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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.
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 stations. So several ships set up DJ studios just outside the 12 mile limits or whatever the range was those days, and they broadcast rock 24/7.
The government tried all sorts of tactics to shut them down, and one day one of the ships sank! It was in trouble for several hours, during which time hundreds of fans got together boats to come rescue all the DJ crew. It was a really fun movie, made more enjoyable by our friend's recounting of the true story since she was in England at that time.
The main difference between MM Cinemas in SMA and the McAllen multiplex: tickets were $2-5 more in Texas, and popcorn and snacks were several times more. Instead of 42 pesos at night with our Mexican senior discount INAPAM cards, about $3.75, the McAllen tickets were $6-7. We figured a family of four could easily spend $50+ for a night at the movies.
The Motel 6 was cleaner than many--they took the smelly carpets out and installed Pergo wood flooring, so the rooms looked and felt better.
The trip both ways was smooth. I have Norma's directions in the blog below on how to avoid Monterrey, and I'm going to add the highway numbers to them now that I have a map in front of me.
We had a few minutes where we were worrying--Norma missed a turn and almost went down an umarked one-way street and a tránsito pulled us over.
Our friend had a fake wallet with an expired credit card and old drivers license in it with 500 pesos, which would probably have been enough to get us through any ordinary mordida, but Norma was the one driving. He looked in all the windows (the SUV loaded to the gills) and noticed the Guanajuato license plates and let us go.
We were determined to get our FM2s stamped both directions, since on an FM2 the government does keep track of how long you are out of Mexico. Be out more than 18 months in five years and you could lose your FM2 and have to start all over on accumulating the five years to apply for inmigrado status and possibly dual citizenship.
We walked into the aduana going up just before the International Bridge heading to Pharr, and presented all our papers. The man at the counter gave us forms to fill out. We did, and I handed mine to him saying, "Están correcto, ojalá." (They're okay, if God wills it.) He laughed and stamped us quickly.
Our friend, as a Brit, had to get a separate kind of paperwork, and that went fast going up. Coming back down, she was in the office so long we were wondering what to do.
It was all fairly routine, however, and we got the green light at the first checkpoint. The second fed/green light was broken, and a young woman came out and looked through the windows. She examined our visas and then glanced at the Mexican license plates. She waved us through, too. Norma and I had our receipts well categorized in case we would be asked about any purchase, but we weren't.
It was a fun trip! The actual purpose of the trip, to pick up three cartons of The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico we'd had shipped to two friends who now live in McAllen, took maybe 15 minutes.
It was good to see old friends anyway, even if they are going to abandon San Miguel totally and move instead to Ajijic when they make their final retirement move to Mexico. There's something in Mexico for everybody.
Here's more on the directions I promised, with road numbers, since we have a map before us now:
Going up from San Miguel to the US, you take 57 past San Luis Potosí to the signs toward Victoria. It's a busy small area with an overpass, before you get to Matehuela, about halfway between San Luis Potosí and Matehuela.
Turn right at that sign to Ciudad Victoria. You'll be going left on highway 101 toward Victoria. Follow the Corta sign veering to the right to bypass the city. You're in the mountains so you won't even see the city.
Continuing on 101 to 180, follow the signs to San Fernando. Stay on the highway past San Fernando, don't go into San Fernando.
Go left on 97 toward Reynosa. As you come into Reynosa, stay on the right and you'll come to a fork in the road, with an auto parts store in the middle of the fork. Continue on the right and you'll go onto the freeway.
When you see the International Bridge sign, go off the freeway. We always have to hang a U there, we never have quite figured out how to come off heading the right direction. Then proceed to the border. We take the Pharr crossing.
Coming back, when you leave immigration at Pharr, take the second right toward Reynosa. Look for the sign to San Fernando and highway 97. You'll have to do a retorno U to get there, from the left lane. Continue on 97 until you go onto 180 toward San Fernando. You will then turn onto highway 101 toward Ciudad Victoria. Again take the Corta and follow 101 toward San Luis Potosí.
If you still have questions, ask Norma on the forums!
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
November 30, 2009--Directions avoiding Monterrey, the giant black moths, SMA recycling, another good book signing
For those who have written asking for the directions to get to McAllen without going near Monterrey and with only one small toll, here are Norma's words:
On heading up from SMA, take 57 past San Luis Potosi. Before you get to Matahuela, there is a sign to the right for Cuidad Victoria. If you get to Matahuela you've gone too far. Follow the signs toward Ciudad Victoria and but before you are in the city you will see a sign, CORTA Ciudad Victoria. (Corta means cut, a short cut, a bypass.)
Follow the Corta signs until you see the signs for Reynosa. As you enter the outskirts of Reynosa there will be a Y in the road--veer right and the road will go onto a freeway. Get off at the International Bridge, which is to the left, but the exits go to the right. Hang a U-turn. Then cross the border at Pharr into the US. The banjercito will be to your left before you cross the border if you need to return a car permit.
