Category: Mexico

Mexican cities are loud. Music blares from storefronts and restaurants. Inspection-free cars rattle and grunt down the roads. Saws, jackhammers, and pick-axes accompany the frequent construction sites. In order to reach their audience, food vendors have gotten creative as they walk or cycle down the residential streets of Merida. Here is our list of food…

Just about every town you pass through by bus in the Yucatan has something being cooked around the central plaza: pollo asado (grilled chicken), a taco truck, maybe just a sandwich cart. This was not the case in the small village of Ek Balam. This tiny village hasn’t seen a bus in probably ever. It…

On most nights Parque Santiago is a typical plaza in Mexico: young couples smooching on park benches, old people chatting, a food vendor is selling corn. Tuesday nights chairs line the plaza and the front row is filled with finely dressed older couples: guayaberas, huiples, and a corsage here and there. Around 8:30 the 10-piece…

There are too many historical Mayan sites in Mexico, and the government is struggling to preserve them. Sometimes they fail, like the highway bisecting Tohcok. A side effect is that it makes visiting this small site very convenient – as long as you happen to show up when the talkative caretaker arrives on his bicycle…

An under-appreciated aspect of mass tourism is how predictable it is. Tour groups act the same everywhere: buffet breakfast, long bus ride, tour and buy souvenirs, buffet lunch, long bus ride, dinner show. In Chichen Itza, they result in hundreds of trinket vendors littering the site. They are also the ones who helped vote this…

We still don’t know too much about Merida. For our first 4 days, the city has been celebrating Carnaval. Most of the storefronts have been closed and replaced with impromptu coolers of cold Coca-Colas for sale or fluorescent pink hand-written signs advertising clean bathrooms for 5 pesos and up. Half of our meals have been enjoyed from…