Week 9: Playa del Carmen

Welcome to our weekly recap! This one's for February 27th- March 5th, which is week 9, 2014. We are in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.

Most memorable moment: Snorkeling with the turtles in Akumal. You can just walk into the water from the beach, swim a bit, and there they are. I thought they could be hard to find, but no, there are plenty of them. I spent a long time just hovering over, watching them eat sea grass. What cute creatures they are!

Surprise of the week: We took a walk on the beach in the evening, our idea being that we could dine there next to the ocean. Only place we found was a very expensive hotel restaurant, and nothing else. Weird. Maybe we should have walked the other way? We went down on Calle 16 and headed up north until Mamacitas. Nada. Nice walk though, since the beach was very quiet.

Workwise: Antti completed his first project at Analysis Exchange, which brings together volunteer web analysts and non-profit organizations. Antti has also been editing his upcoming book on mind mapping while I've studied publishing and marketing of e-books to get the book out when it's ready. I've also spent a lot of time with Wordpress, setting up a local development environment (so I can work on sites offline) and experimenting with some tools.

What did we learn: We learnt about a new animal! We actually saw it already the week before in Tulum, but only googled it now (pic in Our February 2014 post). It turned out to be a coati, apparently a quite common animal in Latin America. - It's quite rare nowadays to see a mammal the size of a big cat and not to recognise it. Always learning new!

Food love: Juices, smoothies, anything from fresh fruits <3

Random thought: There's so much work in making websites more user friendly, maybe we should think about doing more of that? Really, it took me a week to book our Transatlantic cruise (starting in April :D) on the Royal Caribbean website. Crashes, errors, missing instructions, strict rules clashing with their automatic deductions, and so on. And yes, I did try calling them, but they kept forwarding me from one person to another. Lucky for them, I really wanted the cruise we now got. - Rant over.

Tip for others: If you go snorkeling to Akumal it's cheaper to buy your own gear from Playa's Walmart (or some other store) than rent from the beach. And it's probably better quality also... Another option could be to rent from one of the dive shops around there, I only thought about that too late. Probably still not cheaper, but could be better equipment.

30 Avenida runs a few blocks from our apartment and is filled with restaurants, mostly small, local and inexpensive.
 

The house next door is so pretty with the flowers and the bright yellow color. It makes me smile every time I walk past it.
 

Mixed juice from fresh fruits! It's just sooo good :)
 

This is Avenue 5, the pedestrian street filled with tourists and shops. Although somehow I managed to catch it quite empty for this shot... We like to joke that visiting it is like taking a short vacation. It's such a different world from our place, only about 10 minutes away.
 

That's it. How was your week?

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This post is part of Instagram Travel Thursday and all the pics are from our Instagram account. Instagram Travel Thursday ia a gathering of Instagram related blog posts every week. You can find a list of other participating posts, or add your own post, at Destination Unknown, Skimbaco Lifestyle or at many other hosts' sites. You can also participate by tagging your Instagram pics with #igtravelthursday.