Separately, a few comments on dining:

I cannot stop myself from ordering wine when I’m eating food (such as lasagne) that calls for it. But I know the wine is going to be terrible (due to the heat), and expensive (due to weird tariffs). I think tonight’s ‘mer-LOT’ (with a final ‘t’) may have trained me, finally. Or maybe the lasagne was to blame. I wound up kvetching about it to a nice Chinese-American guy who runs a Chinese-Filipino-Thai restaurant here. He told me where I should’ve eaten lasagne, and also that his restaurant has all Hong Kong chefs, plus a Filipino guy. So two places I could’ve eaten instead. (The Filipino angle is due to the huge number of Filipinos on the cruise-ship crews, incidentally.)

Before that, I happened to meet a man (whose name was Marco Polo, incidentally) who deals in fish (he was wearing a shirt covered in a fish pattern, which is more relevant). He’s based in Merida, and sells frozen fish from Progreso, on the north Gulf coast, to Cozumel. This is interesting, because I’m sure most diners here imagine they’re eating fish fresh-plucked from the sea out front. I never put much thought into it, but I guess I thought something at least halfway like that. Not frozen, at least. Right now, said Marco Polo, the seas are bad and no one on the Caribbean is doing any fishing–so all the fish happens to be frozen. I left him starting to read a National Geographic all-fish issue from 1995. And I didn’t order fish for dinner…but that’s how I wound up with nasty lasagne.

On a nicer note, I have noticed that people passing by my table on their way out of restaurants say “Buen provecho” to me. Is this because they feel sorry for me, eating alone (like, someone has to say it to her, the poor thing)? I haven’t really noticed it happening to other people. In any case, it’s a gallant gesture, to wish a good meal upon a stranger.

(This post was brought to you by the parenthesis.)