On Saturday morning we attended a temple session at the Merida Temple. That was fun. I was muddling my way through getting organized when a Sister Palmer, a missionary from Orem, Utah, came around the corner. She arranged for the translator and helped me to know when to be where. That afternoon, with Sharon and Gardner, we rode a bus out to the Americanas Mall to go to a movie—Sherlock Holmes 2. Sarah and I went to a movie when we visited S and G in Oaxaca. You just have to be careful. Quite often the '”big movies” are listed twice—once with an S for subtitles, and once with a D, for dubbed. So, we just pick the one with an S and after a few minutes, you don’t even notice the Spanish subtitles anymore.
That evening we took a bus to the “Noches Mexicana”, which occurs every Saturday evening. It’s a gathering of about a dozen food stalls, and singing and dancing entertainment. Every Saturday night! The food was great—the singing kind of started to sound all the same. I’m sure if one understands the words, there is more noticeable variety! Sharon and Gardner had taken us to the Santa Lucia park on Thursday night where they have a “Serenade” every Thursday night. And at the Santiago Park there is dancing every Tuesday night, sometimes there is a dance contest where the winners go compete with couples from other communities. Here in WJ we think we’ve really outdone ourselves if we show a movie in the park once a week for eight weeks in the summer!
One other fun thing we did on Friday (I just remembered) was that we paid for an open air trolley tour of Merida. We rode for about 90 minutes all throughout the city. We had a cute little Merida-ite young lady who proceeded to give us information about what we were seeing—sometimes first in Spanish then English, sometimes in English first. Sharon, who understands Spanish, noticed that she gave many more details when she was speaking in Spanish. Just stands to reason, I suppose!
Sunday morning, before 11:00 church, we all walked over to Santa Lucia park and rented a bicycle. It seems that EVERY Sunday morning, they block off several of the many little streets and a whole long section of the Paseo de Montejo and everyone goes for a bike ride. To the south of Santa Lucia park the city streets are all torn up, resurfacing project, so we were only able to ride north. But we rode up and back for about an hour. Merida is perfectly level, it was lovely. I was amazed at the number of people that were out cycling. When we rented out bikes there were probably a couple dozen to choose from. When we brought them back, there were only two left. And there were several spots from which to rent bikes.
It was a great way to see part of the city, and the people!
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