Harmattan Bow Waves and Other Discontents

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig…

Well, not exactly. But I bet you could, if you went to the Lucas de Galvez market. We’d been advised, and directed, and cajoled, and practically suborned to visit the Lucas de Galvez market in Merida by pretty much the entire population of the city, and anyone the airlines could import from abroad to tell us to go to the Lucas de Galvez market. Have you heard? You have to see the market!

Shopping as an activity has never had any appeal to me. This might have something to do with my wedding vegetables. I’ve heard that the distaff set enjoys it, but this could just be a wild intertunnel rumor. That joke about the guy telling his friend that his wife’s credit card was stolen, but he didn’t report it to the cops because the thief was spending less, can’t be true, can it?

I dunno. I dunno a lot, these days. There are a great many limbs the average person in America has crawled out on, and started furiously sawing at, while we stood stock still, clinging to the trunk. Don’t ask me what the man in the street thinks. I ain’t average, and I stay out of the street, lest I get run over.

But you have to see the market. You just do. It’s Tangiers and Stamboul and the Mercado de San Lorenzo and any number of other famous souks rolled into one, with tacos on the side. Ya gotta go.

Of course the temperature during the day is comparable to the sunny side of the strada on the surface of the sun, so you gotta go at night. Yucatecans aren’t vampires, but only because they aren’t afraid of crosses, or garlic, or dumb enough, gringo, to walk around in the noonday sun. Mad dogs and Englishmen, and all that.

Wrong continents, mostly, and I ain’t no Englishman, but the point stands. We learn by observing the local flora and fauna. When the iguanas are basking, there’s no point in asking. We won’t walk to the Lucas de Galvez market.

But night falls, and with it the temperature, to something simply sultry. We decided to hoof it south, and get Galveznized. There was a problem. We couldn’t find it.

No, really. We have Gargoyle Maps and that kind of app-y stuff. We can speak Spanish well enough to gargle a donde and maybe understand the izquierdas and derechas that get fired back at us. We could just take a cab (Uber) and simply demand to be taken there. But the Lucas de Galvez market is visible from space. It’s the Great Wall as shopping mall. It’s a hinge of history, it’s not a mystery. I’m told you can walk into the side of it, and break your nose while espying it. How hard could it be?

So we walked on the skinny sidewalks groaning with pedestrians, fanned by the harmattan bow waves of buses that tickled your shirtsleeve (outbound side only). We searched high and low. Me high, wife low. That sounds like Chinese, but isn’t. This is not a testimonial about problems matrimonial. For reasons of stature I don’t seem to match her.

She gets along better than I do, because a tall man in Merida is a wive’s tale told to frighten children. That’s an effect I had pretty often, events my complexion didn’t soften. So she shopped in the windows as we walked, while I browsed for chances to open my scalp on street signs, awnings, and the odd air conditioner, while occasionally moving my part to the other side of my head via cable wires.

We never did find it. We think we were near it. We felt its gravitational pull, like a bowling ball on a hammock, but succumbed to cares more thermodynamic. It was too hot to walk anymore, footsore, so we purchased regalos in the outlying barrios.

I can’t believe this wasn’t the big market that we had for our target. But it wasn’t. It’s just some shops, into which we straggled and haggled and then shuffled off home:

I went on Gargoyle maps this morning to see if I could manage the trek virtually. I pitched and yawed down the digital calles, until I finally discovered it. It was a huge, concrete building that looks like it could hold the gross domestic produce of Mexico, with room for Belize left over. And there, over the doorway, was a sign that read: San Benito Marketplace. You know, the little market down the street (some street, who knows), from the elephantine mise en scene of the mysterious, ethereous Galvez Market.

The Mexican Lost and Found

We were droopy. Sunburned a bit from a sojourn to Sisal the day before. Still exuding a hint of cervezas from our pores from the night before that. My wife suggested something less than a plan. Take a nap, and then go to La Ermita barrio again on a whim.

A plan would have been deadly. It would have killed and stuffed our evening, and set it out to frighten off the crows of amusement. Whims are underrated. They’re alive. They hum. We only knew one destination in that part of town: Take us to the La Ermita Cantina, senor, and don’t spare the horses, or the hydrocarbons, or the electrons, or whatever.

