One more time I am excited that I will be able to see my parents back in India. I cannot wait to hear what kind of complaints my mom will have or what kind of comments my dad will make. I know he has to a lot to say. Last three months he has been trying to talk to me quite a few times during my daily call to mom. But since he is hard of hearing, he cannot understand a word I say on the phone. Every time he would get frustrated and say “Tui aay. Tokhon katha hobey” (You come. We will talk then).

My predictions are that he will claim he has become better and that we do not need any more domestic help or the physiotherapist. He will complain that we are wasting too much money on them. My mom will complain that dad is not listening to her and will try to get off his bed when nobody is around (or sleeping). He has fallen three times already in the last three months trying to do this.

I know my dad is waiting for me to get him the printouts of Natasha’s articles (in those various publications she writes in). He is a big fan of her writing and keeps her articles neatly stacked on one side of his bed. He was upset that in December I had not brought the printouts. (In my defense, on Oct 31, he could not even recognize me; I had nary a clue that in December he would be sitting up and reading newspapers).

In terms of intersection points, this may not be an eventful trip in India. Most of the time I will be with my parents. However, there is another country I am going to visit for a couple of days and while I have some work there, I hope to meet some of my long lost classmates and colleagues.

But before all that excitement ensues, I have three flights (one of them nearly 14 hours 🙁 ), two long layovers and a trip by car to endure. And then 100+ deg F temperatures everywhere!!

That said, I cannot help reflect how lucky I have been that I have the flexibility to go see my and Sharmila’s parents and my siblings every three months!! Most of my friends my age are not even lucky to have all their parents and parents-in-law alive. I just hope they will live long enough and I will have the flexibility to do this as many times as is possible!!

The whole spectrum of blue – from turquoise to ultramarine, the Caribbean waters has it all. The picture quality is terrible – we were about 10,000 feet above ground when the airplane banked to its left to head north and I had a few seconds to pull out the iPhone before the plane straightened out again. The clouds in the sky and the greasy window pane in the plane did not help matters much.

But you can still get a glimpse of what it looks like. That is the Cancun beach in Zona Hotelera. A 8 mile long “C” like island. If you can spot the three red roofs towards the very low end of the “C”, that is where we were staying…

So long, Cancún!

Saw this board in Cancun airport. It was very funny – or should I say “punny”?. Brought Nikita from where she was to show it to her.

Sitting in the plane, I was wondering if there was a myth behind the Conch Republic. Found out there is no myth. Only reality!!

There is a micro nation (mostly the Key West) which is called the Conch Republic. It even has an army and artillery – chiefly water guns and stale Cuban bread!!

I lived in Florida and never knew about this. You can read up about the hilarious history here…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conch_Republic

I can’t recollect in all my flying years having ever come across a gate number 0 !!!
Have you?

On our way back from Chichen Itza, instead of taking the normal route, we had planned to take a slight detour and visit a small town that my friend Christina had told me about. I am glad she had given me that tip. Valladolid is very different from most of the other small towns or neighborhood we have seen so far. The striking thing is how colorful each and every building and house is. The even have doors painted in bright colors contrasting with the house colors. The city center roads were cobble stoned.

Reminded us of a place we had visited in Italy a couple of years back – I think it was called Burano. (island off Venice).

Very nice people and you can see the pronounced indigenous features in the faces of the citizenry here. An interesting feature was all the middle aged and elderly ladies seem to dress the same style – a casual, white tunic like one piece dress with some modest prints on them.

Went to a flea market to check out the local wares…

On our trip into the Yucatan Peninsula yesterday, we went to a local place to eat. It was a very large outside restaurant. While eating, we noticed something curious. Look near the roof at the edges. You see those plastic looking bags seemingly hanging with water in it? Well, they were actually plastic bags with water in it and they were hung up all over the edges of the roof.

Having flagged down the nearest waiter, I asked him what that was all about. Got a very interesting answer. Apparently they put it up to keep the flies away. I was wondering whether it was merely a custom or there was any reason for it. Before I could ask, the waiter explained to me that the flies get scared since everything looks bigger in it and thru it (the rounded edges of the water magnify things).

“Do you see any flies around?”, he asked.
“Nope”, I admitted.
“Mayan technology”, he proudly declared and went away.

Last evening I was researching on the Internet about it. I remember the craze for some purple colored water in villages in Bengal some time ago to keep away mosquitoes or something. I had seen it while running and had similarly asked a house owner about it. That was a complete misconception, I had found out while researching.

This one though is not so clear cut. Snopes (one of my sites to do fact check) left it as “Not determined”. Some people absolutely swear by its effectivity. Some claim positive bias (the ones who see a difference report enthusiastically, the ones that don’t simply move on to other things instead of reporting it).

In any case, that was an interesting learning…

First the geographical background. Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico is mostly formed with limestone rocks. Limestones being limestones, they often cave in. And I mean not like your average potholes in the road – this is tens of meters in diameter going down tens of meters below ground level. These “sinkholes” – called Cenotes were often a source of relaxations and pilgrimage for the Mayans who found clear water (and cold water, I might add) in the holes. (The water was mostly rain water getting filtered of all particles after going thru tens of meters of soil.

After seeing a few of those 6000-odd cenotes in Yucatan, this one truly took our breath away. The limestone rock caved in more or less vertically for about 90 feet. The sinkhole is about 200 feet wide and about 130 feet deep with water.

The amazing part were the vines that went straight from trees in ground level to the water.

Can you spot a couple of people in the picture jumping into the water?