Around the Corner from the Camels

We walk everywhere in Merida and enjoy seeing all the little details we’d speed by and never notice if we had to focus on driving.  Some of the most interesting things we’ve come across are these little clay plaques around Centro affixed to the corners of the buildings.   

At first we thought they must identify the buildings, but then we saw the monkey plaque and the building housed a bakery, so that theory went out the window pretty fast.   We asked around and finally found someone who knew what they were for.  They once provided the address system for Merida, before it grew into a big city, and the depictions apparently did have some significance to their locations originally.  For instance, the scorpion was in a neighborhood that was known to have an unusual number of scorpions and the parrot was where the trees were that the wild parrots liked to roost in.  The kind of things the locals in a small town would know about.   How fun, we thought, that our address would have been three doors down from the raindrop and around the corner from the 2 camels.   So far though no one can explain why camels were in the hood....

Here are the turtle, the little girl, the drop of water, the ring, the 2 camels, 2 we can't translate, and the pearl.