The sun had retired for the evening. It still had enough oomph to spread a marmalade backdrop for the palms and the boxy houses on the horizon. It was Saturday night, and the street was jammed. We’d visited in the heat of the afternoon once, and the sidewalks had been deserted. The locals know better than to wander around without a mission during the open oven door of midday. Even with the sun fading fast, it was ninety.

It was… a cantina. No other word can describe hullabaloo like that. Barroom, nightspot, taproom, bucket of blood; a cantina is different than all other forms of local enclosed benders. It appeared that every single inhabitant of the La Ermita barrio was present and accounted for in there, and they had a three-drink head start. The manager met us at the door, wearing a shirt that exclaimed in Spanish that he could speak additional languages depending on how many drinks he had in him. There wasn’t an inch to spare in there, or a centimeter I should say, because they measure things in soccer in Mexico. He offered what he had: You can share a table.

It was that kind of place. We joined a couple already seated at a table for four, and were met with a buenas noches and no ill will. We’re American. This confused us a little. Being deposited at a half-filled table would have precipitated a one-star review on Yelp, or maybe a fistfight back home. Here it was just another Saturday night. There were people on every horizontal surface, and if they could have figured out how to hang people on the wall, I think they would have done it.

Here’s where the bosh comes in. If you read online reviews, and influencer crapola about Merida, Mexico, you’ll hear glowing encomiums for this cantina, urging all their readers to visit the place. They all have a very shallow bag of adjectives. Everything is amazing, whether it is or not, and this cantina is no exception.

Except that it is. I’m here to tell you that I was amazed. In the real sense of the word, not over a middling meal. The place dropped my jaw. It was packed and loud and lively, and it was real. A neighborhood meetup place, where everyone gathers at the end of the week without a schedule to shepherd them in. And no matter how many Instagramholes talk about the place, none of their followers go there. We were very obviously the only extranjeros in the place.

Ordering food was easy. I asked for a menu, which elicited a laugh. They had one thing on, and you could choose one of two different ways to get it. And it wasn’t, you know, amazing, but it was fine, and we chased it down the hatch with arctic beers and laughter. Then he brought la cuenta — the bill. Four beers, two plates of chicken. $260.00.

Don’t panic. Those are pesos. A peso is worth slightly less than a nickel now. Grammar school math says it was thirteen bucks. A bartender anywhere in Maine will charge you ten bucks just to glare at you before you order something. I’d say it was amazing, but I get hives using that word all the time.

We glided out into the night, and were hit right in the face with an unexplained fiesta. They’d set up shop in the square in front of the church, closed a few streets, and were partying down.

It was still ninety degrees at 9 PM. Nobody much minded, us included. After all, it’s a Barrio Magico. It’s ten degrees cooler than the afternoon, so you’re mesmerized into thinking it’s almost chilly.

Hot or not, they dance in La Ermita. The following video shows local kids. It was fun to see them walking down the street in their performance togs, and to see their parents buy them treats after they were done.

That music. I try to identify the various strains in it. The clear clarion call of the Spanish trumpet. The blattering roar of the French music hall saxophone. The twinges of oompah loompah background from the center of Europe. Mexico took them all in, and made them their own, and their children embrace them all, and  keep their traditions alive in the street before the church they were baptized in.

It struck me that Mexico is the continent’s lost and found, but nothing is lost, and everything is found. That includes my wife and me. We weren’t lost, but got found in La Ermita anyway.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

I guess I am required to tell you about La Ermita. We have scampered over its brick pavers, risked lightning bolts by entering its ancient church, wandered its quiet streets, and desolated the provisions in its bakery, served by a true cinnamon girl. I’ll tell you about it, even though I will have to betray my new friends to do it.

Everyone is sworn to secrecy about La Ermita. When asked about it, you’re first required to deny its existence entirely. You can increase the efficacy of this approach by feigning deafness, or speaking Italian all of a sudden. In some cases, if that doesn’t put the inquirer off the scent sufficiently, the fallback approach is lying like a Turk in a bazaar.

