The cost of currency

Foreign currency fascinates me.  The unusual shapes and colors.  Even the texture.  The feel of the foreign currency in Mexico was particularly odd:  soft and fluffy. Not only that, it was bright blue.  Suspension of reality must be employed when one enters a resort environment.  My American money was eclipsed in value by towel cards.  These magical towel cards are distributed with great discretion:  one per person.  You carefully take your prescribed card to a happy little hut and exchange the little piece of plastic for a great big, bright blue, soft and fluffy towel.  You are entrusted to guard this fabric with your very life.  Should you fail in this mission, you will be unable to retrieve your card at the end of your visit, your name goes on a list, and you will be unable to leave the country with any amount of dignity.

Obviously, this established economic structure is a tad flimsy.  Everywhere you look, there is a sea of blue.  Your initial vigilance begins to relax and you find yourself wandering further and further from your towel.  Occasionally, you lose eye contact with your towel.  You then abandon your towel altogether like its a baby at a gas station.

Chuckie and I made the mile or so trek back to where we'd left our towels beneath the shade of a tropical umbrella next to the pool on our way to the spa.  We scooped up our towels and headed off down one of the seemingly endless paths of the resort. A stern voice stopped our steps and we turned to see a rather large man headed our way, gesturing madly.  "I think we should run," I whispered to Chuck from the side of my mouth.  But it was too late, my father-in-law faced this potential crisis head-on.  Interpreting the wild pointing, demonic, accusatory stare and barrage of German shouting, I believe that this nut thought that Chuck and I stole his towels.  Naturally, Chuck responded to this with some impressive gesturing of his own while I hugged my towel to my chest like it was a baby monkey and shouted, "My towel...my towel."  We all headed back to the scene of the crime where the German man's wife was keeping a stern eye on my waiting mother-in-law who too, was clutching a blue towel to her chest and insisting, "My towel...my towel."  The Mexican man from the happy little hut emerged and the great United Nations debate ensued.  It was the tower of Babel all over again.  Justice finally prevailed and the good guys were sent off down the happy trail with their soft and fluffy blue towels.

Several hours later, Brad shed an illuminating light on the situation.  The true culprit in the towel caper was our Aunt Pat.  Fearful of leaving our towels unattended, she'd gathered them up and stored them in her room.  The Germans then arrived, "invading" our territory, and planted their blue flags.  Oblivious, Chuck and I returned and took "our" towels.  Wait.  What?  I wasn't the good guy?  I was guilty of petty larceny on foreign soil?  Brad returned the stolen merchandise to the Germans accompanied by another enthusiastic round of gesturing.  I'm pretty sure my husband made humorous wide circular motions with his pointer finger towards the side of his head while everyone laughed.  Well...I certainly wasn't laughing.  What sort of warped resort was this that assigned such an unrealistic value on towels so that people would be willing to battle, conceivably to the death, to protect them?  It was with a great deal of relief that I exchanged my towel for the plastic card and then returned the plastic card to the hotel front desk to be granted clearance to leave this awful, awful place.  I could return to normalcy, my home where the almighty dollar rules and no one ever argues about it.

Sun-baked buns

My dream of snorkeling  with turtles was surprisingly different from the reality of snorkeling with turtles.  I envisioned a "Fantasia"-inspired underwater ballet where I somersault comically among my flippered friends. Instead, I was awash in fear as I constantly scanned the shallow seas for serrated-toothed terror.  Implementing "Shark Week" in my classroom prior to this trip was a colossal mistake.  Not only was I well-versed on the predatory habits of several species of sharks, I also conducted a research-based project chronicling the geographical shark attack "hot-spots,"  and here I was set to simmer in the day-old bakery bargain bin.  As time passed, I felt torn.  Not a single shark showed up.  What...wasn't I good enough for them?  Should I be insulted or gratified that I don't even REMOTELY resemble a seal?  I refocused on the dreaded jellyfish. "Maybe you should try focusing on breathing through your snorkel," remarked my husband, observing me inadvertently attempting to snorkel sans snorkel on several occasions.  "Your mother thinks she's Aqua-Woman," Brad told Sydney as I spat out several gallons of salt water, "Help her."  Sydney took my hand and tugged me further into the deep depths of the dangerous ocean.  I saw something lurking, a shadowy presence beneath me..."Squirrel!" I shrieked into my snorkel, scrambling backwards away from the giant turtle who glared menacingly at me from the ocean floor.  I had expected hubcap-sized smiling shelled creatures who would flip me five as they glided by.  Instead, Volkswagen-Beetle beasts scoured the sandy bottom of the sea.  Undaunted, Sydney guided me further along to a small coral reef pulsating with potentially poisonous fish.  I held my breath as I glided over the coral, sucking in my already concave gut to narrowly avoid evisceration.  Finally, it was time for this little mermaid to sprout legs and stand on dry sand.  It was then that I realized that I'd overlooked the most obvious and prevalent danger of all.  Sitting would no longer be an option for me for the next few days as, while my head was on constant vigilance below the surface, my "bobber" was busy keeping me afloat and inadvertently exposed to the deadliest element out there.  Of course I'd applied sun protection.  I had enthusiastically lathered it on my cheeks but not my "cheeks."  I'd narrowly avoided a vicious shark attack, just barely escaped being stung by a jelly fish, skimmed over a coral reef machete without a scratch and managed to not die during my turtle encounter.  I would, however, be forever scarred by this experience.  It was a really big red flag.  Hindsight might be 20/20 but my near-sighted eyes were focused on an immediate future fraught with danger. It was NOT a happy ending.  