On heading back to SMA, after leaving immigration at Pharr, take the second turnoff to the right toward Reynosa. Continue in the middle lane but be ready to get into the left lane, looking for the sign for San Fernando. It will be a U turn retorno from the left lane. At the next San Fernando sign make a right.
(We overshot one street beyond the San Fernando sign and got on a one-way going the wrong way and a transito stopped us, but he only gave us a warning.)
Continue toward San Fernando, always taking the Corta, the short cut. You will be following the signs as if toward Ciudad Juarez, but before that you will see the Corta sign for a left turn to San Luis Potosi. You'll hit 57 which will take you back to the turnoff to San Miguel de Allende.
It's Greek to me, but Norma assures me that anyone who has driven to or from the border will understand. If you have better directions or Norma has made a mistake, please email us.
Before I get to the road trip itself, I'll describe some of the other happenings of the past two week. I wrote about the cats tracking a giant cockroach/palmetto bug in the bathroom when we first moved in, but they missed another bug that decided to make its appearance when we had friends over. How embarrassing.
And then one morning we noticed the cats were all staring at the ceiling in the living room--a giant black moth we at first thought was a bat. When I was taking watercolor classes at Belles Artes every year around this time there would be hundreds of these huge black moths all over the building, mostly dead in the stairwells. I was afraid we'd be deluged with hundreds of them ourselves but we only saw the one, and it disappeared at some point, whether Alejandro ate it or it flew away or we'll find it behind the TV some day. Friends in La Lejona had the same thing happen but it was a real bat, and they chased it all over the house with a broom until it figured out the open front door. We really aren't bothered by bugs, other than the cutter ants that keep walking off with our red bougainvillea leaves, but it only takes one appearance at a dinner party to be memorable.
Norma has an alliance with two neighborhood boys who now show up promptly at 7 am M-W-F to get their five pesos to wait for the garbage truck and to load our bags onto the truck. Norma can wake up for a few minutes of consciousness to get the bags out and then come back to bed. So that problem is resolved.
The recycling company doesn't come to Col. San Rafael but here's the link: http://www.reciqla.com/index.php. For about nine pesos a month the trucks will come to these colonias: Mondays starting at 8 am, Candelaria, Labradores, Sonterra, El Cortijo, Cieneguita. Tuesdays: Atascadero, Residencial Fuentes, Balcones, Obraje. Wednesdays: Villa de los Frailes, La Cañada, Mesa del Malanquín, El Encanto, El Secreto, La Lejona II sección. Thursdays: San Antonio. Fridays: Guadiana, El Parque, Ojo de Agua, La Cañadita, Condominios El Caracol. Saturdays are the pickups in some areas of Centro. We're on the list to be alerted if they expand into San Rafael.
This is what the website says about the amount of trash generated in San Miguel de Allende: "...during the low season, more than 90 tons of residue enters the landfill every day. During the high season, it increases to 110 tons....By 2012 there will be over 3,000 new residences in San Miguel. Considering that an average family of four generates approximately 300 kilos of waste per year, the volume of waste they could generate is over 900 tons per year. This represents 40% more than the present generation." Whatever helps keep some of these tons out of the landfills sounds good to me.
Our second book signing, at the Biblioteca Nov. 27, wasn't as big as the one at our book designer's house, at which we had 45 people, even though this one was in Centro. But we still sold some books and signed some more and answered a lot of questions for the ten people there. We've heard other book signings around this time also have had fewer people than expected. Tourism is definitely down. We're doing very well on Amazon.com, however, and that's our main sales point. We expect The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico will have a long selling period, with updates as needed.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
November 18, 2009--Road trip! Odds and ends
We mentioned our upcoming bus trip to McAllen to a friend and she asked to come along and offered to drive! Road trip!
She's never been to McAllen and is going to feel much more secure driving with those who have already been the route many times, by way of Victoria rather than Monterrey.
As somone who once did a four-month camping road trip from Detroit to LA via Quebec, Fairbanks and Mexico City, I admit this isn't exactly a biggie. And Norma and I did RV full-time for 3 1/2 years. But still it's exciting.
We keep adding little things to our "look for" list, like camel shoelaces since we've only found white, brown, black and outrageous patterns and colors for the young set in SMA shoelaces.
Most importantly we're picking up more books to sell back in SMA. We need them for our 2-4 pm Nov. 27 book signing at the Biblioteca in the Sala upstairs. Y'all come!
Little things keep working out. Two boys have discovered that Norma will pay them five pesos to wait around for the garbage truck and toss our one to five bags up to the guys in the back of the truck each M-W-F. There was no service Monday for Revolution Day and the bags had really piled up. So she only has to get up at 7 am, throw something on, put the bags out on the sidewalk, then come back to bed. That helps.
