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CAROL'S BLOG
(Note that this entire website is copyrighted. Please send people to this website, www.fallinginlovewithsanmiguel.com, rather than forwarding sections without permission or credit. And only the latest few months are displayed--the older posts are being saved for future books. Thank you.--Carol Schmidt and Norma Hair)
June 27, 2009--Final editing, final arguing; the freezer door left ajar; the shootout an hour away from SMA, one of those delightful SMA days
Norma and I are still in the last throes of editing The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico, Norma insisting I write specifically all the visa and car permit info as if we're writing The Complete Idiot's Guide to Moving to Mexico, while I like to tell all my stories. When someone is about fall off a cliff, don't tell them about the history of the discovery of gravity and the archaeological and geological stratas they will pass as they fall, just tell them where to stop! I like to ramble, life is so interesting, and it all ties together in the end. Norma says tie it together now. It doesn't help that nothing is final or certain about dealing with Mexican bureaucracy, and what happens to one expat one day, at one crossing, may have nothing to do with what happens to another two lanes over, or that afternoon in the same lane, and not necessarily anything to do with law anyway. And so we spend our days at our computers.
We did lose two complete days. We left at 11 am for our usual walk to Mega Wednesday, its giant cheap produce sale day, along the way taking notes on all the restaurant comings and goings on Ancha, discovering that the little produce stand on the steps of Espino's has the small yellow tender ears of fresh corn in season instead of the huge white tough ears of corn usually on sale in Mexico, stopping to talk to lots of people, checking out the Aunt Jemina corn meal and Chinese spicy black bean chile sauce now at Carey's, having a limonada at the Longhorn Smokehouse, having a cappuccino when we finally get to Mega, having another decaf when we run into more friends just arrived in town for three weeks as we're about to leave, and finally taking a taxi home with all our packages accumulated along the way and at Mega. We didn't get home until 4 pm. What do we do all day?
Our housekeeper ran downstairs to help us with the bags, and sadly breaks the news to us: the door to the upright full-sized used freezer we keep in the back bathroom that we use only for storage had somehow been left ajar. Norma admits she did it, she's the one who was in there last, and the cats must have distracted her as she was trying to keep them from running into the storage room and hiding under the Christmas tree ornament boxes. They think it's a game to hide from us and then wail at the door to come out at midnight.
Maria noticed the problem when she saw water leaking out into the bedroom from under the door, she tells us hesitantly. It's really time for her to leave, but she stays over for another hour as we all go into high gear. Norma goes into corporate accountant mode, organizing our plan of attack, barking orders. We think of nothing else, not even dinner.
Norma and I don't stop working furiously until after midnight, trying to save as much as we can. We fill five big trash sacks with the obviously defrosted stuff right away. Maria is running up and down the stairs taking the soggy bags out to the garbage. A big package of defrosted berries from Costco splits and shoots red juice all over the three of us and the bedding. Quick stop to rub stick stain remover over all the spots and change clothes and carry on, the change of sheets to wait until later. Maria mops the floor continuously before she leaves. (It wasn't until after midnight that we finally got around to putting stain remover on the sheets and coverlet and starting another wash load. Hope the raspberry stains come out.)
One way we can live fairly thriftfully and eat well is with the help of that freezer and Norma's ability to cook six meals at once and freeze them. Out we tossed five meals of Emeril LaGasse's kicked up meatloaf, several kilos of hamburger, chicken and turkey casseroles, turkey soup, pizza sauce, six freezer containers of homemade BBQ sauce, Kung Pau sauce, chile peanut sauce, dozens of breakfast-sized portions of homemade sausage, hand-squeezed orange and lemon juice, homemade pesto...
We reach a layer in which there are still ice crystals in the food. This level can be saved but all the food will have to be cooked right away and refrozen where possible. There's no way we can do it all. Maria says shyly that she's having a birthday party that night for her youngest son (he's in his 30s). Aha! Her whole colonia will have a feast!
Into four plastic shopping bags go the Costco packages of spring rolls we'd been doling out four at a time to accompany Chinese meals--her son will have 44 spring rolls for his party. Out comes a slab of salmon and some salmon patties and dozens of portions of catfish. Not foods you can cook and refreeze. Her son will have salmon and catfish for his birthday. He gets chicken wings, hot dogs and hot dog rolls, biscuits, pumpernickel bread, cake. Maria is giggling in delight. She'll invite everyone who lives on Canal to his cumpleaños.
We send her home in a cab and we get to work cooking what's left. Norma makes an all-purpose marinade for all the pieces of chicken, steak, thin arrachera and pork and heads for the BBQ on the roof. I'm handing her up cookie sheets of meats to be grilled, then washing out the pans well to receive the BBQ as each load finishes. We slice the various kinds of poultry and meats into taco and fajita sizes and put them in freezer bags and label them all, noting on several batches, "Too salty"-- these will be mixed into salads or cream sauces with no more salt.
While she's grilling I'm slicing open homemade and Costco-sized packages of at least four kinds of sausages and putting them all together into one big pot to be brought to a boil and repackaged. We now have very interesting flavored packets to be stirred into omelets--so what if there's a bit of an andouille flavor here, an Italian flavor there, a little kielbasa over here. We couldn't tell some of the packages apart so we now have a new combo flavor of sausage in the house, dozens of meal-sized packages. It actually is quite tasty. Some interesting omelets and pizzas lie ahead. Tasting the meats and sausage was dinner.
We found two meals worth of gumbo we didn't know we still had--Norma had been grumbling she needed to clean out the freezer some day to see what all we had, but this wasn't the way we'd envisioned doing it. The gumbo, too, was reheated to a boil for ten minutes and repackaged.
We lost hundreds of dollars of food. But at least the freezer is cleaned out. And Maria's son and colonia had a fantastic birthday party. And Norma won't have to cook for quite a while.
We were so keyed we never could get to sleep until around 6:30 am. And then the construction noise from a project adjoining our apartment complex started. (Never count on a view lasting forever--our neighbors now have a very dark house because the house behind them is getting a second and third floor that blocks all their light.) We were shot the entire rest of the day and our sleep patterns have been messed up ever since. In fact I'm writing this at 4 am Saturday morning. Another day will be shot.
I was going to write about all the little restaurants we've checked out lately, but I'll do that later. I do have 26 new pictures in the Food Scenes album in our Photo Gallery of this website that you can scan in the meantime. Note especially Suryaluna, a great little Indian restaurant on Hidalgo 17. It deserves special attention later.
But I will repost what I wrote in the Living in SMA forum as my reaction to the latest drug cartel shootout, this one only an hour's drive from San Miguel, east of Celaya in a town I'd never heard of. Twelve cartel hitmen were themselves killed by police and only one policeman was hurt seriously. I call that a victory for the good guys, though the news story is already all over the world, from Taipei to Australia and Bangkok, spun as just another shootout in Mexico, implying that civilians are in constant danger. And I will finish with another of those perfect days we just had in SMA, totally unaffected by that crime an hour away:
The Houston Chronicle is describing this town of about 70,000 as an hour's drive east of San Miguel. I never heard of the place until today.
Again, I never worried about gang and drug violence an hour's drive away from me in Flint and Detroit when I lived in rural Michigan, nor about gang and drug violence in downtown Phoenix when I lived 35 miles away near the Superstitition Mountains, nor about violence in South Central when I lived in Santa Monica when I first moved to LA. Now the violence and corrupt cops all around me when we moved near downtown LA, yes, I was afraid with good reason, as I've described often.
For those political campaigns for the July 5 elections wanting a return to the "gold old days" under the 71-year reign of the PRI, when government just let the narcos do their thing and everyone took payoffs and all seemed fine on the surface, President Calderon just said, “To turn one’s head, to act as if you don’t see the crime in front of you, as some politicians want to do, is no option for Mexico." Mexico has got to do this, terrible as it is during the fighting. It will never achieve the greatness Mexico is capable of while it is still rotting from corruption and drug wars.
My view is to know and acknowledge the drug wars going on throughout Mexico, and even close to San Miguel, but to also know that it is almost all drug cartels and police shooting each other and the cartels fighting each other for markets.
Our daily lives are not affected at all, unless you are selling drugs, in which case be afraid, be very afraid. The cartels are now picking off independent street drug dealers as they tighten their market share within Mexico to pick up the small stuff. We lived our lives and still had a good time in Los Angeles where there actually was crime all around us.
If you're panicking about a drug shootout that killed 12 gangsters an hour from SMA, let's talk about it.
Meanwhile, we had an absolutely lovely day today, though it started with an emergency run to Dr. Vargas who saw us within an hour and charged only $16 to repair a broken dental plate, then a wonderful visit with friends who showed off their new garden in their three bedroom home with a hot tub and fully equipped brand new kitchen and more for which their property taxes are $100 a year, and then we met friends up on the roof of La Posadita restaurant and enjoyed Las Tunas Renaissance-costumed musicians marching past us below accompanied by a burro decorated with bright flowers, and then a brass precision band on the Jardin celebrating what seemed to be the kickoff of some sort of endurance motorcycle race, and a pleasant long walk home on a Friday night in which the newly arrived rainy season has left us cool again, and so many more so-satisfying little sights and sounds and smells and touches all day long, a truly wonderful life.
Yet friends back in Phoenix are emailing again, petrified for us, even as Phoenix and Tucson are experiencing far worse crime all around them than we have here in San Miguel.
Know crime is out there, take common sense precautions against the usual street crime like purse snatchings that you are far more likely to experience, watch your feet since you're even more likely to fall on the cobblestones, and don't sell drugs, and you'll be safer than in many cities in the US. How many crimes are committed each day within an hour's radius of Philadelphia, New Orleans, Atlanta or Houston?
I'm not going to lose any sleep over the deaths of 12 narco hitmen in a police shootout. Luckily no police died, though one is in serious condition.
Is it a terrible thing to still enjoy life fully even while there are pockets of drug cartel violence going on in many areas of Mexico? Should we wrap ourselves in shrouds and beat our chests and start wailing and living in fear while the Mexicans all around us are going on with their daily lives, too?
We didn't stop living when we were in LA where the Crips and the Bloods and the Diamonds and the 18th Streeters and a dozen other gangs were shooting our office parking lot full of machine gun spray many nights and a gay man was dumped into a garbage dumpster behind the gay bar across the street and the local gang had us scared to even go down the hillside of our own property...I've told it all here before. The Hillside Stranglers and then the Night Stalker were far more scary to have operating in our downtown LA neighborhood than anything we feel here.
