Background
I flew into Cancun from Cali, Colombia on Nov 15 and took a bus from there to Mérida a day later after sleeping in the hotel room of a girl I met on the shuttle from the airport who invited me in to sleep with her but then did not want sex because I “was not her boyfriend.” Weird but sometimes you come across weird girls. Can’t win ‘em all.
I had been living in Cali, Colombia learning salsa and Spanish for 3 months prior to going to Mérida so I was conversational in Spanish on a very basic level but well enough to get around and I was not totally inept when it came to dancing, which is a very useful skill in Latin America that I recommend any guy thinking about spending a significant amount of time in the region look into learning.
Me
Age: 26
Height: 5ft 8in
Nationality: American
Ethnicity: Caucasian
Spanish Ability: Very basic
Location: A shared house about 15 minutes by taxi from the city center
Bankroll: Approximately $1500 a month
Occupation: I was just on vacation and not working at this time
Game style: Both daygame and nightgame
Pipelining: None
Online game: Only Tinder
Game Level: Intermediate but depends on who I am being compared to
Notes: I noticed that I had a certain exotic appeal to local girls and I got lots of matches and messages on Tinder. Normally, I don’t waste time with Tinder but Mérida, being a college town, is one of the few places I would actually recommend using it in addition to the in-person game that I would always recommend anywhere other than maybe Iran or some other place where you can get in trouble for being near women in public. Non-white guys should be fine here. I saw some black guys with local girls and the locals themselves are all over the place ethnically with most being Amerindian (mostly Mayan), white, or a mix of the two. Whatever your ethnic background, you should be fine here if you have at least a basic level of game.
Mérida
This is probably the safest city I have ever lived in outside of Korea. There are not even pickpockets. It’s almost weird how safe this place is. I was told by a taxi driver that one reason for this (aside from the locals just being generally nice people) is that the police in Yucatan (the province where Mérida is located) are required to be from Yucatan whereas the police in other regions of Mexico can be from any part of the country. Mérida, while probably being around the size of New Orleans, is also a city where people tend to know each other and gossip a lot so any criminal would quickly be known to all. I saw gates open, windows without bars, women walking around alone at all hours of the night, and even front doors left open at times. From what I’ve already said, this should not be shocking but I did not find any ghettos or rough areas in Mérida.
As for quality of life, Mérida has pretty much everything that a city of similar size in the US has except for drinkable tap water. You should drink bottled water. Other than that, though not highly international, Mérida’s proximity to the US and the reality of NAFTA mean that you will be able to find most if not all of the products and major company brands that you would find in the US. This includes Wal Mart, which is were I shopped for groceries, soap, and things of that sort as well as UPS. Uber is also very useful in Mérida and I highly recommend getting it if you don’t already have it as it can be cheaper and more convenient than taking taxis.
Mérida is a college town with several local university campuses in and around town so you can find people, especially young people, who speak English well enough to carry a conversation but some knowledge of Spanish will only help you since Mérida is a 2nd or 3rd tier city.
There are a number of decent and affordable Airbnb options available and there are a number of hotels throughout the city but I recommend the ones in the historic downtown just because it is such a cool area.
Local Guys
Very friendly and civilized in my experience. They do not seem to be very protective of the local women which meant that I did not face any blocking or drunk bruisers looking to throw hands with me for stealing their women and polluting their pure gene pool. Generally, the young guys, who will be your main competition, are university students and have a decent sense of style on average. I recommend befriending a few of them as I did so that you can have 2 or 3 of them to go out with to give the appearance that you have local status and have been/will be staying for a while. If you look out for them, they’ll look out for you so, when you engage a girl you like in a club or other social setting while you are with them, set them up with her friends or some other girls that you pull into your group and they will be a solid team for the rest of your operation.
Local Girls
Mérida, being a college town, has a significant population of college-aged women, many of whom are not bad to look at. As I mentioned previously, the locals are mostly Amerindian, white, and/or mestizo (mixed between white and Amerindian). How they rate is really a matter of opinion as some guys prefer the whiter girls and others prefer the more Amerindian ones. I personally tend to prefer the latter and, in my estimate, I’d say that there are enough 7s walking around to keep a guy occupied for some time. This is not the most mind-blowing city I’ve been to in terms of how girls look but it’s not bad by any means and the girls are very approachable, friendly, and open to getting with visitors.
