Puerto Vallarta
Crunchies
October 2021
Let’s talk about crunchies. And by crunchies I mean some sort of millipede type thing. We started calling them crunchies because when you inadvertently crush the shit out of one, they are kinda crunchy. This is odd, because they look very soft and wet when they’re crawling around.
So we when we first go to our place in Puerto Vallarta these guys were everywhere – mainly outside our place but also inside. After all, we are in tropical climate and it was hot and moist. Each morning we’d find a few of them on the wall, or in the shower, or on the floor. Sometimes they’d be diligently snaking up the wall, or maybe just gettin’ vertical (ie sticking to the wall motionless in a vertical line). Sometimes they’d be in the crunchy equivalent of the fetal position, a nice little circle type formation. So first thing in the morning we’d do a quick scan, and just sweep any rogue crunchies into the dustpan and toss ’em outside, hopeful they can live a life without being crushed by human feet.
One of the first nights here I awoke in the middle of the night and noticed something on the bed next to me, a dark circular thing. I picked it up – “What is this? A button?” I said to myself. But it was no button. It was a curled up crunchy. On another occasion one seemed to drop from the heavens above, cold and wet onto my arm. On both occasions I hastily threw the crunchy towards the wall, searched the bed for other arthropods and felt ghosts crawling on my skin until my paranoia subsided.
Anyway, these things are kinda gross to me, but now a month in we don’t see them so much anymore. I’m not sure why – maybe it is weather related. It cooled down a bit and hasn’t been raining as much. I’m no arthropod or weather expert. But regardless, I kinda miss them. Is it weird to talk to the crunchies you find around the house? “Hey crunchy! Where you goin’ bud?”
What about writing a song about them to the tune of “Do ya think I’m sexy?” by Rod Stewart? Is that strange? Ask Ang about that one.
Alas, our days weren’t all focused on crunchies. There were lizards too! We talk to them as well.
Puerto Vallarta is a tourist town to be sure. We staid in the Romantic Zone, which is busy area by Muertos Beach with nice restaurants and what not. Go in a few blocks away from the beach and it feels more like “Mexican”, but near the beach you are constantly peddled all sorts of things. If you stay for a week, it’s no big deal – maybe you actually want to do one of the four things that are offered to tourists in PV (ATV, canopy tour, boat to an island, or tequila). After a month it gets a bit tiresome even to say “no gracias” every 2 minutes while on a walk.
We’d routinely take a long mid-day walk down the Malecón (a pedestrian walkway full of restaurants and shops that follow the beach for a few miles). Not that I expect any locals to remember me, but each day there’d be a guy selling temporary tattoos on the Malecón. He had a book of them, and the page was always open to the Batman logo (I’m considering it). But like clockwork, as soon as we got near him you’d hear “weed…coke…”. Coming back the other way a voice always seems to come out nowhere, and amid the hustle and bustle of noise and Spanish speaking it cuts through: “I got weed man.”
So we established a bit of a routine. I was wondering what it’d be like to work in such a warm, lovely place as PV, and not be on vacation. But it worked out just fine. Around noon I typically take a break and go sit by the pool for a bit, and soak up some vitamin D. There were a few others in our building staying for a few months, so we had some non-lizard/arthropod company. And even on a bad day, after work I’m five minutes away from a beer on the beach. That’s my perspective.
It was very hot when we got here, and it took a bit to acclimate. Now I feel in pretty good shape. I find it far easier to be active when the sun is out and the weather is warm. And we have to climb a lot of stairs. Just to get out of our apartment is a 90 stair climb. And a few days a week I walk up the Mirador, a very high look out a few miles and several hundred stairs. Even when traveling and living nomadically routine is still nice. Sweep up the crunchies, do some work, sit by the pool, do some more work, climb up the mirador, drink a margarita, eat some tacos.
We are spoiled with sunshine and beaches here. Muertos beach is nearest to us and your really can’t beat walking five minutes to be in the sand and the ocean. Awesome sunsets. But it doesn’t have the greatest water and it can be a bit crowded. Go a few miles south though and you have more options. Conchas Chinas has a great little cove of aquamarine for swimming, Mismaloya is a nice, small beach nearly devoid of vendors selling jewelry, blankets, and grilled shrimps on sticks. Punta Negra is our favorite so far. Wide open flat sand, and nice smooth waves.
Feel less like a piece of shit.
People ask us a lot about the food here. After all, it is Mexico. There is good food here. There a lot of great restaurants very close to us and we go out to eat or get takeout basically every day. Initially, we thought we’d do more cooking, but we adapted our lifestyle a bit.
