A Walk in the Park

We’re in Merida, Mexico, in a barrio called Santa Lucia. It’s more or less smack dab in the middle of the city. Well, a little east of the smack dab. The actual smack dab is a big square called the zocalo, or the Parque de Independencia, or the Plaza Grande, depending on who you ask. My advice is to ask no one nothing in the Plaza Grande, or you’ll have to endure a fifteen minute peroration in heavily accented English about buying a Panama hat. The zocalo is very big, and greener than we remember it from a year ago. The city sure is making an effort. There are Catholic churches all over the place, some so close they are almost touching each other, but the biggest, oldest, cathedral fronts the big square: Catedral de San Ildefonso.

I went to Catholic school as a child, but I don’t remember a St. Ildefonso. When called on topics like that, I often resort to straight fibbing. “Oh sure, we called him St. Fonzi back in the day. Solid saint. Holy bigly. The patron saint of oil refineries, I think, or maybe tube socks.” Never show fear, and you’ll get away with it.

It’s called the oldest cathedral in North or South or Central America, which is technically correct, I guess (the best kind of correct, I hear). It was finished by 1598. But they’re cheating a little. There was one in Cuba, first, I believe, but I gather an island doesn’t count for as much in North or South America as regular old land. If you can fish in every direction from it, it’s considered too short to get on the continental rides. Even Rhode Island doesn’t count for much in the scheme of things, although it’s just a name, but Providence smiles on it anyway (The management cannot vouch for that pun, and disavows any knowledge of its creation).

But the the cathedral is built on, and with, a demolished Mayan pyramid of some sort. You can see how old the blocks in the walls look. Very. Many modern historians and various other kvetchers excoriate the Jesuits and Dominicans and other orders for eradicating a lot of the existing structures and local flavuh when they showed up swinging their thuribles and clonking holdouts on the noggin with their croziers. It’s useful to remember the lighthearted hijinks the natives favored before Spanish was spoken. They had a kind of jolly game show that involved cutting out hearts and showing them to the contestants for as long as they lasted on top of those pyramids. So I tend to cut the friars some slack, although I’m still a little peeved about a B+ I got in History once. Totally should have been an A-. We’re certainly not barbarians like that any more. For instance, only the IRS is allowed to cut your heart out and show it to you nowadays. We’ve come a long way.

Never mind all that. I think the original inhabitants were pretty confused in general. The original, pre-Columbian name of the city, was T’ho’. So they had at least one thing in common with our current batch of intertunnel spellers. They liked shotgunning apostrophes into words willy-nilly. But the confusion didn’t stop there. The translation of the name means roughly: place of the hills, or the place of the five hills. Uh huh. I’ve walked all over this town, and it’s hard to find something to stub your toe on, never mind walk up and down. The entire peninsula is as flat as a countertop. It’s no wonder they built pyramids. It’s about the only way I can figure they could get their ankles up out of the water every time it rained.

The zocalo is where the city puts “The Letters.” Mexico has a charming tradition of putting big, colorful letters in prominent public places to tell you where you are, in case you have dementia, or are American, which I gather they feel are similar conditions.

At any rate, it’s the place where tourists get their picture took, as we used to say in the vernacular. It’s a great way to identify yourself and where you are to your folks back home. It’s also a handy way to identify yourself as a tourist, so the locals can offer to take a picture of you and your sweetie with your cellphone, instead of one at a time. And, you know, for them to launch into a fifteen minute oration about the history, design, construction, sales, and marketing methods for Panama hats.

I’ve tried various approaches to interrupting these outbursts, to no avail. I’ve explained that I’m allergic to hennequen fibers, a magnificent lie that I worked on like a fourth-grade essay. No dice. I tried telling them my hat size, which qualifies me to wear a shimmering blue smock and needle Captain Pike on the original Star Trek. No effect. “Eet stretches, senor!” I said, “No neccesito, gracias,” until my tongue got sunburned. No help there. But finally I hit on the perfect approach. When they start in, I hit them with, “Können Sie mir bitte helfen?“, followed up by, “Können Sie ein bisschen Deutsch sprechen?”

Works like a charm. They flee like a European army.

