We’re still in Chetumal, waiting for our parcel to arrive and getting itchy feet. It’s not so bad, as we have a relatively cheap, nice hotel with free Wi-Fi and even a disco PrayStation™ on the roof (see pic below), but there’s not a great deal to do here.

Probably the most exciting event for several decades happened on Sunday night; Mexico won the Gold Cup (footy) 3-0 against the USA, which was cause for much celebration here – cars driving up and down the “strip” (7 or 8 restaurants and bars on the sea-front) with flags out of their windows and music playing, tooting their horns. These guys had got well into the spirit of things with one of them on the drum and the others dancing, waving and shouting at passing cars, joggers and dog-walkers. The fat guy with his top off reminded me of Stavros from Britain’s Got Talent…

Ise tried a local “speciality” – called a michelada, as it was listed on a restaurant menu under beers for just 8 pesos (about 40p). It did seem a bit too good to be true and that turned out to be the case… Instead of being a small/stubby cheap beer (which was what we’d thought the waiter had described), it turned out to be a normal bottled beer, mixed with something like angostura bitters and salt. Totally disgusting. What was worse, is that they charged us an over-priced 40 pesos for the beer and then an additional 8 pesos ON TOP, to make it virtually undrinkable. Ise was not happy!

On the plus side, I have found a bar here that will make a cup of tea the correct way (i.e. pouring boiling water onto the teabag, instead of bringing you the bag in a little packet along with a cup of almost hot water, or – worse still – in response to a request for a “té negro, con leche”, bringing a cup of hot milk and an accompanying teabag)!

We also visited the one tourist attraction here in Chetumal; the Museo de la Cultura Maya, which was very good and air conditioned (a big plus here, as it’s so humid).

We learnt about the ancient Mayan calendar and about their numbers and counting system (also used in trade), which made my brain hurt, but I’ll try and explain it here… The Maya use a (conch) shell to represent zero, a dot to represent 1 and a line to represent 5. So 8 would be written as /… and 16 would be ///.
Instead of working from left to right, with the units on the right, the ancient Mayans worked from top to bottom, with the units at the bottom. So far so easy, I hear you say.

The bit that made my brain hurt was this; instead of working in terms of multiples of 10, i.e. 10,000s, 1000s, 100s, 10s and 1s, the Mayans worked in multiples of 20, i.e. 160,000s, 8000s, 400s, 20s and 1s.
So, in order to write the number 21354, you would have to work from top to bottom:
8000s x2 = ..
(with 5354 remaining)
400s x13 = //…
(with 154 remaining)
20s x7 = /..
(with 14remaining)
1s x14 = //….

And to write the year 2009, you would have to work it out like this:
400s x5 = /
(with 9 remaining)
20s x0 = @ (a conch shell!)
(still with 9 remaining)
1s x9 = /….

Those Myans must have been a dab hand at their 400, 8000 and 160,000 times tables!

As I’m a bit bored, I thought I’d set a puzzle (100 kudos points to the first person who gets it right) – can you tell me what these are?

Uno Noche Mas
Dos Corazones
Amante Fácil

Love Gude
xxx

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