I'd rather remember the green pozole soup thick with chicken breast chunks that I had for dinner at La Posadita, served with a lazy Susan of diced onions, minced jalapenos, oregano, cayenne pepper, fried pork rinds, tortilla strips, and avocado to decorate it with, and the shared flan for dessert, and the walk home past the crowded Jardin at night with that brass band playing and the spiffed-up motorcycles raring to go for whatever race it was, and the Mexican couple dancing to the music, and all the tourists snapping photos of the Parroquia lit up at night, and the toddlers tugging at their balloons and pull toys, and the fancy poodles and Chihuahuas strutting with their owners on their walks, and the crowds at Harry's as we walk past enjoying their 2 for 1 drinks, and the taco stands on the streets filling our senses with great smells and sights, and the artists' gallery openings where we can duck into Galeria Izamal and sneak some of Henry Vermillion's homemade chutney and chips as we check out the latest paintings on our walk...
Life is so good here. I absolutely hate it when the Taipei Times makes it sound as if all of Mexico is one giant shootout. It's not.
More soon on the great little restaurants we've discovered lately. Check out the Food Scenes album of the Photo Gallery in the meantime.
Carol Schmidt, Falling...in Love with San Miguel de Allende: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security
June 15, 2009--Our eighth Day of the Locos; we finally get to celebrate our 30th and 5th anniversaries
Another confirmed H1N1 flu case popped up in San Miguel, giving us 37, including the bedridden woman with heart and kidney disease who died of it last month. It's been more than a week since the last case, so I suppose we needn't worry, though when I read the story I couldn't help realizing that we'd been in the middle of crowds all day for Day of the Locos.
Atencion predicted 10,000 would march in the parade, and we were so close we could touch most of them and had to watch our feet from being run over by the sound trucks. The parade reached us on Hernandez Macias near Mesones at 12:30 pm, from its 11 am start in Colonia San Antonio near the church, and it was mostly over by 2:30 pm. As usual I took far too many photos--483 in those two hours. Why do I do that? My photo software program is so overloaded it barely budges. I need to take some time and delete thousands of photos from the past seven years. I'm so overwhelmed with photos to edit and resize that I've paralyzed myself. My latest camera, $140 USD at one of the big box stores, allows me to take 640 photos before downloading or recharging. It's a curse.
Day of the Locos is our favorite parade--or do I say that about all of them? We staked out our spot right at the sidewalk's edge at 10:30 am and hid under sunbrellas and read until we could hear the drums. We picked out the child least likely to be able to collect his or her own candy and donated everything that landed in our laps or at our feet to him.
A shy boy of maybe three, he was behind our plastic patio chairs and watched the parade wide-eyed between our shoulders. It was the least we could do, we were blocking his access to the street, or rather his mother had chosen to stand him behind us. We were there first. Two boys of about nine were on either side of us, scooping up everything that came near them, grabbing candies even out of our laps if we didn't move fast enough. One of the boys kept sitting down on the arm rest of my chair and slipping down into my lap. It was that crowded. Mexicans' spatial sense is far different from Anglos.'
The other one kept running out into the parade and grabbing hold of the paraders who were throwing candy so that he got even more. Some of the marchers were so irritated they shooed him away with nothing and didn't throw anything in our direction for any of us, punishing us all. So many of my photos ended up with him in them, tugging on the costumes I was trying to shoot. Many more have his hand and baseball cap in them, waving in front of my camera to catch more candy. I wanted to smack him.
But the parade was not designed for me to take photos with an uninterrupted view. If I'd been more aggressive myself I would have jumped out into the parade and asked those in the best costumes to pose for me--a Mexican guy with a camcorder had no hesitations in doing so. In others of my photos he's inserted himself into the scene and I have photos of him taking photos.
Oh well, out of 483 shots I'm sure I have more than enough--to do what, I'm not sure. Am I a photo junkie? I never did this when a roll of film had a tidy 36 shots and it cost money to develop them. How will I ever organize my thousands of shots? I have them filed by date taken and a short blurb in the file name, but you can't exactly describe hundreds of shots taken over a week with a file name. I can't even imagine getting myself down to 140 characters to Twitter successfully. That's another time-consumer that I'm afraid would develop into an addiction. I have quite enough to do already, thank you. Don't send me any more invitations to Twitter with you! I can barely get a blog out once a week! And don't bring up how overdue I am on our next books. I'm even overdue on some library books.
Our housekeeper has told us definitively that the Running of the Bulls will be back this September. She heard it on the radio from Lucy (Lucy Nuñez, candidate for SMA Mayor, for whom our housekeeper feels a first name friendship though she's never seen Lucy except in political posters and she didn't know Lucy was married to the owner of the radio station).
Our housekeeper is thankfully usually wrong. She and her friends, the housekeepers at the Hotel Sautto, can build up a rumor until it is from "The Twilight Zone." But I keep asking those who might know if they have heard anything about a second coming of the Pamplonada, and they all shudder at the thought and say no. If you by chance have heard anything about that possibility please let me know.
I'm sure the restaurant, hotel and bar owners would love to have it return because of the terrible business decline right now. But would they pay for their share of the increased security, cleaning, and portapotties that would be needed? They never paid before, even when they were told that the city was going to cancel it unless they chipped in their share. It wasn't fair that they made a lot of money each year on the crowds of mostly young men and their girlfriends who came to town for the running of the bulls and they didn't pay anything toward their cost of doing business.
The money was drained instead from the poorer folks who desperately need city funds to extend running water and sewers into the areas they have started to live on, around the outskirts of the city. They're not paying taxes, either. Where should the money come from?
Expats who are homeowners are thrilled to pay only a couple hundred dollars a year in property taxes for a house, compared to the thousands they paid in property taxes back in the US, but we would be a likely source of additional revenue. We want the city services same we had in the US but are glad to pay almost no taxes for them. For some of us, Mexico is indeed the land of the free lunch. But the government can't exactly discriminate against expats and charge us higher property taxes or it would be seen as another "gringo tax."
I don't know what the solution to Mexico's economic situation is. All I know is that they need more money to solve their massive problems, and they don't take in enough taxes, and many people can't afford to pay more taxes. And, the hotels, restaurants and bars are hurting, just as everyone is, and everybody is scrambling trying to find new sources of income. It's a global recession.
So what did we do but splurge on an anniversary dinner Saturday night since Doc Severinson and Gil y Cartas were at Bella Italia for this weekend. They were traveling for our actual April 27 anniversary, our 30th of being together, and Norma was sick that week anyway and we didn't really celebrate, even though 30 years is a biggie. They were going to be gone again for our actual June 21 fifth anniversary of our legal marriage in Provincetown. So we combined the two celebrations into Saturday night. Money may be short for many things in San Miguel, but Bella Italia was packed. The ony two empty tables were behind pillars.
Gil y Cartas were always good but Doc Severinson has snapped them into total professionalism. When he waves his hand, that band moves along in perfect timing. You could cut a tomato on their precision stops. Jon Davidson and his wife Rhonda were in town and dropped in for the evening. The youngest of you wouldn't remember that Jon Davidson alternated with the Andy Williams Show on TV and was a major force in popular music 30 or 40 years ago, and then he was on Hollywood Squares for years. He still tours Las Vegas and many venues catering to those of us who do remember. And he remembered meeting us at a party last year! How to feel like a big shot when Jon Davidson comes over to your table!
Our meal wasn't exactly a cheap eats night, but our total bill for a fine meal, drinks and two hours of big-name entertainment was the equivalent of $54 USD. We started with two excellent appetizers: pate fois gras on small breads around lettuce topped with a blueberry salad dressing; and three big rounds of smoked provolone that I think was baked. Our entrees were a pasta with clams, mussels, shrimp and calamari for Norma, and an oxtail sauced pasta for me (it reminded me of the good old German beef gravy over noodles of my childhood).
We try not to order anything that Norma would cook at home because she probably cooks it better and then we feel cheated of our dinner price. But there was no way Norma was going to cook all those kinds of seafood, and she surely would never cook an oxtail. She left all that good old poverty food behind. But sometimes I like to remember. She won't eat beef liver or tongue, either, and I consider them delicacies. We split a dessert, a bombé of chocolate coated homemade vanilla ice cream over a coconut cream center. With two Margaritas and two soft drinks the bill was 700 pesos. I doubt if we could have bought one ticket to a Doc Severinson concert in the US for that.
If you've been reading our forums you know that two guys made a wrong turn off of the toll road into Monterrey at 2:30 in the afternoon on the same day that federal police and Monterrey police were clashing over Calderón's attempts to not only bring down the drug cartels but also to find and fire all corrupt police and government figures. The local police were in a standoff against the federal police at the same time that two officers stopped my friends and tried to shake them down for a mordida. When they didn't have enough money the corrupt cops took them to a spot they said was behind the police station and demanded their ATM and credit cards and PIN numbers. So it was an express kidnapping more than a mordida attempt.
They were threatened with jail and with the loss of their car, and they gave up the cards and PIN numbers. The police took them to an ATM and then were angry that they had so little in their accounts. One of the men feigned a seizure--he recently had cancer surgery, and the medical papers were right there to be shown to the cops. The cops brought the guy into the station and a breathalyzer was run on him--zero. The one who did the breathalyzer was angry at the two cops and finally my two friends were released. They had hidden one credit card that had just enough to get them back into SMA and to survive for the rest of the month.
Five police officers witnessed this shakedown and did nothing. No wonder Calderón has targeted Monterrey as one of the cities for his crackdown on corruption. Some 80 cops have been fired there so far. Another area is the state of Michoacan, and the governor there is still furious that he was not alerted that a raid was going to happen that seized 10 Michoacan mayors and 17 other officials. If he'd been alerted ahead of time, would the men have still been there when the federal police came?
Mexico definitely has major problems right now, and this is the first time people I know have had this kind of shakedown and express kidnapping happen to them. They're recovering but are still very upset, understandably. Will they stay in Mexico? They were from LA, and Norma and I had far worse stuff happen to us in LA; we still feel much safer in San Miguel. But if we were driving still, we'd stick to the toll roads through the cities where there have been drug problems in Mexico, just as we knew not to use many streets in LA, Phoenix, and Detroit.
I email them about what they went through, and then Norma and I go out and enjoy the Day of the Locos and Doc Severinson at Bella Italia. We walk to Mega and pass the dozens of "Cheap Eats" restaurants we love, and we chat with friends at every cafe and corner along the way, and we have parties and lunches with so many more friends than we ever had anyplace we lived in the States, and we feel closer to Mexico's spirit and soul and all the problems and all the joys of this complex country far more intensely than we ever felt connected to anyplace in the US.
We loved LA, warts and all, too, and it took five burglaries and robberies and the murder in our backyard and the rape and brutalization of a woman two doors from us and so much more that was in our face every day before we started to feel afraid there. I don't feel anything like that fear here, even though so many relatives and friends up north think I should. I get so tired of having to defend Mexico's warts when instead I want to be telling people about all the good stuff. If only they could spend the Day of the Locos and a Doc Severinson night with me, they'd shut up about the newspaper stories. Maybe.
