I didn't sleep well last night. Kept waking up in the middle of the night. Plus, since I went to bed so early, I wanted to get up and get ready at 6am. But, I was alone in that so I ended up going back to sleep and waking up at 10am. We had a small breakfast and got ready for the day. It was partly cloudy but still warm out. I decided to wear shorts anyway, since I figured it would be nice. We packed a jacket and were ready to roll.

We hadn't decided what we wanted to do, but we decided we would take today to figure it out, since we still have another 6 days here. The night before we were unable to haggle with any of the taxi drivers for fare and $5 no matter what is pretty ridiculous. It seems like that is the fair if you are American, but I know some of the locals only pay $2 or $3; at least the tip is included. Anyways, it was a day to explore and figure things out, so we walked downtown. It wasn't very far either, probably a mile. There is a lot of construction going on from the hurricane and from new development. Our condo is right on the golf course, so there are some new places going in right off the course. I was suprised to see them being sold by Remax and Coldwell Banker though!

We finally got downtown, and I needed to find a bank so I could hit up the ATM. There are only two banks that I know of so we went to the closest one. The exchange rate didn't seem to bad from my quick calculations but I don't recall exactly what it was. The ATM charge wasn't the best, but I expected it would be higher then normal. That is one problem I didn't think about. Typicaly when I take cash out of an ATM that has a fee, I withdrawl several hundred USD at a time so I don't have to pay the fee for multiple withdrawls. The problem is that in Mexico I didn't want to carry a lot of cash because that just seems stupid, so I regretfully will be paying a lot in ATM charges. Lesson learned for next time.

After I got some cash, we checked out the ferry to Cazumel, since we want to do some snorkeling and eat at a restruant that was recommended over there. We found the best deal for what we wanted to do at Fun Quest. Silvia hooked us up with an amazing deal that ended up being 50% off from their listed rate. After checking it out further, they book their packages with hotels and if you go through your hotel for their services you will pay a much higher rate since the hotel takes a rake. The other thing I learned was that the other companies offering better deals then her for the same thing required sitting through a presentation for a time share. Something I'm NOT interested in doing; I'm on vacation people!! Hopefully it will be nice tomorrow and we will get to goto Cazumel!

Seeing how it was already about 12:30pm we decided we would spend the rest of the day wandering around the downtown area and doing some shopping. I ended up buying a few things for myself and some gifts for some friends. I found some beatiful jewelry and clothing. A word of caution when buying jewelry however is if you are buying silver look for the stamp. It should be printed on the inside of the piece and will indicate the quality. For those that don't know, 925 is pretty standard and decent quality; it's okay to buy. If you can find 950 though, it's better. I only found one store that had 950 so far and I could easily see the quality of their jewelry was superior to other jewelers in the area. Just the amount of detail in their pieces was amazing.

One of the restruants on our list of places we must eat at was The Glass Bar, which is of course on 5th Street. I had the lobster raviollis with tomatoes; it was absolutely amazing! I have had a lot of great meals in my life, but this is definitely in the top. The service was also very superior to anyplace else I have eaten since arriving here. I HIGHLY recommend it to anyone traveling to Playa del Carmen. We then finished the night at a nice bar with good drinks called the Tequilla Barrel.