We are having a blast with Banana here in Merida - and lots of bad Mexican beer. Sometimes we don't even know what we've ordered but the most popular for me is XX Lager. We tried to order "yardas" of beer thinking yards (and the guys at the table next to us had really tall yard glasses) but it turns out that just means really big margarita glasses of beer. Those guys must have gotten theirs from the Carnival(e).
Surprisingly we haven't seen all that much of Carnival(e) but we did catch some concerts (where we got free bandanas) and everyone is dressed up - for adults (women, anyway) they look like showgirls and for kids it's like Halloween. For some reason a ton of little boys are wearing outfits I thought only dragqueens wore - long sleeve, shiny tops that stop just below their pecks - open tummy - and shiny bell bottom pants. Very strange. Tonight we're going to the parade, so that should be fun. More pictures to come.
What we do have pictures of (on photobucket as of today) is our trip with Banana to the Cenotes! Cenotes are like sink holes or caves full of water and are beautiful - but kinda scary in that the water gets dark and there are little fishes I don't want to touch me. However, they were a blast to swim in and Banana has an underwater camera so the pictures are hysterical.
In order to get to the Cenotes we took a bus and then had to take a bicycle rick-shaw. THEN you had to take these cart things that use the old mining tracks. The carts are pulled by horses and there's only one track so whenever we run into a cart headed towards us one of us has to get off the tracks and let the other pass. Not sure how they decide who, but it ran pretty smoothly. We visited 3 different Cenotes on the tracks and each one was different but fun. The first Cenote was beautiful but the moment we got there everyone left so it was a tad creepy - the back part of the cave was really dark so we didn't swim all the way back.
The second Cenote was awesome because it had a platform to jump about 10 feet into the water - so Banana and I swapped spots and kept trying to get pictures of ourselves jumping into the water (but I suck at timing the photos and missed her every time - my bad). The second Cenote also had these tree roots hanging down which I grabbed a hold of until I heard Jeff say he saw big spiders on them - and then I swam away from them for good. We had a picnic lunch and visited the last Cenote, but only Banana swam there since we were running out of time. The underwater pictures of us are hysterical - so check those out. On the way back, Jeff decided to tell the rick-shaw driver that he wanted to try out driving so the driver and I rode in the front while Jeff drove. He did a great job, but I believe it was tiring. We passed some adorable Mexican suburb type houses - just like the USA where each house is exactly the same but in alternating colors. Only difference is that their colors are much more vibrant (see pics).
PS. Don't keep your wallet in your pocket when you jump into a Cenote - because then you have to dry out all of your money while traveling back on the carts. DO, however, keep your watch on - because if you watch happens to be annoyingly broken and won't stop beeping every hour, this will fix it to it no longer beeps every hour (even if you lose the face of your watch...somehow).
Tomorrow we're headed to the ruins of Uxmal (ooosh mall), so more pictures to come. Tooodles!
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