Prairie Girl Gets Yuca-tanned

Mom and I got home from Mexico on Friday, safe & sound. It was an amazing trip. We started in Merida at my brother and sister-in-law’s house for a few days. They live in Centro, the historic downtown district, in a house they completely refurbished. Houses in Centro look more like U.S. storefronts, with a front door opening directly onto a little sidewalk then the street, and long, narrow, rectangular house going back from there. Most homes in Centro have inner courtyards, so in this part of Merida at least, one’s yard is INSIDE. Most of the buildings are quite old, and regulations prohibit much updating of the facades, so you can’t tell by looking at the front of a house if it will be gorgeous inside or abandoned.

We spent the first few days taking day trips around Merida (a city of almost 800,000 people), to Mayan ruins at Uxmal, and to the nearby beach at Progresso on the Gulf coast. Since it was over 100 every day, we spent afternoons floating in the pool.

The heat was oppressive at first. But once I decided that I didn’t need makeup, didn’t care about my pasty-white armflaps hanging out of a sleeveless shirt, and wasn’t any more or less coated with sweat than anyone else, it was fine. There were very few places with AC, so we just got used to it. Mom occasionally pasted wet napkins to her forehead, which I thought was a nice accoutrement in lieu of makeup.

On Monday of last week, we drove across the peninsula to Tulum, a little resort town on the Caribbean coast. We stopped along the way at the Chichen Itza ruins, then for lunch at Valladolid, where we wandered around a cenote, cave-like pools caused by sinkholes in the limestone. We spent the next three days at a little beach resort called Posada Meriposa.

We toured the cliff ruins at Tulum one day, but we spent most of our time at Posada Mariposa on the beach. I didn’t know it was possible to spend so much time relaxing. I read Dead in Dallas and The Alchemist between naps on my beach lounge chair, dips in the warm turquoise water, strolls on the cool white powdered-sugar sand, and beach deliveries of fresh watermelon juice by adorable Italian boys. I have a new appreciation for the expression “beach novel.” Posada Mariposa is owned by a pack of 20-something Italians, and the place is renowned for the food in its open-air restaurant. I could have lived happily on their breads & bruschettas for the rest of my life. It was all just glorious.

We flew out of Cancun on Thursday, so on our way from Tulum to Cancun we stopped in Playa del Carmen, the “Riviera of the Yucatan,” where Caribbean cruises make shopping & dining pitstops.

I came home with a positively tropical (in a freckly sorta way) Yuca-tan, silver, hammocks, starfish, a Day of the Dead nicho, and an absolute love of the people of the Yucatan. I’ll blog more about Mexico, probably obsessively so for a while. For now, I’m just re-acclimating and settling up with these truths:

* Food, customs, and languages may differ, but people are people. They work hard, they love each other, they sometimes have troubled, fractured lives, they’ll give up almost anything for their kids, they try to find meaning.

* Poverty is universal. Anyone, in ANY country, who lives in a decent house, has electricity and fresh water, and eats every day, should be a constant sappy bucket of GRATITUDE.

* The world is a big, beautiful, fascinating place. If you’re lucky enough to be able to travel, GO. If you never leave home, it’s like looking through a pinhole and thinking the little patch of South Dakota pasque flowers you see is all there is.