street scenes 11
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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything

Escenas de las Calles de Mérida

Well, nothing left to do but wander down the street and gawp at things. This is just a random selection of houses near the centro of Mérida. I like the ones left to weather the decades as much as the spanking painted ones. Patination is wholly underrated in the United States. That’s why most everything is plastic or powerwashed. But Mérida is a kind of paradise for me. Everything is real.

Roll up doors like that one are pretty rare, thankfully. Iron gates or wooden doors are the common thing.
That’s about the only really big car I saw in town. It looked out of place on the slender streets.
There is almost no way to tell what’s behind the facades. A house 8 feet wide might be 150-feet deep. Love the Juliet balcony, and Romeo’s little pickup truck.
This terra cotta color is all the rage.
Under this sun, yellows really stretch out and get some exercise.
This house is really big, and quite elaborate inside. That tank you see up on the roof is the water supply. Some places have cisterns in the ground, but most have a tank on the roof like that one.
Peach and red and 75 years of weather.
Looks like a John Ford western set.
There’s that golden yellow again. Mexico designates certain districts in a few towns as Barrios Mágicos, and sometimes everything gets painted golden yellow like that. It reminds me of the Centennial United States painting entire neighborhoods of New England homes white with green shutters.
There’s plenty of Art Deco stuff in Merida.
Poiple is common, too.
And pank.
The walls of a lot of the buildings are literally mortared rubble, and the rustications are applied as surface treatment.
Powder blue looks great under the unrelenting sunshine.

[Thanks for reading and commenting and buying my book and hitting my tip jar. It is greatly apppreciated]

4 Responses

  1. When my wife and I visited Merida some time ago, I was struck by how colorful all the buildings were. We have here in north central Ohio an authentic Mexican restaurant owned and run by immigrant Mexicans. They, too, chose to have the restaurant painted in vibrant colors. It stands in contrast with the usual brick or drab paint that is seen in most of our town. But if you go to the historical Victorian neighbor, you will see Victorian homes restored, and they too have a great deal of color, at least in the trim and wood scroll work.

    1. Hi Bob- Thanks for reading and commenting.

      One of the great pleasures of writing on the internet is finding fellow travelers, so to speak. It makes it possible to compare notes with people that have also been there, done that, and got the t-shirt.

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