I'm an Alberta girl, or more accurately, a high-altitude, cold and dry weather dwelling girl. Apparently, the heat, humidity and sea-level of where I was in Mexico did not agree with my feet (or hands for that matter): they swelled. A lot. The feet swelling was made painfully obvious to me when, on my first full day in Mexico, I went on a shopping trip (to find the purple dress in the picture from the last post) in my VFF KSOs. I don't remember a time when my feet hurt so much, ever.
To explain more fully, my KSOs looked like a balloon had been overinflated in them. It wasn't a problem for the first hour of walking around but became more and more of a problem within the second hour of shopping. I noticed the beginnings of several blisters on the bottoms of both feet. The heat of the sidewalks became a problem too, it felt like the bottoms of my feet were burning in my shoes because of the heat (although it could have been a symptom of the swollen feet and constant friction, too). Eventually, every step was agony and it hurt to move my foot at all inside my shoe.
When I finally took off my shoes, I had one blood blister beneath the toes of my left foot (all of them) and a normal edematous blister beneath the toes of my right foot. Thankfully, my heels were not blistered, they just had felt that way.
Sadly, I did not wear my KSOs the rest of the trip. I had been so excited to wear them, too, because it's been too cold in my native Alberta to do so.
My point to this little whine-fest is this: if you're not used to the heat and humidity of the tropics, you might want to bring a pair of shoes with ample room to accommodate foot swelling. (Now that I've written this down, hopefully I'll remember the same thing the next I travel to the tropics.)
Thankfully, I had brought a pair of shoes that I could wear for the rest of the trip because barefoot was, sadly, out of the question after the shopping trip. More on THOSE shoes to come...
