I have a few spaniard family members on my dad's side of the family so I have enough spanish blood flowing through my veins to have double citizency with Spain and get a spanish passport aside from my regular mexican one and spanish passports are pretty damm powerful, due to Spain being part of the european union and having really good diplomatic relationships with other countries, it gives you access to 186 different countries which makes it rank on the top 3 of best passports in the world so knowing I have access to this power I knew I must reclaim it but this types of procedures can only be done in certain offices that we do not have where I live so I had to travel to Monterrey for a weekend and you know what that means :) another travel blog!!!

Okay so starting with the hotel review it was pretty nice! it had 2 beds that were both beside a desk with 2 chargers so you can comfortably charge your phone or any electronics while chilling in bed, the layout was a bit weird (but not in a bad way) since the entire room was like a rectangle and it was significantly smaller than a lot of other hotels I've stayed at since it only had a bedroom and a bathroom (and a closet that i did not use) but that's more than enough for me, the bedroom cosisted of the 2 beds I mentioned earlier, a TV in front of those beds, a couch close to the window, a desk and even a fully functional coffee machine (which is funny because I've actually been to this exact same hotel before and back then they had the coffee machine but with no coffee so you couldn't use it and my dad has a habit of drinking coffee every morning and I remember him being so pissed off he had to go down to the cafeteria to get his drink instead of being able to make it himself), the only thing I had problems with was the fact that the bathroom's door was broken or something because it wouldn't lock (which wasn't a really big deal considering there was nobody I had to worry about opening it but it still made me a bit uncomfortable) and that I had a hard time figuring out how to turn the lights on because almost all the ligh swicthes were clustered in the same area and it was hard to tell what each one does, they also do that stupid thing I hate where they put the bathroom's light switch OUTSIDE the bathroom WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?! can you imagine if someone turned the lights off while you were showering and there was nothing you could do about it?! the rest of the hotel was also really fancy, the cafeteria was huge and it even had this really cool stained-glass window in the ceiling that I unfortunately couldn't take a picture off but trust me it was really awesome

Now let's talk about what I did during the trip itself! on friday my dad woke me up at 5:00 a.m. because apparently the offices close at 10:00 a.m. so we had to get there fast, I hadn't even finished packing my stuff so I speedran getting everything in my suitcase and because I was in a hurry I unfortunately forgot to bring any plushies to take funny pictures with so sorry if the pics for this trip are a lot more boring :( the road was okay for the most part and when we got to the office to finally recieve the damm passports I swear I got the biggest mini-heart attack because my dad aparently forgot this super important document back home, I had just spent over 3 hours sitting in my car so if I had to go back to my house just for that thing then at that point it's not even worth it, fortunately for me by some miracle we didn't actually need that document and the woman at the reception just gave me the scare of my life for no reason but in a matter of minutes me and my dad finally had out passports and had the rest of the day free to chill and do whatever we wanted

So of course the first thing I did as a responsible adult with a ton of self-control is to spend all my money on videogames but i mean can you blame me? I'm the #1 fan of physical games, as someone who plays on a Switch so I care a lot about saving storage because my godamm console can only have like 3 games downloaded at the same time because of how little space it has, and besides it's an awesome way of showing your love for a game you like, it feels so much more special to hold the software in your hands than just having it exist in the digital realm, finding the game you're looking for in a shelf, looking at the cover art, reading the back, going to the register to buy it, opening the case when you get home and being ocasionally surprised by finding freebies, cartridges are an art and I make sure to give them the respect they deserve, I find physical games infinetly more convenient and cooler so when I found Hollow Knight and FNAF the core collection (meaning the first 5 games) for the switch and Luigui's Mansion: Dark Moon for the 3DS I couldn't resist the tempation and if it wasn't because I had no cash left I would have also bought It Takes Two but I guess I'll need to wait for another oportunity

Aside from that I also have a ton of family members that live in that city and because my dad wanted to see them I was forced to also hang out around all my extended family that I don't really have anything in common with but it was worth it in the end because I got to see my favorite cousin Paulina! I think having a cool cousin that you only see during the holidays who you are a little awkward around during the first couple of minutes but then once you start getting familiar you become inseparable and once you leave you end up crying because you know you won't see them until next year and the cycle will repeat is a universal experience between people with big families

Something weird that I really really like is hotels, I dont know why but there's something so beautiful and comforting about them, I travelled a lot as a kid so maybe it's my nostalgia speaking here but staying at a hotel is a surreal experience (in a good way), it's like being in your home but better because you have 0 responsabilities, having other people do things like cleaning my room and cooking my breakfast for me makes me feel like royalty, sometimes when I go on a trip the thing I'm the most excited about is the hotel because I want to see which kinds of famcy amenities there will be and I'm so easily impressed that I will get excited when see any kind of luxuries and most of the time I don't even plan on using them, I just think it's neat that I have the option to