As for personality, I found the local girls to be pretty tame and relaxed as opposed to having the fiery tempers and volatile dispositions that Latinas are stereotypically known for. I never encountered any girls who were rude or unnecessarily abrasive and everyone, women and men included, seemed to be very laid back and welcoming as long as I was polite and gave off good vibes.
It may not show immediate on the surface but the girls here are promiscuous. Mérida is a college town after all and most of the young people studying in the city are either living away from their parents or they do not have curfews. To make things better, since Mexico is a pretty diverse country and, like most of Latin America, race-mixing has historically been very common, a guy visiting will not get stares or bad reactions from locals if he is goin around with a local girl and, in all likelihood, he may not even be noticed.
Female Nonsense and a Personal Example
Sometimes flaking happens, sometimes girls show up late, and sometimes girls are just either stupid or they are playing games and are fully aware of what they are doing.
I personally picked up one girl in a club and spent some time with her there but, when the moment of truth came, she lied to me saying that her mom was calling and she needed to go home that instant. I know she was lying because I saw her smoking weed in a car with another guy (a beta local guy who, I was told by another local guy, had been orbiting her for a long time) less than 50 feet from the club when I walked outside. I still gave this girl another shot the next day and arranged to meet her in at a spot in the historic district but, when I got to the meeting place, she told me she was in another location about 10 minutes away by walking. So I walked to the other location, which was the Catedral de Mérida in the center of historic downtown, and, when I got there, she told me that she was back in the place that I had just left (the original meeting place).
This back-and-forth location game is one that girls often like to play in Latin and Asian countries and this was not the first time I had encountered it. The objective of this game is to either piss you off and induce an emotional meltdown so that they can experience their own dramatic telenovela moment or to see if you are a beta who will just say it’s all ok and keep rescheduling and orbiting her indefinitely. Don’t play this game and don’t give these women any emotion because they are energy vampires who are fully aware of what they are doing and are trying to set you off. I told this girl (in a calm way) that I knew what she was doing and that I wasn’t into playing games. I ended the conversation there and never contacted her again.
Instead, I started walking around the plaza in front of the Catedral de Mérida where she had told me she was before changing the location back to the original place. There, I met another local girl who was sitting on a park bench. I sat on the bench across from hers and made friendly eye contact a couple of times. Then I got up and walked away for a minute or two and, when I came back, someone else had taken my seat on the bench. So, naturally, I sat down next to her on her bench and started talking to her. After some talking, I noticed that she was feeling cold (it was evening in December) and so I said “let’s go” and we went to a bar/restaurant called the Mayan Pub only a few minutes by walking from the Catedral de Mérida where I learned that she was bisexual and wanted to have a threesome with me and another chick she saw at another table. See how well things can go for you when you are willing to ditch a girl who is trying to jerk you around?
I did not go for the threesome because it would have taken a while to pick up the girl that she wanted me to pick up and that girl had 2 male “friends with her (one of whom we suspected was gay) which means I would have had to get her away from them as well as running game on her and I frankly just did not want to bother as this girl was already rubbing my cock through my pants under the table and I have never actually been much into the threesome thing personally (I’ll take it if it’s offered but I won’t go out of my way for it). So I paid for our wine and took her back to my place where she climaxed twice (one time in doggy style which is always fun), and I used all 3 of the condoms I had in my drawer, after which she grabbed the lotion I had on my table (always keep your face moisturized, girls notice that sort of thing) and used her hands to get me off for a second time, edging me all the way until I could not hold it in anymore. We were getting physical at my place for around 2 hours and, after that, I got her an Uber and sent her home. Good stuff.
420
I personally don’t have an interest in drugs and avoid them whenever I can, not for moral reasons but just because I like to stay lucid. That said, I saw weed in Mérida. People have it, it’s easy to find, and, if it is illegal, nobody seems to care. One of the Mexican guys in my shared house smoked it in front of everyone and even left his stuff on the table in the living room when he went out. No fear whatsoever. So, if you enjoy the occasional spliff, you probably won’t find Mérida to be stifling.
