Quiet Yucatan

I have often been asked where to find quiet places in Yucatan.

I always find this question amusing: “You have got to be kidding. Have you ever been to Yucatan before?”

I love Yucatan, but after forty plus years here quiet is something that has nearly eluded us. The locals love their lifestyle, and if you have a good positive attitude you will too.

At times it seems to me that the Yucatecan mentality holds two things sacred above all else: smoke and noise. Their ultimate success in life is an ear-splitting motorcycle emitting a cloud of impenetrable smoke. Do they possess a genetic predisposition to racket and an aversion to silence?

Vehicles rattle, clatter, squeak, and incessantly honk their horns while mufflers seem to be a superfluous annoyance.

Petite vehicles marauding city streets sporting enormous megaphones powered by mammoth amplifiers relentlessly blast deafening clatter that will vibrate the fillings out of your teeth.

Ear-splitting fireworks are incessantly detonated for festivals or business promotions, day and night. Dogs desperately try to cover their ears and escape.

In most places in the world this sonic trash would be prohibited…not so here; the government happens to be the major delinquent.

If ultra high decibel racket drives you to distraction beware of the salon de fiestas, also known as party palaces. I swear these all night establishments are capable of shaking you out of bed even from several blocks away.  Many times they magically materialize in hotel lobbies around midnight.

You may locate an upscale restaurant to enjoy a special occasion in tranquility. The waiters are sure to turn on a giant screen TV even if you are the only clients. A Mariachi band is liable to trumpet their way through and an industrial strength blender will be revved up that cannot be screamed above. Coffee grinders are sure to pick up when noise generating is slack. 

One day I went to the neighborhood grocery “tienda” and had to scream in the owner’s ear. A large bank of mighty speakers left from a previous night’s fiesta was terrorizing the neighborhood. I asked if they had requested the volume to be turned down. The owner replied yes and was told he was too nervous and if he listened to the music he would like it. The next retort was “if you don’t like it, you don’t have to listen.”

Looking for tranquility we have stayed in a typical Mayan hut down a dirt road located far out in the jungle and with no electrical service. Before the first glimmer of dawn crowing rosters broke the relative silence. They were joined by squealing pigs, barking dogs, trucks honking and screaming with bullhorns selling bottled gas and coconuts. We didn’t know if we should laugh or scream.

If you can hear dogs barking it is considered quiet.

We travel with 33 db foam ear plugs. Dampen them, roll tightly, and press into your ears. Allow them to expand slowly and their effectiveness is increased.

We happen to live in a relatively quiet neighborhood with a canopy jungle ecologically friendly home where we can actually hear birds singing in our fruit filled trees and crickets chirping.

This is the real Yucatan. Arm yourself with a positive attitude, be happy and if you don’t like the noise, don’t listen!

 Visit our home.

Mayapan

Mayan temple ruins near Mérida - seldom visited - quiet Yucatan.

Peoples Drug Store, Superior, Wisconsin

Photo: John A. Grimsrud, owner Peoples Drug Store, Superior, Wisconsin, and John M. Grimsrud standing in front of the Upjohn Company exhibit, Disneyland, California, 1967.

My first recollections of Peoples Drug Store – Superior, Wisconsin

1943: I waited in my Dad’s maroon 1940 Oldsmobile fastback across the street from the Peoples Drug Store at the corner of Belknap and Baxter.

Dad and Art Haugen, his partner in the East End Drug Store, were in the process of closing a purchase deal with O. B. Olson, owner and builder of the Peoples Drug.

I don’t know the exact time of year, but there was no snow on the ground. Summers in Superior were so short that we jokingly hoped summer would come on Sunday. 

When I was a child my dad told me a story about Peoples Drug Store in the Roaring Twenties.

Dad was sixteen years old in 1924 while America was riding the speculative economical rollercoaster fueled by post WWI industrial expansion.

Prohibition had the country swilling clandestine boot-leg booze in gangster controlled speak-easies.