• The Germans bombed it flat during WW2. Little known battle. Nothing there casts a shadow anymore
• It’s an iguana sanctuary. They say the iguanas are rabid, but that’s silly. They’re just vicious
• There’s a narcoterrorist hiding behind every bush, waiting to kidnap you. They’ll hold you in a bunker underground and collect your Social Security check, and they keep renewing your prescription for Paxil, which they sell in the US for fabulous sums. It’s also a desert, so there are no bushes
• I’m not saying it’s aliens, but it’s aliens
• Two words: human sacrifice. Even the Catholic church has ’em. At least they’re not cannibals, like the Methodists down the block
• It’s a leper colony. It’s illegal to wave to passersby, because their hands fly off
• It’s incredibly boring there, so the locals appreciate the daily earthquakes. It breaks up the monotony. And the houses
• It’s in the Guinness Book of Records under “tarantulas”

Of course the real story I’m supposed to hide from you is La Ermita is the pleasantest little barrio in Merida. If too many people find out about it, it won’t also be one of the most affordable barrios near the centro, and it will be filled with expats like me instead of the MexiMayans who live there now, and like it.

Luckily for the Ermitans, pretty much nobody reads this blog. This is as close to a cone of silence as you’re going to see in this world. So it’s safe to tell my several readers, an NSA agent or two, and four thousand  scraper bots how much we like La Ermita. The barrio will slumber peacefully at night, knowing not a manjack from the US will ever be enticed by my description to go there. Except my wife and I, but La Ermartians seem to like us OK.

Walking down the streets in La Ermita is a trip. I am, for want of a better word, an exotic there. The whole time we were there, we only saw two people who looked even vaguely gringolicious, and when they walked by us they were arguing in some European argy-bargy language. Well, if arguing is defined as a guy being yelled at in Cyrillic by his consort. I didn’t need an interpreter to know the problem was it was hot, and nearly-noon hot at that, and it wasn’t her idea to visit Mercury on short notice.

Yes, it’s hot in La Ermita. The temps were in the high nineties, and they routinely go well into the hundreds. Hitting 120 is not unheard of. I’d stay away from the place if I were you.

But the place is built for it. The houses show blank masonry faces to the sun. The walls of every structure are thick enough to hold in a thousand Edmond Dantes, and hold out the heat at the same time. The roofs are catapulted off the floors into low earth orbit, which is about eighteen feet high if I remember my high school science classes correctly (I skipped school a lot, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt me none). High ceilings, thick walls, and fans and minisplits make the indoor climate straddle the line between bearable and comfy. The little square by the old church is shady and cool with lots of benches to malinger on. Some people call it the Plaza del Gallo, because way back when it was an empty dirt lot where they held cockfights. See, this place is too scary for you. I’d give it a miss.

The square isn’t square, which is a rarity in Merida. The city is laid out on a grid, E-W, N-S, so parks and squares really are square. But La Ermita is very old, and was once outside the city proper. The road leading out of town headed straight to Campeche, so it collides with the city grid at a Flatiron Building angle. This lends interest to the park, and it makes the streets around it bustle in unusual ways.

The La Ermita church is now called Santa Isabel. My recollections of Science class might be sketchy, but I had the nuns for grammar school, so I remember that Isabel was John the Baptist’s mother. I don’t recall her opinion of Salome’s recipe for The Head of John the Baptist With a Side of Fries, but I assume she didn’t approve.

That wasn’t the original name of the church, though. it was “Nuestra Señora del Buen Viaje.” Our Lady of the Good Journey. The road to Campeche (the Camino Real), was pretty scary back in the day, so people stopped to pray and fill their canteens and reload before setting out. It’s still terrifying, I’ll bet. I’d stay clear away if  I were you.

As I mentioned before, we were served in the bakery across from the park by an actual cinnamon girl. She had bright eyes and a winning smile and a cinnamon complexion. She brought us stuff with actual cinnamon on it. She wore a T-shirt with a cute little unicorn on it, a kind of My Little Pony riff. And in a cute, girlish, glitter font above unicorn, it read “Don’t F*ck With Me.”

I’d stay out of La Ermita if I were you. With terrifying creatures like that roaming the land, it’s not safe.