Other Foreigners
Don’t sweat it. There are some foreign students doing exchange programs here (mostly Germans for some reason from what I saw - I lived with 2 of them) but they are not many in number and do not pose a threat. The other foreigners are mostly married and very often retired people who will also pose no threat for obvious reasons.
I did meet 4 German girls in Uxmal and wound up walking around the place with them the whole time I was there. We then took the bus back to Mérida and went to La Negrita, which is a restaurant and salsa dance club, where I proceeded to dance salsa with one of them. Unfortunately did not get to bang her due to logistics and all of them being legitimately exhausted. I guess I’ll just get my German flag in Europe.
FYI: If you are thinking of spending any significant amount of time in Latin America, I strongly suggest learning the basics of salsa. You will not regret it as it is great for escalating with local girls and also for upping your status with any foreign girls you might come across as they almost never know how to dance and, if they are from a Western country, have likely never followed a man’s lead before so you may be able to turn them on in a way they have never felt before.
Nightlife
In terms of nightlife, all of the best places are going to be in the historic downtown. Of the places there, the ones which stand out (and which I went to) are:
La Negrita: This is a restaurant located about 10 minutes by walking from the Catedral de Mérida. The food, to put it bluntly, is not good compared to what you can find elsewhere in the city. However, they also have drinks, live salsa bands (check the schedule), and a small dance floor. Don’t go alone if you can avoid it. If you can, go with some friends and grab a table so you can all rotate on and off of the dance floor.
La Pulquerida: This is a dance club which mostly plays reggaeton and had a decent gender ratio when I was there. There are two main rooms and I recommend that you go through the first one and through the hall to reach the second one which opens up into an outdoor space with a disco ball. This is a great place to go to grind on some local tail if you can’t dance salsa.
Mayan Pub: This place has a really cool look and vibe about it and there are live bands playing sometimes (check the schedule). Like the other two places I just mentioned, it is in the historic downtown area where most of the local university students go to hang out both in the daytime and after the sun goes down. They have actually got a small dance floor in front of the stage that the bands play on but I think the bands are geared more toward relaxed and/or slow dancing music than salsa so this is another option for guys who may not care for salsa. This place seemed to be one where people went to hang out with people they already knew rather than meet new people so it might be best to come here with a girl you have already met as a venue change from somewhere else before the final venue change to your place.
*I recommend looking all of these places up in Google Maps or some other app/site so you can see some photos of them and plan your logistics.
Daygame
There are malls but I never felt the need to check them out because the historic downtown is where it’s at, both in the daytime and nighttime. Of the malls that do exist around Mérida, I was told by locals that La Gran Plaza is the best so that is probably where you would be most likely to find local girls.
Personally, I prefer the historic downtown around Catedral de Mérida as it is pretty lively and several of the local universities have their campuses there so you will see students walking around and hanging out everywhere at pretty much all times unless maybe you are there during a major holiday when everyone goes back to their hometowns to visit family or something (but, even then, a lot of them are from Mérida so there would still be some around).
Mérida is a very historical town that is well preserved and most of the cool stuff is in and around the historic downtown with the malls being located far enough away from most other things of interest that you would need a car to get between them. The town square area is also where nearly all of the good bars, clubs, restaurants, and so on are and it is where the college students go to enjoy themselves in the evening and nighttime as well. You can surely find girls at the mall too if you go there.
Note: When I say "town square area," I mean the historical part of town that radiates out in all directions from its epicenter at the Catedral de Mérida. When you are finding a place to stay in town, try to get as close to the epicenter as possible for the sake of logistics.
Munchings and Crunchings
You can’t really go wrong with a local taqueria and most of the restaurants around Mérida seem to be decent. I can make the following recommendations from my own experience though.
Taqueria Mixe: Nice staff and great food. They load their tacos and burritos up and they don’t skimp on anything. Great value for the price. I almost never cooked and at here damn near every day.
Tilingo Lingo: These guys are near Taqueria Mixe but are a bit on the pricier side if you order off the menu and not a la carte. They have seafood options which I love. I especially liked the tacos with “pulpo (octopus in Spanish).” There is a Uruguayan steakhouse right next door as well which I didn’t try but it looked good.
