The big news is...... we bought a house in Mérida! I know some of you already know this but I wasn't ready to put it up to the whole world until I'd had a chance to tell some friends here in Akumal about it. Also, since the deposit on it just went through yesterday I was jumping the gun a little by telling half the world about it before that. Now I have to find the rest of the money by the beginning of March.

Moving away from those boring details about money and finding it and moving it and getting it to Mexico, arghhhh!

The house is over 100 years old, not ancient in this part of the world but pretty damn old in my world. The walls are over 2 feet thick and made of stone, the ceilings are 20 feet high and still have the old style of beam and mortar, there are two rooms that still have the original pasta tiles. These are local tiles that are made by pressing colored concrete into molds and then baking it in the sun. The tiles are a couple inches thick and the color goes almost all the way through. So, you can polish old tiles and the color comes up and they look even better than new ones.

OK, that's what it has. What it doesn't have is electricity or plumbing that I'd want to use. It hasn't been lived in recently, it was last updated in the 1950's and basically it is a ruin. A really big ruin! Probably it was one wing of a colonial house that used to take up the entire block. You could ride 2 horses abreast down the center hallway. It's in the old center of the city, about 6 blocks from the main plaza.

Instead of doing this all again, I'm just going to give a link to a page I put up about the house when we made the offer. I put some pics of other houses done by the same architect we are using first, mainly so I wouldn't scare my son and friends in the US with the down and gritty shots of the real house right away...scroll on down, the real dirt is at the bottom. Mérida House