The Boy on a Dolphin, Grown Older and Wiser

I met a traveler from an antique land.

He was riding a Dolphin. No, really. He was the type of philosopher who used to drop a flag when he met you. He spoke no English — he said. He did not lie. I don’t think his interior regions were arranged with room for the organ that permitted true prevarication. I wondered how humans, who are all brothers when you get right down to it, can be assembled so differently, because there’s always been plenty of room in me for one. But words are tricky things. I speak no English. Examine that fabulation closely, and get back to me.

You had to find the key to his lock. Entiendo un poco espanol, senor. Buen dia. Nos gusta mucho su ciudad. Then his accented English appeared like a ship on the horizon, sails full, coming into port. He was thoughtful in an offhand way, and wise. It became his city because I had awarded it to him in clumsy castellano.

He said most extranjeros made no effort, and effort that is not made cannot be rewarded. He did not see many Americans. He wondered where we were from, in particular, and why it made us the way we were. I had not thought of that. He was all of a sudden a simple, goodhearted Spengler, wondering if we were rootless, sargasso floating on any warm water that would support us, or arboles, pulling our life from the ground below us and the peculiar sky above us.

He laughed at the imaginary friction between our countries, and called it that. We said that la gente de la ciudad es muy amable, y feliz, and it suited us. He told us that he meant no harm, but Americans seemed to him to be caught up in a spiral, always climbing, looking for more, grasping at a higher rung on an endless ladder. He did not understand it, or did not like it, I’m not sure which. But he said that when a man and his family have enough to eat, and a roof over their heads, their minds should be tranquilo. He used that word.

Tranquilo is a Spanish adjective that means calm, peaceful, or relaxed. It can describe a person, place, or situation that is free from stress, noise, or disturbance.

I know enough about Spanish to know that it’s more malleable than it first appears. Subtle. Manana can mean tomorrow, or later, or never. And tranquilo can mean more than the dictionary can offer.

It dawned on me that I was riding a Dolphin with a Mexican Buddha, a Mayan Epictetus. And it made me tranquilo.

Merida. Where the Ugly Americans Aren’t American

We’re in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. We’re meeting all sorts of people here. There’s the usual steady diet of locals that wander in and out of our lives abruptly. Uber drivers and waiters and cleaning women and maintenance men and so forth. But tourist interactions are a terrible way to judge a foreign locale, and to be judged. Of course the person at the desk in the hotel is friendly to you. You’re paying them to be friendly to you.

This has led, in our life, to people we know back in the states telling us we’d certainly be killed in Mexico within minutes of stepping off the plane, because they don’t know any Mexican concierges. They watch Chicken Noodle News, and believe what they hear. The same people go on vacations in places like the Dominican Republic, and tell you how safe it is, and how friendly all the people are (at the front desk). We were cautioned by one well-meaning group that Mexico was invariably lethal. They’re in Sarasota Florida. I looked it up. Sarasota’s violent crime rate is 14-times higher than Merida’s. That information would just clonk off their foreheads and fall on the pavement if I supplied it to them, so I don’t.

We were invited to a get-together at a privada last night. A privada is a gated community. We’d never been to one. The local environs of the address were pretty rough and tumble compared to the city center where we are staying. Lotsa rubble. The privada itself consisted of a cul de sac with about a dozen brand new, two-bedroom, masonry homes. They’re joined together in long rows. These are not particularly popular with expats. For the most part, Mexicans buy them to get out of the noise of the main part of the city, and to get better plumbing. A privada doesn’t appeal to my wife and I, but we do see the appeal. And it’s not an Omega Man situation here. We stood out on the curb waiting for our ride home in the evening without a hint of Danger, Will Robinson. It’s just not as upscale outside the walls as it is inside.

The assembled guests, besides us, were a Syrian-born long time Houstonian who was educated in France. A Mexican woman who married him. An American from Rochester, New York, who rides all over the city on his bicycle. A young goth fellow from Connecticut, a veritable Richmond from the IT crowd. A Canadian fellow who also lives in the privada part of the year. Another, younger Mexican woman, who professes to know no English, but smiles when you say something funny, so might be fibbing un poco. And the host, a Meridiano who also lived in Houston, but has returned to his roots here. He made dinner for us, a traditional Mexican dish called… lasagna? Well, he heard my wife say she was Italian, so that’s what he made. Man, people are pleasant here.