The LA Times did run a nice column calling for some "empathy tourism" for Mexico right now, as we still reel from the flu, the drug wars, and the economy. US citizens flocked to New York City after 9/11, and they supported New Orleans with their tourism dollars after Katrina. Mexico could use a little help here now, folks.
Carol Schmidt, Falling...in Love with San Miguel de Allende: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security
June 7, 2009--World Heritage Day; supporting our favorite restaurants hurt by the economy; a lazy evening at the Jardin; more kittens
Ever since we went into Olé Olé last Friday night and found we were the only ones there, and began to realize just how seriously hurting many of our favorite restaurants are, we've been trying to go out more to our favorite "Cheap Eats" in particular, to do our bit to help them survive. We'd run into the owner of Tacos Don Felix (www.tacosdonfelix.com) at Bonanza and he said he was doing okay, but there was just a little pleading as he invited us to come by any time.
This popular restaurant which is usually packed on Friday and Saturday nights had only one other couple there from 6 pm until 8, when finally a foursome showed up. I have photos of the empty dining room and of our favorite entrees, the taco sampler platter of seven different kinds, and the green chicken enchiladas, and other recent restaurant experiences, in the Food Scenes album of the Photo Gallery of this website.
Please make an effort to support all your favorite restaurants right now. After the flu closing in Mexico City, 20,000 restaurants never reopened--they'd been living that close to the edge financially. The SMA restaurants which can do so are offering great deals--Harry's New Orleans even has three-for-one drinks of all kinds from 4 to 5 pm. I guess you'll be too drunk to leave at 5 and you'll stick around to order a meal to sober up. Whatever works.
It was a lazy Friday evening, perfect weather, so we walked down hill from Tacos Don Felix, smiling to the families sitting out on their doorsteps enjoying the evening. We ended up at the Jardin for what we thought would be casual people-watching, to find ourselves in the middle of World Environment Day. We hadn't bought this week's Atencion yet and so were unprepared for the events going on in the Jardin, and throughout the city, for the weekend.
Norma said as we got closer to the Parroquia, "I see feathers."
I squinted. Yes, there were conchero dancers with their six-foot-spread peacock feather headdresses, on a temporary stage, dancing and talking to the crowds throughout the Jardin, not just the 100 or so people in folding chairs in front of the stage. An ecological film of endangered landscapes and animals filled a screen on the stage when the dancers left, and the audience stayed, actually interested in the ecological presentation.
Behind the chairs a dozen mojigangas, the ten-foot-tall paper mache puppets who show up for just about every celebration, danced to music coming from a sound truck, and workers on an Ecologica pickup handed out plastic bottles of purified water, a bit of a mixed message.
We kept running into people we knew in this small town of San Miguel, sharing pleasantries, news, and, well, gossip. One mariachi band was doing its best to get some paying customers to shell out 100 pesos or so for a song by wiggling their hips and throwing their whole selves into some sample songs.
Another band was singing their hearts out for no particular customers we could see, and from nowhere a gringa with a guitar showed up and slipped into the group, joining right in with all the traditional mariachi tunes. They didn't seem surprised. She was the first gringa mariachi player I've ever heard. A restaurant in Tlaquepaque promotes its all-woman mariachi band, but this was a gringa who for at least a few songs joined right in with one of the regular SMA mariachi bands. If anyone knows the story about how that happened I'd love to hear it.
Everybody joined in on "Cielito Lindo"--Ai, yi yi yi! Oye vey.
It was a typical Jardin evening, Mexican families who often have small houses using the park as their living room. A few scattered fireworks erupted occasionally, and groups of teenagers of one sex eyed the groups of teenagers of the opposite sex, while toddlers scampered after bubbles their parents blew for them and dragged their clackety plastic wheeled horses around behind them on strings, and dogs met and determined who was alpha and who was going to hide behind their owners' legs, and the aromas of steamed corn, mayonnaise, cheese, lime and chile spread throughout the Jardin, and kids tried to sell packages of gum, and balloon vendors showed off their Spongebob and Hello Kitty unlicensed balloons, and wide-eyed tourists snapped endless shots of the mariachis and the Parroquia and each other.
A donkey with a big wire halo of brightly colored flowers and hearts wandered past the arches, led by a newly married couple as their wedding celebration continued into the night. A full moon beamed down on the scene as we sat on a bench and reflected on how glad we are to live in San Miguel. Just another evening in the Jardin.
Check out the photos of these scenes in a new Photo Gallery album I created for the evening, "A Lazy Friday Night in the Jardin June 6, 2009."
Otherwise, we're still working on The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico, trying to make sure it lives up to its title, and living our lives. We took the bus to Celaya this week for staples like 36-roll packages of toilet paper, canned smoked oysters, grape tomatoes, Italian chicken sausages half the calories of regular Italian sausages...the necessities of life. First we went into the new Sam's and there couldn't have been more than 10 people in that whole gigantic store.
A few more were in Costco where we did most of our shopping, but it was dead compared to a few months ago, even considering it was a weekday. The economy is hurting all over. We keep running into taxi drivers newly returned to SMA who had been construction workers in Dallas, Austin, Cincinnati, for a dozen years or more. No jobs in the US, no jobs in Mexico.
And some gringos complain about paying a cab driver 25 pesos, under $2 USD, for a ride within town, cab drivers here averaging under $100 USD a week to support their families by the time they pay for the rental of the cab. Someplace somwhere it's still written that 15 pesos is the correct fare within SMA. Nobody I know has paid that in six years. Actually we're adding a few pesos more in tips everywhere to try to help Mexicans recoup from the downturn in the peso in the past six months.
Remittances are down something like 18%, too, the second or third largest segment of the Mexican economy coming from the $16 billion or so that Mexicans working in the US send home to their families in Mexico. The only good point--the dollars they send back are worth more because of the devalued peso.
Speaking of paying less than full price for cabs, Primera Plus no longer accepts the INAPAM Mexican seniors discount card on the directo bus to Celaya. We paid the full 38-peso ticket, not half price. It left this time on the hour at the half hour from the SMA bus station, which meant it would leave every hour on the hour from the Celaya bus station.
When we were finally in the check-out line at Costco we realized we'd just missed a directo, which meant we'd be sitting around on the bus stop benches in front of Costco for another hour. We were really tired, and our cart was loaded---we took a 300-peso cab home.
The driver was thrilled with his unexpected big fare. He enjoyed the summer ride through the countryside to SMA as well. He'd never been to our town so I pointed out landmarks as he took us home. Turnabout--the passenger telling the taxi driver about the tourist sights.
We have been so exhausted since we started going to the gym three times a week for nearly two hours a visit. Any day we go to the gym is a lost day completely, we're too tired to do anything else. And we didn't lose a pound in the two months (minus the ten days when everything was closed down for the flu epidemic).
It was no longer fun. The expected returns of being peppier didn't happen. We stopped going.
Anyone who knows us would have expected that to happen sooner or later. Anyone who knows human nature would have expected that to happen sooner or later, for most people, not just us.
So we're back to taking our long walks through all the streets of San Miguel again. We'd missed those walks. We'd been too tired to even get out for our favorite events the past two months. No more justifications or explanations, we just quit the gym. So you'll see us back on the streets again.
Saturday we joined two friends at M M Cinemas to see "Star Trek"--a young male action film to be sure. We were not its target audience. The entire "Star Trek" concept was brought back to the beginning days of Kirk, Spock and others when they were reckless teens and young adults, not sharing any deep concepts or heartfelt values or painful learning that we could relate to. It got a 95% favorable rating at www.rottentomatoes.com, but not from us. Not that films aimed at a young male audience automatically turn us off--we're awaiting the final "Harry Potter" as eagerly as any teenager.
We had a late breakfast/early lunch beforehand at the '50s restaurant in the strip mall across from Mega that has the Banamex and Italian Coffee in it. Cute little place, all decked out with 1950's movie posters, with background music playing from our teen years.
I had creamed spinach soup with green apple slices and blue cheese crumbles, an unexpected pleasure. My body must have been craving antioxidants--I followed the soup with a spinach, mushroom and tomato salad. Norma had a burger which was not as good as the ones she makes, so she was disappointed. The waiter couldn't grasp the concept of putting blue cheese on a hamburger as Norma requested. Oh well, there's always cheddar. Other friends really like the place, I don't want to knock it. It just didn't really grab us...
...the way that Fenicia did on Zacateros 73 just north of Cafe Monet, across from La Cava, in the space formerly occupied by a Chinese restaurant. Fenicia is a Lebanese restaurant that I've already raved about in our forums. I posted photos in the Food Scenes album of our website photo gallery of Norma's kafta wrap and my combo platter of kibbe and falafel, and of the restaurant interior which is still fairly plain. Only one other couple was eating there when we were there, another example of a worthy restaurant which needs some support. Fenicia had the best baba ganouche and hummus I've had in San Miguel.
We walked past another new restaurant we want to try out, Sappo's next to the fish taco place, La Palapa, around the corner from Espino's. Sappo's is actually the other side of the parking lot, before you get to Parque Juarez. It's in one of those luxurious homes in the Parque Juarez area that you usually don't get to see inside of except on House and Gardens tours.
The restaurant is in a beautiful courtyard, and the food looks good though we haven't eaten there yet. Much of the menu is what you probably expect--varied breakfasts, sandwiches and salads, Mexican dishes, a few US style favorites. Much of it is "Cheap Eats," too, under $6 for a meal before drinks.
Saturday night we got a call from friends who were heading out to the Longhorn Smokehouse to hear Billie Rose sing while they ate Texas chili and chiliburgers. Norma and I joined them for a slider for me and a pulled pork sandwich for Norma as we enjoyed the blues and country music. I was expecting a glorified White Castle burger but my slider was just another hamburger. Shoulda stuck with the ribs.
A beautiful new B & B has opened up across from the Hotel Sautto, called Casa Florida, Hernandez Macias 60, www.casafloridasma.com, 415-154-8195. The owner waved us inside and showed us the three upscale B & B rooms and her dining area and kitchen where she talked brunch recipes with Norma. Great view from the roof, as you'd expect from anyplace in Centro. She, too, is feeling the economic heat and is offering $99 a night rates to introduce people to her new endeavor!
Seven or eight months ago three straggly kittens wandered into our courtyard for a few days, then disappeared again. Our housekeeper said that a street dog had killed their mother. One of the kittens showed up again a few weeks ago, looking a bit round about the tummy, and our neighbors took her to Dr. Vasquez to be fixed. They brought her back to the courtyard and she disappeared again.
A truly feral cat can never be converted to a pet; the humane societies say that the kindest thing you can do for a stray cat that won't respond at all to humans is to catch it somehow, have it sterilized, and release it back near where you found it, in as safe a place as you know.