Not everyone is so lucky among our friends--one young woman with two babies is going to have to go back to her folks in the US, the money is too scarce in SMA. She hates to go, but caring for your babies always comes first.
And at the same time construction is moving right along on the Rosewood Artesana hotel resort and luxury homes complex across from Cardo parking lot, where individual homes will sell for $800,000 to $3 million USD. They hope. They're still bullish on SMA and didn't stop construction when the economic crisis hit hard, as many of us thought would happen.
We hosted my book club at our place yesterday and Norma made pizza, to the usual standing ovation and urgings that she really ought to open a restaurant in town. Right. Talk about work! Often I feel as if I'm working as hard now in retirement as I ever did in the US.
After seven years of thinking over and over again that she'd finally found the perfect pizza recipe, now she feels she finally HAS found the perfect pizza recipe, grilling them on our BBQ. She made two kinds, "the works" with pepperoni and Italian sausage and all the usual toppings, and a pesto and goat cheese vegetarian one.
Norma and our road trip accompanist are off taking our three assorted dogs to Rodrigo Garibay, the vet in La Lejona who has good boarding facilities. Agreeable dogs of similar sizes can run loose together in their own areas. This will be Lambchop's first visit to Rodrigo and she's going to love it. Our housekeeper is staying in our house while we're gone and will take care of our cats.
Spanish class got very hard the second week, three new tenses being thrown at us at one time, but this morning we only did review, review, review. Last week I felt so stupid. All my life I've based my self worth on being the smartest one in the room. If I wasn't the smartest in a particular situation, at least I worked the hardest and could appear to be the smartest. Last week I was the dumbest. Very humbling. Not that it was the first time my posturing hasn't worked.
Somehow I just cannot memorize a thing, and at some point there has to be some rote memorization of vocabulary when you're learning any language. The teacher recommends dancing along to music while reciting the words, and also he suggests holding the cards up just above eye level on the left side, which is where people instinctively look when they are trying to remember something. That way you will see the card in your mind when you do that. Hmmm.
I'm still shuffling my old Warren Hardy index cards, along with some new ones I made containing the 26 most common irregular verbs, and I still can't fix any of them in my memory. Some days I can rattle along with a taxi driver to the point where he congratulates me on my Spanish, other days I can't think of word one that I am sure is correct, blocked by lacking a key word or verb tense. Bleah.
Our teacher, born in Mexico City, does point out to class members who think Mexican sentence structure is illogical, that Spanish came from Latin, which came first. It was English that messed up much of the clean, clear logic of Latin and the Romance languages.
Of course it makes sense that you should say, el gato negro, setting the word cat first and then describing the cat as black, rather than having the adjective black floating around first without a noun to anchor it to. The teacher insisted I should bring my index cards along on our road trip. Sure. I'll dance around in the car, too.
Somehow I feel giddy about the trip, which is only a couple of very crowded days. It will be fun to see how much on our "look for" list we can actually find! PF Chang's and Barnes and Noble, here we come!
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
November 8, 2009--One successful book signing deserves another; planning a trip back to the US to pick up more books; succumbing to studying Spanish; candying up the neighborhood kids for Halloween
We didn't get the 75 book signing attendees I'd hoped for but we had around 45, most of whom bought books, more than the realistic Norma had expected to come to our Nov. 3 book signing. Thanks again to Jon and Wendy Sievert, and to Bill and Jackie Wilson who schlepped books, food and wine for us.
The Biblioteca wants us to do another book singing Nov. 27, 2-4 pm, in the Sala upstairs next to Teatro Santa Ana. At least we don't need to provide refreshments and drinks for this one--no food or drinks are allowed in the Sala room, and anyone who is hungry or thirsty can go to the Cafe Santa Ana on the same upstairs floor.
At the first book signing, people laughed in all the right places and listened attentively and asked lots of questions, so I guess my reading was successful. I'll do another reading at the Nov. 27 book signing, probably around 2:30 pm, and again answer questions. Rolly isn't able to come, he's having health problems.
We're having a heck of a time getting the books to San Miguel and other destinations within Mexico. In fact we're going to make a bus trip to McAllen before Nov. 27 to pick up three more cartons of books in person, rather than just hoping the cartons will arrive here in time.
Two former SMA residents now live in the McAllen area and they will receive the boxes for us. We plan to hit Red Lobster and P.F. Chang's, Barnes & Noble, and probably Target and JC Penney in the day and a half we'll be NoB.
The luxury Omnibus or ETN buses round trip from Querétaro to Reynoso and back will cost us about $100 USD for both fares with our INAPAM cards. We'll see if the bus lines provide transportation across the border as they did our last visit north, or maybe we'll end up with a cab across the border, and maybe it will be cheaper to rent a car for one day while there. As I recall, all the cab rides were around $10 USD.