Hyper-active 138 pound Dad was self-motivated at an early age. He had three newspaper delivery routes at the same time employing a helper.  He mopped floors and did janitor work before school mornings at Peoples Drug, and repaired bicycles in his spare time.

Early one morning Dad was slipping his key into the door at Peoples Drug Store to begin his janitor job when a big long car screeched up to the curb, stopped, and three machine-gun wielding men scrambled out.

Dad was pushed inside and forcefully ordered to open the safe at gunpoint. He nervously told the menacing gangsters his only duty was to mop the floors and carry out the trash. He didn’t know the combination to the safe.

These Al Capone type gangsters were in a big hurry and luckily only locked Dad in the basement coal room instead of blasting him to bits.

In the pitch-blackness of the coal room Dad’s thoughts quickly turned to the idea of escape. He felt his way around in the blackness and found the coal shoot leading from the coal room to the street.

This would be his escape route.

Dad then stealthily crept up the coal shoot and carefully pried open its little door. As he cautiously peered out he was terrified. He was looking down the barrel of a machinegun.  Dad thought that his heart would explode. He gingerly lowered the little door with a trembling hand.

The gangsters grabbed what they could quickly pick up items of value, breaking into the narcotics drawer, and then sped away with a sack full of Parker fountain pens and lots of drugs.

Dad said that the incident didn’t bother him for about a week and then suddenly flashbacks would startle him out of a sound sleep with sweaty terrifying anxiety.

Dad went on to get his pharmacist license and eventually became the owner of the Peoples Drug Store by the early 1940’s buying it from O. B. Olson, the original owner.

The gangsters were apprehended a few weeks later and one of the things that helped convict them were all of those expensive Parker fountain pens.

Peoples Drug Store had an ornate soda fountain/lunch counter featuring hamburgers that were greases to kill. My favorite soda fountain beverage at the lunch counter was the 5¢ Coca Cola that came in several flavors all made from extracts known as phosphates, the charged water was added. Cherry flavor with a dash of chocolate was sensational.

I started working at Peoples Drug Store when I was fourteen, cleaning shelves, washing bottles, washing windows, shoveling/sweeping the side walk and burning garbage.

At sixteen years old I started waiting on customers, stocking shelves and doing the inventory. When I got my drivers license I did deliveries and got to know a lot of people in the five years I worked there.

The Drug store had three full time pharmacists, Bob Cleary, Bud Dice and my dad. At the time there were fourteen Drug Stores in Superior and none were chain operated. 

The grand opening of Peoples Drug Store was on May 17, 1924.  Ralph Carter was the general contractor of the building and all the brick was supplied by Northern Supply & Fuel Company and the lumber by Campbell Lumber Company. Peoples had 

an "up-to-the-minute" soda fountain and on opening day gave away souvenirs to everyone visiting the store - candy for the ladies, a puzzle toy for the children and cigars for the men. The drug store is still in business in the same building at 1124 Belknap Street.[i]

---

[i] Superior Public Library Facebook post, Nov. 20, 2014.

PORK – MMM…MMM…mmmm – Good! Chicharrón

Just too good to hurry through!
A visit to Yucatan is a culinary sojourn down memory lane to a place from by-gone years before prepackaged foods embalmed with corporate chemicals and barcodes.
This is fun food worthy of the search.
You can enjoy it even if it is nutritious.
These pork delights are fondly enjoyed throughout Latin America, North America to Canada…even Europe and Asia.
Regional seasonings and presentations are uniquely area specific.
The good news is that one of Yucatan’s classic delights can still be found here in Mérida.
We invite you to come and meet smiling Don Herberto the purveyor of these succulent treats and find out for yourself.

Enterprising  Herberto Chán is located at the corner of C. 28 and 37 in Emiliano Zapata Norte, two blocks east off Paseo de Montejo. Find him there daily from mid morning to mid afternoon.

This is smiling Don Herberto Chán who we have been happily patronizing for more than thirty years. He has been in this neighborhood business for thirty-seven years and his excellent quality has remained unchanged. Sample an authentic morsel of Yucatan from years gone by.
He has tortillas, limes, habanero chilies, and pre-cut taco stuffing and veggies bagged. 
His gastronomic delights will make you into a repeat customer.

