Living Here: Monday Morning Coffee

It started only a couple of years ago, but has become a ritual for us. We congregate Monday mornings, around the shiny, wooden tables of a local cafe. We sip coffee from heavy old china. Spoons and cups clink against saucers, to a background of soft voices and faint music.

The core group consists of three: Paul, Eric and myself. From time to time others sit in but often it is just us three.

A few other morning regulars do the same nearby as white-guayabera-clad waiters move between tables, pouring refills and bringing food. Newspaper softly crinkles as someone scans the morning news or sports section. Sometimes a whiff of woodsmoke sifts in from the huge, brick bakery ovens out back. The place is old, and has changed little over the decades. Sitting here it is easy to imagine one has been transported back the 1940's.

Except of course that in the 1940's we likely never would have gotten together, because we first became acquainted through blogs. We are bloggers. When we talk about blogging, it's usually about comments or topics brought up in the community of blogs we follow. But mostly we dive into a variety of other subjects.

Eric and Paul

Although we don't get heavily into politics, it's there from time to time, along with occasional doses of philosophy and faith. We talk about the many things that interest us, and as mature people do, sometimes we reminisce a bit. But I think mostly what it gets down to is we're all interested in getting the most out of the years we have left to spend on this planet, and we like to share ideas along those lines. It's always an interesting and enjoyable conversation.

That's pretty much the way it is Monday mornings at La Flor de Santiago, when a few friends reunite to sip coffee and converse.

We don't exactly solve the world's problems, but sometimes we feel that perhaps we've made a little headway. That's a pretty good way to start the week.


Things are about to change. Eric leaves this week, as family and other obligations call him north. And Paul will do the same soon. I'll miss them and our Monday morning coffee sessions until they both return to Mérida in the fall.

Read Paul's blog here and Eric's blog here.

A Good Cafe on Parque Santiago

I first drank a cup of coffee in La Flor de Santiago in 2003, the same summer I bought a house three blocks down Calle 70 from this historic cafe. The Mérida barrio of Santiago was already hundreds of years old when these heavy wooden doors first swung open for business in the 1920's. Now as the oldest operating cafe and restaurant in Mérida, La Flor has earned its own place in local history.

That's only one of several reasons why I was concerned a couple of weeks ago when I walked in for a session of backgammon with my friend Diane, to be told by her that there was almost nothing available from the menu. The place was getting ready to close down, according to one of the waiters. And it certainly looked that way. The baked goods display cases were empty: bakery closed. There was no espresso coffee: machine broken and not being fixed. As we ate toast, drank our cafe americano and rolled dice, workers walked back and forth carrying loads of buckets, bottles and boxes of miscellaneous junk from a storage area to the sidewalk. There, as soon as the items were set down, scavengers and recyclers scooped the items up and hauled them off.

A mesero waits for customers on a recent slow day

It was hard not to notice that we were just about the only customers. The few others were elderly regulars who drink coffee and while away the hours talking, reading newspapers and watching traffic pass by outside the large street doors. La Flor is a big place with a lot of staff, and overhead must be high. Selling cups of coffee to customers who hang out for hours, request lots of free refills and don't eat a lot probably doesn't pay the bills. Things weren't looking all that good for La Flor.

When I first lived in my house the kitchen was not functional, so I ate out most of the time. Hot mollettes, made from french baguette baked in La Flor's own wood-fired ovens slathered with refried beans, cheese and hot salsa, and washed down with fresh-squeezed orange juice and lots of hot coffee, became a frequent breakfast of mine. Or, I'd eat choco lomo across the street in the Santiago market and afterward cross to La Flor for coffee while leisurely reading the morning's copy of Diario de Yucatán.

After I got the house fixed up and started living in Mérida full time I patronized La Flor less, but it has always been a special place. And just over the past year or so I've been spending a lot more time there again.

To be honest, the coffee in La Flor is not the best in town. But there is more to a good cafe than just coffee. La Flor is a place to meet. It's part of the neighborhood and reflects local culture. It's a place for people watching. There are old timers, many of whom arrive at the same hour daily and order the same thing they have for years. The waiters are mature, professional, friendly and remember your likes and dislikes. La Flor is a real, traditional cafe. Very few exist these days.



Most contemporary "cafes," and particularly the popular chain versions, although they may prepare a good cup of coffee, just don't compare to an established, old-style cafe. I've seen a couple of the nice old cafes in Mérida centro close over the past few years. I've tried -- and abandoned -- several of the newer ones where the staff is young, poorly-trained and managed, the music is loud and apparently played for the pleasure of the staff and not the guests, and any ambience or personality that exists seems to be more superficial marketing strategy than anything else.

I've heard since that La Flor de Santiago may remain open, but that the owners are looking for new ideas to improve the bottom line. Let's hope they manage to stay in business without changing things too much. It would be a sad loss to the community if yet another tradition fades away.