Motel 6 is around $45 USD a night. We'll take advantage of night bus rides to save on any other motel costs, sleeping through the night. Since we'll be there such a short time it will be fun. When we have to deal with traffic, congestion, stress, and higher prices in the US for any length of time it no longer is enjoyable.
Yes, we go to chain restaurants when we're in a condensed trip north. No time to experiment with unknown restaurants, we know exactly the tastes we want and we know we'll get them at reliable chains: Mongolian beef made spicy for Norma, dan dan peanut sauce noodles for me at P F Chang's. Norma makes great Chinese food but these two tastes don't seem to be able to come out of our SMA kitchen.
Even though sea level McAllen is probably hotter overall than 6,400-foot elevation San Miguel, the stores will have thick dark winter clothing, their summer sales long gone, so we probably won't be able to pick up any clothes this trip. Not that it hasn't been cold enough the past few weeks in SMA to appreciate thick sweaters and coats. We've been layering like crazy. Mexican houses are usually very cold because of the thick cement construction and lack of heat. We have to shed layers once we hit the sun outside. We have to keep telling ourselves as we layer, it will be warmer outside than inside.
And our propane fireplace had a gas leak so we haven't been able to use it yet. Our handyman Pedro Romero comes back tomorrow to get it working. SMA probably start a heat wave in honor of the new furnace connection.
We gave out assorted sweets (dulces) to the neighborhood kids Oct. 31 and distributed the leftovers to the same kids in daylight the next day, on our way to Day of the Dead events in Centro. We're hoping we won over the kids with our generosity. Even the littlest tykes definitely know of the existence of Halloween as a day gringos give out candy, and personally I don't think the two holidays take away from each other.
Every holiday articles appear worrying that Halloween will obliterate Day of the Dead, Santa Claus is taking over the Nativity, the Easter Bunny will outshine the risen Jesus. We all shake our heads and say that the old ways can't possibly survive secularization.
But somehow the booths go up all over town the week before Day of the Dead selling sugar skulls and lambs, all the grocery stores feature Dia del Muerte breads, the altars spring up in both gringo- and Mexican-owned businesses, the flower vendors sell out of marigolds and a deep red flower that looks like what we called cock's comb when we grew it in Michigan, and the cemeteries are full of mourners recreating their departed loved ones' favorite foods and memories.
I think the kids know the difference in the religious and secular holidays. The same problem exists in the US--probably far more households buy a chocolate Easter bunny than go to church Easter morning, or put out gifts under a Christmas tree than go to Midnight Mass. Can't blame gringos for this, there is such movement across the border in all directions that Halloween is brought here by Mexicans who studied or worked in the US, and the media and movies don't stop at borders.
So soon more Mexican newspaper editorials will come out worrying about Santa Claus in Mexico, while Mega, Home Depot and many other stores have gigantic displays of Santas and Christmas tree ornaments and not so much of nativity scenes.
I'm hard at work with my old Warren Hardy verb conjugation cards, concentrating hard on learning regular past tense (as in, I shopped there, we ate there) and the imperfect past tense (as in, I used to shop there, sometimes we ate dinner there). If I had worked as hard at studying the past tenses as I did in complaining about how hard they were, I might be fluent by now.
Eli at www.thespanishguru.com wants us to make all our own index cards with verbs and other vocabulary, so that the act of making the cards ourselves reinforces the learning experience. At the first class last Wednesday he asked a question and I rattled off a long sentence that made him think momentarily I belonged in a higher level class than intermediate. Then he realized it was all in present tense and yes, I did need the class, badly. The next question, I totally froze, challenged beyond my comfort level.
Learning Spanish as an adult isn't easy, except for a very lucky few with the knack for languages. I remember a guy in one of my art classes when we first got here who was rattling off Spanish with the Mexican students as if he'd been born here. I asked him how long he'd been studying. He hadn't taken any classes, he'd just picked it up in the two weeks he'd been in SMA.
And then there's me, my ninth formal attempt to learn Spanish, caught again by the past tense that had been presented to me the first year with no success, and I just kept repeating that first year over and over again, blocking always at past tense. This time I'm determined to get beyond taxi and restaurant and housekeeper Spanish.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
November 1, 2009--Books arrive in San Miguel and are on sale in three locations; getting ready for the book signing Nov. 3; Day of the Dead activities are all around us; cold snap
It's been really cold at night the past couple of weeks, ever since Hurricane Rick threatened the coast and other tropical storms have been hanging around both sides of Mexico. The central plateau sometimes get the fallout from severe weather coming up both coasts and we're in the middle.
