Another excuse to go to Mexico! Christine and I have been several times before, but this is the first time we’ve had a honeymoon. Over the past several months we’d been looking around for places to travel to while she had her Christmas break, but thanks to COVID, Mexico was an easy thing to settle on – namely due to the low prices (we got tickets for $187 apiece round trip) and the lack of a mandatory 14-day quarantine. We want to go visit my foreign exchange sister Farah in South Korea, but the quarantine they require pretty much kills any chance of a trip for pleasure. Which to be honest, is probably as it should be during a global pandemic.

While Christine had been to the Yucatan peninsula twice before, this was my first visit. While the temperature hasn’t been too bad in Wisconsin thus far, it was still nice to get to tropical climates. After arriving at the Cancun airport, we had initially planned to take the 5 dollar (approximately) “ADO” branded bus from the airport past the “Zona Hotelera,” the huge North-South running strip of gorgeous beach running along the eastern coast of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, to get to Central Cancun, where we had our first night’s hotel before heading on to the Yucatan State Capitol of Merida. However, despite the bus company’s website stating that buses would run until 11:45 at night and us stepping out into the humid air at 11pm, the taxi drivers were more than happy to inform us that the buses had stopped for the evening, and “you are at our mercy” was not stated, but subtly implied.

We knew the Mexican cartels control the transport system around Cancun (Uber and other ride-share systems simply do not exist in Cancun, like they do in other parts of Mexico, due to High Chances of Messy Decapitation) so we didn’t bother arguing too much. We took our “private” taxi for $15 per person up to Central, although the hustlers at the taxi center suddenly crammed another 3 backpacking young people into our cab (all English speakers from Europe, who told us they were also told they were getting a “private” taxi for $15 each) and necessitated several long waits in heavy traffic along the Hotel Zone.

Our first night’s stay was quiet and relaxing in an “eco-hotel” – a refreshing return to one of my favorite aspects of Mexican and Spanish (and Arabic, let’s be honest – thanks Moors!) architecture, the unassuming front of the building hiding a gorgeously appointed interior courtyard with fountains and gardens everywhere. A quick foot-dip in the pool and breakfast, and we were on to the central bus station of Cancun (we had chosen the hotel because it was a 5 minute walk to the bus station) and a 3 hour ride to Merida.

Our hotel in Merida was called the Mission of Friar Diego. I had never heard of this Spanish fellow, but the stately convent-converted-to-hotel had lots of helpful plaques, artwork, statues, and signs to give some history. Apparently several hundred years ago he performed an “act of faith” for the Mayan people, by helpfully burning thousands of religious books and objects to better focus their attention on his god. He was later granted the Bishopric of the region by the Spanish crown for this action. Fast forward to now, and I’m not entirely sure how the hotel’s owners were presenting this guy; as neutrally as possible, it seemed. The room was nice though; having 2 foot thick stone walls really kept the place comfortably cool and quiet.

For our first day in Merida, a young Mestizo (Mayan/Spanish descended) man named Gus gave us a cooking class. We were joined a quartet of 20-something Germans, two brothers and their girlfriends on vacation. Gus freely admitted to us that this was his first time leading his class again in a year and a half since the pandemic began. He and his elderly aunt had run it out of her home for several years, but due to her advanced age he didn’t want to risk her health with guests, so we’d instead be using his friend Joachim’s kitchen.

Our previous Mexican cooking class experience in Oaxaca several years ago had begun in the local market, and Gus’s class was the same: the bustling central market does indeed seem to be a hallmark of Mexican culture. Throughout our time in Mexico, people did a great job of keeping their masks on, even outside in public – from what we could tell it was until recently mandated to wear masks even while outside, but that had been relaxed somewhat. 18 month habits die hard though, and it seemed 60-80% of people kept up the practice. Inside in the market, it was closer to 95-99% – which was good, because the aisles were tightly packed.

We saw lots of fresh hot sauce for sale, and surprising numbers of radishes. Proprietary and exotic blends of red, black, green, and brown spices, mixed with oil and water to make it a sticky and grainy paste, were sold in plastic bags. Most interesting to me was a rickety, almost steam-punk looking corn tortilla making machine in one stall – its owners would feed in the stone-ground cornmeal dough into a chute on the top, where it’d be flattened and exuded into a thin sheet on a drum underneath, where two disc blades sliced the sheet every 6 inches into two neat circles and recycled the excess back into the drum. The twin baby tortillas would drop onto a semi-circular grated conveyor belt which was precisely long enough to run the sets of twins under a long upper and lower burner, perfectly toasting them by the time they reached the end where the staff would scoop them up by the handful and place them directly into consumers’ waiting hands. The price was 20 pesos per kilo, which equals a little less than a dollar. And a kilo of small corn tortillas looked like about 60-80 – so yeah, people here eat a lot of tortillas!

Thanks to the pandemic, the government has set laws on the number of people that can be in taxis and rideshares – and no one can ride in the front seat next to the driver. So our group of 7 had to be split into three Ubers (no cartels here to stop the rideshare industry; Merida is known for being a relatively safe community in the peninsula) which Gus paid for in cash. The 20 minute ride across town cost the equivalent of about 2 USD.

We met Joachim at his home and beers were cracked open all around as we began to cook. One of the young German couples worked in the kitchen of a boutique hotel near the Baltic sea and industriously began perfectly dicing the tomatoes and onions exactly to Gus’s specifications. We made our own tortillas from masa corn flour Gus had on hand (we didn’t grind the kernels ourselves though!) in an aluminum die-cast mold. For some of the tortillas, we mixed in the finely diced leaves of a local Mayan herb, Chaya, into the dough before molding.

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