Pork Rinds or chicharrones:
Mexico is one of the world's largest producers of pork rinds, known as chicharrón or cuerito. The very best is fresh from street vendors, eaten as snacks or antojitos.
Packaged store bought pork rinds are adulterated with preservatives and flavor enhancers such as MSG. Remember no bar-coded foods from Don Herberto!
A 1-ounce serving of chicharrones contains zero carbohydrates, 17 grams (g) of protein, and 9 g of fat which is 43% unsaturated. Consider this; chicharrón has nine times as much protein as potato chips.
I still love them even if they are healthy.

In the Yucatan these tasty delights of yesteryear are cooked to absolute finger-licking perfection.
No place in Mexico does pork better than Yucatan. Regional subtleties are the standard. 
Exquisitely cooked and ready to take home to devour. Buy chicharrón by the kilo, gram, or as custom made tacos. .
We like to buy a chunk of pierna or leg and slice it very thin and serve it warm or cold.  Building tacos makes ingestion a pleasurable occurrence.
I still haven’t learned how to build a little taco.  

No product code and 100% natural food from tropical Yucatan
In the above photo starting at the top: glasses of pineapple liquefied in the blender and flavored with slow steeped jamaica tea, chicharrón and bacon bits, lower left, a all meat pork taco with chicharrón and lower right a salad featuring home made sauerkraut, shredded onion, carrot, chopped sweet peppers, tomato, chives, and radishes with a hard boiled egg. The dressing is key lime juice and olive oil.
My creative wife who happens to have won the Betty Crocker Homemaker award quickly made our salad into fusion food. She suggested dumping the contents of our pork taco onto the salad and it was terrific!
Come savor this authentic slice of genuine paradise before it is gone! You will have only one regret…you didn’t find it sooner.

The Water is Wetter

Pictured is one of the many fishing trawlers built in St. Augustine, Florida, that we delivered to various ports in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Gulf of Mexico.


The Water is Wetter

In preparation for our escape voyage aboard our home built and designed 46-foot sailboat Dursmirg my wife and I spent five years in night classes learning seamanship and navigation

We launched Dursmirg, sailed away and spent the next fifteen glorious years living aboard, cruising where the wind blew and when the spirit moved us.

St. Augustine, Florida became our port of call.

Our maritime knowledge led us to a number of boat delivery jobs.  These took us to a variety of distant ports such as Trinidad, Panama, Baja California, Texas, and Yucatan, Mexico, to name a few. This was not a get rich quick business but we loved the sea, strange new ports, and we were treated well.

These deliveries were primarily of brand new DESCO or St. Augustine trawlers, all were well over 100 tons in displacement. The passages were more than five days and some as much as a month. They were followed by the logistics of return flights back to our home port of St. Augustine.

This was an especially fun and interesting interlude in our lives.

The major company we delivered for was DESCO (Diesel Engine Sales Company), a division of Whitaker Corporation.  At the time it was the world’s number one producer of trawlers with a motto “The Sun Never Sets on a DESCO Boat.”

DESCO was actively looking for new markets for expanding their sales.

As a promotion they built the “super trawler” using their 128 ton displacement fiberglass hull, then the world’s largest production line fiberglass trawler.  This was an ultra luxury vessel loaded with all the latest state of the art amenities and gadgets. It was made to impress. The DESCO dreamboat was paraded at all the commercial boat shows and fisherman’s fairs, including Miami, Annapolis, New York City, and Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada, and many more.  Its uniqueness warranted a second look that made other boats appear shoddy by comparison.

The super trawler trip to Lunenburg, Canada, for exhibition at the fishermen’s fair was captained by our friend Eddie Long, a long time employee of DESCO.

There was only one problem; the trip didn’t generate any new orders.

Jane and I, having made numerous boat deliveries for DESCO, were actively involved in the industry with our own commercial shrimp trawler, Secotan.  