We've been carrying pre-sales books all over town to get them to local residents and mailing them to other buyers throughout Mexico. We're hoping for at least the 75 attendees who came to our 2006 book signing for Falling...in Love with San Miguel: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security. We're planning for both inside and outside possibilities for the reading, 3-5 pm Tuesday, address and directions in my last blog.
A couple of friends have been going through some terrible personal stuff, so our attention has been divided several ways. All around town Day of the Dead altars and celebrations are enlivening the city and drawing much-needed tourists. Merchants and restaurant owners who read about the book signing in Atención keep thanking us and hoping we'll help bring more people back to Mexico, as tourists and as prospective SMA residents.
In many ways San Miguel is continuing on just as it always has, but there is an underlying current across the US that spills over to here, optimism tempered by deep worries. I suspect that many more US and Canadian citizens will continue to think about moving to Mexico, for so many reasons, despite the hype over the flu (so far overblown, and H1N1 is hitting far worse in the US) and the ongoing battle with the drug cartels (crime still feels really minor here compared to how we sensed it personally around us in LA).
You shouldn't consider moving to Mexico solely to save money. You have to be an adaptable person, willing to immerse yourself in a new culture and way of life, or else you will be uneasy all your days here--always trying to get the fireworks to stop and never accepting that things are different. Not inferior, just different. We really hope our book will be a service to many people who are being forced to think about moving someplace else where they can survive economically, to help them see if Mexico is a realistic choice for them.
We bought a big bag of assorted Halloween candy and were suprised to find it contained Tootsie Rolls and red licorice. Kids who come to our door later tonight and tomorrow night will not have any of those in their assortment! Luckily the bag did not contain miniature chocolate bars or we'd be in worse trouble. May the kids who try to sell Chiclets in the Jardin never switch to Snickers.
We don't know how entrenched Halloween is in this neighborhod compared to Day of the Dead and how many will show up. Last night we were in the Jardin and brought the candy, luckily, because many kids were in Halloween costumes and gobbled up goodies from us, mouthing the words "Trick or Treat. Maybe they weren't sure what the words meant but they knew that gringos carrying bags were likely to give them candy. They're not quite clear that Halloween is Oct. 31, they're wearing costumes this entire weekend just in case they spot a gringo with a bag that could contain dulces.
I'm finding my Spanish is not good enough for San Rafael, though I felt okay with my level most of the time living in Centro. I'm going back to classes Wednesday at www.theSpanishguru.com, whose slogan is that he emphasizes talking more like a native than a textbook.
A friend took beginners level from the man, who was born in Mexico City and taught himself English by paying attention to casual conversation, to what people actually say to each other, rather than from classes. His approach to teaching Spanish is similar, concentrating on real conversation and slang.
Norma will follow later--she wants to start at beginners I, even though we both have had the equivalent of eight semesters of Spanish, the same first year repeated over and over.
Maybe this time I will actually learn past tense enough to use it confidently, instead of having to mentally conjugate verbs every time I try, and by then the conversation has come to a screeching halt. Norma is even threatening to go back to Warren Hardy I, probably the best Spanish course we ever took, though the intensive 2 1/2 weeks practically kill you. We were so overwhelmed by Warren Hardy II that we never did conquer it. We had to back to the US right after that course and forgot everything. So now it's back to work.
Our garbage collection has returned to normal. As is usual in Mexico when political administrations change, the incoming and outgoing political parties are charging this and that about each other. We can't possibly know what is true, what is political posturing, what has been arranged for political PR, etc. Same as the US.
Luckily the Mexican Constitution forbids foreigners from attempting to influence Mexican politics on any level, so we don't have to try. There has to be a balance between paying attention to what is going on in the real world of Mexico, not just our isolated expat reality, and trying to change Mexican politics, which is definitely not our responsibility or realm. I just want our garbage picked up regularly.
I do wish the trucks came to our colonia later in the day. We have had to change our entire lifestyles, which were geared to our biological preference for 2 am-10 am bedtimes, to going to bed at 11 pm so we can be up for the garbage trucks at 7 am M-W-F.
And if we're following an 11 pm-7 am sleep schedule three nights a week, it just doesn't work to try to switch to 2 am-10 am the other four days. So these night owls are now almost early birds. Have to admit, it is nice to get so much done in the mornings now.
We dug out our sweatshirts and pants from the move and in the mornings and evenings now we simply live in sweats. We're not ready to figure out how the propane heaters and the fireplace in our new house work. We'll save that learning curve for December and January, our worst months. I'm alrady looking forward to Candelaria Feb. 2 when Parque Jaurez turns into a giant plant nursery and we can find some hanging fuschias for our patios.
We hung a hummingbird feeder but it's been so cold, the hummers may have already migrated. Our cats keep eyeing the feeders in anticipation, though. Friends in El Encanto have four feeders and a continuous stream of the tiny birds, who are so tame they light on fingers. We don't want them to get that tame here in case they mistake a tail for a finger!
