Carol Blogs San Miguel de Allende

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September 2, 2010--A late update first. Then, my aunt is back home, despite our concerns; getting two electrical meters pays off; finally I have my inmigrante (formerly FM2) renewal card; Mega makes new pitch to luxury-loving expats with fresh fish, shellfish, imported cheeses and 300 more items costing as high as 600 pesos a kilo; beyond expectations organic foods festival in Parque Juarez every Saturday 9 am-2 pm; Sibyl English concert enriches San Miguel; after-party at El Ochenta is a pleasant surprise; some views on Medicare coverage extending to expats some day

Added Friday morning--I got a call from my aunt's three friends, also around 88, who have been checking in on her every day, asking us for help. My aunt just isn't doing well at home. She isn't eating right, she won't take her pills from the orderly daily pill containers, she's wearing long-sleeved sweaters and can't figure out how to turn the air conditioning on when temps are a humid 90-100 F in Detroit, and she can't figure out the microwave and hasn't eaten the meals she's been left every day.

In fact the microwave has never been plugged in--the coiled cord and plug are still taped to the bottom--so she has been lying for years saying she uses the microwave all the time. She never did figure out the upright washer/dryer, though I spent a long time with her on it in 2008. Not the coffee maker, either.

Her friends have begged us to come to Detroit--and our last two trips there in 2008 to check on my aunt cost us $2,500 USD each. We just don't have it right now. We have to talk to the rehab center social worker and doctor and her attorney to see what can be done. We were sure last week she needed to go into assisted living rather than back home, but we had no say, the rehab center staff said she was ready to go home. Wrong. And so our lives are back in chaos. We just ran into another expat friend here who'd come back to SMA from weeks getting her mother moved into assisted living and closing down her mother's home. She was totally frazzled. So many of us in our 60s and 70s are facing the same problem--or worried about the same fate for ourselves.

Now back to my Sept. 2 blog:

After weeks in the hospital and in a rehab center recovering from her three days on the floor in her condo unable to get up before she was found, my 87-year-old aunt is back in her condo as of Tuesday.

She refused to go to any assisted living facility, including the wonderful one in San Miguel, www.cielitolindoassistedliving.com, or one my sister found close to her in Dallas, or the one affiliated with the rehab center where she is now. She may even refuse to let into her house the physical therapist, nurse and daily assistant she is supposed to call to have regular visits to her house--if she calls them for appointments at all.

I wonder if she will wear the panic button necklace she is supposed to order? I do now have medical power of attorney, but the only way anyone can override her desires and insist she go to a safer living situation is if my sister and I go to court and ask that we be appointed full guardians. No one at the hospital thinks we should do this yet.

We also cannot insist that she not drive any more, though we have found out that lately she has been seen by friends driving through stop signs and using the passing only lanes. She lives by a grade school; I can only picture kids in those intersections. She told the last doctor that I had asked to do something about her driving that she had been driving without an accident for 70+ years. She stormed out at the very suggestion she at least take the Triple A insurance classes that help elderly drivers compensate for slower reaction times.

Turns out she has had many minor car accidents, her friends have since told me. Back in pre-WWII years when she first got her license, the first time she drove her friends to school she drove up over the curb and almost into the Detroit River. They vowed to never let my aunt drive them anyplace again. So much for her perfect driving record.

I feel totally helpless and anxious about what is to come now that she is home, and there is nothing I can do about it. She won't leave her familiar northeast Detroit/St. Clair Shores area, which I can understand. The Mexican or Dallas skyscapes alone would be disconcerting if you've only lived among lush green trees and lawns and the Great Lakes nearby. She has a few friends in the same age range who have been friends for 80 years, since grade school! My aunt is probably as important to them as they are to her. This is where she wants to remain, and so she shall.

How many other expats in San Miguel, and those reading this from the US and Canada, are facing the same situations, for our relatives or ourselves? Several women here who live alone have told me that their worst fear is experiencing what my aunt went through. We ran into another friend who had just returned to SMA after weeks getting her mother into assisted living; she was in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion from the experience.

We don't have to go back to Detroit, at least not now. And so we can resume our lives, though a big part remains on hold, awaiting every long-distance phone call. "What fresh hell?" Norma and I say to each other each time our Vonage phone rings.

As I blogged earlier, our electrical bill soared and so we had an electrician install a second electrical meter for our house in a different name. Now we are in no danger of going back into the dreaded higher rate, which we slipped into when we used more than 500 KW a two-month billing period or 3,000 KW a year. Now with our appliances balanced between the two meters, our base rate has already slipped back into a lower rate range. We thought it would take a year to readjust. Instead of more than $200 USD every two months, we're already back into the $80 every two months range.

Another government encounter: I finally received my new wallet-sized plastic card that is my renewed inmigrante (formerly FM2) asimilado visa. The new online application and renewal procedures under the May 1, 2010 Mexican Migration Manual are actually simpler than before, and they're supposed to do away with anyone's need to use a paid helper for their visas.

But I would be the one to mess up. I went to the correct website, http://setram.inami.gob.mx:8080/solicitudes-web/estancia.html, which is listed in our forums and on www.rollybrook.com, with clear and easy instructions on how to fill out the online form. But instead of struggling with the Spanish page, I tried to find the right English language version. It really isn't complete and easy to use, it is better to follow along on the Spanish language page.

Somehow I got onto an English language page that started out with the first question messing me up. It asked for my first name.

Now on the Spanish language page I'd noticed that the first request was for your last name, which meant Schmidt. Don't even get into the question of English language middle names versus Spanish language mothers' maiden names, which get confused in so many Mexican forms. I'm down as Señora Lucy or Carolina in so many data bases instead of under Schmidt.

I had a queasy feeling that putting Carolyne, my full legal first name, down in that space was going to mean trouble. But there it was, the online form asked for my first name.This was the English form, surely the form makers understood what "first name" means for English speakers. And I continued with the rest of the form and took down the file number I was given and went down to Immigration.

Surprise, my file couldn't be found, it was under Carolyne, and the whole thing was thus wrong. The official at the desk just shook his head in disgust at me. The new process is supposed to be simpler. I'm supposed to be one who knows how to manage these things.

He handed me a sheet of paper in Spanish of all the requirements, and as I was haltingly sounding out the first one and making my clumsy translation he grabbed the paper back from me and slowly and patronizingly told me all the requirements. I knew them, of course, I just was flustered, and I decided to give up and just go across the street to the escritorio público and let him figure it all out.

I was going to have to go to him anyway for my five infantil sized photos for the new card. For my original FM2 last year I had to get the larger sized photos. First I went to a photographic studio where they did beautiful shots of me, from the front with hair slicked back and no jewelry or glasses, then right profile, to what the studio said were the exact measurements.

But those pretty shots weren't accepted at INM that year--my chin to forehead measurement was off a fraction of a millimeter.

The replacement photos at the studio at no charge were also not accepted--the teeniest wisp of hair had drifted onto my forehead.

So after spending 250 pesos at that studio for pretty shots last year, I went to the escritorio público and got shots that were accepted the first time around, even though I looked horrid in them.

This year I wasn't fooling around. I went to the escritorio público for my photos the first time, as well as to have him clean up my application.

He didn't even need to put a headband on me to draw my hair back from my face. I'd just had a haircut that left me with such short hair no hair could even think of falling onto my forehead.

Now the card photos can be in color, and mine didn't turn out half bad, even though my new haircut makes me look as if I have a pointed head. It looks as if I'm wearing a jaunty elf's cap the way my hair goes in a weird ridge.

Norma's photos look worse than mug shots. She got the dreaded headband and she obeyed when they said no smile, so she looks as if she is scowling as well as scalped. I let the tiniest smile escape just as the shutter was snapped and my photos look almost decent. Other than my pointy head.

The escritorio público was so reassuring as he held my hand and helped me recapture my ego. He said not to worry about the incorrect file number floating around somewhere in some Mexican data base. Right. Of course I am worried that one day it will pop up and some Mexican official will decide I don't exist as Schmidt, Carolyne, I'm Carolyne, Schmidt, and my visa has expired, or something equally critical.

When I took my completed application over to Immigration, I got my new file number and password to check on when my visa card would be completed. But I was also told to just come in ten days later. Which I did, without checking online.

After the usual hour's wait at Immigration, i was told my application wasn't complete. Because I have work papers there had to be a sentence in my cover letter explaining exactly what work I did. Back to the escritorio público for a sentence to be added explaining that I wrote, published and sold books and wrote articles for publications and websites. No charge--the escritorio admitted it was his mistake.

Back to Immigration, where the application was accepted once more. And this time my visa card was done in four days. I didn't even think about checking online and maybe seeing my two file numbers were creating mayhem. I just breathed deeply and went to Immigration in trust, and there it was, my renewed inmigrante, now in card form.

For almost everyone, the new online process is much simpler and they get through it faster and easier and don't need any paid help. For some of us, there's always help, at least in communities with large expat populations and Mexicans eager to help us. Make fun of me for needing someone to hold my hand, it's okay.

So much is going on in San Miguel, and we're not getting to see all we want. I'm posting a few photos in the Gallery of this website, in the San Miguel Scenes album, of, first, the Chamber Music Festival concert out in the Jardin in which the Synergy Brass Quarter, playing for a fee later that night. performed for free in the afternoon. They were accompanied by four new mojigangas--giant paper machie puppets--depicting heroes of the Bicentennial.

The mojigangas are appearing every Friday and Saturday at 8 pm in the Jardin as part of a reenactment of the events leading up to the Mexican war of Independence from Spain, launched September 15, 1810. At 9 pm weekend nights there is a light show and images cast on the walls depicting the tale of Independencia. It's supposed to be excellent and of very high quality. We haven't been able to see both events yet, but the shows run through October, so we'll make a point of catching them soon.

I added another photo in San Miguel Scenes of a tourist policeman on horseback, riding down a Centro street that should be bustling with tourists this time of year, and it was almost empty.

I also have a couple of photos in the San Miguel Scenes album of our Gallery of the latest efforts of Mega to capture the gourmet gringo market even more. This time on August 27-29, Mega featured 300 imported and gourmet items, many for tasting.

We didn't trust the sample cups of lettuce with new gourmet salad dressings, though--would the greens have been pre-soaked in Microdyn?

Some of the fresh fish and shellfish and some of the imported cheeses were more than $50 USD a kilo! Probably similar quality at gourmet shops in the US would have also been $22 USD a pound, too, so the prices really weren't all that outlandish. And the high-end Wal-Mart, Superama grocery store near Querétaro, also has goumet items in that price range, and expats all ooh and aah at Superama and buy like mad.

But it was a shock to see a lobster on ice in our Mega at 689 pesos a kilo, and a European blue goat cheese for 899 pesos a kilo. The highest price was for duck pate foie gras at 1,350 pesos a kilo! And then there was a complete smoked pork leg, not on ice, probably ten kilos, for around 9,000 pesos, about $750 USD! I was told by one worker that the new items would continue, but I can't imagine there being enough expats willing to buy a fresh lobster or foie gras every day to make it worthwhile to keep stocking these items. We've been burned too often with spoiled meats from Mega. We'll see.

We did taste a lovely smoky spread in the ceviche section that we were told was sierra. At a dictionary we found that was sawfish. In Mazatlan we fell in love with what was called marlin, though it was a smoked roll of assorted fishes, including tuna. If the sierra is back the next time we go to Mega we may splurge on it. It was something like $16 US a kilo, not really that much, since no one could eat 2.2 pounds of a dense, rich pate. If anyone knows what a sierra fish really is, if it''s no a sawfish, please let me know.

In another food event, we went to our first Organic Food Fair at Parque Juarez, which happens every Saturday, 9 am to 2 pm. We'll be returning every Saturday we can. Our expectations weren't high. But there were dozens of booths, some of them from the expected organic food shops in SMA like Via Organica, Natura, Panaderia Casanova, and Quesa de Luna. We also enjoyed the displays from small Mexican farmers without SMA shops, presenting homemade jams and jellies made of unusual fruits, or their own homegrown baby veggies and herbs, or breads we'd never seen before.

What we did buy was a 50-peso loaf of sourdough that tasted pretty close to that from San Francisco, and we bought many little delicacies for our lunch. One stand had Oaxacan tamales steamed in banana leaves. Another had huaraches, a thick tortilla-like base shaped like the sole of a shoe, layered with beans and then any of a half dozen toppings, including chicken mole. They were 20 pesos, a steal. We shared a 12-peso enchilada from La Buena Vida bakery which is located inside Los Golondrinas courtyard across from the US Consular Agent office and Belles Artes. Next we split an heirloom tomatoes pizza slice from Via Organica, and a few other delicacies. Definitely worth visiting, if you haven't discovered it yet.

Another high point of our week was Sibyl English's concert at the Teatro Angela Peralta August 26. Love that woman's voice! She took the simplest of classics and made them her own, even if you've heard them a hundred times before by other singers. I usually grimace when I see "Begin the Beguine" and "Besame Mucho" on a song list; I don't like either. But Sibyl did a little scat, a little improv, and I enjoyed both songs. She teased the audience that she had worked so hard on learning a Spanish language song and please be forgiving, and then she sang it perfectly, far as I could tell. The audience loved it and told her she'd aced it. So she did a total of four Spanish language songs out of 12--pretty good for a Southern girl from Charlotte who had never spoken a word of Spanish until a year or two ago.

My favorite was her closer, "Stormy Weather," a tribute to Lena Horne, and Lena would have been proud of the way Sibyl took the song to new heights and depths. Afterward Sibyl hosted a party at El Ochenta, what I thought was a luxury restaurant next door to the Peralta at 80 Mesones. I'd never seen a single customer in the restaurant whenever we'd walked by. But it was jammed that night, and we found that they actually have some fairly inexpensive items on the menu. We ordered the fish tacos at 80 pesos and were expecting many two tacos, since the menu said tacoS, plural. Surprise, there were four on a big rectangular platter with a chipolte mayo and pico de gallo. We vowed to return to El Ochenta if only for more of those Baja style tacos. A table mate was devouring the Chinese wonton dumplings as well.

We haven't been going to many new restaurants of any price level lately. We have our favorites--see my list in the forums--and are reluctant to try someplace else where we don't know what we'll get, when there are 15 or so we love and trust to be delicious and (mostly) consistent. We need to broaden our outings more. So much to do in San Miguel, we can't possibly try everything new.

Meanwhile, one issue back in the US of great political interest to all expats is the campaign to expand Medicare coverage to US citizens living abroad. Right now there are only a only times Medicare will pay for health care out of the US, such as cases where the closest hospital to a US citizen needing hospitalization is in Mexico. Paul Frist has been leading an international campaign to get Medicare coverage extended to expats in Mexico in a pilot project, and he spoke in SMA Monday, at a 150-peso a head fundraiser for his campaign.

I wasn't able to attend but Paul Lambert gave permission for me to copy his report on the meeting. I'm reprinting it here from our forums since this is of such interest to all of us:

I went to the Americans for Medicare in Mexico meeting expecting to be bored but learned a lot, especially the ways in which events are converging to make this more and more likely - but not in the next couple years but probably 5-10. It's seems not if, but when.

In no order, they are:

o The Health care Reform Act established a commission which sets up in 2013 which has the power to do a Demonstration project of Medicare in Mexico (MIM), without Congressional approval;

o Unions with large Hispanic workers are in favor of MiM because their Mexican workers want to retiire in Mexico;

o There are Republicans who relate well to the fairness issue: we paid in, we still pay taxes and we deserve to get the benefits regardless of where we live;

o There are European precedents that show that cross border medical care is practical;

o There are three large US insurance companies already working in Mexico - Cigna, Aetna & Blue Cross - so the infrastructure for the intermediary pay system is already here and doesn't need to be an expensive proposition;

o Mexican insurance companies are in favor because they would like to get a piece of the Medicare market;

o The Mexican accreditation system is moving toward the US model by 2011 for private hospitals and 2013 for public ones - 9 hospitals are already US accredited and 23 more are in the process and the newest hospitals have to waitseveral years to have the statistics to apply;

o Mexico, while not allowing large malpractice claims, like the US, has an arbitration system in place;

o Some medical companies are reviewing the possibility of setting up Internet Tele-clinics where tests would be done by a Mexican doctor or nurse under the supervision of an US Medicare doctor and the total exam billed to Medicare; and,

o There are 18 members of Congress who will co-sponsor a MiM bill if it comes up while others are reviewing a possibility of setting up an emergency system where Medicare will pay for hospitalization and doctors in case of an emergency or a voucher system.

So thanks to Americans for Medicare in Mexico, Paul Crist, Democrats Abroad and Dr. Jose-Luis Gallegos for such an information lecture.

Paul Lambert

I'm less optimistic that we will ever see an expansion of Medicare coverage into Mexico and other countries in our lifetimes. The anti-Mexico mood of many in the US, and the move to dismantle Medicare and Social Security entirely and let the stock market take over seniors' economic futures, and the difficulties of bringing Mexican doctors and hospitals into alignment with US health care practices, make such a switch impossible, as I see it.

Even to save money, most politicians wouldn't dare to support something that would be seen as benefiting Mexico and expanding Medicare.

And those of us who have left the US and still want our cake? Love it or leave it, and we left--that's what many voters would say to expats. Live with your choice.

A forum member is right now trying to settle a problem with his Medicare Advantage program, which was terminated when he changed his address with Social Security and Medicare was informed. The red tape on the US side is formidable; add to that the notorious Mexican bureaucracy.

But Paul's report on the meeting makes it sound as if some progress is being made in this direction. Of course we'd all be thrilled if it happens!

Expats also had the opportunity last week to hear a panel presentation on the SMA Hospice and health care in San Miguel. The program was aimed at newbies and I've reported much of the information on this website before, but I'll write up the meeting soon for a review here.

Now back to worrying about my aunt. She sounded great on the phone a few minutes ago. We'll keep checking on her as best we can from here.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

August 21, 2010--Our lives are on hold after my aunt falls and isn't found for three days; why expats move back NoB; our top 15 SMA restaurants; updates since last blog report on visa changes

Shortly after my last blog post, my 87-year-old aunt in Detroit, whose only relatives are my sister in Dallas and myself, fell in her bedroom and got wedged between the bed and the door. She couldn't get up for three days until her childhood friend, worried because my aunt hadn't answered her phone, came by on the pretense that she'd take my aunt to Sunday dinner. She has a key to the house, and when she saw three days' newspapers on the porch, she called 911. An ambulance took my aunt to the hospital where her friend was told that if she'd been another day, my aunt would have died.

After rehydration and all the expected heart and brain tests to try to find out why she had fallen, my aunt was transferred to a rehabilitation facility where physical therapists are trying to build up her strength to the point where she may be able to live on her own again. But the staff says that she will need a fulltime caregiver, or a move to assisted living, which she has resisted. She was still driving, and now we hear that she has been seen running stop signs and driving in the passing only lane and shouldn't be driving. Living on your own without being able to drive is almost impossible, at least in most cities. She is always shocked when I tell her most cab rides in San Miguel are around $2 USD.

My aunt is having to come to terms with a lot of things, and a staff meeting Tuesday will determine whether the social worker should start trying to convince her to go to assisted living. Whether that will be in the Detroit area where her half-dozen childhood friends can continue to see her and everything is more familiar, or whether it is in the Dallas area near my sister, or some other alternative.

Also in the past few weeks I've had to get the legal medical power of attorney issue straightened out--for many days I couldn't get a word of information from the hospital or home because of a technicality. My aunt's lawyer finally drew up the papers correctly. Getting information from any US medical facility is always difficult, even if you're right there. Tell them you're in Mexico and see how cooperative they are! You know anyone who moves to Mexico is loco!

So that is where my attention has been the past few weeks, and where it will be until after that Tuesday conference meeting on her condition, and where it will be until September 1 which is her tentative date to leave the rehab facility, and where it will be until my aunt is settled someplace and we can feel comfortable about her care.

Remember how when we were younger we thought the commercial, "I've fallen and I can't get up," was kind of funny? Now I'm just hoping my aunt can figure out how to use a panic button in case she does fall when she is alone and still can't get up, even with the rehab exercises. The doctors say it is likely. It's probably every older person's worst nightmare. Even those of us in couples still worry about being the one left, and then where would we go? Will we be able to stay in San Miguel the rest of our lives as most of us want? I talked about this in a forum post a few days ago, and I'll copy it here.

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Several expat couples have recently moved back to the US, for reasons such as medical care that will be paid by Medicare in the US, or just being fed up with the hassles of living in Mexico. As a guy wrote in a letter to the editor of Atención recently, the city just installed 20 topes (speed bumps) on the way to his house out by Cieneguita. How many topes is too many to finally be the last straw, he asked? Not one little hassle but a cumulative wearing down of little hassles can break some expats' delight in discovering Mexico.

Others of us of course find the hassles usually amusing and they keep us young in mind--take nothing for granted! Find new ways to do things! Learn to adjust! Don't be stuck in old ways! We gripe to each other and finally one will say, "Where do we live again?" and we'll laugh and point out something we love about this place that makes up for it. Or we'll remember that the US or Canada had equal problems and annoyances, we shouldn't idealize past homes as places where everything was always perfect at all times, either.

Someone sent me this link to an article in a magazine called Escape from America, dealing with why some expats don't last long abroad. The writer is in Panama and the experiences are about Panama expats, but they apply equally to those of us in Mexico.

In short, there are four main reasons why expats leave. The first two are: 1) unrealistic expectations that they have found paradise while no place is paradise, and 2) unwillingness to accept a new country for what it is instead of always saying their new country OUGHT to do something the way it was done back home, or asking continuously, WHY do they do that? The ways we used to do things may not be the only or best way to do things, no matter where or how we live now.

The third reason is investing unrealistically, such as throwing all their money into a new business or big house, without thinking about whether such a plan would even be wise back in the US. The saying goes, to make a million in a new business, start with a billion.

The fourth reason is that some people are just unhappy anyplace they are. You bring your baggage when you come.

Here's the link to the article:

http://www.escapefromamerica.com/2010/08/real-estate-investing-casco-antiguo-panama/

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Another forum post I made recently that deserves copying, for the sake of those who only read the blog and not the forums, is on my favorite restaurants, which someone asked me for. Here they are:

For our favorite restaurants of all price ranges, we keep going back to these 15.

Harry's New Orleans restaurant, fantastic brunches Sat and Sunday for 75 pesos and up that include small mimosas, a biegnet, corn nut muffin and bread, butter and marmalade, fruit plate, and unusual favorites like poached eggs on creamed spinach and artichoke hearts, or salmon croquettes. For dinners we like the fried oysters platter and the andouille sausage burger, but the menu is huge and we like many items. It is the most consistent restaurant in town, IMO. The singles scene bar is packed for happy hours, but we go for the food and hide out in the booths in the right rear. It's not just for gringos--count the number of Mexican customers, many from DF on weekends.

Keith's Longhorn Steakhouse, Salida de Celaya next to Pemex near Stirling Dickinson, our favorite comfort food--pulled pork sandwich with a side and chips for 75 pesos, filet mignon wrapped in bacon with a big baked potato and salad for 100 pesos on Thursday nights, chicken fried steak on Tuesdays, many more specials, best ribs in town, live music many weekends. Keith is a sweetheart.

Tacos Don Felix is open Fridays and Saturdays 6-midnight and Sunday 2 to 9, www.tacosdonfelix.com. They run the cafeteria at a big high school and started out their own place as a little taco stand under a tent a few years ago. They became so popular that they turned their first floor of their house into a restaurant and it is wonderful. Try the seven assorted tacos platter for 85 pesos, or chicken enchiladas for 65 pesos, and the mantecada ice cream (vanilla, prunes, pine nuts, but don't reject it until you try it).

La Posadita, on Cuna de Allende a half block from the Parroquia, up two flights of stairs to the roof for a beautiful view, great pozole for 85 pesos, good Mexican food overall, not too expensive, and then there's that view.

The Food Factory in Fabrica Aurora, menu on chalkboard, a great Mexican passion shrimp and red/white/green pasta, a platter full of assorted grilled meats, a Vietnamese platter. Lettuce wraps are very salty, we think.

OKO Vietnamese noodle, across from Mega in the small strip mall. Excellent pad thai.

Cafe de la Parroquia, Jesus 11 by El Tecolote bookstore, very popular breakfast spot, a dozen cheap eats on the menu, open Sunday until 2 for brunch, until 4 pm other days except Monday. At night Francoise's daughter turns it into La Brasserie, a decent evening meal place.

On Salida a Celaya two doors north of Telemex is a hidden little place called Carmen's, open noon to around 4 M-F, best cheap eats in town, a 35-40 peso platter that includes an entree like chile relleno or enchiladas plus rice, beans, a steamed veggie and bit of salad, tortillas and salsas, and a fruit ade. You only know it's open when there's a yellow sign out front that says, Rica Comida Casera, tasty homemade meals.

China Dragon on Salida a Celaya almost to Mega has the best Chinese food in town, we think. We often split the sizzling shrimp broccoli platter.

Cafe Monet, Zacateros 83, unhappy hour 7-11 am with breakfasts from 30 pesos, lunch and dinner until 9 pm, great oatmeal and cinnamon rolls. Most beautifully decorated inexpensive restaurant in town.

For an expensive anniversary splurge we like the Sunday breakfast buffet for 185 pesos, 9 am to 1 pm, at the Antigua Villa Santa Monica, behind Parque Juarez on Fray Jose Guadalupe Mojica 22, 152-0451 for reservations.

Vivolé Cafe at Hernandez Macias 66, 152-0045, has many two for one hours for entrees, too. Their eggplant parmesan and calamari are good, and we love their lunch salads with grilled chicken for around 70 pesos. We eat far too much of the foccacio with olive tapenade starter.

Bugambilia on Hidalgo north of Insurgentes has the best chiles en nogado all year long. Definitely try them--poblanos stuffed with a meat and raisins filling, a crushed walnuts cream sauce, and sprinkled with pomegranate seeds for green, white and red, the Mexican flag colors so it's called the national dish. Other places sell the dish only in September for Independencia. Beautiful garden setting, often live guitar music in the background.

A few doors away on Hidalgo just south of Insurgentes is Aqui es Mexico La Fonda, a small place upstairs part of a small hotel, with three 45-peso comida corridas (a complete meal of the day), our favorite being the chile relleno special. Cute place.

Hecho en Mexico on Ancha de San Antonio, same block as the Instituto, is another expat favorite. We like their big Greek salad with grilled chicken. Many people like their burgers and onion rings, and their huge brownies with ice cream.

That's 15. There are many other good and even excellent restaurants in SMA, but those are the ones we go back to the most. Harry's, Keith's, Tacos Don Felix, and La Posadita are our top four.

Of course we have the cappuccino mocha frappe for brunch in the Mega coffee bar the most of any meal out! That's where we love to meet and greet all our friends who are doing the same thing. Starbucks is second in that category. (Too bad for those who think it is terrible to patronize a franchise owned by a local Mexican woman whose family has owned the building where the Starbucks is located for hundreds of years. She happens to love Starbucks, too!)

Consistency is a problem with most restaurants, not just in SMA, so someplace we recommend might have an off night--don't think we're crazy if you go there that off night!

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When we can concentrate, we're working on the one-year update of The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico. A few more clarifications have come up on issues raised at the July 30 meeting at the Biblioteca with officials of INM and SMA Consular Agent Ed Clancy. Here are the emails to and from Clemente Villalpando, the INM director in SMA, in response to those questions, also copied from my forum posts for the benefit of those who only read my blog and not the forums:

First, here's the DEFINITE answer on 18 months vs 2 years out of MX on FM2 before losing it.

I emailed Clemente Villalpando, the INM director in SMA, on the recurring question of whether it is 18 months or 2 years being out of Mexico before the holder of an FM2 (now inmigrante visa) loses it.
Turns out both answers are right! If you're going for inmigrado after your FM2, it can only be 18 months. For others on inmigrante it can be 2 years.
If you are gone too long and lose your FM2 inmigrante, you have to go back to FM3, non-inmigrante, and start over.

Below is Clemente's response.
There are two different cases, in your question:
1) inmigrantes FM2 that stay abroad for 2 years total will lose the Calidad (inmigrante) those have to start over a FM3 non inmigrant application.
2) Inmigrantes FM2 that will want to became "inmigrado" must not be abroad more than 18 months.
This amount of time applies to the whole 5 years, that´s why FM3 or non inmigrants are temporal and inmigrants are definitive.

Second, note this exchange with Clemente, clarifying that volunteers do have to go to Immigration to change their activity status to volunteer, in addition to the organization having to provide a list of volunteers and employees to INM as well. Also, it is possible to start over on a new five-year non-inmigrante visa (the old FM3) isntead of going up tgo the inmigrante (fm2) visa after five years on an FM3.

Below are the emails from Clemente, in his own words, on these two issues:

Could you clarify exactly if these three statements are true?
1) Any expat working for an NGO who is being paid must change their immigration status to lucrativo and register with Hacienda and pay taxes on that income.

TRUE, BUT IT IS AN INEXPENSIVE TAX PAYMENT.

2) All NGOs must provide to INM an expediente basico which includes A) paid employees; B) volunteers with responsibilities such as board members; and C) other regular volunteers. "Gypsy" volunteers who only volunteer sporadically or for a short time need not be included.

TRUE, I COULD NOT SAY IT BETTER.

3) No volunteers for NGOs, meaning those who are not being paid, must notify INM of their change in activity, so long as they are not being paid. The NGO's expediente basico takes care of the notification to INM for them. Even board members need not change their activity status at INM, because the expediente basico takes care of that.

NOT TRUE, EXPEDIENTE BASICO IS A EXCLUSIVE TRAMIT FOR THE NGO. CHANGE OR EXTENSION OF ACTIVITY IS AN EXCLUSIVE TRAMIT FOR THE FOREIGN INDIVIDUAL

Or is it true that volunteers need to register their volunter activity themselves with INM?

YES

In addition to the expediente basico? YES

If so, is it all volunteers, or only board members? BOTH

If that is true, do they need to make a special trip to INM to inform your office they are volunteers, and does that require a change on their visa card that they are volunteers non-lucrativo? Can they wait to do this notification until their next annual card renewal comes up? Will their new activity be listed on their visa card?

I ADVISE TO DO IT AS SOON IS POSSIBLE, NOT WAIT FOR THE RENEWAL.

So there you have it. I have another email in to Clemente asking whether it is true for sure that only those expats who have work papers on an inmigrante (FM2) visa have to give up their foreign-plated cars, while those FM2 holders without work papers can still keep their foreign-plated cars in Mexico--so long as their visa status is kept current, of course. I'll let you know what I hear back. That question may have to wait until the SMA meeting with representatives of Aduana, which is supposed to be coming soon, since car permit issues are under Aduana and not Immigration.

So I got together a blog anyway, despite all the concerns running through my head. I did want to add that the rainy season is still upon us, and if you're about to come to SMA, bring an umbrella and shoes that can get wet!

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

August 2, 2010--Immigration reports to SMA expats on latest changes--volunteers no longer have to get work permits!

(My computer has stopped letting me make Mexican punctuation marks, so please excuse their absence until I figure out a new way. Also, I posted the report section of this blog in the "Living in SMA" forum of this website. I attempted to use the INM website myself to start my renewal process for my FM2 with asimilado status that allows working, and botched it. I'm going back to INM Thursday morning to try to figure out how to salvage my renewal. I'll blog again on what happens then, and anything else I find out in the meantime.)

The Biblioteca Sala was packed Friday at noon and much of the Santa Ana cafe was crowded as well, listening in via microphone. US Consular Agent Ed Clancy introduced the new director of immigration, Lic. Clemente Villalpando, Instituto National de Migracion (INM, formerly called INAMI), to make some important announcements to the expat community, and his second in command, the INM Regulations Director.

(Her name is Mireya, I'll get her last name when I verify a few things with Clemente tomorrow, and the worst thing that happened at the meeting was that when Mireya attempted to address the group with specifics on some of the regulations, many expats hooted her down for speaking Spanish and would not listen to her give her report, which would have then been translated by Clemente. It was horribly rude and embarrassing.)

I'll give the highlights from Clemente's presentation and then summarize all of the information as he presented it, which was as a detailed outline of the new changes in Mexican immigration law that went into effect May 1.

Of major interest to the expats in the audience, many of whom had been rallied by Roger Hind, director of Mujeres en Cambio, was the news that volunteers no longer have to get work permits!

Previously we had been told that any expat who volunteered for an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) needed to get a work permit even if not earning money, especially if the volunteer had any kind of position of responsibility such as an officer or board member. Casual volunteers like a puppy socializer at the SPA or an usher at the Chamber Music Festival would usually be exempt, but the line as to what was a position of responsibility was not totally clear.

Now it is clear: if you are not earning money, you don't have to get a work permit. But the responsibility is now on the NGO to prepare a basico expediente, a list of 1) all paid employees, 2) all volunteers with positions of authority, and 3) all other regular volunteers. What Clemente called "gypsy volunteers" who only volunteered while they were in SMA on a 180-day maximum tourist permit (now called the FMM) or who showed up occasionally did not have to be listed.

The question is whether these non-paid volunteers still have to go to INM themselves to put on record that they are volunteers, non-lucrativa, unpaid. The man at the INM desk this morning who looked over my attempt to renew my FM2 online (I made a mess) said that volunteers did need to do so, they just didn't have to apply for work permits any more. There is still enough confusion over this question that I will continue to find a definitive answer.

Other bits of news came up during the main presentation, which began with Clemente assuring the audience that it was now easier to get immigration papers, and the entire process had been streamlined and computerized. Many terminologies have also changed.

Clemente noted that there are 100 INM offices in Mexico and they handle some 500,000 tramites, transactions, or in this case visas, a year. Expats in Mexico represent some 200 nations. INM has three offices in the state of Guanajuato, with the one in SMA being the major one--"because you are here," Clemente smiled. The SMA office is the delegation regional. (A year or so ago there was discussion of moving the SMA INM office to Celaya because of the large number of illegal immigrants from Central American who are processed there, but that idea has apparently been shelved.)

The next largest INM office in Guanajuato is in Leon, the largest city and an industrial center with many international workers, and it is a delegacion local. The last INM office in the state is at the Leon/Silao BJX airport, and it does not grant visas, but as a Puntos de Internacion Aeros it handles the tourist permits of international travelers at the airport.

The entire visa system is now under El Setram, the electronic system put in place May 1. "We in immigration hate papers, we want the system to be totally computerized," Clemente said. To get into El Setram, you start at www.inm.gob.mx.

Ed added that the US is also moving to transfer as much work as possible to computerization, so that you start by going to www.travel.state.gov. Both agreed that once you use their computerized systems a few times it will seem very easy. (For me personally, so far it is not.)

Once you're into El Setram, you go to the web page for Solicitud de Tramites de Empresas, Clemente said. It is also available in English and several other languages. When you fill out the application for your new or renewal visa, you will be told what supporting documents you will need to bring to the INM office when your visa is ready. At the completion of your application you will be given an account number (pieza) and password (contrasena) to use to check on the progress of your application at www.inm.gob.mx/solicitudes-web/seguimiento-tramite.html.

"When the site says your document is ready, you come to INM with whatever supporting documents you have been told you need and your photos (plus the paid invoice from a bank for the INM fee), and you can pick up your visa that day," Clemente said. The five photos must be to exact specifications--infantil size, both front and right profile, with no jewelry or glasses, and no hair covering the ears or any part of the forehead or face. (Among the places which take photos to meet the specifications is the Escritorio Publico across the street from INM, and the office to the left as you face the INM.)

Some familiar terms are gone under the new system. The tourist permit is part of the FMM, which we fill out at the border, and which has places to check whether you are coming in as a tourist or as a resident. It is no longer called the FMT. Anyone coming into Mexico is supposed to fill out an FMM for statistical purposes, even if you have an FM3 or FM2.

The FM3 is now non-inmigrante, and the FM2 is now inmigrante. The olive green booklets given to FM3 holders and the gray booklets given to FM2 holders (the gray booklets also continued as your inmigrado document after five years on an FM2) are now replaced by wallet-sized plastic cards. They indicate your visa and work status on the front of the cards. You do not have to go into INM to get a card instead of your booklet until your regular renewal time for your visa.

There is no space on the cards to register when you leave and return to Mexico; that information will now be kept only in your US or Canadian passport. There is no limit to the time you can be out of Mexico on non-inmigrante, but it is still only 18 months you can be out of Mexico on an inmigrante card or you lose that status and must start all over again. For the inmigrado status you can be out of Mexico a total of five out of ten years before losing it.

You can only have four one-year renewals of your non-inmigrante card. "Then you are seen as living here, and you move on to the inmigrante," Clemente said. He did not explain what to do if you cannot meet the higher inmigrante minimum monthly income requirements. (I'll check with him on this--I have heard that you simply start over on a new non-inmigrante card but if you are in that gray area, please let me know what you find out happens in real life, too.)

Probably the most commonly asked question for tourists is, what if I drive into Mexico and get a temporary vehicle importation permit for my car and a 180-day FMM tourist permit, and then I fly out of Mexico during the 180 days and leave my car behind. When I reenter Mexico on a new FMM, is my car legal?

Short answer: no.

Ed said that the best solution to that problem is to fly back in, and when you arrive go to one of the 42 aduana offices throughout Mexico (the nearest to SMA is in Queretaro) and get a five-day letter of permission to drive the now-illegal car to the border. Once you are back in the US, either sell the car there, or you can drive it back in and get a new FMM and new temporary vehicle importation permit. When you are back in SMA move up to a non-inmigrante visa so that your car is legally in Mexico even when you go back and forth, so long as your visa remains up to date.

"Ignorance of the law does not exempt you from compliance with it," Clemente stated.

Clemente went over key provisions of the General Law of the Population, starting with Article 60 LGP: every foreigner who wants to have an activity in Mexico must be authorized by the Secretary of the Government, meaning in this case the INM.

An activity is whatever you do--if you are a tourist, your activity is being a tourist. If you are a noninmigrante rentista, your activity is living in Mexico on income from out of the country, such as rents. (Rentista does not mean you are a renter, it refers to your having a sufficient source of income from abroad.)

Article 74 LGP states, no one can give work to foreigners who are not authorized by the Secretary of the Government, meaning the INM. If you want to work for an employer in Mexico, you must go to INM and change your status to lucrativa, meaning you are working for money. The company that hires you in Mexico must make sure that you have permission to work here, meaning the lucrativa status, which will be clearly stated on the front of your visa card. (Once you have work papers, you must also register with Hacienda, the equivalent of the US IRS, and arrange with an accountant to pay taxes every other month.)

If you are a non-inmigrante, the former FM3, the minimum monthly income requirement is 14,365 pesos, or about $1,200 USD. If you are an inmigrante, the minimum monthly income requirement is 22,984 pesos, or about $2,000 USD. These figures are for 2010, when the Mexico City minimum daily wage is 57.46 pesos.

Many fees and fines in Mexico are calculated as multiples of the Mexico City minimum daily wage for that year. There are three regions of Mexico with different minimum daily wages, San Miguel being in region C with the lowest minimum daily wage, a few pesos less.

The non-inmigrante level is determined by 250 times that year's Mexico City minimum daily wage, while the inmigrante level is 400 times that year's Mexico City minimum daily wage.

Clemente said that the requirements for a non-inmigrante visitante rentista (formerly the FM3 with no work papers) are to go to www.inm.gob.mex and fill out the application. Be prepared to bring with you to show you really have them, when you pick up your card:

Your previous visa document, whether the FMM or previous FM3,

Your US passport,

A cover letter stating you are applying for your visa (part of the online application),

Your most recent three months financial statements indicating you qualify,

And the money you will need to pay at a bank between when your application is reviewed at INM and when you return with the paid invoice and pick up your card.

For the non-inmigrante the 2010 fee is 2040 pesos, about $157 USD. (Norma just paid 2801 pesos as the fee for renewing an FM2 with asimilado status allowing working, about $220 USD.)

You will also need the five infantil sized photos and you will be fingerprinted when you pick up your card.

Mexican embassies and consulates outside of Mexico will not be authorized to give out non-inmigrantes or inmigrantes any more, Clemente said. "You cannot apply outside of Mexico any more." (Meanwhile on other area forums, some expats are reporting that they are still being told they can get new and renewal visas in some Mexican consulates in the US, paticularly the one in Los Angeles.)

All of this information was leading up to the more detailed explanation of the new requirements for volunteers, Clemente said. All NGOs must prepare a file for INM listing those people who are working for wages for them, as well as volunteers not being paid who are in positions of responsibility, and those who are regular volunteers.

The Mayor has appointed a liaison between the city and NGOs: Irma Rosada, Directora de Vinculacion con ONGs, phone 415-152-9600. Her photo is at http://www.sanmiguelallende.gob.mx/nuestragente/cextranjera.html. She works in the Instituto de la Mujer office on the first floor of the Presidencia (city offices on the road to Queretaro, past the Four Heroes glorieta and intersection to Dr. Mora).

She was in attendance at the Friday meeting and said she is very willing to work with any NGO to help them prepare the expediente basico. The person who is listed with the Presidencia as the legal representative for the NGO, its acto constitutivo, is the one who must sign the expediente basico.

At this point one man who said he'd been the president of an NGO for ten years said that NGOs "are doing the work that the city should be doing. It's hard enough to get board members to serve, and they are not going to want to go to INM. If we lose volunteers, we lose the NGO and all the work we do won't be done."

Clemente replied that INM is very aware of the value of NGOs to the city, and he understood that people who volunteer don't want the problems of paperwork.

Ed intervened to point out that this regulation is actually simpler than before. "Two years ago we sat in this same room and were told that volunteers in positions of authority needed to get work permits, whether they were paid or not. Now we are being told that only those who get paid need to change their status to lucrativo."

Irma added at this point that the mayor fully appreciates the work of NGOs and their difficulty in getting volunteers, and she would assist anyone who had any problems with adjusting to the new rules.

It had sounded earlier as if all volunteers needed to go to INM to tell INM that they were volunteers, even if unpaid, but at this point someone asked if the expediente basico list would fulfill that requirement for those who are not being paid, and Clemente said yes.

(However, others at the meeting were saying afterward that they understood that all volunteers still had to inform INM that they were volunteers. I'll try to get a more definite answer from Clemente when I go to INM this morning for my own FM2 renewal.

(Added later--Clemente wasn't available. The man at the desk who attempted to handle my botched online application said that even onpaid volunteers must come in to INM and report that they are volunteers, bringing a copy of their NGO's expediente basico that has their name on it. At this point I want to hear it from Clemente! As with so much in Mexico, each office and each official may interpret a law somewhat differently, and the official who is in front of you at that moment is right.)

Now came the question and answer period. Someone asked that, if now we must move to inmigrante status after four years renewals on the non-inmigrante visa, what would become of our US-plated cars? Could we still keep them legally?

Ed clarified that under the old rules expats could keep their foreign-plated vehicles legally all the way up to the inmigrado status, unless they got working papers with an FM2. At that point they had to take their foreign plated car out of Mexico and buy a Mexican-plated car if they wanted to keep a car here.