Tarbush: Lebanese restaurant owned and operated by a Druze family from Lebanon. Very nice people and the food is great. An average meal here with a meat thing and a veggie thing will probably run you around 200-250 Mexican pesos which is a lot more than what a meal at a taqueria will cost you but hey, that is foreign food for you. I’d say it’s worth it though and I recommend checking this place out.
Final Thoughts
Mérida is a great place to visit and relax for a while. It is very laid back and safe. The only real downsides to it are that, since this is Mexico, there is some obesity, though not nearly as much as I see when I go back to the US to visit my folks (just more than in Colombia), and it is a bit too relaxing after a while. It can veer a little on the boring side but that could be bad for some and great for others. Depends on your preference and how much of a maniac you are. If you like every day to be wildly different and filled with crazy activities and adventures, you may find Mérida boring but, if you like to live a very structured life with a regular routine and sleep schedule, Mérida could be your place.
Before I close this out, I want to recommend a few things around Mérida (all accessible by bus) for those who have the time and money to check them out:
Uxmal: This is an ancient Mayan city that was recommended to me over Chichen Itza by locals. The people I talked to who had been to Chichen Itza told me that it was more expensive, everything is roped off so you can’t touch anything, it’s crowded as hell, and their are hawkers swarming you constantly trying to sell you crap that you have no use for. By comparison, Uxmal was not crowded at all, admission was only about $12 USD, and almost nothing was roped off. I was able to climb up the stairs, walk into the rooms, and all that good stuff. Great place and a great experience.
Progreso Beach: Not impressive if you have been to places like SEA like I have but still relaxing and nice, especially since they are only a 30 minute drive from Mérida. You can also get kitesurfing lessons here.
Valladolid Cenotes: I was not able to go here but I kept hearing about them and word on the street was that they are the best cenotes in the Yucatan. The photos I’ve seen look amazing and I’ll definitely be checking them out if I find myself in the Yucatan again.
So, in closing, I recommend that anyone considering staying in Cancun for a while give some thought to Mérida as well. I think it could be a better alternative for a guy who goes into it with a plan.
I flew into Cancun from Cali, Colombia on Nov 15 and took a bus from there to Mérida a day later after sleeping in the hotel room of a girl I met on the shuttle from the airport who invited me in to sleep with her but then did not want sex because I “was not her boyfriend.” Weird but sometimes you come across weird girls. Can’t win ‘em all.
I had been living in Cali, Colombia learning salsa and Spanish for 3 months prior to going to Mérida so I was conversational in Spanish on a very basic level but well enough to get around and I was not totally inept when it came to dancing, which is a very useful skill in Latin America that I recommend any guy thinking about spending a significant amount of time in the region look into learning.
Me
Age: 26
Height: 5ft 8in
Nationality: American
Ethnicity: Caucasian
Spanish Ability: Very basic
Location: A shared house about 15 minutes by taxi from the city center
Bankroll: Approximately $1500 a month
Occupation: I was just on vacation and not working at this time
Game style: Both daygame and nightgame
Pipelining: None
Online game: Only Tinder
Game Level: Intermediate but depends on who I am being compared to
Notes: I noticed that I had a certain exotic appeal to local girls and I got lots of matches and messages on Tinder. Normally, I don’t waste time with Tinder but Mérida, being a college town, is one of the few places I would actually recommend using it in addition to the in-person game that I would always recommend anywhere other than maybe Iran or some other place where you can get in trouble for being near women in public. Non-white guys should be fine here. I saw some black guys with local girls and the locals themselves are all over the place ethnically with most being Amerindian (mostly Mayan), white, or a mix of the two. Whatever your ethnic background, you should be fine here if you have at least a basic level of game.
Mérida
This is probably the safest city I have ever lived in outside of Korea. There are not even pickpockets. It’s almost weird how safe this place is. I was told by a taxi driver that one reason for this (aside from the locals just being generally nice people) is that the police in Yucatan (the province where Mérida is located) are required to be from Yucatan whereas the police in other regions of Mexico can be from any part of the country. Mérida, while probably being around the size of New Orleans, is also a city where people tend to know each other and gossip a lot so any criminal would quickly be known to all. I saw gates open, windows without bars, women walking around alone at all hours of the night, and even front doors left open at times. From what I’ve already said, this should not be shocking but I did not find any ghettos or rough areas in Mérida.