In Seattle we cooked regularly, but I realize now just how spoiled we were there. I absolutely miss how easily we could pick up a perfect green, squiggly, head of kale, or arugula, spinach, etc. But obviously what you have access to here is going to be different. For instance, I haven’t yet found any peanut butter without hydrogenated oils. And yeah yeah, I’m sure some of you roll your eyes at that, but isn’t it more odd to have hydrogenated oil in peanut butter that just…peanuts? I digress…
Another oddity – a lot of supers here sell unpackaged Costco stuff. For some reason, a Kirkland brand jar of mixed nuts costs nearly $40, and interestingly, half the amount in an unmarked container costs exactly half. Shrug.
Some things are awesome (tortillas, salsas, papaya!), so we keep it pretty simple in the house, buying things at local “supers” just when we need it, and not stocking up in a traditional “American” grocery sense. Ultimately it turned out not to be worth our time to take trips to the grocery store (nothing very close by, and we have no car).
The other thing is our kitchen is not awesome. Just a microwave and a four burner gas stovetop (no oven). Also, the sink is at such a strange angle, you really have to wedge yourself in this little corner nook to be able to do dishes. I’m no architect, but it seems like a curious choice to me.
Long story short (too late), considering the lower cost of things here, the amount of time we save not cooking, and also the need to force ourselves to get out of the house, going out for food has been a highlight of our time here. The other day we went to a local brewery and had four draft beers (total) and a plate of fries for about $12 as an example. I’m sure once we get back to the states we’ll taper off our dining out, but for now I’m enjoying the cheap tacos and beer. Though totally missing good beer (again, very spoiled in Seattle).
We did manage to get what I call the BIG D a few times. Now, throughout my travels I’ve gotten sick in a variety of foreign countries, including Czech Republic, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Thailand, and India. Maybe I’ll write a separate post on that – anyone interested in few thousand words about diarrhea? I’m not joking. Anyway, what I got here was relatively mild. I’ve been to PV five times, and this is the first time I’ve gotten sick. And it wasn’t even from eating anything exciting. I’ve “rolled the dice” countless times, so to speak, and been fine, so this time around it was even lamer. My guess here is some produce we bought that we didn’t wash well enough, and some jalapenos at a restaurant.
On the bright side – a consistent regiment of stair climbing and the big D will help you get those six pack abs you’ve always dreamed about.
Dia de Los Muertos happened while we were here. I bought a tall can of Victoria at the OXXO and walked around and snapped some photos. Then I ate a corn dog from a street vendor.
Now, the thing with corndogs is that there is very little middle ground. They are either awesome or terrible. I knew the odds were 50/50 in this case. On the one hand, the corn dog was sitting, stick down in a holder, side by side with a few other corn dogs in the open air for an indeterminable amount of time. Could have been a few minutes, could have been a few days. But hey, its a goddamned corndog am I right?
This was a cooked corn dog, and being an experienced connoisseur of corn dogs, I knew that there was a chance this was just a display model. After all, there was a nearby pot of hot oil, in a full rolling boil. So maybe there was a slim chance there would be a freshly dipped and cooked corny in my future. This wasn’t the case of course, the corn dog on display was indeed the one I’d get. And honestly it looked good. This is why I wanted to eat it. A crunchy hand dipped corny with maybe a bit of catsup and mustard, that’s good eatin’s in my book.
To freshen it up, the vendor did another dip in the oil. Oh – good idea I thought, crisp it up a bit, why not. But then it was in the oil for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time. So it was hot, but not to be too anticlimactic here, although it looked incredibly crispy golden brown, it was somehow soft and mushy, and frankly, not very good.
Similarly, there is a bakery in the Romantic Zone that has AMAZING looking bakeries. We now call it the Fakery. You go in, grab a tray, some tongs, and select whatever weird looking and colorful pastry type things they have available. And for an average American, they cost virtually nothing, which makes them even more delicious looking.
Then we ate some of the things, and they were very underwhelming. I don’t mean this in a “I’ve been to France and I know what good bakery is” type of way. I’m a guy who loves corn dogs and Penguinos (Mexican equivalent of Hostess Cupcakes), so don’t think I’m being pretentious here. Again – these things looked awesome. So we just chalked it up to the fact that it was late in the evening, so maybe they just weren’t so fresh.
We tried again another day in the morning – surely they must be better. There were even more items and they looked – and smelled, great. But again, they did not taste good. And again, not to be hypercritical of the bakery, I just don’t understand how something could look so good and taste so bad. Truly mysterious. Fakery.
So far our decision to pack up and live nomadically been a good one. While only a month in, things have gone basically gone the way I thought they would.
Every day isn’t some magnificent adventure. After all, work is still work wherever you are. Warm weather and sunshine don’t make a desk job suddenly awesome. However, I haven’t worn pants in a month, and that is awesome.
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