He believes that the same will be true only with the different terminology. Those on non-inmigrante visas will be able to keep their foreign-plated vehicles for which they obtained temporary vehicle importation permits at the border, so long as their visas remain valid.

The same will be true of those who move to inmigrante status so long as they do not work for pay and get work permission. Once they move on to inmigrado status they definitely will not be able to keep a US-plated car in Mexico.

Clemente said that those on inmigrante visas can now apply for Mexican citizenship after two years on an FM2 or inmigrante visa. (Naturalization is handled under a different federal department, however, and that website still says the requirement is five years on an FM2, or two years if married or closely related to a Mexican citizen. Later another person contacted Clemente and he said it was a misunderstanding. It still takes five years on an FM2 before you can apply for inmigrado or citizenship. You apply six months before your five years on the FM2 is up.)

He clarified that you do not have to have five years on an non-inmigrante, formerly FM3, before moving up to inmigrante, formerly FM2. You can apply directly for the inmigrante visa after entering Mexico on an FMM.

There are sanctions for not following the rules, he noted. (I could see on the slide show that one of the sanctions is a fine of a thousand times the Mexico City minmum daily wage, or 57,460 pesos, around $5,000 USD.)

He gave out his email: cvillalpando@inami.gob.mx, phone 415-152-8991 or 152-2542. He also said that he would get a representative of Aduana to come to SMA and address our car questions.

As I said, I will continue to attempt to get clarifications on the points mentioned in this report.

***

I also wanted to add some personal stuff to this blog. I was probably over the top last blog on our major disappointment about not being able to follow through with a big project we've wanted to do for 25 years. But consoling friends are brainstorming with us on alternatives. Stay tuned! (We're both in relatively good health and not divorcing, for those who imagined the worst. As I said, I was over the top.)

We had another fantastic time Saturday night with a new great band discovery for a fun night of dancing. The band is called Phyllo's, and they're based in Puerto Vallerta but are in SMA to escape the PV hot summer. They played at Keith's Longhorn Smokehouse on Salida a Celaya, next to the Pemex, close to the Stirling Dickinson crossing, and they'll do it again at 7 pm next Saturday, Aug. 7. We can't go that night but recommend that you do. Keith had a ribs special with baked potato and salad for I think 125 pesos--great comfort food.

Phyllo's started out with pure rockabilly the first hour but came back at 8:10 with rock that got the crowd dancing. Actually Norma and I were the first ones up, as usual for many events, compelled to get up when they played, "Gonna Buy Me a Mercury." For some songs you just can't sit still. As soon as we took the floor a dozen other women joined us, and a couple of men came up later, in heaven.

Phyllo's played "Shake, Rattle 'n Roll" as rockabilly--that's one of the first rock songs I remember from around seventh grade. Couldn't sit still for that one, either. And then just for fun the band played the same song as a sexy slow blues tune and one couple really got into the song as we all watched and enjoyed.

One of the women who rushed onto the floor when we did is, I think, the best dancer in SMA, and we asked her later if she'd ever danced professionally. She laughed no. She brought her Chihuahua up with her at first, and they both took center stage. How do you dance alongside someone who could front for Black-Eyed Peas? And we tire more easily than we used to, too. Excuses, excuses.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

July 29, 2010--A short and not very peppy blog

We're dealing with the death of a 25-year-old dream this week so I'm not up to being perky. I'll be covering the Immigration official's presentation to the Ed Clancy event tomorrow at the Biblioteca at 10 am, so I'll write that up within a few days afterward.

This week there was one bright spot--the five baby swallows of the second brood of this summer in the nest in our back patio flew the coop.

One of the babies was huge--he or she was the first in line when the parents would fly in with insects to distribute among the five gaping mouths, and he must have gotten more than his fair share.

And, one of the babies in the rear was tiny--he or she would pop up every so often through the mass of shoulders and beaks and make its presence known, but the big one must have gotten most of its feedings.

One day four of the babies were out flying and happily chattering on the electrical lines ten feet from their nests, taunting our three cats who stood below with their mouths open.

But the giant one was still stuck in the next, scared to fly, maybe realizing the aerodynamics would be different in his or her case. It took two more days, parents nudging the big baby with their beaks, the others tweeting encouragement, until it finally dared to fly away, too.

A few more nights to make sure they were really gone, and Norma took the opportunity to knock down their nest before more eggs could be laid. The nest really was pretty messy.

But now we miss the nest and wish we hadn't destroyed it. The parents haven't been persistent and returned to try again, either.

Hopefully for thdeir future babies' sakes they found a new spot without three cats with open mouths below, waiting for any mishap. Not that there aren't plenty of spots throughout the city for a new nest. Swallows are not an endangered species.

We just miss the babies and wish the parents would give us another chance. In case they're reading, we promise to clean up after your messes and not disturb you any more! And we'll keep the cats out of the back patio the week before and after the babies start to fly!

Other than that, it's been cold and gray and rainy many days. Is it too much to ask that rainy season structure itself the way it used to be, so that there would be hours of sun each morning and early afternoon before the sudden fierce thunderstorms, and then it would clear up again? Or, why can't all rain fall between midnight and 6 am? Is that too much to ask, huh, huh?

Back to brooding. I'll try to perk up for the Immigration meeting tomorrow.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

July 17, 2010--Norma gets her FM2 work permit renewal; crime news; San Miguel City Limits and NY Choral Society benefits among the best we've ever attended; the old "You're wearing rose-colored glasses and not doing enough" argument; emergency medical care in SMA; more baby swallows; the ongoing search for the perfect pizzas

It actually was easier this year to get our first visa renewal under the new rules instituted in May. You can just go online directly and fill out your application for either a new or renewed FM3 or FM2, and then get a number to track when you can pick up your card (wallet sized, to replace the former Mexican visa booklets similar to the US passport). But our situation is always just a little different, and since we'd read that the bank does not refund your fee if you make a mistake, we didn't chance doing it totally ourselves.

Off we went to the escritorio público across from Immigration (on the extension of Canal past the bus station and past Aurrera Bodega, on the way to the old train station and then La Cieneguita).We had to go to him anyway for the five small infantil-sized color photos for the new cards--we don't trust the other photo studios in town after it took three times to get acceptable photos last year. A millimeter off on chin-to-hairline size, a wisp of hair at the ear, anything can get your photos tossed these days.

You come out looking butt-ugly with the photos at the escritorio público but at least they'll be accepted. They put a plastic headband on you to make sure every wisp is controlled. No smiling allowed. Result: a card you'll keep hidden in your wallet.

The escritorio handles your online application for you to guarantee you won't mess up with the incorrect translations or anything else. You can go directly to Immigration and use their two computers in the lobby set up for you to apply online there, and someone from Immigration will help you if needed. Again, we had to go to the escritorio for the photos anyway, and our situation is always just a little different.

For one, last year we received asimilado FM2s that allow us to work at any field, starting first with anything involved in books--writing, publishing, selling. When we add a new industry, which we will soon do (hint at a future project!) we only have to let Immigration know in writing. It costs a couple hundred dollars to make the addition--just as any change in address, marital status, etc., costs money to make a change to your card and files). The basic renewal fee for both an FM3 and FM2 is 2801 pesos this year.

Immigration can't refuse our additional occupation changes, we just have to let them know, same as those expats who are on inmigrado status. We'll go for inmigrado status as soon as we can, after our fourth FM2 renewal. It will take awhile, we know--the applications have to go to Mexico City and it has taken months, even a year, for those who applied for the inmigrado card in the past. Most inmigrados just settled for a stamp in their old gray FM2 visa booklet, which got more and more battered through the years. Now we'll have to go for the inmigrado status and card in three more years.

Once we get that, no more renewals! We'll have just about every privilege of nationalized Mexican citizens except the right to vote and a few others that don't concern us, like being able to own a brothel. As hard as it is to be an informed voter in the US, I don't really want to be able to vote in Mexico anyway. Sour grapes--i probably will never be able to pass the history and culture exam in Spanish to become a Mexican citizen, and Norma would have a harder time than I would. Inmigrado status sounds great.

So we went through the FM2 renewal process for Norma with the escritorio, who gave us the invoice to take to a bank for payment before we brought the application to Immigration ourselves. Immigration is only open 9 am-1 pm M-F so it took two days to get everything done and get back to Immigration. We saw immigration helpers Patti Garcia and Moises at every step of the way, Patti even using the escritorio público herself to get the forms typed.

(Gotta have an old typewriter for so many Mexican forms, and the escritorio will do it all for you and even use the flowery formal language to make sure your letters will be accepted by Immigration. I first was proud I could write all my cover letters myself in Spanish, but the escritorio gently told me that I needed to be less terse, more formal, in any business writing in Mexico. So it's easier to just let him do it than try to copy Mexican business writing style.)

When we brought the final packet and invoice to Immigration, we were told our cover letter also needed to have more information about our work permit, adding a sentence on what we actually did with our work permit. So it was back to the escritorio to get a sentence added on our book writing, publishing and selling, and then back to Immigration. Then Immigration told us we needed to have a copy of our RFC and recent tax receipt to show we are registered with Hacienda (Hacienda is like the US IRS) and that we are current with our taxes. Another trip, first to our accountant for receipts and then back to Immigration.

But we didn't have to show any of our old papers like in the past, such as the most recent three months' financial statements as proof we qualify on income to get our visas. We did have to sign a paper that we swore all the past paperwork and statuses we claimed in our original application were still true and valid.

Finally yesterday Norma picked up her new wallet-sized FM2 card, with a photo not even her mother would have loved. The card doesn't have a black electronic card strip on the bottom as we expected. How in the world is Mexico going to be able to keep track of how often we cross at the border to know if we have exceeded the 18 months (though i think it has gone up to 24 months) in five years we can be out of Mexico to retain our FM2 visa status? Sure, all the border crossings are so fully computerized that everything will be kept accurately and up to date. I won't even think of possible future problems. Maybe there will be none.

Next month we go through the same renewal process for me. All in all, it actually was simpler and quicker. It took ten days from when we turned in the renewal application to when we could pick up the new card, compared to two to three weeks and sometimes more it used to take. And we didn't have to gather all that same paperwork year after year, especially the financial statements. You're asked for your approximate monthly income, and so long as you say more than $1,200 USD for the FM3 and $2,000 for the FM2, no more questions are asked. You just sign that paper that you are telling the truth.

It's interesting that friends who are stuck back in LA for medical treatments at their visa renewal time still have been able to get their new FM3s, even with a work permit, and FM3 renewals, at the LA consulate--though this is supposed to be ending later this month. Supposedly no Mexican consulates in the US or Canada were to be able to give FM3s any more once the changes to the Mexican Migration Manual went into effect in May.

In fact, supposedly no Mexican consulates in the US or Canada were ever to be able to handle FM3 renewals. And yet some of them did, and now we have friends who got an FM3 renewal and a new FM3 with work permit at the LA consulate. Someone else said it: Mexico's motto is YMMV, your mileage may vary. Rules? What rules?

Now that that process was over, we got on with our lives. San Miguel living is as wonderful as ever, though there seems to be far fewer tourists in town than in past summers. All the Mexican crime news keeps getting worldwide publicity, even though the drug cartel violence is still mostly located in a few areas: the border towns and the states of Sinaloa and Guerrera and Durango which have desirable transportation routes toward the US drug market. Michoacan has also joined the list since La Familia Michoacan has grown in power--all areas where a key drug lord has been taken out and so there is jockeying for power.

And La Familia is jockeying to expand even into the states just north of Michoacan, namely Querétaro and Guanajuato. Parts of Celaya and its surrounding small towns are having severe drug problems, though the shopping areas of Celaya many SMA expats frequent are as safe as ever. We still take the bus into Celaya most months and go to all the places we've always gone to.

Same with Querétaro, though there have been two shootings there recently, one of a policeman in front of a hospital, another of a drug leader who was hospitalized. All over Mexico, when a drug lord is to be assassinated by another drug lord, it doesn't matter if he is in the hospital or in a drug treatment clinic, he will be found. It is surprising to hear of any drug violence in Querétaro though--it and San Miguel and the city of Guanajuato have all been very safe areas, and they still are overall.

I have no qualms going to anyplace within these towns. I actually have no qualms going to 99% of Mexico, knowing I am not involved in any way in drugs or law enforcement and am not a target. It's as likely I'll get caught up accidentally in something in Mexico as it was that I could have been killed in a convenience store robbery in the US.

But the news of every drug shootout anywhere in Mexico spreads quickly throughout the world, and relatives back in the US still think we're in danger of being shot or kidnapped at any moment--they tell us from the "safety" of their homes in Detroit, Phoenix, LA and Dallas.

I get so tired of telling people who write to me with huge concerns about crime that I really don't worry about drug violence in my personal life here, at all, at all. I'm still living the good life, I tell them. I do the same kinds of common sense security tips I would do in any city in the world, and our daily lives are just fine, as fun-filled and enjoyable and sometimes absolutely breathtakingly beautiful as they have been for our eight years in San Miguel.

I feel badly about the violence affecting parts of the Mexican population and don't know what I can actually do about it, except keep informed and realize that my personal safe bubble life is not the reality for some others in Mexico.

Knowing I personally am safer here than I was living in Detroit, or in Silverlake/Echo Park in LA in the late '70s and early '80s, does not mean I am wearing rose colored glasses and ignoring the plight of many in Mexico. That is the recurring charge of those who want all expats to feel terrible because we are safe and many of our Mexican neighbors are not so safe.

Some of those who are constantly criticizing expats seem to think we should all move back to the US--and to what safe haven do they suggest, that we can afford and where we might actually have things to do and enjoy life there? Will our Social Security checks help our Mexican neighbors here if we're spending them NoB?

It's an ongoing cycle--if we share our reality that our own expat lives are pretty darn safe, we're not telling the whole truth about Mexico to others who might consider moving to Mexico.

Yes we are. Both realities are equally real. Those living in safer parts of metropolitan Los Angeles are not lying if they share their own life experiences, knowing very well that their lives are not the same as those in South Central or Boyle Heights.

I don't know what to do about the discrepancy. When Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, spoke to my Catholic liberal arts college in Detroit in 1964, she said all of us should sell or give away all but two changes of clothes to help the poor and then live in poverty in support of those who must live in poverty.

I was the only one I knew who did some of that, and I was already living closer to poverty than many of my friends. I then volunteered in the Cass Corridor soup kitchen for the Catholic Worker many Saturdays, and all that I could see happening was that I picked up bed bugs and fleas.

It is the constant call to those who say they are concerned for the poor--do we give all away and live with the poor? Are we terrible people if we still live in our safe, comfortable life styles when others can't? Is it not okay for some reason to live our comfortable lives and give what we can, to help the ways we can, to go to benefits and volunteer at charities and do whatever we do best that helps the larger situation, while we still live our safe and comfortabele lives?

I guess I've read one too many personal attacks on those of us who live in San Miguel for supposedly wearing rose colored glasses and ignoring the lives of many Mexicans. I actually think most expats in SMA are far more likely to be involved in helping to improve the lives of poorer Mexicans than some of those stereotyping us as all privileged uncaring elitists.

This kind of criticism has been going on forever, all over the world. None of us can ever do enough. None of us can ever escape judgments from others and from ourselves that we're not doing enough.

I remember a joke: a guy dies and is in line before St. Peter on whether he gets to enter heaven, and he's feeling pretty good about his chances, until he realizes Mother Teresa is ahead of him and she's being told, "But Mother Teresa, you could have done just a little more."

All any of us can do is do the best we can and make our own decisions on what is right for us as to how we live and how much we give to help others and whether we're wearing rose colored glasses when we feel good about our lives in Mexico.

Ironically, at the same time as the constant news about Mexico's problems is apparently keeping down SMA tourism (along with the global economy), the readers of Travel & Leisure magazine have voted San Miguel de Allende as one of the top five best cities in the world!

We ranked at number four, ahead of places like New York City and Rome in the top ten! Oaxaca in Mexico is also in the top ten. I find it hard to compare little San Miguel with places like New York City and Rome, but the Travel & Leisure readers have voted! I'll take it!

Meanwhile, as examples of the kinds of things happening in SMA that make life here so wonderful, I'll write about two benefits we attended here the past two weeks.

On July 4 we had to make a choice between the Democrats Abroad annual picnic at which SMA Mayor Lucy Nuñez was to be the honored speaker, and San Miguel City Limits II, a benefit for Feed the Hungry, the charity that provides a hot meal every day for thousands of school children in the poorest schools in the region. Joe King Carrasco, Houston Marchman, and Vudu Chile were the bands scheduled to perform. It's been a long time since we've danced, so we took a cab to Los Piños Salon, a huge events hall at Salida a Querétaro across from the Hotel Misión el Molino, almost to La Luciernaga mall. I'd never even noticed the hall before, and then wondered how we'd ever not noticed it, it's so big.

We bought the cheap seats upstairs, 200 pesos, and had the best seats in the house to observe the couples on the dance floor and the bands close-up. Decorations were in red, white and blue for the Fourth, and even the huge cake for dessert was patriotic. Hot dogs, hamburgers and all sorts of beverages were on sale cheap. We danced unseen upstairs and soon realized that many couples had left their reserved tables downstairs early, so we slipped downstairs and were squatters.

The first musical acts were Texas based, and the dancers were doing the Texas two-step as if they'd been doing it all their lives, which I'm sure they had.

I've lost my ability to pick up new dance steps quickly. Such a simple dance at the root of it, and I just can't get the timing and patterns. Loved watching the almost-pros, though. Arthur Murray now has a dance studio in SMA, and some of the crowd might have been graduates. Or more likely they've just been doing this for decades and it shows. Love all the little dips and heel kicks and twists that many dancers threw in.

One particularly good male dancer must have gone through 20 partners in two hours, each one better than the next. Naturally, there are a lot more single women who are great dancers waiting to be asked than there are good male dancers in SMA, same as in every community with a lot of older people where women live longer. We were surprised to see quiet couples we'd never dreamed were great dancers strutting their stuff! I'm waiting to tease some of my friends I see every so often about their hidden prowess.

So when Craig Caffal came up on stage to join Joe Carrasco's band, and he roared out the introduction to "Johnny Be Good" signalling the switch to rock, we were on the floor in a split second. What an entertainer! Such a powerful voice! Such energy! He's a part-time sanmiguelense and also lives in the SF Bay area, and I'm going to make a point of showing up any time he's going to be performing in SMA in the future! We danced till we almost dropped. Unfortunately that point comes much earlier in the night than it used to.

Six nights later we got to hear an even more internationally renowned act, the New York Choral Society, which has performed in China, the Czech Republic, israel, Austria, France, italy, Greece, the cathedrals of Notre Dame and Chartres in France, and the Basilica of San Marco in Venice.

This was a benefit for the SMA Red Cross, and the 150-peso tickets hopefully raised a lot for this charity. We know the music director John Daly Goodwin and his wife Ruth who is a member of the Choral, and they have a beautiful home in San Miguel. Goodwin has conducted 40 concerts in Carnegie Hall alone. The quality of the night showed this impressive background.

At one point when the Choral was singing a particularly moving version of the "Kyrie Eleison" from Requiem by Maurice Duruflé, I leaned over to the guy from Chelsea next to me (whose partner was in the tenor section) and said that if a church in SMA had music like that, I might even go back to church.

The Choral performed "Turn the World Around" by Harry Belafonte, one of their classic acts, to close for intermission, and then came back to do some Mexican songs, three of which were by Sanmiguelense Gil Gutiérrez, formerly of Gil and Cartas, now playing with Doc Severinson all over the world. Gil was there and apparently liked the way the Choral did his songs!

One Choral member must have been from Mexico, or at least he's spent a lot of time here. He could roll his r's and do all the traditional Mexican calls and whistles to enliven "La Charreada"and "Mexico lindo y querida" just as good as any performance in Mexico City's National Auditorium. The benefit oversold the capacity of Templo del Tercera Orden (next to San Francisco church) and chairs were tucked everywhere to fit in the overflow. (One point if you're going to a concert there in the future--the acoustics are better in the back half of the church than in front.)

The full Choral has nearly 200 members, and 70 had come along on the Mexico tour. Many joined Jack and Ruth for an impromptu concert in the Jardin kiosk afterward, swelling one of the usual mariachi band's acts! Great fun! World class quality! Why we love San Miguel!

Besides the proceeds from this concert, many new efforts are underway to improve emergency health care services in San Miguel, including upgrading the Red Cross ambulance service and purchasing defibrillators for key locations in the city. One woman who is now involved with these efforts posted a horrifying story on Civil_SMA about her own experiences. She woke up one night worrying she might be having a heart attack. She knocked on the door to tell her Mexican neighbor that she thought she might be having a heart attack, and the woman told her that if she thought that, she should call a doctor, and closed the door. The woman wouldn't give her an aspirin!

She then called a doctor who makes house calls and he said yes, she was having a heart attack, and he called an ambulance for her--and then left! The ambulance never came. She took a cab to Hospital General where she was told to go to the end of the long line!

By this time a friend had joined her and drove her to Hospital de la Fe where she was seen quickly and given the proper treatment to dissolve the clot that must be given in the first few hours after a heart attack starts to greatly improve your survival chances. Now she is involved in the program to improve emergency health care in SMA.

To be fair, I have been seen immediately at Hospital General, ahead of the line, when I've gone in twice for irregular and rapid heart beats, and I've gotten excellent care. Four hours with EKGs, x-rays, IV medications, and continual attention cost me about $50 USD the last time! The followup visit was going to be free, with an internist who specializes in cardiac care (though he is not a board-certified cardiologist as Dr. Alvarez is--Dr. Alvarez at Hospital de la Fe the only one in SMA who is fully accredited as a cardiologist and he is now my doctor).

A friend who had a heart attack called another local doctor who came immediately and drove him to Hospital Angeles in Querétaro, to make sure he would get the best care along the way if he had more trouble. What US doctor would make a house call and then drive you 45 miles to the best hospital?

Other friends have been treated at Hospital General with absolutely top-notch care for all kinds of medical conditions. But I am sure there is plenty of room for improvement. I hope the Red Cross benefit proceeds help to bring them about. One continuous need is for a better blood bank situation. When an expat needs blood for an emergency surgery, the word goes out on the Civil_SMA Yahoo Group to find donors, and most of the hospitals won't accept blood from those of us over 60 or 65, or who are on medications as so many of us are. We had the same problem in rural Michigan where the seven-bed hospital had to send to Port Huron, Flint or Detroit for any emergency requiring blood. Sometimes the patient doesn't have that long.

Meanwhile, daily life goes on in San Miguel. Little things--we have our second next full of baby swallows in our rear patio, five little wide-open beaks this time greeting us when we go out back, mamma swallow on guard nearby to buzz us and tell us to go back inside.

It could be that we've had enough of these swallows--they are making a mess. Maybe our friends who immediately sweep away all beginnings of nests along their eaves and patios are right. We'll wait until this batch of babies is flying well before we make a decision. Or maybe we'll build a little floor under the nest area to contain their mess. Our cats will miss the entertainment if we get rid of the nest when it is (briefly) empty again.

The last swallow in the last batch didn't want to leave the nest at all, he (or she) kept returning every night, until the parents insisted it was time to leave for good--new eggs were waiting to be laid. We'll only have a short interval in which to sweep away the nest before more eggs appear, if that's what we decide. But the babies are so cute!

And Norma has perfected yet another gourmet grilled pizza, this one a Moroccan curried chicken with a honey glaze. Can you imagine how good it is?

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

July 3, 2010--False alarm

Our taxi bringing us home from Mega with groceries Wednesday turned onto our short street Wednesday and we gasped--two police pick ups and two burly preventiva policia were in front of our house! A small crowd was gathered across the street, waiting. For us.

Norma knew immediately what had happened. Our housekeeper comes on Wednesdays and if we think we might not make it home before she comes, we'll leave the alarm part of our security system off until we arrive. But we'd thought we'd be home before now, and Maria had set off the alarm.

The taxi driver wanted to be out of there ASAP but he did take time to get our groceries out onto the sidewalk. Norma told me to talk to the cops and she'd find Maria and get the groceries inside.

Yes, Maria was very upset. She said the police had been there 20 minutes, and they'd gone into every room and closet and looked under the beds and used flashlights in every nook of the garage and they'd gone up to the roof and looked at all adjoining rooftop routes away from our house and they examined every window and lock. She went with them and said there was nothing missing or messed up--at least not more messed up than our office desks usually are!

(My folks once had the police show up at their house in rural Michigan when I was already in LA but my baby sister still lived at home. The police had had a call to check out something suspicous at the home where no one was present, and they waited for my folks to come back, too. They said to my dad that either there had been a break-in to one of the bedrooms, or a teenager lived there.)

Maria has orders not to touch anything in our office other than mop the floors, and she insisted that there was nothing wrong in the house, she'd been the one to set off the alarm. She did know that much, and now we have an appointment with Maria and the security company to show her how to use her own new alarm remote.

But the police waited until they heard everything was okay from us.

My Spanish came easily as I explained what had happened and assured them that everything was okay if Maria said it was okay. They were very polite, not particularly garrulous, but they seemed to understand what I said, and they finally asked for our dog's name.

"Lambchop," I said, as Lambchop stopped racing around and barking at the men and started to go into slurp mode, trying to lick them to death.

Just like Maria, they couldn't say "Lambchop," so that it came out as "Lancha," a small boat. That fits, too.

So the experience was positive, and we now know that we're getting what we pay for in the 340 pesos monthly charge for the alarm hookup. Circe first tried to call us, but Norma didn't have the cellphone with her. So they called both families who are on our backup, and both families knew nothing about any break-in and said Circe shoudld call the police.

Actually we'd just left one of the couples at the coffee bar in Mega and they drove back to Mega to see if we were still there but we'd gone. we checked in with both couples as soon as the police left and thanked them for responding. They did the right thing, if you don't know if there has been a burglary or not, it's better to assume there might have been and to call 066.

And as one of the guys said, "At least now you know everybody in the niehgborhood knows you have an alarm system and that the police come immediately." That experience was worth the upset to Maria and the shock to our systems and the false report to the police! We'll be looking in the crime blotter in the next Atención for a report on a false alarm in Colonia San Rafael.

I wondered if the police are as police and prompt in responding to our neighbors' calls, too. I hope so, and I hope their seeing the police be so prompt and professional for us might have helped to erase any negativity they have toward the police. Maybe. i wondered if any of them was thinking that, the gringas sure got fast response, how about us? As usual, I have no idea what is really going on in anyone's heads, I'm just guessing.

I'll also copy here some comments I posted on our forums in response to a potential Sanmiguelense's thoughts about assimilating into Mexican society:

Even if you marry into a Mexican family, you'll still be a gringa.

People I know who are totally fluent in Spanish and who marry into Mexican families will be accepted up to a point, but every so often they are made aware that they are still gringos.

Same is true everywhere--my Dad was always very conscious he was the only non-Catholic outsider with my mom's family gatherings, and when one of his sisters married a Pole it was almost as bad as if she'd married a Catholic as Dad did. We won't even go with what it was like when I dated black men, on both sides of the families.

I had a bit of a fantasy that I would move to Mexico and become completely accepted into a Mexican community, which can more easily happen if you become fluent and live in an area without an expat community--where it is so much easier and more tempting to make friends with those who are very similar to you and there aren't all those difficulties of language and culture and stereotypes to overcome.

One on one people can achieve deep friendships and love across any kind of barrier, but once the families and friends are brought in the barriers always are in mind and it comes out at unexpected times, when you think you are really fitting in and are finally accepted.

I'm speaking in terms of living completely in the black community in Detroit, and even of being the Catholic, half-French, college-bound city kid at my Dad's family reuinions of Lutheran, German, high school drop out farm folks.

Of course it's wonderful to try to totally assimilate into some part of a Mexican community--and any Mexican town has so many levels of class, color, indigenous versus Spanish, religion and other divisions that you can't magically be accepted in any total community. Even our part of Colonia San Rafael has its own cliques that barely talk to each other, much less accept a gringa. And we have very little in common to talk about, with either clique.

We do interact pleasantly in everyday matters--the iron worker who flirts with every woman walking by flirts with us, the woman who sells chicken gizzard tacos weekend nights out of her garage is very friendly all week long, the kids we've donated stuff to for their school and church garage sales remember us as good guys, the conchero dancers I've applauded for their fiesta dancing are appreciative and make a little chit chat the rest of the time, the guy whose red chow I adore has decided that if his otherwise vicious dog likes me, I must be okay.

Working very hard at becoming totally fluent would be a major first step, and I haven't done that myself, only in spurts. I can carry on casual conversations but you have to be able to get the subtleties in deep thoughts to be able to achieve real friendships, I think.

I'm writing this because I sense in your comments the same kind of unrealistic hopes and expectations that assimilation will be the norm and not the exception, at least in San Miguel.

I don't think that's a terrible thing--the same kinds of divisions and barriers across color, class, and religon in particular existed where I grew up in Detroit, and they exist within Mexicans here as well. It's not easy to achieve total integration anyplace!

A part of society that is mostly married couples will not reach out all that much to single women, anyplace. Single men are more accepted by married couples. At least that's what I've seen. When I got divorced in 1977, I lost all my married friends.

In LA there were enough people that we really got segregated into those of similar lifestyles, sex, incomes, education and interests. We almost never had a married couple over to our house for dinner, nor were we invited.

Here we look around at a party and we might find that night we invited only married straight couples, and we didn't pay attention ahead of time as to what categories of people we happened to be inviting! No biggie, no problem, we like each of the people we invite to something for who they are, and we're far less likely to think what "categories" they belong to here than we did in the us.

Some of the married men make jokes about being the only man in a party otherwise of all women sometimes, but hey, it happens, and it's okay with us and we hope it's okay with them.

We cross all kinds of barriers in everyday living here in the expat community that we never did living in the US. That's quite an accomplishment in and of itself.

And that's one of the most attractive points to San Miguel living to me, the 12,000 or more expats are so diverse and fascinating people that you broaden your horizons a lot without even noticing you're doing so. And whatever relationships you can develop with native Mexicans are an additional plus.

(Remember that the borders are fluid and many Mexicans have lived and studied in the US and intermarried themselves and they can be very much assimilated themselves, while others have been more isolated in their lives. Interacting with each individual Mexican is its own process, same as with meeting a new gringo, who can be all kinds of complexities, too.)

Just don't expect it will happen easily and completely and be the norm. At least not in San Miguel. To SMA's critics, that makes us a terrible place, the expats aren't all fluent and completely integrated into Mexico. So be it.

If you're among only a handful of gringos in a Mexican town you probably will be more involved and accepted and your interactions will be more frequent. And that's a good thing, too. (Though when we lived in rural Michigan after LA, we were never accepted, because we were now forever outsiders even though we'd both grown up nearby. Again, those who had gone to college outside of the small town were more likely to accept us than those who had never left the town.)

So these are my thoughts today on a gringo's chances and expectations of assimilation into Mexican society, at whatever level of Mexican society you are comfortable with. They keep changing the longer I'm here.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

June 28, 2010--The color purple

Mexico teaches you to take nothing for granted. A working phone? Our land line went out last Monday and you can't call the 050 phone repair service on a cell phone. All three of Mega's public phones weren't working.

(We're down on Mega this week--we bought two pounds of ground pork to make just a small amount of sausage for a pizza, not enough of a need to make a special trip to La Lonja or another reputable butcher, and when we opened the package it reeked. Mega keeps displaying raw meat and its rotisserie chickens unrefrigerated. The frozen turkey bins are often so loaded that parts of turkeys are up in the air, defrosting, then being turned back down into the freezer area when the next customer jostles the birds. We're not buying any more meat there now. And now there is someone collecting a few pesos "donation" before they give you toilet paper for the bathrooms. But I digress.)

So we walked from Mega to TelMex, worrying all the way that we were going to get the English-speaking manager who seems to hate gringas, he treats us with such scorn. But a woman in customer service rescued us before he got to us. She filled out the required forms for us and promised a repair man would come that afternoon or next morning.

There he was early next morning and we showed him to our bedroom where the jack is. He worked at it for awhile and first told us it was the fault of the security alarm system, on the same jack. No, we told him the phone had been acting erratic since long before we got the security system installed. He finally believed us on that.

Next he reported to us that he was going to have to chip open the bedroom wall (freshly painted) to get the worn cable out. At least that's what we think he said. Oh no! We whispered to each other that we'd rather have our handyman Pedro Romero do any such destruction. But the TelMex tech apparently gave another good tug and the cable came down, and he was able to get a new one up through the small channel home builders leave for such cables.

(Actually in a typical home building experience, the first workers pour the concrete for the floors and sidewalks, then the concrete is torn up in places for the plumbing. It is relaid. Next another place has to be torn up for the electricity. The completed walls must have a channel dug into them for lines like the phone, then the concrete is restored and repainted. Windows are taken out of a wall as an afterthought. But I digress.)

I suddenly noticed that the tech had left the door open to the second story terrace and I yelled to Norma to check for all the cats. I found the dog and two cats, and Norma came racing up the stairs to find the Siamese.

I heard a thud and a wail.

"Are you all right?" i asked.

"No," she said.

Huh? I couldn't believe it. "Are you all right?" I asked again.

"No," she said again, and i dashed to the stairs to see her standing there, immobile.

"Look at it," she said. I couldn't see anything wrong with her left foot, which is what she was staring at.

"Look again."

I still didn't see anything, so she pointed to where her big toe was now pointed sideways.

"OMG, do you want to go to Hospital General?"

"No, just pull on it, it's dislocated is all. It will snap back into place."

Okay. I pulled hard on her big toe and it seemed to go back into place. At least it was now facing the right direction at rest.

She hobbled around for awhile and finally admitted it still hurt, the tug hadn't been enough, maybe her toe was broken (and i'd probably made it worse).

"But there's nothing doctors can do for a broken toe except tape it to the next toe to keep it immobile until it heals on its own," she said, voice of experience. So she taped her big toe to its neighbor toe and we went back to our daily lives. (The Siamese was fine, she'd already run to a hideout.)

The next day her huge toe was bright purple .

We'd thought about trying to find someplace to put some purple in the house when we repainted and hadn't found the right spot and color. Now we had vivid purple in the house.

Do we go to the hospital or not? It felt kind of silly to be worrying about a toe, when we have such other more serious medical issues to worry about. But like a sore thumb that keeps making itself the center of your universe, that toe became our focal point for our lives. A couple of days of tape, soaks, ice packs, heating pad, peroxide and more taping, and the toe has come down in swelling and purpleness. She'll live.

And our phone is still working! Take nothing for granted in Mexico.

For those who don't read our forums, here is a book review I posted this week of Geo-Mexico: the geography and dynamics of modern Mexico

I've come back to this book several times since I first turned to it to understand Mexico's earthquake patterns earlier this year.

I keep learning more, and being startled by the correlations between Mexico's geography and its politics, religion, economics, commerce and even tourism patterns.

It's often said that biology is destiny, but possibly to an even greater extent, a country's geography shapes its destiny. Mexico is one of the most geographically diverse countries in the world, with vast deserts, rain forests, jungles, high plateaus, volcanic belts, and coastlines.

It's the 14th largest country in the world and ranks 11th in population and economy ($1.58 trillion USD a year). Three fourths of the country is higher than a thousand meters altitude (3,300 feet).

Some 85% of the population lives in these higher regions (half the population lives in a band across the middle of Mexico from Veracruz to Guadalajara), largely in a giant central plateau that could be called high desert.

Yet the country has 30 inches of rainfall a year overall, more than the averages for Canada and the US. Only 3% of that rainfall seeps down to replenish its aquifers. Some 44% of the country is severely water stressed.

Mexicans use 1,441 cubic meters of water a year for all purposes, while the US uses 2,483 cubic meters a person. Water shortages and patterns are one huge factor that has shaped Mexico, even to its reliance on corn as its main food product throughout history since corn requires less water than many other food sources.

It is a country which has major mountain ranges separating its peoples, some areas better suited to transportation by horse, then trains and cars, so that these populations became more assimilated into the world than the more remote areas, which stayed poorer and less exposed to new cultures and social forces.

In these remote areas, 16% of the women speak only an indigenous language, no Spanish. When the Conquistadors arrived the people throughout Mexico spoke 170 indigeous languages, and today there are 62, disappearing rapidly.

While overall the average level of education for Mexico is 8.4 years for men, 7.9 years for women, in indigenous areas for men it is 5.1 years of education, 3.9 for women.

There is no way of knowing the population of Mexico when Cortés arrived, but it fell at least 90% in the next hundred years, to 1.6 million, largely due to diseases. Now it is about 110 million.

The birth rate keeps falling, until it is expected that within a few decades, it will fall below the 2.1 children per female level required for its population to maintain itself. Its elderly population is expanding, causing the same kinds of problems as the US is alrady experiencing.

So many geographic factors shape Mexico. It ranks seventh in countries in the world according to known oil resources, producing 3.2 million barrels a day in 2008, exporting 44%, for about $50 billion USD income a year. But its known reserves will be exhausted in ten years at current rates of extraction.

More than a hundred maps, graphs, charts and text boxes show concretely how Mexico divides itself geographically, even in religion. A band across Zacatecas to Michoacan includes the highest percentage of Roman Catholics, some 95% of the population in that area, while less than 75% of the population in southeast mexico, from Chiapas to Quintana Roo, calls itself Roman Catholic.

To help develop agriculture in the more desert north, President Obregon gave tax concessions, freedom of worship and exemption from military service to some 3,000 Mennonite families of German and Russian descent.

They came down from Canada in 1922 and turned much of that region into workable dairy farms, producing in particular Mennonite cheese similar to the yellow cheddar they'd produced in Canada. (Most of Mexico's cheeses are white.)

Mormons were drawn to the Chihuahua area and today they make up more than a million people throughout Mexico, up from a quarter million in 1980. Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses are other fast-growing religions this book calls "Biblical, not evangelical" non-Catholics. The evangelical Protestant groups are making strongest headway in southern Mexico.

This book even examines the influences of geography with major cities, particularly Mexico City which was the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan built on an island. Spaniards imposed European ideas of how a city should be laid out upon colonial cities, while cities like Monterrey which were not so much Spanish influenced grew along their own natural geographic patterns.

The Spanish interfered with natural development in so many ways, including importing as many as 200,000 slaves from Africa during colonial times. They were heartier and lived a little longer working in the mines.

Blacks outnumbered Spaniards in Mexico until after 1810. Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829, while the US kept slavery legal until 1865. Some 4,000 escaped US slaves settled in Mexico, given land concessions to encourage development of some areas.

Every page of this thoroughly researched and documented book contains valuable information for anyone who seeks to understand Mexico, not just its political history but the even deeper geographic forces which have made it what it is today.

And the book is highly readable as well, bearing no resemblance to the geography textbooks that turned most of us off of the subject in school.

Richard Rhoda is a PhD geographer, university instructor and author who has headed international aid and environmental programs in Asia, Africa and Latin America. He has lived in Ajijic, Mexico since 1999.

Co-author Canadian Tony Burton, formerly of Ajijic, is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and edited the Lloyd Mexican Economic Report for 12 years. He was chief Examiner in Geography for the International Baccalaureate Organization. He authored two previous books on Mexico and is a moderator on Mexconnect.com.

I recommend Geo-Mexico highly to anyone who wants to understand Mexico and move beyond the stereotypes and superficialities that have done it a grave disservice.

I put this review onto the book's Amazon.com page as well.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

June 21, 2010--Our very own water feature in our living room

It was 5 pm Friday and we were thinking about maybe going to Keith’s Longhorn for the fish and chips special 6-8 pm and the live dance band scheduled to start at 9.

Maybe we’d remember to turn on the cable TV for the 5:30 news. We’re learning to live without our satellite TV but not happily. The day when we are all supposed to learn what is going to work here when all the satellites get reconfigured keeps getting pushed back. Last time I got to watch “All My Children” Erica Kane was falling into a pit and Mountain Man was about to rescue her. Did she even lose a fingernail or false eyelash, assuming she got rescued? We’ll never know except maybe in some future flashback. It was a lazy Friday afternoon.

Suddenly: Flash/crash. Lightning and thunder happening simultaneously. The storm was upon us without warning, right there. No time to count one-one hundred to mark the seconds, five seconds between lightning and thunder indicating the storm was still a mile away. We hadn’t even noticed any gathering of clouds as we worked at our computers. The storm was right there. I thought I could feel a tingling in the air.

Another simultaneous bolt and crack, even louder. “Turn everything off,” we each yelled and dashed from room to room unplugging even the UPS systems, which are good but nothing protects against a direct hit.

We knew from the unexpected heavy February storms that rain comes into the house under the patio French doors, so we gathered all the towels in the house and put them against the doors. We settled into the living room sofa and stared at the useless TV. Our dog wanted on our laps. The Siamese decided to be loving and tucked her head into my shoulder. The two male cats paced, radiating anger.

No leaving the house tonight. We could hear the rain rushing down our streets, in front of and behind our house, probably over the curbs already. You’d go out only if you wanted to practice for a river log-rolling contest like the ones we used to watch at Michigan county fairs. You’d get to be the log.

So Norma picked up a pizza cookbook and I turned on my Sony ebook reader and we prepared to wait it out and go to bed early. If the electricity went out we’d be in bed even earlier.

A strange sound made us look up. What in the world? A waterfall was coming down our stairwell—not down the stairs themselves, but sheets of water like Niagara Falls were pouring under the hallway railing all around our upstairs landing, making an L-shaped water feature worthy of a mansion. But this one wasn’t supposed to be there.

Norma shrieked and ran upstairs with a broom. I followed and slipped and slid on my rear down a few steps. I retreated to the sofa. I had already been fighting a cold and hadn’t felt that great to start with, the main reason we were hesitating in our earlier evening plans.

We only had one broom anyway, and it flew in Norma’s hands for two hours straight as she fought to keep the water on the least destructive path, straight back out the living room through the kitchen and out the back door.

She kept it from the living room rug, a San Miguel hand-woven wood special, not particularly colorfast. She got all the computer wires up on the desks and protected valuables like cartons of old photos that never made it into photo albums and crates of our books still to be sold locally.

I went into my usual catatonic trance when a catastrophe strikes. Thankfully Norma stays alert and focused, and she worked until she had blisters on her hands and her back ached. The weather just kept on pouring down our stairwell, covering all the walls, soaking into the wall electrical plugs, endangering our artwork. Leaves and dirt brought in from the patio flooding cascaded down our walls and embedded in the new paint job.

Pico, our big black and white cat, must have had to go. He just stood on one of the dry corners and howled. He tried to tiptoe to the kitty doors but he wasn’t going to walk through four inches deep of rain and then brave the downpour outside. And then there was that hallway and the litter box upstairs. A housebroken cat’s got to do what a housebroken cat’s got to do. He walked stiff-legged up those stairs, through the waterfall, through a couple of inches deep of racing water, and made it to the litter box, howling the whole way. He found a dry corner upstairs and didn’t come down until morning. The others just held it.

