When travel doesn't feel like an adventure

 You could say that we are old hands at at travelling around Mexico.  This trip is our 7th.   We stayed in an all-inclusive resort once on a family visit, but we made the other trips independently, travelling around the country by car (once), but mostly by bus and combi (shared taxi) the other times.  On one of those trips we stayed with a family while studying Spanish 4 hours a day, on another we studied Spanish for a week while we lived in our own rented house for a month. Twice we've rented our own place and at least occasionally shopped and cooked our own meals.

And yet....on pretty much every trip there comes a moment. For me that moment was the day we arrived in Papantla, shortly after we arrived.  I was hot, discombobulated, weighted down by carrying all of my valuables on my person because our hotel room seemed sketchy. We'd just had the oddest pizza of our lives in the busiest pizza restaurant in town (roast cauliflower, carrots, peppers, and onions with a whole lot of melty cheese on a decidedly non-thin crust) when we were accosted by a stranger with a small child that he insisted we kiss.  I couldn't understand a world he said other than "besar", but Harvey could and apparently it was a shakedown for 50 pesos.  

I was done.  All of this was too strange, too overwhelming, too hard to understand. I wanted to be home, where I understood how things worked and I could understand more than 20-80% of conversations (depending on the speaker, the subject, and the context).

But....there is no quick retreat from Papantla!  Here you're at least an hour from the nearest small airport (I assume there's one in Poza Rica), and 5 hours from Mexico City. And besides, we had another week in the country before we were scheduled to move on.  So, return to the hotel room, lighten the backpack to the essentials, have a drink, relax for a few minutes on the lovely deck attached to our room....then venture out again and suddenly the world looks like a different place.  

We finished the day by touring the local art museum that features the works of honoured son of the city Teodoro Cano (artist and creator of the frieze that adorns the city square, former head of the art department of the University of Veracruz in Xalapa). And then listening to the Jarocho music and dancing in the city square. Sometimes all you need to find adventure again is a little time.