12/24/2011 - Christmas Eve & the day before

First, let me give you a little feel for what the marina we're in looks like. This isn't the marina itself, but the hotel grounds that are associated with the marina:

Yesterday, we finally left the marina and headed out for a walk. The marinas are way the hell and gone on the north end of town but we decided to see what, if anything, we could walk to. The trip didn't start out too promising as we walked by the fronts of hotels and a golf course. But, eventually, we started getting down toward the beach where there were still a lot of hotels but there were also restaurants and stores. Mostly it looked like lots of this:

We had walked about 3.8 miles when we decided to turn back. For those familiar with this end of Mazatlán, we walked almost to MacDonald's. We decided that we really deserved a bite to eat on the return trip and we'd noticed a couple of places advertising $10 peso tacos and 2 for 1 cervezas so we picked on of them to stop at.

Carlos & Lucia's turned out to be a great stop. We started with 3 tacos each (carne asada, pollo, pescado). Those went down so good that we decided to have a few more. Lulu had 2 pescado and 1 marlin and I had 2 marlin and 1 pescado. Hey, at $10 pesos each, we could afford to be pigs. And, truth be told, you don't really get all that much meat on a $10 peso taco on the tourist strip. But they were tasty. Carlos was a really affable guy. Came out and talked to us about the fish they use, etc. His daughter was equally friendly and they both spoke excellent English. While we were chillin', I noticed a sign

for a Christmas Eve dinner. They were serving your choice of turkey, piglet or both along with all the sides and homemade flan for dessert for $200 pesos ($14.65 US) each. That's not a huge steal but it's not bad. Having no other plans, we decided to partake. So we made reservations for 6:00-ish tonight. I'll let you know tomorrow how it was. BTW, we logged just under 8 miles walking yesterday.

Today, Christmas Eve, we decided to ride the bus down to the old section of town and just have ourselves a preliminary look. I suspect we'll spend a lot of time down there during our stay in Mazatlán.

We disembarked at the central market. Like the mercados in La Paz, this is a large roofed area containing booths selling produce, meats, cheeses, souvenirs, clothes, jewelry, etc. But this mercado is much larger than the two in La Paz.There are 2 different buses at work here. The "green" bus is air-conditioned and a little "nicer" and costs $9.50 pesos per person per trip (about 70¢). The other bus is not air-conditioned, is smaller, and is a bit more ragged but, at $6.50 (49¢), who's complaining? As luck would have it, the first bus to stop was a green bus. We climbed aboard and headed downtown.

This shot doesn't really do justice to how crowded it really was. You could spend hours in there just gawking at stuff if the crowds didn't bother you. Upstairs is the "food court" and, although we didn't try any of the offerings today, we will be back. Probably many times.

When we'd finally had enough of the market for now, we decided to just wander around town for awhile. The scenery was great.

Unfortunately, my camera's battery went dead before I was finished seeing stuff to take pictures of. Oh well, like I said, I suspect we'll spend a lot of time wandering around down in Viejo Mazatlán.

Now we're just cooling our jets while we wait to head back down to the hotel district for Christmas Eve dinner with Carlos and Lucia and who knows who all else?

Hope y'all have a very Merry Christmas.