At one point one of the giant cockroaches/palmetto bugs slipped in under the living room patio door, on his back, doing the back stroke for all he was worth, in the riptide. He got rescued but I made sure he didn’t survive his swim. Pico would have loved helping me but he was still upstairs, hiding out in a snit.

Two hours. This rain hit our house far worse than the February floods did. After all, we are up a slight hill, away from the arroyo, the smelly little stream that goes through the Canal/Guadalupe/Calzada de la Luz neighborhoods on the northwest side of town toward the presa, the manmade lake and dam to the northeast of the city.

Norma said that at times the water on the upstairs patio was five inches deep, and that was with it running off as fast as it could toward our stairwell. We tried to find out afterward how much it had rained and one local weather station actually based in San Miguel (most are based at the Queretaro airport 45 miles away) said San Miguel had under 2 inches of rain in all of June so far, and the other one’s water measuring system had been plugged. We’re sure it was far more than two inches in the two hours. It was the most intense rain we’ve ever been in, that we recall. Oh, once in rural Michigan around 1991, it did rain 13 inches in 24 hours and much of the low-lying areas of the Thumb region were flooded. The little town of Vassar, along the banks of the Cass River, was flooded to the second stories of homes and shops. That had been a steady, heavy rain. This one was a two-hour onslaught.

Turned out we didn’t have it as bad as some friends did. Here's what a friend emailed: >Yep, it rained…and then it POURED!!!!! Of course, just as our albanil was finishing laying concrete in our patio. What a God- awful mess!! The rain managed to wash away half of the cement, that left only gravel. Meanwhile in the front of the house, the pile of newly mixed concreto had to be hosed and washed down the street so that we wouldn’t have a large concrete mountain in front of our door! The upstairs patio developed a leak in the ceiling, the bedroom leak reappeared, the water came in under our bedroom doors and soaked the wood floor and two of the skylights developed some drips GRRRR!!!!!! Today we went to look at 2 houses for sale in Independencia and the builder said we got 18 inches of rain in a couple of hours. All I know is that I had to launder towels for 2 hours today. One thing our albanil said was that the caulking dries out and shrinks during the hot dry season and we should have everything recaulked annually just before rainy season starts.>

When we got to Mexico we always wondered why even an otherwise handicap accessible flat one story house would have a big step at the doors. We’ve learned why. Our handyman Pedro will be called to add a cement step at every patio door to keep out future heavy rains.

And we don’t think that the patio was built to slant away from the house anyway. It seems to slant inward so the rain is more likely to come inside, under the doors, than to battle it out doing down the one gutter drain out to the street. We may add another drain as well.

The net result for us when the rain stopped was that a box of Norma’s old quilting fabrics were damp at the bottom of the box, and a big bag, about 20 pounds remaining, of cat food and a seven-pound bag of dog food got wet on the bottom. The bottom layer will probably rot. We have to find something big enough to hold the food that remained dry.

Norma laid out her quilt stash to dry and some pieces will have to be rewashed. She’s nowhere near getting around to doing another quilt any time soon anyway. Every towel in the place is of course being laundered. And every time we go up or down the stairs we pick leaves and dried up bougainvillea petals from the walls.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

June 17, 2010--Another Day of the Locos, minus photos

I took 366 photos of this year's Dia de los Locos parade but lost them all. Don't ask. The budget for a new motherboard for a new computer for me got postponed for other emergencies, like my biopsy. Soon.

We weren't positive we'd even go to the parade this year because it didn't rain the night before and we expected too much heat. True, it was a hot, sweaty day, even though we found a viewing spot in the shade on Zacateras.

But a sound truck started rounding up participants from Col. San Rafael around 9 am, and we couldn't resist. Norma was bouncing around at the computer, doing her own version of a table dance, and we got dressed and headed out. First we took the bus to Mega for a cappuccino frappe since we didn't take time for breakfast and we had a few groceries to get.

We took a cab from Mega and asked the driver how close he could get to the start of the parade. He just looked at us sadly. Didn't we know better? Just about every street was closed off for the day.

Yes, we knew, but we hoped a cab driver would have some secret way in. He could have taken us to behind the San Antonio Church, he said, but this year the trucks were lined up on Ancha de San Antonio starting at Cardo. We got out at Stirling Dickinson and Ancha.

This was the first year I got shots of the trucks before they were loaded down with garrafones of water, trash bags of wrapped hard candies, and the personnel for the trucks. And I took photos of some absolutely lovely costumes of marchers by themselves posing for me against non-distracting backgrounds. Wonderful photos. All gone.

When we lived near the Hotel Sautto past years, we always got a spot on Hernandez Macias by 10:30 am. We were used to the last minute walkers trying to find a spot long after the choice positions were claimed. This year we were one of the late searchers. It was 11:30 am before we found a position behind a young Mexican family of five--three of them kids under six or so--who were sprawled on the curb. Great, we had our little folding cushioned stools from Mega and we perched behind them. The kids weren't all that tall and when they got up we should still be able to see the parade while seated.

Wrong--the man who appeared to be about 20 (the older we get the younger everyone else looks) was all over the place, and his girlfriend and the kids were no better. He kept bumping into me with his elbows, knocking my straw hat off, and almost knocking me off my stool. At times i just wanted to bite his elbow when it was coming at my face. He paid me no mind.

I kept telling myself, he's doing what he's always done at Day of the Locos, his first concern is getting candies for his kids, he isn't supposed to adjust his usual viewing habits just because some old gringa has perched herself on a stool behind him. I could have ruined my entire experience just dwelling on his swinging elbow. Rise above it, Schmidt. Remember that Mexicans and Anglos have different spatial attitudes.

The kids were like vultures, constantly swooping in and snatching a candy out from under my stool just as I was reaching for it. Norma and I had decided in advance that all candies coming our way would be given to the two toddlers next to us. They couldn't even get to the front or see anything, and their harried mother couldn't leave the kids alone to grab for candies herself. The family got about a half-gallon sackful of candies from us anyway. The little girl was so shy but once we started handing her dulces, she opened up fast!

So when I could keep my attitude positive I loved the parade, as always. This year it took at least two hours for marchers to dance past. Last year the parade was much smaller, and there were fewer commercial floats, so perhaps the economy really is picking up.

As usual I was disgusted by racist costumes. One float and is marchers made fun of the South Africa World Cup fútbol team, portrayed the green and yellow-outfitted South African players as the ugliest, blackest stereotypes you can imagine. Wish my photos hadn't been lost to show you. I was so sad, so angry. I have to keep remembering that the most racist posters I can imagine show up in the US for anything involving a competition against predominantly black teams, or political rivals, equally as disgusting to me. Mexico has its equivalent of the Know-Nothings, too. Mexicans are entitled to be raw and ignorant, like some in the US. I just don't have to like it, I want everything about Mexico to live up to my ideals. Right, like that's always happened in the US, too.

Some of the paraders were dressed like President Calderón, and Norma spotted one Obama mask. Most dancers were various kinds of monsters, as usual. Some costumes were so clever, the person inside the outfit dressed as two people, one giving the other a ride, or one being a burro or a cycle or something.

As usual many men dressed as balloon-bosomed women with outrageous dresses and makeup. Young dressed as old, women as men, city folks as campo farmers. For this Bicentennial year, most of the costumes were supposed to reflect either 1810 Independencia leaders or 1910 heroes like Pancho Villa and Zapata. Yes, many dancers did pick up on the historical importance of the year, but most were just plain fun. Atención reminded readers that the parade is primarily a religious event, honoring St. Anthony. Right. A few marchers kept that in mind.

How they have the energy to keep on dancing from the kickoff around 11:30 am after Mass at San Antonio church, up Ancha, up Zacateras, up Hernandez Macias, east on Insurgentes, south on Pepellamos, east on Mesones, south on Nuñez, and west to the Jardin many hours later, always amazes me.

After the parade passed us, we had a Diet Coke at Café Monet and taxied home when the crowds cleared. Another wonderful Dia de los Locos, and I managed not to bite the guy's elbow, too.

What else has happened this week? We welcome the rains many evenings and the temps are reasonable again. The last baby swallow still returning to its nest each night found that the nest was occupied by a mother sparrow warming a new clutch of eggs. It's been circling forlornly on the electrical wires nearby. Adulthood happens, ready or not.

Our landlords visited San Miguel and perused our wild painting job throughout their house and proclaimed us the Tenants from Heaven. Friends had birthday parties.

Our book club discussed The Story of Pi, about a young Indian boy who was a Hindu, Christian and Muslim simultaneously, surviving seven months in a lifeboat with a 450-pound Bengal tiger.

We had Lambchop shaved down for the heat and she no longer looks like a Bichon at the moment. She's such a little gangly dog, 14 pounds, underneath her winter sheep's coat.

Norma keeps trying new pizza recipes and discovered a recipe for basil pesto that uses pecans instead of pine nuts. She made one of the best pizzas I've ever had with grilled eggplant, onions, tomatoes and Portabella mushroom slices on a pesto and mozzarella base. She also tried thick-cut bacon and grilled pineapple slices on another pizza, for those who usually like ham and pineapple pizzas. With bacon chunks it's better.

I kept hearing cheers from throughout our colonia the past couple of hours and Norma who has been following the game on the internet just announced Mexico beat France in the World Cup! San Miguel will be crazy tonight! Next game, Uruguay! I still can't watch fútbol for any length of time, but I can appreciate enthusiasm!

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

June 10, 2010--Report on the US Embassy Town Hall June 7 at the Biblioteca Teatro

Six staffers from the US Embassy in Mexico City came to the San Miguel Town Hall June 7, to explain US State Department services available to expats and to answer questions. Nothing new was presented at the meeting for those who follow this website, but i'll summarize the various presentations and the Q&A. The Town Hall ran an hour and a half and then staffers answered questions individually. The Teatro Santa Ana, which seats about 81, was packed.

The Embassy's American Citizen Services unit handles safety and security announcements, passports and citizenship quesions, notarials and apostilles, arrests of US ctizens abroad, deaths of US citizens abroad, crimes involving US citizens, missing persons, emergency preparedness, medical, legal or financial assistance, voting abroad questions, coordination with other agencies such as Social Security, IRS, Selective Service, and Department of Homeland Security, and information for US travelers to Mexico.

It is located at Office 101, US Embassy, Av. Paseo de la Reforma 305, Colonia Cuauhtemoc, Delegación Cuauhtemoc, Mexico City, DF, 06500. Email is acsmexicocity@state.gov.

Websites are http://www.usembassy-mexico.gov; http://mexico.esembassy.gov; and http://mexico.usembassy.gov/eng/citizen_services.html. For after hour emergencies call from Mexico 01-55-5080-2000 ext. 0, or from the US call 011-52-55-5080-2000 ext. 0, and ask to speak to the Duty Officer.

If you have a question about Federal benefits including Social Security, from within Mexico only, call 01-800-772-6394 (SSAMEXICO), or email FBU.Mexico.city@ssa.gov. Phone hours are Monday through Friday from 8 am to 2 pm. That office is also at Reforma 305 in the US Embassy.

All expats and US citizens traveling in Mexico are urged to register at http://travelregistration.state.gov/ibrs. Another information website is www.travel.state.gov, and also the US Embassy's website at www.usembassy-mexico.gov. You can register as much or as little information as you like. If you provide a valid email address you will receive travel updates and safety and security alerts from the Embassy.

Why register? The office explains, "During a natural disaster or emergency situation overseas, US consulat officers can assist you by warning you of possible crises, keeping you updated on events in the area, helping family and friends in the US contact you, and even assisting with evacuation plans for registrants when necessary." When you register you create an account for yourself that you can update as you travel throughout Mexico or change residences, email addresses, etc.

Information was handed out about the Child Citizenship Act, Immigration and Nationality act, section 32D, which provides for automatic citizenship of qualified children under 18 who have at least one parent who is a US citizen by birth or naturalization. For information about making sure children of US citizens become US citizens consult Citizenship and Immigration Services at http://uscis.gov, or go to Room 118 at the Embassy. Hours are Mon-Thurs 9 am to 1 pm, and the phone is 52 55 50-80-20 00 ext. 3492 or 3494.

The final Embassy program which was presented was the Virtual Presence Post, http://elbajio.usvpp.gov for the central Mexico one (http://spanish.elbajio.usvpp.gov in Spanish). There is also a Virtual Presence Post in Chiapas/Tabasco at http://chiapas-tabasco.usvpp.gov, or in Spanish, http://spanish.chiapas-tabasco.usvpp.gov.

The overall email address for the program is virtualconsulatemex@state.gov. From Mexico phone 01-55-50 80 20 00 ext. 4369, or from the US call 011-5 55 80 20 00 ext. 4369.

The Virtual Presence Posts are outreach tools of the Embassy "to build deep and productive ties with a distance audience by using a combination of periodic face-to-face contacts, regular information exchange by email, fax, web chat, the internet or other remote means, and aggressive work with local media. in a VPP you will find a wealth of useful informaion on how to apply for a US vita, how to find an American business partner, learn about programs and acivities of special interest, useful links to host government sources of information, business and commercial information, press releases and photographs from official visits to the region, and much more."

(Our website has posted the times when online chats about Embassy questions can be asked in real time with all those linked into the VPP receiving the information immediately, and we'll be sure to post the times for future VPPs.)

After the presentations on the services of the US Embassy, the first question in the Q&A section was on the current status of a proposed three-year pilot project to bring Medicare coverage of health care costs to expats living in Mexico. "We're not aware of anything yet," was the Embassy answer.

Second question: what US address should expats use for documents requiring a US address--a mailing service address in the US such as those in Laredo, the address at which they last lived and still vote at, or where they have their drivers license, etc. Answer: For voting the last address at which you physically lived is your official address.

Third question: "I read a book that said that there will be a worldwide financial crisis soon. What will the Embassy do for expats in case of a major event?" Answer; if you are registered through http://travelregistration.state.gov/ibrs the Embassy will keep you informed of whatever information they have on alerts and on actions that can be taken for various kinds of catastrophes such as earthquakes. You will get wardens' messages, alerts and advisories if you have provided a working email address when you register.

Fourth: "i lost my US drivers license. Can I get a new one at the local consulate?" Each state handles its own drivers license procedures and you'll have to contact the state that issued your license. Some allow you to get a new license by mail, some accept online renewals, others require that you apply in person. Clay County in South Dakota is one office that allows expats to register their cars in the US without being there, without insurance, and without any kind of inspection, and perhaps Clay county would be a good place to check out drivers license requirements.

The fifth questioner went on at length about being sick and tired of being stopped for mordidas (bribes) while driving in Mexico. "Is there anything you can do to stop these yahoos?" Various answers from Embassy representatives included, "We are all here as guests, and it is up to us to abide by the traffic rules. if you have a complaint you have to file a denuncia with the particular police department.'' others noted that when they ask for the police officers' ID, they don't give it, whether they are genuine police or not. Get the number on the police car, one expat suggested. Often they're driving motorcycles with no ID number was the questioner's response.

You can report extortion threats to the US Embassy, but usually they will want you to have filed a police report. Another expat in the audience added his story: he drives a 2007 Monte Carlo and the officers wanted to take his car. "I'm a US citizen. i tried to call the Embassy but got no help." Some audience members suggested he drive a small pink jalopy no Mexican would want to drive, or get big daisy magnetic paste-ons for an attractive new car. Big late model expensive SUVs and pick ups, especially black or white, are the most popular targets.

Consular Agent Ed Clancy suggested avoiding areas known for mordidas, such as Monclava and the entrances into the State of Mexico and the Federal District, and pay attention to the State Department travel advisories and warnings on areas which are currently experiencing any kind of criminal activity. (Note--Carol and Norma were stopped last month for a mordida just before the Colombia Bridge near Nuevo Laredo, a crossing which has been considered the most safe. Read earlier blogs here for descriptions of that experience.)

Some areas of Mexico have a Tourist police agency that could be informed. It is very legitimate to point out to Mexican authorities that these mordidas hurt tourism, one of the most important parts of the Mexican economy. Clancy said he has in his office an 800 number to call if there are any problems on the road, and he'll make copies of that number for those who stop by his office. (The consular agency is on Hernandez Macias 72 Int. 6, across from Belles Artes inside the Plaza Golondrinas.)

"One person called me right while he was being stopped for a mordida, and I walked him through the process and it was resolved without any money changing hands," Clancy said. He urged participants to never give out their original drivers license or registration papers, because once the phony or real tránsitos have your real documents, they have leverage. "Just open your window a little bit, and give them copies, or show them the papers so that they can copy down whatever information they want. Let them look but don't touch."

Clancy said his primary advice is to act is if you have all the time in the world. "Get out of your car, don't let on you are in a hurry to get across the border or to get going so you can make it to San Miguel before dark." Offer to drive back to the police station to get the ticket and pay the fine in person. Use up their time that they could be using on another target and getting money more easily.

The next question topic was on direct deposit of US Social Security checks into US banks. You can do that but just let Social Security know you are out of the country and give them an address where you receive your mail regularly, so that you can be contacted if there are any problems and your checks won't stop because you can't be reached.

An expat asked about dying out of the country--how does the Embassy handle that if you have no relatives or friends?

This possibiility is one big reason to register at http://travelregistration.state.gov/ibrs so that your next of kin can be contacted. There are many possible processes depending on whether the deceased has a will or has otherwise indicated a desire to be cremated, to be shipped to the US for burial, or any other options. if there is an autopsy, that requires other options. Have a will that can be found easily and have your wishes made clear to your executor and family.

A questioner asked what to do if your spouse dies and the car you have in Mexico on a Temporary Vehicle importation permit is linked to the deceased spouse's FM3. "You can get a five-day emergency exit permit to drive a car out of Mexico and either dispose of the car in the US or bring it back in on your visa," Clancy explained.

Next topic was on the new US Health Care Reform law, which requires that all US residents have health care insurance. Does that mean that US citizens living in Mexico will be fined if they don't? The law doesn't take effect until 2014, and it would only be an issue if the expat returned to the US. Medicare is health care insurance and qualifies under the law.

Several people had questions on wills. The recurring question is whether an expat needs separate wills in the US and in Mexico. Clancy noted that both the US and Mexico are signatories, with 100 countries, to an agreement assuring that wills legally made in each country are legal in all the countries.

But for the sake of speeding up the process, you'll probably want a will in the US that applies to assets you have in the US and one in Mexico for your Mexican assets, he said. "Time is money, and lawyers probably will have to be involved if your will in one country has provisions applying to property in another country. Mexico may want to have the legality of the US will accredited, which will take more time. If you are giving money to people or charities in either country, do you want decisions made about how these groups are notified and he money distributed made in another country? Just for general ease in having your wishes carried out, it will probably be easier to have a US will for US assets and a Mexican will for Mexican assets."

He urged that expats watch out for language in either will that says something like, "This is my last will and it invalidates all previous wills," which would cancel out the other will. Make sure lawyers drafting both wills know about the other will and that the existence of both wills is acknowledged in each will.

September is Wills Month in Mexico and all lawyers must charge half price on wills written that month.

Questions turned to the drug cartels and whether it is safe to travel within Mexico. This is why you should register with the Embassy and give a working email address so that you will be informed of all travel advisories and alerts within Mexico, Embassy officials repeated. It is your responsibility otherwise to go to the State Department websites and keep yourself informed of the latest travel information. You must make the decision yourself whether to travel or not; the Embassy's responsibility is to provide the most accurate and updated information they have available. You should also read the latest news reports for areas in which you are thinking of traveling.

Concerns were raised about negative reporting about Mexico in the US. Embassy representatives replied only that the US is based on freedom of speech. You can contact media which publish or air stories you find distorted, and you can write letters to the editor, write comments on websites, and email reporters at their addresses many publications and sites provide for each reporter.

Clancy added, "For business owners in particular, it is very important to have a strong local Chamber of Commerce to respond to such negative publicity, and to present positive publicity about your area. The one in San Miguel is not particularly strong, but you could contact the Mayor and offer to help with such a program extolling the benefits of SMA in the US.

"People who live here know that all the stories that are published in the US are far more complex and multi-sided than what is actually reported, but those in the US only know what they read or see. We could be doing more to present a more complete picture."

Someone asked about a rumor that there will be major changes in Mexico's handling of prescription drugs soon. An expat clarified that as of August 15, Mexican pharmacies will require a doctor's prescription for all antibiotics. Globally antibiotics are too easily prescribed and used, and "superbugs' unaffected by existing antibiotics are arising worldwide because of this past lackadaisical use of antibiotics.

The next expat question dealt with taxes, particularly on paying capital gains on the sale price of a property. "Tax laws in the US are long and complicated," Clancy said. "The laws in Mexico appear to be shorter and simpler, which allows for greater interpretation by local notario públicos and officials. The only one who can give you autoritative advice on your personal tax situation in Mexico is a notario, and each notario will interpret the laws differently."

He advised consulting four or five different notarios and determining which one interprets the law most favorably in your case, and then insisting that the notario be part of the sale deal.

Officials were asked if there was a website to help you write your own will in Mexico. "You can have a holographic will in the US, but in Mexico a handwritten will is only legal in certain cases," Clancy said. "It's too easy to go astray with something as important as a will, so I advise using a notario."

I asked the question, "How many expats does the US State Department say live in Mexico? I see the figure that there are a million US expats living in Mexico, but where are they? If there are 15,000 in Ajijic and 12,000 in San Miguel, how many more could there be in other tourist areas and scattered throughout Mexico? Will you be working with the US and Mexican census departments to get accurate figures?"

(Others such as Dr. Sheila Croucher who have done research on the actual number of US expats living in Mexico note that especially along the borders, there are hundreds of thousands of dual citizens, often children who were born in the US and thus are US citizens but they've never been back, and they can't really be considered expats who made a choice to willing leave the US to repatriate to Mexico.)

Embassy officials said that there was no way of knowing an accurate figure. All they can base their estimates on are those expats who formally register with the State Department through the website given above. The Embassy is not connected with either the US or Mexican census.

Clancy gave the example of a US magazine reporter who showed up at his office on a day there was a long line and asked if he could come to the front of the line because he was a US citizen.

Clancy made an appointment for him for later in the day and asked the reporter what he thought the citizenship of all those in the line ahead of him was. The reporter guessed they were Mexican citizens. Clancy pointed out that they were all US citizens as well and were legitimately dealing with US consulate business.

Guanajuato is among the four Mexican states that sends the most workers to the US, and many become dual citizens, or their children are dual citizens.

"I have a box of thousands of old forms from expats who registered in this office, and I have no idea whether these expats still live in San Miguel, whether they have returned to the US, or even died. Because of privacy laws, I cannot register that information with the website because I don't have their permission. It is best to assume that all old registrations done in this office are not of any value any more. Register yourself on the website.

"There is no way I can know how many US expats live in San Miguel," he continued. "The local government has been using the figure of 10,000 expats in San Miguel for many, many years. Do they include only FM3 and FM2 residency visas, or FMt (now FMM) tourist permits as well? if someone lives here six months of the year and the other half of the year in the US, where should they be counted? Are dual citizens counted twice?"

Possibly the Mexican census underway this month will help to provide more accurate figures, but some of the above questions still remain. There is no way to know accurately how many US expats and other foreigners live in San Miguel and in any part of Mexico.

Next question was on the reliability of crime statistics for San Miguel. Again, all of these statistics are prone to distortions. The best source is the local police department, Embassy officials said. Clancy suggested that expats who are interested in this issue join the Security Committee which meets monthly with the Director of Public Safety and the Mayor. It was established to be a liaison with the expat community. (David Bossman who organized the committee can be contacted at dbossman11@yahoo.com.)

An expat asked what was the proper word to use to describe yourself if asked where you are from, by a Mexican. Mexico and the US are both in the American hemisphere and thus are both Americanos, and both Mexico and the US are both in North America, making both Norteamericanos.

Estadounidenses was the word suggested by Embassy officials. (But Mexico is formally called Los Estados Unidos de México, so Mexicans can also be called estadounidenses--though usually that word is used only for those from the US.)

Next question dealt with what was considered "significant" volunteer work requiring that an expat obtain a work permit. Clancy said that Mexico does not have any formal guidelines on what is considered the line for "significant" volunteer work. "Certainly if you are in a leadership position like an officer or board member, that would be considered significant," he said. "The only place you can find out for sure is Immigration. They're very aware of these issues and they expect expats to be coming in and asking about their own situations."

He cited a case in Oaxaca last year when four US women on FM3s were doing volunteer work at an orphanage, and they had to leave Mexico because they did not have work permits.

He said he didn't know how work permits would be handled under the new visa cards that started being issued May 1 with the new Mexican Migration manual. The cards replace the former geen FM2 booklets and the gray FM2 booklets, which were similar to the navy blue US passport booklets. The new cards are credit card sized. Formerly the wording for the work permit appeared inside the FM3 or FM2 booklet. "I don't know if an additional document will be issued to those with work papers or whether the information will be on the new cards." (Carol and Norma will find out next month when they renew their FM2s with work permits.)

Embassy officials were asked if it was better to email or to phone, and they said that emails would generally be reviewed each day by all staff members and answered that day. That way any research could be done before the reply and the question would be given to the best person to answer more easily than with switching phone calls.

A question was raised about the $20 USD passport cards which can also be obtained at Clancy's office. The passport cards are designed primarly for those who live near the border and cross frequently.

Last question was on registering with Hacienda (the Mexican equivalent of the IRS) when you get a work permit. Clancy suggested going to a notario to do so if you have questions. (Carol and Norma found that a Mexican accountant can also do the registration with Hacienda with you, and arrange for your bimonthly tax payments. Next payments are due July 17, then September 17, etc. Common charge for the accountant to handle all the bookkeeping and filing is 200 pesos per person with a work permit every two months. The bimonthly tax on the lowest income category is under $5 USD.)

At this point the formal meeting ended and Embassy staffers met privately with expats who had more individual questions.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

June 6, 2010--Clear biopsy; the swallows keep returning; the rest of the report on the last "Coffee with the Consul"; a few forum posts I made that I'm copying for those who only read my blog, on the census, crime and expat expectations

First, my biopsy ws clear. No melanoma. I'm still learning to live with the rash on my neck and hands, an autoimmune disease with no known cause or cure called granuloma annulare. Dr. Blanca gave me a corticosteroid cream to use for 20 days, to be followed by a couple hundred injections of corticosteroids all over the rash, which may or may not work. For those who haven't noticed before, the rash looks a little like ringworm which is contagious, but this isn't.

Her charge was 3000 pesos for the initial visit, biopsy, and followup exams, and it will be 1500 pesos if I need to have the hundreds of injections for the rash.

And the three remaining swallows who hatched in the nest on our garage are still hanging out around our back patio, sleeping in the nest every night even if their parents have moved on to their next brood. Our cats keep hoping another will make a mistake and fall, but they seem to be watching the cats as intently as the cats watch them.

When I finally got myself together to review the rest of my notes from the last "Coffee with the Consul," I found not much else had been covered at the meeting. I need to get this report finished since I'll be covering the Monday "Town Hall" with the US Embassy representatives at 1 pm at the Biblioteca, Insurgentes 25. I'll probably be a few minutes late to that meeting since we've got to be at City Hall just before it, and who knows how long city officials will take?

I'm sure I'll procrastinate with the "Town Hall" report, too. But without TV I've got some time. Still to come some day: my lengthier book review of Geo-Mexico, and my notes on our guided trip to Querétaro last month.

Ed Clancy opened the meeting telling about David Bossman's Security Committee, which now has ten members who meet monthly with Walter Avila, the Director of Public Safety, and with the mayor. If you want to join, contact David at dbossman11@yahoo.com, or call 152-3001.

Clancy noted that there is now a new form in triplicate that is to be given to those who call the preventiva police when a crime is in progress or feared. One copy stays with the person who called the police, one goes back to the office with the preventiva police, and the third may go to Ministerio Público--the city department that is comparable to a US city's district attorney's office, where all crimes must be reported if you want them investigated once the preventiva police have completed their initial response.

Even if a copy of the form goes to Ministerio Público, a crime victim still has the responsibility ot reporting the crime to Ministerio Público directly before the crime can be investigated or prosecuted.

Three speakers from the Mexican Census Bureau then arrived and gave their presentation to the expat audience of about 20, which I summarized on our forums and I've also copied that report below in this blog. The main speaker was Lic. Juan José Huerta, Jefe de Desarrolla Estadistico, jose.huerta@inegi.org.mx, www.inegi.org.mx. If you have any question that a person coming to your door in the INEGI off-white vest and baseball cap is really from the Census, you can call 01-800-111-4636 to check their ID, or go online to verify they are a genuine census employee at www.inegi.org.mx.

After the census presentation, Clancy noted that there had been a demonstration organized by the PRD political party that ended up at Clancy's office, asking him to present a petition to President Obama through the US State Department protesting the Arizona immigration law. He added that there are demonstrations almost daily before the US Embassy in Mexico City, some including demonstrators wearing Klan uniforms, indicating what they think of the Arizona law's supporters.

Clancy said that as an example of how high tempers are rising against the Arizona law, one expat who visited a bar in Tampico was asked where he was from, and when he said Arizona, the bartender took back his drink and told him to leave. [Carol and Norma no longer say they are from Arizona if asked by a taxi driver, for example. We just forget those seven years and say we are from Michigan and California.]

Clancy compared some political organizations in Mexico with the Tea Party groups in the US in terms of ther intense views. He reminded the audience that a demonstration that seems to be non-political and non-violent can quickly turn sour. Expats can be swept up into the protest in violation of the Mexican Constitution's order against foreigners taking part in Mexican politics, an act which can be punished by deportation.

"The United States needs a stable workforce, and Mexico needs income from remittances (money sent back to Mexican families by those working in the US) so they both need each other. Something will be worked out," Clancy predicted.

The next question was on illegal parking in San Miguel, particularly in spaces reserved for those with mobility handicaps. Clancy said that he always calls the tránsito police and tells them to send a tow truck, don't send someone to just investigate. Sometimes it has taken him ten calls to get an abandoned car towed away, he said.

"It is totally illegal for someone to put out tables or rocks or anything else to try to save a parking space in front of their business," Clancy said. "What I've done is start to load the piece of furniture into my car, and when the owner rushes out I say I thought it was being put out to give away. While they remove the furniture to their house, I park in the space."

The Department of Ecologia will help you if you call to say that rocks have been placed in the street or sidewalk, Clancy said. He recommended that expats call the Department of International relations, either Fernanda or Javier, at 120-4529, to ask which city department is the right one to talk to about a particular problem.

Asked about Mexican tax laws regarding capital gains on the sale of a house, Clancy said that expats should disregard everything they read or hear about Mexican taxes, unless a notario público says it. (A notario público is an attorney with advanced training in government forms and regulations, including real estate sales and taxes.) "Talk to four or five notarios and find the one whose interpretation of the laws gives you the best deal," Clancy said. "You can specify in a real estate sale that the deal is based on having that notario. A lot of personal judgment enters into Mexican tax and real estate law. Only the notario's word in binding."

There is no way to escape paying capital gains on a house which has been used as a rental business, Clancy said.

A notario may report a sale of a house in Mexico to the United States on a 1099 US tax from but it isn't necessary.

Clancy said that his impression of the new Mexican Migration Manual changes so far is that the process is now easier and smoother. For new and renewed FM3s and FM2s, an expat now applies online and then goes to the nearest Mexican immigration office to pick up the FM3 or FM2 visas. The visas are now small plastic cards instead of the green or gray booklets similar to US blue passport booklets.

Another recent change in Mexican law that may impact expats is the $10,000 trigger before an overseas bak account had to be reported to the IRS. Now all foreign bank accounts are to be reported to the IRS, no matter the amount in them, and during the grace period many US citizens closed all their accounts out of the US.

He was asked about the chances of Medicare coverage being extended to expats living in Mexico. "There is a high degree of Medicare fraud in the United States," he said, "and it would be even harder to take all precautions against Medicare fraud in payments to Mexican doctors and hospitals. A better idea would be for Medicare hospitals to be built in Mexico, naybe in Mexico City or Guadalajara, for US citizens who are on Medicare, similar to the VA hospitals in other countries to take care of the health care needs of US veterans who are out of the country."

Another expat asked Clancy what is a fair wage for maids and what is a fair tip. He noted that Mexicans pay their house staff 20-30 pesos an hour, and in Celaya the going rate is 10 pesos an hour. He knew of a Mexican woman who moved to Celaya and tried for a year to find a housekeeper's position paying 30 pesos an hour and never did. (Many expats now pay 40 pesos an hour, or even 50 pesos if the employee is doing shopping, paying bills, supervising other employees or cooking, some in the audience said.)

On a fair tip for a waiter, Clancy said that Mexicans tip 10% no matter what, while in the US many people now pay 20% standard for an evening meal's service in a nice restaurant. [Carol and Norma pay 10% to someone who only brings over a beverage, 15% most of the time, and rarely 20% for exceptional service.)

Though technically it's still on the books that cab fares within Centro are 15 pesos, the average now is 25 pesos, Clancy said. He noted that taxi drivers who wait in line at Mega and La Luciernaga have to pay the stores 50 pesos a week for that opportunity, so they usually charge more. It's more for longer distances outside Centro, and at night (whether that is after dark or after 10 pm is debatable). It is double the fare if you phone a cab to come pick you up.

On obtaining death certificates if someone dies in San Miguel, Clancy said that usually the Ministerio Público is told of a death first, and if the person is an expat Clancy is soon brought into the picture. Dr. Robert Maxwell is one physician with the authority to sign death certificates. The funeral home and the consulate provide both Mexican death certificates and also US certificates of death that are used for US insurance claims and other legal matters.

He said that when a person dies the Ministerio Público may seal off the person's apartment or house, but that is not the same as making it secure from robbery. a guard may need to be hired to prevent illegal entrances into the home.

He gave a plug for Hospital General, the 60-bed government hospital out in the direction of the SMA city offices, for assisting several expats who had no money but who still got excellent health care at a very minimal charge. (A financial social worker does an interview with the person or family on their monthly income, home ownership, pensions, etc., to determine the adjusted charge for each person. For Carol a four-hour stay in the ER with x-rays, IV meds and EKGs was 500 pesos.)

Hospital General is separate from the IMSS hospital for which some expats have insurance coverage, and it is different from Hospital de la Fe, which is a private, for-profit hospital that is physician owned. He praised the volunteer home health care groups in San Miguel which help expats who have no family or friend to stay in the hospital with them and arrange home care when they are discharged.

Some in the audience noted that it is important to have a family member or friend to go with someone to the hospital here, to do the services such as feeding, walks to the bathroom, pillow fluffing, etc., just as in the US it is becoming more important to have a patient advocate with you when you are hospitalized as well. Ed noted that legally he can't intervene to arrange assistance to an expat who is hospitalized. St. Paul's Anglican Church is one organization which can assist expats with many health care needs, such as loan of a wheelchair, crutches, or hospital bed.

The "Coffee with the Consul" lasted nearly two hours. The next meeting for expats is the Town Hall Monday, June 7, at 1 pm at the Biblioteca sala, hosted by the US State Department's Embassy from Mexico City.

======

Now, below are three posts I made on our forums which I think will be interesting to those who only read my blog. The first is the census info that was discussed at the "Coffee with the Consul." The second is in response to a question on what is the current crime situation in San Miguel. And the third is in response to someone who was arriving in 10 days and wanted the name of a cookbook in Spanish she could give to her maid so that the maid would cook her fresh, organic, local, healthy mealsl

MX Census takers coming to your door May 31-June 25

They'll be wearing off-white vests and baseball caps with the census logo and the initials INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estroística y Geografía).

They will show you their photo ID, and you can call 01-800-111-4634 to verify that person is a census employee working your neighborhood.

Or you can ask them to wait a minute while you go to www.inegi.org.mx and see a photo of the census worker to verify their identity.

The logo is the outline of a house with a simplified outline of a person standing inside.

Here is a gov. website with more information:

http://www.censo2010.org.mx/

Most people will be asked only 27 questions, such as name, sex, nationality, marital status, age, and employment, plus information about the quality of the house: does it have a roof, floor, bathroom, water, electricity, sewers, TV, phone and internet.

Just as in the US, a small percentage of people will be asked more detailed questions such as about income, education and health.

The census takers will be Spanish speaking only in most cases. You may want to arrange ahead of time for a Spanish speaker to assist you in answering the census questions, or look up ahead of time the key words for these questions.

They will be going in groups of four or more and keeping an eye out for each other. In areas where there is known criminal activity they will negotiate ahead of time for a temporary truce so that they can conduct their questions.

Just as in the US, the census is required by law every ten years, with a smaller update every five years. Each respondent's information is protected and only summarized information will be available, in March, 2011.

Just as in the US, the information is used for determining governent allocations of representatives and many kinds of government assistance. Cities also use the data to help in their long-range planning.

Some homes have already been visited for training sessions. These homes may be revisited during the May 31 to June 25 official census period.

In 2005 at the last interim census, the updated figures determined that San Miguel de Allende had an urban population of 80,000, a rural population in 540 surrounding communities totaling 60,000; 12,000 foreigners living in SMA at any one time; and 7,000 of those were on residency visas.

Those foreigners were 70% from the US, 20% from Canada, and the rest from 31 other countries. Figuring what percentage expats are of the SMA population depends on whether you take only the figures for the expat residents or the total number, and whether you compare those statistics to the SMA city population or to SMA as a whole Expats could be as much as 15% of the city or less than 8% depending on how the caculations are done.

I wrote the report on this update for Cris Finkelstein, then Director of International Relations, Tourism and Economic Development, under then-Mayor Luis Villarreal, for Atención in 2006 when the information became available.

Those figures were the last official figures on SMA population. It will be very interesting to see how many expats there are in SMA now, and what the population is now.

Representatives of the census campaign spoke at a "Coffee with the Consul" at the Biblioteca May 21, organized by US Consular Agent Ed Clancy. I will be writing up the rest of the information given out at that meeting on my blog soon.

Just for comparison, I've posted below a link and first paragraphs to an article about the US census which is underway right now. So far, 113 US Census takers have been assaulted in some way, including carjackings, out of 635,000 Census employees hired to conduct the US census.

I was a US census taker in rural Michigan in 1990 and can report the work can be dangerous--an armed man threatened to shoot me if I stepped on his property! It's a thankless job.

My advice: please be nice to these Mexican census takers! And do check their ID online or by phone if you have any questions.

Look for the teams wearing white vests and baseball caps with little house logos in your neighborhood May 31 to June 25.

You can't trust crime statistics

But with that caveat, the crime blotter in Atención has shown fewer street crimes reported recently, and both on Civil_SMA and this forum and at the last "Coffee with the Consul" and in my converesations with friends, street crime seems to be down.

Every Christmas there is a surge in burglaries and street crime all over because thieves are both stealing for their own holiday season and taking advantage of the black market need for cheap holiday gifts.

Also, some of the big upscale construction projects bring in out-of-SMA workers, even Mexico's own illegal immigrants from Guatemala and other Latin American countries where workers come willing to work for even less than SMA construction workers.

For example, there were a lot of workers at the Rosewood luxury development and the renovations at the Jacaranda, the luxury hotel and restaurant on Aldama almost to Masion del Bosque and Parque Juarez that was sold and is being rebuilt.

These transient workers had good overviews of all the rooftop paths in Centro to see where the nicest homes were without dogs, to scope out targets for their real income possibilities at night.

It is also true that all elements of society tested the new mayor when she came into office at the end of last year, and also tested the new Director of Public Security, Walter Avila, retired military officer.

Lucy did start monthly meetings with colonia officials and with expats on crime and other issues. At the last meetings I attended there did seem to be a determined group of expats who were riding the issue of street crime, especially by El Raton, the purse snatcher and burglar on Tenerias near Aldama.

El Raton was very good at keeping his thefts below 20,000 pesos, the level at which a theft becomes a higher category, and so he only served time overnight when he was caught. He also used many aliases, and the right hand of the city never knew what the left hand was doing.

Most victims never followed through to file formal complaints with Ministerio Publico, so it was as if the crimes never happened. (A recent study found the main reasons why crime victims don't follow through: they don't believe anything can be done, they don't want to deal with all the hassles of reporting, and/or it is difficult for them to spend all the time it takes to file reports, which can take many hours.)

El Raton did get imprisoned for five months but was released this spring and the dedicated group of expats going to every city security meeting were keeping the pressure up on El Raton in particular.

At one early meeting I attended of her administration, Mayor Lucy showed shock at hearing about El Raton, she said she had no idea there were repeat criminals like that victimizing San Miguelenses, so maybe she is following through and keeping the pressure up on him.

David Bossman of the Midday Rotary Club has formed a committee with ten members so far that is dedicated to working with the city on security issues, and the group next meets June 9 at 3 pm. If you want to join the committee and attend their monthly meetings with the police chief, contact Bossman at dbossman11@yahoo.com, phone 152-3001.

When you get back in town, you might want to contact David and see what his group is doing, and attend the city's monthly meetings that are open to the public for Q & A. The English language meetings are the first THursday of each month at 6 pm at the city's community center and auditorium in Fracc. La Luz out near the city offices. I've posted detailed directions to those meetings here in the past and I can find t hem and post them again if you're interested.

There is still street crime and more serious crime, and the city has not given clear answers to the big crime rumor in the city right now, mainly is it true that La Familia Michoacan has been kidnapping wealthy Mexicans in SMA for ransoms.

The rumors are that perhaps a dozen Mexican business owners have been kidnapped briefly and released when the ransom was paid, which is what is happening in much of Mexico as the drug cartels "diversify" and move into more income revenue areas.

But I have heard nothing verifiable on these rumors. I hear a name here and there but no information I feel I can trust. La Familia is growing in strength and outreach as the drug cartels continue to fight among themselves for power and transportation routes to move their drugs to the wealthy market for drugs in the US. They are active in Celaya and some of the small communities near SMA.

But as I have given as a comparison often, someone living in Malibu isn't going to be affected by the gangs in South Central or Boyle Heights, maybe 10-20 miles from Malibu.

It isn't burying one's head in the sand to keep a perspective about the drug cartels, who defiitely exist and are definitely causing serious crime throughout Mexico, especially in the border cities and some other areas in Mexico.

Part of being a responsible expat, IMO, is keeping up on all of Mexico's serious problems and doing our bit where possible to help our adopted country, and realizing how Mexican citizens are being affected by these problems even if they don't touch us very often.

Most of us are probaby more fearful, with good reason, of a purse or wallet snatcher who may knock us to the ground if we struggle, than we are of drug cartel crime affecting us.

It is far more likely in Mexico, as in the US, that you will be hurt by a family member in domestic violence or a neighborhood dispute than you will be caught up in drug cartel crime--so long as you're not involved in drugs or law enforcement (or journalism, reporting on the cartels).

You could be in the wrong place at the wrong time when violence breaks out, or a truck loses its brakes, or lightning strikes, or a sinkhole opens, anyplace in the world.