As for quality of life, Mérida has pretty much everything that a city of similar size in the US has except for drinkable tap water. You should drink bottled water. Other than that, though not highly international, Mérida’s proximity to the US and the reality of NAFTA mean that you will be able to find most if not all of the products and major company brands that you would find in the US. This includes Wal Mart, which is were I shopped for groceries, soap, and things of that sort as well as UPS. Uber is also very useful in Mérida and I highly recommend getting it if you don’t already have it as it can be cheaper and more convenient than taking taxis.
Mérida is a college town with several local university campuses in and around town so you can find people, especially young people, who speak English well enough to carry a conversation but some knowledge of Spanish will only help you since Mérida is a 2nd or 3rd tier city.
There are a number of decent and affordable Airbnb options available and there are a number of hotels throughout the city but I recommend the ones in the historic downtown just because it is such a cool area.
Local Guys
Very friendly and civilized in my experience. They do not seem to be very protective of the local women which meant that I did not face any blocking or drunk bruisers looking to throw hands with me for stealing their women and polluting their pure gene pool. Generally, the young guys, who will be your main competition, are university students and have a decent sense of style on average. I recommend befriending a few of them as I did so that you can have 2 or 3 of them to go out with to give the appearance that you have local status and have been/will be staying for a while. If you look out for them, they’ll look out for you so, when you engage a girl you like in a club or other social setting while you are with them, set them up with her friends or some other girls that you pull into your group and they will be a solid team for the rest of your operation.
Local Girls
Mérida, being a college town, has a significant population of college-aged women, many of whom are not bad to look at. As I mentioned previously, the locals are mostly Amerindian, white, and/or mestizo (mixed between white and Amerindian). How they rate is really a matter of opinion as some guys prefer the whiter girls and others prefer the more Amerindian ones. I personally tend to prefer the latter and, in my estimate, I’d say that there are enough 7s walking around to keep a guy occupied for some time. This is not the most mind-blowing city I’ve been to in terms of how girls look but it’s not bad by any means and the girls are very approachable, friendly, and open to getting with visitors.
As for personality, I found the local girls to be pretty tame and relaxed as opposed to having the fiery tempers and volatile dispositions that Latinas are stereotypically known for. I never encountered any girls who were rude or unnecessarily abrasive and everyone, women and men included, seemed to be very laid back and welcoming as long as I was polite and gave off good vibes.
It may not show immediate on the surface but the girls here are promiscuous. Mérida is a college town after all and most of the young people studying in the city are either living away from their parents or they do not have curfews. To make things better, since Mexico is a pretty diverse country and, like most of Latin America, race-mixing has historically been very common, a guy visiting will not get stares or bad reactions from locals if he is goin around with a local girl and, in all likelihood, he may not even be noticed.
Female Nonsense and a Personal Example
Sometimes flaking happens, sometimes girls show up late, and sometimes girls are just either stupid or they are playing games and are fully aware of what they are doing.
I personally picked up one girl in a club and spent some time with her there but, when the moment of truth came, she lied to me saying that her mom was calling and she needed to go home that instant. I know she was lying because I saw her smoking weed in a car with another guy (a beta local guy who, I was told by another local guy, had been orbiting her for a long time) less than 50 feet from the club when I walked outside. I still gave this girl another shot the next day and arranged to meet her in at a spot in the historic district but, when I got to the meeting place, she told me she was in another location about 10 minutes away by walking. So I walked to the other location, which was the Catedral de Mérida in the center of historic downtown, and, when I got there, she told me that she was back in the place that I had just left (the original meeting place).
This back-and-forth location game is one that girls often like to play in Latin and Asian countries and this was not the first time I had encountered it. The objective of this game is to either piss you off and induce an emotional meltdown so that they can experience their own dramatic telenovela moment or to see if you are a beta who will just say it’s all ok and keep rescheduling and orbiting her indefinitely. Don’t play this game and don’t give these women any emotion because they are energy vampires who are fully aware of what they are doing and are trying to set you off. I told this girl (in a calm way) that I knew what she was doing and that I wasn’t into playing games. I ended the conversation there and never contacted her again.
