Blake and Deborah in Mexico: Cancun

Cancun is a short 1 hr 50 min flight from Fort Lauderdale. Before landing I warned Deborah about the time share salesmen that I had read about who harass any and all who try to exit the airport. Despite these warnings I managed to get sucked in myself (much to Deborah's amusement) by someone who I had mistaken for a tourist information official. At first he seemed to provide useful information on various attractions and it wasn't until after he asked, “Do you like to save money?” (duh) and started to offer discounts on tours if we attended a "presentation" that I realized whom I was dealing with. We finally extricated ourselves from his sleazy grip with the excuse of needing to catch our shuttle bus.

We stayed in the downtown area of Cancun rather than the hotel zone. The latter is where most tourist stay and it is very glitzy and Americanized and not particularly interesting to us. The downtown area is more genuinely Mexican. It actually started as a collection of shacks for the workers building the mega hotels. Everything is significantly cheaper there. We found a great little eatery we actually ate at twice. The second time Deborah got brave and ordered Chicharrones, not quite knowing what they were. When they arrived they looked like thin, limp, gooey slabs in a greenish sauce. She was convinced they were intestines or stomach or some other organ meat she wasn't at all interested in consuming. As it turns out they were pig skins – pork rinds really, but squishy not crunchy – not as gross as intestines, but not exactly mouth watering either. She will probably stick to enchiladas from now on.