Tulum, Mexico - Tuesday, October 28, 2008

We slept relatively late today - 7:00 a.m.! It was a really cool night last night - so cool in fact, that at one point I had to get up to turn the fan off. There was a beautiful sunrise this morning!

For breakfast today we wanted to try someplace new, so we stopped at Tita Tulum. This was initially a very pleasant breakfast, but at the end turned out to be unpleasant. I'll explain in a moment.

Our waiter was very sociable - almost to the point that we started wondering about him (he was a little too over the top). He chatted up a storm with us, even telling us about his recent trip to Las Vegas in which he said he won about $100,000 gambling. (Maybe that's why he was in such a good mood). Anyway, the food was very good - Mr. Sassy ordered huevos rancheros, plus yogurt with fruit and granola (he was extra hungry today) and I ordered huevos Mexicano which came with beans, tortillas and fresh-squeezed orange juice (total was $265 pesos, or about $22 USD). The service was decent, although we had to remind him a couple of times about coffee refills we had asked for. There were almost no other customers, so we are not sure why he wasn't attentive to that. Our waiter stopped by mid-meal to ask us if we wanted him to take our picture, so we obliged and were grateful since I am always behind the camera and we almost never get photos of the two of us together.

When it came time to pay the check, a 10% service charge (tip) was already added on, so we added an additional 5% (which is our standard for decent service). This is where the unpleasantness began. When we gave the check and money to our waiter, he counted the money in front of us and had a very negative reaction, "You were not happy with my service?" We asked him what he meant. He rolled his eyes and said the tip was very low. We thought perhaps he had not counted the money correctly so we said, "we added 5% extra to the tip, so it is 15%" but he still insisted that that was very low and tried to make us feel that we were being very cheap for leaving 15%. He told us that at Tita Tulum, the 10% tip that is automatically added goes to the kitchen staff and that he gets none of that, so all he gets is anything extra added (and we would know this how?). He tried to make us feel sorry for him. We told him we were confused that he was upset about the tip, since 15% is a reasonable tip for decent service. We also told him we did not think it sounded right for Tita Tulum to give 10% of his tip to the kitchen staff and that we might come back when the manager is in to talk to him about this policy. To be honest, though, we began to suspect that this was not be true and that he might actually be trying to extort more money out of us by telling us this.

At any rate, one thing that was interesting was that when we first sat down for breakfast he asked us where we were staying and we told him. Later, when we handed him the check and the money (right before he accosted us about the tip), he asked us again where we were staying. This seemed curious to us. We later wondered if he was asking us this because he had planned all along to pull this stunt and wanted to make sure we were not staying at Tita Tulum, since we might complain to management about the incident and he might get into trouble.

Anyway, you can imagine how upsetting and embarrassing it was to be accosted by a waiter about a tip. This has never happened in our lives and is in such terribly poor taste. It was so shocking to us, we were almost rendered speechless. I admit that at first, he made me feel so badly that I was tempted to give him extra money, but then something inside of me was telling me no - that this was some kind of scam, and afterwards Mr. Sassy said he felt the same way and that if I had tried to give him more money, he was prepared to stop me.

Afterwards, the more we thought and talked about it, the more convinced we became that he was trying to scam us, and the more angry we got. We decided that once we got home, we would contact Tita's management about it (we would hate for this to happen to other customers!), and that's what we did. About a week after the incident, I sent an e-mail to Tita Tulum to report this matter and explained to them in detail what happened, exactly as I have done here. A couple days later, I got this response:

Hello,

thanks for your comments, in fact we fired this waiter the next day the 29th, we've seen he was drunk some times, perhaps the day you mentioned he was. We are very sorry about this, we always try to give the best to our costumers.

We hope you can visit us again and recive a better service.

Regards,

Tita Tulum - Hotel
Ecológico

Interesting that they fired him for something unrelated to this incident. Well, at least he won't be accosting any future customers.

So that incident was probably the most drama we had during our stay in Tulum essentially the only negative thing that happened.

Today was a very windy day and the ocean was rough, so we didn't go in the ocean except up to our legs. We spent the day lounging around (what else is new?) and reading (I'm glad we brought a lot of books!). The ocean was very warm, and we so wanted to go in, but the second we tried to swim, the ocean was knocking us down and dragging us down the beach. In the afternoon, we got off our butts and took a long walk north on the beach. We stopped at this half-buried boat to get a picture.

For dinner, it was back to the pueblo. We decided we wanted a break from Mexican food, so we dined at La Nave, which is an Italian/pizza place. Cute little place! Mr. Sassy ordered a margherita pizza and I ordered a vegetarian pizza. The pizza was very good and very different from what we are used to in Philadelphia. The crust was extremely thin and crispy, almost like a cracker or a baked tortilla. The pizzas were large, but because the crust was so thin, they turned out to be just the right size to fill us up. Delicioso! Mr. Sassy also got a beer and I got a mojito. Our total bill was $222 pesos, or about $18.50 USD).

For dessert, we went back to the gelato place...we were fast becoming addicted. Mr. Sassy got chocolate mint and I got 2 flavors: chocolate and caleta (which was similar to caramel) - total of $70 pesos or about $6 USD. Delectable.

The weather was decent tonight so we browsed in some shops for a little while, but we didn't buy anything. I was keeping my eyes open for a nice gift for our close friend who is house/cat sitting for us this week but so far we have not yet found just the right thing.