Vacation

Last week, from Monday to Friday, I went with several of my friends from high school to Morelos. One of them has an uncle who built a weekend house there, though the place isn't used much. It has three bedrooms, two bathrooms and an outdoor kitchen all in a row at the back of the property, and then a lawn with a few trees and a pool.

We got there by bus (it's not a long ride– about 1.5 hours on a bus, then two half-hour rides on vans and then a short walk up a hill) and spent several hours cleaning the place and reclaiming it from the insects and arachnids who had staked out their territory in the absence of people. It had accumulated dust and dirt and did I mention the wasps?

There were a few wasp nests here and there. Some of them we knocked down, but we left the bigger ones alone. The biggest was inside a bathroom, so it happened several times that someone would go in, shut the door, and then come barreling back out in a panic shrieking that there was a wasp inside.

One night, most of us stayed up late talking, and then moved into a small tent that we had set up on the porch (on the porch because it was raining so hard). Seven of us somehow squeezed into the two-person tent to keep talking, and then six of us fell asleep inside (one guy was smart enough to go to bed at 3AM). We woke up in the morning feeling all stiff and crampy.

Another night we set up a bigger tent and slept in the yard. Sometime in the early morning someone woke up and noticed that their blanket was wet, and realized that it was raining and the tent was leaking. So we groggily went to our rooms, and stupidly left behind a bunch of sheets and comforters behind to get soaked in the tent.

Oh, and on one day, my friend's uncle– the owner of the house– swung by with some other men to paint the walls. They brought a little boy, about four years old, who we took turns playing with ALL DAY. That kid did not know the meaning of the word "tired". For about an hour we played a game that consisted of him standing at the edge of the pool and "hiding" a plastic ball inside one of four inflatable swimming tires. He would then instruct me to swim underwater from one end of the pool to the other and surface through the hole in the tires, looking for the ball. Of course the ball was always in the last tire where he made me look. On the plus side, it was an excellent workout; that kid should be a personal trainer.