Anyone I met on vacation last week in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, who spoke English, was peppered with questions by the snoopy American lady.
Did they have relatives in the USA?
Did they want to move to America?
Our first taxi driver, Ricardo, said he didn’t have any family in the states.
He owned his own taxi, which he was terribly proud of, but he worked hard to pay for it. Seven days a week, 12 hours a day, he rushed from stop to stop around town to keep his wife and two children fed and clothed.
“If I don’t work, there is no money,” he said.
Most folks around our resort spoke little English. Reviews we read before the trip said it catered to locals. We were definitely in the minority. Still, we bonded with ladies from Olympia and met folks from California, Wisconsin and Louisiana.
The Louisiana couple said they didn’t want to talk about potential oil washing up on their beaches. The resort had some American channels on the TV and we kept up with CNN reports on BP and the “top kill” plan to stop the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.
“You don’t want me to get started about BP,” the gentleman said.
We chatted with the southern couple at the resort’s Italian restaurant that featured creme brulee as delicious as my favorite dessert served at Anthony’s in Everett.
I felt sorry for the restaurant workers, just as I did when we cruised in the Caribbean.
On the ship, a Russian waitress was on duty around the clock. She had a little boy who lived at home with his grandmother. The ship worker got to see her son about four times a year.
I remember when we left the ship, the woman was busy setting up tables for the next batch of tourists soon to board. I wondered if we tipped her enough money to brighten her long, solitary months at sea.
Rosie, who served us drinks at the Melia pool in Mexico, was also our hostess some nights at the hotel buffet. She was excited because her one day off a week was coming up and she would see her children, do laundry and shop for food.
Her home, she said, was about 20 minutes from the hotel on a bus.
Don’t think big blue Community Transit rigs.
Think bouncy old heaps snorting gray smoke.
My husband, Chuck, and our friends, Tom and Jackie Williams from Lynnwood, wondered who raised the children in Puerta Vallarta?
Were grandmothers at every home? Surely the young hotel workers couldn’t afford day care. The rumor around the resort was that they made $5 per day on their jobs.
The entertainer at the pool directed bingo games and water polo.
He said he had no relatives in the states but had heard that Mexicans who lived there found construction jobs.
He worked six days a week, 10 hours per day. He said I could probably find men who cleaned the pool who had relatives north of the border.
I just never got up in time to meet any of guys with little nets. Around the pool, a woman scrubbed walkway tiles. She appeared to be well into her 60s, a bit stooped, and spoke no English.
She swept. She picked up empty foam cups that blew underneath lounge chairs in the wind. She pushed a heavy cart in the hot sun hour after hour.
Not a service person we usually tipped, she beamed when I handed her $5 as she pushed her wet mop back and forth across red tiles.
She spent the rest of the week quickly picking up empty cups on a wooden table under our shady palapa.
On a taxi ride to Wal-Mart (so what — I wanted to check out Wal-Mart), the driver said he worked seven days a week for a taxi company. It was interesting to hear him talk about tipping. Cruise ships stop by Puerta Vallarta on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. He said certain cultures don’t adhere to tipping.
It was a hoot to hear someone foreign to us disparage folks from other countries.
Wal-Mart looked the same as the Lynnwood store. Tomatoes were plentiful and cheap, but clothing and household goods were priced the same as in America.
There was a McDonald’s there, too.
At a Puerto Vallarta Marina mall, we ran into the owner of a souvenir store who said his name was Nacho. He noticed my Seattle Seahawks cap.
“I know Seattle,” he said. “I worked in Yakima and Ellensburg.”
He said he picked enough fruit after several years to earn money to open his own shop. Nacho chatted, then offered to sell us day trips on fishing boats or a pirate-ship cruise, but we had already paid to snorkel around the Los Arcos caves.
On our walk back to our resort, we passed an office for First American Title. I wrote a story for Sunday about a women who worked at First American Title in Everett.
I told my husband how lucky I was to have my 40-hour-a-week job, with benefits, in Everett. I never asked our gracious Mexican hosts if they received paid vacations, but I think I knew the answer.
Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451, oharran@heraldnet.com.
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