Wed 1843 Back at the hotel, there's some sort of event being set up in the main square, so when I got home I had a look to see what it was. It was obviously not starting straight away. I couldn't see any musical instruments either. It might be a political rally or something like that for all I know. Anyway, despite me having had a look a couple of hours ago and some running web search, it turns out there is a language exchange here tonight in some sort of public library in town. It starts at seven. I probably ought to go, but I'm probably not. This is maybe a bit weak, but I'm bit late and I need to shower and clean my teeth before I go and it's... Let me waffle generally.
It's been an odd kind of day, just sort of for me nothing really strange has happened. I didn't sleep too badly, I got up not that late ut then I sort of dicked around in the room before going out about one. There might be some kind of mud dogs and Englishmen thing here because maybe I should make an effort to go out early and then come home or hide myself away somewhere else during the peak of the day but I don't and because of ticking around and I can sleep. I didn't.
I think I have to accept that part of the attraction for me of Merida on this particular stay is that I splurged on a private room with air conditioning, so I can't entirely blame myself for wanting to indulge in it, so to speak.
I will say that if I'd found out about that language exchange, assuming it's actually odd, which it probably is, when I looked at five-ish, I would probably have tweaked my plan slightly and made an effort to go. So we could put it down to sort of anti-serendipity, me finding out about it later. I did look about five-ish. Just, I didn't find that website because I wasn't going in with what are the public events to try and find out what's happening in the main square. I still haven't found that out. And again, I'm probably not going to go back. maybe I will wander out for that, probably not.
I'm feeling a bit bad as I say this. I've been feeling a little bit funny all day, but I'm not going. I do feel I ought to, and it might even be fun, although it does have English, Spanish, and other languages. And with it being in a public library, you do kind of wonder what it's going to be like if it's not in some sort of bar. But the key thing is the timing. I wouldn't really need to shower, and maybe not shave, because I did that this morning. I'd need to shower, clean my teeth. It would be at least ten past seven by the time I left the hotel. I'd then be turning up late, I don't know how long it goes on, I don't know how informal it is, maybe I'm making excuses, it's not a deathbed regret situation.
So I went out for a walk about one and it was hot as hell and I didn't really know what I wanted to do and I was just wandering the streets and I was feeling a little bit like, what the hell am I doing? I was gonna maybe have a pastry or something but I didn't find any bakeries, I was gonna have a coffee but I didn't find anywhere that didn't seem like a rip-off. As I wandered around I did actually go into one place that seemed to be advertising a white coffee or a latte at about 60. But I went in and it looked quite big and slightly fancy and they had a courtyard at the back so I wandered out there to see if it was cooler or warmer in there than inside and a waiter sort of looked at me and he said table for one in Spanish and I said I just wanted to have a coffee and he pulled a fucking funny face at me and then he said yeah okay and I just said in Spanish probably badly it's okay I'll leave thanks I wasn't even storming out in a strop, i just wasn't that desperate for And the last thing I wanted was to have them pissed off with me and give my money to them if they were going to act like that. It's not like there were no tables free. The entire inside was empty, well, like 90% empty.
By sort of chance, I saw the Museo de Ferro Carrille in organic maps and I thought, okay, I'll go over there like, you know, that's serendipity. So I wandered over towards La Plancha and the park's quite nice and queued us to the town under the owners or the council or whatever. The railway vehicles and carriages scattered around the park haven't been refitted even though they appear to be publicly accessible and although it's hot as hell (OK, exaggeration), it's really rather nice.
After the full start and the fact I was a bit weirded out by the fact that you have to seemingly walk past loads of staff and down an aisle to get to the ticket office and that it was 120 pesos which felt a bit steep and that they asked me to leave my bag at the counter. I went into the museum. At least it was air conditioned and I will fully admit that for whatever reason I was feeling in a slightly funny mood already at this point I had vague political crap running around at the back of my head which maybe didn't help although I probably didn't really alter my perception too much. I just wasn't feeling, I don't know, in the mood for touristing or I don't know, I don't know.
So I went in and I'm looking at some of the exhibits and there's an annoying train chugging and whistle sound going off every now and then. And I'm having a look around the exhibits and it's not bad and it's like the place isn't actually as small as I expected. A couple of things different from the very informal, oh here's some trucks out on some track and a little exhibition doesn't open till three in a single room thing in Oaxaca. Although the oaxaca one was cool and in some ways I preferred it, you know, it was just different at the very least.
As I say, I had some vague political stuff running around my head, but there did seem to be a vague art gallery, word salad, workers' revolution, hints of diversity stuff about the text on all the exhibits. I was reading the English versions, but I looked at the Spanish ones and they had the same kind of slightly weird word salad structure. It wasn't just that the translation was poor.
There were like three set-piece things there, and I'm going to say technically they were pretty cool, right? I'm not going to say they're most amazing ever, but they were pretty cool, technically, and kudos for that. One of the annoying things about them was that there seemed to be like staff members or a few staff members kind of shadowing the little groups of tourists. There were not that many tourists there. All the stuff I did was basically me and I, as you were a Mexican couple, probably Mexican tourists, who knows. I didn't really speak to them except to smile at them a little bit. Actually it was sort of another half set piece that was just a bit dull but was nicely done in it way and probably aimed at kids but let's talk about that in a minute.
So anyway, before we get onto what they were, like the problem with these staff shadowing around was like you'd be looking at some exhibits and you feeling like you're being watched. And then at one point I was going to wander down a corridor to look at some stuff that was there and it probably wasn't the most interesting stuff ever, but there were some exhibits. And instead the staff woman politely gestured me into one of these set pieces. And then I never got to go and look back at the other stuff. I'm not exactly gutted about it, but it's like there was stuff in the museum I couldn't see.