Instead, I started walking around the plaza in front of the Catedral de Mérida where she had told me she was before changing the location back to the original place. There, I met another local girl who was sitting on a park bench. I sat on the bench across from hers and made friendly eye contact a couple of times. Then I got up and walked away for a minute or two and, when I came back, someone else had taken my seat on the bench. So, naturally, I sat down next to her on her bench and started talking to her. After some talking, I noticed that she was feeling cold (it was evening in December) and so I said “let’s go” and we went to a bar/restaurant called the Mayan Pub only a few minutes by walking from the Catedral de Mérida where I learned that she was bisexual and wanted to have a threesome with me and another chick she saw at another table. See how well things can go for you when you are willing to ditch a girl who is trying to jerk you around?
I did not go for the threesome because it would have taken a while to pick up the girl that she wanted me to pick up and that girl had 2 male “friends with her (one of whom we suspected was gay) which means I would have had to get her away from them as well as running game on her and I frankly just did not want to bother as this girl was already rubbing my cock through my pants under the table and I have never actually been much into the threesome thing personally (I’ll take it if it’s offered but I won’t go out of my way for it). So I paid for our wine and took her back to my place where she climaxed twice (one time in doggy style which is always fun), and I used all 3 of the condoms I had in my drawer, after which she grabbed the lotion I had on my table (always keep your face moisturized, girls notice that sort of thing) and used her hands to get me off for a second time, edging me all the way until I could not hold it in anymore. We were getting physical at my place for around 2 hours and, after that, I got her an Uber and sent her home. Good stuff.
420
I personally don’t have an interest in drugs and avoid them whenever I can, not for moral reasons but just because I like to stay lucid. That said, I saw weed in Mérida. People have it, it’s easy to find, and, if it is illegal, nobody seems to care. One of the Mexican guys in my shared house smoked it in front of everyone and even left his stuff on the table in the living room when he went out. No fear whatsoever. So, if you enjoy the occasional spliff, you probably won’t find Mérida to be stifling.
Other Foreigners
Don’t sweat it. There are some foreign students doing exchange programs here (mostly Germans for some reason from what I saw - I lived with 2 of them) but they are not many in number and do not pose a threat. The other foreigners are mostly married and very often retired people who will also pose no threat for obvious reasons.
I did meet 4 German girls in Uxmal and wound up walking around the place with them the whole time I was there. We then took the bus back to Mérida and went to La Negrita, which is a restaurant and salsa dance club, where I proceeded to dance salsa with one of them. Unfortunately did not get to bang her due to logistics and all of them being legitimately exhausted. I guess I’ll just get my German flag in Europe.
FYI: If you are thinking of spending any significant amount of time in Latin America, I strongly suggest learning the basics of salsa. You will not regret it as it is great for escalating with local girls and also for upping your status with any foreign girls you might come across as they almost never know how to dance and, if they are from a Western country, have likely never followed a man’s lead before so you may be able to turn them on in a way they have never felt before.
Nightlife
In terms of nightlife, all of the best places are going to be in the historic downtown. Of the places there, the ones which stand out (and which I went to) are:
La Negrita: This is a restaurant located about 10 minutes by walking from the Catedral de Mérida. The food, to put it bluntly, is not good compared to what you can find elsewhere in the city. However, they also have drinks, live salsa bands (check the schedule), and a small dance floor. Don’t go alone if you can avoid it. If you can, go with some friends and grab a table so you can all rotate on and off of the dance floor.
La Pulquerida: This is a dance club which mostly plays reggaeton and had a decent gender ratio when I was there. There are two main rooms and I recommend that you go through the first one and through the hall to reach the second one which opens up into an outdoor space with a disco ball. This is a great place to go to grind on some local tail if you can’t dance salsa.
Mayan Pub: This place has a really cool look and vibe about it and there are live bands playing sometimes (check the schedule). Like the other two places I just mentioned, it is in the historic downtown area where most of the local university students go to hang out both in the daytime and after the sun goes down. They have actually got a small dance floor in front of the stage that the bands play on but I think the bands are geared more toward relaxed and/or slow dancing music than salsa so this is another option for guys who may not care for salsa. This place seemed to be one where people went to hang out with people they already knew rather than meet new people so it might be best to come here with a girl you have already met as a venue change from somewhere else before the final venue change to your place.
