[If you just arrived, I’m recounting a recent trip to Mérida, Mexico in painful detail. Perhaps the perspective of someone who doesn’t travel all the time might be useful. But I doubt it.]

It is always interesting to land in a plane. I’m sure it’s interesting for the pilot. It’s one of the few opportunities he gets to do anything except tell you the time and temperature in a place you haven’t arrived at yet. He slumbers peacefully through the whole journey, I’ll bet. There’s nothing to do on a plane worth doing for good, long stretches. He’s likely trained himself to sit bolt upright while he does his nothing, a useful skill I don’t have. I fidget, and wonder if I’m expected to carry my legs in a basket and stow them in the overhead compartment, but missed the sign in the airport that told me to. There is a lot of signage in an airport, but precious little actionable advice. The recorded voice on the loudspeaker in the terminal in Portland just told me to stop putting handguns in my carry-on, over and over. I don’t generally expect gunplay over the little packs of peanuts, so I leave my gat at home anyway.

Pilots must be conditioned not to look right or left as they while away the hours, and doze, and tap the occasional dial. They’re like dray horses used for carriage rides. It would be bad form to notice the other pilot sleeping if you wake from your slumber and started looking around. But landing gets the blood racing, and keeps the arteries from hardening. We all have something to do. The stewardesses have to totter up and down the aisle clutching a trash bag while the plane careens into the correct angle for landing, while wondering if you’re ever going to finish that shot glass of Sprite they gave you two thousand miles ago, so they can collect it. They hit the tackling dummies of the seats with their shoulders as the pilot awakens and starts pressing all the buttons and pulling all the levers to make flaps flap and landing gear gear, as they say in Liverpool, or should if they don’t.

I get busy too, looking out the little window to see the city below as it scoots by. It’s mildly exciting to see an oil tanker or container ship in the Gulf of Mexico from near earth orbit and wonder if it’s a bug stuck on the window or a giant hulking rusting beast abroad on the water, looking for a bridge abutment to shake hands with. Generally, dead bugs don’t leave a wake, so you can sort them out.

But cruising over the rooftops, close enough to worry the passengers and the citizens alike, now that’s interesting. You can tell a lot about a place when you see it from the air. You’re not supposed to. See it from the air, I mean. Cities are designed to be viewed from the ground, and nobody bothers much about their appearance from overhead. An airplane window is a backstage pass. The cars move like phages in some great beast’s arteries. The clutter on the roofs of big, modern buildings reveals the lie told by the austere, featureless deserts of their glass facades, and the lamebrain architects who design them.

Cities have a general color, I’ve noticed. Each is a pointillist painting when viewed from the sky, the final effect produced by letting all the bits and dabs run together to give an impression. I’ve flown into Detroit, for instance, which is the color of a Pall Mall stubbed out in a plastic plate of fast food. Atlanta is a golf course, with lots of big lawns around the edges, dotted with the stark white sand trap roofs of big commercial buildings all around.

I figured Mérida would be green, as the Yucatan peninsula is a jungle, but it’s not. It’s white. Santorini white. Moroccan white. The houses huddle together in privadas and show their flat, white concreta faces to the sky in a blank stare. Its nickname is the White City, I later discovered. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than calling New York the Big Apple. Wikipedia has some very specious logic on display about the origin of the name. But logic isn’t big on the internet, and I don’t go there looking for it. The city looks white from space, in a sea of green, and it looks white from a one-story rooftop downtown, and everywhere in between. Wikipedia needs a shave with Ockham’s Razor.

Mérida is big and low and spread out like Los Angeles used to be, before they ran out of little squares of desert to put houses on and started to look up instead of out. It has a small-ish airport. It’s newish, too. On Google maps, you can roll the map cursor back and forth in the parking lot and see the terminal building disappear and be replaced with a few blockhouses and the roofs over the car rental lots.

So we’re in another country now, not just someplace totally alien, like Atlanta, Georgia. We rolled off the plane, smiles all around, and followed the crowd through the halls, ready to get pawed over by a series of vicious, dimwitted, bribe-happy martinets in dirty, ill-fitting uniforms. Well, that’s how the same sort of people who write for Wikipedia describe interacting with the Mexican authorities. As is usual, reality is something else altogether.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting, recommending this site to others, buying my book, and contributing to our tip jar. It is greatly appreciated]