When most newspaper writers file stories about Mérida, they pick up on the city’s dominant tourist attractions and list spas and restaurants. Jane Fishman writes about the city’s natural rhythms.
And she is smitten. So much so, in fact, that she’s imagining a future life here.
“I’m moving to Mexico,” Fishman writes in the Savannah Morning News. “Not today, not tomorrow, probably not next year. But I’d like to, maybe to Mérida on the Yucatán peninsula, probably in the winter. Summers are scorching.”
Fishman observes everyday life here.
“The people are kind, they are good workers, they love the earth, they love their children, they love their fruits and vegetables, they take care of their elders. On Sunday afternoon, they go to the town square to walk around or sit on the benches,” Fishman continues. “They schmooze. When the band — lots of horns, musicians of all ages — starts playing, they start dancing.”
Fishman was enamored of the city’s “keen sense of aesthetics, including the large murals in the walled courtyard of the downtown Governor’s Palace by Mérida artist Fernando Castro Pacheco … and an impressive night-time laser show against the front of the cathedral.”
And she marveled at how the houses “sit close to the sidewalk; each neighborhood has a square, a church, a market, a bar/restaurant and sometimes a movie theater.”
Whether or not Fishman moves to Mérida, the city has given her the impulse to plan a future life south of the border.
Her final paragraph echoes her first: “I’m moving to Mexico.”