In perspective from my point of view, San Miguel remains just as safe as most tourist cities in the US, and safer than Rio, New Orleans, Atlanta and Houston. David, what's the crime rate in Seattle?

Because we are a Federally-designated tourist Magico Pueblo and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, San Miguel continues to get special attention and will not be allowed to become a crime center. And there are many expats and Mexicans alike who remain involved in security issues, which always helps to keep attention focused on crime.

Hope this answers your question somewhat, since I don't have more specific information.

Chances of becoming a crime victim in Seattle: 1 in 147

With still no TV, I've been Googling away. Here's one of the websites with statistics on Seattle crime:

http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/wa/seattle/crime/

For violent crimes each year, there were 3,828, or 6.79 per 1,000 population.

For property crimes, there were 44,409, or 78.83 per 1,000 population.

For expats alone, at about 12,000 expats in SMA, we'd have to experience about 76 violent crimes and 946 property crimes a year to equal Seattle crime rates.

Most crimes in Mexico are never reported, of course, but I think expats would tend to do so.

Now you may feel very safe on a small WA island. We escaped LA crime to move to rural Michigan in 1985, where, when we complained about LA crime, the neighbor said they had crime too--just last week somebody stole underwear off her clothes line.

And then it turned out we'd moved next door to a member of the Michigan Militia and only a few miles from the McNichols farm house where Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombers hung out and plotted their domestic terorism.

The FBI esconced itself into the town of 2,000 for several years investigating, sharing the McDonald's every morning with the farmers, black SUVs next to tractors in the parking lot. Ya never know.

A response to a poster asking about giving an organic fresh foods cookbook to her maid

You're probably not going to find a Mexican cook who already knows how to use fresh organic local alive beautiful food. Probably you'd have to hire away from one of the high end restaurants one of their cooks, at huge expense. They wouldn't want to be a maid who cooks, either!

There is a woman here who teaches Mexican maids how to cook more than traditional Mexican dishes. She might know of one of her grads who is unemployed right now, or you can get someone into her next available classes.

Her name is Victoria Challancin, from the US dial 01152-415-152-5912, and her newsletter is Flavors of the Sun. It includes photos of her students with the dishes they've learned to cook.

She also takes cooking tours to Morocco and other places in the world so I don't know if she is in town right now. Here's her blog to get you started: http://flavorsofthesun.blogspot.com/

You can see from her photos and recipes that she does exactly what you want! There are other cooking schools in town but hers specifically teaches maids how to cook meals other than traditional Mexican recipes.

The other suggestion I have for you is to go to Via Organica, one of the best health food stores which has excellent organic produce, and talk to the owners to see if they know of someone who shops there frequently and who might have a cook available. The store is at Margarito Ledesmo #2, 152-8042.

You take Hidalgo north to where it becomes Calzada de Aurora, then the first street after it becomes Calzada de Aurora at Calzada de la Luz is called Calle Maria Talavera. Take Maria Talavera left, and the first street is Margarito Ledesma. Turn left onto Ledesma and the store is about halfway up the block. You can have your healthy organic meals there while you're finding and training a cook!

On the corner of Hidalgo and Calzada de la Aurora is another excellent organic foods restaurant, La Media Naranja, upstairs over the Pharmacy on the corner. You could also ask there if they know of a cook who might suit you.

In general, if you present your ideas to the typical Mexican housekeeper and cook she will run from the room and never come back! She will be very set in her ways with the recipes her mother and grandmothers taught her, and you will get very tasty enchiladas, tamales, chicken mole, etc., but she will have no idea what you are talking about and probably will be resistant to learn. Victoria's classes are the best way I know to teach a Mexican maid your kind of cooking.

Putting a cookbook in front of her, even in Spanish, will not be enough. My German grandmother would never cook anything but the German recipes she'd learned from her mother, and my French grandmother would never cook anything but the French recipes she'd learned from her mother. My own mother had to add many German recipes to her French cooking because my father insisted, and iin those days a woman did what her husband said. I can't even imagine the resistance if he'd handed her a cookbook in German! So it's not just Mexican housekeepers and cooks who prefer to cook what they like and already know how to do.

El Tecolote bookstore at Jesus 11 has an extensive cookbook section, including many in Spanish, and you will probably find some cookbooks there that you like.

But remember that the average adult level of completed education in Mexico is around six years, and many of the older women you may interview will be functionally illiterate.

In dealing with Mexican employees, there is a whole different culture. You can't be confrontive and rushed, you need to go around the subject and present info in a non-threatening way, to present changes in a way that leads the employee to think she's come up with the idea, and never make her lose face or you have made an enemy. She'll chalk one up on you and she may find a subtle way to get even.

I suggest you read Boye de Mente's book, Why Mexicans think and behave the way they do, before you arrive. And do learn as much Spanish as you can, asap, to help you in working with your maid and everyone else. You can get the fundamentals in 2 1/2 intensive weeks at Warren Hardy Level 1.

I think you will be cooking for yourself for a long time until you find someone who is willing and able to learn to cook the way you want.

You're going to have to lower your expectations and practice patience. This isn't Berkeley! Good luck eventually getting what you want!

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

June 3, 2010--Annoyances, in perspective; baby swallows nesting on our garage wall; our freezer we bought used finally dies at only 27 years old; International Brotherhood Week; the Mexican Census is underway; a US Embassy Town Hall at the Biblioteca at 1 pm Monday, June 7

Lots of annoyances keep us unsettled and irritated, though we fully realize our anger is petty compared to what is going on in the rest of the world. Spoiled expats.

The most genuine concern is a little spot on my back that Norma noticed and we were off to dermatologist Dr. Blanca. She didn't think it was malignant but removed it anyway and sent the mole off for a biopsy. At least another week until we get the results. Norma had a similar suspicious mole that was non-malignant on the first biopsy but Dr. Blanca had to go back in and dig it all out, and it had tracked several inches across her shoulder blade. I'm hoping that my biopsy results determine that there is no need to go back in. The removal site, three stitches, first hurt and now is itching like mad.

This is the first time I've had to have a spot removed. Three friends have died of melanoma. I keep thinking of the book and movie, "The Puppet Masters," where alien creatures bury themselves between the shoulder blades of unsuspecting humans and then the people are under the control of the aliens. I hate the feeling I may still have a little parasite lurking under my skin.

Then there's the lack of satellite TV. Some satellite went off kilter and caused readjustments in nearby TV transmission satellites, including the one serving us. We won't know until June 16 or later whether the replacement satellite will work with our existing dishes or whether we will have to buy one bigger than six feeet to pick up US networks.

There is a Mexican DISH satellite TV system that has very few US channels, naturally. This is Mexico. Meanwhile we went to Telecable to get the English channels on our cable TV, which we hadn't bothered to have hooked up before. We use Telecable's Cybermatsa for our internet and the cable TV just came along with the package.

I hate cable TV. Very few of the 101 channels are ones we have always watched--ABC, CBS and NBC, but no MSNBC, Comedy Central, Food Channel, History Channel, Discovery, TNT, AMC, etc. We got used to the DVR feature on satellite, like TIVO--we had almost all 150 hours filled with shows we planned to watch some day. Now we are watching them. The program guide for cable is horrible. It rotates through the 101 channels so slowly, showing only one hour ahead, and if you blink and miss the channel you want to see, you have to wait five minutes for it to come up again.

The satellite went out the week of the season finales for our favorite shows--The Biggest Loser, NCIS, The Mentalist, Criminal Minds, and The Tudors. We missed the last show after five years of The Tudors, not that we didn't know what happened in real history. Henry VIII's last wife, who naturally feared being beheaded, survived her husband. The child King Edward lived briefly, and then Henry's two daughters got to rule with no heirs, before the Tudor line ended forever. We still wanted to see the final performances of this splendid series.

And, we've missed "All My Children" most of two weeks, although we could have watched it on cable if we stayed home each day at noon. We're not that bad of TV addicts, we won't change our entire lives just to catch the network shows, and we haven't bought a DVD recorder or VCR (still available in Mexico in some stores) to tape our favorites. We can last until June 16. It's the uncertainty, and not having our favorite shows to go to sleep on. Yes, this is a minor problem in the grander scale of things. Pampered expats.

Not being able to keep up with the latest on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been part of the problem. I think that crisis is also part of the general discontent we're feeling. How can anyone not feel upset at what is going on there? Most of us feel helpless and angry about it.

And then our internet went out as well. We fussed with it until Telecable convinced us it was something with our own electrical system, not their fault. Norma changed our office layout around with new cables, and now we're on broadband again, not wanting to spend around $40 for a new wireless router. The new arrangement works. It's just another disturbance, having to think where I'm walking when I stumble into our office upon awakening, and watching for more wires all over the place.

Norma first gave up on building me a new computer with all the assorted parts we had lying around. She did order a new motherboard via Tiger Direct and it arrived damaged. The joys of buying things online--not so easy to do a return. She decided the knowledge she'd learned in a class on building computers back in Phoenix was now outdated. But she's studying Tiger Direct again--I think new parts are going to be arriving soon and she'll try again. If it works, I can get a gaming quality computer equal to hers for a few hundred dollars, while a new one of that capability here would be around $1,300 (less on the internet, even with shipping and duty, but the warranty would be useless here). So my computer continues to act up--yet another source of irritation.

The weather is a biggie. It's in the low 90s F. many days. Yes, we last lived in Phoenix where it is probably over 110 by now, but we knew six months of the year in Phoenix it would be over 100 and we had A/C in our car, house, all malls, the movies, and everywhere else we went, plus we hit the clubhouse pool every night. Thick concrete walls of Mexican construction keep inside temps a little cooler for a few hours of the day, but it takes longer for a house to cool down at night, too. Ceiling fans just don't do it, and they give us sinus headaches and congestion, too. Having a sinus headache most of the tiem is another discomfort in our lives. We're all hoping for the start of the rainy season, which often starts mid-June. Since we had such massive rains in February, not usual, we may be off kilter for these rains, too. Another bit of uncertainty and waiting.

After many defrosts through the past six years due to electric failures, our upright freezer we bought used when we first arrived finally died on its own--another crisis as we tried to save as much meat as we could. Our housekeeper and handyman got most of what had to be cooked and used immediately. We cooked what we could that would fit in the freezer section of our refrigerator and ate casseroles for days. But once again Norma lost her frozen lemon juice and home made sauces, both Asian and Mexican. Another annoyance that required us to adjust our lives.

Picky, picky. We had one positive thing going on in our lives, four baby swallows in a nest attached to our garage wall in our rear patio. We have friends who use the hose to wash away all beginnings of nests of swallow regurgitation, not wanting the mess of swallows dripping down their walls. Understandable.

But this nest was already there, and the swallows came back to it and filled it with eggs. We counted four different adults who came and went from the nest frequently, so we weren't sure if this was a commune or extended family, or two sets of parents were sharing the nest, or what.

The babies hatched and we watched every day to see how big and how fast they grew. When they looked grown enough to possibly start flying, we shut down the pet door into the back patio so that our three cats couldn't hurt any baby that fell out of the nest or didn't make it to the wall on its first flying trip. The cats would meow at the pet door, wanting to do just that.

The babies were so cute--I put a photo of them on our personal photo album on the Photo Gallery page of this website.

And then they did take off one day and had a grand time soaring to the nearest electrical lines and neighbors' houses. They would sit on the wires and flutter their wings madly, testing their strength, proud little puffballs.

We were shocked that night to find that all four returned to the nest at dusk! We didn't see any of the parents return to feed them, though the babies sat there with their mouths wide open, hoping. Inside our house, our cats batted at the pet foor, their mouths wide open, still hoping.

After three days of their flying around, going farther and farther from the nest each time, we decided that the babies were now strong enough that there was no danger they'd flutter to the ground and our cats could get them. We opened the rear pet door. The cats glared up at the empty nest and at us. Foiled.

From our office we could see the fledglings flit from wire to wire, house to house, sometimes disappearing for a long while but returning to home, though the nest remained parentless. They look like barn swallows in the SMA Audubon book, which pictures them with dark blue backs and light orange chests, their long tails definitely in a V, their wings as long as their tails. But the backs of our babies were almost black, not a definite blue like the Audubon book shows them. Maybe our colonia has a different variation in barn swallows.

They were such fun to watch. We couldn't identify any distinguishing characteristics for any of them so they escaped names.

And then one morning I could hear Norma swearing up a storm in the kitchen. Bird feathers were all over our floor, and the tiny carcass of one of the babies was on the patio floor outside. We wanted to kick our cats, but of course cats are animals first, pets second, and they were doing what their natures insisted they do. We still shunned them anyway for a few days.

The remaining three babies still come home to the empty nest each night! It's been at least a week. Who knew? Watching them has been a highlight throughout this dismal two weeks, even with the cat-astrophe.

And then our hummingbirds came back. We'd cleaned up the feeder and put it away when they disappeared about a month ago. Hummingbirds migrate, so we thought we wouldn't see any until the fall, winding their way back from Canada or wherever.

But the same morning we found the dead swallow we noticed a few hummingbirds dive-bombing the empty space where the hummingbird feeder had been. Quickly we boiled some sugar water, four parts water to one of sugar, and filled the feeder as soon as it cooled. The hummingbirds have been constant visitors ever since. Norma smeared vaseline on the wire hanger to keep ants out of the food this time, and that seems to be working.

When you live in a house with a yard, life is very different than in an apartment. Daily experiences around the house take up so much more time. We don't feel the need to go into Centro for every fiesta and procession any more. That's probably a shame. And it's also to be expected as we've seen most of the annual festivities seven or eight times now. If you're an observer, not a believer, seeing the same rituals every year is less and less interesting.

Now we did find outselves downtown during some nights of International Brotherhood Week. That was the first event we experienced when we arrived in SMA in 2002, and every year the city celebrates a little differently.

One night was dance troupes representing a dozen different countries. The first act we saw was sort of leprechauns, or were they supposed to be frogs, from Ireland. Belly dancers were terrific, spreading their sheer veils like wings. That act performed again the next time in one of the auditoriums for a charge. All the events of Brotherwood Week were free in the Jardin.

A Hawaiian troupe was better than the stereotypical hula act we expected. The US was also represented by a tap dancing crew doing songs from the Big Band swing era. I have photos of some of the dancers on our Photo Gallery page of this website as well, the album titled, International Brotherhood Week, 2010. I posted a few other new shots in the San Miguel Scenes album and in our personal album.

I still have a report to write up on the last Coffee with the Consul, besides the only real news out of that meeting that the Mexican Census is underway May 31 to June 25. I described the census news in some detail on the forums. We saw the first interviewers in their little off-white vests and baseball caps on our street today, so they'll probably get to us tomorrow.

There will be a US Embassy Town Hall in San Miguel Monday, June 7, at 1 pm in the Biblioteca sala upstairs. If you have any questions about the role of the US Embassy and our local Consular Agent in assisting expats, please attend.

I'll have to do the Coffee with the Consul report later, along with my report on our wonderful day in Querétaro a few weeks ago. I also have a longer book review of Geo-Mexico to post soon. The past two weeks have been so unsettling that I haven't felt like writing a thing. The heat hasn't helped. April and May are our hottest months, so the heat is to be expected, but the whole town is just waiting for the rains.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

May 20, 2010--Our first mordida on the drive up to Laredo; impressions of Laredo; eventful bus ride back with no FMMs required; we may not tell people any more that we last lived in Arizona

I'm still reading a book on Querétaro before I write my blog on that personal tour with friends last week, and I have 150 photos to select from and edit. But I will write about our shopping trip to Laredo May 13-17 while it's still fresh.

We drove up with a friend who hadn't made the drive before and she wanted some company. We gladly volunteered--thanks to Alejandro our chewing cat Norma's underwear had become very saintly, I mean holey. And we always need computer printer ribbons, Frank's original red hot sauce, Chinese sauces and such. Carey's, one of the local gourmet imported foods shops in town, is closing, and they often had unusual foods, even at triple the US price. The availability now of gourmet products at Mega, Soriana, La Cava, Luna de Queso, Via Organica, MM Minimarket, and other SMA stores has apparently hurt Carey's. Better stock up on Asian foods in particular in the giant HEB markets in Laredo.

We all planned what to do in case we were stopped for a mordida (bribe) on the way up, though more often phony or corrupt cops stop expats in US-plated cars on the way down, just below the border.

That had happened to our friend on her way down, driving with her daughter. A very short distance from the Colombia bridge border crossing, she was stopped for going around 100 kmh (60 mph) in a speed trap area posted 60 km, even though it was a double divided highway with trucks whizzing by at 100+. They'd ended up giving the two tránsitos (traffic cops) on motorcycles about $100 USD. That was in January. Their dog, about a 50-pound Wheaton terrier, slept through the entire stop.

So now in May we prepared our false purses with outdated credit cards and a 200-peso bill each, about $18 USD, what we each decided was the maximum we'd give easily if we were stopped. Our friend had copies of her drivers license and all other official papers so that she wouldn't have to give up originals and end up detouring to the police station to collect them and pay the bribe the next morning. Our friend wanted to get all the way to San Antonio that night, after dropping us off at our hotel in Laredo, and we left at 6 am, so we had maybe an hour's leeway for stops.

But we really didn't expect anything to happen on the drive up. I even forgot and bought Diet Cokes with my 200-peso bill at a Pemex when our friend was walking her dog, leaving me with 140 pesos in change.

Would you believe at the exact same spot within maybe a mile of Colombia bridge Norma spotted the 60 kmh speed limit signs and yelled at our friend to slow down? But it was too late, here came two tránsitos on white motorcycles!

And our friend hadn't cut apart her copies of her drivers license. As the officer watched, she tore a sheet in rough halves and handed the officer one. He accepted it, skimmed it, and started to call her by her first name. He had no name on his badge. First clue.

He pulled out his booklet with the costs of various kinds of tickets. First he said 100 pesos. I decided to ask immediately, "If we give you 100 pesos, can we go on?" He said no. Our friend said, ""What a relief, an honest cop." Too soon.

I eventually figured out he was saying that traffic tickets are determined by multiples of the Mexico City minimum daily wage, which is around $4.50 USD, but he kept saying it was 100 pesos. Then he kept pointing to various categories of traffic tickets and their multiples. Driving under the influence was six times the minimum daily wage, or did he say 60 times? Our friend reacted with horror, "No alcohol! We've had nothing to drink!" He shook his head and said that was only an example. He was working up to the fine for speeding.

Our friend and Norma pretended, not too difficult, that they didn't understand a word he was saying: "No hablo español." I wasn't doing too good a job understanding myself but I laid low and only occasionally muttered a mangled Spanish sentence that he didn't understand anyway. He did understand that I kept offering to pay 100 pesos to settle the ticket right then and there. He kept shaking his head no.

The booklet said that speeding was 20 times the minimum daily wage, and since he insisted the minimum daily wage was 100 pesos instead of the accurate 52 pesos, that meant the ticket would be 2,000 pesos--only if we went with him back to Nuevo Laredo to the police station to pay it.

The Colombia bridge is probably 30 miles from Nuevo Laredo. That would really mess up our schedule. We mouthed to each other that we werén't going to do that, we'd be too late getting in. That meant we'd be paying something to him, sooner or later.

He kept saying that if we paid the fine directly to him it would be 2,500 pesos, or we could follow him to the police station back at Nuevo Laredo and pay only 2,000 pesos (about $175 USD).

I kept saying, "Es posible pagamos cien pesos ahora y continuamos?" Can we pay you 100 pesos and go on our way? I knew he was saying no, I was trying to wear him down.

Our friend kept doing her bit, bringing up that we had not been drinking, horrors at the thought. Norma kept saying, "No hablo español" and also occasionally calculating the fine various ways in her accountant style. I kept trying to get him to let me read the booklet, because I wanted to see if it said that the minimum daily wage for 2010 was around 52 pesos, or did it actually lie and say 100 pesos? He wouldn't let me even touch the booklet.

The dog slept on.

I think we were actually making headway, wearing down the first cop, when the other guy came into view and said roughly, "How much do you have?" In English.

We could tell, this was The Closer. No more fooling around. We pulled out our phony purses and our total of 540 pesos, about $49 USD including much coinage, and piled it into his hands. He looked at the heap of pesos and the two of them walked back to their motorcycles and drove off.

The dog slept on.

We actually laughed afterward. "We almost had him," our friend said. "If only we'd been able to sound more convincing that we were willing to drive back to Nuevo Laredo with him. He didn't want to do that any more than we did. And at least this time we only paid half what I paid in January. Good bargaining!"

Rolly Brook, our coauthor of The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico, describes in our book how he has paid as little as a few cents the three times he has been stopped for bribes, by persistent negotiating.

Other friends who were stopped a few weeks ago had a Mexican with them, and when the cop asked them for 3,500 pesos, she said, "How about a Coke?" He replied, "How about a whiskey?" They ended up paying something like $15 USD.

But we also know of a case where a guy with a motorcycle in the back of his truck was told he had to pay $10,000 USD. When he refused they wanted to take his motorcycle. He ended up paying about $200 USD. And then there is the experience of two readers of this website who didn't have any money with them and they were express kidnapped and taken to an ATM where their accounts were drained. So I don't think most expats who do get stopped can expect to pay only a few dollars any more. Yeah, it sucks.

I noted that starting salaries for police throughout Mexico were usually the equivalent of around $300 USD a month, and if the two of them scored about $50 every half hour, they could make $200 USD a day each, maybe $4,300 USD a month extra. I'd be tempted, too.

So we drove on to the border, weren't asked a thing at the US side besides did we have any alcohol, drugs, guns, ammo, or fresh fruits and vegetables. We said no and were waved through. We pulled over to the immigration offices on the left side of the crossing area and went inside so that Norma and I could have our FM2s stamped. On FM2s you can only be out of Mexico 18 months out of five years, so immigration does insist you get your visa stamped every trip, both directions. Ten minutes and we were on our way.

We'd checked prices at our usual Motel 6's in Laredo and they were charging around $50 USD a night. Norma decided to see what we could get on Priceline for $50 a night and we scored a $90 room at the Holiday Inn Civic Center. Our friend left us there and drove on to San Antonio. The dog slept on.

A Jehovah's Witness conference was going on in the hotel. Nobody tried to convert us, though.

All through Laredo we heard far more Spanish than we usually do in San Miguel, and spoke as much Spanish as we do in San Miguel. Every time a Mexican-American apologized to us for not speaking English we had to laugh and explain that we sure sympathized, our español was siempre malo no matter how many classes we took.

We only had eight meals including breakfasts to eat in Laredo, and a dozen restaurants we wanted to take in, but we were so tired Thursday night that we phoned Papa John's for a Works medium pizza delivered to our 14th floor room.

Norma paid by credit card on the phone and added a $3 tip to the $2 delivery charge and $10 charge for the pizza. When the guy arrived he wanted $12 and tip, he had no record of the pizza being paid for. Another hassle by phone and he was told by his manager we'd paid, including his tip. He was not happy. We didn't care, we were just hungry. We hadn't stopped for any meals, we'd brought sandwiches and munchies along for the 12-hour drive including the speeding stop. The pizza wasn't nearly as good as we remembered. Early to bed.

We'd picked the Holiday Inn Civic Center because it had a free shuttle to the Mall del Norte, the bus station, the border, and the airport. We were thinking we wouldn't need a car, we could use the shuttle to the mall every day and maybe pay for a cab or two. We soon found that cabs were a $4 drop when you got in the door, and another $4 for a 2 1/2 mile trip, plus tip. We also discovered that Mall del Norte was not a compact shopping center, it went on for several blocks, on both sides of the freeway, and there was no way to walk to everything we'd planned. Six cab rides would pay for a car rental, which we did. Free shuttle out to the airport to pick it up. Few US cities are designed for walking.

Shopping went well--JCPenneys was having a huge sale, and if you used their credit card you got to scratch a card for an additional 15-30% discount. Between us we bought a dozen blouses and tops for $4-7 each, plus everything else we'd planned. The $19.95 watch I'd bought at the McAllen Penneys a year ago had stopped working, even a new battery unable to coax it to work again. It was cheaper to buy a new one than pay for a repair, even in SMA. With the discounts my new watch was $9. Even Tuesday Market is not that cheap. The Laredo economy is hurting.

We chatted with most of the sales clerks and told them about San Miguel. The watch sales clerk went on and on about the new Arizona law requiring everyone to show citizenship papers to any policeman who stops them on vaguely worded guidelines for guessing who was illegal. She called the AZ governor the devil. Just about everyone we talked to brought up the Arizona law very quickly. It was a heated topic. We made it as clear as we could that we had only lived in Arizona for seven years, we never voted for the governor, we were now from San Miguel, we did not support the law.

We took in "Letters from Juliet" and "Robin Hood" at the mall theater and enjoyed them both. We love historical movies and thought "Robin Hood" was far better than the reviews, but we're still not sure how much of the legend is true--if any. Have to Google "Robin Hood" later.

No meals were as good as we expected or remembered. We may have written off Red Lobster forever, and the Olive Garden wasn't much better. The best meal of the trip: Denny's for breakfast. Yes, we love chains, they're usually consistent, something SMA restaurants rarely are. And we ate a pint of Blue Bell Moollenium ice cream from HEB every night.

Monday at 11:30 am we caught an Americanos/Grayhound bus to Monterrey where we could catch a luxury bus to Querétaro and then whatever bus came first to San Miguel. We expected to be home by midnight.

The bus stopped immediately after the Bridge II crossing and we all put our luggage out on a counter where it was x-rayed. No red/green light buttons were working so nobody got a more thorough check.

We were the only gringos on the bus so the driver waited while we went into another building to get our FM2s stamped for the return. I asked specifically, aren't we supposed to fill out FMM forms for statistical purposes, even though we have FM2s? The official looked at us as if we were crazy. So we never got to see the FMM forms in person.

After the baggage x-rays, during which time the entire bus was x-rayed with a giant wand like in a car wash, the baggage compartment under the bus was sealed shut. Once we were all back on the bus, the door was sealed as well. We didn't have to stop at the aduana for a second red/green light button. Before we knew it, we were in the Monterrey bus station.

Ugly! No attempts to make it attractive. I felt as if we were cattle in a warehouse. Bathrooms in Mexican bus terminals now cost four pesos, and these were only one step up from outhouses.

The first executive bus headed to Querétaro was an Omnibus at 4:15 pm. We took it. The fare with our INAPAM senior discount cards was something like 270 pesos, about $24 USD. It was supposed to get into Querétaro at 1 am Monday. We were ready to sleep the whole way anyway.

As I got to our assigned seats I noticed the guy across from us was putting drops into his eyes and he looked as if he'd just come out of a boxing match. He wrapped many layers of bandages over his swollen eyes and curled up across two seats and went dead to sleep.

We wondered what had happened to him. Car accident maybe? We couldn't help thinking that maybe he was a bad guy of some sort. After four hours the bus stopped for a quick dinner at a spotlessly clean restaurant somewhere between Saltillo and Matahuala. We never could find the name of the tiny village. The guy across from us was still dead to the world so I didn't wake him to ask if he wanted us to get him something to eat or drink.

At 1 am we were nowhere near Querétaro. The guy woke up and undid his bandages. His face was so battered, and he couldn't see except for out of the corner of one eye. He was starving. I only had cough drops. He told us his story:

He was born in Celaya and his family took him to North Carolina when he was 15. He was now 41 and had never been back to Mexico. He worked as a roofer and had a wife and kids in Carolina. He had taken the bus to Laredo, walked across the bridge into Nuevo Laredo, and was looking for a taco stand or someplace to eat. He was robbed and beaten by, he said, 15 guys, and left for dead. No one came to his aid or came over to help him all the while he laid there unconscious. He'd been back in Mexico 45 minutes when he was attacked. They even took his shoes. He came to and someone called for help and he was taken to a hospital for what he said was a five-minute stay, during which they gave him pain pills and the eye drops and bandages. His family wired him money and he got on the bus to Celaya at Monterrey, where we'd seen him use the eye drops and pass out again.

He berated everything Mexican and said he'd never been afraid or robbed in North Carolina. I didn't ask whether he was now legal and able to reenter the US after visiting his family in Celaya, or whether he was going to sneak in again, but his wife and kids were waiting for him back in Carolina. We told him a little about ourselves. When we mentioned we'd last lived in Phoenix he warned us to never tell a Mexican we were from Arizona or we might get beaten up because of the new law.

We kept saying, we only lived there briefly, we didn't vote for the governor or anyone who voted for the bill, and now we were from San Miguel, not Arizona. But it did make us think--was he coming from a perfectly understandable delusional place after the beating experience and from the pain pills, or did he have something there? We might actually be quiet about last living in Arizona now.

He said he had to sell a house in Celaya, eight rooms, and we could buy it and live in two rooms and rent out the other six. Cheap. Right.

He got off in Celaya, we reached Querétaro at 2 am, and we barely made it onto the last bus of the night to San Miguel at 2:15, a Primera Plus. At SMA we took a cab home and were asleep by 4 am. Even with the sleep on the bus, we still haven't caught up with our rest.

So even a simple little trip up to the border can be exciting! Life is never dull in San Miguel.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

May 13, 2010--Not the Querétaro report, either, but some comments I wrote on the forums on expats in Mexico

Many readers don't check our forums, so I'm copying two posts I made Wednesday in response to a question on whether it is possible to live a >simple, relaxed, less intrusive, and downsized lifestyle> that is not >a reflection of life in the US.>

If you've read these posts on the forums already, sorry for the repeat. Someone said I really ought to include the first post in a future book, and the best way to ensure that it will get in a future book is to include it in my blog where it won't get lost. So here are my thoughts once more on expats and Mexico:

Mexico and US cultures cross borders both ways

Are San Miguel and just about every other city in Mexico gaining more and more of the culture of the United States? Yes.

Is just about every city in the US gaining more and more of the culture of Mexico? Yes.

Does having a Walmart make a Mexican city Gringolandia? Then there are hundreds and hundreds of gringolandias with almost no gringos, since Mexicans have made Walmart the number one retailer in Mexico just as it is in the US.

Keeping Mexico "quaint" often equates with barefoot and pregnant. Working Mexican women appreciate one-stop shopping and convenience foods, just as they do in the US and much of the world.

Does getting a Mexican restaurant make a US town invaded by Mexico and no longer "truly American"? Will the US picketers be out demanding, "We want our country back"? just as a few expats harassed the Mexicans who opened the SMA Subway?

What about when the same town gets a Chinese, Greek, German, Italian, Vietnamese, etc., restaurant?

When San Miguel got its first Lebanese restaurant more than a decade ago, was it time to turn out the lights, SMA is no longer Mexican?

The border and the airwaves are porous both ways and globally.

There have been a Baskin Robbins, Domino's, Dunkin' Donuts, Subway, Blockbuster, and Starbucks in SMA since I've been here. The Baskin Robbins, Dunkin' Donuts and Subway are no more--the market spoke.

It was a Mexican woman who is the wife of one of the leading figures in San Miguel, whose family has owned the Casa Canal complex on Canal and HIdalgo where Starbucks is now, who wanted to open a Starbucks, one of her favorite restaurants.

The family has owned that property adjoining the Jardin for hundreds of years and they have contributed more to making San Miguel what it is today than any gringo you can name, including Stirling Dickinson.

Should she have been prevented from opening her Starbucks because it would make SMA Gringolandia? Some expats thought so.

A US expat can live totally integrated into Mexican culture almost anyplace in Mexico, and can also live an almost exact copy of his or her US lifestyle most places in Mexico.

Thousands of expats in San Miguel live well outside of Centro in middle or working class Mexican neighborhoods, relating as much as they choose to with their neighbors, cooking the same menus, shopping at the same stores, etc. And thousands more (we're talking out of a total of at least 12,000 expats in SMA) live very similarly to the way they did in the US--except of course for all the ways that US life cannot be duplicated here.

Mexican governmental and services idiosyncracies will never allow life here to be simple and routine, I suspect, no matter how many US dollars you bring. That's part of the fun. It keeps you alive and always thinking. It's very hard to become complacent here. Keeping track of what today's fireworks and processions are for is enough to keep your mind working.

I bet Mexican culture is infiltrating New York City life just as much as New Yorkers are changing San Miguel.

Life here is what you want to make it. You'll never totally pass for a Mexican, but you can integrate pretty completely. Or not.

The Mexican grandmother who moves to Los Angeles is probably going to seek out Mexican grocery stores, pharmacists, doctors, restaurants, and Spanish language movies and periodicals, and she will probably never become fluent in English. (Norma and I are greatgrandmothers.)

Her kids who move to LA will be pretty much bilingual and bicultural, and her grandkids born in LA may have to take Spanish in high school and learn how to cook a burrito that doesn't look like it came from Taco Bell.

Nobody will make you go to Starbucks and speak only English, just as nobody will insist you only eat at the neighborhood taqueria and speak only Spanish.

You can paint your home ten shades of white, or you can paint one wall limon, another terra cotta, another turquoise, another raspberry, another avocado. It's totally up to you! You'll feel freer here to discover whatever the real you is and go for it!

Expats joke about newbies moving here to reinvent themselves and maybe do a border upgrade--if they were a teacher they now say they were the principal, etc.

I don't know anyone who totally took on a new personna, it's more like finally feeling free to do what you want, look the way you want, make friends with those you want.

I suggest you read our first book, Falling...in Love with San Miguel: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security, from the Bookstore page of this website or from Amazon.com, to immerse yourself in our move to San Miguel and our experiences our first calendar year here, learning the culture, making all the usual mishaps, stumbling with Spanish, and, mostly, learning how to unwind!

We're both on fewer medications here, for one thing, with less stress, more walking, and cheaper and more available fruits and veggies. Norma's cholesterol went down nearly 100 points when she went off the statins and started walking!

You can easily create exactly the kind of lifestyle you want here. And if it is too much like someone else's definition of Gringolandia, tough. You can always move a few blocks more out of Centro and rarely see a gringo face, if you want that, too. And then you have the best of both worlds--you can live way out of Centro and then take a bus into town when you want the full artistic and cultural experience that is San Miguel, in both languages.

If you choose to move into a mostly expat gated community with all the rules of a homeowners'association in the US, well, you may feel you are still in the US. And for those who want that, what's it to anyone else?

You don't have to fully integrate into Mexico, though many expats scorn those who don't at least try. You will have a more complete Mexican experience if you do your best to learn Spanish, go to local shops and restaurants, live in a mostly Mexican neighborhood, read the local publications and listen to the local radio station, etc.

Or you can be one of the eccentrics of any society who does his or her own thing, who cares what others say, just so you're not hurting anyone or judging others and saying they should live just like you do. There's too much of that in the world all over!

=========

And then the original poster responded that I sounded like an elementary school nun preaching at her. My response in more depth:

I wasn't aware I was attacking you--didn't mean to. Your question was just one that is asked so often, usually with negative connotations against expats for ruining San Miguel, and I gave you a variation on my usual general answer to the standard general question.

If others echoed the same sentiment, well, expats get asked the same question a lot, and usually there's that implication that we're changing Mexico for the worse by our very presence. If you didn't mean that at all, I apologize.

I'll start again to answer your question: is it possible to live >a simple, relaxed, less intrusive, and downsized lifestyle> that is not >a reflection of life in the US.> Yes, but first...

The desire for >a simple, relaxed, less intrusive, and downsized lifestyle> that is not >a reflection of life in the US> ïs very much itself a reflection of a certain kind of thinking found more often in the US than in Mexico.

The very need for >simple, relaxed, less intrusive and downsized> is very much something many US citizens start to feel somewhere in the middle of the rat race.

I can't say I know enough of the culture of the Mexican ambitious middle to upper classes to know if many Mexicans feel this way, but I don't think it's a prevalent attitude. It's a US boomer stereotype no less true for being a stereotype.

Could you clarify what you think would be >a simple, relaxed, and downsized lifestyle> that is not in some way a reverse reflection of life in the US, a mirror, and therefore still a reflection of life in the US, even if in reaction to your view of life in the US?

Can expats find ways to just be themselves freed totally from any (reverse) reflection of life in the US? Probably. If you can imagine it, you can do it.

There are plenty of free spirits down here leading simple, relaxed and downsized lifestyles, doing their own thing. Are they totally free of any kind of reaction to their past lives in the US? You'd have to get to know them well to determine that for yourself.

For myself, I'm certainly leading a simpler, more relaxed, and downsized lifestyle here, but I have to admit that I am still very much tied to the US in my head and heart, though the link gets less as years pass. I follow US news almost as rabidly as I did in the US and rarely miss Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, Huffington Post and Americablog.com.

I still look for certain items I loved back in the US that I can rarely find here. Though I can live without them and have found acceptable substitutes for most, it's nice sometimes to have a "touch of the old country"--potato chips with Lipton onion soup dip. Blue Bell Moollenium crunch ice cream. Teva sandals. The New Yorker in print with the cartoons.

(Yes, I have spent some time in New York. My longer time residences in Detroit, LA and Phoenix also qualify as cities of great diversity. And I took part in my first civil rights demonstrations in Detroit in the '50s when I was in grade school.)

Sorry we got off on the wrong foot. If you become an expat you may come to understand my response.

I'll see if I can dig up an article from a former English language daily newspaper in Mexico that goes in depth into the attitudes that "gringo hordes" are destroying Mexico by trying to recreate their US lifestyles here. The article cited at length a particularly strong and widely circulated lefty rant denouncing expats.

The article led into a very favorable review of our first book as a prime example of how gringos don't have to fit that stereotype; many of us first and always try to do no harm. It may help you with an answer to your question. I have permission from the author to reprint it:

The Herald review

Random Readings: Looking out for the ‘Gringo hordes’

By Kelly Arthur Garrett/The Herald Mexico
El Universal
http://www.mexiconews.com.mx/21421.html

If you Google the words “Mike Davis” and “Mexico,” or poke around the site www.tomdispatch.com, you’ll find an essay that’s been stirring up debate on both side of the border for several weeks now. It’s called, variously, “The Perfect Swarm Heads South” or “Mexico’s Immigration Problem,” and it deals with . . . well, let’s give the author the honor:

“What few people — at least, outside of Mexico — have bothered to notice is that while all the nannies, cooks, and maids have been heading north to tend the luxury lifestyles of irate Republicans, the gringo hordes have been rushing south to enjoy glorious budget retirements and affordable second homes under the Mexican sun.”

Mike Davis is a scholar, an urban theorist, for lack of a better word. He’s an important voice on the left, and the author of numerous books on social issues, including “City of Quartz,” the unsentimental examination of Los Angeles that changed the rest of the world’s perception of that once-Mexican city.

His article on the steadily increasing — and soon to soar — number of U.S. retirees coming to Mexico to spend their final decades is timely. Trust me, we’re all going to be talking a lot about this phenomenon in the years to come.

Baby boomers have been called “aging” since the Carter administration, when the oldest of them were still in their 30s. But now that generation really is aging, and Davis quotes a recent Wall Street Journal article on what that will mean to Mexico: With more than 70 million American baby boomers expected to retire in the next two decades ... some experts predict a vast migration to warmer — and cheaper — climates.”

That mostly means to Mexico, and Davis points out that the migration has already begun. He cites U.S. State Department statistics claiming that the total number of U.S. citizens living in Mexico has grown five-fold over the last decade to a million. (Mexico’s National Statistics Institute, or INEGI, puts the total at much less than half that.)

That so many people from the United States are, and will continue to be, choosing to reside in Mexico presents challenges, the kind that could be addressed in a NAFTA that dealt with people instead of only capital. The most immediate problem, Davis points out, is the rampant speculation in real estate, especially in Baja California, which already has a higher U.S. expatriate population than any other state. The resulting increase in land values is pricing average Mexicans out of the market.

The environmental consequences are equally worrisome, especially in a state like Baja California, where “thanks to the silent invasion of the baby-boomers from the north . . . much of the natural history and frontier culture of Baja could be swept away in the next generation.” The “gringo footprint” from expatriates who prefer their “well established havens (of) San Miguel de Allende and Puerto Vallarta” portends another disaster in the making, he says, namely the specter of “norteamericanos mak(ing) themselves at home in more ways than one.”

Here’s how Davis knows about the cultural pollution problem: “An English-language paper in Puerto Vallarta, for instance, recently applauded the imminent arrival of a new shopping mall that will include Hooters, Burger King, Subway, Chili’s and Starbucks. Only Dunkin’ Donuts (con salsa?), the paper complained, was still missing.”

It’s hard to tell here if the author is being flip or really thinks that junk food joints are proliferating because the “gringo hordes” demand them.

If you haven’t caught on by now, Davis’s piece glows with overheated rhetoric. To him, the growing influx of U.S. citizens is not a phenomenon but an act of aggression. Folks with blue passports who want to live in Mexico aren’t making a life choice; they’re participating in a renewed manifest destiny, in neocolonialism. They are hordes, swarms, invaders.

I suspect that Davis uses the language of the Minutemen in reverse to make his point with an ironic bite. It certainly is an attention-getting device for injecting the reality of north-to-south migration into what has been a unidirectional debate.

But the effect is to demonize U.S. citizens, as though the issue were the nationality of the new residents rather than the clash of socioeconomic levels.

This is unfair to individual immigrants, most of whose intentions are benign and transgressions inadvertent. It also poisons the issue, turning a migration problem on which Mexicans and Americans should be cooperating into an adversarial showdown based on country of birth. U.S. nativist xenophobes have no qualms about casting Mexican migrants themselves as enemies who “keep on coming.” Thoughtful people should be discouraging that kind of jingoistic hate-mongering, not encouraging a tit for tat.

As it happens, Davis’s essay coincided with the release of “Falling ... in Love with San Miguel: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security” (Salsa Verde Press), by Carol Schmidt and Norma Hair. The authors are a U.S. couple in their sixties who visited San Miguel de Allende, were seduced by it, as so many seem to be, and decided to retire there.

That must make them living, breathing examples of Davis’s neocolonialists, card-carrying warriors in the "gringo hordes," shameless practitioners of the new manifest destiny.

They are, of course, nothing of the kind. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a pair of immigrants more innocent, in both senses of the word. They are innocent because they follow the Hippocratic oath of expats — first do no harm. And they are innocent in that they came to live in Mexico as complete babes in the woods. It’s that innocence that makes the book a delight. Though Schmidt has been a journalist, there’s little in the way of investigation or reportage here. The women simply (very simply) share what they learn and experience as they negotiate their way through their first year in a new land.

The concerns of expat retirees are not the concerns of an urban theorist. Carol and Norma (I use their first names in the spirit of the book, which reads like a compilation of letters home) deal with the core issues of the recently uprooted: Is Skippy peanut butter available? How much can I pay the maid? What’s the bathroom access like around town? Can we survive the way they drive here? What’s with the dog poop on the sidewalks?

Carol seems to be the actual text supplier, since Norma is always referred to in the third person. Her style, at least in this case, can only be described as homey. It’s the kind of book you can open at random and run across sentences like, “Norma laughed out loud a few minutes later when we drove over a tarantula crossing the road.” Or, “Once I literally bumped into Charlton Heston in my ex-husband’s fish store ...”

