Acapulco by Photo (#1)

So Mandy says I should blog about said summer vacation. And I don't say no to Mandy. So here goes.

This is Mandy's apartment in Acapulco. It's very hip and relatively cool. By cool I mean that with all the lights off and shades drawn and fans running and bare feet on the tile floor, it's only 97 degrees with one million percent humidity. All you southerners who are reading this (and I know most of you are), you are not allowed to say "it's not the heat, it's the humidity" anymore, okay? That's a new rule, make a note of it.

Off to the right is Mandy's kitchen and behind that is a fun little room with no windows, which lowers the temperature to 96.5 degrees, except at night, when she is permitted by her neighbor to turn on the a/c. They have an agreement...at 9:00, when the hottest part of the day has already come and gone 5 hours ago, she can finally cool off because that's when he doesn't care if the condensation drips into his alleyway. So you may be wondering how this seems fair, and the answer is: it isn't. A drip-free alley is apparently more important than the very real possibility of heat stroke in Acapulco. But if I were Mandy and living in a large-ish city 9,000 miles from home where I didn't really speak the language and a strange man who is probably smaller than me but somewhat threatening nonetheless approached me and told me to turn off my a/c, I would do it. No questions asked. So we can't fault Mandy for going with it. Plus she's just nice and considerate like that.

But until 9:00, you have to figure out how to keep cool in that room, and I took care of that by laying spread-eagle (so as to increase the surface area of skin to tile) on the floor and watching season 1 Chuck episodes, and it was all good. No complaints here.

The last thing you'll note in the picture is the gigantic, delicious, back-stabbing avocado in the table. While in Mexico, I essentially became addicted to avocados because they were SO DARN GOOD. No matter that they're not quite as good here, they're still good enough and I am eating them like a fiend, even though they carry a whopping 29 grams of "supposedly-good-for-you-as-if-there-is-such-a-thing" fat. Avocados...friend or foe? That's for you to decide. I have to go eat one now.