Here's Hammockman's post on La Flor.

Anthropology: Urban Vestiges

I really enjoy looking at architecture and the bits and pieces of cities that inform us about the past. It is easy to overlook sometimes that although evidence of the past may change form or context, it is still with us. Matter and space do not disappear; it's the arrangement that evolves.

I recall peering out a seventh-floor window of the Mendenhall Apartments in downtown Juneau, Alaska, where I lived, on and off, for many years. One day in the 90's I noticed, high on a building nearby, on a side now hidden from street level by more recent construction, a peeling, antique-style black painted sign for the San Francisco Bakery. The bakery was still there under another name when I was young, but the San Francisco logo was probably out of use before I was born. From the style of the lettering I guessed the sign was likely from the pre-World War One era. I did a little checking. The business opened in 1914. Bingo! What I noticed was possibly an original sign, long ignored and unnoticed, that continued nevertheless publicizing an enterprise, now closed for decades, that was selling bread when my grandparents were children. Although the ovens are now next door and the old bakery space is a dining room, the bakery tradition is continued in the same place after almost 100 years, now operated by the Silverbow Inn.

I also remember a multi-colored, billboard-sized 1937 Chevrolet ad painted on the side of an old brick building along Alaskan Way in downtown Seattle, which was visible from my earliest memory until the wall was altered or demolished maybe 15 years ago. I miss that sign. It was a little piece of history, forgotten and unappreciated, that spoke to me from the past. It is these kinds of experiences that have fed my interest in the detective work of discovering details about the past from the vestiges that survive, often unappreciated or uninterpreted, today.

Mèrida, where I have lived for the past few years abounds in these kinds of clues. And since it is a very old place, having been a thriving Mayan city before the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500's, the vestiges of the past are varied and fascinating. I started thinking about all this some time ago when I began passing over the above advertising message, fired on tiles set in the sidewalk. It's placed like a welcome mat in front of the doorway to an abandoned building a few blocks down the street from my house.

The corner building, whose unadorned architecture and location indicate that it's quite possibly a true colonial-era structure, apparently once was a pharmacy that sold, "Roberina, 5 centavos, cures headache, toothache, rheumatism, colds." I wonder if Roberina was a patent medicine, or perhaps as a friend suggested, something made in Mèrida of local herbs. That is very possible. There is a vast treasury of traditional medicines used by the Yucatecan people, even today.

On my way to take the pictures above, I passed by this plaque on a building that stands at the corner of Calle 57 and Calle 70, not far from home and almost at Parque Santiago.

These plaques are to be found at intersections all over the historical center of Mèrida. In days when only clergy and the wealthier classes were literate, the rest of the people needed a way to navigate and find things around the city. Many of the important intersections were named after landmarks, objects or animals, and if necessary signs or sculptures picturing the identifying names were installed at the crossings. I live nearest the corner of "Los Cuatro Vientos," The Four Winds. Also nearby is the corner of "Dos Soldados," Two Soldiers. The Robelina ad and abandoned pharmacy is at "El Cardenal," The Cardinal. That plaque is visible in the photo of the building (above).

El Coliseo, The Colisseum, was the original bull ring of Mèrida, situated at this intersection which still bears its name. I figured out where the structure was located after seeing this sign. I noticed that, in a neighborhood that consists of very old buildings, there are two blocks, near this intersection, of much more modern architecture. When El Coliseo was torn down and replaced by a new structure in a different location several decades ago, houses and businesses were built in its place. So, although the original structure no longer stands (what a shame), its shadow remains still, for those who are willing to see it. A large and beautiful painting of El Coliseo, by the Yucatecan painter Mario Trejo Castro, hangs in the cafe La Flor de Santiago, on Calle 70 just around the corner from the plaque and a stone's throw from the site of the old bull ring. La Flor is a venerable establishment dating from the 1920's. I suspect in the old days that many of the conversations echoing off the cafe's walls were uttered by customers stopping in for refreshment either before or after going to a corrida at El Coliseo.

There are many more, often more ancient vestiges apparent to a person walking observantly around this city, and I plan to write more about them. However, this week I am going to end with evidence of a modern

corporation that did business in Mèrida, and was practically a household word in the United States through the middle of the last century. The above logo, incorporated into metalwork above the unused side door of a well-known downtown building, now a hotel, provides a clue. What was the name of the business, and what did they sell? To the person who first posts the correct answer below in the comments section of this blog, a free lunch for two at El Principe Tutul Xiu, one of the finer Yucatecan-food restaurants in Mèrida. Or, if the winner prefers and provides the transportation, I'll buy at the original location of this same restaurant which serves delicious poc chuc and other fine traditional dishes in the pueblo of Manì, Yucatàn, a place also rich in fascinating clues to the past.