Merida
We're staying at really cool airbnb. Merida is an old colonial city and the Spanish recreated the buildings that they had in Spain here; a lot of the buildings were built around 1800s. The buildings are squares that go right up to the sidewalk, but then a huge square courtyard in a minute. So the rooms are all on the edge of the square, and our unit is a little slice of that; the bigger buliding has been cut up into smaller units
It's 3 bedrooms, with M's bedroom out of the main building, off of the small pool. K and my bedrooms are on the top floor; there's a balcony off of my room. Here's a diagram of our place.
The courtyard is really cool. There are two orange trees with green oranges. (We've tried one - dry and sour). We've gone swimming in the pool and built and tested Lego boats. There's cool little details like windows with secret doors for looking out.
We're about 8 blocks from the plazas, parks, museums, and outdoor market and grocery store, which can be a long hot walk in 90 degree weather (especially for seven year old legs). We've had plenty of local snacks, including pastries, churros, liquados frutas (fruit smoothies), and soft colored marshmallows. We've tried a new fruit, mamey, which is brown and bumpy skinned but dark red inside, sweet with a feeling between an avocado and a papaya. I like it; boys are not a fan.
On Sunday, they have performances in the main square. We stayed for one puppet show. On Monday night, we went back for part of the traditional dance show. It was like being in a musical.
We also to a Museo Macay, a modern art museum. On the second floor there were abstract works by very famous artists. We tried to Google translate the descriptions but didn't get far. On the bottom floor, there were some cool sculptures. Here are pictures of a few.
Nearly next door was the Palacio Gobierno, a beautiful green building with a courtyard and murals about the history of the Maya, with a focus on their centuries long fight for liberation from the Spanish invaders. It was like a history museum and an art museum together.
Merida is a beautiful, colorful city. The buildings are painted lime green, turquois, ocean blue, peach, pink, lavender, all different colors. There are gates over the windows and doors, curly, detailed wrought iron. There are some places that need a little love, the paint and outerwalls flaking flaking off and wooden doors falling apart and trees growing in the walls, but there's also lots of construction happening to fix places up. Any city faces that challenge, just like the outerskirts of Boston or Worcester; it's hard to keep up a city that has so many residents and workers and tourists. And weather. In fact, the population of the city of Boston (which includes Dorchester, Roxbury, etc.) is smaller than Merida, around 650,000 people compared to around 900,000 to 1 million people.
We went on a walking tour of the city. To build the cathedral and buildings, the Spanish had used stone from the Mayan pyramids to build the city. Our guide helped us to see the patterns etched on some of the blocks that had once belong to the pyramids sticking out from the cathedral walls. We've also hit nearly all of the museums, getting a close look at some of the artifacts found at different Mayan sites. There are also these "video mapping," shows at night in many of these towns, were they project onto the building a light display. It's really cool; it really looked like the doors of the cathedral were opening, or a flag was blowing, or vines climbing up the sides of the building.
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