Stayin’ Alive in the Mall

As we’ve previously observed, malls are as dead as disco in the US. But we’re in Merida, Mexico, on the Yucatan peninsula, and neither the mall nor disco is dead here. As a matter of fact, you can hear disco on the PA system in the mall. If you’ve got a hankering to sit in the food court while listening to Stayin’ Alive, Merida has you covered.

In many ways, Merida reminds me of the US in the sixties. Big, extended nuclear families go to the mall. The little boys hair is slicked down, the little girls in pony tails. Mom and dad are well-dressed. A slovenly man, woman or child is a rare thing at their mall. Well, present company excepted.

The little boys mug for a picture in front of the full-sized Iron Man statue in the toy store while dad snaps away with his phone and mom rolls her eyes. There are things for tots to ride around the mall. Scooters, and little dinosaurs and other assorted extinct creatures. Of course to our USian eyes, everything in the mall is like a glimpse of extinct creatures. Everyone is married and has children. The few tattoos you see indicate waitstaff, not biker gang.

The malls are in the northern reaches of the city. Like many American cities like Houston, or even Boston, there’s a ring road (the periferico) that defines what’s the city proper, and what’s the outlying burbs. The malls are inside the northern rim of the periferico, but just. After that, it’s a half-hour straight shot to Progreso Beach, and the Gulf of Mexico. Er, America. Um, Mexico. I give up.

If you were born in the sixties, this mall would be deja vu for you, except all the shoppers are tawnier than you remember. It’s spotless and orderly, like life used to be for norteamericanos. Here’s an American expat from Chicago, I think, wandering in all three of the big ones:

The mallers are certainly not the lower financial class in the city. The northern reaches of the city are generally newer, more desirable, and more expensive than the centro or especially the southern regions of the city, where you can still get your fill of rubble, if you’re so inclined. I’ve mentioned that most everything in Merida seems quite affordable, if not downright cheap to extranjeros like us. A good (great, really) meal in a restaurant for two, with drinks and everything else we can think to order included, is commonly just forty bucks. If you’re more adventurous, street food and market stall comestibles are a fraction of that. I’m not that afraid of Mexican Delhi belly, but I’m allergic to things, and my Spanish is poor. They might give me extra shrimp in my taco because I told them it would kill me in incomprehensible Spanish. Or maybe they’d give me extra shrimp on purpose just to stop me from desolating their language any longer. Either way, I can’t chance it.

But up there in the mall, I finally encountered eye-watering prices on things. Some people have real money here. We were in a department store which reminded me of the glory days of Jordan Marsh and Filene’s in the Boston of my childhood. I looked at a pair of sunglasses in a display case, and did the math that pesos require. Whoah. I can’t afford $650 sunglasses in Mexico, because I can’t afford them in the US, either. Someone has money down here.

So how is the mall different than back in the states, you ask? I dunno. Does your mall have water skiing in it? If not, I’d stop snickering at Mexicans if I were you. They have waterskiing at the mall:

Of course all the malls don’t have waterskiing. The next nearby mall has ice skating in the middle of it. And a Radio Shack. Your move, America.

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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Discovering Xocolatl the Hard Way

We’re in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. Merida is the capitol of the state of Yucatan. It’s also the name of the whole peninsula that threatens to reach out geographically and count coup on Cuba, but never does. It’s hot here. Officially, I think March is still the cool season, but it’s never more than a Pat Boone sort of cool. Daytime temps have hovered between 90 and 100 since February. In the summer months, it gets even hotter, rains a lot, and is humid to drive home the point: It’s a jungle out there.

We were curious how everyone lives in Merida. We aren’t staying in a tourist hotel, and we’re skipping many tourist things. Our neighborhood, Santa Lucia, isn’t predominately gentrified. You can walk to all the gentrified things you want from here, though. You can also head due south to La Mejorada, where the real folks live and work untroubled by people who look like Ichabod Crane, i.e., me.

La Mejorada is a thronging, bustling area. I went there early this AM looking for provisions, and there were hundreds of regular folks lined up on the curbs waiting for one bus or another to take them to work, and hundreds more trying to get past me on the skinny sidewalks. They were all the sort of people that have nothing to do with the My Little Pony Kristallnacht, coming or going. They’re the stratum of people that will have to scrub all the paint off the rest of the city, while the upscale feminists who defaced the whole downtown sleep in. Most everyone in La Mejorada have the good, strong, solid, Mayan faces that I admire. The closest you can come to it in the states is an Apache. They don’t look one iota European. I know the Spaniards came, and saw, but I’m not sure they ever really conquered this part of the joint.

