We’ve been counting down the days with Ouest for five days now. “Ouest, how many days until Grammy gets here?” Five days, four days, three days, two days, one day, today.
“Now?” she asked after getting told it was today.
“No. Right now Grammy is on the airplane way up in the sky.”
“Me see? Huh, me see?” she then asked while excitedly rushing out the patio doors to look at the overcast sky.
I always feel a little bad when my mom and aunt Beth visit because as soon as they walk out of the terminal I lead them right past the taxi drivers standing right outside the door excitedly trying to get our business. Two hundred and sixty pesos these guys want for a trip to the center of town. That’s madness in the world of Mexican taxis. Their argument is that they are fully insured. That’s the sum total of their argument for the exorbitant price.
So anyway, I lead my AARP clan up over the pedestrian bridge and down the other side to the waiting yellow taxis where us locals in the know get the same trip downtown for a hundred pesos.
I know it’s ridiculous, and that my mom would happily pay the extra twelve dollars not to hike the hundred meters over the highway with a bunch of luggage, but I just can’t bring myself to allow it.
On to the subject of water for no particular reason. Tonight at dinner my Aunt ordered water. (Ouest calls cold water, “Brrr Agua,” which I find utterly adorable.) When the waiter asked her if she’d like tap or bottled she set a new record for fastest response time, “Bottle!”
As well, a couple of weeks back on Facebook somebody asked us what we do for water on the boat. “Surely you don’t use the water at the dock.”
In fact that’s exactly what we use. Everywhere we go. Every marina, without question. And in restaurants if they bring us a bottle of water we send it back and ask for a glass with ice and a straw. Because only the kids drink water in this family, Ali and I try and stick to fermented drinks.
Anyway, we’ve never gotten sick, gotten a stomach ache, spent a night on a toilet, nothing. And some people would probably get sick just looking at the taps that we drink from, much less from actually drinking the water.
Point is… ah, there is no point. Maybe that we don’t need water to come from bottles, or maybe that Mexico isn’t as backwards as people like to think, or maybe that the Bums just have guts of iron. That’s probably it actually. Man, if we were unsanitary before, you should just see us now that we’ve got kids.
Lowe got a black eye today. He is at the walking stage where he often reaches for handholds that are just out of reach, resulting in a face first bounce off of whatever it was he was reaching for.
He’s also got a chipped front tooth. Neither of us knows exactly when that might have happened. It’s a nice sharp little corner chunk missing. Funny that now we consider a chipped tooth to be no big deal. “At least he didn’t kill it yet.”
