My Name Is Carpaccio

I decided to restart my blog while on a last-minute vacation. I'd been working more than two weeks straight without a day off when my chef (the Frenchman of a Thousand Moods, most of them wonderfully charming, some of them Darth Vader-level intimidating... don't get Chef angry, ok?) said I could have a four-day weekend. In his outrageous French accent (everytime he talks to me, I have the uncontrollable urge to reply with a Pythonism along the lines of "your father was a hamster and your mother smelt of elderberries!"), he told me "why don't you go somewhere, eh? Go to Kul-ee-fornya maybe, eh?"

Instead, I decided to go online and play package deal bingo, hopscotching between various sites until I found a deal. So I would up going to Bucerias, Mexico, a small village just north of Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific coast. I got a ridiculous two-bedroom, three-bathroom suite (I never did find that third bathroom, the place was so huge) for less than the Puerto Vallarta hotels wanted for a small room in the middle of Gringo Central. My hotel was right on the beach and I spent three days doing nothing other than reading and fighting the urge to go hiking or rent a car and find some obscure archeological site to roam around. It was odd doing nothing for three days, but also what I needed as I find Las Vegas to be stressful and unappealing, and my externship to be rewarding but intense and sometimes overwhelming.

The only annoying thing about my trip involved Homeland Security and their stupid "no liquids over 3 oz. in carry-on" rule. I didn't want to check luggage, since I didn't need to and also didn't want to lose it making my connection in Mexico City, so I packed what would fit into a Ziploc bag. That meant leaving behind both sunscreen and my beloved DHC Micro Skin Water, a refreshing aerosol spray of purified water and essence of things like bladderwrack, which is really far nicer than it sounds. I figured I'd buy sunblock in Mexico... not knowing that they would be charging outrageous sums for it, or that they would have a limited choice of stuff with a lot of unpleasant chemicals. So I winged it, going for some unprotected sun exposure. As a result, even though I tried to move into the shade and change positions and all that, I got a streaky tan that left me red and white all over, looking like all I needed was a drizzle of olive oil to be served up as human carpaccio.

Here is a view, essentially, of my long weekend:

Here's a view of the hotel grounds from my private patio:

The only thing I did, other than read Gordon Ramsay's autobiography and Douglas Adam's posthumous "Salmon of Doubt," was take the local bus into Puerto Vallarta one morning. Actually, I took two local buses, as I had to transfer midway. On the first bus, a guy boarded and tried to sell everyone vitamins or some kind of medication that cured a long list of ailments from depression to impotence to high cholesterol (not sure about the specifics, as my Spanish is improving but not that great). On the second bus, a guy with a guitar got on and regaled us with Mexican folk tunes, even though 95% of the passengers were locals and not gringo tourists prone to tipping.

I wandered around Puerto Vallarta, stopping for a late breakfast at a charming place right where the Rio Cuale arrives at the ocean. I had an apple and pecan crepe with a Bailey's Irish Cream sauce and strawberries. When the plate arrived, I was surprised at the effort put into the presentation, and felt I needed to photograph it. Then my increasingly picky food snob instinct kicked in and I couldn't help but notice the maraschino cherry and blobs of green kiwi reduction were completely gratuitous and worked against the rest of the dish, while the mango and strawberry puree was at odds with the apple-nut crepe and Bailey's.

Of course, I am not yet such a snob that I didn't eat every last bit of it.

In Bucerias itself, I had a lovely grilled snapper filet with tons of garlic (in a good way) one night on the beach at Aduato's Beach Club, plus a free frozen guava margarita, courtesy of the server who found my attempts to speak Spanish amusing (I made myself speak only Spanish, whenever possible, for most of my trip). I had a truly lousy meal another night at the "in" place to eat in Bucerias, Mark's Grill, where my lobster chile relleno was soggy and poorly seasoned (and garnished grotesquely with the poor lobster's antenna thing stuck straight in the top of the relleno like some kind of last desperate grasp for freedom), and my ginger-citrus creme brulee had not only neither ginger nor citrus (the dominant flavor was, uh, cream), but was so overcooked that the egg proteins had begun to separate from the cream. Sacre bleu! When I mentioned the brulee's lack of flavor, the server got all surly with me. He was not tipped.

One lackluster meal aside, however, it was a wonderful break, though a little sad because reading "Salmon of Doubt" I was reminded what a funny, smart and engaging writer Adams was, and it vexed me that he died in his 40s with so much more to give while some people, like, oh, I don't know, certain presidents of certain united states, still live and breathe despite questionable contributions, to put it ever so mildly, to humanity.