WE MADE IT!

    We pre-paid for a taxi from the airport to Hotel Catedral, where we'll be staying for the week. The taxi was only M$250 (that is, 250 pesos), which translates into US$12.50, using my rough conversion formula of moving the decimal point one space left, and then dividing by 2. On the way, it suddenly occurred to me that exactly 500 years ago , 1519, Cortez also entered the city. He was greeted graciously by Montezuma, who thought he was a god. No one had any illusions about our divine status, but everyone from the taxi driver to the shop keepers who sold us a throw-away telephone and our waitress who spoke very little English treated us with great kindness and humor.

    Being tired from our travels, we opted for dinner at the hotel, where we had two large bowls of cream of mushroom soup, two entrees of chicken mole, and two bottles of wine (one of which, nearly full, came back to the room with us), all for about US$25, not including tip!

    I should mention the incident at the Oxxo store, a kind of 7/11, where we bought our throw-away telephone. No one spoke English, so we made do with hand gestures and humor. The problem was that no one could open the box that the phone came in. The first clerk handed it over to the second clerk, as the line for people wanting to buy something grew longer. The second clerk, frustrated, handed it to the first person in the check-out line. He couldn't get the box open either. Finally, the clerk brought a new box out from under the counter, and somehow, she was able to open it, put in the chip, and hand it over to Bob to figure out how to use it to call a Uber taxi tomorrow. By then, the whole check-out line and the clerks were in stitches. Cost for the telephone: US$17.50. The experience, priceless.