take the lack of comments on the last blog as a "you've said it so well that we have nothing to add" rather than a "no one reads this dumb thing..." But all of that aside. Do you remember when you were between the ages of like 12 and 14? Every time that I would walk into a store the employees would stop and stare to make sure that I wasn't stealing anything. Well sometimes I feel the exact same way here. Maybe they stare because I'm clearly a foreigner, but there are times when I know it is because they don't trust me. For example, tonight I was walking back from the bus stop on the sidewalk as a guy was getting out of his car. He walked up to the front door of his house and just stopped to make sure I walked all the by and didn't stop at his car. I don't know what he thought I was going to do, or if they have a lot of American thievery in Mexico... Whatever it is I thought it was really humorous, because that is a stereotype that I wasn't aware of.

This weekend! I forgot I haven't written about it yet. I went scuba diving in the Caribbean. The water was the most turquoise water I've ever seen. We saw barracuda, a sting ray, and tons of colorful fish. I didn't have the ability to take any pictures while I was down there, but it looked a lot like this...but it was a much bigger reef.