So the first set piece was this old train, I think it's number 350, but it doesn't matter. Took a few very bad pictures, but I tried not to go nuts on the pictures. It was in this sort of circular room, and there were projectors, I don't know if there was some sort of laser light as well, and it wasn't quite 360 degrees around the walls. There was nothing right behind the train, I think. But otherwise it was close to 360, and they were projecting a sort of animation on it, and there was some narration, Andor Music. The first thing I saw, which the Mexican couple didn't turn up in time for and weren't allowed to stay to watch on their own because they had to shuffle us all around was some very brief animation about some people running through a desert and one of the women got pricked by a cactus-y thing and she picked up the thing and hit it on a rock to punish it and she discovered how to make some sort of fibre by beating this plant on a rock and it was like, well, a bit weird. to folk story or did you make this up? But, you know, it was fine. No real objections there.
And then the second bit in this circular room with the train was along, I think, pretty much music-only, slightly psychedelic animation of flying through space with vaguely train and station-related imagery, but a lot of statues and stuff. And as I say, it was actually quite cool. I did quite like that. It wasn't a lot the best thing ever, but yeah, I did like that.
So after that I was wondering what would happen next but then the woman shooed us out the opposite door to where we'd come in the other side of the train and we went into this room and there was some exhibits and then I started looking at some of them and then this is where I got chewed into the second set piece and we sat in this old carriage and there were like projectors set up either side so were you looking out the window as you were looking at a projected image and then they had a kind of she told us to sit down well I didn't know and I don't think the Mexicans knew It was actually going to be a set piece. We thought we were just walking through this carriage to have a look at it. It was an old second-class carriage from 1925. Quite nicely restored, quite nice. Yeah.
And so she told us there was going to be a show and to sit down. She didn't say show, but whatever. And then there was a pepper's ghost type thing where a virtual chap gave us a little introductory spiel and my heart sank because he said we were going to learn about gender equality. For better or worse, he meant men and women, but it's like for fuck's sake. I didn't go to be lectured.
And the odd thing is that the actual like projected filmy thing was just so contrived. It was just sort of in parallel chuntering about bills in the Mexican Congress or whatever in 19, whatever the hell it was, you know, early 1900s-ish, mixing that with this womans story While they were building the railroad and how she had been selling like food to the men working on the trains. They didn't go on about how she had been handicapped or something. It was just, oh, better for our daughters, working for the future, equity. It was utterly contrived. Maybe I should be grateful that it wasn't too really hammering the point home, but it's like they were just desperately trying to force this theme into a railway context. I don't know.
And the thing is the actual technical side of it was really good. At the start, there was some juddering or jerking. I'm pretty sure the carriage couldn't move at all, but maybe it could. You know, probably just had something knocking on it at the right point. I did expect this, but when they started to alter the production, so it was scrolling past the carriage, it did actually kind of feel like we were moving. As I say, I cannot rule out that the carriage didn't move a tiny bit but I don't know what makes me kind of suspicious Is that they seem to drop the moving illusion really quite quickly. It was probably just the way the film was done. It was a kind of animated thing, I think, quite hard to describe. And they did do it again a bit later on, so, and I can't really see the carriage being rolled back and forth inside the museum, even on a short length track. But who knows, my best guess is it was the illusion where you're sitting still because the window moves, you know, the stuff outside the window moves, you think you're in Like when you're in a coach and a coach next to you pulls out and you're not moving but for a second you think you are.
Anyway, we got out of that and the woman took us up to some projected thing on the wall and it turned out it was like a three people could play conveniently independent thing where there was like a virtual button and on each of three tracks that are sort of animated vaguely open TTD station you could push a button to start and then you'd pick a train and that train would drive in and then you could pick a carriage and that carriage would roll in and join itself the train and then when you were ready you could press start and the train as a whole would drive out of the station and then it would repeat. I didn't quite get it at first and I wasn't sure if we were supposed to be competing against each other and although you know I try not to worry about looking childish and its nice to do these things rather than having to be/pretend "oh I'm an adult no I won't do that thanks". I also felt a bit awkward and I was feeling a tiny bit peeved after the the gender equality pseudo lecture.
So after that she took us into the final thing which was not technically as good but sort of technically good. We sat in a room with mirrors all round basically with loads of chairs and although I kept sort of not actually paying attention to the depth of fact and I'm describing this backwards the basic setup was There were two parallel mirrors and we were sitting between them, so obviously you could see a sort of distant and slightly fainter reflection of the rear mirror in the front mirror, whichever way round you're facing. I guess you all were meant to face the same way. You could of course see yourself and the two other people who were in the audience with me, but that wasn't too distracting.
And they then projected two sort of synchronised but slightly different films on the front and rear mirrors so as we're looking at the front mirror we have kind of one film in the foreground and the other one which as I say I sort of accidentally kept mostly ignoring in the background. Quite a nice technical effect all the same and I don't think I'd see anything like that before.
I didn't massively object, but the problem was that the film was essentially a promotional piece of fluff about the Tren Maya, you know, a little sprinkling of all connecting communities and crap like that, but it just feels like why the hell am I paying to watch proper gandery shit (propaganda shit, but i love the voice typing version, it has a news huddlines feel) like this? Maybe the Trenmaia is a great idea, maybe it's not, but it's like, apart from the technical merits of the film, it really wasn't that interesting. as at least it was a train theme, but...
And then she told us we could go out and there was a temporary exhibit (which had actually already been to the door of accidentally and spoke to the woman there about where the entrance to the Real Museum ticket office was) in a small thing across the way which had some hard to describe, some sort of fabric-y artworks, like I've got some photos of it that were like almost pseudo-giant knitted figures and dresses and geometric-y kind of shapes made of fibers. If not amazing, I took some photos of that, so that will help explain better than I can say.
They also had like a cafe in one of the two or three railway cars that were sitting along the track where you had to walk past to get to the ticket office. I think one of them was an old Pullman car and it was air-conditioned and I had a cafe in. I did open the door and take a quick peek in. I was kind of tempted to get a coffee and it would have been slightly cool to do it but there was absolutely no price list and I was still feeling a little bit miffed at the way the whole thing had worked out and the proper gandery quality of it and it's like no I'm not that desperate I'm not going to give you any money especially if you know I go in and then you say oh it's 150 for a latte or something so anyway.
