The emerging expat enters that precocious stage

February 18, 2012 By 1 Comment
Pollo Yucatan, Connecticut style

Pollo Yucatan, Connecticut style

We’ve all seen the college student who goes off to London for a semester, returns home, and can’t shed their newly acquired British accent. Or the young professional who takes a trip to the Taj Mahal and returns more insufferable than ever, because no one else in his crowd had ever ventured past Europe. Travel can bring out the smartypants in a person. Actually moving abroad can make a person intolerable.

So naturally I rolled my eyes and created a fuss when my neighborhood Mexican food joint, in coastal Connecticut, dared to offer something “Yucatecan” on the menu. I scoffed. I rolled my eyes. I did my “superior dance” around the table. Chicken with mushrooms and a white wine sauce is certainly not Yucatecan, I proclaimed. But a little voice inside me said, “shut up, punk. You barely know your panucho from your pok chuc.”

And it’s true. I know just enough to let my big mouth run away with me. I can toss off careless advice to people more newbie than me. Then, I’m humbled by someone else’s post that shows me something absolutely new. I’m always learning something about Mérida and the region, which is why it holds my interest.

So I’m trying to hold back on the glib advice, keeping mouth closed and my eyes and ears open. I really don’t know [Read more...]

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A new face at Amate Books

February 16, 2012 By 3 Comments

Jorge Fichtl at Amate Books in Merida

The Mérida offshoot of Oaxaca’s Amate Books is in a large yellow building on Calle 60 x 51. Walking between Santa Lucia and Santa Ana, I have passed it many times, wondering if they were ever open. Apparently they were open the whole time, they just look closed. So a couple of weeks ago, we walked in, and we immediately recognized the friendly face behind the counter.

It was Jorge Fichtl, whose hospitality (and honesty) we remembered at the former Café Libertad. (My blog must be the death knell for coffeehouses, because El Hoyo is gone as well.) I say honesty because back at Liberdad last May, I was bleary after a long day, and the whole currency situation still taxes my little brain, so I mistakenly left about $100 U.S. for coffee [Read more...]

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The wedding gown I overlooked

February 12, 2012 By 2 Comments

I was going through my camera roll today and noticed something in a picture I took back in November. There’s that wedding gown! It’s folded over like a schmatta on the back terrace wall.

How did I overlook that? Easy. I’m distracted by everything else there is to see.

Like they say, it’s a jungle out there.

I don’t know when I have seen a yard in the Centro with more cactus. There’s a cactus tree, something that looks like prickly pear growing over the septic system, and a cactus tree that’s very thick.

I can’t identify anything out there, really, and I’ve never had a head for botany. I just don’t know what anything is called unless it has a plastic tag provided by the nursery. I also don’t want to clear the yard recklessly. Mature  trees and plants are a treasure.

One thing I know I don’t have is a key lime tree. But my new neighbor has one. So I’ll need to keep at least one fruit-bearing tree to have something to trade with when I’m in the mood for a gin and tonic.

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What was left behind

February 7, 2012 By 4 Comments

The wedding dress left behind at Casa NanaJoanna, Jorge, and Patricia and Don. I’d call them our “new friends,” but somehow it feels we’ve known them forever.

It was nice to see the house through their eyes. They were very reassuring that we had made a good move, that the house had lots of possibilities. And it took a feminine eye to notice something Paul and I has passed over. Although the previous owners did a pretty good job clearing all their items out of the house, a few things were left behind, including a piece of shimmery cloth folded over a balustrade in the backyard.

If I had even noticed it, I would have thought it was a tablecloth, but Patricia immediately realized what it was.

She and Joanna unfolded the soiled, but still intact garment. The photo above is a spoiler, so you know where this is headed … the owner left behind a once-beautiful wedding gown. And would you get a load of that tiny waist! [Read more...]

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Tinaco trouble: Making a splash in the neighborhood

January 30, 2012 By 8 Comments

We have had this house for about a month now, and already it’s falling apart. I thought it was already a fallen-apart house, but it’s falling apart even more. Mainly, my new neighbor tells me a tinaco on the roof is leaking water into her yard, and mine. Mérida is already wetter than it normally is this time of year, and now I’m contributing to the problem. Possibly the city water feeding in won’t stop because of a faulty valve. I’m not ready for news like this yet.

Was I supposed to get a property manager already? I have put out some feelers, and I have some prices and services to compare, but I wasn’t going to really get around to this until next month maybe. Well, now is the time. We need someone down there, paid to be our eyes and ears. One of the prospective managers promises [Read more...]

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A lesson in Mérida house hunting: Sizing up our ruin

January 29, 2012 By 2 Comments

No, this is not a bar chart drawn by a drunken graphic artist. Nor is it an example of mid-century modernistic post-neo-deconstructionist art. (Although I’ll frame and sell it if this image catches on.)

These are shapes of lots in the Centro of Mérida, put side by side and seen in proportion to each other. These shapes represent houses we saw on the casa crawl, or through an agent, and contained features we would want, like a central courtyard, full-sized pool or a casita in the rear.

Everyone who has seen our space tells us we have enough room to do all this, but I wanted proof.

I’ve been tracing outlines from the Google satellite images to compare them with the place we bought. I can only ask you to believe me when I tell this isn’t an exercise in “whose is bigger.” I’m merely trying to figure out what’s reasonable to build in a lot our size.

I’ve never had a sense of scale, which you’d know if you’ve ever seen me lug home a sofa that doesn’t fit where I wanted it to. It’s even harder when we have never seen our property filled with furniture, or trimmed of jungle growth out back. Sometimes the property seems pretty big, [Read more...]

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