Earlier in the day, we went to the Merida English Library. It’s a fave gathering spot for expats, mostly Canadians. They had a bazaar going on, so 90 percent of the people there were straight up local Mexicans selling paintings, jewelry, foodstuffs, and clothing. The entertainment was a flute player, an announcement that filled me with dread. I pictures some pseudo-Peruvian Paul Simon schtick, I’d rather be a hammer than a nail…

Wrong again, poindexter. He looked Cuban, and played jazz standards like a demon, if demons favor smiles and Satin Doll covers. Really enjoyable.

At any rate, we talked to a pretty large cross section of Merida inmates in a single day. The topic of ugly Americans came up fairly often, and it was interesting that none of the ugly Americans mentioned were Americans.

A Canadian woman was mentioned a lot. She made the news (TikTok version) by purchasing a house on a godforsaken stretch of beach and then yelling at, and eventually throwing eggs at, a Mexican family who camped on said beach. She said (screamed) that she owned it. The Mexican family, who know that in Mexico it’s illegal for anyone to own a beach, or to keep you from using it, tried to explain. Of course the Canadian woman speaks no Spanish. Why would she learn that, just because she moved here permanently?

The next, really ugly American was from Spain. He’s some sort of journalist, although nowadays what does that mean? I guess I am too. It’s the perfect business card for a drunken layabout like PJ O’Rourke, or Hemingway, or me, I guess. Anyway, he’s lived here a long time, but hasn’t figured out the Mexico has zoning by roulette wheel, and Mexicans are generally happy and occasionally loud. He was pissed off that the restaurant next door to him celebrated open hours in the morning with the usual mariachi disco torch song vibe they favor. He went next door, confronted what I’m supposed to call a young lady, but really was nothing but a girl, and yelled at her, threatened her, frightened her more than a little, and knocked over and broke some of the stuff on the tables. I guess he showed her.

Knock knock. Who’s there? Angry mob. Angry mob who? No joke, just angry mob. Luckily for our (z)hero, they didn’t lynch him. They probably didn’t have time, because when the inevitable video of his behavior hit the social media circuit, seventeen kinds of police showed up at his door to cart him off to the hoosegow.

He went to jail. Mexican jail. No bail jail. I have it on good authority you do not want to go to Mexican no-bail jail. He tried explaining that he was a good feminist, and wrote all sorts of articles about women’s rights. You know, women except the ones right in front of him. Theoretical women always get treated correctly by feminist men, I have observed. It’s the real ones that get threatened.

After a couple of what I’m sure were scintillating, educational weeks in the pokey, his Mexican lawyer, if not the man himself, figured out that by being very, very sorry, and making what must be a very, very large settlement with the girl and the restaurant owner, he could at least get out on parole. He’s still going to go in front of a judge, and I doubt it’s going to be a frolic for him. All over a radio.

We were here a year ago, and I seem to recall the same sort of situation happened then, too. IIRC, a Canadian woman who owned a shop got in a big beef with a little girl over the restaurant next door crowding her sidewalk or some similar infinitesimal contretemps. She pitched a similar fit. I can’t find the story to verify the details, but I believe the authorities advised her by her collar that she might be happier in Canada, and a Police Line Do Not Cross kinda sign was stretched over her business the next day.

The third ugly American is German. We’ve met rather a lot of Germans here. Way, way more than Americans. I gather this is a popular spot to escape North Sea winters and waiting to the end of the sentence to encounter a verb. So one spot tourists like to visit is nearby Chichen Itza, and its magnificent pyramid, El Castilo.

Most people leave it at that, but not our German freund. He decided he wanted to run up El Castilo, and he didn’t have the sense to try it at midnight during a slow week. He was booed all the way up, and a security guard had to chase him up there. When he came down, he was lucky there were very serious police waiting for him, because the mob of people waiting for him might have pulled him limb from limb. I hope his little bit of intertunnel fame was worth it, because the fine can be $15,000 (not pesos), and maybe jail time if you break something.

