Urban Diner editor Andrew Morrison spent the holiday season in Zihuatanejo, Mexico with his family.
Please excuse the terrible photography, as I am unfamiliar with the technology and therefore forced to rely instead on my cell phone.
I’ve never been anywhere warm for Christmas. It’s always been the colder clime mix of Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Wales and England for the past 30 some odd years, so Mexico really put the zap on me. Our kids, too, were out of sorts, but that might have been the fault of the croup, a mysterious and feverish affliction both seemed to have caught right on the very verge of take-off.
The trip really started on the 23rd, with an evening spent at the Fairmont’s airport hotel. We were all about the food court (Burger King seemed the soundest option – a meal deal of some kind and some chicken finger sharables) love rather than room service. We just soaked in the otherness of being outside the house. Jack (near 5) was besotted by the take-offs and landings on the runway outside our floor to ceiling and sound-proofed windows, but even he couldn’t resist going to sleep early. The kids had already seen Christmas the night previous (the 22rd) at home with family, and a couple of nights earlier in Victoria with my Mom (they had been sugared up and down for days). For Jack, at least (Pip is one and a half), going to Mexico was all about adventure. Yet for us grown-ups, we’d already exhausted trying to rationalise the otherness of the whole idea. Being somewhere that couldn’t possibly be construed as home (or even “home-ish”) was too foreign a wintry concept to register as even remotely plausible, a feeling that still swept us on to the plane the next day.
Flying out at dawn on Christmas Eve was weirdness writ big (we’re used to shivers by the fire and eggnog with purpose), but Zihuatanejo held an even bigger mystique than the George Bailey-esque home at home show that is a Christmas played out in the cold of Canada.
After a plane ride that saw not a little vomitus courtesy of Jack (lover of cheese and loather of apparent dining at 40,000 feet – use the bag, dude!), we walked off the plane (down the stairs and on to the Zihuatanejo-Ixtapa tarmac – old school) and slipped, sweltering, into an air-conditioned SUV bound for the Sotavento Beach Resort on the Playa La Ropa, a long, idyllic crescent beach that stares at Hong Kong from across the Pacific.
It was sunset, so we kicked off our windstorm weary socks (we were without power at home) and laid into some Pacifico beer and a dinner of Chicken Cordon Bleu, very good guacamole studded with the odd wack of habanero, some real deal flan with sketchy whipa, and plenty of Dos Equis and lime-heavy margarita frappes rimmed with local sea salt (bags of which I brought home for a dollar a kilo).
We went to sleep with the aid of Nemo and ancient Bowie on the recently unwrapped iPod, visions of sugar plums the farthest things from our heads.
We had no idea really, what to expect when the sun arrived. We were way up on the top floor, but it was dark and all we could see were the lights of the bay. The deafening din of the waves, 8 stories below (in an 8 story complex), proved a solid enough serenade that caused us not to fret too much. We were out like lights.
Tomorrow would be hot and sunny, we knew, but would it be Christmas?
More tomorrow.