*I recommend looking all of these places up in Google Maps or some other app/site so you can see some photos of them and plan your logistics.
Daygame
There are malls but I never felt the need to check them out because the historic downtown is where it’s at, both in the daytime and nighttime. Of the malls that do exist around Mérida, I was told by locals that La Gran Plaza is the best so that is probably where you would be most likely to find local girls.
Personally, I prefer the historic downtown around Catedral de Mérida as it is pretty lively and several of the local universities have their campuses there so you will see students walking around and hanging out everywhere at pretty much all times unless maybe you are there during a major holiday when everyone goes back to their hometowns to visit family or something (but, even then, a lot of them are from Mérida so there would still be some around).
Mérida is a very historical town that is well preserved and most of the cool stuff is in and around the historic downtown with the malls being located far enough away from most other things of interest that you would need a car to get between them. The town square area is also where nearly all of the good bars, clubs, restaurants, and so on are and it is where the college students go to enjoy themselves in the evening and nighttime as well. You can surely find girls at the mall too if you go there.
Note: When I say "town square area," I mean the historical part of town that radiates out in all directions from its epicenter at the Catedral de Mérida. When you are finding a place to stay in town, try to get as close to the epicenter as possible for the sake of logistics.
Munchings and Crunchings
You can’t really go wrong with a local taqueria and most of the restaurants around Mérida seem to be decent. I can make the following recommendations from my own experience though.
Taqueria Mixe: Nice staff and great food. They load their tacos and burritos up and they don’t skimp on anything. Great value for the price. I almost never cooked and at here damn near every day.
Tilingo Lingo: These guys are near Taqueria Mixe but are a bit on the pricier side if you order off the menu and not a la carte. They have seafood options which I love. I especially liked the tacos with “pulpo (octopus in Spanish).” There is a Uruguayan steakhouse right next door as well which I didn’t try but it looked good.
Tarbush: Lebanese restaurant owned and operated by a Druze family from Lebanon. Very nice people and the food is great. An average meal here with a meat thing and a veggie thing will probably run you around 200-250 Mexican pesos which is a lot more than what a meal at a taqueria will cost you but hey, that is foreign food for you. I’d say it’s worth it though and I recommend checking this place out.
Final Thoughts
Mérida is a great place to visit and relax for a while. It is very laid back and safe. The only real downsides to it are that, since this is Mexico, there is some obesity, though not nearly as much as I see when I go back to the US to visit my folks (just more than in Colombia), and it is a bit too relaxing after a while. It can veer a little on the boring side but that could be bad for some and great for others. Depends on your preference and how much of a maniac you are. If you like every day to be wildly different and filled with crazy activities and adventures, you may find Mérida boring but, if you like to live a very structured life with a regular routine and sleep schedule, Mérida could be your place.
Before I close this out, I want to recommend a few things around Mérida (all accessible by bus) for those who have the time and money to check them out:
Uxmal: This is an ancient Mayan city that was recommended to me over Chichen Itza by locals. The people I talked to who had been to Chichen Itza told me that it was more expensive, everything is roped off so you can’t touch anything, it’s crowded as hell, and their are hawkers swarming you constantly trying to sell you crap that you have no use for. By comparison, Uxmal was not crowded at all, admission was only about $12 USD, and almost nothing was roped off. I was able to climb up the stairs, walk into the rooms, and all that good stuff. Great place and a great experience.
Progreso Beach: Not impressive if you have been to places like SEA like I have but still relaxing and nice, especially since they are only a 30 minute drive from Mérida. You can also get kitesurfing lessons here.
Valladolid Cenotes: I was not able to go here but I kept hearing about them and word on the street was that they are the best cenotes in the Yucatan. The photos I’ve seen look amazing and I’ll definitely be checking them out if I find myself in the Yucatan again.
So, in closing, I recommend that anyone considering staying in Cancun for a while give some thought to Mérida as well. I think it could be a better alternative for a guy who goes into it with a plan.
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