Somebody said that it couldn’t be done —
But then, with a grin, he replied
He’s never been one to say it couldn’t be done —
Leastways, not until he has tried.
So he buckled right in, with a bit of a grin;
By golly, he got right down to it.
He tackled The Thing That Couldn’t Be Done!
And goddammit but he couldn’t do it.

— Anonymous

The human race loves to travel far afield from familiar things. It yearns for discovery. Sometimes the voyage is as simple as doing a crossword puzzle, just to see what words might appear on a grid. Other times you’re suffering from scurvy and sunstroke while Vasco da Gama tries to figure out which way is east, and asks you for the hundredth time if you smell curry, too. The urge for discovery is the same, only the circumstances and the stakes change. It’s the same reason you watch Nicholas Cage movies on Tubi. It’s very, very doubtful, but there’s an off-chance that something interesting might be there, so you go exploring.

And so it went with our little thought experiment: What’s My Line. I offered two photos I took on the Paseo de Montejo in Mérida, Mexico, and challenged my readers to guess what function the building served, just by looking at it. The urge for discovery ran deep in the comments, and many tried to divine the building’s use. But a riddle that goes unsolved after many attempts just gets annoying, so I’ll spill the beans.

Here are the pictures again:

Of course the stakes were very high. A Don Rickles cookie was in play if anyone could guess what was going on inside this building. Many intrepid souls stabbed it with their steely knives, but they just couldn’t kill the beast. The guesses ranged from amusing to understandable, but not very close to the mark. There’s a reason for that, and I’ll explain it, along with the answer.

You see, I knew no one would guess the answer, because I didn’t have any idea what was going on when I passed by the building for reals, more than once. I marveled at it, but I didn’t understand it. In true explorer fashion, when I couldn’t puzzle it out, I went in and asked. And got an education, so to speak.

The reason that I couldn’t figure it out is the same reason nobody else could figure it out. Our American minds have been marinating in our own cultural formaldehyde that we can’t see things properly any more, or even imagine things anymore. We’re boiled frogs.

That building is a school. An elementary school, I think, my Spanish skills are poor, and the different levels of schooling in Mexico is obscure to me. That’s it, a children’s school, nothing more. When I asked, I figured I’d misheard, and asked again. Is it a museum of an old elementary school? Nope. A fancy private school? Nope. Just an elementary school. I stood inside that open vestibule you see there, and inside was a beautiful greensward, lined with a colonnade with classrooms doors in a row. That flowering bush tumbling over the wall on the exterior rambled all around inside, too.

I didn’t recognize it for what it was for the same reason my readers didn’t. It didn’t look like a medium security prison, like it would in the United States.