Getting into the swing of things

After a couple weeks into the internship, Marc and I had settled into the Playa life. We got local cell phones, purchased from the convenient store, Oxxo. The cell phone system is pre-pay, you purchase credits as you go. You can buy the credits from any Oxxo. We bought the cheapest phones we could get and were suddenly back in the early 00’s with T3 version of texting. At first we didn’t know how to work the phones; it’s amazing how far technology has come. Marc was transferred to Playacar because they were short on staff. Taxis to Playacar for “locals” (yeah we were now locals and paid the local price everywhere we went) was 40 pesos, which was still a couple dollars. After a couple days paying for a taxi, we decided the most economical way for Marc to get to work was by bicycle. We were working 6 days a week and had one day off to get what we needed to get done. On our day off, we walked to the bicycle shop, which was a couple blocks from Mega. Marc got a brand-new fancy bike with a lock!  The new bike with lock ran us just under 1,500 pesos ($115 or so US). Little did he know at the time was he would eventually be doing the grocery shopping with his new form of transportation! We didn’t have a kitchen, just a hot plate we bought at Wal-Mart. Yup, there’s a Wal-Mart in Mexico. We had found our way around Playa and were really enjoying ourselves.