There’s an initial temptation not to take this kind of writing seriously, but once you accept the rawness of the exposition, you realize that you’re getting nothing but the honest truth, an unvarnished guided tour through the minds of a retired couple in a Guanajuato town who do batik and write and participate in a reading discussion group. A thousand New Yorker short story writers try to get at what these two tell us directly.

The authors don’t shy away from discussing the controversies, and we learn they wrestle with those as they wrestle with everything else. They are concerned about gentrification, recognize that the richer expats live in a different world, and are ashamed of, as well as resigned to, their inability to master Spanish.

New arrivals soon learn that there is no shortage of fellow ex-pats who take it upon themselves to tell others what they are supposed to think about the relationship between the two countries. Mexico is closely related to the United States, our authors hear, but they also hear “that the friendliness and apparent similarities are purely superficial, and that some inherent fundamental differences are irreconcilable.”

Carol Schmidt’s take on this timeless debate: “I have no idea whether any of this is true.”

I try to read as much as I can about the subject, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more refreshing comment than that.

=======

I have to say, that is my favorite review I have ever received.

I've got 200 photos and two tourist books on Querétaro to incorporate into my initial experiences from last week, so that blog will be a few days. Hopefully not three weeks. I was really impressed with the city.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

May 10, 2010--A bus trip to Dolores Hidalgo, an escorted tour around Querétaro (nope, that has to be tomorrow), lots of unremarkable stuff I'll remark on anyway

Another mostly uneventful three weeks passes. I take notes of anything that might be blog-worthy and other than the trips to Dolores and Querétaro, I wrote down notes like, "Norma cleans refrigerator, shelf drops, messy cleanup (sticky Chinese sauces everywhere), we go to Keith's Longhorn Smokehouse for the 100-peso Thursday night steak special to unwind. He makes the best baked potatoes in town, hard to do with the crummy wet potatoes available in SMA." Yeah, that's worth a blog.

Another day's note: "My aunt is delighted to get hard copy photos of our new house colors, she is no longer aghast we have a red bedroom, she sends $100 check in gratitude, it actually can be cashed (she didn't use correction fluid on the numbers or misspell my name or date it 2009). We splurge by buying four new blouses at Girasol on Calle San Francisco." Earth-shaking.

Girasol is having a sale, though--the prices on cotton shirts made in Guadalajara had edged up to 350-425 pesos, getting out of our range. We only by chance stopped in that day to discover the sale for 250-275 pesos on our favorite styles--which are being discontinued, thus the sale. If you like simple cotton shirts in bright colors, now is the time to drip by Girasol. They're sized from extra small to extra large, hard to find in Mexico. I kept eyeing the hand-painted jackets that were around 1250 pesos.

Let's see, I have a note from the day we took the bus to Office Depot just for compressed air spray for the computer Norma is building me. The last desktop she built for herself is so fast, suited for her games like Age of Empires, that I sit around five minutes waiting for Hotmail to come up while she is already breezing rhrough the day's mail.

She promised to build me one equal to hers. I said I didn't need anything that expensive, is there any way you can use some of the old parts that are all over the office and come up with something a little faster than my old laptop? That Toshiba weighs 4 1/2 pounds and just doesn't handle the way the new netbooks do, at a pound or two each. So she got me a netbook last Christmas, and then that's too small to write books and edit many photos on, so it's just for travel.

And here I sit with the old Toshiba that is missing its space bar key and that gets hot and shuts itself off even though I have it sitting on a special kind of fan for notebooks, and the monitor often just goes off for awhile for no reason, etc.

But all of these spare parts don't go together well in the new computer Norma is trying to build me. She's never had trouble getting a new machine to work, but this hodgepodge just won't connect right. So she decides to give it all a good spray of compressed air. None can be found, we bus it to Office Depot and back, I go downstairs to watch Rachel Maddow while Norma works, and suddenly I hear a shriek so loud I think she's been bitten by a scorpion or something.

I rush upstairs to find her standing there in shock while foam melts all over the inside of my would-be computer. She's bought foaming keyboard and case cleaner spray by mistake. It was right next to the compressed air and in similar packaging. What will this mean to my almost-computer innards? We don't dare turn it on until the morning when the foam should be totally dry. It does the same as it did before the foam bath, which isn't much, but at least it's still sort of working. The computer now just sits there while Norma gets up enough nerve to tackle it again. She suspects the new motherboard was dead on arrival. One problem buying online from the States is that it is a hassle to return electronics on warranty. Bt it is so much cheaper, and the manuals are in English.

Hmmm, I am working myself up to a blog.

What I am thrilled about is that the new Migration Manual changes that went into effect ten days ago seem to actually be simpler, as Immigration promised. Those who have go to their usual assistants to help them with their FM3 renewals, at about $50 USD, have found that the helper just fills in the online application form I've given the link to on the forums, takes or arranges to have taken five of the small (infantil sized) color photos for the new cards that have replaced the visa booklets, and types up a letter in Spanish saying that everything is the same as last year.

The expat only has to go to the bank and pay the fees and pay the assistant, and then go to Immigration a few days later to pick up the new card. No showing of the most recent three months' financial statements to prove sufficient monthly income to qualify, no rustling up utility bills to prove residency, no need to produce an apostilled marriage certificate to qualify as a dependent on half the monthly income requirement, nor the house deed to qualify for reduced income requirement that way. Nada! I can't believe it, I keep expecting a sudden announcement, it was all a mistake, you must produce all the same documents as before.

We'll see if we can just do the online application form ourselves later this summer a month before our FM2s are to expire. We don't want to do an update on The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico until we are pretty darn sure that we know what is happening in real life to expats dealing with immigration all over Mexico. Each state, each office, can set its own rules and procedures. But so far, the transition is going more smoothly than I ever imagined.

One thing that was kind of interesting this week was a farewell party for a lesbian friend who is going back to the States for the rest of the summer. As usual it was a very mixed group of friends. People ask us all the time, where are the gay and lesbian bars? What do you do for community? And we always reply, be careful what you ask for, we've got total acceptance and a wide range of friends and feel no need to seek out specifically lesbian gatherings any more.

Oh, maybe we'll host a party to try to match-make--never works--but usually we don't even pay attention to sexuality when we're planning parties any more.

And so this party got started on our friend's relationship woes. Was this latest relationship attempt worth a real commitment? All of us, gay or straight, young or old, single or partnered, could chime in expertly on the topic. We all have fears of commitment, fears of getting hurt, fears of being foolish. And so we were all giving her advice, even on sex. I half expected some of the straight men to have a different involvement in this part of the discussion, but pleasantly, we all just chimed in with our advice. She probably isn't going to pay attention to any of it, but it was fun to be in a hen session with roosters, too. That's the kind of friends we have around here.

Now on to the trip to Dolores Hidalgo, which was on our 31st anniversary, by the way. We wanted to do something a little different but not too expensive. An Autovias first class bus was about to leave for Dolores when we got to the SMA bus station, no waiting, 16 pesos each with our INAPAM Mexican senior discount card. Easy ride to the Dolores bus station, which is right downtown. Bathroom fees are now four pesos each in all bus stations.

We wanted to go to the quality downtown ceramics shops but driving in we'd seen a street lined with the cheapies, which we want to visit first, just for kicks. The bus station is on Tabasco and Yucatan, and we walk along the river one block over toward the west, past all kinds of street food stands, to find the street we passed with all the junque. I think it was called Av. Poniente, and we had fun admiring the low-end ceramics first.

I posted a new album on our Photo Gallery of this website titled bus trip to Dolores Hidalgo, where you can see shots of the unicorns and "Bienvenidos" garden frogs and black and white Holstein pitchers and mugs and the purple tequila set-ups and the crocodiles. I labeled one shot, "Lions and tigers and bears, Oh my"--every kind of animal, Indian, Mexican hero, and Disney character was well represented.

By now the quality ceramics shops were 12 blocks away, according to our tourist map. The taxis cost 15-25 pesos in town. Now these were the nice places on Pueblo 54-60. Beautiful lead-free dinnerware, as simple or as ornate as you want. Giant to petite vases. Outdoor barbeque grills, some made in the form of smiling pigs (better looking than they sound), wall and tabletop tile murals of flowers, historic scenes, religious scenes, animals... We fell in love with a four-foot-square wall mural of a colorful rooster that we want for our patio. Some shops had display rooms and gardens showing how tiles can be used beautifully--on stairs, lawn chairs, arches, gates, kitchen and bath backdrops and walls...

When we had a car we always stopped at the shops and factories coming into Dolores Hidalgo, particularly San Gabriel, along the side of the road from San Miguel. There is so much more to Dolores! The best shop we found was JMB, for Juan Manual Martinez B., at Puebla 60, www.dtalavera.com. Their factory is in Carr. Adjuntas del Rio Km 2 No. 8, but we didn't get there.

We walked all over the little side streets and found ourselves apparently headed to the Jardin. Two women walking on the other side of the street recognized us from our book photo and came over! They were headed to the Jardin, too, but they were going the opposite direction. We did the appropriate asking of three Mexicans to see if we could get agreeing directions from at least two, and then there was a tourist kiosk with arrows. That we could trust. We ducked into a couple of churches and other shops along the way. The Church of the Sanctuario was beautiful. Daily mass was going on, with less than a dozen attendees. Actually that wasn't bad for a Tuesday mass.

At the Jardin we took the usual photos and watched toddlers chase pigeons and teenagers smooch and smartly dressed businessmen get shoe shines. Should we have one of the unusual ice creams unique to the Dolores Hidalgo Jardin since early last century? No, we're saving ourselves for the Blue Bell shop inside the Soriana grocery store near the Four Heroes statue, and before that we want our traditional Carnitas Vicente.

Vicente's has at least nine restaurants throughout Dolores Hidalgo, and they have tried to open branches in San Miguel twice and both failed. Do we remember seeing any of the nine as we walked? No, so we take a taxi to the original and biggest one on Ave. 60 Norte. We order half a kilo of suave (smooth) meat, not the skin and bones and crunchy, fatty goodness of the mixed platter. Ordering suave gets you a better quality of meat. It comes with the expected assortment of salsas, tortillas, chiles and pickled carrots. Heaven, for around 70 pesos for two, plus soft drinks. We make a point of not staring into the giant vat of fat in which the carnitas has been frying next to the entrance.

Should we try to walk along Ave. 60 to Soriana? We're getting tired. Another cab. And then when'we're inside Soriana we discover that Blue Bell no longer has a shop. To think, we passed on the mantecada (vanilla, prune and pine nuts) ice cream back at the Jardin, too. Oh well, we didn't need it anyway. That Soriana does have a big bulk Brach candies section and we buy a kilo of red and white striped peppermint candies that work well when our throat is dry or a cough is about to erupt in the movies or even to help get to sleep at night. We haven't been able to find them anyplace else. We walk out to the main street and a Primero Plus bus is coming that says San Miguel on it. The driver stops for us, nowhere near a bus stop! Another 16 pesos each and we're home, exhausted, and it's 4 pm.

By 8 we're saying the night is young and we go to Harry's, our usual anniversary spot. Fried oysters for me, andouille sausage burger for Norma, and ice cream for dessert. Not Blue Bell but it was good.

It has suddenly started to thunder and lightning and I'd better shut down the computer now. I'll have to do our trip to Querétaro tomorrow or the next day. Another blog! It shouldn't take three more weeks to get to that one, I have plenty of notes and photos. And soon we're going to Laredo and that will be another blog. I've gotten two emails today asking if I was sick, and if not, where was my blog!

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

April 17, 2010--We find a real lemon tree, take a few interesting walks, avoid most of Semana Santa, come to hate "Veinte, Veinte, Veinte" at 7 am every morning, see the caged circus animals from a child's perspective, enjoy the purple haze, substitute migrated hummingbirds for nesting swallows, find the perfect kitchen island countertop, and in general appreciate the little things

How can it be three weeks since my last blog? Nothing major is happening, I don't have any urgent compulsion to share anything or to rant, we're just living our daily lives that I wouldn't think are of much interest to many other people. But I'll report on what's happening anyway, so that you can see just how ordinary and happy daily retirement lives in Mexico can be, while the US and Canada think we're in the middle of a raging war that must have us huddled inside in fear.

Michelle Obama spent three days in Mexico and at least told reporters that it was safe to travel in Mexico, it was mainly the border areas where the drug cartels were battling, and you have to travel smart anyplace. And she did make the point that US drug users were a big part of the cartel wars over supply routes into the US.

The Gulf Cartel seems to have moved over a bit to the tiny towns just below Fort Hancock in Texas, now that the Sinaloa cartel has won the battle to control Ciudad Juarez and the lucrative El Paso entryways. But all that feels a million miles away, not just a thousand or so, and we haven't heard anything major coming out of the McAllen or Laredo areas lately, and there haven't been any drug-related crimes reported to my knowledge anywhere near San Miguel lately, not even anything major from the Celaya region. I'm sure it's going on, but it isn't touching tourists and expats. We never worried about what was happening ten miles away in South Central (Watts) and two miles away in Boyle Heights when we lived in LA, either.

Friends are crossing the border both ways daily without incident. We're still driving up to Austin and back with friends next month and aren't worried about the trip at all. Oh, we may put together fake wallets with expired credit cards and maybe $10-20 USD cash in case we get stopped by a real or fake traffic cop out for a bribe near the border.

One friend was stopped and the cop first asked for $3,500 USD. His Spanish-speaking passenger said, "Too much--how about a Coke?" The cop replied, "How about a whiskey?" She asked, "What does a whiskey cost these days?" They ended up paying him 150 pesos, under $14 USD. Of course we still keep in mind what happened to the two friends who were express kidnapped when they made a wrong turn into Monterrey last year and their ATM accounts drained.

So our heads are not in the sand, but our daily lives are routine and pleasant, more so than the craziness I keep hearing from friends in the US.

The weather is perfect. Even though April and May are supposed to be the hottest months of the year here, it's still cool enough for a light blanket at night. I only get uncomfortable when we're walking a distance in the hot sun at midday. After the coldest, wettest winter in anyone's memory, we're still having an occasional unexpected shower some days, highly unusual. With all this evidence of climate change, who knows what rainy season June-October will be like? The protective railings along the river east of Fabrica Aurora still haven't been repaired since the crazy February deluge.

I was practicing my Spanish with a cabbie who told me about the tourists who asked him if it was going to rain that day. They had raincoats and umbrellas with them. He looked up at the sky, said no, and so they put their raincoats and umbrellas back into their house and got into the cab. Later that day he ran into them during a massive thunderstorm and they cursed him mightily. Now, he says, when anyone asks him anything, he only answers, "Ojala," if God wills it.

The whole city is under its usual purple haze from the blooming jacarandas every spring. Norma isn't having much allergic reaction this year. Maybe her real problem was the dust kicked up in the nearby parking lot at our previous apartment, not the jacarandas at all. Bougainvillea vines in purples, maroons, reds, pinks, oranges and golds are more intense and blossom-laden than I ever remember, too, possibly because of those winter rains. Someone in the San Miguel Garden Club once told me bougainvillea needed drought to really show off, but that doesn't explain this spring's abundance.

I posted a photo on the SMA Scenes album of our photo gallery of a bougainvillea bush near us. I didn't even know it was a flowering shrub until a few weeks ago when it erupted. I also have new photo albums for Semana Santa 2010, a walk in Col. San Rafael, a walk from Mega to the nursery Viveros Los Pinos that includes the antique shop with the malproportioned giant metal horse statue out front, and more shots of our flowering patio in Carol's and Norma's personal photos album. Also in the SMA scenes album are a couple shots of the caged circus animals who were driven around town for weeks while the Atayde circus was in town.

We came to hate the circus trucks who must have gone down every main and side street in the region every hour for weeks, the speakers booming, "Veinte, veinte, veinte." Apparently admission to this circus started at 20 pesos. The big Atayde Hermanos Circus with 15 tigers that we have enjoyed prices its tickets as high as 100 pesos, but you should avoid the ringside seats because the tigers will spray you.

Of course we especially hated seeing the promo trucks with their caged lions, zebras, baboons and smaller monkeys, until we ran into a friend who has a pre-school girl and a baby boy. We got to see the kids loving those animals up close! Their mother, a gringa married to a Mexican, said she wasn't even going to try to explain to her kids about animal exploitation, they just enjoyed seeing the circus animals so much. And, it could be the only time they might ever see wild animals up close, at least for many years when they might get a trip to the US to visit a more ecological and animal-friendly zoo. For many poorer Mexican kids, these caged animals on trucks might be the only chance they will ever see a lion, zebra or monkey. So that was a different perspective.

If I had any personal discomfort these past three weeks, it was over Semana Santa which this year did not seem like mere cultural pageantry to me, I kept thinking of the altar boy abuse scandal of the church, in the news every day. A priest in my childhood would always say during Christmas sermons, don't get too happy in the Christmas holiday, remember that the wood of the manger is the wood of the cross. I have my own problems with a few priests in my past, and with the Papal Bull written by then Cardinal Ratzinger declaring that not only were homosexual acts immoral, homosexuals themselves had a serious character disorder leaning them toward depravity. As I've said often, I didn't leave the church, the church pushed me out.

And so this year I kept thinking of the role of the church worldwide throughout history, especially in Mexico's history, and could not get into the dramatic reenactments of the Biblical scenes. We went out Holy Thursday night to visit some of the altars and right away came upon some life-sized statues of the crucifixion, rendered in agonizing detail. The wretched expression on the first thief's face got to me. We went home.

I took some photos of everyday houses and streets in Colonia San Rafael on one of our walks, just to show friends how pleasant and ordinary our colonia is, not some raging hotbed of gangs and crime. Someone new bought a house near us and immitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they're painting their house (and covering their graffiti) in the exact same shade of yellow as our house. We joked about it with them as we complimented them on their work. Our Virgin of Guadalupe tile murals are still doing their job, keeping away graffiti.

And on a whim we walked from Mega to the nursery Viveros Los Pinos probably less than a mile up a slight incline along the Carretera a Celaya south of the city. (Ancha de San Antonio is the widest street in SMA leading out of Centro, and it changes its name to Salida a Celaya, salida meaning exit to Celaya when it crosses Stirling Dickinson. That's an east-west street named after the first grinto in San Miguel who was a major force in transforming SMA from ghost town status to the thriving art colony it became after WWII). After the El Pipila glorieta at Mega, the road becomes a highway, or a Carretera, headed south to Celaya.)

Yes, they had a US lemon tree, not a limon, or lime tree, and not a lima, the yellow fruit that looks very much like a US lemon but tastes quite different. The owner said it was a Meyer lemon tree, the sweetest of the lemons, but we're not sure he knew what we were talking about. Maybe it's a Meyer, but we're pretty sure it's at least a US lemon tree--he put that in writing. It was at least six feet tall and cost 650 pesos, around $58. We bought a giant ceramic pot for the same price and several bags of tierra, garden dirt. Delivery was free, but we tipped the two guys who hoisted the tree and pot up some stairs 50 pesos. Our handyman Pedro Romero came over and planted it for us. All our flowering plants Pedro picked out at Candelaria are blooming like mad.

The walk to the nursery yielded some photos I'd always thought about taking but was never on foot. First, opposite from Mega on the Carretera a Celaya is the strip mall with the Oxxo, Banamex, OKO Vietnamese noodle restaurant, La Galleria upscale restaurant and karaoke bar that plans to add live music, the Italian Coffee restaurant, Bove restaurant/organic dairy/butcher shop/bakery, and several other businesses. But next to that is a massive gray concrete building that has been in construction for years. Nobody I have ever asked has any idea what it will be. Looks like space for dozens of offices, but who knows. Ojalá. Lately heavy construction equipment has been running around the site so maybe something will open there some day soon.

Next is a yellow antiques shop, Casa Reyna (reina is queen, but my dictionaries don't explain reyna). The Trojan Horse-like metal statue out front has grown and shrunk through the years and added a rider recently, but the horse's legs are so disproportionate I have to laugh whenever I see it. A giant motorcyle sculpture also guards the front door. For the first time we went inside. Fairly average antiques, though a very large, old red cash register caught my eye, as did a poster bed that must have been made for five-foot-tall Conquistadors. I remember having to bend over to walk through doorways in European castles, built when the average height must havce been well under five feet. Mexican natives were even shorter--though the entire population added half a foot shortly after lye started to be used in grinding corn so that more minerals were preserved in the grain.

We did want one thing--a family of small burro statues that would look very good in our garden. Friends spotted life-sized burro statues on one of their shopping trips to Dolores Hdalgo and bought only the female one--the male was in a perpetual excited state that just didn't lend peace and harmony to their garden. I wonder if anyone ever bought the male statue?

An iron working shop and key shop are along the walk, and Norma walked in on a whim to see if they might have a small shovel. They did. She carried that with her the rest of the walk, which was along a small dirt road parallel to the highway, with small paths winding off into the brush. On one side of our walk it was like thousands of miles of Mexican roads through vacant, dusty, cactus-filled countryside, while across the highway to our left was Colonia La Lejona 2, accented with the stark whiteness of the El Encanto development.

Finally we came to Viveros Los Piños and I took lots of photos of the nursery. The shots were interchangeable with dozens I've taken in previous years at Candelaria. Something about masses of flowers is irresistable to just about any photographer, or in my case snapshot taker.

We had a nice walk yesterday around Centro, too, along streets we don't usually hit now that we're arriving into Centro at Plaza Civica by bus. I'm still not enthralled with the steep climb up Insurgentes from Guadalupe to Quebrada. Sometimes we do it, but I hate it. We stopped at Bonanza where Norma bought half a pound each of garlic powder and dried mustard powder for under a dollar, while in Mega teensy amounts of each were several dollars.

She makes her own seasoning salt, a recipe called Barron's, which is probably on the internet. Bonanza was out of the decaffeinated Diet Coke that we loved in Phoenix but it almost never is sold in SMA, so we couldn't load up on that. Fresh strawberries and blackberries were on sale at the little market to the west of Bonanza--the one to the east disappeared one day but this new one opened up right after, possibly even the same shop in bigger space. We bought probably a quart of each for 26 pesos total.

Bonanza rarely has kosher salt, either, and the Barron's recipe calls for two cups of it as the base. We headed to Carey's on Ancha de San Antonio and Callejon de San Antonio (a callejon is a little street or alleyway) and they had it, "only" 55 pesos for the three-pound box. The heart wants what the heart wants.

And we decided to splurge on a 120-peso box of dried buttermilk for some salad dressing recipes she's come across. Plain old buttermilk is almost never found around San Miguel, though there is a heavy cream spread called something like Jocoba that is like a condensed buttermilk. It's in Mega at the end of the butter and crema aisle, across from the yogurts. Using this dried buttermilk will in the long run be much cheaper for salad dressings and a few other recipes that call for buttermilk. We think. Maybe it tastes terrible. We don't know yet.

A few doors south, still on Ancha de San Antonio and across Callejon de San Antonio, is a new gourmet artisanal cheese shop. The clerk offered us a chunk of jalapeno-laced manchego. We had to have it, her mission accomplished. 250 grams, a little over half a pound was 26 pesos, around $2.30 USD. The shop had many dozens of kinds of cheeses and every one we sampled was tasty. Another find.

Queso de Luna farther south next to El Maple bakery and La Cava on Zacateros are other fine cheese chops, plus Bonanza, Mega and other grocery stores have a wide variety as well. There is a cheese factory just outside of San Miguel past the train station, called Esmeralda, in case you've seen the range of factory-produced local cheeses around. Mexico does not lack in good cheeses.

And then we were at Interceramica next to Don Pedro hardware shop, and on another whim Norma looked around for a smooth countertop for our kitchen island. Right now it's covered with small squares of tiles that are no good for rolling out pizza crusts or anything else, and the grout holds dirt and flour and is difficult to clean. Of course she's been eyeing marble, granite and Corian, for hundreds of dollars more to cover only half of the kitchen island. (She's going to put a plastic cutting board over the rest of the island, once we learned that wooden cutting boards are no longer considered sanitary.)

And there it was: a one meter-square piece of glossy chocolate brown tile as fine as marble, for 740 pesos, about $69 USD. Should we dent the budget with this find? Pros and cons--get it over with, this tile is perfect, stop looking at the marble and granite and Corian and expecting them to ever be priced this low, it's a nice color, it's just the right size to cover half the island... We bought it and tipped a cab driver to bring it home for us. It's so heavy we don't even have have to do anything to anchor it in place. Norma is happy. I expect pizza crust any moment.

Norma is on a cooking spree as I write, but not pizza crust today, she says. She's making an all-purpose chicken/corn/poblano pepper/onion mixture that is great for burrito or taco or omelet filling, for quiche, for hot sandwiches, for biscuits, for rice, and so much more. She just got back from a dash to the tienda across from us--eight more poblanos, three big yellow mangos, and a giant white onion for 21 pesos, about $1.85. She's been making chicken broth in the slow cooker for days, simmering a big whole chicken for the meat and assorted chicken feet and backs for flavor, two batches cooked in the same broth to intensify the flavor. Our freezer is full of containers of home-made chicken broth again, and we have a lot of chicken meat to use up and freeze the rest.

The tomato crisis in the US due to bad weather in the south has meant the best Mexican tomatoes have been shipped to the States the past couple months. For awhile our local tiendas had pretty crappy bruised and soft tomatoes for 10 pesos a kilo. Those at Mega were artificially ripened fast so that they were tasteless and hard white inside, for as much as 36 pesos a kilo, about $1.50 a pound. I don't know what tomatoes were going for NoB, but the shortages hurt our menu choices here. I saw on TV that some of the US fast food chains were telling customers there would be no more tomatoes on their hamburgers, etc. Good tomatoes at lower prices seem to be coming back to our shelves now. I hope those of you in the US enjoyed our tomatoes!

Our hummingbirds seem to have migrated north. Only one or two a day stop by our feeder. But as compensation we have a nest of swallows on the garage wall in our back patio. The cats are watching carefully, hoping the babies are slow learners when it comes time to fly away.

See? Very ordinary stuff happening around here. I hope you're having as uneventful and pleasant a time as we are.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

March 28, 2010--More on Christine Conway's death; another circus is in town; not-so-great bus trip to Celaya; Holy Week (Semana Santa) is upon us

I want to add more about Christine rather than just saying she lived life to the hilt, a bit of a cliche. She had her salon in Mexico City for nearly 20 years and had been in San Miguel for close to 20 more. She hired a young Mexican woman as her assistant to clean up around her beauty shop and eventually convinced the woman she could do more in the salon, starting with shampoos.

At the memorial service yesterday I talked to the first woman to get a shampoo from Mari and she remembers that Mari was scared to death. Christine wanted to send Mari to cosmetology school but Mari said she could learn more just watching Christine. Christine's two brothers and two sons were at the service yesterday and they have decided to give The Cutting Garden, Christine's beauty shop on Codo, to Mari. That tells you a lot more about the kind of woman Christine was, to have such a family.

Christine was famous for taking the bus to Mexico City periodically and bringing back English treats from some source there. She brought us back various kinds of English sausage, plum pudding and mincemeat pies for several Christmases. When we were new to SMA we'd sit in her beauty shop and find out all about places to go to get things we needed--kind of like this website does now.

One year we were coming back to SMA by plane and missed a flight--I forget whether it was cancelled on us--and were stuck in the DF bus terminal waiting for the next bus to SMA. We ran into Christine, who was sympathetic to our plight. She ended up finding us an earlier bus back to SMA so we didn't have to spend any more time in any more terminals. She made a dismal day of down time in terminals into a fun event, and gave us some sausage to take home besides. That's the kind of woman Christine was. There are a lot of Christines in San Miguel.

This morning even though it is Palm Sunday the circus advertising truck is circling town, that stereotypical deep Mexican male voice calling out the announcement of everything at the circus. No matter what is being advertised on the loudspeakers of various trucks driving around town, the same voice resonates with the same over-emphasis, just like the circus barkers of my childhood.

This week it's the Atayde circus, which has on its tent site near Mega the claim that it is the biggest and best of all the circuses. But I asked various cab drivers if that is true--isn't the circus that is called the Hermanos Atayde Circus the best of all? That's the one with the 15 tigers that we always go to see when it is in SMA. Both having the same name Atayde confused me.

The cabbies assured me, the Hermanos Atayde Circus is really the biggest and best. Who knows what happened in the Atayde family that they split into two competing circuses? My Spanish isn't that good to understand even if the cabbies really knew. They're great at making up a story if they don't know something. Like getting directions in Mexico, don't believe anything unless you get verification from another source that isn't just repeating the first source.

With all of our painting the past month, we've made several bus trips to Home Depot in Celaya to pick up more paint, especially semi-glosses for the bathrooms and trim to match the wall matte colors we bought first. We werén't thinking that we'd need semi-gloss for doors and such.

The last trip we called a friend who had wanted to make the bus trip with us her first time so that she could be sure of where all the stops were. First, Primera Plus changed its times for the directo bus to Celaya, so that now it leaves from the SMA bus station at the top of the hour. Before it left at 20 after the hour. So we missed the directo and decided to take the regular second class Flecha Amarilla to Celaya rather than wait another 40 minutes. We should have waited.

It ended up taking longer on the economico than it would have if if we had waited another 40 minutes for the next directo, by the time it made all its stops along the long route through Comonfort and Empalme. But we got to Celaya, did our shopping, and asked at the bus stop in front of Costco when the next directo would be back to SMA. We decided to wait for it after our experience on the economico--and when it arrived it was already so packed that the three of us didn't get a seat.

Wait another hour? No, we got on. Luckily for me a 30-something Mexican man could see I wasn't going to make it standing for an hour and he gave me his seat. But Norma and our friend had to stand the whole way, packed like sardines. Not at all a pleasant trip. I bet our friend won't be taking any bus to Celaya again any time soon.

It's Semana Santa, Holy Week, in San Miguel, and somehow we have no desire to go to all the processions and events this year, after seven years and probably thousands of photographs of the week.

Today fireworks announced Palm Sunday's arrival and we saw Mexicans throughout town with the intricate braided palm statues and crucifixions they'd purchased at the varous church celebrations today. I'm sure the parade at the Jardin of the statue of Jesus on a burro riding into town was packed, as usual. What did we do instead? We celebrated by going to Mega for a cappuccino frappe because we were out of a kind of chorizo Norma puts into her burritos, and we always need a few things more.

Naturally we ran into a dozen expats at Mega and talked ourselves hoarse. It felt like a great way to wake up on Sunday. (And I love waking up in our newly painted raspberry and blueberry bedroom, under the domed brick arched bodega ceiling--just seeing those colors first thing in the morning is a delightful way to start the day.)

Oh, maybe wé'll break down Thursday night and join the crowds visiting the main seven churches in Centro to see the altar decorations, after the washing of the feet ceremonies in most churches. The tradition is that if you go to all seven churches you will have a plenary indulgence, all your sins forgiven so you don't have to go to Purgatory before being purified enough for Heaven. (We always stop at six because we've earned our sins.)

And probably we'll go to the afternoon if not the morning procession on Good Friday. At 11 am at the Parroquia is the reenactment of Jesus's trial before Pontius Pilate, followed by the procession to the 12 stations of the cross reenacting the Good Friday death on the crucifixion.

Around 4 we may find a good spot to wait out the evening procession proceeding the glass bier containing the statue of the crucified Jesus. That procession has to be the most impressive even all year in San Miguel.

We won't have our usual great viewing spot in front of the Hotel Sautto anymore since we don't live in that area now, so we'll have to think about what is the best place to plunk our folding chair. I really don't need to take any more photos, I have thousands from past Holy Weeks. But probably I'll manage to take a few hundred more.

And then comes the exploding Judas paper mache statues Easter morning around 11 am at the Jardin. Yeah, we'll probably end up there, just to see everybody. Other than that, we're passing on this year's Semana Santa!

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

March 27, 2010--My Hotmail is out and messing up my life; 41 new photos posted to show you what we've been doing; Col. San Rafael's bad rep; two visits to the latest hot new restaurant in SMA, OKO Noodles (Vietnamese)

It's not the only reason I have for being so late with this blog but having my Hotmail account down for more than a week has been a major problem for me. After screaming on every Hotmail forum there is about my woes, I finally thought to research the problem and found that "only" one percent of Hotmail customers are being affected by a server problem. Out of 67 million customers, that means I'm one of about 670,000.

When we try to get into Hotmail we keep getting a routine message that Hotmail is temporarily undergoing maintenance, and if we're inconvenienced for more than an hour, contact them at a certain link. When we go to the link, we're told to wait four more hours, and since this is routine maintenance, there is nothing else we can do, except maybe post on their forums--which are never answered by anyone in charge. Grrr. All my email addresses and eight years of saved emails in files are on my Hotmail. I'm paralyzed, unable to even write a thank you note. (Sorry to those I haven't corresponded with lately.)

I am coveting the Apple iPad, due out April 4, for $499 base price, plus $30 for a docking station and $70 for a full-sized keyboard. According to Steve Jobs, the iPad will change my life. It wouldn't improve Hotmail, though, so maybe I just keep waiting and trying until I get access to my Hotmail once more.

Meanwhile, I haven't been sick, as some readers have worried when I was so long getting around to this blog. We set a deadline to totally finish this house for last Sunday, and we did.

We ended up hiring Pedro Romero to do the downstairs painting since it involved the stairwell--not exactly what we wanted to navigate. He and his crew did a spicy curry wash over the pale peach, to go with the office that is spicy curry, lemon yellow and fern green trim; and the master bedroom that is a paprika red with deep denim blue trim; and the spare bedroom/craft room that is a terra cotta and yellow; and a hallway wall that is fern green; and bathrooms of yellow, turquoise, and denim blue. Norma painted most of the upstairs, I did bathrooms and trim.

We don't have enough art work for all the walls but I have dozens of watercolors I did at Belles Artes 2002-06 that we might be able to get framed now. Norma may be doing more batiks, too, now that we have all this space, if she can find a way to keep the bees from tracking her down and stinging her when they smell the bees wax used to cover each layer of dyeing.

Check out the 18 photos of our paint job and landscaping by Pedro by going to Gallery, then click on Carol's Photos, then the last album, Personal Photos of Carol and Norma.

While you're there check out the new 17-photo album, Walking in Col. San Rafael, and six new photos in the Food Scenes album of dinner at OKO Noodles, the new Vietnamese restaurant that has opened up in the OXXO/Banamex shopping mall across from Mega at the El Pipila glorieta.

Sanmiguelenses are a fickle restaurant crowd. Right now the hot spot is OKO Noodles, deservedly so. SMA hasn't had a Vietnamese restaurant before, to my knowledge, and a couple of young people have put together a great spot with good vibes and good food.

We've been twice, and both times the coconut shrimp appetizer, cubed pork with rice noodles and spring rolls, carrots, bean sprouts and other veggies, and the two desserts (baana pudding and an Italian sponge thingie that is a cross between a flan and a pound cake) have been excellent. Two friends say that on repeat visits the usual SMA restaurant problem of inconsistency has kicked in and they didn't recognize the same dish they'd ordered the first time due to menu experimentation.

That's one reason we like chain restaurants in the US--you always know what you are going to get. The individual dishes include several entrees that would fit in our "Cheap eats" category of under $6 USD, but if you add appetizers and dessert and some thing from the extensive and unusual drink menu, it can get pricey.

There are three kinds of tables--some regular individual wood ones as you might expect, plus some corner benches and low tables that feel Japanese (though you don't have to get on your knees or otherwise crawl under the tables), and some 10- or 12-foot-long wood planks that must be former doors, for family style seating. The bar area is an attractive rose, and the wall posters include fascinating photos of Vietnamese people and scenes.

The restaurant is in the spot formerly occupied by the short-lived '50s restaurant. Down the strip mall a bit is another new restaurant, La Galeria, that has karaoke some nights and plans to feature live jazz and other music. Meanwhile in the same mall is an Italian Coffee restaurant and the still-popular Bove restaurant which has great breakfasts in particular.

Nirvana, which was one of our favorite breakfast spots, has closed its restaurant on Mesones next to Tio Lucas and moved out to Atotonilco, to be part of a luxury resort. See the post with directions in our Announcements forum on this website. The Thai restaurant on Quebrada is gone back to Dolores Hidalgo. Constant changes in the SMA restaurant scene.

Soon we wll start our research on current SMA "Cheap Eats" spots for our next book. We plan to walk every street in San Miguel to find the hidden gems, though we know we'll still miss some. So many neighborhood spots open only a few hours a week, such as the place on Calle Antonio Villanueva near us in Col. San Rafael that serves chicken gizzard tacos on Friday and Saturday nights. Many grills suddenly appear on the streets in this area late at night, mostly on weekends. We'll try all that look as if they have good food handling and that have a crowd of Mexicans enjoying the meals.

We've been walking around our neighborhood more and taking photos of average homes and tiendas here, posted in our Gallery. After the police chief called Col. San Rafael the worst colonia for gangs, though also saying it was much improved because of their increased police presence, I wanted to show that our colonia is just another working class Mexican neighborhood, not to be feared, though of course you take the usual precautions. We haven't had to use our security on our house yet--we're still working on showing our housekeeper how to use it, though she has figured out all the fancy locks. Once she forgot and we came home an hour after she arrived and she was waiting outside for us. Two new friends moving to SMA, just found another great house for $550 a month. Yes, there are still bargains in San Miguel.

We did have one incident--two couples were outside on the sidewalk with us saying our prolonged good-byes when one of the three glue-sniffers/drunks on our block came shuffling over, uninvited. He could barely walk. He knew three phrases of English: wazzup, BS, and FU, and he kept repeating them until I guess we were firm enough about "go away now," in English and Spanish. He careened back to his friends sitting on the curb kittycorner from us, so drunk or stoned they were barely conscious.

This is the same house where the police came one day when we were new to the neighborhood and dragged one of the guys out of the house and hauled him off. The police are well acquainted with the bad guys in the neighborhood. We've always figured out who to watch out for wherever we've lived and taken precautions accordingly. At least here the SMA preventiva police come promptly and are always patrolling the streets.

A friend, Christine Conway, who owned a beauty shop on Codo near Espino's, died suddenly this week. She was a Brit who used to do Margaret Thatcher's hair, and then she had a salon in Mexico City before moving to SMA at least ten years ago. We used to go to her when we first moved to SMA, until we learned to trust the neighborhood beauty shops that charged 25 pesos for a haircut instead of $25 USD.

We're going over to a memorial meeting at Bacco restaurant in the Hotel Sautto this evening, and there will be a formal memorial service at St. Paul's Church next month. She was a lovely woman, very giving, and she had a great home in Fraccionamiente La Luz across from Tuesday Market, one of the first expats we met way back when who lived in a totally Mexican neighborhood.

As I was trying to reconstruct my email addresses floating out in space somewhere with my disappearing Hotmail, I was struck by how many people in my contact list have died. Christine lived and loved life to the hilt, a good role model for all of us.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

March 3, 2010--ATM frauds; Feast of San Juan de Dios in our neighborhood; The upscale Juriquilla suburb of Querétaro and upscale lakefront restaurants; Universidad Tecnológico de Guanajuato Norte's cooking students invite expats for a sample dinner

While many expats are highly agitated over a rash of burglaries and of ATM card frauds in SMA the past few weeks, and some are talking about organizing anti-crime protests here, daily life goes on for most of us just as enjoyably as ever. Yes, we still love San Miguel.

If you don't usually follow our Living in San Miguel forum on this website, you might want to check out the thread labelled Mega ATMs, though the problem is not just at Mega, and the root cause seems to be cybercriminals in Bogota, Colombia and in Monterrey. ATM fraud is a multi-billion dollar problem in the US--Google and see.

Part of the problem with burglaries and robberies, which also seem to be more frequent right now, may be all the road and construction workers in town, spiffing up the city for the Bicentennial celebrations that start with El Grito Sept. 15. It's the 200th anniversary of Mexico's fight for independence from Spain, and San Miguel was right in the middle of the earliest plans and battles.

Many building projects bring in cheaper workers from nearby towns and even from Colombia and other countries farther south. These laborers have nothing to lose while they're hanging around this tourist town with so many rich expat homes and tourists available. Construction workers up a few stories high on some of the luxury developments have a clear view of the rooftop access routes into the nicer homes, in case they decided to return in the middle of the night. I'm glad we added security to our house.

I've listed a lot of tips to help you make sure ATM fraud doesn't happen to you. It's a global epidemic, certainly not unique to SMA or any store. SMA had a smaller epidemic of ATM fraud a couple of years ago and finally the ATM that was located in the same Plaza Golondrinas as the US Consular Agent was removed totally.

There are "Out of Service" signs up on three of the four ATMs at Mega right now. I hope no one overreacts and takes away all ATMs from San Miguel! This particular cybercrime wave will pass again and another tourist city will be targeted.

Meanwhile, if you're coming to SMA right away, you might want to consider bringing old-fashioned travelers' checks instead of expecting to withdraw pesos from a local ATM, which is the usual way most of us get our spending money. There's an American Express travel agency and bank teller on HIdalgo across from Harry's, half a block from the Jardin.

We had two totally contrasting experiences this week, one with a Col. San Rafael celebration of San Juan de Dios day a block from our house, the other a trip to Querétaro where we stopped at Superama and at the upscale suburb of Juriquilla. There we explored the lakefront restaurant row where one dinner on the menu at the place we chose was 1,100 pesos for king crab and the lobster dinner was 935 pesos. Hint: thats not what we ate.

And then we were in on a trial run-through for the gourmet cooking students at the Universidad Tecnológico de Guanajuato Norte. Expat volunteers to sample the student cooking are still being sought--email me and I will forward your name to the school.

First: our local fiesta that we thought was school kids practicing their drumming for the next holiday. But the drumming kept up, and around dusk we decided to check out where and what it was. From our roof we could see a party going on just a block uphill and around a corner from us!

It was like a small block party back in LA, with kids running around and families bringing their folding chairs and elderly relatives sitting in honored positions and street food stands providing tacos, fruit cups, and chicarrones. The usual large statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe was in a prominent spot with vases of yellow and white mums all around her. No sign of St. John of God, though, the alleged feast day celebrant.

On one end of the block somone had some pretty good-looking music equipment and a dozen Locos danced endlessly and effortlessly. These are the same costumed dancers who parade for hours on Day of the Locos mid-June. Their costumes are usually clowns or copyright-infringement Disney characters or Sponge Bobs or Smurfs.

We watched them for awhile and then walked to the other end of the block where drummers using big metal cans instead of expensive wood and leather instruments were flailing away. They were beating out the same familiar rhythm that drew us to the Jardin when we lived in Centro and could tell something was going on from the faint sound of drumbeats.

A couple dozen Conchero dancers did the same steps as the dancers at the Jardin, Chichimeca patterns that have come down through the centuries. One of the guys spotted us and pointed at his wrist. Oh, what time was it.

"A las siete," we called out to him. The dancers exchanged glances. Yes, they'd danced long enough. They broke ranks and went to their respective families. None of them were even breaking a sweat after their hours of hard work, though.

