Spring Break with Ma and Pa (rough draft)

An "unedited" travel essay written for a creative writing class.


Spring break 2005…Cancun, Mexico…with my parents…
Ok, so maybe not every college sophomore’s ideal spring break trip. I was just happy to go some place warm, though. I needed to bronze my white Wisconsin skin. I finally convinced my parents to take me with them on their vacation. The year before, UW Madison and Poynette High school’s spring break did not match up. So my parents, brother, and sister went on vacation without me. I didn’t get to go anywhere but home during my spring break that year, thanks to my lack of money and coordination with friends.
In 2005, though, our two schools’ spring breaks matched up. My parents booked an all inclusive vacation to Cancun. I was excited for the fact I was going someplace “cool”, someplace warm, and someplace for free. “With my parents” though, held other implications. No drinking, no going out, basically no fun.
We flew out of Rockford, IL straight down to Cancun. As soon as I stepped off the plane and walked down the tunnel, I could feel the humid tropical air through my sweatshirt. It felt warm and inviting. We made our way through customs and found the bus that would take us to our hotel, the Oasis Viva.
At about 9 pm that night we boarded the bus. Our guide invited us to buy and drink Coronas as he gave us a brief tour along the way. Despite only being 20 at the time, in Cancun, the drinking age is 18. As we drove along, I imagined what would happen if I raised my hand and beckoned the tour guide with Coronas to the back of the bus. My father’s (the man who has never had a drop of alcohol in his life) jaw would drop. My mother (who occasionally had a can of beer on a hot summer’s day) would flash me the evil eye and tell the man, “no, my daughter doesn’t drink; she’s underage” and I’d be humiliated in front of the entire coach bus of college liberals.
Cancun was lit up like Christmas. There were young people everywhere and long lines wrapped outside every club. We could hear the music blasting through the bus windows. I thought about how if I would have planned it better I could have been amongst those people right now and not sitting between my mom and little brother.
After dropping off almost everyone else on the bus, we finally reached our hotel. We were all starving and could not wait to check in and eat some Mexican food. It didn’t even have to be Mexican for all I cared; I just couldn’t wait to eat.
After dinner, my family decided they wanted to check out some of the malls and excitement that we passed by on the way to our hotel. Great, I thought, this is going to look real cool, ten-thousand drunken clubbers crowding the streets and my mom asking them to snap pictures of us. We changed out of our Wisconsin weather sweatshirts and jeans and into something a little bit more climate friendly. Then we took a stroll downtown to look at the markets, malls, and clubs on the main strip of Cancun.
We walked to an open air mall called Forum by the Sea that had performances in the center by both people and animals. That night a seal performed. A large seal hobbled its way down the mall to the center ring and did tricks for us before taking pictures. There were also human statues. People painted themselves a glittery silver or gold from head to toe and stood on a small platform in the mall as still as statues, occasionally changing positions. I really began resenting being there with my family. My mom kept taking our picture with each step we took. Can we look anymore like tourists, I thought. I almost leaped for joy when my dad suggested heading back to the hotel.
If there was one thing I was going to do while in Cancun to keep myself from looking extremely lame, it was maintain my bathing suit figure. On our first full day in Cancun, my sister and I woke at 7 am and ran for about an hour. Not on purpose, though. We were going to do a 40 minute out and back loop, but we got a little lost on the “back” part. Christy, my sister, got really dehydrated and we had no water so we stopped at a fountain in front of a restaurant and I told Christy to dip her head into it and splash water on her face. A man yelled at us for playing in the water, so we had to cut the cool-off short and keep going. Christy constantly needed to stop and walk. She was not acclimated to the humid weather at all and really struggled to keep up. I tried my best to take care of her, but I had left a note for my mom saying we’d be back no later than 50 minutes after we left so I had to keep pushing her to move so we didn’t have a search party out looking for us. After taking every wrong turn and back tracking over and over, we finally found the road our hotel was on. When we got to the hotel, we went straight to the bar and ordered two tall ice waters. All of our runs after that were much shorter and we hydrated better before heading out on them. One good thing that came out of the run was that we covered a lot of the city that surrounded our hotel and by the end of the trip, I knew Cancun like the back of my hand.
Later on that day, my parents decided to do some shopping at an outdoor market. I just rolled my eyes as my mom packed her oversized blue-jean purse with baby wipes, water, snacks, Kleenex, playing cards, as if we were never going to return. She then handed the bag over to my dad saying it was too heavy for her to carry all of our stuff and we each had to take turns carrying her purse.
I was not looking forward to going to the market. Not because it meant spending the whole day with my family and not on the beach, but because I’ve never been a huge fan of market places. The atmosphere makes me uncomfortable. I’m not very good at making deals or ok with men yelling things like “Hey pretty lady, I have just what you’ve been looking for! Come here beautiful!” at me. In the market, my sister and I stopped at a leather goods shop and we each picked out a small purse to have our names burned into. The vendor only spoke Spanish, so I had to recall my knowledge of the language and threw out a few cuanto questas and a gracias to make it look like I knew what I was talking about. My dad tested my limited knowledge in the Spanish language even further when he asked me to help interpret what the taxi driver was saying and get us a good deal on our ride back to the hotel. I let him down, though, partly because of my shyness but mostly because it had been over a year since I had taken Spanish 102 and it was only an elementary level class.