While we were making an autumn sojourn into Nova Scotia, Canada, we were lucky enough to attend the last of the fisherman’s fair at Lunenburg. This North Atlantic seaport town was made famous in the sailing industry for their foundry that set a world standard for marine hardware…especially their coal and wood fired galley stoves.

The show catered to all aspects of the fishing industry from fish hooks and nets to canned, cured and frozen seafood. It was educational and fun.

We were anxious to find out the reaction of maritime Canada’s fishing industry to the new DESCO trawler.  

The response of all the fishermen queried about the new DESCO trawler was the same, negative head shakes.  “Why?” we asked.  The reply was with the simple explanation, “The water is wetter up here.”

We didn’t quite grasp the significance of that statement until later when we visited family in Norway and witnessed the horrific sea conditions that northern latitude fishermen, like the Norwegians, New Englanders, and Canadians, were actually fishing in.

We had assumed that ocean fishing was the same worldwide. In the raging North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans the fishermen fitted out their vessels to cope with storm ravaged conditions, dressed accordingly, and, of course, possessed a genetic predisposition to their rugged seafaring Viking ancestors.

Back in Florida, where we had learned and done our commercial fishing, ports would be closed to boat traffic when weather deteriorated to conditions those northern latitude fishermen worked in every day.

DESCO had assumed fishing worldwide was all the same…wrong! Administrative decisions were made by men who had no conception of the brutal reality that Mother Nature dished out. Glitter and glitz appealed to them, not no-frills functional ability.  Their concerns leaned toward plush carpet, sumptuous easy chairs, and a well stocked liquor cabinet with a push button galley and butler. The management must have wanted to sell dazzling pleasure yachts instead of functional work boats.  They wrongly assumed when they should have been thinking. The executives were out of touch with reality and their assumption cost them a lot of money, in fact it was not long and the sun set on DESCO.

This taught Jane and me a good lesson. We should never assume anything. Think, and always remember that you will never know it all.

Our old fishing partner Captain George Tappin was found of saying about the commercial fishing industry: “You are not going to learn it all in just one day.”

Now we understand the meaning of “the water is wetter.”

We have made numerous autumn excursion trips by VW camper van to the Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. The Maritime Provinces of Canada are one of our all-time favorite places in North America. 

Recommended reading on the subject of "the water is wetter."

The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea by Sebastian Junger

 A Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain's Journey by Linda Greenlaw

For further reading about our boat delivery and VW campervan adventures, read:

Ecologically Friendly Germany 2014

If the world would follow the German ecological model,  the world would be a better place to live.

Four years ago I wrote a two part essay entitled Germany Green and Clean.

At that time Germany had a goal of becoming fifty percent reliant on wind and solar power. They are on their way to achieving that goal, and have set even higher goals. In renewable energy German is the world leader.  

Wind and solar fluctuate continuously as does demand ebb and peak, therefore the production/consumption rates are always in a state of flux.

In this day of computer coupled grid networks voltage levels are maintained by shifts that are far reaching, extending across international boundaries.

Neighboring Denmark has picked up the ball and is running with it Wind is their number one natural resource. They are taking advantage of their North Sea location and positively feeding into the grid.

Petroleum exporting Norway is a net exporter of electric power with their abundant hydro plants. [To the best of my knowledge Norway is the only major oil exporter that traps, liquefies, and pumps all the CO2 back into the ground from their oil wells…exemplary!] They are also part of the European grid network

Germany is a tough act to follow. This is a commendable achievement that the rest of the world needs to emulate.

I invite you to view Germany Green and Clean and also tour our ecologically friendly home, which we designed and built twenty three years ago, by clicking these links.

Part 1 - http://bingsbuzz.blogspot.mx/2010/08/germany-green-and-clean.html

Part 2 - http://bingsbuzz.blogspot.mx/2010/09/germany-green-and-clean-compostre.html

Our  home - http://www.bicycleyucatan.com/ecolivingyucatan.html