We’re more or less on the centerline of the city, east of the main square with the big cathedral. That’s generally where tourists go to be pestered by touts to buy jipi japa hats, better known as Panama hats. They’re little trilbys made from fine, soft hennequen fibers. I’ve heard the pitch for them so often I can recite it. I don’t want a trilby, because what gods there be have made me ridiculous enough right out of the maternity ward gate, and there’s no reason to compound their error.

I like their shirts, though. Guayaberas. All the gentlemen wear them. Half the gentlemen sell them, I think. There are a few different kinds, and uncounted versions of each kind. There’s one kind I recognize in an instant. it has two open pockets, low on the front. Elegant viejos (older men) favor them. They lend an air of sobriety to what is essentially a casual garment.

We ate a few times at the Maya Chuc. It’s a neighborhood restaurant that serves authentic Mayan food. I guess it’s authentic. How would I know? If they cut a leg off a rhino from the zoo and fed it to me, I’m too Spanish-deprived to call their bluff. Large local families like to eat in there, and we liked making faces at their impish but well-behaved children when they mugged at us. The cafe fronts two pleasant streets, so it’s fun to watch the passersby while you eat. On Sunday, one street was blocked to traffic and people cycled by on every kind of contrivance you can pedal. The entire city is flat as a pancake, so cycling is easy if you can stand the sunshine boring a hole in the top of your head. Maybe you should wear a jipjapa or something, norteamericano.

The elegant-looking jefe (boss)in the Maya Chuc was wearing the guayabera with the two pockets, a dead giveaway to me. The hostess seated us at a table, and I reflexively pulled the chair out for my wife, and pushed it in as she sat down. I haven’t clapped eyes on a nun for many decades, but their lessons stick hard if you went to Catholic school. El jefe came over and pointed to me and said I was a caballero — a gentleman. I’m not, but I infer that the average American has no manners whatsoever, so I merited an attaboy. I’ll wear his compliment invisibly on my chest like a medal for many days. If he’d have called me an hidalgo, I think my heart would have burst. But I’m sure he would have needed to see if I left a good tip when I paid the bill before honoring me like that.

Mayan food is very strange to us. It has nothing to do with the usual Taco Bell stuff Americans think of when Mexican food is mentioned. It all looks like a big mess on the plate, and it’s hard to decipher exactly what you’re eating. I have to be careful, because I’m allergic to things that can kill me in a few minutes, so street food is too dicey a proposition for the most part. But we try this and that in restaurants after explaining the gustatory sword of Damocles that hangs over me. The staff of the Maya Chuc did the impossible in this regard. They convinced me to try this:

The Mayans basically invented chocolate. They still like it a lot, and put it in all sorts of dishes where I would’t go looking for it. They have a sauce called mole (moe-lay). It’s spiced chocolate sauce, and they put it on meat, chicken, rice, and who knows what all.

Now, I’ve eaten mole. I’ve vomited mole. Those two details of my life seem inextricably linked in my mind, forevermore, so experimenting in the chocolate field is strictly limited for your humble author. But I was presented with xocolatl by my new, greatest admirer in Mexico, and I felt duty bound to try it if I must, or find a potted plant to water with it if no one was looking. Because I’d heard of xocolatl before, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to drink it, or even kill a plant with it. It is, essentially, Yoohoo, served hot.

But I was backed into a corner. I would rather have donated a kidney to Pol Pot than disappoint el jefe. He presented it to me as something special, a regalo (gift). I toughened up, and belted it back.

It was fantastic. I can’t explain it. It’s got like vanilla and chili powder in there, cinnamon maybe, and some form of ambrosia I couldn’t identify.

El jefe seemed pleased by my reaction. I felt very special that he singled me out for such an honor. I did notice that all the other diners were likewise treated to the same, special honor. I deduced that he was just allowing them to bask in my reflected glory, being in the same room. And when we ate there again, he wasn’t working, but the waiter brought it out and plopped it in front of us, and for everybody else in the joint.

I really must have made quite an impression on that place. There’s no other explanation I can come up with.