So yesterday that cat was going in and out of a three-foot-tall decorative ceramic pot in our courtyard, and our neighbor peeked in and saw that newly fixed cat had a tiny kitten! Who did she steal that from?
It was going to die in that pot, since the kidnapper, or kittennapper, couldn't nurse it. We had a neighborhood phone debate and Norma went down to look at the kitten to see if there was any way to get it out of there without being attacked by the kittennapper.
Surprise, another of the three kittens now grownup was in there with her litter mate, and she had three kittens total, co-mothered with the cat we'd had fixed. The kitties had two mommies, we'd have to name one of them Heather.
Both cats hissed at us looking into their ceramic home, and we all retreated for another confab. When we went back downstairs to the courtyard, the ceramic pot was empty. No sign of any of the cats or kittens. Soon there will be even more cats to fix.
I've written about my lecture from our cardiologist Dr. Alvarez about relying on the internet for diagnoses and treatments. A little while ago Norma noticed I had a half-circle of red spots on the back of my hand. "Ringworm!" she yelled. "My kids had that and it was hell to get rid of. It's highly contagious!"
I rushed to the internet and the photos of ringworm looked a little like the C on my hand, and the gross photos of advanced cases scared me into following all the precautions from the internet advice. We washed sheets and towels daily, I used paper towels and alcohol gel constantly, I didn't touch anyone or anything with my hand, and we headed for Chelo's pharmacy to get some antibiotic cream for ringworm.
Chelo took one look at the red marks and nodded, it was ringworm, and sold me two tubes of creams for $20, one for morning, one to be applied before I went to bed. Nothing happened. The mark didn't spread. Norma didn't catch it. Maybe it was a little less red. I continued to keep my hand discreetly away from people, though.
Then Norma noticed a little raised bump on her scalp and since two friends have had extremely serious cancer episodes that started with a raised bump on their scalps, we made an appointment with Dr. Carla Archer, the new dermatologist at Hospital de la Fe, who has been highly recommended to us.
She's young, is moving here full-time this summer, and has been affiliated with a leading university in Mexico City for many years previously. She was born in Texas and her family moved to Mexico City when she was six, so she speaks perfect English. She has studied on both sides of the border.
Dr. Archer looked at all the suspicious spots Norma pointed out and at every one she said, "Age spot." It was embarrassing--how to feel really old. Better than the alternative, certainly.
And then I showed her my hand and asked if it was ringworm and if the two creams I'd brought with me were the best cure. "That's anuloma granulari," she said instantly. "The creams are worthless." No one really knows why anuloma granulari comes and goes, but it's not contagious and nothing topical will help. Sometimes injecting a bit of cortisone into each bump will help but mine was so minor it was to simply be ignored. Very possibly it had popped out because of the stress of getting our book out. Or not. Another relief.
Dr. Archer chewed me out for going to a pharmacy for a medical diagnosis (though much of Mexico does the same). Pharmacists in Mexico are not educated and licensed as they are in the US. Someone with a second grade education can call themselves a pharmacist, a pharmacy can open up with no one with any medical training of any kind on staff, only a chemist has to be on board for the original application for the store to open, and then that chemist can disappear and go on to help another pharmacy open. So much for my recommending Chelo for inexpensive routine medical needs. Medical bills have eaten us alive the past two months. But we're fine, so the bills have been worth it.
Oh, Norma has amoebas again and on Thursday goes to Dr. Barrera, the internist at Hospital de la Fe, to get another prescription for that. She decided to go in at the first signs of continued stomach pain rather than waiting until she was passing out as she did in November, 2007, when she had to be hospitalized for 48 hours of IV antibiotics.
Another friend also let stomach pains keep on for months before she finally got medical care, and the doctor told her the amoebas had gotten into some of her major organs. She was hospitalized as well. Our new motto is, Preventative medical care immediately! Don't wait until we need expensive hospitalization!
Tomorrow we're going to make a point of getting out to the Jardin for Sunday morning, experiencing this town once more. It is too easy to get caught up in our daily lives, too busy to even leave the house, or rather, the computers. We live in a wonderful town! People come thousands of miles to experience the magic of San Miguel, while we sit around inside and keep checking email and political news sites and our forums and surfing the internet for all the diseases we most certainly have.
Carol Schmidt, Falling...in Love with San Miguel de Allende: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security
June 1, 2009--Six arrested after gunshots in Centro; more of my memories of guns and drugs in Michigan and LA; it's the economy, stupid; daily life goes on with another spectacular 15-day celebration of the Holy Cross by the Valle de Maíz pious and locos
According to one of the local newspapers, which would as soon sensationalize a story as simply report it, gunshots were fired in Centro Saturday morning, no one injured, and SMA police soon after arrested six in a heavily armed van with Durango license plates. The story made a big deal out of the fact that three of the six were dyed-blonde-haired women in "trendy" blouses and jeans, the photo showing that their definition of "trendy" was a narrow black strapless, midriff-less top, and the women were transported separately using women police, all six escorted to the Guanajuato state facilities under heavy guard.
Okay, so San Miguel has survived another attempt by organized crime to infiltrate our city. Durango is where three drug cartels are battling for control, the worst of the cartels being the Zetas. They're former trained military forces who were the muscle for the Gulf Cartel but now seem to be striking out on their own, according to some US in-depth news stories. Zetas are the ones who more than a year ago tossed five heads onto the floor of a bar in Urupuan in Michoacan that police frequented, as their grand entrance into the competition. Another of the cartels battling for power in this region is La Familia, which has a religious cultlike aspect. Members who drink or use drugs themselves will be killed.
I have no confirmation of this but I hear from many sources that small shop owners in SMA are being solicited for protection money, one of the side businesses of these organized crime groups. It is likely that throughout Mexico repeated attempts will be made to expand the cartels, just as the Al Capone era saw organized crime expand and finally be thwarted in the US. My mother told me of the Purple Gang in Detroit that ran booze across the frozen Detroit river from Windsor each winter, hundreds if not thousands of cars cracking through the ice and sunk to this day laden with their heavy cargo. Dad and I used to pull some fat fish from that river.
People don't believe the stories I tell about guns, gangs and drugs in Detroit and LA, but they're true. A few more that came to mind when I read the El Sol de Bajio article. My Dad brought home 60 rifles and guns from WWII and kept them in a gray wood chest in the attic. Whenever Mom would start a discussion he didn't like, he'd take that opportunity to bring down some of the guns and clean them. All my male relatives on the Schmidt side had many guns. During deer, duck and pheasant season in rural Michigan farmers would sometimes paint "COW" in orange letters on the sides of the smaller tan Swiss and Guernsey cows so they wouldn't be shot by Detroiters who barely knew how to handle their guns.
On New Year's Eve so many people would be out shooting their guns that I finally just spent New Year's Eves in my bathroom that had at least two walls between me and the outside, same as I did each night of the 1967 Detroit riot. And then of course Norma and I found ourselves living next door to members of the Michigan Militia who were friends of the Oklahoma City home-grown terrorists, when we escaped back to rural Michigan to get away from LA crime, stress, prices, traffic, etc.
One more drug story from LA, circa 1975 or so: my then-husband worked for a tropical fish store that sold drugs on the side, or maybe the fish business was the side. Marijuana was sold in Tetramin fish food containers of one ounce--the real fish food was out front, the more expensive stuff was in a back room. At first glance you couldn't tell the contents apart. Cocaine was sold in false tetracycline capsules, the real medicine in blue capsules out front, the ones that would make you forget your fish were sick were in the back room. If you wanted a whole lot of cocaine, that came packed in the bodies of empty plastic flashlights, no batteries included. That's how the rock stars bought it, or rather their limo drivers would come in to the store for it. One time the store was robbed of all the drugs and there was no one the store owner could report it to. My ex was furious and frustrated. And now you really don't believe a word I write. Back to Mexico:
President Calderón has not yet signed the drug decriminalization bill and the creation of a new national police force that will be a bridge between the military and the current federal police to specifically fight the drug cartels, though he asked for both bills. So much political infighting went into their passage in both parts of Congress (the Senators and Deputies) that the bills are now PRD bills rather than PAN bills, editorials have commented. The decriminalization bill would make it legal to possess up to five grams of marijuana (an ounce has about 28 grams, so we're talking maybe three joints) and smaller amounts of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines--though to pass a joint to a friend puts the user back out of protection and into distribution.
After being picked up on one such minor use, the person would have had to be evaluated for drug addiction, and after three times picked up for even these minor amounts, the person would have had to go to drug rehabilitation. That part of the bill was cut out before final passage by Congress. I wonder whose pork barrel included drug rehab centers?
The Mexican Congress passed a similar bill under President Vicente Fox, but after pressure from the US to veto the bill, he did. Now there is more support in the US in some political circles, for decriminalization of minor amounts of marijuana at least, so as to free drug enforcement from having to pursue these minor crimes and concentrate on the biggies.
It's come out that the US Mérida Act money of something like $700 million that was to help the Mexican government fight crime has been embroiled in US politics. The first money passed under President Bush specified Bell helicopters, built in Texas. The latest money specifies Black Hawk helicopters built in Connecticut, home to Joe Lieberman and Chris Dodd.
Local SMA politics are heating up. By the July 5 election probably hardly a square inch of fences and walls will not have a political sign on it. The four mayoral candidates are all addressing the expat community this week at the Biblioteca's Teatro Santa Ana. These sessions will be fair and supervised forums for expats to legitimately gain information about the candidates' views for SMA's future without violating the Mexican Constitution's prohibition on foreigners' participation in Mexican politics.
Lucy Zavala is speaking Wednesday, June 3, 2-3:30 pm; Cristóbal Franyuti on Thursday, June 4, 1-2:30 pm; Miguel de Jesús Rangel Friday, June 5, 2-3:30 pm; and Alberto Mendoza, Saturday, June 6, 2-3:30 pm. Mendoza is from the Nueva Alianza party and Jesus Rangel from the PT (Work Party). Cristóbal is PAN, the same party as Fox and Calderón, and Lucy is from a coalition of the PRI, the conservative party that ran Mexico for 71 years before Fox; the left-leaning PRD; and the Green Party.
Our housekeeper came in one morning and said Cristóbal is a thief, she heard it on the radio. She didn't know Lucy's husband owns the local radio station. According to this week's lead story in Atención (www.atencionsanmiguel.org), Cristóbal has lodged a formal complaint with the Electoral Institute charging the radio station is giving two hours to Lucy each day, and Lucy has lodged a complaint with the district attorney against the publisher of Ecos de San Miguel newspaper for publishing an article about a YouTube video that insults Lucy. I'm very glad to stay out of local politics. Let Mexico be Mexico, they certainly don't need expats telling them what to do.