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
October 25, 2009--We've set Tuesday, Nov. 3, 3-5 pm for our book signing; up close and personal with garbage; our tap water is certifiably pure; last hassles with our FM2s and work permits; H1N1 and the vaccine; Sappo's; the circus; John Davidson
All the US presale orders of the book have been printed, shipped, and arrived, and we already received a wonderful five-star review on Amazon.com!
If you have your copy of The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico already and you like it, please write a review on Amazon. (If you don't like it, tell us.) We were so happy to have gotten back up to five stars overall on Falling...in Love with San Miguel: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security, after one guy posted that he didn't like that book because it wasn't a how-to book. Then suddenly we got another review saying the same thing which knocked us back down to just below five stars again. I hope those two read the latest book that is actually the how-to book they wanted.
But the Mexican-bound presale books are still stuck in Laredo. We're not worried at all that it's only nine days until our book signing, not at all. We may hop an Americanos bus to Laredo ourselves and haul all the boxes across the border in plastic plaid shopping bags.
We're having the signing Nov. 3, 3-5 pm, at the home of our book designer, Jon Sievert, and his wife Wendy, at Campanario 12 in Mexiquito. Directions: take Calzada de la Aurora past Fabrica Aurora to the end, and turn left across from the Pollo Feliz onto Fray Juan de San Miguel. Then turn left again onto Claustro, then right onto Campanario to the end. We'll have big green signs saying "Book Signing" with arrows posted at each corner.
We like having our book signings at private homes, rather than in someplace like the Biblioteca where other people are walking through and it is formal and we have to follow the site's rules. We'll have a big casual party for our book signing.
In fact, since in the middle of all our moving Norma never did get to have a big birthday party for her 70th earlier this month, we'll have a birthday cake, too. Practice the lyrics to "Las Manañitas" as well as "Happy Birthday"--there will be a test.
Our house is settling down and feeling like a home, though boxes keep multiplying in the garage. We still have to be up close and personal with our garbage, though. It was so easy in our previous Centro apartment--Maria just took it all away for us and it disappeared magically. Here we set the alarm for 7 am every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and hope.
New Mayor Lucy Nuñez initiated a Volunteer Clean-up Day the first Saturday she was in office. Dozens of volunteers with pickups joined the garbage trucks and scoured the streets for the garbage that was piling up in certain streets. The reason given was that the previous administration had depleted all the city funds and there was no money for gasoline for the garbage trucks. At 7 am sharp Saturday the garbage truck pulled up on our block and Norma raced to find her clothes and get the bags out of our garage in time.
And then the trucks came promptly on Monday and Wednesday as well. What a relief.
But Friday they didn't show. We're optimistic they'll show Monday. Our garage is unbearable when they miss a pickup day.
Lucy has even called for private donations to the city to carry through this turnover crisis. It is a long tradition in Mexico that when a new administration is coming in, the old one depletes all funds. If you want to give money for garbage collection or anything else, I have a post in the forums of this website with the city's bank account number. It's a surprise to many expats that you often can pay a bill or make a donation by going to a bank and giving the teller cash and the other person's or company's account number.
Lucy has cleaned house in another way--all the previous department heads are gone. www.atencionsanmiguel.org this week has bios on the new appointees. I used to know several of the department heads in the old administration but I don't know a soul in city government now.
We had to go to the Presidencia, the city offices out by the glorieta to the road to Dr. Mora, to register our work permits with Hacienda/SAT. We saw the garbage trucks in the back of the parking lot, some of them broken down and there are no funds for repairs so they sit in the back of city hall, full of reeking garbage.
When we finally got an appointment for Hacienda through our accountant, our timeline of 30 days to change addresses and complete our FM2 paperwork was almost up. The Hacienda appointment was simple, over in 20 minutes each. But we did run into an expat who was trying to deregister from Hacienda so that she no longer had to pay taxes. She was retiring from her health care job, and she complained that it was much harder to deregister than it had been to register a few years before.
Our very last step, we thought, was to go back to Immigration with our completed Hacienda paperwork and also change addresses. Immigration closes at 1 pm, and we made it in plenty of time. It was going to be all over soon, our six months of hassles getting our FM2s and work papers. We handed over all our paperwork to one of the two officials up front, after only half an hour's wait.
He looked at all our papers, then read them all again, and pronounced that we didn't have work papers!
We freaked. Six months of incredible hassles and we didn't have work papers? What was all that fine print in our FM2s then? He read it again. He asked where did we do this work. We said in our house, and we repeated that we needed to change the address. He read it all again, shaking his head. We were in catatonic shock.