So I walked through the park, which was hot but quite nice, so I walked around the lake and you know it was clean and it felt safe and there were a few people around and there were a couple of tracks marked out with I think three different lengths, presumably for people who want to cycle a jog which is nice obviously I'm not doing that in this heat and wearing a clothes I was wearing blah blah blah but you know really quite nice
At the south end I think there was possibly the actual old station. It had been turned to some sort of academic-y building with a preachy sign out front. You were allowed to go in but I wasn't sure I'd be able to get out the far end and you know I just took a few pictures and then went out of the park through one of the normal entrances.
Oh, I also, earlier in the day before I got to that park, I walked up just by accident that sort of commercially street, I can't remember the name of it, just to the north of the centre which I think Mark had told me about with shops and stuff down it. They attempted by a noodle type place but it was like a proper Thai restaurant and the prices were a bit high. Paseo de Montejo is the street.
Oh, I also forgot to say that I did the flight seat booking before I left the hotel at one ish. I had to use the phone data, you know, mobile data. The hotel wifi seemed really slow, but I got it done. I used some air miles to get the price down to 31 pounds, which isn't great, but I think that's as good as converting the air miles to nectar points. Although, I'm not really sure. And, you know, anyway, it is what it is.
So I was wondering around the sort of quite nice actually, I quite like it, the sort of slightly grittier area, vaguely south and east of the main square. I think it's the main square of my geography really, isn't that clear here? Afterwards and looking at the little shops and like there's the little party shops selling party accessories and pinatas and there's all the sort of clip-party signs like, oh it's not a party without such and such and all these It's ridiculously happy, kind of kids enjoying the party. And that's how I'm still oddly cheering, I suppose.
And you know I saw a couple of taco restauranty places and there were a couple of Chinese pseudo buffet type places and I was really quite tempted but I was also feeling a real pull to go back to cheese up pizza and long story short I wandered round a bit and I had a coke and I found somewhere to have a coffee on the square (nicte-ha) which was a bit of a mess somehow but not a huge deal and I used the free Wi-Fi to call home and then I went and had my pizza (carnes frias not mexicana today) at cheese up and came back to hotel via main square (seeing that event set up) and oxxo to get some cold fizzy water and takis fuego.
As I was wandering around looking for a coffee and killing a little bit of time before the pizza, I did actually find another nice little square with some places round it, but one of them seemed a bit expensive and then there was a Starbucks and also seemed a bit expensive. There was actually a Costa next to it and I nearly bought some of them because it wasn't expensive, but luckily I asked the woman at the counter and if they had toilets for customers and she said no, I double checked, so it's like I didn't go there anyway. It seems ridiculous, but there you go.
So if we're talking generally it's like I think in all sorts of ways I'm in a bit of a funny mood, it's the end of the trip, it's hot, I have paid for this private room, I'm obviously a little pushed for time, I may be a little bit "the trip's almost over", getting lazy or so on, not quite just wishing I was home already, we're not quite that far on but maybe an element of that.
I'm really not entirely sure if I like Merida or not. I think I kind of do, but it's just been so weird. I didn't like the heat earlier but maybe I picked the worst time of day to go out. As I was wandering around that bit sort of southeast of the main square and finding all these little places I could eat. I was kind of wishing I could stay and eat in them, but it's not that they were particularly superbly Mexican or anything, so it would be pretty ridiculous to stay on just to have some more evenings to eat. It's not that there won't be any noodle bar in Valladolid.
I mean probably the best you could say is that I kind of do like it here but it's been a real flying visit because I was originally gonna skip it on this particular trip and then I decided I would come here because I sort of got tempted by the prospect of a private room (even if it wasn't super cheap) and I didn't really want to do a double bus hop to get straight from Campeche to Valladolid. And maybe, although everything was of course fine in reality, maybe it was nice to have a private room and a bit of quietish time to myself after the minor in my own head stresses I've written about in Campeche.
If the guidebook is to be believed there's quite a lot of like side trips you could do from here to places nearby, a lot of them seem to be a bit indigeneous-y but I guess that's not that different to some of the places near San Chris. I think I could totally see myself coming back through Merida on a future trip and making more of a stay and more of an effort if I fly into or out of Cancun. But anyway with the time constraints and so forth and the relative expense of staying in this hotel I think it I'm Better to just treat it as a flying visit and move on to Viadolid tomorrow where I should be able to have four or maybe five nights depending on what I do about staying or not staying in Cancun the final night. That's also something I really need to look at tonight.
The need to look at viadollid accom and buses and make decisions or at least initial investigations on the bus from Valladolid to Cancun is another reason not to go out tonight on top of the private room and the laziness and the timing of the lang exchange and the uncertainty of the thing in the main square. It does all feel a little bit crap but you know I think it's fine and I'm probably now I have written all this up with the voice typing in a horribly waffly, slangy, unpunctual way, going to watch a bit of YouTube, drink some more of my cold, fizzy water, and then after that I'll have a look at some of this onward investigation plan stuff.
Ideally I need to remember to buy some souvenirs and post a couple of postcards from Viadolid. I saw some postcards today that made me think about it, but it figured it didn't really make sense time-wise here by that point. I did also go in one little shot and I got chewed out after a little bit and I only realised after a few seconds that she was telling me I had to leave my bag at the counter, but I just left. I was pretty sure I didn't really want the thing. I didn't drop out or anything, it's fine.
I'm maybe also a bit edgy about staying a dormitory and or whether I'll get chatting to anyone and so forth but it's fine. I mean I've got a recommendation for a hostel it might even have a free bar which doesn't make sense but whatever and I think it's got curtain beds and I will jist book for two nightto start wkth s if I can get into this one of course and see how it goes. If I meet people great, if I don't I suppose it's not ideal but I'm kind of feeling a little bit tired and end of trippy and I've already had some good social experiences so it is fine.
Just to repeat something I think I've said before, one of the downsides of being in a hotel is that you don't get a fridge and there's no free drinking water. I've got my filter so the latter's not a huge problem but you know there are downsides. On the plus side it's maybe a lot less tempting to just drink for no reason so this is helping me have a couple of days off and to a limited extent I suppose that also helps offset the cost of the room versus a dorm.
