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better food outside the resort
Saturday, June 16 2018
location: Room 2342, The Reef Coco Beach, Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo, Mexico
The crappy weather continued, though it wasn't always raining. With overcast skies, I'd yet to require any sunscreen on this summertime Mexican vacation. At some point I got a free margarita from the poolside bar (it was pretty good) and went for a stroll northward up the beach. The Reef Coco Beach has a terrible beach, with a thick layer of seaweed on the sand and a fair amount extending out into the water. Not far beyond that are numerous small boats that have for some reason been anchored offshore (there is a dock, though for some reason none of the boats are at it, implying that to get to a boat, one must either swim out to it or make use of a smaller, portable boat). North of the boats, though, the beach is empty for a long distance and if one wanted to, one could set up there and have it all to one's self. There's a fence keeping people from either coming or going to that beach from the jungle, and there are few people walking along the beach. The seaweed problem persists, of course, but it's actually not as disgusting as it looks.
I got another margarita and returned to my room, where I caught up on all the craziness in the remote workplace diaspora. It was the weekend, and the chatter had abated a bit. But I was feeling pretty good about things. On Thursday night, Gretchen had posted a picture of me chowing down on that burger at Modern Love, and it had received a lot of likes & loves, including from people presently working at The Organization. Some of the luminaries of the animal rights movement (all of them women who had blown the whistle on the #ARMeToo scandals back in February) had also expressed their support, and that validation did much to temper the inevitable second guessing I found myself doing.
While our resort restaurant was clearly not up to the task of feeding a family of hungry vegans (or vegan-adjacents), a little internet research revealed to Gretchen that there were fully vegan restaurants just outside the resort, one only about a block away. Late this afternoon, four of us (Gretchen, my sister-in-law, and my niece and nephew) all left the resort on foot and walked to a slightly further-away all-vegan sandwich shop called Marvin's Burgers. There we ordered a range of junky sandwiches (and fries). While we waited outside, my nephew wanted to bust open a coconut he'd found. I tried slamming it against an exposed bolt at the bottom of a lamp post, which managed to break free some of the outer husk. But to crack the shell, we had to cross the street and beat on it with a convenient concrete block. This allowed us into the nut, where its white meat was unexpectedly good.
On the walk home, Gretchen took us down an alleyway that had looked like a street on Google Maps. We had to walk through a disgusting mess of garbage and palm fronds to avoid a massive puddle. We'd seen a few dogs here and there along the way. Some of them were collarless and had the fawn color and corkscrew tails of the average dog genome, suggesting that they were wild. Thankfully, none of them looked to be starving. Indeed, someone had set up a system to feed wild dogs using PVC pipes attached to lamp posts, though the one we saw didn't seem to be operational (it had greenish water where there should've been kibble). I don't know about the wisdom of feeding wild dogs, though it's definitely a kind thing to attempt.
Back at the resort, we all supplemented what we could scrounge from the buffet with our delicious burgers. This time I drank red wine with my meal, which proved to be the better option.
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