The other official pulled him into the back room. Many minutes later he came out and smiled and almost apologized. He said something like he understood our frustration. Now all we needed were formal letters in Spanish requesting the address changes and final completion of the work permit paperwork. (You can't just say you need to change addresses, it has to be a formal application.) It seemed as if he had never seen an asimilado work permit before.
Our attorney had said he worked hard to get us the best kind of visa for a work permit, asimilado status, so that we could do any kind of job we wanted. All we'd have to do, when and if we decided to do anything more than writing and publishing, would be to tell Immigration that we were adding the new job, just like with inmigrado status. (No, Norma will not open a pizzeria.)
We went home, frazzled, and I wrote up two letters in Spanish requesting the address change and the completion of the work permit paperwork. We still had a form to be typed up, so we had to go to the escritorio público across the street from Immigration the next morning first.
I showed that man my letters and he smiled gently and said it would be better if he did them. Oh well, my Spanish seems to have deteriorated now that I have moved into a more Mexican area. I no longer feel confident and am going to have to go back to classes or study on my own or something.
He prepared very formal letters with all the embellishments and purple prose of Mexican formal documents, another 460 pesos, and we went back across the street to Immigration.
The same guy was much more friendly that day (feeling guilty perhaps?). He accepted the paperwork, stamped about 50 pages in each application, and said come back in two days, which we did. The FM2s were actually ready.
And finally we are through. Six months of hassles.
We had another moment of relief this week. We'd paid about 720 pesos to have our water tinaco cleaned out and silver halide capsules added to our tank through Monarca, which assured us that was all we needed to have drinkable tap water for the next two years.
But we kept remembering that Dr. Delgado, an infectious disease expert who had been in SMA about five years ago until he was lured back to Dallas to earn enough to send his two daughters to college, had insisted we'd need two different water purification systems to be safe.
The house already had water purification filter systems on two taps and we finally found replacement filters. Then we took a sample of tap water to Hospital de la Fe for testing, about 260 pesos more.
We ran out of the last garrafon of bottled water we'd brought with us in the move, and started to drink from the tap even before the test results were back. It was like shop lifting, a secret sin. Should we have waited until after we got the test results? Every tummy twinge had us worried. And then we picked up the test results and all four categories were zero.
I feel guilty every time I turn on the tap or flush the toilet and the water pressure system shoots out so much water so fast. When you make big changes in your life it's a good time to reexamine your footprint on the earth. I'm trying to just turn on the tap a little bit so I don't waste water. One good thing--the hot water reaches the shower almost instantly, instead of the five minutes of wasted cold water in our previous shower waiting for it to heat up enough.
Every time we get a throat tickle we think about H1N1, too. We've heard that Mexico's criteria for giving out the vaccine are different than in the US, where those over 65 are the last in priority. Children, those under 25, and pregnant women are at highest risk for the complications of H1N1, and those over 65 seem to have some antibodies already from previous exposure to similar flus.
But here supposedly we will be able to get the vaccine sooner. I'm sticking with the priorities from the CDC, why take a dose from someone who is high risk when I'm low risk? It doesn't much matter yet--there is no vaccine available here yet anyway.
I've also read that Mexico is trying to get its own sources of the vaccine, which is in high demand because H1N1 grows much more slowly in the eggs in which the vaccine is cultivated than the CDC had expected. If I were a health care worker or cared for children or was younger or pregnant, I'd be anxious for the vaccine. Right now, I'm not worrying. We did buy four packages of face masks in case there is a rapid increase in cases here. I'm washing my hands more often than I think I ever have in my life.
Despite all these hassles we've been having a lot of fun. We tried Sappo's restaurant last week and loved it. We shared a grilled fish and pineapple Veracruz style sandwich and an arrachera (grilled flank steak) sandwich on foccacio, both with large side salads, for 70 pesos each, about $5.25 USD. That squeaks into our "Cheap Eats" category.
The owner of the beautiful house near Parque Juarez died and left it to an employee, who has made it a wonderful restaurant. Sappo means frog or toad, even though I'd learned that frog was la rana and toad was el sapo. It's his restaurant, he can spell it the way he wants. I'm sure no expert, I'm just confused.
We went to the Atayde Hermanos circus last week because they have 15 fantastic tigers who are worth the 120 peso mid-range admission all by themselves. Others have said that this is the best of the traveling circuses that come to San Miguel. We also went to Atayde the last time they were in SMA, maybe four years ago.
Last time the clowns did one skit that was definitely making fun of Bush. I wondered if they would do anything on Obama this year, but as far as I could tell, the acts were politics-free.
The clowns were hilarious--they did one skit as members of a small orchestra, and the conductor was made up to look something like Johnny Depp. Every time one of the musicians made a mistake, Johnny Depp took him by the ear and marched him backstage where a shot rang out. When the orchestra was down to one member that clown was really shaking. The rest of the skit was his grand escape.