Some of them, our neighborhood youths, made small talk with us, since we must have seemed far more approachable there than when we are walking down the street. Some tried out their few words of English and seemed delighted we could speak some Spanish with them. Where are you from? Do you like San Miguel? What was the weather like back in Phoenix? Some knew about Phoenix heat from having worked there. Mucho calor! Si!

We ran into one of the guys the next day as we were rushing to something or other and hailing a cab. He seemed glad to see us and told me his name: Lalo. It felt really good to have gone to their neighborhood fiesta! Another small step toward blending into the community.

It didn't help the next day to read in a local paper that Director of Public Security Walter Avila called Col. San Rafael the worst in San Miguel. From our experiences here so far, if this is the worst, San Miguel is in really good shape!

It was quite a contrast a few days later to be invited to go to Querétaro with two friends who wanted to show us the upscale suburb of Juriquilla and some lakeside restaurants there.

First we stopped at Superama, the high end Walmart gourmet grocery store outside of Querétaro, close to Juriquilla. Somehow it didn't seem so gourmet anymore, now that we have Mega and Soriana. The only thing we bought was two bags of real lemons. We're still looking for a Meyer lemon tree for our patio--if anyone spots one at a nursery please let us know!

(Our patio flowers from Candelaria are looking pretty good now as they fill in. Go to the Photo Gallery section of this website, click on Carol's photos, then go to our Personal photo album at the bottom to see our patio. I also created two new albums that go with this blog, titled 1) Querétaro suburb of Juriquilla, and 2) University tourism students invite expats to dinner.)

We did some shopping at Costco--the Querétaro store has a few different things than the one in Celaya--and then headed to the high point of our trip: restaurant row in Plaza Nautica on the lake of Juriquilla.

Exit the freeway where you spot the big yellow factory building and turn left in the suburb and follow the signs for Cubros del Lago home development. Once there you'll see signs for Plaza Nautica, or ask directions. (This is Mexico--ask several people directions until you get some that agree.)

From the freeway the suburb always looked like thousands of almost identical homes. I'd first thought they were the Infonavit low-cost homes that the Mexican government builds and sells to workers enrolled in IMSS, for prices around $35,000 USD equivalent. The government even offers these workers mortgages, usually pretty rare in Mexico.

But once we were off the highway we could see that these were very nice homes indeed, the bedroom suburbs for the multinational corporation workers of Querétaro. I picked up a real estate magazine and there were some condos in the area in the $35,000 USD range, but far more homes were over $100,000 to $400,000, and some were even higher. I'm sure the nicer waterfront single homes were over a million dollars.

As we drove the neighborhood reminded me more and more of San Diego suburbs. And then we parked in the shade of some trees for Plaza Nautica and explored the waterfront restaurants we'd been promised. One upscale Mexican, an Italian trattoria, an Argentinian steak house--and then we spotted Porto Buzios Nautico Lobster House. Would there be anything on the menu we could afford? Yes, we were assured, though it was definitely not a candidate for our upcoming "Cheap Eats" book.

It felt like a Marina del Rey restaurant built over the water, ducks in the water below floating up and quacking in our direction for food, bougainvillea framing the photo ops, very well dressed Mexicans filling up the outdoor dining area into the late afternoon.

One one side of the menu we spotted tacos, soups and salads in the 50-75 peso range so we wouldn't go hungry. We dared to flip the page and look at the entrees. Immediately I spotted an 1,130-peso king crab dish, and below it a 925-peso lobster. Move along.

Many entrees were in the 125-175 peso range, though, and we decided to splurge. It's the first of the month. We had red snapper with a Caesar dressing on the fillet, not on an accompanying salad as we'd expected from the menu. It was served with rice and steamed veggies--delicious. Our friends had big slabs of grilled tuna, one with teriyaki sauce, with mashed potatoes and the veggies, for 135 pesos each. Not something we'd do every day, but I'm glad to know the area exists.

Another friend teaches English to the cooking students at the Universidad Tecnológica de Guanajuata Norte, located behind the SMA city offices, on the road to Dr. Mora. Their first year at the new university they didn't have working stoves and so they concentrated on food presentation. They do put out beautiful plates of food. (Check out the University photo album on our website Photo Gallery.)

We enjoyed watching them put finishing touches on the 14 plates they were going to present to the six expats my friend had rounded up: coq au vin, roast lamb, poached pears with chocolate sauce, ratatouille and stacking zucchini towers, shoestring French fries stacked gourmet fashion.

The plates were before us. Only three forks and knives. No napkins or plates to take samples onto. No serving utensils for the food dishes. No place to sit. Help yourself, but with what. Our teacher friend got them rolling into gear to find silverware and plates, and we stood around and compared our thoughts on the various dishes. The students dug into the rest of the food back at their food stations. You could tell the kids who were most likely to succeed--they hung around us, practiced their English, wanted to know our opinions, offered information on how the dishes were prepared. They're learning.

I heard that the next group of expats got a slightly more polished presentation, and I am sure that by the time the students graduate they will have learned much more. We wanted stronger spices and found some of the chicken and lamb overcooked and dry.

But some dishes were excellent--I loved the red wine sauce on the coq au vin and on the mushroom accompaniment, and we all loved the pears, which were served either on grated chocolate or with melted chocolate, or with a chocolate and custard sauce with slivered almonds. It was kind of fun to be back on a college campus once more. (If you want to be on the list for a future student cooked meal let me know and I'll forward your contact info to my friend.)

Such contrasting experiences this past week. We love San Miguel!

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

February 25, 2010--My report on the "Coffee with the Consul" Feb. 22, including Q & A with representatives of Immigration and Hacienda/SAT, with information on the new Immigration Manual

The first half hour of the meeting, 10:30 -11 am, before the speakers arrived, was devoted to general questions from expats for Ed Clancy, SMA Consular Agent.

Only around 30 expats were present in the Biblioteca's Sala at any one time, and at noon the meeting had to move to the café because another meeting was scheduled for the room.

At that point only the first speaker, from Immigration, had been able to answer questions. The questioning continued on a one on one basis in the café for those who remained.

In general the speakers from Immigration, Hacienda/SAT, and the Guanajuato office of Finance and Administration (he dealt with mostly with car questions), confirmed what I'd reported here from other sources about the new Migration Manual that goes into effect May 1, 2010.

Summary: Mexican consulates in the US and Canada will no longer issue FM3s. FM3s and FM2s will no longer be in booklet form like a US passport but will be plastic cards with imbedded data strips. The FMT will be replaced with an FMM that will have three options: one is a regular tourist permit like the current FMT, and the other two options will be for business people who come to Mexico for up to 180 days to conduct business for their foreign-based corporations. It is not true that the new FMMs will allow tourists in general to work during their 180 day maximum stays in Mexico. The rules overall are going to remain the same but the intent of the changes is for the process to be simplified.

Now on to the meeting as it happened. (The comments in parentheses are my additions to explain the background of the questions, for those who are new to Mexico.)

Ed Clancy started by announcing that the next "Coffee with the Consul" will be about three weeks, and the invited Q&A speaker is Waltrer Avila, the new Director of Public Security, to talk about crime issues.

The first questioner warned that if any expat buys property, have it surveyed immediately. Already she is finding that her neighbors are encroaching on the land she thought she had bought, several feet in each direction, and she is finding it impossible to get back the land that she believes she bought.

Clancy said that surveys are generally not done unless specifically asked for. In the US he believes the time for someone to possess land until it actually becomes theirs is 10 years, and in Mexico it may be 5 years or less.

(Squatters are almost impossible to remove from property if they have been there a long time and their presence has become established. Similarly in the US, if a property owner allows public access over his or her property, that public access becomes legal after so many years.)

Clancy also warned against buying ejido property unless it has been through the formal process of conversion. Don't buy ejido land unless you can afford to lose your investment, he said. There are many areas where the rest of the ejido members can simply steal back property that an expat thinks he or she has purchased legally from an ejido member.

(Ejido land is communal property given to groups of farmers and to soldiers from the winning side at various times in Mexican land reform programs, and it is to be owned and farmed communally. The conversion process involves a member of the ejido first informing the rest of the ejido to see if anyone wants to buy the specific property. Then the city gets a chance to buy the property. If no one else wants it, the ejido member can then go through the process of formally separating the piece of land from the ejido community so it can be sold to another individual not in the ejido.)

The next expat questioner wondered if there are any legal ways to stop a construction project that is taking away a view.

Clancy said no, unless a specific zoning law is being broken or there is a problem with a permit. Though it is the law that all new construction s to have a permit first, many owners don't get the permits.

You have no legal right to a view, in Mexico as in the US, he said. Often it is better to be the last person in a new development to do your building, so that you can be the last to take the view. The first building will probably lose its view right away.

Building heights are the most likely cause of a stop order on a new project. It isn't true that 8 1/2 meters is the tallest approved height for a building, Clancy said. If all the homes on a block are only 7 meters tall, a new building on that block will probably only be able to go 7 meters tall.

The question of where do you measure the heighth of a construction can vary, especially if the property is on a slope. Generally the height of the construction from the most favorable point for the owner is used.

Almost never is a completed building ever torn down despite violations. A fine may be only 1,000 pesos, and the architect and owner would far rather pay that amount to be allowed to do what they want with a piece of property. If you are going to fight a new building, document the problem with photos and start early, before the building has gone up.

In protected areas like historic San Miguel, besides city authorities the National Institute of Architects (name may not be exact) does have the power to tear down construction which is in violation of the historic nature of an area.

The next expat questions dealt with mailing prescription drugs from the US or Canada. The only way to have any medicines mailed into Mexico is by obtaining a permit from the Secretary of Health, one permit per mailing. In SMA the Secretary of Health offices are in the former Hospital General building on Relox, a block north of the side entrance to the Biblioteca.

Medications simply are not allowed to be mailed into Mexico without a permit, Clancy stated. He is not sure how those who say they have permits can accept mailings of prescriptions into Mexico. The problems of shipping medicines into Mexico or even being purchased in the US or Canada by those whose legal residence is Mexico are complex. Most insurance programs will not allow drugs purchased through their coverage to be shipped to Mexico, and your coverage may be discontinued if it is discovered that you are doing so.

Because of these kinds of laws governing international shipments of things like medicines, just about everybody is living on the outskirts of the law in some way or another here, Clancy joked, and it is not always clear on which side of the law a particular practice falls.

He said that generally prescription drug costs in Mexico are less than US retail prices for the same drug but usually more than your insurance copay if you have a drug prescription plan.

What expats generally do is to go back to the US every 90 or 180 days and buy their prescrptions for the next 90 or 180 days and bring them down themselves (with their prescriptions from their doctor in case they are questioned at the border). Or, they have their meds brought down by friends or relatives who will be visiting SMA. "Those who are doing other things, I don't want to know," Clancy said.

Some ways that medicines have been brought into Mexico in the past have been discontinued, such as under the previous Consular Agent who accepted packages of medicines mailed to his office for SMA expats.

The next expat question was on the benefits of having an FM3 versus an FMT (now to be an FMM). Don't assume that having an FM3 or FM2 will automatically bring you a better tax arrangement in a property sale, Clancy warned.

You should talk to various notario públicos (lawyers who have advanced training in government documents such as real estate sales) to find the notario with the most favorable practices for your situation, and then only believe the advice from that notario, Clancy said.

With an FMT (now FMM) you can come and go as often as you like, but each time you leave you give up your current FMT and come in on a new one. An FMT is for one visit only. If you have brought in a car on a temporary vehicle importation permit on that FMT, you must take your car out with you when you leave, and you may not be able to bring in your car on your second 180-day FMT in a year.

But it is also true that not all border offices have computer access to the Mexican data bank of all expat cars legally in the country at any one time, and you very likely will be able to do so, at least until every border has complete computer hookups to the data bases.

So having an FM3 is far better if you are going to be bringing a car in to Mexico for long term use. Once you have your FM3, even if you changed to an FM3 from an FMT while in Mexico, your car remains legally imported as long as you are legal. If you are one day late leaving on your FMT, you and your car are both now illegal and the car could be seized.

Even though many expats do so, you can't come in on one FMT with your car, leave by plane with your car staying in Mexico, and come in on another FMT later. Your car is not magically transferred to your new FMT, Clancy said.

(In the private meetings after the main session, the representative from the Guanajuato Secretary of Finance and Administration, Jorge Pinedo, disagreed. He said that as long as you are in Mexico legally, your car isa here legally. You can put it in a garage and not have it driven while you leave Mexico on your FMT and come back on a new FMT, and your car will be legal again. I told him that everything else I had read and everybody else I had talked to at any other agency had disagreed, but he insisted that your car will still be legal even if you come back on another FMT. I wouldn't assume that everyone who may stop you will have this opinion, but he did present that strong opinion to the people at the meeting.)

Continuing on the benefits of an FM3 over an FMT, Clancy noted that you cannot get a work permit or an INAPAM senior discount card without an FM3. However, for those who do not have enough income to qualify for an FM3, the FMT is the only option. The current SMA minimum monthly income requirement being used by Immigration for an FM3 is about $1,000 USD, and about $1,700 for the FM2, he said.

He was asked what an expat should do if a car becomes disabled. In the past you had to have the car towed to the border, he said. But now you should have a mechanic write a letter that the car is not driveable any more, and you should have the mechanic remove a circle of the windshield that has the intact hologram for the Temporary Vehicle Importation Permit.

Bring that piece of glass with the hologram and the letter from the mechanic to an aduana at the border so the car can be removed from the data base.

He wasn't sure that if your car is stolen and you make a formal denuncia with Ministerio Público that your car has been stolen, if that is enough to take the car out of the data base as being yours.

The questions shifted to work permits, though Clancy said that questioners should follow through with Immigration to be sure whether in their specific cases they needed a work permit.

Someone asked that if they are teaching an art class in their home, did they need a work permit? Clancy said yes, you are making money, whether from your home or not, so you will definitely need work papers.

He said that he has informed every major organization in SMA that their officers need work permits, even for volunteer positions. If Hacienda were to make an unexpected inspection of the organization and discovered they had key volunteers who did not have permits, the organization would be fined.

Someone who is an usher for a concert series wouldn't need a permit, while the organizer of the series would, he gave as an example.

Clancy was asked whether there is a crackdown on people who have bought homes in Mexico on their FMTs and now they continue to get new FMTs at the border every 180 days and never transfer to a residency FM3.

He replied that technically the border agents don't have to give you an FMT. They may question you, but generally they want people to come to Mexico. (I added that those who write to me who have been told they must move up to an FM3 when they live permanently in Mexico just go to another border crossing where they usually can get one with no questions.)

The discussion shifted to renting out rooms and apartments on an occasional basis--does the homeowner still need to get a work permit and register with Hacienda and pay taxes? The short answer: yes. If you are going to generate income in Mexico, you definitely need to get a work permit onto your FM3 or FM2 and register with Hacienda and hire a Mexican accountant who will determine and collect your taxes. If you don't earn any money some months, you don't pay taxes, but you still pay your accountant for the filing. (Ours charges 200 pesos every two months for each of us.)

If you put on a garage sale once a year, you don't have to gt a work permit or register. But if you are producing arts or crafts in Mexico that you sell even once a year, the intent is you are generating income with your work and you need to get a work permit and register with Hacienda and pay taxes when you do have your sales. Clancy added that Hacienda is very accommodating if it is clear that you are trying to do the right thing. They may not be so helpful if it is clear you are trying to evade paying taxes.

At this point the representative from Immigration arrived and the Q&A shifted.

The immigration official who answered questions is Francisco Salazar, head of the department of migratory regulations for SMA, email fsalazar@inami.gob.mx. Clancy translated questions into Spanish, the two of them conversed in Spanish for a couple of minutes, then Clancy condensed the conversation down to a sentence or two reply.

The question was asked, do you need an FM3 to rent out a room or apartment. Answer: if you are making money in Mexico you need a work permit and registration with Hacienda to pay your taxes, and you need an FM3 or FM2 to get a work permit.

A regularly scheduled volunteer in several areas for Atención and who also volunteers for the Red Cross asked if he needed a work permit. He was told yes, and that he would need papers in two areas, one to do any kind of work in the field of publications, and the other to volunteer for a community organization.

In the past, working papers were extremely specific, Salazar said in translation. You would need the wording on your visa to specify you worked as a waiter for the evening shift in X cafe, and if your hours or duties or employer shifted you needed a new work permit.

Part of the process of attempting to simplify procedures now is that you can be given a work permit for a general field, such as publications, or the food industry.

A volunteer's permit has the wording, non-lucrative. Taxes therefore do not have to be paid nor does a volunteer have to register with Hacienda and hire a Mexican attorney to set up regular tax payments.

If a business or charitable organization is found to have people working without papers, even in volunteer positions, the business or organization could be fined.

Making a volunteer's position clear via work papers could also be important if the volunteer happened to be hurt while performing volunteer duties.

Salazar mentioned the new immigration manual that goes into effect May 1 and said the intent of the manual is to make the process simpler, inluding making it easier to work legally. The goal is to make it simple enough that no one needs to hire a lawyer to help them get working papers; it should be a process you can do yourself.

An expat asked if those who currently have FM3s or FM2s will have to apply for the new cards that will replace the current booklets. The answer is no, the replacement cards will be given at the time of their next regular renewal.

Should an expat who has an FM3 or FM2 fill out the forms to get an FMT (after May 1 to be the FMM) that are handed out on airplanes headed to Mexico to all passengers? No, because doing so means you will have to two different visa categories, which is illegal and you are subject to a fine. You should show your existing visa to prove you don't have to submit an FMT or FMM application.

Several expats complained of having to go long distances in Mexican airports to get their visa stamped that they were leaving or entering Mexico. In the Leon airport in particular, often there is only one person on duty from Immigration who must attend to both incoming and outgoing flights and the desk may not always be convenient or the official may not be there.

The complaint boiled down to logistics at particular airports and Salazar said these kinds of complaints would be better handled at the airports. However, suggestions for improvements could be made into the suggestion box at the SMA immigration office, to be handed on to the right people.

Clancy added that having your visa stamped when you come and go from Mexico is not that important for FM3 holders, but FM2 holders cannot be absent from Mexico for more than 18 months out of five years, and so it is important to document time out of the country.

When you cannot find someone in authority to stamp your visa, keep all records such as ticket stubs, boarding passes, or toll booth receipts to prove the dates of your trips, Clancy suggested. Then bring this proof to the immigration office later so that the information can be entered into your visa booklet, or onto the new visa card after May 1.

Can the renewal date for a visa be changed? Short answer: no. However, if it is very important that you change the renewal date for your visa, it is possible to hand in your current visa as you exit Mexico (be sure to get a receipt), and then reenter Mexico at a time that gives you a more convenient renewal date when you apply for a new visa.

Salazar said that if you are out of the country at your renewal date, you have 60 days to legally reenter Mexico past that date, and then another 30 days to get to the immigration office to get your renewal. (Other sources have said that you have only 60 days total after your renewal date to get back into Mexico and to get to Immigration to start the late renewal process.)

I asked if the early legal interpretations of the new manual were accurate that it would no longer be possible to get an FM3 at a Mexican consulate in the US or Canada, but instead you would apply at a consulate and be given a sticker on your passport that would allow you to enter Mexico any time in the next 365 days, and then you had 30 days to get to a local Immigration office nearest to your home in Mexico to apply for the FM3.

Salazar said Mexican consulates anywhere in the world would no longer be issuing FM3s. Clancy noted that it might make sense to come into Mexico on the new FMM at a convenient time and then apply for your FM3 at a Mexican immigration office.

At this point the meeting broke up and moved into individual Q & A with the officials in the café. I continued talking with Salazar about just how the process was going to work with the new FMMs and visa cards. I was particularly interested in legal analyses that said the FMM would have three options:

1) The regular tourist permit (Visitante con Actividades no Lucrativas);

2) Business (Visitante Persona de Negocios); or

3) Business (Visitante con Actividades Lucrativas).

Did that mean that it was now going to be legal for a person coming in on a 180-day FMM tourist permit to work?

He explained that the FMM was now going to be a broader kind of 180-day permit form that would incorporate many kinds of temporary visitors besides tourists--including corporate business employees who come to Mexico for their employers to conduct business dealings or attend conferences or training sessions across international borders.

In no way was this kind of FMM to be used by someone who wanted to come down to Mexico for 180 days and seek employment or do temporary work for a business in Mexico. The people in these categories would generally be business executives working for international corporations. (In our research for The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico we found at least 17 kinds of visas and permits in the past, including those for ministers, athletes, scholars, students, scientists and so on, and the new Manual is intended to simplify all of these many kinds of applications.)

I next talked to Maria Teresa Torrea Segovia, from the SMA Hacienda/SAT offices, about how all of the work permit information in particular would be handled on the new cards.

She said that the bar codes on the visa cards could be updated much easier with address changes, marital status changes, employment changes, and so on. There will be no more problems of having to wait for these kinds of updates to be put into print booklets so that people couldn't travel until they got back their updated documents.

I asked if everyplace that would need to have an electronic bar code reader to change or read all of the information on a visa card would have the machinery by May 1. Ojalá, we both smiled. If God wills it.

I asked her more about expats who only occasionally rent out a room or casita on their property. They still need to obtain a work permit and register with Hacienda and have facturas (official receipts) printed that are proof they have rented out their property, and they still have to take their facturas to their Mexican accountant every two months to determine what taxes they should pay.

However, it is possible once a year to go to Hacienda and have the process put on suspension, if the property owner is not going to be renting out the property for a long period. When you stop renting out your property permanently it is necessary to go back and deregister.

I went on to talk to L.C.I Jorge Pinedo, Dirección General de Verification al Comercio Exterior, which is part of the Secretaria de Finanzas y Adminisatración for the state of Guanajuato. His email is jpinedol@guanajuato.gob.mx.

He was assuring an expat that if they get a temporary vehicle importation permit for their car when they come down on an FMT (or an FMM), when they switch to an FM3 they do not have to do anything more to keep their car legal. So long as they remain legal with updated visas, their car remains legal.

"To be honest, we're not trying to bother the tourists here," he said."We want to make it as easy as possible."

He went on to say, however, that it is perfectly legal for someone to come down on an FMT with their car on a 180-day permit, then to leave the car here in a garage someplace where it is not being driven, and to come back later on a new FMT and the car would still be here legally because the permit holder was here legally.

(This statement is contrary to what other officials have stated, who say that the permit for a car left in Mexico does not automatically switch to a new FMT if its owner leaves Mexico and reenters on a new FMT.)

I said that other officials would disagree, and an average tránsito from Celaya or some other town might not know that interpretation and might impound the car. Pinedo stated that only Hacienda has the authority to seize a car for an importation permit violation.

All of the officials said that the rules in all the areas had not changed, only the processes were being simplified.

Many expats were still lined up attempting to get their questions answered from all three officials. I didn't want to monopolize their time any more, though there are still many unanswered questions in my mind.

I am studying the new manual attempting to get some answers but I suspect we are going to have to just wait and see how it all works out. I'll keep looking around for all the new bar code readers that will be needed for our new visa cards.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

February 17, 2010--A new Mexico Immigration manual and changes in visas coming; A fallen police commander; Happier things like a sudden trip to Celaya for our hummingbirds and new flowers from Candelaria planted in our patio; the kids hitting each other in the Jardin with confetti-filled eggs before the start of Lent; Report on a city security meeting

I posted the first information I've seen on the new Immigration Manual for Mexico that goes into effect May 1, 2010, on the "Living in San Miguel" forum of this website. Right now it looks very confusing and I'm not at all sure what any of it means yet. I'll lurk on the immigration lawyers' pages and read the other forums and see if Ed Clancy will invite Immigration officials back for a "Coffee with the Consul" soon to explain it all to us--once they figure it out themselves.

The change was supposed to simplify the entire immigration process, per a request by President Calderón last September. We'll see if it's simpler or not when we figure it out. Don't get flustered, it will all work out. This is Mexico. You get to hang in limbo awhile. Snapping your fingers only gets you hurt fingers.

The terrible event in San Miguel this week was the murder of Police Commander Jesus Araiza in a combined SMA and military police operation against a counterfeiting ring in a town of 750 in the direction towrd Dolores Hidalgo. Three men in a Ford Ranger started to shoot at the police, all three men were wounded, and the last shots included a bullet to the Comandante's side so that it entered the heart area. He was the only policeman hit.

He was rushed to Hospital General and died there, under heavy security. He was 33 and leaves a wife and small son. Contributions to the family can be made directly to them; you will be escorted to the deceased officer's home so that you can be sure the money will reach their hands. Call or email EfrainGonzalez2008@gmail.com, 415-114-0588.

Efrain and Bill Wilson have very moving tributes to the officer on the Living in San Miguel forum, on attending the funeral and procession Tuesday. I was unable to attend but when I tried to take a taxi home around 6 pm, the memorial that had started at 2 pm in the Jardin and moved to the funeral mass at San Francisco church and concluded with a very large procession with his coffin to the cemetery, was still going on. Centro traffic was paralyzed. I was glad to see the massive turnout in support of our first fallen policeman since I've been in San Miguel.

We did manage to have some wonderful light moments the past ten days which I will describe before moving on to my report on the city's security meeting with expats the 11th. Norma was changing the water on our hummingbird feeder when it slipped and broke. We know from experience there are no decent hummingbird feeders on sale in San Miguel. The only ones we've found have been at Kona pet shop next to Wal-Mart in Celaya.

Could we put off the trip until our next usual Costco run the 3rd of the month when our Social Security checks come in? The divebombing birds said no, they were going to stage a protest until the feeder magically reappeared. Cadres of them kept flying up to where the feeder should have been, circling the spot, fighting with each other as if the other was responsible. We couldn't let that mayhem continue. They were going to kill each other and maybe draw blood on our heads.

No time for breakfast, we took a bus to Mega and had a cappuccino frappe while waiting for the next Directo first class Primero Plus bus to Celaya. It stops across from Mega on the Libramiento behind the Italian Coffee. The Directos come at 20 before the hour to that stop; they leave the SMA bus station on the half hour. 18 pesos each with our INAPAM senior discount cards and we were off. The hummingbirds were waiting.

Quick dash through Home Depot when the bus let us off there, a 30-peso cab to the pet store to buy a new feeder, another 30-peso taxi to Costco, and a quick run through that store to see what we might pick up. We really didn't need anything--hamburger, smoked oysters, Zip-loc baggies. And it was back on a Directo at about ten after the hour at the stop in front of Costco. Easy. The hummingbirds survived. We found an even bigger feeder and half a dozen dive bombers are circling it at any one time.

A tiny nest is in one of our patio trees, with two jelly bean sized eggs, but we've never seen a hummingbird sitting on the eggs and we fear they froze. The weather has mostly been sunny and nice since the rain storms ended, but some days--like today--are still cold and wet. We even had hail for about five minutes a few days ago.

Our handyman Pedro Romero took us to Candelaria the last day and we bought a hundred dollars worth of plants--fuschias, hydrangeas, flowering vines, pansies, plants we didn't know the names of but Pedro assured us they'd grow well on our sunny patio. We never found a real lemon tree though we didn't really expect to. Somebody some day will say that some nursery has Meyer lemon trees for sale and we'll rush off. In Mexico limones are lime trees, and then there are limas that look like yellow lemons but have a different taste, more like a lime.

If anyone sees Meyer lemon trees for sale anyplace near here, please let us know! Our patio looks beautiful now. I'll post photos in a few days when the plants have recuperated from the transplanting and it's sunny again.

Sunday was both Valentine's Day and the last weekend before the start of Lent Ash Wednesday. That's the weekend kids head for the Jardin to buy bags of decorated eggs that have been emptied out and filled with confetti. It's all-out good-natured warfare as kids go on the run, dashing up to each other and landing a hit with eggs on each others' heads.

We had our Valentine's Day brunch at Harry's and then sat for an hour laughing at the kids. We know better than to buy a bag of eggs ourselves--having the eggs in your possession means you are In The Game.

I took a lot of photos but since I didn't have permission from any of the parents I'm not posting them in our photo albums.

I tried to paint a watercolor of the scene a few years back and it didn't turn out well--I wanted to show the chaos and excitement of all the kids running every which way, but instead the final painting looked like busy wallpaper. No focal point. Kind of like my blogs. You write and paint as you live. With me there's always so much going on that sometimes it isn't clear what's really important. We're too old to be the iPod/voicemail/Twitter generation, easily distracted and excited, but maybe it's contagious. Or maybe it's like insanity--we inherit it from our kids.

The security meetings with the city have been pretty important, though they have been overshadowed by the murder of the police commander. And now I fear that expats may lose focus as we're hit with the news of the new Immigration Manual, trying to figure out the ramifications, if any, in our own lives.

Time rushes by so fast these days. Remember how long summer vacation lasted when we were young? It took years from June to September. Now I look around and wonder where the month and the year went. At least there's always a lot going on in San Miguel, enough to make me feel sometimes as if I have ADHD.

Let's see if I can concentrate long enough to find my past posts on the security meeting and edit them into something that makes sense.

Only about 25 were in the audience, almost all expats. Mayor Lucy Nuñez answered questions for two hours. Eight people from the city were there, mostly department heads, plus Director of Public Security Walter Avila who had to leave early because he wasn't feeling well.

Several in the audience complained because the meeting had been moved to the CEDECOM community center auditorium in Fracc. La Luz from the Police Headquarters meeting room. The CEDECOM auditorium has movie theater style seats, far more capacity, and the meeting was miked. This room is more professional, the mayor responded to their complaints.

The original meeting was to be last week but it was rained out. That meeting had already been scheduled for the CEDECOM auditorium rather than the police meeting room, which was overflowing into the halls at the first meeting with insufficient chairs for everyone.

At the beginning, some members of the audience questioned whether enough had been done to publicize the meeting. Notices of the meeting were on these Fallinginlovewithsanmiguel.com forums which have 1,000 registered members, and on Civil_SMA which has 4,000 registered members, and on the smaller smacoollist and smasecurity emal lists. Some in the audience said that wasn't enough, they're not on any of those lists and don't want to be.

You have to make an effort to be involved in your community, the Mayor said. It's a two-way street, you need to take steps to find out the truth about what is going on and the resources available and the procedures to take.

The mayor listened to all of the expats who signed up to speak, many of whom had been mugged or burglarized. She said she didn't know about the many arrests of a particular purse snatcher on Tenerias. He always steals less than 20,000 pesos so it is considered a minor crime and he spends only the one night in jail for a petty theft.

The last time enough people came together on the police report and he got five months in prison, but he is back out. Nuñez vowed to see that a joint complaint could be filed with all of his offenses, which are often filed under his different names and aliases, so that the amount would be larger and he would be viewed as a repeat offender.

Nuñez said the city had considered the expat community's suggestion at the last security meeting to provide duplicate forms for the initial report-taking by the preventiva police, so that the person making the report would have a copy and the police would have a copy. She noted that the city agreed this was a good idea and had prepared this kind of form.

The new city forms were distributed to the audience. They are half sheets stapled together with a half sheet of carbon paper in the middle. Nuñez said that expats could use them when a police officer comes to the scene and get the name of the person who received the report. They could bring the other copy to Ministerio Público for the formal denuncia, the report that generates the actual investigation and possible prosecution of the crime.

Members of the audience responded that it is the police who should be carrying pads of these forms, the same way transito police do to give out tickets. The forms should be numbered so that no forms can be thrown away, and one form should be filed by number at the police station and one form given to the person who has called the police. Nuñez said the city can do that.

Otherwise, audience members said, the city would have to produce 120,000 sets of forms at least, and get them to every resident of San Miguel, and people would lose them or not have them when it came time to call the police. There needs to be a numbering system for all of the forms so that it can be seen where a form was not filed. That would answer complaints that police reports disappear.

Members of the audience insisted that crime is up in San Miguel, while Nuñez said that she gets the statistics from the police every day and it is not. She stressed the urgency of going through the hassles of filing a report with Ministerio Público so that a crime can be documented and pursued.

She cited the success story of the store robbery of Patrice Wynne's new story Abrazos on Zacateros, where Patrice did follow through and spent seven hours making the formal report at Ministerio Público. The criminals were caught when they tried to use her stolen credit card at Liverpool and her money was returned.

Some audience members said that those who work cannot take off entire days to go to Ministerio Público to file reports and the process should be simplified. Some warned that if the city does not stop these crimes expats would leave and tourism would drop.

Mayor Nuñez reminded the audience that they had chosen to move to Mexico which has a very different legal system and procedures than the US. The issues are very deep-rooted and also global, not just San Miguel. She asked that expats give her a chance to take action on these issues. She has been in office only since October.

She repeatedly urged everyone to add a security alarm system, motion detectors and other security to their homes. She urged people to take steps such as not carrying large purses, and not bringing the originals of their visas and passports and other important documents with them. Don't walk down dark streets. Other common sense prevention measures should be taken. It is a two-way street, you have to take steps to protect yourselves as well, she said.

Some expats complained that street lights get vandalized the moment a new light is installed. Nuñez was aware of that problem and said that the city keeps working on it, finding new ways to protect the lighting.

She said that the crime in San Miguel is mainly muggings and burglaries. The city is working very hard to keep out organized crime, which keeps getting closer and now there are many organized crime cases in Celaya.

She deliberately chose to go to the military to hire the Director of Public Security, Walter Avila, who has a long career in military service. "We are sending a strong message that we do not want organized crime in San Miguel," Nuñez said.

By coordinating closely with the federal government's efforts to fight organized crime with the help of the military, there is a greater sharing of information sources and resources. For those who do not like a military presence in San Miguel, she says she would rather have that than organized crime.

To someone who complained that the one police officer who had understood the crime scene in her neighborhood was no longer working there, Nuñez noted that all police officers in SMA are being checked for corruption and many are being fired, and this process will continue.

Repeatedly she appealed to expats to give her a chance, to allow her some time to dig deeper into the problems they pesented to her and take action. She urged expats to go to http://sanmiguelallende.gob.mx/ong/ongeng.html to fill out census data and to offer suggestions and ways we want to help the city, with our qualifications. Citizens advisory councils are being set up on many issues to help Mexican and expat residents work with the city and provide input.

Here is the city website page with the list of the city department heads and their contact information: http://sanmiguelallende.gob.mx/direcciones/directorio.html
The administration's main phone number is 415-152-9600. Erma Rosales at that number is a bilingual liaison for the expat community to the government.

After the meeting, a few of the expats were going to follow through on various issues from the meeting. One was going to follow through on getting a more coordinated denunciation of the Tenerias robber. Another was checking on prices for carbonless forms for multi-copy crime report pads to be carried by every policeman.

A woman at the meeting showed her vest that has zippered and Velcroed pockets inside, where she keeps important papers when she has to carry them.
She had a very strong over the shoulder purse with a thick strap that nestles against her abdomen in front, not so easy to grab (the same kind I have--washable, lightweight, great for traveling). But she said that if she does lose her purse, the important stuff is in her vest.

She said that Patrice Wynne at Abrazos on Zacateros, the woman who makes the Day of the Dead aprons and clothes, is considering ordering handmade vests with plenty of inner pockets for possibly $175 USD. This is still tentative.

Norma and I have been checking out cargo jackets online with many inner and outer pockets that run about $110 USD--they're of good fabric that is also waterproof. They're on our list.

If we can find an additional color besides khaki that would be great. Otherwise we're the Bobbsey twins again. So often we see the same kind of clothing that we both want and buy, and some days we're dressed alike. Oh well, we're old, we can wear what we want.

Yes, smart criminals know that expats may have money hidden away on their body, but again, you don't have to run faster than the bear, you just have to run faster than the other person the bear is also chasing.

A thief doesn't want a hassle, he just wants to grab the money and run, and a flopping big purse carried in a frail hand or over the back is an easy target compared to having to down somebody and search their inner clothing while there is a chance a cop could hear the screams and make an arrest.

If your house has a security alarm, a burglar will prefer to go to a house that doesn't, just in case the police would come in time while he was still inside. Any lock can be taken apart with a blowtorch or welder, but it's easier to find one that pops with a crowbar or something.

If someone is targeting you specifically, they probably will find a way to do so--even the Pope has been stabbed, and he has an immense bodyguard staff. Presidents get assassinated. But most small thefts are crimes of opportunity.

I talked to our handyman about the Tenerias purse snatcher and he says the guy burglarizes homes, too, scoring someplace just about every day. It isn't just expats who fall victim, it's whoever is the easiest target that day. His family bails him out.

He's been doing this for many years and is infamous throughout the city, long before expats put two and two together. It's amazing that the mayor said she had never heard of him, and her husband owns a security system company (as well as owning the SMA radio station).

As far as bad publicity, the man who is the son of the man who started 40 daily newspapers throughout Mexico, who was kidnapped three years ago in a terrible crime (but he came home safely after the hefty ransom was paid), later went to the Washington Post which did a major and frightening article about the crime as if it had just happened. The article didn't mention that he was the son of one of the wealthiest men in Mexico and therefore a likely target.

Then his wife wrote up the story again for Marie Claire magazine last year, again as if it had just happened, not mentioning that her husband's family owns 40 daily newspapers.

Now the story will be aired again, this time on Dateline soon, I have heard. Yet another round of frightened people will be writing me wanting to know if San Miguel is safe and should they drop their plans to visit or move here. I think threads on crime fears are the most frequent topics on this website, and certainly they are the most common subject of personal emails I receive from those in the US and Canada.

If someone is genuinely terrified of moving to Mexico because of what they hear in the US, they probably should stay home and try to be safe there. But I repeat one more time, the crime rate for the country as a whole is nowhere near the crime rate in the drug cartel cities.

The rate of small thefts can vary in frequency between Mexican cities and neighborhoods as much as crime rates differ between different parts of a US city, and among cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

Despite what Lucy said about not seeing any increase in the number of crime reports crossing her desk every day, I do think that there is more crime in SMA today than there was when we arrived eight years ago. But it's still nothing compared to what we lived with in LA, Detroit, and Phoenix, and we still feel safer overall here.

And, at the same time, we have added security to our house and stopped carrying purses much of the time, and we don't walk around after dark as much as we used to--not that we ever did that in the US either, even in rural areas. Partly we're not walking around Centro at night as much now because we don't live in Centro any more.

They say a conservative is a liberal who just got mugged. We've been the victims of many kinds of crimes in many areas of the US and we still don't view crime in "The sky is falling" mode. Crime is a fact of life today just about anyplace, and you can live in the safest areas in the world and still get killed.

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood just popped in mind, a truly gruesome home invasion in the middle of nowhere back in the '50s or '60s. The US has supposedly the largest number of serial murderers and rapists working at any time of anyplace in the world, hundreds of them just looking for an easy target.

Yes, you can't fairly compare crime rates of any place, especially when most crimes are not reported anyway. And in Mexico if the victim doesn't go through the whole process of filing a denuncia with Ministerio Público it's as if the crime never happened anyway and won't be investigated.

That's the MX legal system, it's no use wanting it to be different, it's part of the many differences between the US and Mexico. The Mexican people know it should be made easier, but they don't, and until they do, we can complain all we like, it ain't gonna happen.

A major overhaul of the Mexican legal system did pass a couple of years ago and is being implemented slowly, the process to be completed by 2016. The changes are major--people will be considered innocent until proven guilty, about the biggest change possible.

And trials which now are in private, a judge reading only written arguments, will be made public, and attorneys from both sides will have to present oral arguments. There still will be no trials by juries, whether of peers or not.

Another suggestion which is made repeatedly for expats interested in crime prevention in their area is to form Neighborhood Watches. Los Frailes has a very strong neighborhood association that about half the homeowners belong to. Many residents banded together through the association to put on several paark picnics for the police and their families, and I hear they went very well. The police were surprised that they were actually being thanked!

The police who work in that area were all invited to a big picnic in one of the small parks within Los Frailes and there were games, music, and special tributes to individual police, as well as a good spread of food and beer. (I think it was on a weekend when the largest number of police would be off duty.)

That association has also worked together on a good neighborhood watch program. Neighborhood watches are the ideal way to combat all sorts of problems in any area, but of course expats are not too handy in working well with their Mexican neighbors. And it is not a Mexican tradition to form groups like Neighborhood Watches, which require snitching on your neighbors' kids and possibly facing retaliation.

Historically Mexicans have not trusted police, who often have been in on the crimes. The past two and the current administrations are weeding out corrupt cops as soon as they find them, and I know at least 60 were fired under previous administrations. But corruption is still there.

It was hard enough getting a Neighborhood Watch program going when I lived in Long Beach and the city did a big push to have every block form one. We had a policeman come out two different nights to help us, and we had to go door to door to talk to everybody, most of whom wanted nothing to do with the idea.

We had a big picnic for our new Neighborhood Watch, too, and invited the police. That was 30 years ago. Have to say, I'm reluctant to be the one to start anything like that in our own neighborhood in Col. San Rafael. The language barrier would really loom if I tried to talk to all our neighbors in any depth about something fraught with the potential for misunderstandings and nuance comfusion.

And somehow being the new gringos on the block makes it not the best for us to be the ones to start something like that. I think we all know who the trouble makers are in this area, and the police do, too. The local police often set up mini substations on Antonio Villanueva, towing a trailer into a parking space, for some weekends.

The colonias are all supposed to have elected officers who meet with the city monthly to discuss their neighborhood problems. If you can find out who your colonia's officers are, that might be a place to start. Maybe there's some sort of mechanism already in existence to help you work with the police and perhaps help out in some other ways. I think you can find out your colonia's officers by calling the city phone number, 415-152-9600. Perhaps start with the International Relations Office, which is supposed to be in place to help expats in city dealings.

All of us have to continually remind ourselves, as Lucy said at the meeting, that we chose to live in Mexico which has a very different culture and legal justice system. It's not up to us to insist on any changes. Change is often slow, in the US and Canada as in Mexico. But it's happening.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

February 8, 2010--We didn't know how bad cabin fever could get here; worst rains in 12 or 15 years; Saturday we escaped to Candelaria, Fabrica Aurora, Tacos Don Felix, and Z Club, our first time ever to the club hot spot; the clouds are rolling back in for more rain and probably more damage starting Wednesday

We thought we'd been holed up while we were getting our fireplace repaired, waiting for workmen. We had no idea what would lie ahead.

I'll talk about the rains in a minute. I wrote about our experiences extensively in the Living in San Miguel forum of this website and I'll copy some of those posts here. Our great escape was Saturday, when we had a great time and took advantage of the reprieve in the weather. That will be fun to write about.

We'd worried that the giant nursery sale that is Parque Juarez during Candelaria week would be ruined by the rains, but the flowers looked great Saturday. The vendors had to have suffered, but at least they had tents over most of the stalls so they didn't lose their plants.

I have 20+ photos of our favorite flower stalls in the Photo Gallery of this website, in an album called Candelaria 2010. Other new photo albums this week are titled Hospice Benefit at Fabrica Aurora Anniversary, and Z Club Jewelry Fashion Show.

