Scenes From an Exhibition-ist

Well, I’ve often remarked that the greatest service an internaut can provide is to simply wander around where you are, and point a camera and your attention at what you see.

That’s actually the stated purpose of the news media. They’re supposed to go to dangerous or disreputable or otherwise notable places that you don’t have the time or the inclination or the ammo to visit, then inform you about what’s going on there. They utterly refuse to do this. Everything on the news is either an editorial or an infomercial. Usually both. The intertunnel is even worse than the old-fashioned media. Everyone just wants to read the newspaper harder than you, and tell you what it said, right after they tell you that everything in the newspaper is a lie. If I wanted someone to read the newspaper to me, I’d enter a nursing home rather early in life. No thanks.

So I’ll take my own advice and wander a bit and take a snapshot of this and that in the neighborhood I’m in, Santa Lucia in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. And nearby environs. Here’s one that caught us off-guard. We went the opposite way around the block one time, just for shiggles, and encountered this front door. Holy cow. I’m a bad photographer. It was even more wonderfuller than my snapshot shows it:

Merida isn’t very green for a city plopped in a jungle. It’s what’s often called a dry jungle. The vegetation can be kind of sparse-looking compared to your typical impression of a jungle. It perks up a lot in the summer when it rains a lot, but this time of year, it basically never rains. There are essentially no surface bodies of water, or rivers. Because of the geologic makeup of the place, all the water flows underground. Occasionally, holes open up to underground reservoirs called cenotes. People swim in them, and generally like to hang around in them for their cool, shaded, mysterious vibe.

Here’s a “colonial” house that’s being renovated. I’ll bet it will be spiffy when it’s done. Great location. It’s as hot as Beelzebub’s curling iron in Merida, even though it’s not the hot season yet. It was about 95F when I took this picture. If you look closely, you can see a guy applying a coating to the roof. I don’t know how he could stand it, but he did:

 

The next one’s still colonial, but more clasico, and restored to a fare-thee-well. It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that all these houses are basically built the same way. The walls are built of rubble set in mortar. Most all the details are molded into the parge layer that hides the stones. In many cases, the rough stone texture is left visible. Sometimes inside, sometimes on outside walls. They call this exposed stone texture chukum. Originally, chukum referred to the resin they sealed the walls and ceilings with, but now it means rough or smooth-ish exposed stone wall.

This one is further downtown…

[Hold on. There’s a gang of giant green and yellow parrots perched in the neighbor’s tree, the one that has blooms on it that look exactly like shuttlecocks, and they’re making more noise than a school board meeting when they run out of money. A cat is yowling, which is making the neighbor’s dogs go into convulsions. Someone’s beeping a horn to get into the auto body shop over the wall. The gay bar over the other wall is in remission, however. I’m going outside for a minute to enjoy it all]

Whew. Back again. So, Mexico has been visited and developed and influenced (pillaged) by a long list of European polities. But that just means you can see French things, and kinda German stuff, Italian goings-on, and of course beaucoup Spanish things. This place further towards the centro might be all those things in a mishmash:

RE: The bicycles. Every Sunday, the city closes one side of the beautiful Paseo Montejo, and many appurtenant streets, and everyone cycles on them. They pedal all sorts of contrivances, not just bikes. Something like surreys with the fringe on top, trikes, scooters, rollerblades, and anything that produces locomotion without gasolina. It’s sweet.

When you’re learning Mexican Spanish from Pimsleur tapes, they don’t call it understanding espanol. They say entiendo castellano. Castilian. This part of Mexico was settled by Castilian Spain, and a lot of the names are the same as in that neck of Iberia. For instance, there’s a Merida, and a Valladolid (a nearby town, halfway to Cancun) in Castile, and various other names around here that sound like Ferdinand and Isabella picked them out of their crown.

But before there was an organized Castile, there was the Moops. There’s plenty of Moopish looking stuff in Merida, like this one:

We’ve already featured a sorta Moopish fantasia that’s down the block from our casa:

I asked around about this place. I figured it was some sort of Shriner’s clubhouse or something, but anyone who would at least lie to me about its provenance said nope, it’s just some guy’s house. Some guy, indeed.

A five or ten minute walk from our place, you’ll find the corredor gastronomico. It’s a big long strip of restaurants, nightspots, and spiffy homes that they just completed a year or so ago. The street is lined with bollards and wide sidewalks, to keep the cars from discommoding the pedestrians and ruining their undercarriages with gringos unaccustomed to Mexican driving.

This neighborhood is in a never-never land between barrios. I think it’s still Santa Lucia. There are a lot of nice clothing stores in this area, and it’s gotten the same concrete brick street, wide sidewalk, and bollard treatment. The cones are out because they closed this street, too, for biking and just plain staggering about, like we did.

Santa Lucia runs into Santa Ana seamlessly. Please note that Santa Ana only has one N in Ana. This is not to be confused with the fellow named Santa Anna who made a hobby of pestering Texicans. The church is plainer than most in town. We went to the church on Ash Wednesday, and not only couldn’t you get into the building, you couldn’t get near it. We went the following Sunday, and sat through a Mass. El corpo y sangre de Cristo sounded close enough to Latin to follow along.

There was a small, pleasant commotion at the end of the service. Our castellano, er, espanol was too sketchy to understand what was happening before it was over. They had invited anyone from far away (extranjeros) to come up and be blessed by the padre in a gang.

I’m not sure after the last forty years or so of my behavior I should risk being sprinkled with holy water, so maybe it was all for the best.