Saturday, January 9, 2010 Mazatlan

Today was beach day. We went down there after our late breakfast and stayed until mid afternoon. I went in the water a couple of times and made my amateur attempts at body surfing, sometimes with a little bit of success. Celeste read her book covered up under towels and I read mine between my swims. It was a pretty good day except for the part where some bird “rained” on our parade!

The beach here is quite wide and flat with nice sand, but you don’t have to go very far out before you find that the sand has been scoured away and onto the beach leaving rough rocks below. At least it wasn’t sharp like the coral that cut my foot in Hawaii a couple of years ago.

We grabbed late lunch at the outdoor buffet and ran into Terry (Letourneau) Tramer from Regina. She and her husband are renting a condo nearby and came here for the beach. We had a nice visit discussing retirement, winter holidays, and grandchildren.

After our visit, we took a long walk on the beach, and then read our books in the shade beside the pool until our dinner reservation at 6 in the Argentinian restaurant. We then stopped in for the evening show at the buffet restaurant. It was a series of numbers from Broadway shows. I thought they missed the mark on this one too. The costumes were fantastic and there were some dance numbers that showed off the talents of the cast, but, for me, too much of it was one or two characters lip-synching to recorded music. Celeste called it “Musical Theatre.” I would have preferred seeing more of their own dance talent and more national folk dances and story telling. But, I guess when you are doing a show every night of the week, they want to have some variety. I think a couple of the shows that we missed were more in line with what I was looking for.

I would wager that close to half the people here are Canadians. In the nightly shows and at some of the activities around the pool (Bingo, for example), they sometimes ask who is from Canada, Mexico, or the USA. Canada is always clearly the majority, followed fairly closely by Mexico, with the USA a distant third. I was surprised at the number of Mexicans, but I guess they holiday at their coastal beaches just like the Americans go to Florida. One group that is noticeably absent is black people. We have seen barely a handful all week.