More or less, people ask me 3 questions about living in Mexico. These are:
(1) What’s the weather like?
(2) Have any problems with drug gangs?
(3) Does the food make you sick?
We’ll go in reverse order with the answers. Up until last week, the answer to (3) would’ve been absolutely not. I’ve sampled food from about every possible microcosm here: street vendors, sweat kitchens (my name for the tiny, one room “restaurants” that line many streets), local restaurants, and tourist geared restaurants. Most all of them were delicious and I wouldn’t hesitate to return to any of them. Yes, I drink beverages served with ice (in most cases) and haven’t suffered. This Sunday, we happened to venture out a bit further than normal to a restaurant we’ve passed by many times but never sampled. The food was the worst we’ve had here, and yes, 30 minutes later I was feeling incredibly terrible. However, so far, that has been the exception, and the rule has been that the food is great. Needless to say, one bad outing won’t hamper our culinary adventures!
The answer to (2) is easy: not at all, have you?
And finally, the weather. Simply put, it’s really terrific. On weather.com it shows rain about every day this time of year. To be fair, it does rain a lot of those days, but it’s important to understand how it rains. First, it rains predominantly at night; some nights it’s almost like clockwork. The second point, is that it has only rained a few times during the day here and it doesn’t last very long. Storms blow in quickly and just as rapidly are replaced with sunshine. Since we’ve been here there hasn’t been a single day where rain would’ve ruined a beach outing for an entire day. We’ve been caught in rain once at the beach, but it’s actually quite refreshing, and again, always fleeting.
In some ways, I’m obsessed with numbers. I know that sounds strange, but it is what it is 
Accordingly, weather statistics and probabilities are very interesting to me. Here is a link that has an interactive and graphical representation of air and water temperatures, precipitation, and winds for Cancun. I couldn’t find something similar specifically for Playa, but I’d say it’s more or less the same.
Extrapolating from the local weather numbers, I also found some graphics on world sea surface temperature, which are really nice.
This is a picture of the world SST from August 31st of this year.
And here’s the same image taken at January 31st of this year, highlighting the Summer of the Southern hemisphere.
It’s pretty fun to see how much the Mediterranean changes from Summer to Winter, as well as the US East Coast. Note that California’s slice of the Pacific is notoriously chilly year round. That alone cured me of SO-CALitis!!
And finally, hurricanes. The National Hurricane Center has a pretty nice website tracking active storms in both the Pacific and Atlantic basins. Recently, however, I stumbled across a much more interface-friendly version (courtesy of RiverGirl, I believe.)
Here’s to hoping Erika stays North and/or disorganized!
