more Hotel El Balam

This hotel is really beautiful. It is owned by a woman who inherited it from her parents. I'm trying to remember the story. I think her father was nicknamed el Balám, which means black jaguar in Maya, and he was apparently single-handedly responsible for developing Mérida as a tourist destination. So the owner enlarged the hotel and the part we stayed in was new, but the original section, where the courtyard is, is very old. All of the fixtures in the new part are old, though. One of the bellboys told us about it. The elevators were old, with old doors. Cool, though, the elevators didn't have sliding doors that closed like modern ones, you had to manually open an antique door to get in or out. This was hard to remember to do and more than once either Ginger or I would stand there like lugnuts waiting for the door to open. It makes you feel silly. Like when you stop at a stop sign and aren't paying attention and you're waiting for it to turn green or something and then you realize what you're doing.