Saturday 31st August
Another travel day today, but we've told ourselves we are taking it easy for time so it was another leisurely get up, we were breakfasted and set to go by about 9.30am.
We walked about for 10 minutes or so until we found a taxi, that's just the way it's done unfortunately, then bought bus tickets at the bus terminal for the journey to Merida. For whatever reason Liam spent an extra 7 or 8 dollars on coach tickets than what we really needed to and we ended up with a very flash coach with comfy seats, free water and headphones for watching the films they showed or listening to music.
Unfortunately my head was very bad and I was feeling sick because of it, so I mostly slept on Liam whilst he watched the films in Spanish. About 4 hours later we arrived, not quite sure if we had missed our stop or not. We failed to be completely understood by anybody around us so ended up just getting a taxi, which I don't think we were ripped off to badly but still paid more than we should have.
The hostel is right on the main plaza of the town, and is fairly nice. Our room has a very high ceiling which makes it seem a lot bigger and we have our own bathroom which is never an essential but always a bonus when we do. After settling in a bit we went out to explore, and were happy with what we found. It's almost like leon in that its a mixture of different types of architect thrown in around more run down looking buildings. The main plaza is great, full of people and birds and stuff to look at. We were generally unharrassed the whole time apart from one hawker who latched on when we were stuck at traffic lights. There are love seats all around the outside so we sat in one of those with a tourism magazine we had picked up from the tourist office drinking a milk shake. We were comfortable and enjoying just sitting for quite some time but then it started to rain so we went back inside.
At about 8pm we headed out again because we had heard it was some kind of " Mexican night" on a Saturday. We walked around and didn't see much going on other than the usual kind of stalls we see everywhere we go. Liam saw a street vendor which seemed quite popular with the locals so decided he wanted to try it. Despite pointing to what he wanted and saying he wanted one they didn't seem to understand what he wanted which was annoying, it gets annoying because people stop what they're doing to watch whenever this kind of thing happens as well. Luckily there was a man around who spoke English and helped us out, I don't think they realised we understand small bits of Spanish because they were trying to charge more than what they were supposed to because we didn't understand fully. Luckily the guy who was helping got it at the right price, although none of this was said to us we knew it had happened which is always a downer when people try to con you out of more money because you're a tourist. Liam asked what the meat was and they guy said he didn't know, and joked it could be dog. It probably was.
We walked back to the main plaza and saw a band setting up in the middle so we stood and watched them for a while before walking more to see what we could find. We went into an arched building which had some sculptures in and little bits of art work and admired the outside stone work of the cathedral all lit up.
After about half an hour of watching the band play and people watching we headed back inside to watch how to train a dragon on the iPad and sleep.
Sunday 1st September
So today was a day to walk around Merida and get a feel for it. The city was founded in the 1500s by some guy from Spain who named it after somewhere already in Spain. It was originally a maya city called something I forget but what meant " city of the 5 hills" - in reference to the pyramids. The spaniards used the maya people to build a lot of their new buildings due to their obvious mastery of masonry work, however also built large walls to keep them segregated.
Because of its history it's got quite an original feel to it, with Mayan architecture mixed with European. Because merida was build on the site of the maya city, it'sconsidered one of the oldest continually occupied cities in the Americas.
We went into god knows how many museums and galleries throughout the day. I will try to remember some ( as I'm writing this quite a bit after as usual)
One of the nicest buildings, actually id say the nicest one, in the grand plaza ( the Central Park) is the cathedral. I mentioned it yesterday when it was all lit up. It's on the site of a former maya temple and some of the stones from it were used to build the cathedral. Apparently the crucifix behind the alter is Christ of unity, a symbol of reconciliation between Spanish and maya when the Spanish finally managed to convert a whole bunch of them to Christianity.
We went to the city museum which had various bits of history most of what I've remembered was written above. The contemporary art museum which was a mixture of stunning art work and odd scribbles which strange people seem to also think is impressive art work but we don't!
We stumbled across the music museum whilst on our wanderings, and although none of the signs have any English we were given some laminated boards with some English translations to use at the start which was nice. You can see the massive importance the music has had on the history of yucatan, however we found the whole place pretty booooring. Grandad Neil would probably have liked it. The only good part of the whole thing was a video in English in one of the rooms which had a sort of documentary about the ancient maya. The fan was really loud though so a lot of the narrative was missed but we enjoyed watching all the same for about 20 minutes. It had a few interesting points including their sacrificial ceremonies, lots of blood sacrifices, and their amazing knowledge of astrology and mathematics. It showed the massive importance the maya placed on writing, they wrote practically everything down. They did say however that historians feel we get an inaccurate history from the inscriptions because they only ever recorded victories and positives. Afterall, the civilisation all but disappeared from all the mighty cities without a trace around 900ad and nobody really knows the true reason why.
In the late 1800′s Merida became one of the worlds most wealthy cities due to the many henequen plantations and it attracted wealthy people all wanting to build mansions. lots of them imported materials from europe to build. That fell apart by the 1900s due to revolutions and other stuff I can't remember! There are quite a lot of mansions dotted around, one street in particular called paseo de monteio has lots of them. It's a tree lined street said to be modelled after the champs élysée in Paris. There's some very lovely buildings, including the former home of a land baron which has been converted into the museum of anthropology. I was really looking forward to going there because I find anthropology quite interesting, but it was a slight let down really. There was barely any English translation so it was near impossible to understand any of it. However there were some lovely mayan relics and a wonderful photograph exhibit outside on the balcony of the second floor. There were some truly amazing shots of local life around yucatan province, and the chance to look at the photos was enough to keep us happy and entertained.
Our wanderings took us to many a street corner where we just enjoyed looking at the city in motion. Locals going about their business, lots and lots of Beatles ( the car) in all kinds of disrepair but looking so cool I couldn't help but stare. There were a lot of little signs for tourists on random walls giving little explanations and brief histories of the area we were in, so we came across a few little bits of history by accident.
In the evening we heard music for a while from inside the hostel do we decided to go out to investigate. The streets were full of stalls which we had seen earlier in the day because they set them up every weekend. We decided to treat ourselves to hot churros from one stall, they had cinnamon and sugar and were delicious. Liam also got a crepe which had melted cheese and chocolate spread on which was also surprisingly nice. We watched lots of locals dancing in the street, some seemed a little drunk and they were all having a wonderful time. One woman in particular was really going for it, the only way to describe her is to imagine an angry donkey. Unfortunately we only got to watch for about 15 minutes before the whole thing ended but we walked around the square for a little while anyway walking off the food before bed.
