Watcha See Is Watcha Get in Mérida

Not to get Dramatic about it, but I’ve been slacking in the information department. Here I am in Mérida , Yucatan, Mexico, sunburned, my liver seizing up and jerking like a 1971 VW Bug stick shift, my ears still ringing from a trip to the Altabrisa bowling alley, and I haven’t even gotten around to showing you fine folks where we’re camping out.

Well, some people are up to no good. But baby, I’m as real as real can get. I’m not secretly staying at the Villages in a hot tub with fourteen retirees with skin like Satchel Paige’s mitt. I’m in Mejico, and I’ll show you what it’s like where I’m at, because that’s where it’s at. Breakin’ hearts just ain’t my game.

We cadged an AirBnB casa in the Zona Paseo Montejo. It’s an unofficial barrio in Centro. Centro is where the action is. The center of Centro is the Zocalo, the big square and park surrounded by government buildings, cathedrals, and clip joints for tourists. Most tourists aren’t from the USA, though. People come from other parts of Mexico, mostly. Canadians are thicker on the ground than USians. There are some Germans, who you can immediately identify by their perfect English. You can see Mennonites wandering around here and there. One is treated very occasionally to an Oriental wearing two sneeze masks, a bucket hat, sunglasses like welding goggles, and a unitard under their other clothes that  covers every inch of their skin but their fingers. They take pictures of gas fittings and trash bins and stop signs and don’t bother anyone, and no one bothers them back. La gente are pretty mellow here, all in all.

The Zona Paseo Montejo is north of the Zocalo. The Paseo Montejo is a big, fancy boulevard that starts in what I think is Santa Ana neighborhood, north of the Zocalo, and runs due north for quite a bit. We’re about half a block off the Paseo, halfway up its first leg. We can walk damn near anywhere we want to go from here, and we do.

Last minute arrangements on AirBnB can result in slim pickings. We got lucky, I guess. We ended up spending slightly above regular money to get a very above average place in a superb spot. It’s the off-season. It’s at least 90 to 100 degrees every day, winter and summer, but this time of year is the rainy season. Hurricanes are named after a Mayan god, so do the math about what kind of rain they get. The days start out perfectly clear, rain clouds form while you wait, and then drop bathtubs of water on your head whether you need a bath or not, probably because you do, as the humidity is 90, too. Sane people stay in during the late afternoon when the odds are bad, and go out early in the AM and after sundown, avoid the puddles, and wonder what the fuss is.

I’m too lazy to look up the exact numbers, but we rented this place for a month for around $2,800. Then we got to identify the only people in Mexico who pay taxes. Hint: it’s not Mexicans. Pile on various fees to the tax, and you end up paying around $3,500. Now mind you, much cheaper accommodations are available around here. There’s fairly posh (by Ramada Inn standards) hotels on the Paseo that only charge about $50 a night. On the next corner on our block, there’s a hotel that charges $30 a night. You might expect Salvation Army accommodations for that, but it looks about fourteen times better than any American Motel 6 that charges more, I’m sure. The lobby has marble floors, and the neatly dressed concierge is becoming used to us walking by, and waves. No one waves anything but a gun at you at a Motel 6.

We’re staying a while, so we need a house, not a hotel room. Here’s what you get for around $100 a night:

We’re in the blue one. Just a window and a door on the street. You might wonder what could possibly be in there. One room with a hotplate, right? There’s a two bedroom, two bath house in there, with a living room, a dining room, a full kitchen, a laundry room, a walled courtyard, a pool, and a covered patio. In Mérida, houses are skinny, and houses are deep. You may now take a moment to commit japery at the magnificent Mexican infrastructure on display. Those wires occasionally part my hair on the other side as I walk down the street. Then again, my internet is faster and more reliable than in downtown Augusta, Maine, so maybe appearances are deceiving.

Step inside, and you’re in the sala, I guess, or the living room, if you’re norteamericano.

I don’t like vertical photos, but there’s no other way to do it. I whack my head on everything outdoors in this town — telephone wires, street signs, tree limbs, doorframes in cantinas — but the ceilings in these colonial houses are 20 feet high. The owners have kept this place mostly old skool, with buttsprung fauteuils instead of sofas to wallow in, but we like it fine. Those are pasta floors. They’re similar to encaustic tile in Europe. Like baked concrete, with the patterns molded right into them, instead of just applied. They’re always cool under your feet, and exuberant to look at.

This room has urns. I have no idea who might be in them, and don’t want to find out. My wife, who could break things while straitjacketed and sleeping, won’t go within ten feet of them. I guess we’re just not urn people. The clock is a hoot. It’s a replica of sculptures I’m very familiar with. They’re someone’s rough approximation of Michelangelo’s reclining statues of Day and Night in a Medici tomb in Florence, Italy. Michelangelo got bored, like he used to, or the check didn’t clear or something, so the face of Night was never really finished. Whoever made the clock decided to take it up a notch, and finish it for him. So we have a clock that doesn’t tell time, with Day and Tom Selleck reclining on it. Which is nice.

Right off the sala is the master bedroom. If fronts the street, too, which can be a problem in some parts of the city. Here, the street is nearly silent after about 10 PM, even though we’re about a half a block from pandemonium, so it’s fine.

There’s an ensuite bathroom off to the right. Like all the interior rooms, there are skylights instead of windows, because you’d have to knock down your neighbor’s house to get a window in, and they’re somewhat unreasonable in this regard. That’s a typical shower. You step in, and the only curtain is a tempered glass partition. Both bathrooms are all sandstone, marble, and tile.

There’s another bedroom off the dining room, with two beds in it, a dressing room, and its own full bath, tricked out like that last one.

Here’s the dining room. Seats eight, easy. There are real, good paintings all over this house, including that portrait. That’s rare. Most other local AirBnBs have nasty modern art blotches and shrines to Frida Kahlo’s unibrow and girlstache.

The kitchen is Italian for some reason. There are no Italians in Merida that I’ve observed. There’s a garrafon of drinking water on the counter. The water for the house is supposedly drinkable. Then again, I’m supposedly handsome. Everyone drinks water from a bottle. The wells are OK, but no one trusts the pipes.

Right off the kitchen is a huge laundry room. You can have your laundry done for you very cheaply in Mérida, but we’re not servant people. You go through a lot of clothes, so having a laundry in-house is nearly mandatory for us. Underwear and towels, mostly. You could live here for ten years and never put on more than shorts and a tee shirt. Same kinda short money for maids and pool cleaning as laundry. Once-a-week pool cleaning is included in our tariff. A seventy pound man driving a seventy dollar car pulls up and carries seventy-five pounds of equipment in with one trip, and does a great job. Tipping is optional in Mexico, compared to the US, anyway, so workers are sometimes befuddled when you offer them a propina, but grateful nonetheless when you insist. The Uber drivers are nearly ecstatic to get a one buck tip.

Here’s the courtyard, patio and pool:

Yeah, that’s a big teevee on the wall on the right. There’s Roku teevees in both bedrooms, the kitchen, and out on the patio. I’d say they were expecting (north) Americans with a setup like that, but the screens were set up in Spanish, and French, so I guess not. The only hard evidence we found that they were expecting Americans was this drawer in the bathroom:

I take no offense about being suspected of being full of mierda. After all, if I ever go to Ireland, the Blarney Stone will kiss me, not the other way around. You know, to recharge it.