Though that isn't stopping the usual complaints by some expats against fireworks, which are in great evidence these 15 days of the celebration of the Holy Cross, the Valle de Maíz colonia's big blow-out each year. Not only are fireworks set off from 4 am to dawn (La Alborada) the first weekend in October as the grand finale of celebrations honoring St. Michael the Archangel, there are several scheduled 4 am fireworks celebrations during the Holy Cross Festival each May. Not that any event comes off as scheduled. Friends went over to Valle de Maíz for a greased pole climbing competition that was set for 7 pm one night of the festival. It started at 10 pm.
We went down to the Jardin Sunday at noon for the Valle de Maíz parade that was to start at noon. We wandered around, talked to people, walked over to Bonanza to try to find corn meal for a catfish fry, meandered to Ramirez Market for some mint and parsley to put in some couscous for dinner, and got back to the Jardin at 1:30 pm. Nada. But we could hear drums and scoped out a good spot for photos--far fewer people in the Jardin than in past years--and as usual I took 300+ photos of the paraders before I knew it. I have at least ten photos of each of the parade costumes from previous years, previous parades, but I can't help myself. Love those Locos!
The Feast of the Holy Cross actually starts May 3. That's the day that all construction workers bring a blessed cross to the work site and expect their employer will provide beer and tacos and make it a holiday. Expats home builders who don't know about the tradition are sometimes caught short and have to rush down to Pollo Feliz or someplace for a quick take-out.
Valle de Maíz has developed partying to an art form. They're the main ones behind the Day of the Locos, which should be coming up in two weeks, though I heard rumors it would be discontinued this year because of the flu. A few new cases keep being confirmed every few days; we're not over this thing yet. When I hear for sure one way or the other, I'll post it on the forums.
It was a mini Day of the Locos for the second half of Sunday's parade. The first half was the religious celebration, floats depicting Christ on the Cross accompanied by concheros and other dancers with all the glorious feathered headdresses and jaguar masks and their flashing muscular thighs. Mexico has no problem making a distinction between the sacred and the profane--there is none. Only in marriage is there a clear distinction between church and state--the only legal marriage is the civil one. You can choose to have an additional church sacrament or ceremony or not. Legal gay marriages are being performed routinely in Mexico City and a few states, though not in conservative Guanajuato.
We've been so housebound getting The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico finished that sometimes we just have to get out. Friday night Norma was planning to make fajitas but we discovered the housekeeper had finished off the last of my salsa and the crema, and it was too late to go to a little shop and we just weren't up to taking the bus to Mega and back. What else to eat--the freezer is always full, and we can always put together a big salad with a can of chunk chicken or make an omelet. But fajitas were on our mind--Olé Olé! The restaurant! We hadn't been there in a couple of years, and it's one of our favorites, it's everybody's favorite. Their fajitas are the best in town, 85 pesos for the chicken and arrachera combo. The over-decorated interior crammed with bullfight memorabilia is as cute as ever, and the stuffed bulls still reign.
Not a single soul besides us was in Olé Olé, at 7-8 pm on a Friday night. Now that is sad. I've talked to a few restaurant owners to see how they're doing, and most are hanging in there but it's very slow. They blame the economy overall, rather than drug violence or influenza scares. Tourists are still coming but in far fewer numbers. And even some expats are being affected--we know people who are seriously considering going back to the States to work for awhile.
To get a job in the US they'll be competing against some six million people who are unemployment benefits, plus however many other millions are underemployed, working part-time, or their unemployment benefits ended and they pretty much gave up and went back to school or are tending relatives, whatever.
My Schmidt relatives who had great jobs in the auto factories in the 1960s (and mocked me for going to college and making much less as a reporter than they did) gradually lost them through the years. One cousin took 15 years before he went out and got another job, as janitor for a Catholic school. He had no qualms sitting around the house while his wife worked as a nurses' aide and he waited for the car industry to rise again. His wife finally lost her job and so he was forced to find something and he reluctantly took up the broom and mop. He's one who talks about lazy Mexicans, too. Anybody who says anything about Mexico, I have US stories to match and surpass! Believe them or not.
Carol Schmidt, Falling...in Love with San Miguel de Allende: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security
May 23. 2009--Memories of our deceased best friend who lived in SMA 2002-2008; three movies this weekend; dealing with medicine side effects; Billie Rose at Longhorn Smokehouse
Nancy Gates' daughter called us this week to say Nancy was diagnosed with lung cancer a week ago Wednesday and died this Tuesday. This is the first person who has been in our inner circle in our age range who has died. She was 70, a few months older than Norma. Norma and Nancy had both started smoking heavily in their teens. Norma was able to quit in 1981 after I'd been in a hospital for a month and was having breathing problems when I got home. Nancy never could quit, though toward the end she was using Nicorette gum right along with the cigarettes in an ongoing attempt.
Nancy was the one I wrote about in our first book who dressed up as Fidel Castro for our first Day of the Locos Parade and made it only a few blocks before collapsing with heat stroke and insisting a cab driver take her right through the tied-up traffic back to her apartment. Nancy was the one who had her car stolen. Nancy was the one we got lost with on the buses a few times.
We met her at an RVing Women rally in 1993 and she trailed along behind us the next three years, sharing her experiences using Thousand Trails and NAACO membership RV groups to lower the costs of full-time RVing. Some RV parks are as expensive as motels. One on the California coastline was $100 a night! She got us into a membership group so that we never had to pay another night in an RV park again, though we could only use about 100 parks across the US and Canada and stay a maximum of three weeks per park.
She came from a German-Irish family that took its card playing very seriously indeed, and she taught Norma to play canasta just as her mother had taught her, a very genteel, intense game. Norma played around, would freeze the deck with no warning, would use a 50-point joker to freeze the deck, and in general messed with Nancy's mind. She'd be near tears after a game with Norma. We all played pinochle, and Nancy would go outside for a smoke break when it was time for Norma or me to shuffle between hands, and we'd often cheat and stack her hand with a double pinochle and family, but give one of us five nines so that we'd have to throw that hand in.
We'd watch Nancy getting more and more excited as she'd look at each card and realize she had a huge hand, both of us trying not to laugh, Nancy trying to keep a poker face. And then I'd sigh and say, "I've got five nines, gotta throw it in." She'd shriek and we couldn't hold our laughter any more. Finally she caught on to us and made us always sit by an outside window so she could glare in at us while she puffed. We'd often still manage to cheat in the time it took her to run around from the window back to the card table.
We used to argue who had been raised the poorest (Norma would win) but Nancy would say she was so poor her family couldn't afford to buy her glasses when she was in high school. Then she'd talk about her winter ball dress, her summer dress, her spring and fall frocks. We finally got her to confess that her mother didn't want her to wear glasses because she was supposed to find a husband by the time she got out of high school (she did), and we all know boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses. We all knew each other just about as well as any three people could know each other.
We ended up buying lots in a Phoenix area seniors RV park in 1995--we'd all agreed it would be a really stupid thing to do, and then I got a $1,500 insurance check in the mail paying for my broken nose and new glasses when I had fallen on a broken sidewalk in front of a Kinko's in Michigan, and that very day Nancy had plunked down the minimum $1,500 down payment for a lot and on impulse so did we. The seven years we lived together in the same RV park were fun for the three of us but a disaster as far as living in a seniors homeowners association. She kept getting sicker and sicker with emphysema, and went back to live with her daughter in Ohio.
We came down to San Miguel for the summer of 2002. Norma called Nancy to tell her about our plans, and Nancy up and decided she'd join us in SMA! She even rented an apartment in the same building on Quebrada! We were furious, we were trying to escape everyone and everything and be nobodies in San Miguel, but when she arrived, having lost a lot of weight and her health was much better, we had a ball. She decided to stay on at the end of the summer just as we did. We found our fantastic apartment, she found a $300 a month place on Calzada de la Luz and fixed it up great.
Then her rent was going to go up 10% the next year and she found a $140 a month tiny studio on Callejon de San Antonio. She fixed it up great. (Mind you, her Social Security was higher than mine, and she had profits from a house sale in the bank.)
Then two adjoining apartments opened up across the hall from her and she rented both, at $280 a month, made them into one two-bedroom apartment, and fixed it up great.
Then the rent was going up to $300 next year and she decided she couldn't afford that, either, so she lucked into an INFONAVIT house near where La Luciernaga is now. Supposedly only Mexican employees who are in IMSS are able to qualify for these inexpensive government-built small homes that cost $35,000 back then, but some deals fell through and some expats were able to buy in by paying cash. She fixed that place up great, too.
But as we'd warned her, it was too far out, and she got lonely out there. We no longer had a car. She decided to go back to her daughter in Ohio again. And then we drifted apart. She stopped answering emails and phone messages. And then we got the call that she had died.
I can't believe it's been 16 years since we met Nancy, and that suddenly she is gone. I keep expecting to get a phone call from her suggesting a pinochle game. Her daughter asked that those who knew her make a donation to the San Miguel SPA in lieu of flowers.
With that sorrow in our lives, it is good that this is another heavy duty movie weekend at MM Cinemas at La Luciernaga. This weekend we've already seen "Angels and Demons," which made us want to go back to Italy somehow before we die--we only spent a total of six days in Rome, Florence and Venice on one of those "If this is Tuesday it must be Belgium" bus tours in 1981. We both threw coins in the Roman fountain that is supposed to guarantee that you will come back some day. Maybe.
The other movies we will see tomorrow are "Frost" on the Nixon TV interviews with David Frost, and "The International," which we'd never heard of before but the cast looks good. Back in the early 1980s I wrote movie reviews for the LA Lesbian News and we often saw five movies on a weekend. In Phoenix we often escaped the 120-degree summer days by spending them in movie theaters. The A/C would be so cold that 120 degrees actually felt good for about 30 seconds when we finally emerged from the dark, back into the hot sun. The A/C was cold in the movies today, too. Our rainy season preview was short-lived, it's back to summer. Still waiting for the six months rainy season here to really begin after the false start.
Dr. Alvarez switched my heart meds around and the first day on Tenormin I was so dizzy and nauseous I spent it in bed. The next day it wasn't any better and I called him to ask if I could go off that drug. We'd had our little tizzy over suggestible me always getting all the side effects the internet lists for any new drug, so I knew he wasn't going to be a pushover. He insisted I keep up with the medicine for at least two weeks before he'd change it unless I started having trouble breathing. It was the best one to go along with my other meds and my rapid irregular heart beat. So I decided to switch taking the pill from the morning until evenings, and now I am fine with it. We'll even tackle going back to Fitness International Monday. I was all ready to go back last week when that pill knocked me for a loop. Never give up.
We went to hear Billie Rose at Longhorn Smokehouse tonight. She performs there every Thursday and Saturday night, 7:30-9:30 pm. Thursday night is filet mignon, baked potato and salad for 95 pesos, and Saturday night is T-bone, potato and salad for 75 pesos, which just meets our $6 a meal "Cheap Eats" category now that the peso is 13 to the dollar. We ended up with our usuals, the pulled pork sandwich, chips and cole slaw 65-peso meal for Norma, the ribs and pulled pork plus salad platter for me for 75 pesos. His prices have gone up but he still has several excellent "Cheap Eats" meals. We have enough pulled pork left over for lunch tomorrow.