The clothes were almost dry this morning when I finally left. I'm not going to wash underwear, but I think I might wash my top in the sink tonight because then that's at least stretching the supply out a little bit further.
1939 Okay, I washed the top.
I should say that the woman who showed us round the last two or three things at the railway museum, she was perfectly pleasant, I mean, I was just feeling bit generically annoyed and the fact that she stopped me looking at some stuff that I could have seen but that's I guess just how their system works and I had no personal problem with her, she seemed very pleasant. Oh and I will say it was all in Spanish so you know at least I got to practice all the spoken stuff was in Spanish, the plaques all over the world were in both languages.
I am feeling vaguely guilty about not making the most of my opportunities here, but I think that's just part of the slightly odd feeling of mood I've been in all day. Not exactly down, but just kind of a bit off balance or something. It's hard to say. I really don't think it was wrong for me not to go to the language exchange equally. I'm not going to investigate that event in the main square. Didn't look super promising. I mean, it's easy to make excuses, but I do have the private room. I want to make my plans for the next few days. I'm also leaving tomorrow, right? If I had more time and I was staying a couple of extra nights, it might make all the difference. I might have made more of an effort to find a language exchange earlier.
It's fine. Even if I've not done very well, hardly the end of the world, is it? And, you know, maybe a night or two of relative quiet will set me up for the rest of the trip. You just don't know.
As I was walking back tonight, you know, in the twilight dark, I was thinking as I think I did yesterday, it's really quite evocative, a tiny bit disconcerting, but it really is quite evocative with the sort of yellowy orangy light and the not brilliant lit streets, but it doesn't feel super dangerous, and you know, you're walking past all these old buildings, and the idea of going into some bar or going to some sort of event does kind of appeal, but it's my last night here, I chose to stay in a hotel rather than a hostel, so I've not met anyone. I don't have anywhere to go or anyone to go with. I am leaving tomorrow. It's good to have a couple of days off, etc. But as I say, it probably is worth coming back to Merida and trying to make a bit more of an effort and maybe doing things differently and maybe staying in a hostel or putting in more time here and trying to find events to go to in the evening or something.
It's probably obvious because I don't think I've ever really done it unless I've explicitly said so, but I haven't gone back and looked at my notes from 2010 about Merida. It might be interesting to compare them, but I have not looked at them while I've been here, so they are not contaminating my opinion one way or another. I, to be honest, I'm not sure that I really remember very much. It's like maybe I saw the big flag (or flags before because there's another one in the railway museum park as well as the main square). Maybe I went through railway museum. I think I went to the zoo when I was here last time and I have vague recollections of sitting outside a hot bar in a street somewhere and maybe even talking to a local but really I'm not remembering much at all that reminds me of what I'm seeing here now.
2156 I honestly don't feel that tired, but I was lying down on the bed, admittedly watching YouTube, and I was finding myself drifting off to sleep, so maybe I'm more tired than I thought. Anyway, I've dicked around a little bit, looking at the buses. Basically, I'll check the times tomorrow, but there's plenty and it takes about two, two and a half hours.
It's a bit odd, the hostel which Mark recommended with the free bar, which is called New Friends, is not showing on booking.com at all. It is on hostel world, but if you look at it in the small print it says the age range is 18 to 45, so technically I don't qualify. I don't think that's why booking.com isn't showing it given they will cheerfully show me hostels which only have female dorms available, but who knows? I'm not saying I couldn't try to get in if I wanted, but I'm not that desperate. What if they turned me away on seeing my passport? I'm not entirely sure I like the policy. You know, it's their business. If that's how they want to do it, fair enough. But I'm not sure why I should fight to give them my money. I've had a look on booking.com. There's an awful lot of hostels in Valladolid. I think I've found one that kind of appeals to me. It's fairly cheap and the reviews seem fairly good. It's new-ish. It looks like, although it could be deceptive, it might actually have a genuinely large swimming pool, something you could swim in, which would be a nice bonus. I'd probably just book for two nights and then see how it goes. I am potentially in valladolid for four or even five nights. So if I like it, I can extend. And if I don't, I have maybe two to three nights to try somewhere else. And, if either hostel or whatever I end up staying in an environment is nothing special socially or whatever, it's not the end of the world is it? I've not actually booked it, it's being very coy about only so many beds left, so I'll probably be fine and I'll book it tomorrow morning along with the bus. I'll hopefully therefore not be up too late. I've semi-packed It kind of looks like there's a lot of junk lying around, but I kind of know there isn't. It just squishes into my bag right. There's also the clothes drying in the bathroom and stuff like that. I don't know exactly when I leave. I need to be a little bit cleverer than I was when I was leaving Campeche so as not to waste time unnecessarily, but I think it should be fine for me to get up about 8ish tomorrow and have a little bit of a think and book stuff.
I'll admit I haven't looked at all into bus options from Valladolid to Cancun. I'll probably do it tomorrow, or once I know exactly how I feel about the V hostel, etc. I think if the limited buses direct to the airport do sell out then that's a shame but it's not the end of the world because there's still the option to go through the bus terminal in the centre. It's only within terminal change and I'm pretty sure there are a lot of centre to airport buses. I don't know what times the buses direct from V to C airport are. I don't want to leave it till the last minute Mark said he met someone and they wanted to do it but they booked up because there weren't many but I'm not that worried and I think it would be better to get to Viadolid tomorrow and take it from there.
It really is annoying, the kind of illiterate quality dictating this gives when I'm not taking lots and lots of effort to patch it up afterwards, but at least it gets the stuff down there and it is basically intelligible except where the voice typing misses a chunk out and I don't notice. It's better than nothing, right?
2203 So I'm going to clean my teeth and have a quick shower and go to bed. I really don't have that much packing to do. I've guzzled some of the takis fuego, but I'll finish the rest tomorrow. Bit indulgent, but since it's maybe my last private room, I thought go with it because that's not the sort of thing that's so easy to snack on in a hostel with no privacy. Yeah, I think everything's basically fine and there shouldn't be too much trouble getting up relatively early. I'm not too much under the cosh, given I don't really plan to do anything in town tomorrow. The bus terminal isn't that far and check out is at 12. But if I could be up for 8ish, that would be great.
