We’d been on a run of taking vacations as a family. Usually in the summer and usually to Europe. But more and more I want to flee New England during its cold, snowy winter to someplace warm. This year, we were determined to find the sun between Christmas and New Years’s Day. We settled on Isla Mujeres off the coast of Cancun.

The water was turquoise. The sand was white. Ceviche was everywhere. We rented broken-down bikes nearby to explore the farther reaches of the five-mile long island. A mishmash of iguana hunting grounds, poor stretches of hovels that reminded me of an earlier trip through Tijuana, and hurricane-battered mansions.

An expat from California was running the Casa el Pio boutique hotel where we stayed. A wonderful hotel with whitewashed walls and within walking distance to beaches and town. A municipal square nearby hosted pickup soccer games and piped in Christmas carols which still seem out of place to me in the tropical sun. Throughout the island (we think), flushing toilet paper down the toilets was prohibited. A bummer, but, as the expat assured us, if you leave the used paper in the trash, the [Mayan] girls will take care of it. A sort of Mexican apartheid.

On Isla, I tried the Spanish that I’d become comfortable with living in Madrid during college. But my family protested that I was confusing our conversations with locals. Ironically, when we traveled through Italy a few years earlier, Italians listening to a few words of my bad Italian asked if I was Spanish.

No Spanish, good or bad, was necessary to buy souvenirs, good and bad, and plentiful. I bought a Viva Mexico t-shirt with Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Which may be dangerous throughout North America.