Billie Rose has been plugging along at many restaurants the past couple of years, from the New Orleans place by Espino's that closed, to Romano's that closed, and now to Los Faroles and the Longhorn. Her repertoire has expanded--I hadn't heard some of her songs before, and was glad to hear some of my favorites such as "Hush now, don't explain," and "Summertime" with a few comments interspersed in the last verse--"your mamma's good looking 'cuz she's got a plastic surgeon in both Beverly Hills and Houston." Her low notes, and songs that are mostly in lower registers, are lush and rich. Some of the high notes are a big jiggly, but the meaning comes through with honesty, pain and humor. You can feel the blues. I especially liked one in which she sings that she's "better off with the blues than you."
Don't come before 7:30--the late afternoon sun this time of the year is shining right into Keith's. We had to change tables to avoid the sun in our eyes. Keith was displaying an ostrich egg he'd just gotten, along with his first purchase of ostrich meat, which he is experimenting with to find the most tender, flavorful cooking method. He's now trying a citrus marinade and thin slicing on this very healthy meat. One ostrich egg equals 14 hen's eggs, he's found out, as he plays around with recipes.
Norma saw a pork loin on sale last week and cubed it for the crock pot with several kinds of fresh and dried chiles and other seasonings. She put some of the finely sliced meat and veggies into an omelet this morning--I bet we had the best breakfast being served in San Miguel today. We won't waste the money on a restaurant meal that Norma can cook better and cheaper, but Keith's ribs and pulled pork are better than hers so he knows we'll keep coming back.
We have so many restaurants to check out for "Cheap Eats" soon, while they're still in existence. Not a good time for new restaurants to open. I read in The News this morning that 2,000 Mexico City restaurants ordered to stop serving sit-down meals for the flu closures never opened back up again when the epidemic eased.
On our Living in San Miguel forum page I have the link and a translation of newspaper stories on the first suspected flu death in San Miguel--a 32-year-old woman who has had severe chronic heart problems for 14 years and who was already bedridden and expected not to live long when she came down with the flu and died Thursday. Her death certificate lists the cause of death as severe heart disease, not the flu.
Anyone with flu symptoms these days is first tested to see if the flu is Type A, an easy and fast test, and if the case is, a swab is sent on for definitive testing on whether the case is H1N1 flu. That testing takes awhile and there is a backlog. No one is sure the woman had H1N1 yet. So far there have been more than 80 deaths in Mexico from H1N1. This isn't over yet, though you wouldn't know there is still a problem from the way SMA looks today compared to two weeks ago.
The cats chewed up our face masks. Many food handling employees are still wearing them, though, and occasionally your grocery cart handle will be wiped with alcohol gel, a few token preventive measures. I hope we've all got this epidemic in perspective now, remembering that a typical flu season in the US results in something like 32,000 deaths. The 80 in Mexico in two months is a lot to the families involved. But far more people have been killed in car accidents in the same time and no one is insisting you give up driving.
Or smoking.
May 17, 2009--We celebrate all anniversaries, including our arrival in SMA in 2002, this time with a return to Tio Lucas; flu fears calming in SMA; seeing five movies in one weekend at La Luciernaga; responses on crime and noise in Mexico
We like to celebrate all anniversaries, birthdays, happy days, and so we didn't need much of an excuse Saturday night to go to Tio Lucas, one of the first restaurants we discovered when we arrived in San Miguel seven Mays ago. We were hoping Sybil Lee-English would be singing, but no such luck. We were treated like princesses, even though owner Max Altamirano hadn't seen us inside his restaurant in years (and he had no idea we'd written a book, everybody was treated like royalty).
It's pretty upscale--we looked for the less expensive items on the menu and came up with pepper steak for Norma, accompanied by a huge mound of steamed veggies, for 174 pesos, and osso bucco (called "bull calf shank" on the menu) for me for 142 pesos. We had leftovers to take home. Norma said it was the best pepper steak she'd had in SMA, and for sure it was the best osso bucco since I don't think I've ever had it in SMA before. We try to get menu items Norma doesn't already cook at home because that way we don't be disappointed if they're not as good as she makes.
Good jazz after 9 pm, the place was crowded, service was attentive but not intrusive, and Max himself goes table to table all night long to make sure everybody's happy. He and Bob Thiemann at Harry's, Felix at Tacos Don Felix, and Keith Thompson at Longhorn Smokehouse are all examples of how active involvement by the owner with customers helps make a restaurant succeed. This celebration also helped make up for missing our 30th anniversary dinner April 27 because Norma was sick.
Though in our daily lives the flu scare is over, when we go out we see health department posters in many places urging continued caution, some people are still wearing masks (though employees forced to wear them by their companies usually have them down under their noses), and at some stores like Mega the shopping carts are swiped with an antibacterial wipe. At the movies you're given a squirt of gel from the ticket taker before you get a chance to dip into your popcorn.
H1N1 has been confirmed in 38 countries now. Of course it has become a political issue, PRI and PRD charging it is a PANdemic. (The elections are July 5 and the country is aflood with political signs, especially the wall-sized ones springing up every day on every empty fence and building.)
While Mexico internationally is being praised for its fairly quick and complete responses to the WHO and CDC urgings, inside Mexico everyone who can be blamed is being blamed, as usual. See the 100+ news links and comments in the "Living in San Miguel" forum on the website for the complete story as it has unfolded.
Many articles are commenting on Mexico's many-tiered health care system, just as poorer people in the US are either not insured or get less thorough care at general hospitals and clinics, while richer US citizens get the best health care money can buy. Poorer Mexicans who suspected they had the flu crowded to the IMSS and Hospitals General where they overloaded the facilities. They often were given antivirals and sent home without any report being taken. Sometimes they just gave up in the long waits and went home undiagnosed and untreated. Thos who went to the best private hospitals were usually treated very thoroughly and quickly. Some 3,000 suspected cases in which samples were taken have yet to be tested for final confirmation.
So no one knows just how bad this flu still is and may yet become. The confirmed death toll in Mexico was 66 last I heard. Nine states out of 31 didn't open their schools last week, including Jalisco which includes Mexico's second largest city of Guadalajara, even though the order nationwide was that schools and institutions could reopen.
We've had good showers four days this week and are hoping the six-month rainy season has come a month early. It's already a bit cooler. April and May are our hottest summer months. The rains usually make our June-October period feel more like a late spring.
Five good movies are on at MM Cinemas in La Luciernaga mall this week and we were so thrilled we decided to see all of them this weekend. Usually we get one good one a month. Wednesday tickets are now 35 pesos, with INAPAM Mexican senior discount cards you never pay more than 40 pesos, and the usual nightly ticket price is 45 pesos.
"Los Secretos del Poder" should translate as "Secrets of Power" but the English title of the first movie we saw was "State of Play." Never heard of it before. It starred Russell Crowe, Helen Mirren, Ben Affleck and Jeff Daniels so it had to be good. It was--an investigative newspaper reporter (Crowe), and his publisher (Mirren) of a struggling renowned newspaper very much like the Washington Post just bought by profit-oriented new owners, and a congressman (Affleck) investigating a company very much like Blackwater made a story with unexpected plot twists all along the way.
Next we saw "Duplicidad," with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen both as former government spies. It had us so confused we sat there at the end just as stunned as some characters were. We kept thinking the movie was badly spliced because there was repetitive dialogue at several points--for a reason. If this one ever comes out on HBO we'll watch it again, looking for the clues we missed.
"Doubt" with Meryl Streep concerned about the possible pedophilia of priest Philip Seymour Hoffman was as excellent as we knew it would be. Kendal Butler, an oldtimer in SMA I miss a lot, had the nun's role in an SMA theatrical production of the play before Kendal died. Norma sided with the priest's character, I believed Streep.
This afternoon we're going to see "Milk." I remember the night Milk and the SF mayor were assassinated, and Itook part in the outpouring into the streets of LA in shock and protest. I'd come out in 1977 only because it now felt safe enough to be open without fear of being put into a mental hospital and lobotomized, a common "treatment" for lesbianism in the 1950s when I first suspected, back in grade school. (I did the research, hiding the books I was reading in the public library's adult section from everybody.) The assassination made me realize I still wasn't safe. I'm kind of bracing myself for that film, expecting it to hurt all over again.
Today I got an email from someone who used to live in Tijuana and who was upset by my comments on the four murders of US citizens in Tijuana last week. The four young people had come down to TJ to do the club scene. Their bodies were tortured in the same way drug cartels treat their victims. One of the tourists, all in their late teens and early 20s, all Mexican-Americans, had cocaine in her system. At least one of their friends told police that the group knew drug cartel people. How well did they know them? Were these just US tourists who got killed while doing the bar scene in TJ, or was something else going on? The investigators have already told the media that they have ruled out the possibility the case is innocent tourists being targeted, but the stories and news slants worldwide say that innocent tourists are being slaughtered in Mexico.
The person who complained that my report made it sound for sure as if the four were involved in drugs, as he repeated how unsafe TJ was, got the private response below from me. Some of this I've written about before, and I often get the reaction that I must have a black cloud over my head because of all that I, and Norma, have gone through in our lives. No, I just grew up in a poor area of Detroit, worked as a reporter in an inner-city African-American newspaper, never turned back from anything because of danger, and was on the front lines of a lot of potentially violent events, as a reporter and as a participant. Fearless, young, poor and stupid.
My response, which will be followed by another private response I wrote, the next one to someone worried about noise in San Miguel:
We saw "Gran Torino" yesterday. What a flood of memories. Clint Eastwood perfectly captured the racism of many older Detroiters. He could have been my Dad, but Eastwood's character was more courageous. My Dad had the guns but just ran and hid at any sign of trouble.
Tell me about living at risk in a city where there are drug gangs. I reported on more murders happening in Detroit and experienced it in LA and luckily just read about it in Phoenix since we lived in a seniors only RV park where the only thing we had to fear was other retirees. (One shot up an HOA board meeting and killed a member in Sun City, while a disgruntled HOA member in our own park tried to drown Norma for having raised the dues $10 a month so that the park could remain solvent. Even in white-bread gated senior centers there is murder potential.)
All this same kind of fear and murder goes down every day in LA and nobody says, don't come to LA. We would return home from a day out and there would be police helicopters overhead shining search beams down into our backyard and the adjoining hillside, so that we would turn around and drive away for a few more hours, knowing we could be shot or taken hostage if we dared leave our car and go into our own yard. Possibly the person being hunted would be hiding inside our house. We did have those five robberies and burglaries of our house in our last four years in LA. (We left in 1985. Silverlake is thoroughly gentrified by now.)