2218 going to bed.
It's been an odd kind of day, just sort of for me nothing really strange has happened. I didn't sleep too badly, I got up not that late ut then I sort of dicked around in the room before going out about one. There might be some kind of mud dogs and Englishmen thing here because maybe I should make an effort to go out early and then come home or hide myself away somewhere else during the peak of the day but I don't and because of ticking around and I can sleep. I didn't.
I think I have to accept that part of the attraction for me of Merida on this particular stay is that I splurged on a private room with air conditioning, so I can't entirely blame myself for wanting to indulge in it, so to speak.
I will say that if I'd found out about that language exchange, assuming it's actually odd, which it probably is, when I looked at five-ish, I would probably have tweaked my plan slightly and made an effort to go. So we could put it down to sort of anti-serendipity, me finding out about it later. I did look about five-ish. Just, I didn't find that website because I wasn't going in with what are the public events to try and find out what's happening in the main square. I still haven't found that out. And again, I'm probably not going to go back. maybe I will wander out for that, probably not.
I'm feeling a bit bad as I say this. I've been feeling a little bit funny all day, but I'm not going. I do feel I ought to, and it might even be fun, although it does have English, Spanish, and other languages. And with it being in a public library, you do kind of wonder what it's going to be like if it's not in some sort of bar. But the key thing is the timing. I wouldn't really need to shower, and maybe not shave, because I did that this morning. I'd need to shower, clean my teeth. It would be at least ten past seven by the time I left the hotel. I'd then be turning up late, I don't know how long it goes on, I don't know how informal it is, maybe I'm making excuses, it's not a deathbed regret situation.
So I went out for a walk about one and it was hot as hell and I didn't really know what I wanted to do and I was just wandering the streets and I was feeling a little bit like, what the hell am I doing? I was gonna maybe have a pastry or something but I didn't find any bakeries, I was gonna have a coffee but I didn't find anywhere that didn't seem like a rip-off. As I wandered around I did actually go into one place that seemed to be advertising a white coffee or a latte at about 60. But I went in and it looked quite big and slightly fancy and they had a courtyard at the back so I wandered out there to see if it was cooler or warmer in there than inside and a waiter sort of looked at me and he said table for one in Spanish and I said I just wanted to have a coffee and he pulled a fucking funny face at me and then he said yeah okay and I just said in Spanish probably badly it's okay I'll leave thanks I wasn't even storming out in a strop, i just wasn't that desperate for And the last thing I wanted was to have them pissed off with me and give my money to them if they were going to act like that. It's not like there were no tables free. The entire inside was empty, well, like 90% empty.
By sort of chance, I saw the Museo de Ferro Carrille in organic maps and I thought, okay, I'll go over there like, you know, that's serendipity. So I wandered over towards La Plancha and the park's quite nice and queued us to the town under the owners or the council or whatever. The railway vehicles and carriages scattered around the park haven't been refitted even though they appear to be publicly accessible and although it's hot as hell (OK, exaggeration), it's really rather nice.
After the full start and the fact I was a bit weirded out by the fact that you have to seemingly walk past loads of staff and down an aisle to get to the ticket office and that it was 120 pesos which felt a bit steep and that they asked me to leave my bag at the counter. I went into the museum. At least it was air conditioned and I will fully admit that for whatever reason I was feeling in a slightly funny mood already at this point I had vague political crap running around at the back of my head which maybe didn't help although I probably didn't really alter my perception too much. I just wasn't feeling, I don't know, in the mood for touristing or I don't know, I don't know.
So I went in and I'm looking at some of the exhibits and there's an annoying train chugging and whistle sound going off every now and then. And I'm having a look around the exhibits and it's not bad and it's like the place isn't actually as small as I expected. A couple of things different from the very informal, oh here's some trucks out on some track and a little exhibition doesn't open till three in a single room thing in Oaxaca. Although the oaxaca one was cool and in some ways I preferred it, you know, it was just different at the very least.
As I say, I had some vague political stuff running around my head, but there did seem to be a vague art gallery, word salad, workers' revolution, hints of diversity stuff about the text on all the exhibits. I was reading the English versions, but I looked at the Spanish ones and they had the same kind of slightly weird word salad structure. It wasn't just that the translation was poor.
There were like three set-piece things there, and I'm going to say technically they were pretty cool, right? I'm not going to say they're most amazing ever, but they were pretty cool, technically, and kudos for that. One of the annoying things about them was that there seemed to be like staff members or a few staff members kind of shadowing the little groups of tourists. There were not that many tourists there. All the stuff I did was basically me and I, as you were a Mexican couple, probably Mexican tourists, who knows. I didn't really speak to them except to smile at them a little bit. Actually it was sort of another half set piece that was just a bit dull but was nicely done in it way and probably aimed at kids but let's talk about that in a minute.
So anyway, before we get onto what they were, like the problem with these staff shadowing around was like you'd be looking at some exhibits and you feeling like you're being watched. And then at one point I was going to wander down a corridor to look at some stuff that was there and it probably wasn't the most interesting stuff ever, but there were some exhibits. And instead the staff woman politely gestured me into one of these set pieces. And then I never got to go and look back at the other stuff. I'm not exactly gutted about it, but it's like there was stuff in the museum I couldn't see.
So the first set piece was this old train, I think it's number 350, but it doesn't matter. Took a few very bad pictures, but I tried not to go nuts on the pictures. It was in this sort of circular room, and there were projectors, I don't know if there was some sort of laser light as well, and it wasn't quite 360 degrees around the walls. There was nothing right behind the train, I think. But otherwise it was close to 360, and they were projecting a sort of animation on it, and there was some narration, Andor Music. The first thing I saw, which the Mexican couple didn't turn up in time for and weren't allowed to stay to watch on their own because they had to shuffle us all around was some very brief animation about some people running through a desert and one of the women got pricked by a cactus-y thing and she picked up the thing and hit it on a rock to punish it and she discovered how to make some sort of fibre by beating this plant on a rock and it was like, well, a bit weird. to folk story or did you make this up? But, you know, it was fine. No real objections there.
