Casa Typica

Well, let’s take a closer look at a colonial house in Santa Lucia, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. The one we’re staying at is not exactly typical, but it’s close enough to get the idea.

The house is about thirty feet wide, not counting the massive masonry walls. That’s kind of wide around here. Some houses I’ve seen are only eight feet or ten feet wide, although they’re very deep. Like most colonial houses, it indicates almost nothing about what’s inside from its facade. A typical house will have two tall windows fronting the street, barred with ornate ironwork, with nifty multipurpose windows/shutters/door arrangement. There’s usually a single entry door right on the narrow sidewalk. Then you step inside, and you soon realize that the property might only be thirty feet wide, but it’s 225 feet deep. Here’s the entry court from just inside the door:

The ceilings are crazy high. Sixteen feet up is something of a minimum. The houses were built to be lived in back before ceiling fans, never mind AC. It’s beastly hot in the Yucatan, but you can struggle along in a house like this without mechanical help if need be. It’s indoor/outdoor, shaded, and designed to catch breezes. All the surfaces are cool; either stone, or more usually the pasta tiles you see here.

Pasta tiles are fascinating. They basically baked concrete, with the colors and patterns incorporated into them, not applied to their surface. They’re something close to indestructible, and the Meridians loved to use them in wild colors and patterns.

Off the entrance is a big salon:

That’s old school furniture. We essentially never use this room. It’s huge, and has a wall of cabinets on one side, a desk or two, and a TV set we’re not interested in. Back in the day, they would have opened the doors you see up wide to catch breezes, or more likely, opened some of the shutters and louvers you see in the doors to ventilate the place without sacrificing privacy. This picture is deceiving. Besides the grillwork, the openings are glassed in. It makes it much quieter, but somewhat stuffy. Almost all the rooms have ceiling fans, but only the bedrooms are tricked out with mini-split air conditioners.

Step out of the welcoming vestibule, and into your walled garden, with the remaining rooms marching down the left hand side of the property:

This rambles for something on the order of 175 feet or so. The two bedrooms have separate entrances off this courtyard. Like this:

These double door arrangements are typical, and very European-looking to an American eye. The bedrooms are spacious, with high ceilings, pasta tile floors, and ensuite baths.

The bathrooms are basically formed entirely out of patterned masonry, with stone flooring. You just step into the shower, there’s no door or a curtain. The bathrooms have skylights, a typical touch.

Further on down the line, you dine under a roof, but outdoors:

The table and chairs are massive teak affairs, with another wonderful pasta floor underfoot. The stones lining the patio are interesting. They’re sedimentary rock, and you can see the imprints of turtle bellies and plant fronds petrified into them here and there.

The next room is the kitchen.

Everything is formed out of patterned masonry. The sink is molded right into the monolithic counters. This kitchen is somewhat unusual around here. It has a six-burner cooktop with an oven. Many rental houses just have a couple of electric hotplates, and don’t bother with an oven at all. This place even has a dishwasher, which is very rare. There’s a pantry over by the fridge. The kitchen has a microwave, a toaster, coffee machine, espresso maker, and enough pots and pans to keep from starving. There are screened windows all around, and the usual tall ceilings, so it’s breezy and pleasant in there. Out the window, it overlooks this:

A pool isn’t unusual in Merida, but one this big is. A typical pool here is what my wife and I call a splishy-splashy. It’s like a cold water, very large hot tub. It’s just a place to cool off in a hurry. This pool is huge, big enough for actual swimming, and rare around here.

There’s a laundry room off this part of the courtyard, and a cistern building that holds the pool filtration equipment. It’s Frankensteinian in there, pipes and wires in a jumble, but it all works somehow. With all forms of utilities in Merida, good enough is always considered good enough. There is blistering hot water available in the showers, if you wait long enough for it to arrive, but there isn’t any hot water in the kitchen. If you ask about it, the landlord just scratches his head. What do you need that for? There are some aerial snakepits of wires up many of the the power poles in the streets, and stuff gets strung hither and yon and to and fro and willy nilly. But somehow or another, I’ve got rock solid wifi with fast speeds all over the house, even though the walls make it a bunker.

There’s a third bathroom nearby, mostly to rinse yourself off after a dip. There’s a literal jungle of trees all around. There’s a tree that produces something that looks like rutabagas that plop onto the stone flags. In the back, there’s big trees that bear something that looks like coconuts, but aren’t. In the evenings, squadrons of bats circle the back garden and eat the mosquitoes. The garden walls are inhabited by either one very energetic little lizard, or a couple of thousand of them. It’s hard to tell. They don’t scurry away. They just kind of transubstantiate from one place to another faster than Jackie Robinson. They’re shy and delightful, and we call them all Eddie Lizard.

There are Mexico’s brand of morning doves, who call goo goo ka choo in a Spanish version of Donovan Leitch, I think. The neighbors have packs of dogs you never see or hear until they get upset by Mexican dog things and bark for an hour straight. Dogs are just dogs here, unlike back home where people pretend they’re children. Over the back wall, there’s some sort of house capable of holding at least as many people as our place. We can only hear them out by the pool. They had a 36-hour party going the day we arrived. We would rather have joined it than complain about it, making us unusual Americans, I gather. Americans, and especially Canadians I hear, like to go to Mexico and tell Mexicans to knock it off with all that Mexican business and be quiet and sad like normal people. I don’t get it.

This place is an AirBnB joint. It’s a little run down, although not too bad for something so ancient. It’s allegedly capable of hosting eight people at a time, although that means four people to a bedroom. I don’t know how many Mormons or emirs are interested in renting Mexican houses, so I assume it’s mostly a party house for gaggles of college kids, or maybe large families. The place isn’t exactly cheap, but they give a massive, nearly 50% discount for monthly rentals. If you really did have eight people splitting the check, they’d each only pay about ten bucks a night to stay here. And that includes maid service and pool cleaning once a week.

[To be continued. If you’d like to put a peso in our Ko-Fi tip jar, I promise to put some of it in a mendicant’s tin cup in front of the cathedral, thereby giving you an in with Saint Pedro, if you need it]