I am a people watcher, always have been. Going on vacation
just changes where I do the watching. So here are some of the people we saw
this week in Cancun.
An Asian woman in her early 30s—she was thin, and wore a two
piece suit and sunglasses. She had long hair, nearly to her waist, and had
colored it some sort of honey color. Or perhaps the sun had done that, stripped
the color from her hair and left it looking a bit wan. She stayed at the beach
most of the day, putting her hair up, taking it down, rolling over this way and
that. She’d also saved the beach chair next to her for someone who never showed
up. I wondered if her companion had just overdone it the day before—either too
much booze or sun could do that to you—or if they’d had a fight. The other
person never did show up and she finally left.
A family of three—tall father, slightly tall mother, both
lean with a born-that-way look. The daughter was either a very tall pre-teen or
else a slightly tall young teen. What caught my eye first was the daughter’s
braid. She had very long hair and the first time I saw her, she’d braided her
hair into a braid almost as thick as my wrist. Her mother had nice hair too but
not like the daughter’s. Kent noticed the family dynamics: all three clearly
had high regard for each other. As he said, so often you see pre-teens or teens
sullenly going along with the family vacation, there because they were forced
to be there. But not this family. They sat near us a couple of days, and we saw
them when we were having drinks at happy hour and they just seemed to enjoy the
heck out of each other.
A gaggle (no other way to describe it) of English women who
knew each other, some of them clearly on friendlier terms than others, but all
at least good acquaintances. We finally decided they were probably all flight
attendants there after a long haul flight. We saw them two days in a row and
then poof! They were gone.
Two couples who, I swear, never left the pool—specifically
never left the bar at the pool, although they pretty much stayed in the pool.
One of the women had three or four random tattoos on her back, as though they’d
happened accidentally. The tattoos didn’t have any shared theme that I could
tell and at least one was not in color. I wondered what made her get those,
what if anything they meant to her. They were so random, in fact, that I wondered if she'd lost a bet. The two guys never, ever left the pool
which led me to believe they just peed in it for three straight days.
A couple of senior couples—these were the ones I especially
liked to see because I hope Kent and I are like that when we reach that age.
They were moving slowly but clearly enjoying the warmth, the view and their
time together.