And then the second bit in this circular room with the train was along, I think, pretty much music-only, slightly psychedelic animation of flying through space with vaguely train and station-related imagery, but a lot of statues and stuff. And as I say, it was actually quite cool. I did quite like that. It wasn't a lot the best thing ever, but yeah, I did like that.
So after that I was wondering what would happen next but then the woman shooed us out the opposite door to where we'd come in the other side of the train and we went into this room and there was some exhibits and then I started looking at some of them and then this is where I got chewed into the second set piece and we sat in this old carriage and there were like projectors set up either side so were you looking out the window as you were looking at a projected image and then they had a kind of she told us to sit down well I didn't know and I don't think the Mexicans knew It was actually going to be a set piece. We thought we were just walking through this carriage to have a look at it. It was an old second-class carriage from 1925. Quite nicely restored, quite nice. Yeah.
And so she told us there was going to be a show and to sit down. She didn't say show, but whatever. And then there was a pepper's ghost type thing where a virtual chap gave us a little introductory spiel and my heart sank because he said we were going to learn about gender equality. For better or worse, he meant men and women, but it's like for fuck's sake. I didn't go to be lectured.
And the odd thing is that the actual like projected filmy thing was just so contrived. It was just sort of in parallel chuntering about bills in the Mexican Congress or whatever in 19, whatever the hell it was, you know, early 1900s-ish, mixing that with this womans story While they were building the railroad and how she had been selling like food to the men working on the trains. They didn't go on about how she had been handicapped or something. It was just, oh, better for our daughters, working for the future, equity. It was utterly contrived. Maybe I should be grateful that it wasn't too really hammering the point home, but it's like they were just desperately trying to force this theme into a railway context. I don't know.
And the thing is the actual technical side of it was really good. At the start, there was some juddering or jerking. I'm pretty sure the carriage couldn't move at all, but maybe it could. You know, probably just had something knocking on it at the right point. I did expect this, but when they started to alter the production, so it was scrolling past the carriage, it did actually kind of feel like we were moving. As I say, I cannot rule out that the carriage didn't move a tiny bit but I don't know what makes me kind of suspicious Is that they seem to drop the moving illusion really quite quickly. It was probably just the way the film was done. It was a kind of animated thing, I think, quite hard to describe. And they did do it again a bit later on, so, and I can't really see the carriage being rolled back and forth inside the museum, even on a short length track. But who knows, my best guess is it was the illusion where you're sitting still because the window moves, you know, the stuff outside the window moves, you think you're in Like when you're in a coach and a coach next to you pulls out and you're not moving but for a second you think you are.
Anyway, we got out of that and the woman took us up to some projected thing on the wall and it turned out it was like a three people could play conveniently independent thing where there was like a virtual button and on each of three tracks that are sort of animated vaguely open TTD station you could push a button to start and then you'd pick a train and that train would drive in and then you could pick a carriage and that carriage would roll in and join itself the train and then when you were ready you could press start and the train as a whole would drive out of the station and then it would repeat. I didn't quite get it at first and I wasn't sure if we were supposed to be competing against each other and although you know I try not to worry about looking childish and its nice to do these things rather than having to be/pretend "oh I'm an adult no I won't do that thanks". I also felt a bit awkward and I was feeling a tiny bit peeved after the the gender equality pseudo lecture.
So after that she took us into the final thing which was not technically as good but sort of technically good. We sat in a room with mirrors all round basically with loads of chairs and although I kept sort of not actually paying attention to the depth of fact and I'm describing this backwards the basic setup was There were two parallel mirrors and we were sitting between them, so obviously you could see a sort of distant and slightly fainter reflection of the rear mirror in the front mirror, whichever way round you're facing. I guess you all were meant to face the same way. You could of course see yourself and the two other people who were in the audience with me, but that wasn't too distracting.
And they then projected two sort of synchronised but slightly different films on the front and rear mirrors so as we're looking at the front mirror we have kind of one film in the foreground and the other one which as I say I sort of accidentally kept mostly ignoring in the background. Quite a nice technical effect all the same and I don't think I'd see anything like that before.
I didn't massively object, but the problem was that the film was essentially a promotional piece of fluff about the Tren Maya, you know, a little sprinkling of all connecting communities and crap like that, but it just feels like why the hell am I paying to watch proper gandery shit (propaganda shit, but i love the voice typing version, it has a news huddlines feel) like this? Maybe the Trenmaia is a great idea, maybe it's not, but it's like, apart from the technical merits of the film, it really wasn't that interesting. as at least it was a train theme, but...
And then she told us we could go out and there was a temporary exhibit (which had actually already been to the door of accidentally and spoke to the woman there about where the entrance to the Real Museum ticket office was) in a small thing across the way which had some hard to describe, some sort of fabric-y artworks, like I've got some photos of it that were like almost pseudo-giant knitted figures and dresses and geometric-y kind of shapes made of fibers. If not amazing, I took some photos of that, so that will help explain better than I can say.
They also had like a cafe in one of the two or three railway cars that were sitting along the track where you had to walk past to get to the ticket office. I think one of them was an old Pullman car and it was air-conditioned and I had a cafe in. I did open the door and take a quick peek in. I was kind of tempted to get a coffee and it would have been slightly cool to do it but there was absolutely no price list and I was still feeling a little bit miffed at the way the whole thing had worked out and the proper gandery quality of it and it's like no I'm not that desperate I'm not going to give you any money especially if you know I go in and then you say oh it's 150 for a latte or something so anyway.
So I walked through the park, which was hot but quite nice, so I walked around the lake and you know it was clean and it felt safe and there were a few people around and there were a couple of tracks marked out with I think three different lengths, presumably for people who want to cycle a jog which is nice obviously I'm not doing that in this heat and wearing a clothes I was wearing blah blah blah but you know really quite nice
At the south end I think there was possibly the actual old station. It had been turned to some sort of academic-y building with a preachy sign out front. You were allowed to go in but I wasn't sure I'd be able to get out the far end and you know I just took a few pictures and then went out of the park through one of the normal entrances.
