Before and After And Grilled Cheese

We’re still staggering around Santa Lucia barrio in Merida, wondering what everything is, like toddlers in a pram. Discovery is more fun than data. You can ask Gargoyle Maps to tell you where the nearest whatever is, but I don’t like Gargoyle and I don’t like the jumble it presents on a phone. So we wander and launch partially formed Spanish fricatives at anyone who will listen, and we enjoy ourselves while poking around.

We discovered the SOCO. Hot damn, it’s right on our block, but it took us nearly two weeks to stub our visual toe on it. It’s in a tiny slot canyon of a storefront, and their logo looks like it belongs on a gas station or podiatrist or something. Step inside, and it’s something like an ambrosia factory in there. A panederia. A Dunkin’ Donuts on Saturn.

All the food in Merida is better than anything in Maine. That includes things like Italian food. The Mexican (Merida) version of things like bruschetta beats anything I had in Italy, never mind New England. I think it’s because nothing gets unloaded from the back of a Sysco truck, as opposed to the US, where everything, everywhere does. The local ingredients are. A tomato here is not a hardball. The corn isn’t grown by Dr. Frankenstein on his GMO plantation. When they do import things, they do it right. The upscale pizza joint we favor imports their flour from Italy. If you’ve never had a properly prepared pizza, with good flour, you’ll never know what kind of wonderful chewy it can be. Their meats and cheeses are desperately local, though, and give it this Mexican spin. I don’t know how else to describe it.

The little girl (young lady — I’m getting old) behind the counter had fun with me. I am subjecting everyone to my attempts at Spanish, and I’m often coaxed along like a toddler trying to get from the coffee table to the couch. I asked in barbarous Spanish the correct word (palabra) for a bagel they had in the case, and the girl smiled coyly at me and said, “bagel.” My wife had some sort of cinnamon roll taken up fourteen notches. The food was so good, I went back for lunch and got sandwiches to go, and was rather proud of myself when I ordered them in Spanish. By the way, if you want to order sandwiches in Mexico, the word for sandwiches in Spanish is sandwiches. You’re welcome.

While I was waiting for our take-out order, I espied this little tale of before and after across the street. These two houses are attached, and identical, at least on the outside, and illustrate how this town salvages colonial houses. Here’s the before:

And right next door, an after:

The workmen here are something like wizards. Compared to America, they have no tools. A bucket full of trowels, and not much more. The whole town is some form of concreta, or tile. They work all the time, too. It was over 90 degrees, and I saw guys on the roof two doors down, parging a wall and a roof with mortar. I’d need a radiation suit to simply supervise something like that.

The before was super interesting to me. The window on the right had a really substantial tree growing out through the iron gratings for a very long time. Abandoned, likely, for ages, but someone is looking after it now. I suspect it will look like its neighbor in short order. This town’s economy was based on making rope from hennequen fibers (sisal, more or less), and Mr. DuPont or someone similar killed the industry dead a while back, which in turn killed the town for close to a century. But it’s recovering, finally. It reminds me of western Maine. The pulpers made paper everywhere, until they didn’t, and the whole shebang depopulated itself. I don’t see a Merida kind of recovery happening in Oxford County anytime soon, however.

The interiors of the before and after houses are probably huge. It’s common for houses to be fifteen or twenty feet wide, and two hundred feet deep. There are often interior courtyards and walled gardens open to the sky.

House flipping isn’t really a huge thing here. Someone might live there, or rent the place out to locals or tourists, but pure spec renos seem pretty rare to my eye. But if you’re hankering to see what a renovated house like these cost, and what it looks like inside, check out Real Estate Lab’s listings. Here’s a nice one in San Cristobal:

That’s a very Merida vibe inside and out. I love it.

I also loved, get this, a SOCO grilled cheese sandwich:

Grilled Cheese 180
Sourdough with manchego, cheddar cheese and
house-made xcatic mayonnaise. Served with
roasted tomatoes and basil sauce.

Calling it a grilled cheese sandwich in the American fashion would be like calling Marilyn Monroe pretty good looking. Not the same animal. I’d describe the roasted tomato and basil dipping sauce, but this is a family blog, and I don’t do blue.

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