My current seasonal project involves typing up testimonies. I get a written copy of them and sometimes the stars align so that not only does the testifier read his/her testimony straight through, but the PDF is also OCRable, enabling me to cut and paste it into my document. This cuts down on my work load immensely and sometimes, like today, makes it possible to transcribe quite a bit of audio in a very short amount of time.

By noonish, I’d done two loads of laundry, Skyped my mother to wish her a happy birthday, cleaned the house, and done enough work to make for a large, but manageable load tomorrow thanks to the magic of cut and paste. I decided to take advantage of this and head to Centro, wanting to take full advantage of my last precious days in Mexico this spring.

Before going to the panga, I stopped at my landlady’s to pay the remainder of the tab for the electricity and also to tell her and her husband this, in Spanish:

“I’m having the same problem with my toilet as last time, that the water in the tank gets too high and the water gets all over the floor. I shut the water to the toilet and will be home tomorrow and all next week if you (to her husband) can come fix it. Oh, and by the way, here’s the 240 pesos for the light bill and when you’re over at the house fixing my toilet, can you please cut the palm frond over the clothesline?”

The pair of them looked at each other, burst out laughing, and clapped! When she could catch her breath, my landlady said that she was amazed by how my Spanish has improved since we spoke on the phone last fall and promised to get everything fixed for me and thanked me for making good on the light bill.

So off I went to Maz, taking Constitución since I wanted to have lunch on Olas Altas, unless Beach Burger at Plazuela Machado was (finally) open.

Beach Burger was open! YAY! I keep hearing that they have the best burger in town and I wanted to know if that was true, especially now that I have a few comparison points.

I ordered a Tecate and a burger, making a point to tell the server NO MAYO. Mayo comes on just about anything with bred in Mexico and if you don’t specifically refuse it, your food will come slathered with it. I once made the mistake of asking if a sandwich came with anything and was told just lettuce, tomato, and onion… and it was drenched in mayo.

My meal took forever to arrive, close to if not a little more than an hour! I had my phone and caught up on some FaceBooking and reading. The server came by several times to give me an estimate on how much longer I’d have to wait (very accurate, might I add) and I decided, what the heck, and had a second beer!

When the burger arrived, it was beautiful:

And it was delicious. I don’t think it’s possible to compare great burgers because they’re all unique. A burger, I think, is either good or not. This one was good. The bun was toasty, the meat fresh, generous, and seasoned with Montreal steak spice, which I adore. There was lettuce, tomato, onion, cheese, ketchup, and the mustard I’d asked for. At 70 pesos, it’s definitely pricier than the 30-peso burger I like in the Golden Zone, but it’s a heck of a lot closer. This was definitely a burger worth the wait!

I then got some garrafa de nieve to cleanse my palate and tried jamaica (hibiscus) for the first and last time. Like the agua fresca, it was pretty flavourless. But they had guava again, which I haven’t had since the first time I had some!

The Mercado was next since I had to get an earring fixed. For someone who doesn’t wear a lot of jewellery, that’s a lot of jewellery fixing for me in one week! Unbelievably, one of the posts from the pair of earrings I bought at Yellowstone snapped right off! The jewellery repair guy did a good job on it, but unfortunately washed most of the patina off the leaf after, so now I have a super shiny leaf and a dark leaf. Hopefully, the patina won’t take too long to come back. The guy actually tried to give me back the 10 pesos I overpaid earlier this week, but I insisted that he keep it and I paid the full 40 pesos for this repair as well.

I finished up in the area by doing a Waldo’s and veggie run, then headed to Ley. On the way there, I came across a vendor selling 10-peso earrings and I picked up a pair with small seashells. I didn’t negotiate a lower price; that would have been ridiculous. I’m glad to be rebuilding my earring collection. 🙂

Ley has put my favourite yoghurt on sale before, but today it was especially cheap, only 15 pesos for the big size!!! I picked up two, one pineapple coconut and also the one with raisins, just to try something new.

At the panga, I was about to go down the ramp when a man called up to me to wait a minute. He was promptly berated by a woman behind me for telling me this in Spanish and that he was lucky I understood him. He retorted that he’s heard me speak loads of Spanish and to stop assuming that all Gringos don’t speak Spanish, it would get her in trouble! This rather made a linguistic bookend to my afternoon!

But the linguistic amusement doesn’t end there. I chatted in English with a couple on the panga when I heard a couple behind me discuss in québécois how much they loved my dress (the purple one I got in December). I turned and said, “Ben, merci. Je l’aime aussi!” (Gee, I love it, too!) The look on their face was priceless.