So I thought, hey if I like this thing so much why don't I make a blog talking about it? so welcome to my blog where I talk about hotels, this is mostly just gonna be me logging any hotel I stay at on a trip and talking about what I liked / disliked about them, please don't take this as a serious review because I'm just gonna be rambling in a very non-objective way

The first one I'm gonna be "reviewing" is IHG in McAllen, I'm gonna stay here for 3 days since I'm on a mini-vacation to buy stuff and spend my birthday money, I had a ton of fun and bought some nice clothes a book, a few videogames and a Nintendo 3DS but that's not what this blog post is about so lets talk about the hotel! the first thing I'd like to praise is that the staff was really nice, both times I've been here the guys at the check have been super patient and kind and they even talked to us in spanish even when it wasn't their first language

The rooms are also amazing, they have 2 super comfortable beds (that are really tall for some reason, not that I'm complaining since it makes it more fun to jump on them), there are 2 TVs one in the bedroom and one in the living room which is probably my favorite part since my dad likes watching TV at night but since most of the time when the TV is the bedroom it can make it hard for me (who's also in the bedroom) to concentrate on my own stuff so having my dad's TV somewhat far away so the distance drowns out the noise is amazing, we also got a pretty small but very nice kitchen, it has one of those microwaves that are attached to the ceiling and I want to buy something microwavable so I can use it because it looks way more futuristic that the one I have in my house, our room is on floor 4 and my bed is right near the window so I have the best views for people watching anyone on the pool (which makes me feel a bit like a stalker but it's still pretty fun), something pretty annoying that happened to me was that when I was showering a very small percentage of water would spill on the floor and by the time I was done there was a pretty big puddle so I had to use a towel as an improvised rug, there was also a really weird door that didn't leave to anywhere and it wouldn't open, it honestly creeped me out a lot I felt like I was in a horror movie and it was eventually gonna be revealed there was a dead body inside

Moving out of the room and into the rest of the hotel there's also free breakfast and while there aren't a lot of options I like the few that you get, they had a waffle machine that made waffles in the shape of Texas and I thought that was pretty funny, something weird I noticed is that sometimes the elevator makes noises when we're going up and I'm sure it's nothing since it works perfectly fine but it still makes me uncomfortable, the entire hotel was also located in a very commercial place which was super close to a ton of malls and restaurants and considering I came here for a shopping trip that's incredibly convenient for me

And you know what? while I'm at it I'm gonna talk about my trip too because why not, my birthday was 2 weeks ago so I got a lot of money from my family and since I live in a really small city in Mexico I don't really have a lot of places to spend my money on things I like so my dad was like "hey do you want to go to the USA to buy stuff?" and I said sure so after a peaceful 3 hours on the road we ate dinner at a Whattaburger and it was pretty late so we went to the hotel and went to sleep and we started doing all the shopping the day after, we don't really have the same interests so we decided to split up and met again at the food court in like 3 hours, I had already been to this specific mall before so I already knew where all the stuff I wanted to see was, I got a few shirts at Spencers and Hot Topic, I even decided to get a couple of boxers for gender reaffirming reasons (and also because most of my underwear has holes in it) and to be completely honest putting those one made me way more happy than anyone should ever get about new underwear, then I went to GameStop and that was the exact moment I faced my life's biggest regret, I bought 3 games and just as I was about to leave I saw a small glass cabinet with a few old consoles and games, one of those being a Nintendo 3DS and I've always wanted to get one of those since I think the 2 screens make for very interesting game mechanics, I like how portable it is and I got nostalgic over it because it was the first console I ever touched (to be fair it wasn't mine but my aunt had one and sometimes I would go to her house and play Cooking Mama on it and those are some of my happiest childhood memories) but I had never bought one until now because I thought it wasn't worth it to spend money on an old console that doesn't get any new games anymore but that night I finally said "screw it" and told my dad I wanted to go back to GameStop tomorrow so I could get my 3DS and so we did, the cashier was very kind and explained everything super clearly and even said my shirt was cool, my dad even insistend on paying for the console and now you might be wondering "you said this was your life's greatest regret but you got the console you wanted and you didn't even had to pay for it? what part of this do you regret?" well a detail I neglected to mention is that in that same gass cabinet was a copy of Nintendogs for the 3DS...I assumend it would still be there when I came back but when I returned SOMEONE HAD ALREADY BOUGHT IT!!! IF I HAD MADE MY MIND EARLIER I WOULDN'T BE SUFFERING FROM THE PAIN OF NOT BEING ABLE TO PLAY ANY GAMES BECAUSE I BOUGHT THE CONSOLE BUT DIDN'T BOUGHT ANY GAMES FOR IT, I COULD BE PLAYING NINTENDOGS RIGHT NOW IF I WASN'T AN IDECISIVE DUMBASS