So it appears that my wife and I are the ugliest Americans in town, and she isn’t the least bit ugly, so the mantle falls to me alone. I’m no good at yelling at anyone, and I can at least ask nicely for a table for two ugly Americans, in barbarous Spanish, so I’m not sure exactly how to ruin our national reputation while we’re here. I guess the American and Mexican presidents will have to pick up the slack, and argue like a recently divorced couple over the name of the Gulf of Meximerica. We’re not interested.

Saturday Trash Day

I’m an odd person. You could be forgiven if you said I was defective. Please note that the previous sentence was written using passive voice. If you call me defective in plain, Anglo Saxon declarative sentences, well, it’s hard to pick up your teeth with a broken arm, fella. I know, I’ve had to do it.

Anyway, enough about hockey. I don’t act or think exactly like most other people do. It’s not obvious that I don’t, but I don’t. I’m a Donald Sutherland pod person. I look about the same, but then I get on WordPress and hiss and point at you.

I’ve said it many times here, but it’s not my fault I notice things. You can list all my other faults if you like, and I won’t take umbrage. You know, if you have ten or twelve years and can type fast. I have taken umbrage in my past life, but I’ve always put it back on the shelf before the interpersonal store detective collared me.

So here I am in Merida, Mexico. I know I’m supposed to do tourist things. I do, occasionally. But my heart’s not generally in it. I’m not going to make YorubaTube videos depicting me and my wife shoveling food into our faces. The food’s good here — way better than good, it’s excellent, superb. Case closed.

But back in the cobwebbed recesses of snakepit I call a mind, stuff is moiling all the time. I’m curious about things no other extranjeros ever ask about, or include in their videos and search-engine-optimized drivel. I like to go to different places, like, say, Mexico, and see how everything works there. I don’t want to go to fourteen tourist trap restaurants and film myself eating. I want to know where the trash goes.

Honestly, I do. These are the sorts of questions that fascinate me.

Q: Where does the water in the taps come from? A: Not sure. Occasionally, it doesn’t.

Q: Where does the, um, processed food in the toilet go when I flush? A: No one knows. And occasionally it doesn’t. Then you have to move.

Q: Where did the iguana in my courtyard go? A: Wherever he wants. Who’s going to stop him?

Q: How are they building houses in 100F heat with nothing but a bucket of trowels? A: They’re Mexican

Q: Hey, landlord, what do we do with our trash? A: [laughter] You just put it outside on the sidewalk after 4 PM. It will not be there tomorrow morning.

Whoah, wait a minute there. This is a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, in a Hefty steel sack. Are there trash fairies? [please, no cheap jokes about the drag bar over the back wall] Do the wandering iguanas eat it all while we slumber? What gives?

So we’ve been doing it for three weeks now. The trash fairies come, but we never hear them, or see them, or meet anyone who can tell us exactly how it works. But last night, wonder of wonders, we solved the mystery that would make Agatha Christie blush, and hold her nose. We saw the trash fairies. Up close. Personal.

My wife and  I are adapting to the clime. It’s as hot as a demon’s George Foreman grill every day. Smarter people than us (every Mexican) stay in all day and wait for the relative cool of the evening to wander about. I’m not including working people in this. They bustle early and late, and many ride to work on buses without air conditioning. I’d salute them, but that would reveal the giant sweat stain under my arm.

So the sun was setting. The narrow streets lined with painstakingly assembled skipping stone and mortar houses made miniature canyons to shade us from its last rays. Buses and little cars and scooters went rollicking down the calles, set free from the heavier traffic of the workday world. Young couples (and us) strolled hand in hand on the way to a dinner date, or a walk in the park in the moderated air of the evening.

It was during this leisurely shamble down the skinny sidewalks that we spotted a veritable greyhound of a man. He went by us on a dead run. I’ve never seen anyone run that fast in a city unless he was carrying a stolen TV set. But this mustang carried nothing, and he certainly wasn’t dressed for jogging. He had the true workmen’s uniform here: jeans, a T-shirt, a baseball hat on backwards, and battered sneakers. He got to the next intersection before us, and he ran right into the street, and without an instant’s hesitation ran straight through the traffic passing through the intersection. Our hearts were in our mouths. A toreador has nothing on this guy, except a better tailor.

