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| Our passports in the La Paz airport. |
We stayed at Hotel Marina in La Paz last night. The five of us pushed together two double beds to make one giant snuggle sack and, after sleeping for a solid 10 hours, we explored the La Paz marina. It was beautiful! We ate shrimps and watched the boats sail out into the gulf:
The best part was when one of the coordinators of our program back in the States told us she assumed that we would be drinking tequila on the beach... when we were actually in our snuggle sack at 10pm watching a Friends DVD and preparing to be asleep by 10:15.
One thing that is really astonishing about Mexico is the HUGE amount of inflation. The dollar transfers to the peso at about $12.50. But unlike a lot of the countries in South America where $4 or $5 might buy you a huge meal (or more), the Mexican Peso is so inflated that meals cost 150 - 200 (pesos). So, what you buy in Mexico is actually not cheaper, even though the exchange rate is so high. Now I wanted to do serious research on the Mexican economy so I can sort out how the country is going to deal with it's currency essentially being obsolete...
We flew to Cualican, MX at 6pm tonight and then on to Guadalajara. We landed at 10pm and went to our hotel. The check-in process was hellacious because the hotel wouldn't let us pay for the room through a credit card number that USF admins provided for us... But after lots of deliberation and texting the States we got it cleared. Now it's 12:15pm, our room service dinner will be delivered soon, and we have to be on our flight to Panama City at 6am... Limited sleep!
Layover in Panama from 10:45am - 6:00pm tomorrow!
#winning #strandedinmexico #DOPE
The peso isn't obsolete, at least not yet. Mexico actually had a really terrible currency crisis in the '90s, and thanks to a bunch of loans from the US, Canada, and IMF and NAFTA they came out of it okay. Inflation isn't always super terrible, especially when accompanied by economic growth - it's actually pretty natural. Besides, some currencies have trouble stabilizing - for a variety of reasons - and the peso is one of those currencies. This link has a really good graph of the inflation rate over the past 2 years or so - which kind of mimics Mexican growth patterns over the past two years also: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/mexico/inflation-cpi
ReplyDeleteAnd, despite all of the frenzy over the 'drug wars' Mexico has been doing pretty well (economically) the past 2-3 years. Part of this is due to the Progresa (a.k.a. Opportunidades) program that is a conditional cash transfer program that provides families w/ kids cash in exchange for making sure their kids are in school for so many days out of the year - and are getting regular health check ups. This program, however, is very expensive for the gov't - so, some (very little) of the inflation is due to that also.