[Buenos dias, or tardes, or noches, or whenever you’re reading this. I’ve been boring the internet with my impressions of a recent trip to Mérida, Mexico for a week now. I’m on day six, and I haven’t done anything or gone anywhere interesting yet. Welcome to Sippican Cottage!]

I spoke passable Spanish back when I was a welder in the desert. Well, I was a fair hand at swearing and ordering two beers and so forth. You know, important stuff. But that was quite a while back, and my vocabulary had withered on the vine. No one speaks Espanol where I live. If you don’t use it, you lose it is very apropos of languages. Lucky for you, I can still emit English like a Maxim gun, written or spoken. That’s because my wife speaks English within earshot every day when she yells at the cat for ripping at the furniture, so I get exposed to the lingua regularly and keep current.

There are some Mexicans in Maine, however. They accumulate in two of Maine’s out of the way appendixes. Some pick blueberries in the far Downeast. We drove through there last fall. The landscape was totally alien to us. The blueberry bushes turn a violent red color, like a murder scene carpet, and they’re framed by some sort of aspen-y trees with leaves that turn screaming yellow. It’s a Doctor Suess world over there.

The rest of the Mexicans in Maine are mostly held prisoner in the basements of Chinese restaurants. No, really. I think they’ve mostly been rescued at this juncture, and are only being exploited in Maine’s not very numerous Mexican restaurants now, as God and the immigration officials with the dogs, the dark glasses, and the canes intended. It must be nicer for them to be abused in a language they understand. In any case, you don’t hear a lot of Spanish spoken in Maine.

Mérida, Yucatan, Mexico, isn’t a tourist trap like Cancun, which is dead east about 4-hours drive. Or more accurately, it’s not solely a tourist trap for norteamericanos. The majority of tourists are mostly from other parts of Mexico, as far as I could tell. Cancun is popular with US americans, for example, but Google Map drivebys give me the impression it’s a hole. Playa del Carmen is just south of Cancun, and looks nicer, but what do I know? Never been. Cozumel is an island off the coast of Playa, and is likewise considered a desirable resort. That’s the Carribean.

Mérida isn’t waterfront like those places. It’s about 30 or 40-minutes drive inland from Porto Progreso, a beach on the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a very, very sweet looking beach. White sand, shallow swimming, not much seaweed, not crowded, a big malecon (waterfront drive) to tarry on.

We never made it there, but would someday if we get the chance. You see, we couldn’t rent a car.

No one in Mexico would rent us a car. No. Bud. Dee. Believe me, I tried. Please don’t offer me any advice on the subject. I assure you it can’t be done. Well, it can’t be done with a debit card.

You see, you’re talking to a weirdo here. We don’t use credit cards. I get four or five credit card offers a week, which I shred. We pay our bills with money, i.e. a debit card, so we can’t rent a car. Don’t get me wrong, Expedia and suchlike will let you make a reservation with a debit card, because as Frito Pendejo says in Idiocracy: I like money. They do too, with the same amount of enthusiasm and brains as Frito displayed. But show up at the rental counter with your Expedia reservation, but without a credit card, and you’ll be SOL, and in a foreign country, too.

I find this amusing, sorta, because I do website work for a business in Los Angeles that rents cars to people who use debit cards, and even just cash. In other words, I’m the internet’s greatest oracle for information about renting a car with a debit card, and I couldn’t do it in Mérida.

I’ve grown accustomed to the fact that the world doesn’t like you anymore if you’re willing to pay for what you use. They only like you if you can go into debt while doing it. Well, we’re poor, I guess, but we pay our bills with money we earn. I can’t recommend the fiscal leper colony we’re living in to everyone, but we like it.

So we signed up for Uber. I know you’re thinking, you’ve never used Uber before either? Nope. They don’t have that sort of thing in western Maine, and even if they did, I wouldn’t use it anyway. But in Mérida, we had to get around, and they wouldn’t let me drive to do it. C’est la guerre. Oops, slipped into French there, and that’s no bueno down there since that Cinco de Mayo contretemps got sorted out. Whoops. “Contretremps.” There I go again.

At any rate, I’m going to talk like a short bus student about Uber, too, if you don’t mind, not just flying on a plane. You know, I don’t know what it’s like in the US, but in Mérida Uber was pretty sweet. And you get to gape out the window at the colorful facades, the flowery streets, and the fixer-uppers, instead of at your white knuckles and the windshield.

Mérida is big, at least by our standards. Around a million people. There are only 1.3 million people in Maine, for comparison, and I live in the portion of it where those people ain’t. Mérida is a city and it bustles. If you call an Uber, there’s a ton of them around, and they show up lickety split and take you where you want to go for a pittance. Literally a pittance. I’m looking at the receipts. We went everywhere in the city proper, and the rides were like six bucks, five bucks, four bucks, three bucks. Tipping is optional, but not with us. We gave them all 20 peso tips, the largest button on the app, and all the drivers really appreciated it. They deserved it for listening to me murder their language in the back seat. It’s only $1.20, but it’s real money in a country that thinks like I do, and buys things with money they earned instead of money they borrowed.

I think tipping an Uber driver isn’t common in Mérida because Uber is not just for out-of towners. Mexicans don’t tip each other. Tipping does kinda smack of noblesse oblige, and they don’t go for that sort of thing among themselves. I’m not sure why norteamericanos put up with so much of it. Meridians (I can’t believe I typed that, no one calls themselves that) appreciate it from dolts like me because they understand it’s a gesture of respect, I think. And an apology for talking to them in second-grade castellano.

Because Mérida isn’t a tourist trap, not many people spoke English. More people spoke straight Mayan than English. We learned some. My favorite Mayan word sounds like “sheesh.” I said sheesh about something at dinner one night, and our Mexican friend laughed and dabbed her mouth with a napkin because she thought I was pointing out crumbs on her face. She tried to translate it for us as “leftovers,” which increased the frivolity, because that’s how she understood the English word.

What, you don’t have Mexican friends? You really should get out more, and meet people. My wife and I go on vacation every twenty-five years or so, and we swear by it.

[To be continued, if you can stand it. Thanks for reading and commenting, recommending this site to others, buying my book, and contributing to our tip jar, which, ahem, is getting lonesome lately. It is greatly appreciated]