Gang members stood in our driveway in Silverlake and demanded $5 protection money from our guests and clients not to vandalize their cars. My sister refused and her windshield wipers were broken off and dirt poured down into the windshield vents. More than once Norma would be interviewing tax clients when we had the office in our home and we'd all have to drop to the floor at the sound of gunshots nearby. I could give you hundreds of names of innocent folks killed in the crossfire of gang warfare in LA and Detroit if I took the time to research. Remember the movie "Detroit 2000"--not the year, the number of murders expected one year. I was reporting on them.
I remember standing on a corner on the East Side of Detroit the year before the big riot of 1967, with SWAT cars crawling by bumper to bumper, the cops yelling at me because I was on the corner alone interviewing the young civil rights leader the police shouts said they wanted to kill. He was a former SNCC leader turned more aggressive on civil rights back in the days when the very words "Black Power" sent a chill down many white folks' spines.
Even the guy I was interviewing said, "You'll get killed too if we stay out here." We left to go to a church with a friendly pastor to talk, the cop caravan following us and waiting for us during the interview. They left me and followed him home when we were through. They finally did get him on what seemed like a trumped up charge and sent him away to Jackson state prison before the 1967 riot finally erupted.
I had the National Guard, young white suburbanites, spray the front of my brick apt building one night because somebody looking out a window lit a cigarette and the inexperienced National Guard boys thought it was gunfire. My apartment overlooked 10th precinct where most of those arrested the first hours of the riot were brought. There was a tank in my parking lot and I had to show ID to get into my own house. From my kitchen window I could have shot up the whole precinct. I saw the beatings going on in the station, and reported on them. I slept in the bathroom the five nights because it had at least two walls to stop bullets all around me. I worried more about overreaction by the young National Guard boys than from anyone rioting.
The first story on the 4 TJ murders said that their friends said they knew drug cartel people. That's more than one person having coke in her system. How many drug cartel people did you know while you were in TJ? So far every story I've read on US citizens being killed in these wars has turned out to be involved some way in drugs, except for a few people caught in gun crossfire, and for every one of those I can find bystanders gunned down in a Seven-11 robbery by some doper in the US. I'll match your Tijuana and raise you a Detroit and LA.
Now here's another private response I made to someone who is worried about moving to Mexico but is being told Mexico is so noisy she shouldn't do it. She asked me to rate the noise in our apartment on a scale of 1 to 10. I already posted this response on our forums, but for those of you who only read my blog, here it is:
Our apartment in Centro: usually 1, but when a car alarm goes off in a nearby parking lot, 10.
Many mornings at 6 am when fireworks are most likely to be set off to welcome the day: 10.
The three months or so when for some reason there were 34 chickens and roosters living in the parking lot: 10 (they were a food crop, not pets, and disappeared one day). None since.
No more cars have loud stereos than in the US, mostly weekend nights when the juniors come in from Mexico City with all their money.
Delivery trucks don't have loud speakers that your friends warned you about. But when a garbage truck comes, someone walks ahead announcing to get ready with your garbage with a specific bell. When the knife sharpener is coming he has a certain whistle to announce he's here. When the circus is in town, or when there's a political rally, cars with loudspeakers will wind through the city announcing the event.
Some blocks have an annoying roof dog who barks at everything. Feral cats may shriek outside your window. In the campos you may hear coyotes howling.
Fire crackers do go off all the time but it is almost always a specific celebration or holiday. That holiday may be personal--someone has hired someone to set off fireworks as a farewell to someone about to go on a journey, or to announce a birth or death or birthday or marriage--as well as for all the church, civic and national holidays.
A very romantic suitor, or an apologetic husband, will hire a mariachi band to come sing at the woman's window either at midnight or dawn. This also happens sometimes on Mothers Day. The whole neighborhood gets a treat and turns out to listen. If you're one who would put a pillow over your head instead, Mexico may not be for you.
Many churches use bells to announce the hours and quarter hours, and to give a half-hour heads up when a Mass is coming, then again at 15 to, and again at five minutes to mass to remind those with no watches to get there.
If you live near a club or events hall there will be loud music and parties every weekend night. When it is a major fiesta you will hear drums announcing a parade with Conchero dancers, and then the sound of their seashells jangling around their ankle bracelets. Two very special holidays a year the fireworks begin at 4 am and go to dawn--La Alborada, the dawn fireworks.
The Day of the Locos mid-June the parade of 7,000 costumed people dancing to stereos on trucks will wind through the entire city for about four hours. The entire city will be silent during Good Friday processions, except for the solemn drums setting the pace for marchers.
If you're lucky you'll get invited to the neighborhood parties, though they'll start at your bed time.
Have you never lived in a US city? It's no worse than Detroit, LA or Phoenix, except for more fireworks and church bells. In Detroit and LA it was gun shots instead. I'd rather have fireworks.
And in US cities it was also angry car horns and yelling at every traffic light. Drivers here are pretty polite.
Mostly it depends on your particular block--and a quiet area when you're researching a prospective home site could still get an evangelical church moving in with gospel singing several nights and all day Sunday. Less zoning restrictions in Mexico.
When kids get out of school anywhere there is loud chatter for awhile. If you're on a convenient bus route, the reverse side of that advantage is noise and exhaust. If you're by the libramiento, the main roads that circle the city, you'll hear Jack brakes on trucks coming downhill.
And then there are those damned beautiful parrots and white egrets, and the grackles hitting the trees at dusk. The parks can get pretty noisy with all those people having fun.
We don't even hear any of it any more. If you absolutely hate noise, stay home. As I've said in early messages, you have got to come check out SMA for yourself before moving here. Spend some time, get a feel for the city, see if it resonates with you. If not, well, SMA and Mexico are not for everybody.
We've come to love most of it. This is a joyous, alive city. Mexico is a vibrant, exhuberant country. You may not be able to afford to give your kid celebrating a birthday a car but you can shoot off a few fireworks to alert the world that something special is happening.
Cemeteries are quiet. Thriving cities with people of all ages are loud.
Carol Schmidt, Falling...in Love with San Miguel de Allende: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security
May 14, 2009--The crazy election season is upon Mexico, a potential danger to enthusiastic expats always ready to volunteer and "help;" a Mexican Train tournament; and mostly medical stuff
We've been going to one doctor after another, here and in Querétaro, the past few weeks and will give some updated doctor recommendations later. But right now I want to give my (purely personal) view on expat involvement in the political insanity going on all around us right now until the election July 5. (The wall-sized signs will remain unpainted for years afterward in many cases. I still see Manual Rosa wall signs from the 2006 mayoral campaign, especially in Col. San Antonio).
If you're one who can sit still quietly and observe, of course go to a political meeting and learn. I've gone to many in seven years and sat on my hands when I wanted to volunteer, or rather, Norma sat on my hands. I did advise one friend who I know would be jumping up, giving ideas, volunteering for committees, campaigning for the candidate, probably donating money to the campaign, to just stay home and stay out of trouble.
It is against the Mexican Constitution of 1917 for foreigners to interfere with Mexican politics, and you can get deported for giving money to a candidate, capaigning, going to a demonstration in support of a candidate, volunteering to help in any way. Quite possibly if you are telling a candidate what you think that candidate ought to do to better help the expat community, even if the candidate has asked for that opinion, you might be construed as inserting yourself into Mexican politics, shaping the campaign, "interfering." Of course a Mexican lawyer could give you a real interpretation. I'm no lawyer, I'm just sharing my impressions from what I've read and heard.
Penalty is immediate deportation, enough time to gather some personal effects, not even enough time to make good arrangements for your pets.
Now as with everything else in Mexico, what is seen as "interfering" by one official one day and place may and probably will be different from what another official calls "interfering" another day and place. Mexican politics are easing up, it's not like 1968 where university demonstrators were killed by the hundreds and probably thousands for protesting before the Olympics. After 71 years of the one-party dictatorial rule of the PRI that ended with Fox's election from PAN in 2000, Mexico is learning to live with open democracy.
But even today the IFE, the Mexican election commission, just ordered a Youtube video against a mayoral candidate in another state to be taken down. Search Youtube for Mexican election videos and see what's going up, as crazy as the ones during US elections. A prime example is one someone just sent me against Lucy Nuñez, mayoral candidate from a joint ticket of the conservative PRI, the left-leaning PRD, and the Green Party, however she can represent those diverse interests.
The video opens with someone throwing up, then when the photo of Lucy is shown there is a piercing scream, she is called a "Ratera"(thief) and the world will come to an end if she is elected! Watch it for laughs, like the old Reefer Madness films from the US '30s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhDxJnq2hCE. Will this video be allowed to stay on Youtube? Can anyone censor the internet? We'll see.
I can tell you that the campaign signs have only begun to erupt. Wait until just about every empty wall and fence in town is covered with political billboards. It was just as bad in the 71 PRI years when you would have thought there was a vigorous contest going on each election year, instead of pre-ordained election of the president hand picked by the outgoing president.
A political demonstration can turn in an instant. You may think you are just being an observer on the sidelines when suddenly you are right in the middle and possiby swept up in an arrest. The US State Department warnings on involvement in Mexican demonstrations make that point. I remember my civil rights, feminist, anti-war and gay rights demonstrations from the 1950's to... Hmmm, my last US political demonstration was in 2004 in San Francisco when we had an appointment to get married but the crackdown came before we could, so instead of getting married at City Hall we joined an anti-war demo that happened to be going on that day.
When I had a press card in Detroit I got swept up in several mass arrests but that little card got me out before the fingerprinting and photo stage. My ex-husband and I were in one of the huge antiwar demos in DC around 1970 and found ourselves hiding behind cars in an underground parking lot when police suddenly announced that anyone on the streets after 3 pm was under arrest.
There was no way for us to get back to the buses before 3 pm so we crept through parked cars, making sure our feet were hidden behind tires as police looked under cars trying to arrest the thousands of us still on the streets. I didn't have a valid press card for that one. Another time I was covering a Breakthrough/John Birch demo in Detroit and didn't notice the line had shifted and suddenly I was knocked to the ground by a guy whose name I still remember: Donald Lobsinger. Police recognized me on that one and only arrested him, another bit of luck.
So I am very aware that you can start out to be just a bystander at a political event and suddenly you are in the middle. I am very cautious these days. I don't want to be deported, I have noplace else to go anyway, and I respect the Mexican evolutionary process enough to let it go its own way, let Mexicans decide what Mexico should do and who it should elect. Once a new mayor is chosen, if that person wants expats' opinions, that will be wonderful. Luis Villarreal had many such meetings from 2003-06 that I attended.