Oh, I also, earlier in the day before I got to that park, I walked up just by accident that sort of commercially street, I can't remember the name of it, just to the north of the centre which I think Mark had told me about with shops and stuff down it. They attempted by a noodle type place but it was like a proper Thai restaurant and the prices were a bit high. Paseo de Montejo is the street.
Oh, I also forgot to say that I did the flight seat booking before I left the hotel at one ish. I had to use the phone data, you know, mobile data. The hotel wifi seemed really slow, but I got it done. I used some air miles to get the price down to 31 pounds, which isn't great, but I think that's as good as converting the air miles to nectar points. Although, I'm not really sure. And, you know, anyway, it is what it is.
So I was wondering around the sort of quite nice actually, I quite like it, the sort of slightly grittier area, vaguely south and east of the main square. I think it's the main square of my geography really, isn't that clear here? Afterwards and looking at the little shops and like there's the little party shops selling party accessories and pinatas and there's all the sort of clip-party signs like, oh it's not a party without such and such and all these It's ridiculously happy, kind of kids enjoying the party. And that's how I'm still oddly cheering, I suppose.
And you know I saw a couple of taco restauranty places and there were a couple of Chinese pseudo buffet type places and I was really quite tempted but I was also feeling a real pull to go back to cheese up pizza and long story short I wandered round a bit and I had a coke and I found somewhere to have a coffee on the square (nicte-ha) which was a bit of a mess somehow but not a huge deal and I used the free Wi-Fi to call home and then I went and had my pizza (carnes frias not mexicana today) at cheese up and came back to hotel via main square (seeing that event set up) and oxxo to get some cold fizzy water and takis fuego.
As I was wandering around looking for a coffee and killing a little bit of time before the pizza, I did actually find another nice little square with some places round it, but one of them seemed a bit expensive and then there was a Starbucks and also seemed a bit expensive. There was actually a Costa next to it and I nearly bought some of them because it wasn't expensive, but luckily I asked the woman at the counter and if they had toilets for customers and she said no, I double checked, so it's like I didn't go there anyway. It seems ridiculous, but there you go.
So if we're talking generally it's like I think in all sorts of ways I'm in a bit of a funny mood, it's the end of the trip, it's hot, I have paid for this private room, I'm obviously a little pushed for time, I may be a little bit "the trip's almost over", getting lazy or so on, not quite just wishing I was home already, we're not quite that far on but maybe an element of that.
I'm really not entirely sure if I like Merida or not. I think I kind of do, but it's just been so weird. I didn't like the heat earlier but maybe I picked the worst time of day to go out. As I was wandering around that bit sort of southeast of the main square and finding all these little places I could eat. I was kind of wishing I could stay and eat in them, but it's not that they were particularly superbly Mexican or anything, so it would be pretty ridiculous to stay on just to have some more evenings to eat. It's not that there won't be any noodle bar in Valladolid.
I mean probably the best you could say is that I kind of do like it here but it's been a real flying visit because I was originally gonna skip it on this particular trip and then I decided I would come here because I sort of got tempted by the prospect of a private room (even if it wasn't super cheap) and I didn't really want to do a double bus hop to get straight from Campeche to Valladolid. And maybe, although everything was of course fine in reality, maybe it was nice to have a private room and a bit of quietish time to myself after the minor in my own head stresses I've written about in Campeche.
If the guidebook is to be believed there's quite a lot of like side trips you could do from here to places nearby, a lot of them seem to be a bit indigeneous-y but I guess that's not that different to some of the places near San Chris. I think I could totally see myself coming back through Merida on a future trip and making more of a stay and more of an effort if I fly into or out of Cancun. But anyway with the time constraints and so forth and the relative expense of staying in this hotel I think it I'm Better to just treat it as a flying visit and move on to Viadolid tomorrow where I should be able to have four or maybe five nights depending on what I do about staying or not staying in Cancun the final night. That's also something I really need to look at tonight.
The need to look at viadollid accom and buses and make decisions or at least initial investigations on the bus from Valladolid to Cancun is another reason not to go out tonight on top of the private room and the laziness and the timing of the lang exchange and the uncertainty of the thing in the main square. It does all feel a little bit crap but you know I think it's fine and I'm probably now I have written all this up with the voice typing in a horribly waffly, slangy, unpunctual way, going to watch a bit of YouTube, drink some more of my cold, fizzy water, and then after that I'll have a look at some of this onward investigation plan stuff.
Ideally I need to remember to buy some souvenirs and post a couple of postcards from Viadolid. I saw some postcards today that made me think about it, but it figured it didn't really make sense time-wise here by that point. I did also go in one little shot and I got chewed out after a little bit and I only realised after a few seconds that she was telling me I had to leave my bag at the counter, but I just left. I was pretty sure I didn't really want the thing. I didn't drop out or anything, it's fine.
I'm maybe also a bit edgy about staying a dormitory and or whether I'll get chatting to anyone and so forth but it's fine. I mean I've got a recommendation for a hostel it might even have a free bar which doesn't make sense but whatever and I think it's got curtain beds and I will jist book for two nightto start wkth s if I can get into this one of course and see how it goes. If I meet people great, if I don't I suppose it's not ideal but I'm kind of feeling a little bit tired and end of trippy and I've already had some good social experiences so it is fine.
Just to repeat something I think I've said before, one of the downsides of being in a hotel is that you don't get a fridge and there's no free drinking water. I've got my filter so the latter's not a huge problem but you know there are downsides. On the plus side it's maybe a lot less tempting to just drink for no reason so this is helping me have a couple of days off and to a limited extent I suppose that also helps offset the cost of the room versus a dorm.
The clothes were almost dry this morning when I finally left. I'm not going to wash underwear, but I think I might wash my top in the sink tonight because then that's at least stretching the supply out a little bit further.
