One week in Playa del Carmen

Today was the end of my first week of school and so the last day with some of my classmates.

Language schools can be quite an intense experience. Not only to you have people form all over coming together to do the same thing, but there’s a great deal of time spent talking about your life and experiences in class. So you quickly get to know and appreciate people, especialy when it’s not that big a school. So it was sad to be saying goodbye to new friends.

In terms of Spanish my first week has been revision. I don’t mind that because it hepls lock in basic concepts that are so important when you try to communicate. It has, once again, reinforced for me that if I ever want to really move on I realy need to spend a month or more in a school.

I had lunch with Tatania form Brazil as we both sought out some salad. Mexican food leans heavily into fatty meat and there’s only so much of that you can take unless you were brought up to expect it three times a day. Then I went and sought out the local Mayan ruins. Playa del Carmen is only some thirty years old, before that it was a small fishing village. But in Mayan times they had settlements every ten kilometers up the coast and this was one of them.

There is a little set of ruins that is much like a mini version of Tulum in terms of its layout and so makes me think the buildings perforned the same service as temple, calendar and lighthouse back in the day. Now they are a phtogenic home to trees and iguanas.

I walked back long the beach beside the beautiful carribean waters dodging pelicans (and a million sunbathers).

The week in school finished up with cocktails in the school’s courtyard – made endlessly entertaining by Franzi – who daily serves coffee in t-shirt, shorts and thongs – putting on his best bar-ternder look.