"This is the hipster cafe!" -Brent

It seems like the rainy season decided to come a little earlier just for us. Today it was pretty humid after some rain yesterday afternoon. Right on schedule, the rain came again this afternoon. It cooled everything down considerably. Unlike Alli, I seem to get assigned blog duty on the most low key days. We did our daily writing exercise over breakfast and discussed what we would be doing for the day and later in the week.
We caught a bus to downtown once again and ended up at a (kind of sketchy)artisan store. This store had pretty much the norm of crafts we've been seeing such as hats, pottery and hammocks. When we came in a couple obviously from out of town was being forced into a hammock testing. The people selling the stuff in there followed us around really closely and it was a little awkward. We browsed their wares all of ten minutes and left with no purchases.
After the artisan store we made our way to a really cool bead store! They had tons and tons of beads (imagine that..) in all kinds of colors and shapes. We stayed in there for a while examining textures and styles of beads (and for the air conditioning).

Next, our group headed to our hangout, the Italian Coffee Co. Brent left for a minute to go to a bookstore and returned with a little book for each of us on the history of the Mayans. Murphey especially liked them because they were in cartoons. The sketches we did in the coffee shop were from pictures of the Mayan gods and other images out of our new books.
We got nice and caffeinated and stopped in a chocolate store on our way to lunch. The samples the woman working there gave us were so tasty! Brent and Murphey bought some delicious chocolate milk type drinks. Lunch was at this small Lebanese restaurant with awesome hummus. I got a steak and onion dish with hidden peppers. My whole face felt like it was on fire. Brent got a great looking chicken dish and Clay stuck to tacos. Murphey and Alli had some more of the hummus. The whole meal came out to be a very reasonable 250 pesos. This is what it cost ONE of us to eat at Chili's the previous night.

In one of Brent's guide books on Merida it mentions a swanky little coffee shop somewhere in it that we had to check out, of course. The book says that it's a "hipster cafe" and apparently that term stuck with Brent because that's all he could call it. He also said his "hipster points increased" after going there. Little does he know they actually decreased quite a bit after saying that. The cafe turned out to be a hit. It had a great laid back atmosphere with calming music playing. We got some great sketches done there. It started to rain again while we were there but that really added to the calming atmosphere.
We left the cafe after about an hour and a half and returned to our casse through the light rain. Although our day wasn't as eventful as some it was still great to further explore the city and we got some awesome sketches down. Still more to come...

-Christina