I did another side trip from Cuernavaca when my girlfriend from California flew down to Mexico City and I met her at the airport. We took the bus to Cuernavaca and spent the night with my host family. Then we took the bus to Acapulco the next day. The buses in Mexico are very nice if you take clase ejecutiva o primera. The buses are cheap and have comfortable clean seats and a host to serve you drinks and food on the trips. The drivers are sometimes insane but that is just a part of Mexico. I have come close to a terrible crushing death many times in Mexico riding on nice buses. One time our bus was stopped for speeding and after a two hour wait while the cop and the driver had a heated argument on the side of the road, the driver paid an eighty dollar fine and we were on our way again with a pissed off driver. He drove like a blind drunken puma after his ticket. He was giving Mexican slang lessons to anybody within five miles of the bus as he drove along at even faster speeds than before the ticket because he had to make up the lost time on his schedule.
Halfway to Acapulco is a town called Taxco that is the silver capital of Mexico. I did a side trip to Taxco with the students from my Spanish school and had a good time. The bus we were on this time only did a short stop so passengers could buy silver jewelry from some select vendors or some food and then we continued on to Acapulco.
In Acapulco we checked into our hotel. Since we were doing a Mexico immersion course we stayed in a hotel that catered to Mexicans tourists instead of to American tourists. None of the staff spoke English. The Mexican tourists use a different part of the beach than the foreign tourists use. It is just North of the main Acaculco beach in a small cove with a little museum and aquarium on a little island nearby. All the people at this beach are locals. I enjoyed being at this little slice of MExico way more than the main beach. Everybody treated us very well at the hotel and at the beach. We got some looks like what the hell are they doing here but everyone was friendly. I practiced my Spanish and we hung out on the beach or at the hotel pool. The locals frequently swam in their underwear instead of in bathing suits. Most of them could not afford the extra cost for a suit. There was a shower on the beach and the locals who are normally very shy from my experience were not shy at the public open shower. They would just strip down and shower off the salt water without any thought to all the people on the beach. The prices for food and drinks on this section of Acapulco's beach were less than half they were at the main beach and the ocean was safer because the beach was protected a bit by the island nearby.
We took daytrips into the main downtown area of Acapulco by taking the bus. The buses in Acapulco are brightly painted with personal designs for each bus so that it can be easily recognized by the riders. Lots of them look like mobile graffiti walls. They also play distinctive loud music on each bus. Did I say loud? Sorry I meant to say LOUD MUSIC! There is always a driver and a person to collect the fares. They frequently sing along with the music they play. It was pretty entertaining unless you wanted to chat with your friend on the bus which was tough because it was so loud.
They had just finished a new public bathroom on the main beach when we got there. They were having a little celebration for the completion of the project. There were about a dozen toilets for men and an equal number for women. They building and all the toilets were very modern. Except that is for the plumbing. The fancy toilets were just plumbed together and the water ran down the beach to the ocean in an open sewer. there were little kids playing in the dirty water that ran out of the building. They were making little dams and stuff but the floating logs would always smash up their little sand dams. It was disgusting to watch them play in the sewage like it was no big deal. If it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger right.
There was a big police raid one day while we were at the main beach area. The police did a big sting where they used underage decoys to lure tourists into sex and then arrested the men. They arrested eighty men the day we were there. We ran into one guy after he was arrested and he told us about his experience. He was an American and when he is done paying the price in Mexico he will be subject to American prosecution also for traveling toa place and then committing child abuse. He was bitching because he said the decoy looked to be around twenty five years old and there is no way to verify someone's age in Mexico so how could he have prevented his arrest. He ranted about entrapment. We just moved on.
We went out at night only one night while we were there. Night time entertainment in Mexico does not start until well past midnight. We went to a Spanish restaurant and I had paella Valencia which is one of my favorite foods in the world. Then after we ate we tried to stay awake long enough to go to a club. We wandered around town but we got tired long before the clubs lit up and we gave up and went back to our hotel. When I came here with the students we stayed up all night and partied hardy, but my girlfriend and I went to bed by midnight. Then we took the bus back to Mexico City the next day and she caught her plane home and I took a bus to Cuernavaca after her plane left.
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