1939 Okay, I washed the top.
I should say that the woman who showed us round the last two or three things at the railway museum, she was perfectly pleasant, I mean, I was just feeling bit generically annoyed and the fact that she stopped me looking at some stuff that I could have seen but that's I guess just how their system works and I had no personal problem with her, she seemed very pleasant. Oh and I will say it was all in Spanish so you know at least I got to practice all the spoken stuff was in Spanish, the plaques all over the world were in both languages.
I am feeling vaguely guilty about not making the most of my opportunities here, but I think that's just part of the slightly odd feeling of mood I've been in all day. Not exactly down, but just kind of a bit off balance or something. It's hard to say. I really don't think it was wrong for me not to go to the language exchange equally. I'm not going to investigate that event in the main square. Didn't look super promising. I mean, it's easy to make excuses, but I do have the private room. I want to make my plans for the next few days. I'm also leaving tomorrow, right? If I had more time and I was staying a couple of extra nights, it might make all the difference. I might have made more of an effort to find a language exchange earlier.
It's fine. Even if I've not done very well, hardly the end of the world, is it? And, you know, maybe a night or two of relative quiet will set me up for the rest of the trip. You just don't know.
As I was walking back tonight, you know, in the twilight dark, I was thinking as I think I did yesterday, it's really quite evocative, a tiny bit disconcerting, but it really is quite evocative with the sort of yellowy orangy light and the not brilliant lit streets, but it doesn't feel super dangerous, and you know, you're walking past all these old buildings, and the idea of going into some bar or going to some sort of event does kind of appeal, but it's my last night here, I chose to stay in a hotel rather than a hostel, so I've not met anyone. I don't have anywhere to go or anyone to go with. I am leaving tomorrow. It's good to have a couple of days off, etc. But as I say, it probably is worth coming back to Merida and trying to make a bit more of an effort and maybe doing things differently and maybe staying in a hostel or putting in more time here and trying to find events to go to in the evening or something.
It's probably obvious because I don't think I've ever really done it unless I've explicitly said so, but I haven't gone back and looked at my notes from 2010 about Merida. It might be interesting to compare them, but I have not looked at them while I've been here, so they are not contaminating my opinion one way or another. I, to be honest, I'm not sure that I really remember very much. It's like maybe I saw the big flag (or flags before because there's another one in the railway museum park as well as the main square). Maybe I went through railway museum. I think I went to the zoo when I was here last time and I have vague recollections of sitting outside a hot bar in a street somewhere and maybe even talking to a local but really I'm not remembering much at all that reminds me of what I'm seeing here now.
2156 I honestly don't feel that tired, but I was lying down on the bed, admittedly watching YouTube, and I was finding myself drifting off to sleep, so maybe I'm more tired than I thought. Anyway, I've dicked around a little bit, looking at the buses. Basically, I'll check the times tomorrow, but there's plenty and it takes about two, two and a half hours.
It's a bit odd, the hostel which Mark recommended with the free bar, which is called New Friends, is not showing on booking.com at all. It is on hostel world, but if you look at it in the small print it says the age range is 18 to 45, so technically I don't qualify. I don't think that's why booking.com isn't showing it given they will cheerfully show me hostels which only have female dorms available, but who knows? I'm not saying I couldn't try to get in if I wanted, but I'm not that desperate. What if they turned me away on seeing my passport? I'm not entirely sure I like the policy. You know, it's their business. If that's how they want to do it, fair enough. But I'm not sure why I should fight to give them my money. I've had a look on booking.com. There's an awful lot of hostels in Valladolid. I think I've found one that kind of appeals to me. It's fairly cheap and the reviews seem fairly good. It's new-ish. It looks like, although it could be deceptive, it might actually have a genuinely large swimming pool, something you could swim in, which would be a nice bonus. I'd probably just book for two nights and then see how it goes. I am potentially in valladolid for four or even five nights. So if I like it, I can extend. And if I don't, I have maybe two to three nights to try somewhere else. And, if either hostel or whatever I end up staying in an environment is nothing special socially or whatever, it's not the end of the world is it? I've not actually booked it, it's being very coy about only so many beds left, so I'll probably be fine and I'll book it tomorrow morning along with the bus. I'll hopefully therefore not be up too late. I've semi-packed It kind of looks like there's a lot of junk lying around, but I kind of know there isn't. It just squishes into my bag right. There's also the clothes drying in the bathroom and stuff like that. I don't know exactly when I leave. I need to be a little bit cleverer than I was when I was leaving Campeche so as not to waste time unnecessarily, but I think it should be fine for me to get up about 8ish tomorrow and have a little bit of a think and book stuff.
I'll admit I haven't looked at all into bus options from Valladolid to Cancun. I'll probably do it tomorrow, or once I know exactly how I feel about the V hostel, etc. I think if the limited buses direct to the airport do sell out then that's a shame but it's not the end of the world because there's still the option to go through the bus terminal in the centre. It's only within terminal change and I'm pretty sure there are a lot of centre to airport buses. I don't know what times the buses direct from V to C airport are. I don't want to leave it till the last minute Mark said he met someone and they wanted to do it but they booked up because there weren't many but I'm not that worried and I think it would be better to get to Viadolid tomorrow and take it from there.
It really is annoying, the kind of illiterate quality dictating this gives when I'm not taking lots and lots of effort to patch it up afterwards, but at least it gets the stuff down there and it is basically intelligible except where the voice typing misses a chunk out and I don't notice. It's better than nothing, right?
2203 So I'm going to clean my teeth and have a quick shower and go to bed. I really don't have that much packing to do. I've guzzled some of the takis fuego, but I'll finish the rest tomorrow. Bit indulgent, but since it's maybe my last private room, I thought go with it because that's not the sort of thing that's so easy to snack on in a hostel with no privacy. Yeah, I think everything's basically fine and there shouldn't be too much trouble getting up relatively early. I'm not too much under the cosh, given I don't really plan to do anything in town tomorrow. The bus terminal isn't that far and check out is at 12. But if I could be up for 8ish, that would be great.
2218 going to bed.
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