I looked back to see if Jason Bourne was chasing him. No soap there, but way back on the opposite side of the street I saw another of these human whippets. He was blazing down the sidewalk, grabbing bags of trash without slowing down one iota, then running across the street without looking, and throwing all the bags on the west side of the street.

Another of these mocha Hermes appeared, and then another. I thought to myself that if Mexicans don’t win every medal at the Olympics, it’s only for a lack of interest. Then I spotted it. The trash truck.

It was completely ordinary. Not a fairy coach, or some mechanized monster that picks up your recycling bin and shakes it all over the street on the opposite side of the truck. Just a big cab with a big metal enclosure and a big crusher on the back hopper.

And that truck didn’t stop to pick up trash. It didn’t slow down to pick up trash. There were half a dozen human barracudas hanging off that truck, and taking turns sprinting down the street, grabbing everything, and hurling it into the back, and running the compactor while they rolled. They went down that street like Patton through France. And they do the whole city, a million people’s worth of trash, just like that. I assume there’s more than one trash truck. But I can’t testify to it, because hand to God these guys might be capable of doing it alone. And not one man-jack of them looked the slightest bit winded.

So I can die happy. I know where the trash in Merida goes when I put it outside in the evening.

Hey, now. Where does the trash truck go to get rid of the trash? This is going to keep me up at night until I find out.

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.

Iggy and the American Stooges

Well, it finally happened. Mexico broke containment. The klaxon horns sounded in the Yucatan reactor room, and the Spanish levels started to rise on the (cathode ray tube) screens. Don’t get me wrong. We’re here to live more or less like Mexicans in a Mexican city. But you never go full Mexican. At least, not all at once.

We got the firehose of Mexican life trained on us in one long blast the other day. We thought we were prepared for it, and maybe we could have withstood it a little at a time, day by day, but I’ll bet even Mexicans aren’t prepared for a full Mexican experience served family style in a single pot.

Of course we’ve had minor Mexican experiences already. English is not generally spoken here, and our Spanish is just shy of El Gato Ensombrerado. Pretty soon everyone resorts to speaking Italian, more or less, sputtering, pointing at things, and making wild gestures.

“There’s no hot water.”

“No senor, here for the knob the agua calor ees on the right, and agua fria ees izquierda –on the left.”

“Oh, entiendo. That’s the opposite of los Estados Unidos.”

“Si. Also senor, there ees no hot water.”

We adapted pretty well to the, how do you say it, the informality of services in this ancient city. We’ve had it cushy. There are plenty of people paying real money to rent Air BnBs in the centro near us that can’t flush toilet paper down the toilet, because the pipes were installed by Columbus Plumbing, Heating, and Smallpox, LTD. There’s a trash can for it. Even Ed Norton would pass on that job, Ralphie boy.

Our house and pool is cleaned once a week by two lovely people, Wilma with the gold tooth, and Senor Rainier. They can’t speak any English, so they think they like me. If they could talk to me, they’d know better. Senor Rainier cleans the pool, but he is also on call to sort out any sort of problem we might have. We had some.

There was no water. Nada. Senor Rainier was summoned, and came shortly after. He explained to me that it was so simple. The cistern in the laundry room was empty, but there was another cistern just outside the laundry room with a giant hose you could put into the other cistern. Then you went into the little concrete missile silo in the yard that held the pool filter and four hundred little lizards and flip the primero disyuntor in the circuit breaker panel to start the pump. Flip only the primero breaker, senor, not the other ones, or you could die, maybe, or be disappointed in some other way.

I think that’s what he said. He might have been giving me instructions on how to prepare arroz con pollo. I was still processing the second and third words in his peroration while he was finishing up with the fiftieth. But after pulling back the concrete lid on top of the cistern, which made nifty Indiana Jones noises, and threatened to take a digit if you weren’t careful, the hose was inserted and the water was restored. It was handy that he explained how to do it, because when we returned that night, there was no water again.

