Mazatlan, City of Buses and Shrimp

Mazatlan proved to be just a bit too big for our tastes.  We stayed at Marina Mazatlan north of the “Gold Coast”, a nice facility with friendly staff and lots of small restaurants sporting live or canned music, sometimes till just before dawn.  And wonder of wonders, three times a week the Fruit and Veggies Guy showed up with his artfully loaded truck to help with provisioning.  Besides the obvious he also brought the best tamales we’d had for ages, and we ate so many over the days that the boys grew pretty tired of them (they included veggies along with the beef or chicken).
But it’s a long way to anywhere else, and those bus rides got to be a pain, especially when you took the wrong one or the one you took mysteriously stopped half a mile from your destination.  So we occasionally tried out one of the ubiquitous open “Pulmonaria” taxis, named for the disease they inflict on unwary passengers (sort of the Mazatlan equivalent of San Francisco’s fog).  The boys like riding in them though.
There is a really nice town center, with a great Cathedral opposite the town square (and some interesting art close by, including my favorite way to re-use wine bottles.)
We took advantage of some of the perks of a big city, like the Mega supermarket (great bread and pastries), movie theaters (we saw the latest Harry Potter the day after Valencio’s birthday – in English with only Spanish subtitles).  But probably the biggest perk was a big TelCel store where I FINALLY got the broadband modem working, after four tries and much standing in line.  It even works on our little wifi router – sometimes.
And then there are the beaches, with waves big enough to give our boys boogie board thrills on V’s birthday until the bigger ones broke them open.  But doesn’t Tino look the surfer dude?
And on the last day I found a wonderful coffee shop out by the “Witch’s Beach” Playa de Bruha. 
The best thing about Mazatlan may have been the other teenage boys we met there – 14-yr-old Jack from Just a Minute, and 12-yr-old Josh from Evergreen.  Just a Minute was staying in the upscale El Cid marina a short dinghy ride away, and we all visited there as their guests as often as possible. 
Gee, a jungle-theme pool complete with iguanas, hot tub, boogie-boarding at the beach, and three happy hours a day. We could get used to this.  Not to mention those shrimp… we never did go to the famous (and now over-priced) Shrimp Bucket, but the place next door had KILLER mango shrimp on Valencio’s birthday (it was a busy day…), and then then Patti fixed me some wonderful garlic shrimp for my own birthday meal four days later.  Sorry, no photos of camarones, saliva is bad for your keyboard.
In the middle of our stay we took a trip to Copper Canyon, the subject of the next post…