Norma found a red, a red and purple, and a white hanging fuschia that we did buy because we see fuchsias for sale so rarely. But the ground is so wet and it is unlikely that anything we plant right now will succeed. Norma did spot a delicate orange flowered shrub she liked, now on our list for Pedro Romero, our handyman/gardener, when he helps us find plants to redo our patios soon. (We just talked to him and he says that the ground is still soaked and some homes are finding that water is coming up into their homes even through their cement or tile floors, five days later.)

At Candelaria we kept looking for a Mayer lemon tree but only saw limas, which are yellow but flavored more like limes, limones, than the lemons expats are used to and keep seeking. We also hoped one of the vendors would be selling hummingbird feeders. Nada.

We got one at Kola pet store next to Wal-Mart our last trip to Celaya and it's supporting at least five hummingbirds now. We have to fill it with three cups of sugar water about every other day. Trying to clean the feeder's tinier tubes is impossible. Small dishwashing brushes can't be found around town. The next time someone asks us what they can bring us when they come to visit SMA, we will ask for small, narrow dishwashing brushes.

Our three cats like to sit in the bougainvillea planter underneath the hummingbird feeder with their mouths open, hoping a tiny bird will plummet from the sky and land in their mouths. Not gonna happen--one of the larger hummingbirds is so brazen as to divebomb them, trying to drive them away. The birds divebomb us, too, when we're taking away the feeder for cleaning and replenishing.

That Saturday night we wanted to go to the Mesones Art Walk--we haven't been in Galeria Izamal since we moved to Col. San Rafael. We used to drop in many times when we were on our usual walks around town from the base camp of our pevious apartment. Our routes have changed now that we live in Col. San Rafael. I miss seeing Britt Zeist's latest flowing metallic ink abstracts and also miss her husband Henry Vermillion's mango chutney and cream cheese dish that he always whips up for their gallery openings. My favorite SMA watercolorist Mike Kleimo is back at Galeria Izamal with new paintings from his last trip to Santa Fe. What's fun is that he usually sneaks an antique beat up pickup somewhere into his landscapes.

We'd missed a Peruvian dance troope and concert Friday night at the Biblioteca, too. I'd had a bit of food poisoning or something that night and we'd cancelled those plans.

But now it was Saturday, and what we decided we had to get out to see was the Fabrica Aurora anniversary party that was coupled with a benefit for Hospice SMA.

I always check to make sure my favorite galloping horses painting is still on display in the hallway leading back to Generator Gallery and the other rear galleries and the coffee shop in the rear of the complex. It probably costs at least $5,000. I can dream. I love horse paintings and every time I tried to paint horses myself the paintings were failures. I just can't capture the spirit of free horses. The Aurora hallway painting does.

We dropped in on Edward Swift's gallery--I'm learning to enjoy his whimsical creatures. The first time I saw them I made the mistake of telling him I thought they were "cute." Never tell a serious artist his work is "cute." He was sharing his gallery space with Kelley VanDiver's work, more of my favorites. Kelley, who once was my watercolor instructor, is also a recovering Catholic. He paints detailed, realistic birds in the guise of religious and literary figures, then writes his poetry about the characters on the back of the paintings. Red cardinals, the birds, made out to be Catholic cardinals, the religious authority figures, are my favorites.

Hospice San Miguel was having a "Have a Heart for Hospice" auction in conjunction with the Fabrica Aurora anniversary. Executive director Mark Baker greeted arrivals with Hospice pins that he would put on your label or collar for five pesos. The art preview of the heart-themed creations by many SMA artists was that night, and the silent auction starts Wednesday, Feb. 10, through Saturday, from 10 am to 6 pm. The final bidding reception will be next Saturday, Feb. 13, 4-6 pm, in the Marilo Carral gallery space #9A of Fabrica Aurora.

We'd met friends there and we all decided to go on to Tacos Don Felix, where we were greeted like the Prodigal Daughters since we hadn't been by this year. Right, this year is only five weeks old.

The owners showed us their newly remodelled and expanded kitchen. I took a photo of them for the Food Scenes album in our Gallery on this website. The combination platter of seven different kinds of tacos plus grilled onions has gone up to 80 pesos, and the chicken enchiladas verde are now 60 pesos. They have enough dishes that I can keep them in our "Cheap Eats" book when we publish it later this year, but they're edging up there with 200-peso rib eyes, filet, shrimp and salmon dishes. We had to finish with our favorite mantecado ice cream made by his neighbor who also sells it in the Jardin from a cart on the Correo corner. Rich vanilla, pine nuts, and prunes are the predominant flavors. Yes, prunes. Try it.

Another table of friends there were going on to the Z Club after 11 pm to see the fashion show of designer jewelry pieces that had been on display earler in the day at the Tourism Center on the Jardin. Norma and I had always wanted to go to the Z Club. We were disappointed we hadn't been invited to their Grand Opening a couple of years ago--even the Mayor turned out, despite questions of just how "gay" it would be. The theme of the opening was "South Beach Meets San Miguel,"and the interior designer had been hired from South Beach to bring a hot, hip look to the SMA club scene. It has turned out to be more of a hot young Mexican scene with both gay and straight expats adding to the mix.

And since like any good club scene the Z Club doesn't start happening until well after 11 pm, we'd never gotten around to going there on our own. Our LA clubbing days are decades ago. Z Club is located behind Immigration on Lupita 6. Take Canal past where it becomes Calzada de la Estacion, across the Libramiento, to the Immigration office and turn left. Keep going to the end of that short block (which ends at the glass factory) and turn right. Continue to where the canopied opening indicates that there is something going on in what seems like an otherwise residential neighborhood. Ir's now open more for special occasions like weddings and private parties, plus it has catering. Check it out at www.zclubsanmiguel.com.

We left the friends we'd come with to Tacos Don Felix, who were heading home like any good retired expat should be doing at 11 pm, and we took off with the Z Club-bound party. Our somewhat younger friends just shook their heads at our energy as they got into their cabs for home.

We hadn't dressed for a gala event--sweaters, jeans and jeans jackets, among the chiffon tutus and tight black strapless dresses and stilettos of many of the other attendees who'd already arrived. Oh well, what you learn in LA is that anything goes. Hold your head high and walk in as if you own the joint.

My confidence level wasn't all that high, though, as I stumbled over the various unexpected steps within the Z Club and looked around and wondered what we'd gotten ourselves into. The club is highly stylized, with draped semi-private little rooms all along the sides and expansive modern and Greek-looking art along the walls. Luckily someone who knew us drew us into one of the side rooms where we could see the fashion show up close when it happened.

A newlywed couple was also in our little room, and for awhile the woman joined the three of us on the dance floor in a very different, for us, kind of dancing. It was so stylized and young, just kind of walking around with the flow of the abstract music. Somehow when we'd talked about going there to dance earlier in the evening, I was envisioning our usual '60s through disco stuff, or maybe more recent music by Adam Lambert or even Carrie Underwood. Nope, not a lyric to be heard, just this somewhat techno-pop stuff that does not sit well with these old rock and roll ears. We did our best, though--had to be able to say that we'd danced at Z Club. Then the woman's husband joined her on the floor and they knew their stuff. The three of us sat down.

At the far end of the hall was a big screen and a videocamera set up to film the dancers and then later the models on the runway. I'd heard from the opening a couple of years ago that right down the center of the hall, the long way, was a pool with beautiful artificial koi swimming in it. I was looking forward to seeing those fish. But if the pool still exists for other events, tonight it was covered over and turned into a long catwalk for the fashion show.

Maybe a half dozen models took turns making the walk to show off the designer jewelry--big swinging necklaces with medallions that could have been coin purses. Chunky necklaces that looked as if they would weigh you down after a few minutes. Giant amber beads. Beautiful stuff.

But it was hard to pay attention to the jewelry--all the models had on very tight black dresses, mostly as high as bikinis, some even two-piece like black strap bikinis with tiny miniskirts. They all wore stilettos in the latest designs, some like boots or gladiator sandals. They had to strut high to walk on those stilettos. They did all the professional turns and poses we'd seen on TV and in movies. Sometimes a model coming and one going met in the middle for a few more poses together, cameras flashing all around. It was hot. If I had $5,000 maybe I would have bought a lot of the jewelry instead of the horse painting back at Fabrica Auroa. If--hah.

The models were still strutting when our energy suddenly plummeted. Time to call a cab and get home ASAP before we fell asleep standing up. We're not usually out after midnight these days. Quite a night.

We enjoyed the few days of clear weather between Thursday afternoon and as I write this Monday night. We know that more rain is coming, probably Wednesday for perhaps another ten days. The weather is insane all over the continent. Friends in D.C. had 28 inches of snow.

But heavy rains in Mexico can mean more tragedy than heavy snows in the US. Here are my forum posts from last week as we all suffered through rain that washed out roads, overflowed banks, and threatened dams and human life.

The water levels are back down in the arroyo, the river/canal that runs through San Miguel's northern end, from the old train station area on the west to the lake and El Charco gardens on the east. May the water levels be low enough by Wednesday that they can accommodate the new rains.

I think SMA came very close to real tragedies by the time the rains stopped Thursday. I have heard that two teenaged boys were killed, and that six homes were washed out in Col. Guadalupe, though I have no confirmation.

I do know that at least one road was washed out that ran into Alameda by Vergel in the corner of Col. San Antonio, and the waters just gushed through the abandoned hotel at the end of Calzada de la Presa near Calzada de la Luz, the same hotel that never did open after it was hit hard by floods the last time SMA had hjeavy rains 12-13 years ago.

I know that the shops and San Juan de Dios mercado along Guadalupe were evacuated Thursday afternoon and we were unable to get home in a taxi by all the usual routes until the driver found a back way in from Canal. We didn't dare step outside our house some hours because we feared we could be just swept down the hill by the raging waters coming down our street. It was a frightening period. May it not be anywhere near as bad when the rains come again Wednesday.

Here are my forum posts on the rains from last week:

Wednesday--

I looked long and hard at our streets in Col. San Rafael, which are rivers running down to the real "river" parallel to Calzada de Guadalupe, and decided I didn't need to go to Spanish class this morning.

The Warren Hardy Level 2 class first presented past tense to me in 2003 and I didn't get it then and I'm still not getting it seven years later. Missing a week of Spanish now isn't going to do much more damage in the grander scale of things.

We had a full day of errands planned--choose the color grout we want for our fireplace tiles at Don Pedro Independencia, pick up a dozen more tiles at the tile store on Calzada de la Luz, get skim milk and caffeine free Diet Coke at Bonanza, get mail at La Conexion, and then go over to Candelaria just to see the selection.

We're going to Candelaria Sunday with our handyman whose first love is gardening, and he'll help us pick out the best plants for our patio. But if we'd seen a fuschia or bleeding heart plant today we would have snapped it up in case it wasn't there Sunday.

Now we'll just go with whatever is still left Sunday, all flowers probably having been driven off the plants by the storms. Poor vendors.

I look at the US weather forecasts and it's worse in much of the US. The difference is that those homes have central heating.

Our housekeeper just arrived with soaking feet from crossing the streets/rivers, so we gave her a pair of our thick dry socks. She says she heard that the rain will stop Friday. Ojalá.

Thursday--

We were out of soup, which is what we have been living on these days. Only soup feels right. We saw that we had a three-foot long spot in front of our house that wasn't underwater. We called a cab, directed the drivet to that patch, and escaped to Mega. But on the way home, things got much worse. Yellow emergency tape blocked all our usual streets.

The taxi driver had to wind back out to Canal and come into Col. San Rafael from the back way. We saw the arroyo/river/canal and it was so high it was backing up as it rushed under the underpasses. One giant river of brown roiling water, like a pot on the stove that is boiling so fast it boils over.

It was right up to the ground level of the San Juan Dios mercado shops and DIF, at the corner of Calzada de la Luz and Calzada de Guadalupe/Independencia at the bridge at the corner.

All that was standing in its way were the three feet high or so thin cement walls that seemed designed more to keep people from leaning over and falling in than for holding back a raging river.

The cab driver said the last time SMA had had such a rainy season was about 15 years ago, before we came. I asked if that was the same year that there was snow in SMA the last time, and he said that no, those were different years.

He lived even higher than we do in Col. Santa Julia and he said he wasn't worried for either of us but that he feared houses along the canal could be destroyed.

It wasn't raining when we got home and Norma took the opportunity to walk down to the bridge where we'd seen many people waiting expectantly. It felt a bit ghoulish.

Far more people than we expected had been out all along Canal and the streets around San Juan Dios mercado when we tried to drive through the area, and Norma had asked the driver if there was a procession coming. No, he'd said, everyone is waiting to see what will happen next with the rain.

At the bridge on foot as close as she could get, Norma talked to people and ran into a dual citizen friend who told us that the river had broken through the inadequate retaining walls above the walls of the arroyo.

Some homes had already been lost and people feared more might be lost or at least flooded.

The river was still a roiling brown mess but hadn't broken through the last thin barrier to San Juan Dios mercado yet. All the shops on both sides of Guadalupe in that area were boarding up and closing. Police were telling people to evacuate.

We had decided not to go to the city's security meeting tonight at 6 because it seemed possible that we might not be able to get back into our colonia, especially if Canal and the libramiento around Aurora happened to close. They're the last remaining routes into Col. San Rafael.

And then we got the news from Ed Clancy that the security meeting had been postponed until the same day, time and place next week. That's Thursday, Feb. 11, 6 pm, at the Presidencia (city offices) out at the glorieta where the road to Dr. Mora cuts off from the road to Querétaro.

All the talk at Mega was of how the rain had affected each of us. Besides cabin fever and not having our downstairs propane fireplace logs working and the rain coming into two upstairs bedrooms from their doors onto a terrace, we were fine. Our cats and dog seem annoyed at getting wet when they use the doggie door. We thought of street dogs and cats who might not have made it.

Others were finding leaks where they hadn't experienced them in previous gentler rains. Others couldn't walk out of their homes without wading, their gardens looked pretty much washed away, etc.

Since around 1 pm it hasn't been raining any more here, and it's 5 pm now. May this let-up allow enough water to drain away to not endanger any more homes and businesses.

It still looks gray and nasty out. The sun shone for a few minutes on our way home.

Some people are blaming it all on El Niño. Our dual citizen friend said that less educated Mexicans are saying that the world has been drifting away from good and so God is angry and is punishing us.

Yeah, and I'm sure some evangelicals are saying the same thing or blaming it on gays and lesbians. I remember when Pat Robertson said that it was gays and lesbians who were the cause of flooding around Des Moines. Ironically, every gay and lesbian bar in the area was saved while some evangelical churches were destroyed. In Katrina, the gay and lesbian area in the French Quarter was saved while some were blaming gays and lesbians for causing it.

Human nature sure wants to blame someone or something for natural disasters. I don't really want to know who and what is being blamed for these rains. Sometimes rainy periods just happen.

In rural Michigan around 1987 the Cass River rose 18 feet higher than normal and took out the entire town of Vassar, Michigan, and many other homes along lower areas of the riverbank. Bad things happen to good people and average towns.

Later Thursday--

We jus saw photos--the old hotel by Calzada de la Luz is flooded again.

Luckily the hotel is abandoned now. I don't know the cross street but it's out by Aurora, around Calzada de la Presa, I think. The phone photos I saw showed the water flowing down the hills, as roiled up as the canal near us at the Guadalupe/Independencia bridge.

At 6:30 pm it still isn't raining here--it's been more than five hours--but the sky looks threatening again.

I am so glad the city cancelled the police meeting tonight. We're restocked from Mega on soups, salads, hot dogs and sandwich makings for the duration. Who wants to cook when the sky is layered blue, black, gray, pink and tan and it's cold?

Since we're home for the night, we're going to make our dog's favorite treat, a recipe from Kathy at the SPA:

Take Vienna hot dogs and slice into about a half inch thick rounds. Space them out on a cookie sheet, and put into a pre-heated 250-degree F. oven. Bake for around four hours or until crispy, until you can no longer make a dent into the hot dog rounds with your finger.

The treats don't have to be refrigerated, they're more like jerky, and they've got a little more nutritional value than much more expensive commercial dog treats. Our dog will do absolutely anything for one of them--even go out the doggie door onto the wet patio.

We have an ulterior motive--having the oven on for four hours will help heat the downstairs tonight.

Be safe, everybody. An unpleasant prolonged rain went to potential tragedy in just a few hours today. May this break in the rain have ended the crisis.

Friday--

It's 10:30 am and the sky is blue and clear and the sun is out. The streets are dry, though the dirt roads have washed down onto the paved and the cobblestone streets so that at intersections there is a coating of dirt. It still feels cold inside the house--T-shirt, sweatshirt and jeans jacket on inside. With luck I can take off the jacket when we go outside.

We'll walk around today and do some of the errands we'd put off this week. I never did get out to get an Atención last week but will do my best to find one today.

The area we've heard the most about in these rains is Calzada de la Presa, which is near the lake and by Jose Vasconzuelas school and Fabrica Aurora.

There is an old abandoned hotel on the northeast side of Calzada de la Presa and Calzada de la Luz, and it was hit when a dam broke on the lake maybe 15 years ago and never got remodeled. Water was running through it again this time.

But some homes in colonias all along the arroyo were impacted and sometimes endangered. Someone wrote on another list that they put sandbags in front of their condo on Calzada de la Presa and considered evacuating. Other friends were told by police they had to evacuate.

For those who wanted some sense of the geography of the area and what colonias were affected, here's my attempt.

If you look at the map at www.smamap.com, or the map in the back of the Juarde, or any of the tourist maps around, you can follow the arroyo, which is the river/canal that starts on the far west outside of town by the old train station and runs along Calzada de la Estacion to the south of it. (This is by Immigration and the bus station.)

At the bridge where Canal turns into Calzada de la Estacion the arroyo veers northeast parallel to Calzada de la Guadalupe. This is along San Juan de Dios market and the DIF (social services) office.

At that point you've got Centro to the east, the tip of Col. San Antonio to the west (where Tina lives), and Col. San Rafael on the west side of the arroyo, where we live.

The street Alameda should be on any map you've got, and Tina reports that the dirt road feeding into Alamada is washed away now.

The arroyo continues north from the bridge at Calzada de la Luz where it becomes Calzada de la Independencia, and it runs along the north edge of Col. Guadalupe.

It crosses Calzada de la Aurora at Fabrica Aurora, where at this point there is a fairly deep canyon for the river bed. It continues east across Augustin Arroyo which is at the north end of Calzada de la Presa.

It continues to flow east to Presa del Obraje, where there is a city controversy going on now over how much development to put up at the entrance to El Charco del Ingenio Botanical Gardens and the lengthy lake that runs east west.

At this point the entrance to the lake is north of Col. Azteca, and then the lake is north of Cols. Balcones and Atascadero.

I'm notoriously directionally challenged, but for those not here who want to try to get some idea of SMA's geography and where the colonias are in relation to the arroyo, I hope this helps.

Saturday--

Today it is as if nothing happened.

Clear blue skies, sun, dry roads. We walked down to Calzada de la Luz to see the arroyo and it was down to normal depth. It was moving a little more rapidly than before, and there is some bubbling where it goes over rocks.

Buses and cars could get through everyplace. Some pedestrians were in short sleeves, including us, though as usual most Mexicans were far more bundled up than we were.

We walked all over Centro doing errands. It still feels eerie. Where did all that water go? It's weeks like this that you realize just how tenuous all of our existence is.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

January 30, 2010--Cabin fever: we're stuck at home while workmen install ceramic tile around our fireplace

Workers are still here every day and we're stuck at home. We missed the Chili Cookoff today, and didn't make it to the Pocket Theater this week, nor to the PEN lecture by author David Lida on his new Mexico City book that's on my to-be-read list.

It seems to be a very complex job, installing ceramic tiles around our fireplace so that escaping soot can't darken our living room walls. Just about every tile has to be specially cut since the furnace is an unusual shape, like a giant metal teardrop. I'll post a photo when it's finished, which right now seems as if it will be never. We've got cabin fever.

We did manage to get out this morning before the workers arrived to hit the monthly ALMA garage sale. I think we snatched up every last thick winter sweater that was left, in preparation for next winter, at 20 pesos each.

And we found a cinnamon color made in Italy large salad bowl that looks as if it's never been used, for 45 pesos, about $3.90.

A light and delicate floral watercolor was also marked 45 pesos--many local amateur artists seem to dump their early efforts off at ALMA, and you can sometimes find quite good artwork among the dregs.

The frame will cost far more than the watercolor, of course, and I still have a dozen of my own watercolors to be framed some day. This house has a lot of open wall space left. Norma is painting as fast as she can, but working neatly around floor and ceiling moldings is tough. I'm doing bathrooms and closet doors.

Our painting clothes are a joy to behold: I have an old frog print nightgown that a cat chewed holes in the hemline, and Norma has a faded T-shirt and a pair of slacks so worn and thin that the paint may be the only thing holding it together. Check our arms and legs when we do get out to see the colors we're painting with currently.

We arrived at ALMA, in La Lejona 2 behind Mega, at five to 10 and the crowd was swelling and pulsing against the gate in anticipation. Stand back at 10 am sharp! Mark the last Saturday of each month on your calendar for the best garage sale in town, and all the money goes to benefit the 34 or so poor Mexican elderly who live in the home.

We were through at 10:25 and back home by cab at 10:40 am, since the workers were due at 11 am. They were waiting for us. This bunch comes early and stays late.

We're cooking late lunches for the three workers every day and I think they may be dawdling just to get more of Norma's cooking. Pedro Romero told Norma that she cooks Mexican food better than most Mexican women. She had just fed them Cajun catfish tacos, chipolte slaw and Spanish rice, more like "inspired by" Mexican food than anything "authentic." They were scraping for the last grains of rice at the end.

Not a whole lot is happening this week as we stay at home waiting for our tilework to be done. I hope we have more to report next week. I wish someone could have smuggled me some of the winning chili from the Cookoff today.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

January 26, 2010--Costco opening a friend's horizons; mild weather again; crime concerns; street food stand night and we lived; Via Organica, Panaderia Casanova and El Pato in a Guadalupe walk; military parade for Allende's birthday

A friend who is still working bought a house here for part-time living and usually flies down. This time she drove and brought her dog, who is too big for under-the seat in-cabin flying. She doesn't want to send him in cargo under the plane. The drive was easy, the dog has adjusted, and our friend is getting used to the new reality of having a car in San Miguel. She likes it, never mind parking, traffic and permit hassles. She wasn't sure she would. Living without a car in San Miguel is so easy but admittedly it is great to be able to just pack up and go for a side trip without hiring a driver or figuring out bus schedules.

She asked us to drive with her the first time she went to Costco and all the other big box stores in Celaya, to make sure she had the directions right. As we sat exhausted from all the shopping in the Costco outdoor eating area, she said, somewhat surprised, "This trip has expanded my horizons immensely. Now I can't think of a thing that I can't find here that I really need."

She'd gotten ecstatic over a handheld vacuum cleaner, an inexpensive printer/scanner/copier/FAX, Sally's Beauty Supplies, a big pet store, all kinds of goodies that she'd never dreamed she could find here. Those who laugh at expats' love of the big box stores should know that they really do make life much easier and inexpensive. And it's certainly not just expats who are keeping these stores going all across Mexico.

Admittedly we do wish we had a car again, a reliable if beat-up old VW or something, Mexican plated, good mileage. Now that we have a garage, the idea is even more appealing. Who knows, we may come into a windfall some day.

The electric blanket has been put away, the pilot lights turned off on the propane heaters, the thick sweaters moved to the back of the closet. Normal weather is back.

Concerns over crime have died down a little. Since the Christmas rash of burglaries and purse snatchings where three older gringas were mugged in a few days and the expat community was in an uproar, things are a little calmer. The women were well-known and had many friends, and to see their bruised black and blue faces about town afterward was chilling.

The one mugging that I reported took place in the alley walkway between Colonia San Antonio and the Aldea residential area, a shortcut to Ancha de San Antonio, really took place in front of the woman's house and she was dragged into the alley. It was 8:15 pm around Christmas, and she says she would never walk in that alleyway after dark.

She emailed me, "It's important for people to know that muggings, like ___ and mine, occurred on well-traveled streets. I was no more than 15 steps from the corner of Zacateros and Santa Cruz. And a number of people eating in Cafe Monet and at the bar next to it heard my shrieking, as the thief dragged me to Rinconada de la Aldea and threw me to the ground."

So it is important to not discount the reality of crimes here, and anywhere. To put these kinds of crimes in perspective, another friend who lives part-time in D.C. sent me a post from an email list of residents of a gentrified neighborhood less than a mile from the White House, very close to where she'd had her D.C. house. A family there experienced a home invasion and they were kicked around during the robbery. They're grateful it wasn't worse, but experiencing any crime can be traumatic afterward.

I've written so often about how 45 years later I can still visualize exactly what happened and how I felt when I was beaten bloody in a rape attempt in Savannah. I don't discount anyone's feelings if they have experienced a crime. And I also keep the likelihood of being a crime victim in perspective while taking the common sense precautions I'd take in any city. The drug cartels don't want me, so long as I don't start dealing. The thug on the corner probably does if I look like an easy target.

I'm back to taking my purse around town again if I'm only going to be in busy areas. It's got a thick shoulder strap, i wear it in front, and there's not much in it that I'd miss except my camera. But after dark or on walking journeys into unfamiliar areas I rely just on pockets and a small hidden change purse. No large inviting purses for us.

Speaking of walking tours, we did two recently. One Friday night we decided we'd just walk around to some of our favorite street food stands and see how they are today. We're still working on updating our "Cheap Eats" list and putting it into an inexpensive book format for sale on SMA streets. We shoved 150 pesos in coins in our pockets and took off.

When we're out weekend nights we see a garage restaurant down the block from us, over on Antonio Villanueva in Col. San Rafael. A mother and daughter are serving tacos of all kinds and usually five or six neighbors are chowing down, seated at the white plastic tables and chairs furnished free by Coca Cola to their business customers for the PR.

Usually when we walk by we're on our way to a party or a regular restaurant, but this time we had no excuse. Why not? The daughter was handling the money while the mother dispensed the tacos. The pots were steaming. The restaurant had just opened so the food hadn't been standing around. There was high turnover. All good signs for evaluating the safety of a food stand.

The main attraction was a big pot of chicken gizzards. I happen to love chicken gizzards and livers. I ordered just one taco. Refried beans into the small corn torilla came first, then a salsa, then the chicken gizzards, then a side of pickled jalapeños and carrots. No to the salad. Delicious. Only 4.5 pesos, about 38 cents USD. Norma had a shredded chicken taco, same price, same goodness. We were still fine six hours later. We'll do it again and order a plateful next time. The neighbors smiled at us and the woman waves at us now.

We headed next to the busy tacos al pastor stand that shows up around dark at the corner of Mesones and Pepellanos by Plaza Civica. At 6:30 we were early. One man sliced marinated pork layers off of the gyro-like upright spit and cooked them thoroughly in the catch pan below, another took the drippings from that pan and marinated the arracherra (thinly sliced flank steak) cooking on a big round grill that was raised slightly in the center, another unwound thin salchichas, a chorizo sausage, to cook around the edges of the grill. A woman collected money and served bottles of soda alongside the trailer.

We each had one of each of the three kinds of tacos, served with a side of grilled onions and half a dozen kinds of salsas, a thin avocado sauce not quite like guacamole, peppers, raw onions, and chiles. Total price: 42 pesos, about $3.50 USD.

Did we want a 5-peso tamale from our favorite Tex-Tamal green and stainless stand by the Oratorio? We buy tamales there often for a weekend breakfast the next morning. On to something new.

We'd never actually had a cheeseburger from the popular stand right in front of the Parroquia. In our first book I wrote about seeing a jalapeño fall out of one our first night in the Jardin nearly eight years ago, and at that point we never dreamed we'd be eating from a street food stand. This time we did, splitting a cheeseburger. The patty was big, the cheese melted nicely, we had our choice of catsup, mustard, mayo, crema, raw onions, salsa and jalapeños. We asked for all of the above but hold the mayo, the bottle looked old. It was as good as friends said it would be: 35 pesos, under $3 USD.

Now the mayo bottle was newly opened at one of the corn stands so I ordered an ear, steaming hot, slathered in the mayo, rolled in grated white cheese, sprinkled with lime juice, salted with a red chile seasoning, 15 pesos. It used to be 8 pesos when we first came to town. As wonderful as ever.

We couldn't eat a bite more and so we people-watched for awhile. A boy about four kicked an empty Coke bottle around the plaza for about an hour, never getting bored, as his parents talked. Dreadlocked jewelry makers spread their beads out on blankets. Mariachis tried to find paying customers. Los Tunas showed up in front of the Parroquia and got a rousing crowd going that moved on down the streets, stopping in front of bars for more wine to be poured into plastic cups for the followers. A burro decorated as if for a wedding procession, this time being used by its owner to collect coins from those who wanted to take its picture, followed along with the Renaissance-costumed musicians.

Two women from Ontario recognized us from our book and told us that they had just been approached by some tourists who were sure THEY were Carol and Norma. Where's Waldo. And now here we were. They knew if they hung around the Jardin long enough we'd show up. The other tourists were no longer around; we would have enjoyed meeting them, too.

We were stuffed, contented and happy, and we still had coins in our pockets. We took a taxi home.

On another day we decided to check out Via Organica and Panaderia Casanova, new businesses on Margarito Ledesma a block from Calzada de la Aurora in Colonia Guadalupe. We needed some art supplies at El Pato, a block away on the same street, so it was a good reason to see the two popular shops.

From Calzada de la Luz, as you turn onto the start of Aurora going north, it is only a very short block to Maria Talavera where you turn left, and then another short block to turn left for the food shops. You turn right at that same intersection if you're going to El Pato. El Pato has expanded into another room and has many more art supplies now, if that's possible. It's as crowded and well-stocked as Bonanza is, if in a slightly smaller space.

We were surprised at how big Via Organica is. It winds around sections for good-looking if expensive organic produce, baked goods, cosmetics, health and cook books, grains, candies, and two sit-down dining areas for salads and sandwiches. We saw what the preparer said was a Thai chile salad go by and almost followed it but we'd just eaten. I was glad to see so many people supporting the venture.

Across the street is Panaderia Casanova, run by the same woman who had the restaurant behind Casa Grau on Zacateros for awhile. Both establishments have moved, and Alicia was serving up some great-looking breads and muffins. We bought some sourdough and rye loaves. She also caters all kinds of meals, not just breads--drop by the bakery to see her menus.

We walked around in Col. Guadalupe for awhile as we meandered home. The colonia is certainly gentrifying rapidly. I had posted a photo album of our earlier walk around Guadalupe and Mexiquito a few years ago, and this time there wre far more well-painted "cute" homes among the working class Mexican homes.

I added a new photo album to our Gallery on this website of the three businesses and Col. Guadalupe, titled "Via Organica." There's another new photo album of the street food walk as well, and I added a third new album titled "Military Parade for Allende's Birthday."

I wasn't really planning to go to the Allende parade but we'd set up a meeting with some people in the Jardin, forgetting how packed Centro would be. The speeches started around 9:30 am, we heard, and when we showed at 10:30 a smartly dressed military band was performing. Then the military trucks started to roll by, many equipped with anti-aircraft missile launchers. Probably every school in the region had a marching contingent. All schools were announced from the viewing stand, to loud applause from families.

A new feature this year was reenactment floats, the first with the Conspirators plotting the move for independence from Spain. Another portrayed El Pipila demonstrating how the miner with a big slab of stone on his back was able to get to Granary door in Guanajuato and blow it up, allowing the straggly army to get to the Spaniards holed up inside for the first major victory of the Independencia. El Pipila was a real person, born in San Miguel, though at one point he was considered a myth.

Probably every ambulance and fire truck in the state of Guanajuato was on parade next. The crowds were tired and kept taking back the streets, the police having to work hard to keep a path open for the rescue vehicles. And then the last truck was out of the Jardin, winding its way around town behind the rest of the parade, and we had our Jardin back.

These are the kinds of days of which our life in San Miguel is made.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

January 15, 2010--My report on the crime meeting Jan. 13 (also posted in the forums)

This report is admittedly not complete because much of the meeting was only in Spanish, and my Spanish is not adequate for understanding rapid, complex conversations. The translations into English were usually much briefer than the original statements.

If you want to see a photo of the new Director of Public Security, former First Calvary Captain Walter Avila Arechiga, go to http://www.correo-gto.com.mx/notas.asp?id=137338.

He is giving a military salute in the photo but in person is a likeable, approachable man who wants to improve citizen participation in public safety by encouraging more Neighborhood Watch programs (Vecinos Vigilantes, or alert neighborhoods) in SMA, according to the article.

Avila has been working in the police chief position since the new mayoral administration took office October 10, and he received formal approval from the Ministry of National Defense for the position November 15.

San Miguel is one of many cities throughout Mexico that have hired retired military personnel to head their police departments, in an attempt to achieve better coordination with national military efforts against the drug cartels.

Here is my news report on the meeting:

The regularly scheduled monthly meeting for the elected officers and members of San Miguel de Allende colonias and barrios was used as a forum for about 40 expats to express their concerns to city officials on recent muggings and burglaries in SMA.

It took place Jan. 13 at 6 pm in the police community room in the Presidencia (city offices on the road to Querétaro, at the Four Heroes glorieta and the turnoff to Doctor Mora and Los Rodriguez).

About 18 representatives of various city agencies including Director of Public Safety Walter Avila Arechiga were available for questions by a standing room only audience of about 70, two-thirds members of the foreign community.

The first speaker from the audience was a Mexican man who said he had just moved to San Miguel, to the colonia of Mexiquito, and he was robbed his first day here.

He said that the preventiva police responded quickly and professionally, but he expressed concern about the large number of burglaries in Mexiquito and wanted more police attention to his colonia.

An expat woman who had been mugged in Mexiquito by three young men said that the police came promptly when she called as well.

Another Mexican man said that there had been four burglaries and robberies that he knew of in one night, December 24, in the Parque Juarez area. Only one of the four victims made a formal report to the Ministerio Público.

(That is the part of the Mexican legal system which is similar to the district attorney's office in the US. The preventiva police are the ones to be called in case of an emergency--a crime in progress or suspected. After that, to make a formal report of the crime to have it investigated, a victim must go to the Ministerio Público.)

A police representative responded that mounted police patrol Parque Juarez from 9 am to 6 pm, and from 6 pm to 9 am another officer patrols the park. He said that there is now a permanent police substation in Mexiquito because the city is aware of the increased crime in that colonia.

Other expats asked if there could be cameras installed in Parque Juarez and throughout the city and undercover police used on patrols. Donations from the foreign community could pay for the cameras.

A city representative said that offers of donations for cameras were only part of it, more staff would be needed to process all the information coming in from 50, 100, 200 cameras taking photos 24/7 throughout the city. Problems of theft and vandalization of the cameras were also mentioned.

San Miguel police cover not only the city of 80,000 itself but also 540 surrounding communities with a total population of about 60,000 more people. The city has only 233 police and 30 scout cars to cover this large geographic area.

An expat said that it seemed as if muggers were arrested and then immediately released, and if only a small amount was stolen there is usually no prosecution.

The police representative said that when someone is arrested the people who were victimized need to come down to the Ministerio Público and file a formal complaint, a denunciation, against the arrestee. Most times no one shows to follow through and the arrestee must be released.

Another expat called for the formation of Neighborhood Watch programs similar to those in the United States. San Miguel already has had a program of attempting to get Neighborhood Watch groups organized for many years.

A city representative noted that the administration has been in office only since October and there are efforts underway now to organize elections in all of the 80 colonias and in the smaller rural communities so that they will have designated officers. This will be a way to encourage more citizen participation, which is one of the mayor's major goals, the representative said.

An expat said that in one crime the victim had sophisticated camera equipment that took good photos of the person committing the crime. He had distinctive tattoos, and there were also clear fingerprints from the man, but nothing was done. She wanted to know if the photos legally could be published to alert others.

The police representative said that it would be important to have copies of the photos for departmental use to help officers be on the alert.

Police chief Avila said at one point, through a translator, that San Miguel de Allende is one of the safest cities in Guanajuato.

"Not any more," an expat interrupted from the audience. He said that his house had been burglarized three times in thirteen months and he had since moved. He felt the city was far less safe over the past three years than it had been when he first arrived twelve years ago.

Avila continued that the cities considered high crime in Guanajuato are Celaya, Urupuato, and Sierra Leon. He said that contrary to rumors and charges, there had been only two kidnappings since the new administration took office October 10. Some highly publicized "kidnappings" were really coverup stories for men who were in jail or who had left the city, a police representative said.

He said that everything on the Civil list (an email list with about 4,000 members, mostly expats) was just rumors and gossip and should not be believed. If anyone wanted to know accurate information his door is always open, Avila stated.

A woman from New York City said that she had felt safe in NYC but not here. Her condo has a wall-enclosed courtyard. In December she awoke at 4 am one night to see three men prowling around, looking in windows.

The next night she went to bed with a big knife, a cell phone and a flash light, and at 3:45 am the men came back. The police came in five minutes but they couldn't get into the condo complex because of the locked outside wall. Neighbors in the complex by the wall threw down their keys to the police.

She immediately bought a $700 security system but still doesn't feel safe.

The expat whose home had been burglarized three times suggested that preventiva police should be given numbered forms in duplicate, which could be filled out at the time of the crime, and the person making the complaint could get a copy.

Police would have to account for all the numbered pages. Then the police chief could be sure he is getting the accurate information on all crimes committed, the expat said. None of the three burglaries of his house had been included in any of the "crime blotter" reports in Atención, and the expat said that it is important that all crime information get to the police chief. He said one report had been taken on a small piece of paper and the officer wrote down only his name, address and age.

A city department head spoke of current police efforts to break up a child prostitution ring operating in one colonia. He said that there are several problem areas along arroyos and bridges where criminals can hide easily. Police need more community cooperation reporting where the criminals are hiding.

He said that there are two ways to go after crime--with police on crimes already committed, and also with quality of life help to those who are not already delinquent, such as by the building of community centers in problem areas.

He talked of the problems in the illegal squatter areas of the city where people have no water, sewers, electricity, or even street numbers so that police can quickly find the scene of a reported crime. They need roads and bridges so that police can get to the areas and not find their path blocked.

He said that efforts are being made to include the people in these illegal settlements so that they can be a part of the community development of their areas. A Mexican man spoke at length of the need for all 140,000 residents of San Miguel de Allende to work together, to tear down the walls that keep us apart.

An important part of this work is to report all crimes and suspicious activity, such as if you see someone driving past you in a car who is drunk or who has guns. The police can only help if they have complete information about the extent of the problems, he said.

He suggested that expats get involved with their Mexican neighbors--when you are going to be away your neighbor may then call the police if suspicious activity is going on in your property instead of looking the other way, and vice versa.

There are not enough police and resources to do all the work. Mexicans and expats need to work together with the police to fight crime or it will only increase, he said.

An expat woman wanted to know the penalty for a crime like rape or robbery. If someone is convicted of a violent crime the prison time is five to ten years, a representative said, noting that Mexico's criminal justice system underwent a major overhaul four or five months ago.

But if no one is willing to go to Ministerio Público to make a formal complaint against a criminal, the arrestee must be released.

Some expats asked that they be given a form in English explaining about the Mnisterio Público system and how to make a complaint, in detail.

Others broke in to say that the information is in many sources, including frequently being published in Atención. Others recommended that such a form be developed in both English and Spanish to help people make reports to Ministerio Público.

A Mexican man suggested that the police force add more police dogs. Dogs are faster, they can get into more areas, they can sniff out drugs, one dog can help 50 officers work better, and the dogs work for the price of a kennel and food. More police horses were also recommended. The city already has a trained canine unit.

City officials added that steps are underway to improve the emergency reporting system and also the process to make denunciations at the Ministerio Público.

The next regularly scheduled meeting of the colonia and barrio representatives is Feb. 3 at 6 pm in the community room of the police headquarters. The meeting lasted almost two hours.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

January 12, 2010--Our cold versus what our housekeeper goes through; the sun broke through briefly Sunday and we headed to Harry's for brunch; winter costumes for Conchero dancers; a luxury meal at Cafe Rama behind Natura; trying to keep down electricity costs
We were complaining about the cold temps with our housekeeper, who was being her usual sympathetic self. I asked her what kind of heat she had in her small apartment, in which she raised eight kids. I knew she had propane because we and her other afternoon employer bought her a gas stove and oven one Christmas, and I knew she had electricity because we'd bought her a small refrigerator and many other appliances. I really expected her to say they relied on a wood fireplace.

"Nada," she said. Her family has no heat of any kind in their house. Probably the majority of the Mexicans living in and around San Miguel have no heat, either.

Her rental has one room about 12' by 12' that we've been inside, delivering appliances, and we've seen a courtyard about that size beyond. We think there is a bedroom and bath off of the courtyard on one side out of view. That's it. There's no roof over most of their living space since the courtyard has a lot of furniture in it. In good weather the kids slept outside while she and her husband have a mattress on the floor, under a quilt that Norma sewed them. Her family would be considered middle class--housekeepers are respected jobs and her 76-year-old husband still does some electrical work.

She's been coming to work wearing thick beige cable kneesocks, layered sweaters, jackets, scarves and gloves, which she also wears at home during this cold snap. We're keeping our outdoor clothes on in the house, too. But we do have heat, from a propane fireplace and a heater in our office, plus our electric blanket. I think Norma and I should just shut up about the cold now, especially when I hear how much worse most of our readers have it NoB. It is still the main topic of conversation with everybody, though.

We were so cold Saturday night we could absolutely not get out of the house to go see Paco Renteria at his yearly concert in the Angela Peralta, that's how cold we were. We adore him but just couldn't move. I hear the audience was small--very little advance PR, and maybe others preferred to stay home next to their fireplace, too.

So Sunday we saw sun pouring in our bedroom window and we decided we had to get out of the house. Brunch at Harry's New Orleans restaurant it would be. We took a cab though it's a short walk--the sun wasn't all that warm, just bright.

What did we get for a total bill of 220 pesos including tip, or about $19 USD?

Free champagne mimosas, fresh fruit plates, French bread, corn muffin, butter and blackberry jam, and a beignet with powdered sugar. Chile verde chilaquiles with about eight ounces of grilled arracherra steak (85 pesos). A large Monte Cristo ham and cheese sandwich cooked like French toast with syrup (65 pesos). Decaf coffee and a Diet Coke. Impeccable service. A visit by owner Bob Thiemann to our table to make sure everything was top notch. Light Dixieland music, then music from the '40s to the '70s in the background. Last time we were in a Denny's in the States it cost more than that for crap. Harry's was jammed, others apparently deciding it was time to escape being cooped up in the cold, too.

Afterward we walked to the Parroquia to the sound of drums. I have no idea what Aztec or Catholic holiday it was, but the Conchero dancers and drummers were out, this time in winter costumes I've never seen before: long-sleeved purple satiny fabric with white fringe. I have three photos of the more warmly clad dancers on the Concheros album of the Photo Gallery of this website. The young girls were still flashing a lot of bare leg, though.