On Tuesday I got screwed out of another day of tanning. My dad planned a ferry ride out to the Isla Mujeres and rented golf carts to tour the five mile long, half mile wide island. I felt like an idiot on the back of the golf cart driving around a little island with my mom leaning out taking pictures of every single tree and building we drove by. It was stop-and-go the whole way and I began to feel nauseous. I was so happy when we decided to stop at a lighthouse that sits on the coast of the island to walk around. The lighthouse is a historical landmark of the island, but I’m pretty sure my mom got more pictures of all the iguanas that were cooling themselves on the rocks around the lighthouse than of the lighthouse itself.
That night after dinner, I still felt sick and went to bed early. My family attended a show put on by the hotel staff that consisted of native dancing and colorful costumes traditional to Mexican culture. As I laid in the hotel room curled up in a ball, all I could think about was how I’d rather be here than with them. The show sounded lame. The next morning though, I didn’t hear the end of it. My family still raves to this day about the performance they saw. I guess I’ll never know what I missed.
There was one traditional Mexican event that I didn’t miss out on, but now that I look back on it, I almost wish I would have. Every Wednesday there is a bull fight at the Plaza de Toros in Cancun. My parents insisted on us attending this historical event, and so I didn’t object. We got seats in the front row that allowed us to peer over the balcony right down into the bull ring. My uncle had seen a bull fight in Spain a few years before we went to Cancun. Even though he does most of the veterinary work on our dairy farm and has even butchered cows, he had returned from that trip telling us that the bull fight was one of the worst things he had ever witnessed. Needless to say, if he couldn’t handle it, I expected the worst. After watching a cock fight and some volunteers from the audience try to play soccer in the ring with a bull chasing them around, it was finally time for the bull fight. The matador strutted his stuff and seemed, in my opinion, pretty arrogant, so I rooted for the bull the entire time. Everything started innocent, but got bloody fast.
To weaken the bull, men on blinded and padded covered horses would run by the bull every once in awhile and throw large darts in its back to draw blood. The matador would keep taunting the bull to make it run and blood would flow out of its back and down its sides, dripping onto the dirt below. At one point, the matador got a little too confident and the glistening red bull caught him off guard, knocking him into the air and down to the ground. Men ran out to rescue him before the bull came back for more, but the damage had been done and they had to help carry him out of the ring. The crowd erupted in cheers for the bull.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, the matador recovered enough to come back and finish his job. He taunted the bull and as it charged at him, he quickly moved out of the way and stabbed it in the back of the neck with his sword as it ran by. Blood spewed out and the bull roared in pain. It began moving slower and weaved back and forth as if it was drunk. He continued to taunt it and make it run around. The men on horses returned to finish the bull off, stabbing it with more darts. Finally, it collapsed, right in front of where we were sitting. I peered over the ledge just in time to watch one of the men slit the bull’s throat. Never again will I go to another bull fight (but I can relive it whenever I want with all the pictures my mom took).
The day after the bull fight, we decided to take a break from all the site-seeing and finally hit the beach. It really wasn’t as great as it sounds though. The week after spring break, I had a Chemistry and Calculus exam. Also, my mom only brought spf 30 sun block. Despite my mom’s skin cancer precautions, though, I was able to get a little bit of a tan while reading, memorizing formulas, and doing problems over and over. During my study breaks, of course I had to sip virgin piña coladas.
One evening, my dad decided he wanted to do some exploring and see Cancun’s night life. He invited me to go with him and we walked down to the main strip of Cancun where all the clubs are located. College kids filled the streets, loud music blared, and long lines stood outside of every bar. Wondering what was so great inside these bars, my dad waltzed right into one as I embarrassedly lagged behind. Luckily the bar he chose was not on of the most popular ones and was pretty deserted. I still felt like all eyes were on us, though. My dad doesn’t drink, so it was awkward for me to see him in a bar. He sort of walked around, looked at the interior design, and then said the place didn’t impress him much, so we left.
On one of the last days, my dad paid to take two mini speedboats on the “jungle tour,” which pretty much amounted to driving boats through a narrow path between two small islands where we “might” see alligators. I rode with my brother and let him drive. Being only 16, my brother enjoyed the privilege a bit too much and we were literally airborne for most of the trip. When we reached our destination, a man helped us anchor our boat and we put on snorkeling equipment and jumped into the water.
Back in the third and fourth grade I had considered being a marine biologist. I have always been fascinated with the ocean and I love snorkeling and collecting shells on the beach. Yet ever since I tried to take a fish I caught off of a hook and rubbed the scales the wrong way, I’ve been terrified of touching fish. When we jumped into the water in Cancun, I had to face my fear…times a thousand. The water where we jumped in literally looked like a black cloud of fish. I couldn’t move without touching a fish. I freaked out and was screaming at my brother, “Oh my gosh, don’t let them touch me! It’s going to hurt! I don’t want to touch them!”
After I got over the dramatics, and out of the cloud of fish, I calmed down and really began enjoying myself. I let my body sink down under the blue glass and into a whole other world. Multi-colored coral and fish of all kinds filled the ocean floor. Everything seemed to be closer than it actually was underwater. Huge fish would swim right in front of my face, but actually be a few feet away, which I was just fine with. I took pictures with my underwater camera as they swam by and got some great close-ups of the marine life in Cancun. I was sad to leave the water and return to land. Our trip was coming to an end and I knew I’d miss the jungle tour the most.
We boarded our plane around noon on Saturday. It was a long trip home and I studied most of the time, but I couldn’t help dozing off once in awhile and imagine myself driving around Isla Mujeres, watching the bull get his revenge on the matador, and snorkeling in the Caribbean. I realized then that I’m always have a picture of Cancun in my mind that many college kids never get to see. When I returned in 2006, though, I left my family behind.