We always came away embarrassed by many expats' ignorance of basic elements of Mexican culture, such as you don't confront someone, tell them they're wrong, boo a university expert, talk out of turn, ignore social pleasantries, make demands. If you've paid attention, or done any reading on Mexican social interactions, you are gracious, you find ways to state a problem that doesn't blame somebody outright (even if it is obviously their fault), you offer alternate solutions on how you and the person can solve this problem that happens to exist without their losing face. Remember, the shelf fell, the other person didn't overload it. Ojala, God willed it.
At some of those meetings called by Villarreal I remember an expat demanding he put a stop to truck noise on the Libramiento, even though the highway had clearly been there already when the expat bought the house. One person demanded SMA start a full recycling program immediately, and what should she do with her recycled garbage until then? How can we stop the fireworks, another asked. The attitude of so many expats was me, me, me, rather than, thank you for inviting us to share our concerns, and we will do so politely and try to understand your side and your primary concern which is for your citizens.
Now it is okay for other Mexicans to dump on other Mexicans--former President de la Madrid just called Salinas, the man he appointed to follow him in the PRI "elections" before PAN won, some terrible names, accusing him of stealing hundreds times more from the secret political slush fund than de la Madrid did. Fox is being called a thief for making extensive renovations to his ranch after he left office, as though as former President of Coca Cola he didn't have enough money of his own to make the renovations.
It is a long-standing tradition that politicians leave office with plenty of money. Corruption runs deep throughout Mexican history, Mexicans freely acknowledge that. It is part of the sometimes fatalistic Mexican philosophy. All you can trust is yourself, your family and friends, and nobody better disrespect you or them.
Okay, these are just my opinions. Go to a meeting and see for yourself, but please, don't be an Ugly American. And don't get deported by accidentally getting caught up into the campaigns!
On other matters in our past two weeks, Norma and I went to a Mexican Train tournament, which apparently is a trend sweeping the expat community here. We RV'd fulltime for 3 1/2 years and had our fill of Mexican Train, a dominos game. We'd pull into a new RV park and everyone would head for the clubhouse after dinner and play pinochle, do jigsaws, watch the TV never set to anything we wanted to see but majority ruled, or play Mexican Train. Never again, we vowed. But with friends you actually like, it can be fun.
Friends got to see Norma's accountant professional side when rules kept being changed and her table was called "the slow ones" and she reacted. Don't change rules in the middle of a game, and don't impose a penalty on their table for being "slow." Norma showed them, she won the entire tournament, a 200-peso prize, which we spent on dinner at San Miguel Brewery where the tournament was being held. We're not sure we'll ever be invited back again!
Other than that, the past two weeks have been mainly doctor visits. We were so glad to get back to Fitness International after the ten-day flu closures here that the first Thursday I went an hour on the treadmill and 25 minutes on the bicycle and Norma did all 85 minutes on the treadmill. Then we spent another half hour on the weights machines on the first floor. I never thought I'd be happy to be back at a gym!
And then the next day I was 30 minutes into my hour treadmill run, clipping along with my heartbeat at the recommended cardio level of 122 beats a minute, when suddenly the machine went blank on the heartbeat measurements, then shot up to 178!
I stopped, got off, rested, and didn't know what to do. We took a cab home and talked about it. Hospital or not? I've gone into Hospital General I think four times so far with rapid and irregular heart beat, and after four hours or so on an IV I'm sent home. My heart rate this time got back down to 110 on its own but never got lower, until the next morning. We called Dr. Alvarez, the only board-certified cardiologist in San Miguel, who is at the Instituto de Corazon and Hospital Angeles in Querétaro Wednesday mornings and Friday afternoons, so he wasn't available until Monday morning.
He told me Monday I should have gone to the hospital, and I should have insisted with the receptionist that I be put through to him immediately Thursday. After a bunch of tests, an examination of the echocardiogram and Doppler Dr.Maxwell ordered last November when this happened most recently, a new treadmill stress test, and a Holter 24-hour echocardiogram, he is changing my meds.
I told him I'd stopped the Cordarone given to regulate my heart beat after a previous hospitalization because my heart beat had gone down to 50, and the side effects listed on the internet made it sound like a really dangerous drug.
This made him stop in his tracks. He got out a drug reference book and started reading to me the side effects of a drug: terrible stuff, everything from jaundice to sudden death. Norma knew right away which drug's side effects he was reading: aspirin. Yes, that miracle drug has a scary list of side effects, too.
I told him I'd been PR director for the medical research programs at a UCLA hospital and he laughed, "You're the worst kind of patient. Dear sister, don't stop meds without talking to your doctor first. We'll adjust dose levels together."
I find out Monday what regimen he'll put me on, and then we'll go through a trial and error period to see what works out best. Both Norma and I really like this doctor. He even read every word of the single-spaced page of my complex medical history so that he could see my current problem in context.
His full name is Dr. Jorge Alvarez de la Cadena, at Hospital de la Fe, 152-2233. His hour-long visits have been 600-800 pesos, depending on what tests were done, and the Holter 24-hour EKG and the treadmill stress test were each 1,500 pesos. Can you get a treadmill stress test done by a cardiologist in the States for $112 USD?
We've been taking the bus back and forth to Querétaro a lot the past two week, too, for Norma's allergy problems. Dr. Gonzalez at Hospital Angeles determined she has no underlying lung problems (after quitting smoking in 1981 she still feared lung cancer could show up some day). Now she will be seeing Dr. Lilian Hernandez Garcia, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Hospital de la Fe, for followup on her chronic sinusitis, upon Dr. Gonzalez's recommendation.
I know many expats like to share doctor experiences and recommendations, which is why I went into this detail. Our address book keeps getting more and more names under "doctor." Bette Davis: growing old's not for sissies.
Carol Schmidt, Falling...in Love with San Miguel de Allende: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security
May 2, 2009--a shortie on our perhaps premature escape!
We had to go to Chelo's pharmacy today. Saturday, for a quick diagnosis and medicine of a minor ailment--yes, we rely on Chelo for stuff we know is really minor, and once we have the right medicine from her we go to Guadalajara Farmacia and other discount pharmacies for the refills.
We were happily surprised to see so many people walking on Insurgentes, Hernandez Macias, Mesones and Canal. Out of probably hundreds, only three had masks on, and they were younger Mexicans. Those streets were filled with cars, too--not much for a usual holiday weekend, but a lot more cars than earlier this week.
I think we're all starting to get optimistic that the worst is over--and actually, since there have been no confirmed cases in SMA and this state, that we escaped. Some stories warn against getting overly confident--no one still knows exactly what lies ahead with this flu--but it seems possible Mexico over reacted on the side of caution.
Now if we had under reacted and the flu had turned into a real pandemic, Mexico would be blamed from one pole of the globe to the other, and the final economic outcome would have been far worse.
To have over reacted and caused severe economic hardship now was for sure the lesser of two evils, and the better for Mexico's global reputation, though there are those who are blaming Mexico anyway. Some want to call it the Mexican flu, not H1N1.
Did you see the story I cited in the flu thread on our Living in San Miguel forum from the Wall Street Journal that just maybe this flu didn't even start in Mexico but on a US pig factory farm? It was based on some research printed in Science journal. I'm hoping that's what happened.
Anyway, it was good to be out and about.
And then that little taste of freedom this afternoon made us even antsier about staying in tonight. How did we ever survive snowbound winters in rural Michigan?
Since Tuesday's trip to Querétaro to see Norma's pulmonary doctor that I last blogged about, we have been in the house until our walk this afternoon--almost four days inside. I did get a lot done on our next books, but we were both stir crazy. As an additional flu safeguard we'd given our housekeeper ten days off with pay, until Monday the 11th, so we haven't even had her unbelievable gossip to astound us. (The floors are starting to get cruddy--we're going to have to break down and do some serious housecleaning ourselves soon. Have we forgotten how? To think that only seven years ago we detested the very idea of having a part-time housekeeper.)
So we walked over to Vivoli Cafe for roast pork in cranberry and caramelized onion sauce and steamed veggies for me, seafood pasta for Norma. It came to under 300 pesos, or $22 USD for a very nice dinner for two, justified to us since we hadn't spent a cent in nearly four days. And we hadn't splurged on our anniversary dinner because Norma was sick, and our Social Security checks for May have come in. Triple celebration! It felt as if we had escaped jail, even if there had been no guards at our door.
We weren't the only ones who were walking around in obvious joy to be out. If we'd seen a couple hundred people this afternoon on the streets with only three in flu masks, tonight the only masks were on restaurant employees. A couple recognized us on the street and we almost danced around, all of us so happy to be outside. They weren't wearing masks, either. (Norma and I had brought ours in our pockets just in case we were confronted by somebody, or if Norma's allergies had kicked in and she'd started to cough.)
If this afternoon there were many cars in the streets, tonight there were very few. I took photos of a totally empty intersection at Hernandez Macias and Mesones looking up to Canal. (All my photos I've taken but not edited and resized since our beach trip now total in the thousands and I'm overwhelmed by the task, which is why there have been no new photos in our photo gallery on this website.)
I've been posting up a storm on the flu thread on our Living in San Miguel forum elsewhere on this website, and all the articles I've posted still don't have any definitive answers on such questions as where did the flu really start, how bad will it get globally, is it really slowing down in Mexico, did President Calderon react wisely in shutting down the country so fast or was his reaction too slow, what will be the political fallout from it all, etc.
We may be way too premature in leaving our homes and dropping our flu masks, but it feels tonight as if many in San Miguel now believe it's over. We'll see soon enough.
Carol Schmidt, Falling...in Love with San Miguel de Allende: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security
April 29, 2009--What a difference six days makes; you can't even get into a positive rut in Mexico--no more gym, no more movies; Norma's coughs send Mexicans into panic; a new pulmonary doctor in Queretaro; a foiled 30th anniversary; Dragon Chino restaurant is now one of our favorites
Monday afternoon we were bopping along on the treadmill at Fitness International, nearing the 50-minute mark, when Channel 3 on SMA cable TV news flashed that four unconfirmed cases of the new flu were under investigation in San Miguel: three at the IMSS clinic in La Lejona and one at Hospital de la Fe. Our town was now involved in the flu epidemic that had been on the fringes of our attention for a week--I see I didn't even mention it in my last blog.
By the time we cleaned up we decided to walk over to Mega and pick up a few weeks of staples and prepare to hunker in if need be. Who knew just how hard the flu would hit SMA? We were well aware as we shopped that we had the luxury to stock up.
At Mega we ran into a woman whose teen was just sent home from school with the admonition to stay in the house until at least May 6--all schools, public and private, were now closed for seven days. Mega was quickly filling up with those same kids who had been told to stay in the house and not go to any public places, but here they were, on vacation. Mega employees all had on flu masks, and so did a few customers. Expats had been joking when we met, putting our arms over our faces, shunning our usual kisses and hugs, chit-chatting about the latest flu news from Mexico City. And now it was here, even i |
