Project 365: Day 63

This photo is a bit more of a candid than it was supposed to be... taken by a local guy handing out coupons for the restaurant in the hotel in the background. We spent Friday wandering around Merida, shopping and sightseeing and meeting interesting people. We met a guy who instructed me on Panama hats, then "guided" us to the "right shop" where another guy told us how they were made and I ended up buying one. It remains unclear to me if I got ripped off.
Eventually, we went the very same restaurant (in the background) for dinner. It was our first taste of the amazing Yucatan cuisine, and we met a Mexican guy named Jean-Luc (yeah... his mother is Italian, he said, as if that made it all obvious). He ended up sitting through most of dinner with us, giving us further pointers on what to see and do and buy, and telling us stories. By far the best was when he began to describe his encounters with aliens. He spoke English well, but sometimes he got excited and slipped back into Spanish-- one such (amazing) moment included a full, leaping pantomime of one very strange encounter with aliens/electricity(?) on light poles in Merida. He advised us to look it up-- he reported it to CNN, the FBI, etc, and best of all, there is a video on YouTube. Not very intelligible, but it does make his jumping around the restaurant make a bit more sense. The video.

More of central Merida. That's a neat, old cathedral. Not the oldest in the Americas, though-- that's a few blocks away.

This one. It's very imposing, and not very pretty. It's built out of the ruins of the Mayan city that stood on the site before the Spanish arrived. But it is old! Jean-Luc informed us that it's a very rich church, because it's old. All the high-society folk get married there, apparently.