Yes I’m travelling again, so that means writing a blog post. I am currently enjoying a cool breeze in the common area of a cheap but clean and so far good quality hostel in downtown Cozumel Mexico.
Today was pretty jet lagged (due to a stupid idea on my part to leave friday night, overnight in montreal, so I could catch the earliest saturday flight to cozumel. So that wasn’t my best plan, but I did make it to my hostel before noon today so I guess it worked, if you count having only had about 2 very much interrupted hours of sleep as a success.
Ok, enough about that, how about the food?
First meal of mexico was sorta a late lunch, I had to go to the dive shop to arrange details, size the equipment etc so after taking care of that I asked the owner/manager for the closest/best food. Ended up at a fairly busy touristy restaurant called La Choza, but despite the overabundance of tourist clientelle the food was still very tasty. I ordered the “Comida Nacional” which started with a tasty chicken noodle soup and ended with a plate full of beans, rice and fried beef. Good flavour but simple, and no real effort to spice it, not sure if that’s just how that dish is or if it’s the result of the tourist clients.
Cost with Cerveza – 107 Pesos
Next dinner at the closest place to the hostel – sorry I didn’t get the name. Unlike the restaurant near the dive shop this restaurant was pretty much exclusively mexican families, and they didn’t serve beer adding to it’s mexican family restaurant vibe. I had Fajitas Pollo con Quesa (chicken fajitas with cheese) and dang was it tasty! Enjoy some pics. Again not really spicy, but they did add some sauces which had good flavour but no heat.
My apologies if this blog post is incoherent – my body think’s I’ve just stayed up all night and is yelling at me – but it’s all to be expected when you do a 12 hour time-zone shift. I am posting this from the _future_ (queue spooky music).
It’s 8:20 pm and I figure if I can stay up for another 40 minutes I might just sleep through the night. My recipe for fighting jet-lag includes:
Forcing myself to sleep as much as possible near the end of my flight (required chemical assistance, and even so all I managed was 6 hours of fitful sleep, waking up at 4:30am bangkok time).
No napping!
As much time outdoors as possible to convince my body that yes, the sun really is up and I should be awake.
For the most part I think it’s working, it’ll be a few days before I’m properly in this timezone but at least I’m generally awake during the right hours.
Diving
I won’t be blogging again until Tuesday I think, I leave tomorrow for a 3 day, 3 night liveaboard dive trip. I’ve got this neat camera that can shoot underwater, so hopefully I’ll get some good video to post (though given the quality of the internet connections here it’ll have to be ultra low quality for now). We’ll be doing 10 dives in 3 days, in some of the worlds best diving areas, I’ll post more details when I’m back (and hopefully less tired and brain-dead).
Oh yeah, the flight
I feel like I should say something about the 18 hour business class flight from LAX to BKK – but there really isn’t much to say. For the most part the best thing about business class is that there’s nothing to say about it, it’s nice enough to forget you’re on a plane and just concentrate on sleeping or watching a movie or something. The food is better, but it’s still airplane food and I wouldn’t go to a restaurant serving it, but it’s good enough.
The one bit to note is that on my flight from Bangkok to Phuket I ended up getting upgraded into a first class seat – it’s only an hour long flight so it’s not much to get excited about – but it was very nice… here’s a pic of what the first class seating is like.
I knew, deep down, that this would happen when I booked my “oh my god I’ve been saving aeroplan points for years for this” trip to leave in early February. Late last week I started checking the weather reports obsessively, and my sense of disaster increased day by day. Forecasts started calling for “light snow”, then the next day it was “5 cm snow”, but this is Canada right, we can handle 5cm?
Stupid “Blizzard”
At the very least my obsessive weather checking meant that I knew as soon as my flight out of Toronto was cancelled, and called into aeroplan early enough to get them to put me on the flight leaving a day earlier. So a mad dash of getting everything done last minute later, some drama with an annoying US Customs agent, and one economy segment later, and I’m safe and sound in LA and killing an unexpected extra day in LA.
Decided to go with the cheapest/easiest way and just too the tourist bus to Manhattan Beach, which was pretty quiet. I did have a delicious breakfast burrito though.
On it’s own the burrito was ok, good ingredients but obviously spiced for white people. Once I went a bit crazy with the bottle of Tapatio hot sauce it was delicious. IMHO you simply cannot have a burrito without some heat.
Another awesome thing – I forgot how delicious fresh tomato is, I always do in the winter. It was such a treat to have tomato that tasted half decent inside the burrito.
The hash browns were meh, but the service was excellent with a very personable waiter who I sat and chatted with for a little bit.
Now I’m sitting in LAX, waiting for the Thai Airways counter to open so I can check in for my next flight – 18 hours from LAX to Bangkok. Next update should be from Thailand!
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