"I Live in France, Except When I Don't..."

It's early morning in Mérida, Yucatán. The cocks are crowing up a storm and have been since 4am, if past experience can be counted upon. Their pre-dawn call-and-refrain throughout the neighborhood is so much a part of the daily routine around here that I don't really register their cock-a-doodle-does unless I make a concerted effort.

There is a breeze upon which the humid air is moving in and out and around la casita in which I have been living for the past 6 weeks and it has not yet grown warm because the sun is still taking its own sweet time about rising and shining.

I've been awake since 3:30am, having gone to sleep last night at about 10:30 after sampling the 1st two episodes of LilyHammer on my Kindle Fire courtesy of NetFlix. But, don't worry, I don't have insomnia. Although I probably do have some pesky intestinal squatters and might ought to do a 3-day raid on them with Cipro®, but I'm in good shape and will get around to it when I do.

Working on a well-rounded experience abroad...

In the meantime I have long since made my rounds on the back forty of my cyber property, checking various emailboxes; writing home to my Frencher Half who is busy tearing up the attic of his old house, in the interest of installing a sub-floor--to begin with--and having a visit with his brother down from Paris on a mini-voyage to the country; making my bed; showering; slathering on moisturizer and, more importantly, sunscreen; dressing for the day; making a cup of instant Nescafé Clásico; and cooling my jets until my friend & hostess, L, gives some sign of being up and about so that I can get into the house (I'm currently locked out...) and quickly cook a couple of scrambled eggs on her stove because I am out of propane--which must account for the cool shower I took this morning.

If you can't visit the City of Lights in person,
perhaps your hair can make a virtual voyage...

It's now already after 4pm and I've just returned from a full day of riding shotgun with L across half of Mérida on a mission. It's a school holiday here in town and L works as a financial wizard at a private language school that has been around town for 30 years+, so she had the day off--from her paid employment, that is. Her little boys, HJ, 8, and DO, 5, spent the night with her mother, since they did not have classes today, so L used the time that her mother freed up for her to accomplish myriad errands, beginning with an 8am appointment with the Mexican passport office across the street from the Banamex/Citibank main office on Paseo de Montejo.

I squeezed in a trip to the bank's ATM myself and once L had her photos taken by the passport authorities--after which she needed to wait one hour before returning and picking up her beautiful new 10-year passport--we went grocery shopping for a family of 4, plus live-in housekeeper, plus foreign houseguest, at a hypermarket, Chedraui, just around the corner, where we put that stray hour to good use cruising all of its aisles with our shopping cart as we followed L's exhaustive list.

Under construction...

I had a mental list of my own that was easily exhausted--Leon dark beer in cans for that cold swallow on a gently-swinging-hammock evening; a pump-bottle St Ives body lotion for severely dry skin (overkill in a land in which one never ceases to perspire, but the price was the same as that for extra dry skin...); a 4-pack of Kleenex Cottonelle con Vitamina E toilet paper; one small can of Hederez Salsa Verde and one of Salsa Casera; a little tub of salted butter; a flat of 30 eggs; a cellophane package of diminutive clam-shaped pasta by La Moderna; 2 envelopes of Nescafé "Té con Limon" sin calorias y con Splenda" for a test-drive (I love the sugared one but, of course, don't love the sugar itself); 2 neon-yellow-and-turquoise XL long-sleeved, mock-turtle-necked lycra/spandex swimming shirts (one for me and one for my Frencher Half, for our return to Mérida in November) to wear over one's bathing suit to protect one from the relentless rays of the sun; and a petite adult life-jacket--my gift to L for her trips to the local cenotes for the occasional Saturday swim.

Coming to an historic center near you:
beautiful new streets and sidewalks...

Once the groceries were paid for and yours truly had loaded them into the trunk-with-no-lock of the car, I sat in the sweltering shade of the Chedraui subterranean parking lot and read yesterday's Diario de Yucatán, Mérida's daily paper, while L ran back over to the passport office to pick up her brand-spanking-new Mexican passport, which was ready and waiting for her.

By the time she got back, I had practiced reading my written Spanish word-count for the day and we were both starving, so we drove over to one of our favorite restaurants in town, La Terracita Azul, where we had large glasses of lemonade made "frozen" Margarita-style, like slushies in a glass, with both a spoon and a straw. We had some guacamole with very few chips and a shared entrée of lomitas--chicken in a tomato-based sauce with yellow rice, a white bean colado, and corn tortillas.

A full lunch for each of us would have been too much, but a shared lunch was perfect. We have eaten together there on many occasions, both lunches and dinners, alone and with our husbands, and have never failed to enjoy our meals--the owners and their employees are very sweet and the food is copious, appetizing, and tasty.

