This site has now been retired. I've moved to my new site Silverknife, where you'll find new blog posts and all my latest projects and photos. These pages will remain for at least a while, as I know some of you are still looking through the archives, but I'm reposting my travel journals and many other articles on the new site. Come and check it out.
I breakfast on a couple of sweet rolls from the next-door store, and spend the morning at the restaurant sipping coffee and trying to find a good travel guide to Mexico - they seem annoyingly hard to track down, apart from very specific guides to the major tourist destinations. In the end I settle on just heading for Tampico, the coastal town nearest to Victoria, which looks like it's got nice beaches and plenty of life to experience.
Lunch is molletes, soft round rolls covered in refried beans and cheese. I drop my laptop back at the hotel and spend the afternoon exploring the town. The sheer level of competition here is amazing - some streets have more than twenty restaurants serving very similar menus, and I can't believe they're all doing effective business. Keeps standards high, I suppose. For some reason there are also an incredible number of vets - one street has three.
My Spanish is coming along slowly. Mostly I'm just expanding my vocabulary - I keep sitting down with the conjugation tables and trying to learn my verbs and grammar but my brain just switches off, so I suppose I'll have to learn them from context. I can mostly say what I want to say, if not particularly elegantly, but I'm still having a hard time understanding what's said to me, even in situations (as in the restaurant) where I know a lot of the words. When I do understand someone it's usually because I'm anticipating the type of thing they're going to say, and my brain's primed for it. That too will improve, of course. My grasp of the numbers is already a lot better.
In the evening I go looking for chicharron - Mexican pork rinds in sauce - but nobody has chicarron, so I settle for a flauta with picadillo instead, which turns out to be pretty much minced beef. It's seasoned and good though. I get some of my stuff packed and settle in to read, ready for the morning and my first attempt at hitching in Mexico.
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