Never Eat Yellow Snow...

You know all the great cliché advice you get from friends like "never eat yellow snow?" Well, one of those pearls of wisdom needs amended. What do you hear when you tell someone that you’re going to Mexico? “Don’t drink the water,” right? Well, they should add, “or eat the ice” onto the end of that statement. I mean, I know it seems like common sense…ice is, after all, just frozen water. But when someone tells you not to drink the water in Mexico, I always think of water out of a tap…or a hose…or a puddle someone just bathed in. I don’t usually think of ice in my drink at a nice restaurant, or a nice cup of shaved ice…
Well, I decided to take my new bride to Hotel Secreto on Isla Mujeres, Mexico for our honeymoon. The island was beautiful, filled with markets, restaurants, and a fresh Caribbean breeze. We fell in love with the pina coladas on the island (virgin ones, of course). They were so much fresher and fruitier tasting down there! We would usually order them in restaurants at dinner, but by the end of the week we were craving them within an hour of waking up. Well, two days before we were scheduled to leave, we were swimming in the hotel pool when suddenly we were struck with the urgent need for a pina colada. I stepped up to the poolside bar and promptly ordered two drinks. I slapped a few pesos down on the counter and swaggered back to the pool, proud of the fact that I could so swiftly provide for my wife’s every whim. Later that day, we both had to…well…let’s just say we were both having some gastro-intestinal problems. The next day and a half were not the most romantic we’d ever spent together.
It took me a while to figure out what had happened, but then it struck me…it had to have been the shaved ice in our pina coladas from the poolside bar. I didn’t think it was a problem because we’d been drinking them all week with no problems, but the restaurants we’d been to must have filtered their ice for the drinks or something.
The moral of the story is: If you’re going to Mexico, don’t drink the water…or eat the ice!