Calle 66 #483A x 57 y 59
Colonia Centro
CP 97000 Mérida,
Yucatán, México

Once we were back in the car we made our way toward the northern edge of the city where L had scheduled an appointment with a Swedish man who has lived in Mérida for the past 5 years--3 of which he spent as L's tenant in the small house where she and her husband started their married life and had the birth of their eldest son. On the way to the rendezvous we decided to stop off at a handy Mexican medical variant--a pharmacy with a prescribing doctor located one door away.

For $35.00MX pesos, less than $3.00US, I was allowed to walk-in with no prior appointment, introduction, or referral; have a seat in the waiting room; wait for the doctor to finish with the patient ahead of me; explain my preoccupying GI symptoms to the female doctor, in rudimentary Spanish, may I remind you; have a pleasant conversation about the doctor's cousin--who worked for a Mexican airline, married a Spaniard, lost him to an early death due to a motorcycle accident, married a Frenchman, lived in Spain, moved on to France--receive a Rx for 4 meds, including an antibiotic (5-days, 2-times-per-day), designed to cure me of my ails; and walk half a dozen steps away to buy the medications specified on the 'scrip' from the lovely female pharmacist behind the counter of the pharmacy next door for about $108MX pesos. I feel better already.

M-F: 8am-1pm & 3pm-7pm
Sat: 8am-1pm
999.924.9106

Finally, having arrived a few minutes late and completed the visit with the ex-Merchant Marine Swede, we wrapped up our day full of errands with a drive home to empty the car of the groceries--seriously worried that the 30 eggs would be soft-boiled, one and all, in the trunk! The work for this woman was done, with the exception of receiving the propane delivery man and the cylinder of gas destined to warm both tomorrow morning's shower and its scrambled eggs.

However, L's day was destined to continue in its errand-mode--boys to be picked up from their grandmother's house across town, a return to the prescribing physician's office for HJ who has a temperature, a dinner to be prepared, and a sick child to be watched over tonight. While I had only to write this post and speak more Spanish as I discussed the finer points of purchasing propane with the very nice man who trucked it down L's cul-de-sac with its 3 modest residences, 2 vacant lots, and 1 Presbyterian church complex.

A dentist's office in any other country
would look just about the same...

Hopefully, while reading about this slice-of-life in the Yucatán, it all sounded incredibly familiar to you--women, men, and children engaged in discrete units of activity--conducted, for the most part, in Spanish--designed to maintain and improve life: mothers and fathers with their small children applying for national passports to allow them to travel to visit family, friends, and new places in order to enrich their lives and those of their loved ones; people buying groceries to allow them to gather together with others once or twice around a table in communion before they head off to greet the new challenge-filled day or after they return of an evening; international transients aided and supported by the tight infrastructure of life on Yucatecan time; teenaged high-school students, male and female, wandering through an upscale strip mall sporting signs reading "Abrazos Gratis" and Minnie Mouse ears as they offered a free hug to anyone within arms' reach; rapid hands, smiling mouths, warm eyes, quick senses of humor, and a tsunami of humility.

silver crowns worthy of a character
in a James Bond film...

Perhaps one of these days, time permitting, I'll tell you all about how I walked into a dentist's office down in the old historic center of Mérida, Yucatán, without an appointment a week or so ago, based upon an old blog post by a Kansas snowbird of long-standing in the community, only to be received by a lovely female dentist who ordered a panoramic x-ray and made an evaluation of my teeth, all in Spanish, of course--for $400MX pesos--relative to my request for 2 3-unit porcelain-on-metal bridges, 2 porcelain-on-metal crowns, and a teeth whitening procedure whose molds I could keep (along with my panoramic x-ray) for any future rewhitening I might like to do.

After which she scheduled me for an appointment with the male dentist who is a dental surgeon who specializes in treating periodontal disease, among other things, and who, in Spanish, detailed for me the work that he would do if I chose to proceed with the recommendations that he and his colleague proposed. I told him that I agreed as long as we could delay my first payment for his services until my credit card statement closed for the month of April 2012. He didn't even bat an eyeball as he gave me his accord.

Caution: Work In Progress...

One cleaning (at no added charge) by the dentist himself; 1 injection of sedation to my lower right quadrant; 3 thick, heavy metal crown-removals; 4 teeth drilled down to nubs, destined to receive crowns and anchor a bridge; 2 temporary plastic crowns and 1 temporary 3-unit plastic bridge (fabricated on-site by the dentist himself) later, I am pleasantly surprised to realize how much more secure the lower right quadrant of my jaw feels, even in plastic, now that I no longer have a gaping hole between my last molar and its closest neighbor. And I'll leave it to you to judge the aesthetics of future porcelain versus past bright and shiny metal alloy...

Plastic temporary crowns and a 3-unit bridge
that fit like a pair of Cinderella slippers,
courtesy of Dr. José María Alonzo Sosa...