Viva Mexico Day 1

Mexico, Mexico, Mexico. Where do I begin? There is so much I want to blog about, and I don't know where to start. I am going to document our vacation by days since that seems to be easiest; otherwise you would be reading this post for the next five hours.

Day 1- We woke up at 5 am, ecstatic that our trip was finally here! Dan's parents were nice enough to drive us to the airport, and watch Yuki for the week. What would we do without them?! Once we got through security we still had about 2 hours to kill so we ate breakfast and found our gate. I had just downloaded a new book on my Nook so I started reading, and Dan played games on his phone. We flew from SLC to LAX and had about another 2 hours to kill before we took off for Puerto Vallarta. Our flight landed at about 4 pm. We went through customs, got our baggage, and before we could even make it out the door to our shuttle this nice "amigo" came up asking if we needed help, and insisted he could help us book some of the best tours/activities PV had to offer at "close to nothing". He then went into his sales speech about a timeshare presentation and that if we would attend he would give us three activities of our choice (more on those later) for only $40. In all honesty that was a dang good price considering each of those activities cost about $80 per person. We agreed to meet him the next morning outside our hotel lobby where he would take us to the presentation. However, once we got to our hotel the consierge started going in to the same speech and offered to give us all those activities for free! So of course we decided to go for it--skeptical of any Mexican who approached us offering us "free" things. We were approached by several other people wanting us to attend their timeshare, and we figured they must make pretty good commission if they invite people to attend because everyone was so pushy about it. The next morning we went to the presentation. It was actually pretty painless, and in the end, despite us not buying the timeshare, we did get all three activities as promised for free, and a nice breakfast! I felt bad for having doubted them in the first place! I would definitely recommend you attending one if you ever go to Mexico!

Anyways, back to Day 1--The first day was kind of a culture shock. The city is pretty Americanized in the down town area, but on the side streets and in the older part of town everything just looks so poor and beat down. The people are very friendly and funny, but they expect to be tipped for everything, and they try to get you to pay outrages amounts of money for services. They think that just because you are American you are rich. We got to our hotel and were pretty shocked because it didn't look anything like the pictures we had seen online. There was no safe, no fridge, no dead bolt on the door. Our door didn't even close all the way. The floors and walls were worn and dirty, and there was mold in our bathroom. I almost started crying wondering what we had gotten ourselves into...but once the shock of it all went away we realized we really wouldn't be in our hotel room much anyways, and we got it for such a good deal I don't know why I expected anything nice. Let's just say a Mexican 3 star hotel is like an American 1 star hotel lol. The rest of the night we spent on the beach relaxing.

The bathroom. There was no tub just a nice 3X3 foot shower. You had to flush the toilet about five times before anything would go down. But we did have hot water :)

Our king size boxspring...I mean mattress. But honestly it felt like we were sleeping on the boxspring.

Us taking it all in...

They did have an awesome pool/patio area. They had two kid pools and one adults only pool. They also had activities going on all day like water aerobics, kayaking, beach volleyball, dancing, etc.

We also had a nice patio area that was shaded.

Our first sunset in Puerto Vallarta

Stay tuned for day 2 :)