What Ellen, and everyone else, doesn’t know about Mérida real estate

February 18, 2013 By

ellenOn “Ellen,” a piece of Mérida real estate found itself in the daytime television spotlight.

Ellen DeGeneris apparently has a segment that mocks funny real estate listings. One from Mérida (she didn’t say where it was from) was a groaner.

“This sounds promising. It says right here, ‘Cute home in the historic center.’ Let’s see this cute home.”

Cut to an image of yucky, rundown rooms. The audience groans with horror. “Oh honey, I love it,” Ellen jokes. “This black mold is adorable!”

A cheap shot? Yes. But it illustrates the learning curve most of us north of the border have had to go through. Even if you’ve cultivated an eye for Centro ruins, your spouse [Read more...]

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T Magazine: ‘Not much to shake a stick at’ in this ‘sleepy town’ of artists and models

February 16, 2013 By

tmagThe New York Times travel section has done a good job bringing news from Mérida to readers. Ask the Times’ fashion magazine to do the same, though, and you get an entirely different Mérida.

If you’re tired of mawkish depictions of a quaint and charming Mérida, it will be refreshing to know that today, a new article paints the city as a homely, pissant backwater whose faded beauty has been salvaged by a “clutch of creative insiders.”

Here’s how the T Magazine piece starts out: “On arriving in the sleepy Mexican town of Mérida…” It didn’t take long [Read more...]

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Merida is the new Brittany

June 25, 2012 By

I’m officially convinced that Merida is this year’s trendy new name for baby girls. In 20 years, you’ll see an influx of young women named Merida moving to Mérida, wondering why a city in Mexico would have a Scottish name.

WordPress lets you see what search terms led to some viewers, and “name merida,” “merida name,” and “background of name merida” keeps popping up. Go ahead, try it. Search “name merida” and see that the Google algorithms produce. What looked like a traffic spike yesterday had nothing to do with an interest in Yucatán, just movie goers curious about the name. I’m not terribly pleased about this, but [Read more...]

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Mérida is a cover story again

June 24, 2012 By

Condé Nast Traveler‘s July issue arrived yesterday, and one of its coverlines made my heart jump:

MEXICO

The pleasures of Mérida

(The art, the shops, the meals)

It’s always great to see the virtues of this city extolled in print. Departures wrote a nice foodie article for their American Express Platinum customers last year, and gay-travel magazine Passport wrote in great detail in a recent story, but The New York Times seems to have the largest impact when they decide to write about the place that only travel writers call “the white city.”

But they aim at tourists, barely mentioning some pretty significant population trends going on… people like me buying properties and planning to move there.

The Traveler article initially seemed to cover all the usual bases of a travel article: photos of Rosas y Xocolate, an interior shot of Los Dos, a colorful horse-and-carriage. Closer inspection revealed that writer Amy Wilentz took a different approach, however. Rather than with romance, the  [Read more...]

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What’s in a name? Meet Princess Merida

November 21, 2011 By

This is Princess Merida, the lead character in an upcoming 3-D Pixar movie. Nice name, don’t you think?

Lauded for its feisty female protagonist, “Brave” comes out next June but is already getting a lot of media coverage.  But the lead character isn’t a Latina, even though her name borrows from at least three Latin cities. And frankly, I’d rather hear the voice of someone like Salma Hayek rather than Kelly McDonald, who landed the job. Nothing against Kelly McDonald.

So how did a red-headed medieval Scottish warrior get the name Merida? What are the ramifications for the good people who live in the Yucatecan capital, or are researching the possibility?

First, we are at risk at having the whole world pronouncing the word itself differently.  If the actors say  “Muh-RID-a” or some such thing, no one will ever properly pronounce our city’s name properly again. Could it be [Read more...]

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Design inspiration in tablet form

October 12, 2011 By

I’ve had an iPad plugged into the wall for over a year now, and I have to admit I’m not that drawn to it. I’m so plugged in to my laptop, where I can create web pages and graphics, as opposed to the tablet, which is designed mainly to consume media.

That might start to change. I’ve been frustrated that I can’t get Ambientes delivered to my house in the states. The design magazine wows me every issue, and was one of the many magazines I crammed into my luggage [Read more...]

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