Educational Cancun?

You know.... I honestly wasn't expecting much in way of educational value out of our trip to Cancun. I thought of it more as a spring break beach destination rather than a place with any substance or depth. We had studied about Mexico in general before the trip... but to me Cancun was more beach town rather than real Mexico. However, I was pleasantly surprised!

First of all... because it is a very touristy area, most of the people you come in contact with do speak English. This took the pressure of us to speak Spanish to survive.... but rather to have fun and explore the language. Most people there spoke to us first in English but Alex would generally answer in Spanish if he could... the person he was speaking to would usually smile and then gently lead him and Clara through some basic conversation in Spanish (name, age, etc.). It was fun for them without being frustrating.

Second... even though we were at a resort, there was quite a bit of wildlife about.... birds, iguanas and coati mundi.

Third.... I was pleasantly surprised by our outing to Xcaret (it was included in our travel package). I honestly was expecting it to be cheesy but it really wasn't.

Here are the kids on the Jungle Trail...
Winding our way through the park we ended up in their aquarium which was a nice small aquarium. One the features that the kids enjoyed were the magnifying glasses for you to look through at each of the tanks. There was also a touch tank inside.

Once we were back outside we found our favorite part of the park, the sea turtles...
We all fell in love with the babies... I personally could have stared at them all day :-)

And then we were amazed by the size of the adult turtles...

After lunch we decided to snorkel down the underground river...
That was cool... but not as cool as I had hoped. We all enjoyed it though and it was neat to see the rock formations.

After reaching the end of the river, we only had a little bit of time left for the kids to play on the beach (maybe 30 minutes) before we needed to get our stuff out of our locker and head to our bus. We missed so much of the park.... there was quite a bit more to do that we just didn't get to.

The most amazing educational part of our trip was by far the Mayan ruins.... but I'll save that for it's own post! :-)