Parasailing

Parasailing is a painful topic in the Mosiman home.  Once it was determined that we were, indeed, making tracks for a May trip to Mexico, Savannah and I began planning our airborne adventure.  My mountain-climbing, kayak-paddling, scuba-diving husband immediately began to fuss and fret.  The man who voluntarily leaped from airplanes, scrambled up greased poles in Panama, dashed across a piranha-filled river, and consumed raw rabbit during military winter survival training expressed great concern for my safety.  I immediately translated this concern to mean that he had serious doubts regarding my judgment and overall common sense.  Ridiculous!  I have a staunch history of sound decision-making.  The tone of our conversations escalated and some of us said words that will inevitably be thrown back in his face for the rest of his life.  Two of those words were "foolish" and "floppy."  Excuse me...?  Despite Brad's efforts to keep me safely grounded in an unrealistic world of pre-planning, research, and regimented physical therapy to build up the atrophied muscles in my left shoulder, this Bird of Paradise was destined to fly.

In response to our parasailing inquiries, Savannah and I were directed to a stretch of beach in search of a man named Israel.  A strong biblical name...a sure sign.  Israel happily accepted our sixty dollars each, handed us two sketchy-looking life jackets and pointed us to a jet ski manned by a twelve-year-old boy.  I waded into the ocean to gracefully board this flimsy vessel using what is now referred to in the local lingo as suplicando camello or the supplicating camel position. Soon, I was screaming over the crystal blue water, leaping from one five foot wave to the next to approach the waiting boat.  Savannah and I waved good-bye to our now-deaf driver who could once again breath as soon as my arms were wrestled from about his collapsed chest cavity.  Our boat immediately raced off, forcing my already-nervous stomach to drop forty fathoms.  I revisited Brad's now fateful words when I realized that the crew's English was limited to "How much do you weigh?"  After initially being offended (and embarrassed), I more-or-less answered and then, became alarmed as I realized I couldn't make the necessary metric conversion.  Bright side...if my stomach was any indication, I could soon deduct a few lbs from my original answer.

With a lot of enthusiastic gesturing, I was soon wrestled into a harness and hooked onto a steel arm.  Savannah and I took one look at the industrial-sized carabiners and searched our brains for the Spanish translation of "We appreciate your impressive equipment but we'd prefer you use locking carabiners as the man in our life won't even let our car keys dangle from a carabiner without a locking mechanism."  Before we were able to adequately voice these valid concerns, I felt myself suddenly lift off, as gently as a dandelion spore.  Wait!  Where was my safety lecture?  I haven't signed a disclaimer yet.  

Amy Mosiman, human kite, floated gracefully over the ocean, the occasional tug of the tether rope reminding me of my earth-bound connections.  Were it not for my sagging seat and the building muscle spasms threatening my upper upper thighs, I would have been utterly euphoric.  Savannah slightly diminished my excitement as she explained how I was the hypotenuse created by the boat to human triangle.  Truly, math is everywhere. 

We were reeled in, brought back to earth.  The boat ride brought me back to a belly-ache.  Nausea was my new companion and I feared our new friend would cause an uncomfortable riff in my relationship with my daughter.  I dug my toes into the worn, indoor/outdoor carpet, gritted my teeth, and kept an unwavering eye on the horizon. Finally,  I  flopped from the boat onto the waiting jet ski.  I noticed our driver was also gritting his teeth.  Maybe he was suffering from motion sickness as well.  Savannah and my stomach successfully made it to shore.  As our adventure came to its inevitable end, I thought with a great deal of satisfaction that, as usual, Brad was wrong.  Foolish and floppy?  Ridiculous!

On our way...

Months of Chuck's carefully calculated planning resulted in my family rising at 3 am on a Thursday to vanish momentarily from our lives of finals preparations, teaching lessons, service calls, and sandwich prep to  make a break for the border.  My father-in-law had been email bombarding me for months with helpful travel tips ("Don't talk to ANYBODY.") as we initiated the necessary steps enabling us to temporarily walk away from our mundane, white bread and orange juice lives to browse the exotically-overflowing and abundant buffet of Mexico. As usual, I was trapped next to a blabbermouth on the flight..."Excuse me, sir? I'm trying to read."  "Get over yourself, Amy," Brad snapped, "you can talk to me for at least five minutes.  Then you can resume ignoring me for the duration of the flight." Worried about his exaggerated diagnosis  of "deep-vein thrombosis" to explain the mild stiffness of my legs while traveling,  Brad then proceeded to badger me to engage in ridiculous exercises.  "Stretch out your leg," he demanded, not caring that I was perfectly content to remain contorted into my teeny-tiny little assigned airplane area until I would reach the most amazing travel destination EVER:  Newark! I painfully limped off the plane to a nirvana of food court fabulousness.  After hours of agonizing inner turmoil, I settled on a caprese sandwich.  A daring choice as I'm not what you would technically call a "sandwich girl" (paninis don't count) but I was feeling rather adventurous.  With reckless abandon, I took a bite and immediately realized that my life would be forever changed by this moment.  Fresh red ripe tomato buttressed by thick, creamy mozzarella, snuggled in a chewy Italian roll upon which a garlic-basil olive oil rain would gently fall.  What do you mean...it's time to board the next plane? I would NOT leave Newark! In lieu of calling security, Brad coaxed me on board by waving a warmed chocolate-chip croissant ahead of me until I was securely buckled into my seat.  I sighed, forehead pressed against my teeny-tiny, bacteria-ridden airplane window...watching my beloved city grow smaller.  Adios, Newark.  J'taime.