As usual some gringos were wandering right through their dance routines, oblivious to the disruption they were causing. I once photographed a silver-haired woman trying to put her arm around one of the dancers while he performed so that her husband could take a photo of her with her "pal." I wrote then, she would have never dreamed of going up on the altar during a Catholic mass to take a photo of her and the priest together. The Conchero dancers are performing a religious and cultural ritual, and luckily they don't mind doing it in front of tourists. But they'd be doing it with or without us, I've read. Oh, probably their costumes are a little more festive than they might wear with no outside audience.

We did have a truly gourmet meal a couple of weeks ago that I forgot to write up then. Friends treated us to their favorite place, Cafe Rama, behind Natura natural foods shop on Calle Nueve, between Espino's and Parque Jaurez. During the week it's a very nice lunch and early dinner spot with dishes like lamb curry and healthy-sounding sandwiches, many dishes in my "Cheap Eats" range of under $6 USD.

Fridays at 8 pm, by reservation only, it becomes one of the best restaurants in San Miguel, the fixed price many-course meal at 300 pesos each, bring your own wine.

Some of the many dishes that were included were a grilled shark appetizer, a lightly dressed unusual salad, thick pork chops in an exquisite sauce, and a lemon cake. Jason Malloff is the chef and owner, and I am sure he would like to be able to expand his gourmet offerings to more nights. But for now Friday nights it is. Oh, and you can have a magnificent chocolate truffle for another ten pesos at any time, worth the trip alone.

The courtyard is small and last time I was there a couple of years ago it was only a dirt courtyard with a couple of Coca Cola plastic tables where you could eat anything you'd bought inside at the organic shop, heated up in a microwave if you chose. Now it is a beautiful space, creating a very romantic mood for maybe 20 customers a night. It will be on our list of considerations for our anniversaries and birthdays.

Nirvana has stopped serving breakfasts, the end of one of our favorite traditions. San Miguel keeps changing, and I don't mind at all. No chance of ever being bored here!

We are still trying to keep our electrical usage below 500 KW for the two-month billing period, to take advantage of lower rates of maybe $50 USD a month. But if we go over 3,000 KW for the year, we understand that our rates will more than double. Norma notes our meter every day. In this cold snap we're averaging 9.8 KW a day, and we need to get that down to 8.8 KW a day to keep the lower rate. Yet we don't want to give up our upright freezer, the logical way to drop our usage drastically.

I've stopped using the microwave to warm coffee, I heat it on the propane stove now, and we're very conscious of turning off lights when we leave a room. We are now able to turn off all our electrical usages in the office when we leave so it no longer looks like an airplane cockpit at night. I'm still using the hairdryer--if we survive to April with the rate not kicking up, then I can let my hair dry naturally again. Too cold now.

We're still using our electric blanket and hope we can cut that out soon. I unplug almost everything that has a light on it when not in use, like the microwave, which is generally unplugged all the time now. No toaster oven usage. The TV is not left on as white noise any more. I'm reading by a one-efficient-light-bulb lamp close to me in the living room rather than turning on the six-light-bulb chandelier that can't use energy-efficient bulbs because it has a dimmer switch.

I don't know if we'll be able to make it to summer when it will be easier to reduce electricity. Daylight Savings time will help a lot. And if we do make it through summer, who's to say that we will be able to get electrical usage back down next winter if it is anything like this cold snap?

Oh well, we keep remembering that our electric bill in Phoenix with all that air conditioning the six months when it was over 100 degrees was several hundred dollars a month. And that was achieved only by being on a year-round averaging payment plan.

Here in San Miguel, with our propane bill at about $100 USD a month in the winter, maybe $30 a month in the summer, our heating and lighting bills will still be cheaper here than we paid in Phoenix, even if we get switched to the higher electrical rate.

They will be much cheaper than we paid in rural Michigan ($425 a month propane in the winter, and so many more gray days which needed lighting). In our previous apartment the utilities were lumped into a $50 USD a month add-on to the rent, so we never paid attention to electricity. In this house we have to notice.

At least Norma's the retired accountant who gets to jiggle the bills around. I just get to write about it, and to remember to turn off the lights behind me.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

January 7, 2010--Not carrying a purse is a drag; a security meeting January 13 at City Hall; new talavera tile to cover the fireplace soot; the Santa Julia bus; awaiting Candelaria Day February 2 for both flowers and warmth; Paco Renteria concert January 9 at the Peralta; contradictory and unrealistic desires

Because of the publicity over three purse snatchings from older gringas the past two weeks, we decided not to carry our purses for a few more weeks, to see if this spate could be due to one or two bad apples who might leave SMA after the holidays. We can hope. They might even get caught, who knows.

There will be a security meeting Wednesday, January 13, at 6 pm in the police department offices on the left side of the Presidencia (city hall), called by the new Director of Security.

We've been talking to some Mexicans who assure us the problem is not just directed at gringas. We read that all over the world in tourist cities, crime goes up over the holidays because tourists are sloppy, happy, not paying attention, carrying all sorts of goodies, ripe for the plucking, and the holidays are also when thugs need more money for their own holiday spending. You can be sure many Mexicans will be at the meeting, too.

I hope expats remember social protocol for meetings in Mexico and don't jump up and yell, "You lie" or some such as they might do in the US. Mexicans treat authority figures in public meetings with respect, and the meetings tend to drag out, and the heart of the meeting might not come until long into the meeting after all possible explanations, ramifications and excuses have been presented.

It is considered highly disrespectful to confront an authority figure and say he or she is wrong, especiallyby an expat who has no real understanding of the issues involved. It is more effective to present issues in a respectful, non-confrontational way, to offer solutions, to suggest ways out so that it might not be the person's fault who is in charge, "we have a common problem and what do you suggest considering these possibilities," etc. I've been in too many Mexican government meetings filled with expats who acted as if they were at a protest rally. We'll see.

We ran into a friend who was one of the women whose purse was snatched in broad daylight on the short street of Calle Nuevo, by La Palapa, Sappo, Natura/Cafe Rama, and the parking lot, between Espino's and Parque Juarez. She had a horrible black eye and facial bruises from falling backwards when she tried to hold on to her purse, which she did instinctively, knowing in her head that was stupid. Just give up your purse and you probably won't fall and hurt yourself--the guy is going to get it anyway.

This purse snatching was a couple blocks from Tenerias 13 where "El Raton" hangs out and steals purses when he isn't in jail. He's out now.

The other place where there was a purse snatching, at 8 pm, was in the alleyway shortcut between Col. San Antonio and Ancha de San Antonio through the La Aldea neighborhood. I was uneasy walking that route in mid-day myself the one time I took it, since there were young men hanging around watching the passersby.

And another suspicious area is in La Luciernaga mall by Soriana, by a guy who watches those getting money out of Intercam across from Soriana. The woman who felt she was being watched went into Soriana. Another woman who suspected she was going to be mugged ran out into the street and stopped an oncoming car and the guy ran away.

So I am no longer taking my shoulder bag when walking around town, though it ordinarily nestles against my front and would not be easily grabbed. I doubt anybody is going to take a chance I have anything in my jeans pockets, though.

How annoying it is to not have everything at hand in my purse. We walked down to Calzada de la Luz and looked at talavera tiles at a store/factory at #114. I reached for my camera to take a photo of the tiles we selected to post on this website to show off the design. No camera. Back home in my purse.

I wrote about how our last tank of polluted propane has soiled our living room walls with soot, and we've scrubbed down the walls three times this month. We decided to check out the possibility of putting ceramic decorative tiles all around the fireplace. We were delighted to find that two square meters of tiles plus six meters of edging would be only 810 pesos, around $70 USD! They won't be done until next SS paycheck anyway, so we ordered them and now feel better about the gray-tinged living room.

We did buy a new tank of propane--from a different company--once the polluted one got below 20%, so we hope the problem is solved. But now we know that we will have tile to wash off easily in case the problem ever happens again, and the tile will make our fairly plain living room look so much nicer. It will probably cost another $30 USD to have Pedro Romero, our handyman, install them. Imagine, $100 to add a big section of custom-made decorative tile to a living room! What would that cost in the US?

We took the Santa Julia bus for the first time, picking it up across from the Oratorio and Plaza Civica, and riding it through its twisted Centro detour until it was back on Canal. Then it turned right into Linda Vista or Olimpo colonia and passed through very working class neighborhoods to near CASA Hospital, where we got off and walked home, downhill.

Now we have easy bus routes around most of the city. We still have to try out the San Felipe Neri bus in our neighborhood and see where it goes.

Colonia San Rafael is one of the largest colonias in town, possibly bigger than Colonia San Antonio. It is as diverse as San Antonio is, though this entire colonia is often lumped as unsafe, while San Antonio is considered safe but has high crime areas.

Your immediate block is often the determinant of how safe your home is, just as homes a few blocks apart in the US can be very different. A friend back in LA was badly beaten in a carjacking in the parking lot of her Beverly Hills condo. You might always be at the wrong place at the wrong time, whether for a purse snatcher or a truck with no brakes or lightning. No guarantees anyplace.

Pedro is busy fixing the overhang on our fountain so that the cats can't escape from the front patio, their having figured out how to thwart our last solution. This one involves metal bars, not just window screen.

He can't wait until Candelaria around Feb. 2 (the giant week-long nursery sale in Parque Juarez) to help us select great plants for the patios. We can't wait because Feb. 2 usually (but not always) also signals the end of winter here and some warmth returning.

It has been so cold here--nothing like the mess in the States, but cold for us. One SMA weather station said it was 61 the other day, while another said it was 48. I would have guessed 41. Fahrenheit, of course.

We're layered in turtlenecks, sweaters, and jackets, plus our brightly striped long fuzzy socks, jeans, and even our serious Detroit lined leather gloves. Did you ever try typing in lined leather gloves? My sister buried in snow NoB has no sympathy.

From the tile store today we walked into town to pay the rent at Banamex and Norma reached for her purse and her debit card. No purse, left at home, and she didn't think to bring the card with her when we set out. The rent will be paid tomorrow instead. I had a tickle in my throat and reached for the cough drops in my purse. Still at home. I needed a pencil to write down an address. That was home in my purse, too. We need to refigure this.

Another event we are really looking forward to is the annual concert in SMA by Paco Renteria, the classically trained guitarist who opened for Pavarotti's World Tour concerts. He and his group will be back this Saturday, Jan. 9, at 8 pm at the Teatro Angela Peralta.

Ticket prices went up--first floor is 300 pesos, second level is 200, and the top floor is 100 pesos. I think we'll be on the mezzanine Saturday night. Google Paco Renteria on YouTube to see one of his performances to convince you to come, too. I didn't see any advance publicity this year, he probably won't have a sold-out crowd.

www.atencionsanmiguel.org and www.thenews.com.mx are not updating their websites lately. I miss being able to go to the local newspaper site and check out the calendar, "Que Pasa," what's happening in town. Now I have to be sure to buy it every Friday, and the price just went up to 10 pesos. Gee, I wonder why the papers stopped giving away their info for free?

Someone wrote privately to ask if there was a place in Mexico where they would be close to a beach, not overwhelmingly hot in summer, no noise, lots of culture, not too crowded, not too big a city, and inexpensive. I wrote back that when we RVed for 3 1/2 years across the continent, we were looking for a small town with all the amenities of a big city, a university town with not too many young people, beaches and mountains nearby where the year-round temperatures ranged from 79 to 81, no noise but lots of excitement, all sorts of contradictory desires.

You have to make choices. San Miguel is as close to perfect as we've ever found, but it's not for everyone. I know at least a few couples who are still trying to find all of the above in a retirement area plus absolutely no chance of any crime. This is 2010. You can't go home again to the area that was so perfect when you were six years old. You were six years old.

Jon Stewart had something to that effect last night, politicians harking back to to the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s or 80s as perfect decades, back when they were six years old and had no idea what problems were going on in every one of those decades. You have to live with some kinds of problems everyplace in the world, or have enough money that you can build your own isolated world shutting out the problems as best you can. Few of us are that rich.

So I may have to find some better solution to not carrying a purse. I'm working on it. It was still a lovely day in San Miguel.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

December 30, 2009--More on Dec. 12, Dec. 25 and Dec. 31; our next to-do list for our handyman; cheap flowers; lost in Cieneguita via bus; Hacienda home visits

We got home too late from "Julie and Julia" at Pocket Theater to finish this last night so I'll start a new entry today. Loved "Julie and Julia"--it almost made me want to cook. Her blogging experiences were familiar--first the thought that nobody out there is reading except a relative or two, then the growing awareness that personal stuff you put in may not be thrilling to the others you are writing about so you start deleting any specific mention of others, then the offers to send you stuff that can't be easily obtained that you mention in your blog. For example, two friends coming back from Kansas are bringing us more sage--we used up the last we had in bottles, and the dried salvia leaves and stems in Bonanza's back room spices section were pretty flavorless.

But Julie ends up with a major book contract, big advance and movie sale. Oh well, I think there are hundreds of thousands of us bloggers out there now, probably more than a million. Just reaching a lot of people is worth it and fun.

We also saw "Avatar" at MM Cinemas last week, not in 3-D, so something essential was missing--like true colors and actions. Norma kept growling, "This is Rise of Legends," one of her computer games which has many of the same characters and animals. The game wasn't even credited in the movie though it must have been an inspiration to some writer or director down the line. We were so disappointed in the lack of an original plot to go with the breakthrough special effects--that weren't so special on an ordinary screen. I was hoping to feel the way I did when I saw the first "Star Wars" around 1977. So I'm jaded.

Back to the Virgin of Guadalupe celebrations. We probably should have put flowers at the base of our tile mural. The neighborhood shrines were fully decorated like Christmas trees for weeks before Dec. 12, and the nightly religious ceremonies drew dozens in the cold. I think they were saying the rosary, but I read that there are also other ritual prayers, which put the Virgin first, then Juan Diego, then Jesus Christ. In some Mexicans' minds, I think that's the correct ranking.

I hadn't paid much attention to the house wall paintings of the Virgin on several streets in Col. San Rafael during the year, but they were active shrines through December, not just on Dec. 12. These devotions seemed like the real thing, deeply felt, not the ones that sometimes seem to be performed more for tourists in Centro. San Juan de Dios market and the dozens of small shops extending from the covered produce stands down to Calzada de la Luz along Guadalupe included at least five shrines to the Virgin. Each one had its own ceremonies through the month. I saw mariachi bands performing before one statue one day. "The Little Drummer Boy" had nothing on their performance.

San Juan de Dios mercado includes several flower stalls, which were busy turning out centerpieces and decorations for the Virgin statues throughout the neighborhoods. We bought a 20-peso bouquet of a dozen daisies, mums and carnations for our table one night, and an 80-peso($7 USD) full bouquet of every color of the same flowers for our Christmas table. The arrangements would have probably been $10 and $30 USD in US flower shops.

Someone emailed me asking if it was true that San Miguel had no flower shops, as she had been told by an SMA wedding planner she'd interviewed for her upcoming nuptials here.

I said there were plenty of flower shops, at much cheaper prices, but she might not be able to get the full range of delicate wedding flowers that she could in a big US city--for many times the price. For two miserable weeks as a cub reporter I had to fill in for a society writer at one newspaper, and I had more than my fill of learning all the flowers that go into a wedding bouquet. I blanked all that out of my memory, too.

For my hippie marriage in 1970 we picked flowers from his family's garden. Norma and I bought a few lilies and roses to carry for our wedding in Provincetown in 2004, on the lawn of the courthouse. Don't ask me about planning a fancy wedding in SMA or anyplace else. Not a high interest area for me.

Catholics all over the world are taught to make the sign of the cross when passing in front of a Catholic church. The practice is extended to statues of the Virgin of Guadalupe here as well. I haven't seen so many signs of the cross being made since my First Communion in 1949.

We put up our Christmas tree a week early and I have a photo of it in our personal photo album in the Photo Gallery of this website (along with many photos of the Virgin of Guadalupe shrines in our colonia and in San Juan Dios mercado, in a new album labeled Virgin of Guadalupe Shrines). The cats didn't bother this one; apparently there's too much else to do in this new house.

They did manage to destroy the screened roof over our home fountain that was to keep them from escaping over the front wall, so they're confined to only the back patio again. Pedro Romero, our handyman, is coming as usual when our next Social Security checks come in to continue on our "to-do" list. A stronger overhang for the fountain is number one. How to feel dumb when you are outwitted by three cats.

We don't feel any less safe in this neighborhood than we did in Centro, though there the neighboring Hotel Sautto parking lot 24/7 guard shack provided some additional security. And we still feel safer than we did in LA, Detroit, and Phoenix. We can identify the shady characters in the neighborhood, though. Women and children are walking home alone at night, and kids play fútbol in the street long after dark. There's certainly no mood of fear which we had in LA and Detroit.

So there are poorer homes on the block, and a lot of graffiti in the neighborhood, signs that would scare off many expats who are used to gated communities or upper class suburbs. If you want a gated community or a richer area, they certainly exist in San Miguel. For bargain housing, you come to appreciate how average Mexicans live in working class neighborhoods. More people are out on the streets, for one, since poorer Mexican homes don't usually have living rooms. For that you sit outside on the steps or head to the Jardin or other parks.

We exchange social pleasantries with everyone, and only a few teenaged boys are standoffish and don't reply. Teenagers aren't the most genteel social beings anyplace in the world. I for one didn't want to have anything to do with the elderly neighbors where I grew up and I'm sure as a teenager I was rude and ignored many an adult's "hello."

I did not follow my own advice to never confront a Mexican and say he's wrong when we ran into the propane gas crew who sold us the bad tank of gas. They laughed at our anger and we might as well have been talking into the wind. I doubt they'll ever come to our door again asking if we need a refill. So they've made a little mental check about us, and we've made a mental check about them. I don't know if that exchange will ever come back to haunt us or not.

We scrubbed down the black walls of our living room after the first night operating our fireplace with the bad tank of gas. Since then the soot has been less obvious, but we still have to do another scrubdown when we get another tank of propane--from another company. We got the sheet over the sofa in time, the gray is barely visible, but we do have to have the furniture cleaned professionally soon. It was overdue anyway. Yellow is not the most practical color for overstuffed living room furniture, even if we do love it.

For Christmas we decided to get our housekeeper one of Patrice Wynne's chile aprons, for 340 pesos. Maria loved the one we had and we let her wear it the three days a week she came, since we didn't seem to be apron types these days. We put on sweats for heavyduty cooking sprees.

Through the years the apron turned to rags and we got her cheaper ordinary aprons from San Juan de Dios mercado but we had it in the back of our mind that she'd like a beautiful one for her home cooking.

At an age of somewhere between 65 and 70--she tells us different ages at different times--she's a bit of a clothes horse. She is always showing off her latest 10-peso cashmere sweater she got at some garage sale, or her 5-peso ballerina flats. So we knew we couldn't get her clothing--she loves to find her own bargains. When she house-sat for us during our last trip NoB she visited every San Rafael garage sale and cleaned them out of petite-sized bargains. Most SMA Mexican neighborhoods turn into one gigantic garage sale on Saturdays, same as we had back in rural Michigan.

But Patrice wasn't going to be home, she was coming back into town just in time for a "Whimsy" sale out at Anado's and Richard's colorful home at Cieneguita before Christmas, and we'd have to get an apron from her out there. That meant a new bus trip on a route we'd never taken.

We asked around and the Cieneguita bus leaves from San Juan de Dios parking lot every 20 minutes or so. We walked down and a bus was just leaving. This was an ancient school bus, not one of the newer ones that start from Centro. It was full except for a few seats in the rear, where you bounce almost to the roof at every tope and pothole. We were not sure where it would go in Cieneguita but we were pretty sure it would go by the Cieneguita church, and we'd figure it out from there.

First there is a detour right now from the parking lot area by the old train station, out the end of Canal/Calzada de la Estación. The bus took some back roads we didn't know existed, past some fairly nice working class Mexican homes, brick with no adobe covering, lots of horses and burros and goats and chickens in backyards. Then it got back on the main highway for a bit, and then we were coming up on the church. The bus was apparently going to go left at the church, and we tried to remember if Anado's and Richard's famous artsy ranch (written up in the New York Times, no less), was to the left. We decided it was. We decided wrong.

The bus just kept on going and nothing looked familiar. Suddenly we were stopped in a field, by a blue and white elementary school. We asked the bus driver if he knew anything about a crazy artists home nearby, all bright colors, and he looked at us as if we were the crazy ones. Did the bus head back to the church? Yes, in 20 minutes. The kid who collected the six pesos for the ride took over the one bench at the field and sprawled down the whole length of it. We leaned against the fence outside the school.

A woman carrying a huge burlap bag of something light on her head, holding the hand of a girl about five, walked up and waited under a tree for the bus. The girl first scampered up the tree and laughed from high, out of reach of her mother. Then she came down and was directed to come over and ask us the time. When the mother determined we spoke some Spanish, the girl was told to ask us for ten pesos. We just looked at them funny and shook our head no. The girl climbed back up the tree.

The bus started up after 20 minutes and we made a point of sitting up front this time. We got off at the church. We had a choice of two more directions the home could possibly be. We picked right this time. After about half a mile we could see SUVs with US plates parked alongside the road, so we knew we were almost there.

Anado and Richard call their place Casa de la Rana, house of frogs, and it has color everywhere, with their artwork in every corner and niche. We'd been there many times before when we had a car, but coming by bus was quite a different experience.

We oohed and ahhed over all the new artwork and I took enough photos to make another new album in our website photo gallery, labelled Bus Trip to Cieneguita. After we'd shopped, someone recognized us and we authographed their copy of our book they'd just bought at Patrice's stand. They offered us a most welcome ride home.

Besides the apron, we got Maria a new shopping bag and filled it with all sorts of canned foods from Mega. It had to weigh 60 pounds when we were done. Not only did we include the usual items we knew she used all the time, like cooking oil, beans and rice, we added cans of sardines, oysters, chicken, tuna, and pork.

We tucked in big jars of peanut butter and unusual jellies, not the most common strawberry preserves that are everywhere, plus chocolate and caramel syrup, and plenty of all kinds of chocolate candies that she loves. We topped off our Santa's sack with a big batch of our homemade Monster cookies. She was thrilled and immediately started tasting all the candies and cookies. I think she liked the chocolates better than her aguinaldo, the required Christmas bonus.

We had to call her a cab and all of us help her get it into the back seat. She has an adult son at home to help her unload it.

Hacienda, the Mexican equivalent of the IRS, has been by our house four times during the October to December PAR program trying to track down all expats who are not registered to pay their taxes. PAR stands for Programa de Actualización y Registro. Hacienda's formal name is Servicio de Administración Tributaria, or SAT. They were only looking for a guy who was one of the house sitters here at least a year ago. No matter that each time we said we didn't know him, he didn't live here any more, we had no idea where he was, we were asked the same questions over and over.

They came when Maria was here alone another time and she made it very clear when we got home that she would never tell any government or police visitor anything about us. She played completely dumb, probably the best survival tactic for her, she has learned.

We assured her we weren't in any trouble with the law, she didn't have to worry about our being deported or jailed so that she would lose her job. Now that the PAR time frame is over, we wonder if we will be visited again, or maybe not until next year at this time. Another Christmas in San Miguel de Allende.

We're peopled out for a bit. New Year's Eve Norma is making a fancy shrimp Chinese dish just for us, and then we're probably going down to the Jardin for fireworks, music and dancing at midnight. Many expats have open houses on New Year's Day, just as we did in the US, and we'll see how many we're up to visiting. And on to 2010.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

December 29, 2009--A guilty nightmare; a different kind of Christmas; cookie chaos; neighborhood Virgin of Guadalupe celebrations

I went to bed feeling guilty about still not having gotten to this blog and also thinking about a "60 Minutes" segment on endangered two-inch fish ruining the water supply for California farmers, plus the news about the Christmas day airplane bombing attempt meant that now we cannot leave our seats or use blankets or pillows the last hour of flights.

All these elements glommed together in a nightmare that woke me up: Norma and I were touring the White House when we asked to use the bathroom and two Marines took us out to a big van where Norma was tortured first, fish shoved up her nose.

She was yelling out to me to shut up, never tell government officials or the military anything beyond yes and no, while I was babbling my life story and telling the Marines they'd never get away with kidnapping us, we'd be missed, I did a blog and people would miss it. One Marine scoffed and said I was so slow in doing my blogs nobody would ever notice I was gone. He brought a smelt nearer to my nose.

I woke up and decided today had to be the day I wrote a new blog, no matter what else distracted me. Here goes.

Christmas felt different in San Miguel this year, largely because there was no Christmas tree in front of the Parroquia. The usual life-sized Nativity scene was nice, surrounded by dozens of poinsettia plants, and a few burros and sheep were brought to the creche Dec. 24-26. Former Mayor Villarreal was criticized for erecting a Christmas tree in the Jardin our first Christmas here, so maybe the tradition just started then, though he was definite that Christmas trees are a centuries-old tradition in Mexico, since the Spanish Catholics brought the concept with them from Europe where it originated in Germany. Quite possibly the tradition of December trees goes back much farther to pagan Winter Solstice celebrations, and the worship of tree nymphs. Whatever, he was roundly attacked for erecting a Christmas tree in the Jardin, but one has gone up every year until this one.

Was it the money shortage, Lucy Nuñez's administration charging that former Mayor Correa had stolen from city coffers and even taken city computers, cameras and vehicles, while Correa is countercharging the items were long gone before he arrived and Lucy was not following the laws herself and besides, she has no plan for kidnappings and crime in SMA? Sounds like a US election--money versus fear, corruption versus terror, which issue trumps in voters' minds? The charges and countercharges in this administrative changeover seem worse than in past years, though of course this time there was a change in political parties as well as in mayors.

The city already owns the 30 or 40-foot framework and decorations for the tree, all that would be needed would be fresh boughs. Was it the fact the tree was associated with the PAN political party so Lucy, elected by a coaliton of PRI, PRD and Green, chose not to erect it? Who knows? We don't vote, we have no say, that's fine. I just miss the tree.

SMA did organize big public posadas this year, the nightly reenactments of the Holy Family's search for an inn that would take them in where Jesus would be born. They were well publicized this time. In past years it has been hard to find a public posada, unless an organization had one as a benefit and charged money. We'd see processions of kids and adults walking down the streets with candles during the Dec. 16-24 period and think about joining them but never did. We went to several that were benefits, for Alma and for the school for disabled children, and they were very nice--sufficient, I think, that we had no compulsion to seek out any more.

The one that used to be at the Hotel Sautto to benefit Alma each year was fun, especially watching a blonde Sautto granddaughter be Mary each year and usually get kicked off of the burro, which would be banished to the garden to happily munch on flowers while the reenactment continued. The kids would destroy a piñata and the adults would eat tamales and drink ponche (a mulled fruit drink) and atole (a corn meal drink similar to hot chocolate or Postum). The granddaughter grew up, the generations were changing, and for whatever reason the Sauttos didn't do the Posada any more.

The city also had pastoreles this pre-Christmas week on a stage erected in front of the Parroquia. Pastoreles are morality plays, usually featuring a dance battle between good and evil, Satan sometimes a red devil, sometimes a skeleton.

As seems to be happening more and more, we're spending holidays with our friends here, most of whom decide to have their own dinners and parties, so that we get turkey and ham and all the trimmings many times in December. Not complaining at all. This year we put our claim out on Dec. 25 itself and Norma ordered a 25-pound Butterball from the States, brought down by Keith Thompson of the Longhorn Smokehouse, who makes frequent runs to the border for his meats.

When I was in Spanish class the day before Thanksgiving, The Spanish Guru was roasting his turkey a day early and I thought that was very strange. But the more we thought about it, we decided to do the same. Mexican ovens rarely have even heat or reliable thermostats, and last year the turkey wasn't done until very late. We'd eaten all the trimmings and had the meat for dessert.

Norma had three separate hanging oven thermometers, brought down by friends from the US, and she kept two that matched and gave the other away to another cook perplexed by the random temps of her oven as well. Norma had baking pretty well mastered--but this time she checked the thermometers and they were 25 degrees apart! So doing the bird the day ahead looked like a plan. If anyone wanted to see what the golden bird looked like before carving,I'd take a photograph Thursday and hand it around.

Good thing we did--we wrapped it in foil and roasted it at 450 degrees, the method we think ensures a moister bird rather than open roasting at 350. According to the internet and cookbooks, the 25 pound turkey should have cooked that way in 4 hours. It took 8 /12 hours, until 3 am, for the legs to move easily and the meat thermometer to reach 180. It rested for 15 minutes and the internal temp went up to 185, the desired amount when you have stuffing, and then we carved it and went to bed. That threw off our entire morning schedule for Christmas day itself, but dinner went off as planned and it was all delicious.

Mega had been out of celery and sweet potatoes, of all things, the days before Christmas, and we had to search many stores before we found celery at a stand in San Juan de Dios Mercado. The friend who was to bring sweet potatoes never did find any and brought beets instead. Our Brit friend brought Christmas pudding, similar to fruit cake, with either brandied hard sauce or crema. She also brought crackers--not Ritz, the kind of firecracker-like pulls that erupt to reveal a gold crown for everybody that we wore throughout dinner, plus a little gift--mine was a tiny watercolor palette and colors that at first I thought was a birth control package.

Each cracker also contained a corny joke we had to share--Norma can't remember a single one either, we blissfully blanked them all out of our consciousness. Our raw foods only vegan devotee ignored the plate of julienned carrots, jicama, etc., I made especially for her and went for the traditional dishes. We also had pumpkin pie with whipped cream, a pistachio pudding, fresh pineapple boats, and tons of homemade cookies.

About those cookies: as I said, Norma thought she had outwitted our oven. Not so, it won again. We decided to make Christmas cookies ourselves, accidentally turning on a Paula Deen Food Channel session on "monster cookies." That one got me looking through an old Southern Living cookbook and there it was, bsaically the same recipe for monster cookies: oatmeal, chocolate chips, peanut butter, M&Ms, and raisins. What's not to like? And they're formed in quarter cups, not dropped by teaspoonfuls.

The first batch burned too badly. Into basura. The next batch was pretty good--they went to the kids who pick up our garbage for us Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 7 am. We only have to get the bags out the door and hand them five pesos now. But they did ask if they would be getting an aguinaldo, the legally required Christmas bonus that must be paid to all employees by Dec. 20. Somehow we didn't think of them as our regular employees, and they'd only been doing this for us since October. But why not, we gave them two weeks extra pay and a bag of cookies each. Good for neighborhood relations.

Then we branched out into cranberry and pistachio biscotti, ginger snaps and date bars. We had so many cookies we never got to the dozen other kinds we had planned to make. We brought four dozen to another dinner and had some at home and gave a bunch to our housekeeper and thoroughly overdid it on cookies for another year. Maybe for the rest of our lives. We hadn't made Christmas cookies in 30+ years. That was probably the last time.

One of the parties we went to this season featured professionally-made cookies by a young woman just graduated from colletge and starting her own business, after she couldn't find a job in her field. I keep meeting nannies, women who are college graduates but unable to find jobs in their professions, and nannies make good money in upper class neighborhoods. Thank heavens for Social Security.

Another thing that was different for our Christmas this year was the number of neighborhood devotions to the Virgin of Guadalupe throughout the San Rafael/Independencia/San Juan de Dios colonias. We have our beautiful tiled mural of the Virgin on the front and back of our house to keep away graffiti and so far it's working. (Oh, we did have one word, cuesto, written on our front wall about 20 feet from the Virgin, and cuesta means hill, but I have no idea what cuesto means. If it's nasty, please let me know. Norma painted it out immediately.

Ooops, time to get over to the Pocket Theater to see "Julie and Julia." I'll have to finish this later. This should be enough of a blog to keep me from having any more guilty nightmares.

Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende

December 4, 2009--Haunting slide show of poverty in San Miguel; is true integration on a broad scale possible? skits to try to make irregular Spanish past tense verbs sink in; a bad tank of propane in our fireplace logs turns our living room walls black; brightly striped socks on a cold gray day; new winter's wardrobe at Alma sale; "Celebrity duo"--bleah; the Road Trip; better directions to McAllen bypassing Monterrey

It's hard to think of much else when I've just seen the slide show of an impoverished family of nine living in the campos outside San Miguel, for which I posted the link on our Living in SMA forum:
http://www.slide.com/r/DBWIYnvWyz8c5tiYOfPHOyQog-TJZyM_?previous_view=mscd_embed\ded_url&view=original.

If you want to help, contact Jackie Brummund (jasma256@gmail.com), John Garvin (jrgarvin@hotmail.com) or Rodrigo Landeras (www.CoyoteCanyonAdventures.com), 415-154-4193.

Norma talked at length to a woman who had lived in the house next to us in Col. San Rafael for four years. She said it is unrealistic to ever hope to become fully integrated into a poor Mexican neighborhood, or into a tight working class community like our area. Individuals can do it if they truly are fluent and truly want to live as equals with their neighbors. As long as there is the very visible income gap, we'll be neighbors and acquaintances and not much more--unless a love relationship develops that is between equals.

One friend firmly believes, "No matter how nice many Mexicans may be to you, don't forget that many of them hate you." Actually she said, "All of them hate you," but I can't believe that. Considering how many US citizens hate Mexican immigrants, I can believe it of "many."

I can't say I've ever become close friends with any of my neighbors anyplace, even in the seniors RV park where all of us supposedly had so much in common. No, two senior RVing women don't necessarily have a thing in common with other senior RVers. We feel we have much closer friends with a wider circle here than we've ever had in our lives. Loving Mexico and choosing San Miguel in particular over a life in the US seems to be a deep-rooted commonality that does work.

I could never be close to either my working class relatives on my father's side or the striving middle to upper class of my mother's side. The Schmidts judged me as a snob who went to college and considered herself above them, while the other side saw me as the child of a woman who married far below the family status and who would never make it. And that was with family ties!

Did I realistically think I would ever become close to either poorer uneducated Mexicans or the wealthy Mexican upper class? And if you still can't talk in anything besides present tense can you hope to exchange the meaningful discussions that can lead to a real friendship with any other Mexicans of any class and educational level?

We're approaching our eighth year in San Miguel, and I think at some level I thought that by now I'd have real Mexican friends and certainly be fluent. But still I don't feel I'm missing anything--our life is very full with each other and with expat friends. Is that terrible? Some judgmental observers think so, they insist all expats should be trying hard to become friends with Mexicans and in all ways totally integrate into Mexican culture and society. Don't let others judge you and decide what you should be doing with your life. My own internal judge does that just fine, thank you.

I'm happy.Why should I at age 67 try to be something I'm not when I feel as if I only recently discovered who I am!

And so the discussion goes on endlessly over the proper role of expats in Mexico. Each person creates his or her own life.

Our Spanish class of expats is going to have a party next week with our teacher's Mexican students who are trying to learn English. I expect it to be uncomfortable, but getting out of my comfort level can be good. Maybe I'll have a different viewpoint on all this next week!

We did skits in last week's class trying to use as many past tense verbs as possible. We could choose from four professional occupations, four locations, four topics people argue about, and four relationships to build our skit.

My group was so ordinary, we had a store owner calling the police to report a theft by an employee who denied it (but who did correct the storekeeper on where the money had really been). It turned out the housekeeper had taken the money because she was hungry. We were able to act out our experiences and stereotypes about store owners, police, and two kinds of employees, probably in a very superficial way. All the while we were trying to talk like natives, not textbooks. Oh well. I think we did the Three Stooges fairly well.

The other group was far more interesting--a woman cop tried to get two lovers to move along in the park, and they explained they had no place else to go where they could be together since they had no money. It ended up that the cop brought them back to her place for a threesome! Now that group was being creative and having much more fun!

Warren Hardy has called memorizing the irregular past tense verbs "The Great Wall of Spanish." I've been beating my head against that wall for years now.

On more ordinary events, two propane delivery trucks servicing our street have been fighting for our business, though they are from the same company. One was to come Thursday when our main Social Security checks are deposited, but the other showed up Wednesday when we did happen to have enough cash on us, and so we had them fill our tank.

That night we turned on our propane fireplace logs in the living room as usual, then went to bed groggy after Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert. We didn't notice until morning that our peach walls near the fireplace were covered with soot!

Pedro Romero, our handyman, had said to call him first for anything that didn't require the police, and so we called him. He came over right away. Because the fireplace had worked perfectly on the previous tank of propane, it had to be a bad tank of gas. What to do.

He said if it didn't wash off without taking the paint with it, we needed to repaint the whole iiving room when that tank was use up. The same color goes up the stairwell to the second floor, no easy job. Or, we could put easily washed decorative tile on the wall behind the fireplace. What to do, what to do.

We were going to go out and price tiles first on Friday when our housekeeper Maria showed up. She used Windex Degreaser on the soot and it wiped away, leaving the paint okay. Problem solved, money saved.

We've never had a bad tank of propane before in nearly eight years, nor earlier in rural Michigan when we used it for heating for seven years. We don't know if we'll get any more that will require continual scrubbing of the wall paint, which will undoubtedly flake off at some point. And then we'll face the same decision. With any luck we'll never have this happen again.

I posted a photo of our sooty walls on the "Carol's and Norma's personal photos" album at the end of our photo gallery on this website. Now the walls are clean again. We'll have to periodically rewash the wall all this month until this tank of gas is done.

I also posted a photo of two of our cats who have taken over what was supposed to be Lambchop's new doggie bed, and the two cats looking at each other nose to nose with their new collars and red heart ID tags from our trip to McAllen. More on the road trip later. I know I've said that before.

It's been cold, wet and gray here. We watch the US animated weather maps on TV and see a broad swath of rain coming across the middle of Mexico before it hits the US, so we know it's not just SMA and it's not over. When we were in McAllen Norma bought six pair of brightly colored striped fuzzy long socks. They're labeled, "Socks to stay home with," and that's what I thought we'd use them for, our TV nights before the propane fireplace.

We headed out one morning in the gray mist, both of us in jeans and denim jackets over darl turtlenecks, when I looked down and saw Norma had on yellow, chartreuse, peach, orange and lavendar striped fuzzy socks!

After the first shock it cheered me up just to look at them. And so we both have been wearing outlandish striped fuzzy socks to counteract the gray weather and dulled winter clothes. If I had a bright yellow windbreaker I'd probably put on black socks.

We got another wardrobe boost at the Alma garage sale, the last Saturday of each month at 10 am to 2, but you'd better be lined up by 9:45 am. Somebody had donated a lot of shirt jackets and sweaters in our sizes and we came home with ten for 200 pesos, or about $1.65 USD each! Some of them had top name labels inside and probably cost more than $60 USD each! Alma is the home for poor Mexican frail elderly, in La Lejona 2 behind Mega.

A new reporter at Atención is doing society-type photo features and showed up at our first book signing. He ran a quarter page on us and our attendees, calling us in the headline, the "celebrity duo." Yuck poo. How embarrassing. Please forgive us for that, we had nothing to do with it.

And now onto the Road Trip. We'd gone into a little store on the same block and side of Insurgentes as the Biblioteca before we left Mexico and had discovered fantastic bargains on socks and sweat shirts in particular. So we weren't going to buy any socks in the States. I already told you that we did anyway. Nothing like our warm fuzzies exists above a kid's size down here.

We did intend to buy a lot of things we can't find as cheap down here--a microwave on sale for $46, for example. Mega has had an off-brand microwave for sale for months for around 760 pesos, about $60. We keep seeing them being returned at the customer service counter.

Next to it was a toaster/convection oven for about the same price. Convection ovens are over 1,000 pesos when we happen to find them in San Miguel. Sometimes we don't want to turn on our big oven to preheat for 20 minutes when we can just pop something into the small oven.

Both use a lot of electricity, but from our first bills it seems as if we're okay on electricity. We're not near the big jumping off point of usage where bills get outrageous. We still watch it, such as by turning off a master switch for all our office equipment when we're going to bed or will be gone for awhile. Our office used to look like an airplane cockpit at night.

We got 500-count 100% cotton queen-sized sheets on sale at JC Penney's. Even though our bed is a double/matrimonial, when the cats join us in cold weather, they hog the sheets and covers, too.

We found an HP combination printer/fax/copier/scanner for about $45 at Best Buy--every book we write uses up a printer with all the print-outs of 500 pages at a time. We got plenty of backup printer cartridges as well, much cheaper in the US. We had a Brother that used cartridges almost impossible to find in Mexico, at triple the price of the HP cartridges.

You saw the photo in our personal album of our friend's car loaded almost to the rooftop. We could have gotten another doggie bed or two in at the top. Our friend bought one, too. Of course our cats have taken over Lambchop's supposed new bed.

At PetSmart we got snazzy new collars for all four pets and had new ID tags made for them with our new phone number here. For the cats we loaded up on catnip, less than half the price it is in SMA (though Norma found seeds for it and we'll try growing our own).

After all our anticipation over our favorite chain restaurants, even they weren't as good as we remembered. The Mongolian beef at PF Chang's was too salty and not as spicy as we asked for. The pasta for the Dan Dan Noodles with spicy chicken peanut sauce was overcooked. Red Lobster no longer had the kind of shrimp salad Norma remembered (but oh those cheese biscuits). The Jason's Deli pastrami melt wasn't stuffed with four inches with meat as we expected. We still didn't want to take the chance of trying a totally new place when we had only so many meals and time in McAllen's, and Norma hates to spend money on anything she can cook better. Not sure what we'll do next time.

The Country Omelet wasn't a disappointment, though it was jammed with seniors on their way home from church getting extravagantly huge breakfast plates. Our friend, a vegetarian, was disgusted with the look of our sausage gravy and biscuits platter, though. I guess to a vegetarian it did look like dog vomit, as she generously described it. No restaurant I know of has sausage gravy and fluffy biscuits in SMA!

We went through HEB supermarket three times in two days! Pomegranates and apples as big as grapefruit. Blue Bell Moolenium ice cream. All the Asian sauces we needed so that we didn't have to go to the Japanese market in McAllen.

We also spent a lot of time at Bed, Bath and Beyond, which I had never gotten into before. I kept looking at an Anna's Linens that was right next door to PetSmart and wondering why we couldn't just go there. Norma and our friend just shot me down: "We're going to Bed, Bath and Beyond and that's final." And so we did. Fascinating store. I never knew we needed so much little stuff for our bed and bath.

Another place we went twice in two days was Barnes & Noble. Surprisingly, we didn't buy a thing, though our friend did. I enjoyed walking through all the aisles and reading all the titles and people-watching, but I didn't have the compulsive need to buy a bunch of books, even the sale ones.

I guess I'm just not reading as much anymore myself, spending more time on the internet. I read the quality novel our book club picks each month and that's about it for fiction. I used to read at least one novel a week, often three or more a week.

We went to the movies, noticing the long lines late at night for the opening of the latest Twilight vampire flick. We chose instead "Pirate Radio," which is too quirky to ever get to San Miguel.

It was the mostly true tale of one of the ships that broadcast rock and roll music into Great Britain during the mid-60s, when the British government allowed only one hour of rock a night on the main radio station