I flipped the primero disyuntor like he told me, and filled up the cistern myself. Then I went hunting around, because the water was going somewhere, and I wanted to go and  visit it, and ask it why it didn’t like my wife and me. I discovered that we have a third bathroom. It’s out by they pool, and we had no idea it was there. I do not appreciate having third bathrooms imposed on me by stealth. There was a toilet in it installed by Cortez and Company, purveyors of fine ceramics, and the flapper valve inside the toilet was more true to its name than most flappers. It was flapping up and down and letting water sluice down the drain continuously. I shut the water valve off, said goodnight to the geckos who own the place, and shut the door forevermore.

Of course this is minor, isn’t it? But later the same day, my wife came into our bedroom, shaking like a leaf. “There’s a… there’s a… Come and see… the thing…”

So we went out to the kitchen, over by the pool. We’d seen most every critter over by the pool. Big bats circle the yard noiselessly in the evenings. There are mourning doves, and things that look like crows, but sound like they’re yelling speeches from a balcony. We had a flock of giant green parrots perch in the trees. They sounded like an argument in an asylum. We’ve hosted stray cats, lots of geckos, and anoles, which are little lizards that disappear when you look at them, like a reptilian Vegas act. My wife thinks they’re cute. My wife didn’t think it was as cute when they went and got their big brother. There was a great, big iguana on a limb outside the kitchen window, looking at her like he hadn’t heard a good joke in ten years.

I said, “What ugly squirrels they have here.” My wife was not in the mood to be amused. We norteamericanos are unused to coming face to face with the Mesozoic Era without paying admission to a museum first. If we wanted to walk among actual ancient lizards, we’d sign up for a job as Senate pages.

“Make it go away.”

“My darling, my Spanish is not good. I don’t even know how to order a table for two, or say, gee, it’s hot today in iguana. I suggest we let the iguana do his iguana thing, while we do our gringo thing elsewhere. We’re boring. He’ll probably crawl over the back wall and party down at the drag bar they got over there. It’s livelier.”

So we went out into the evening, and dodged down the little streets to the Remate del Paseo de Montejo. Remate means “end.” But for us, it’s the start of the paseo. There’s a kind of park surrounded by restaurants and handsome houses, with lots of trees. It’s a peaceful spot. Usually.

Holy cow, La Noche Mexicana had set up shop there. How? When? We’d been there earlier, and there was nothing. Now there was a big stage, and hundreds of chairs, and the street was lined with stalls selling street food and gifts and handmade clothing and who knows what all. And this appeared, like a vision in the desert:

You can buy stuff, but it’s free to be entertained. Packed house, with stars bent over the proceedings for a roof. There were lots of acts, all amusing and superb. I loved these guys:

Who doesn’t love a mariachi band? This was the real deal. Four fiddles, a guitarlele, a guitarron bass, and two fine trumpets. Mexican trumpet playing is like the antidote to American trumpet playing. It’s brassy and loud and clear, and doesn’t sound like anything but pneumatic happiness.

The bandleader was a pro. He walked to the front of the stage and teased the crowd and flirted with the old ladies and “did the show,” as we used to call it. He said, “Who wants to hear La Cucaracha?” The crowd yelled. He looked all around, paused just the right amount, cocked his ear, and said, “I heard nothing.” Laughter. “Who wants to hear La Cucaracha?!” He pulled this gag a few more times until he achieved the desired tumult. And then they played La Cucaracha, and everyone (except two sunburned people) sang along. And it was an interstellar version of it, too, like you asked Dizzy Gillespie to arrange it. They sang folk songs, too, that (almost) everyone knew the words to, and sang along. They all played like demons and sang like angels.

The next day, it had all evaporated. The water in our taps flowed. The remate was empty, with no sign, not a candy wrapper, to prove we had seen anything there. The iguana had lit out for better bugs in the neighbor’s yard. We could not summon Senor Rainier to enjoy his smiling face and patient tutoring, because nothing was wrong. We would have to wait a week to see Wilma take off her good flip flops, and put on her work flip flops, and bustle around our casa.

You never want to go full Mexico, maybe. But you sure miss it when it’s gone.

And the night shall be filled with music
And the cares that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.