Both one-hump and two-hump camels were in other acts, along with draft horses, zebras, and a giraffe whose only talent was pulling sheets of some kind of treat out of the mouths of children. They lined up to pay to have their photos taken with the giraffe--and to get a big slobber across the mouth. It was those gorgeous tigers who were the highlight, however. Great fun.
We caught Jon Davidson's new act at the Biblioteca this weekend. He is even cuter than he was when I first saw him on TV in his own music hours, as the host of "Hollywood Squares," as the most frequent guest host on "The Tonight Show," and so many other shows.
There was a cute tongue in cheek game show type slide show before the performances began, with multiple choice answers to questions about Jon's personal and professional life.
I was surprised at how many places he's performed! The only Las Vegas major hotel he hasn't appeared at is Circus Circus.
What everyone in our age group loves about Davidson's performances is that he plays to our interests and concerns. Collapsing on the floor, he groans that, at our age, anything that doesn't hurt doesn't work.
He does a great sing-along medley of songs from the '30s through the '60s as his encore--always be sure to yell for more.
Some of his songs are true dramatic stories, sung more as an actor. His ever-patient wife of 30 years, Rhonda, puts up with his personal stories about their life together in the cyclical pattern of long-time marriages.
He gets the audience very involved, from singing to a woman in the first row, making out madly with her hand and arm, saying that while he's singing to the husband's wife, the husband is paying for the show.
He throws in a lot of SMA references, coming out at the beginning in a red sequinned robe like Liberace, and joking that he borrowed the over-the-top robe from local artist Edward Swift. Turned out he really did borrow the robe from Edward, who ended up giving it to Davidson.
I love his comments about all the closets being wide open in San Miguel, and he even does a love song to the latte boy at Starbucks for the benefit of all the gays in the audience.
He's written a play about his problematic relationship with his now-deceased father, which will be performed at the Santa Ana in January. I'm going to make a point of seeing that performance, too.
He loves "playing to the home crowd" now that he has lived in San Miguel for five years. Along with Doc Severinson, SMA is lucky to have such outstanding internationally renowned talent living and performing here!
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
October 11, 2009--Waiting for the books to arrive; new recomendations as we fix up our house; kids love to ring doorbells; surviving a cold that might have been a mild seasonal flu; Tall Boys Band performance at Cerveza San Miguel
While we wait for our first five cartons of The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico to arrive and shipments to get out to all the pre-sales customers, we're working on our new house. Here are some new recommendations that I will be adding to this website's Recommendations page.
Our accountant working with us to get settled with Hacienda on paying our Mexican taxes is Rocío Pérez Gonzales, Hidalgo 35, 152-0249, rociperez@notario9sma.com.mx. She charges 200 pesos every two months for her small business services on work permits. That's a whole lot less than some of the accountants working with expats on their work permits charge.
We had Monarca water purifiers, 152-3991, come out to clean our water storage tank and add colloidal silver pellets to kill the bacteria and parasites in our whole-house water system. Then we replaced the filters in the faucet purification systems in the kitchen and main bathroom as a further backup. We're taking a sample of our water out to Hospital de la Fe Monday to get it tested to make sure it is safe to drink from the tap. After so many years of drinking only bottled water, I'm hesitant to dare to drink from our taps even though it should be perfectly safe now.
We have a great new handyman, Pedro Romero, 044-415-111-5110, who does everything--plumbing, electrical, tiles, painting, even gardening, and we like him a lot. (The only thing he'll admit he can't do is anything with computers and electronics, and for that we call Daniel Guerra, 044-415-153-2583.) We talked a lot during the week about expats who never learn Spanish and he says it's better for him, they all need Pedro. He's never worked in the US, he learned English in classes in SMA.
Pedro has two young men working for him, the older one for 1 1/2 years now, and we like them, too. They clean up after themselves, always a good sign. We also feed them lunch when they're there more than five hours. We make sure to have two bottle of regular Coke each man on hand each day and we can expect an entire kilo of tortillas and whatever else we put out for lunch to go fast. Norma's middle son used to eat 24 tacos at a meal, so we were prepared for big young males' food needs. We gave Pedro our budget and our prioritized list of more than a dozen jobs we wanted done. He finished most of the list and will return to do the rest in November.
The neighborhood has been fascinated with the work of Pedro and his workers. We talked about how high to place the new wireless electronic doorbell, knowing that kids love to ring doorbells as they walk by. When I was a preteen, groups of us used to make phone calls to strangers and ask them if their refrigerator was running. If they said yes, we said, "Go catch it," and we'd hang up, laughing ourselves silly, which we were. I think ringing doorbells is Mexican kids' equivalent.
We didn't guess high enough, or else there is some adult out there who gets a perverse pleasure out of ringing doorbells and disappearing. We're going to raise it some more.
One new thing we have to consider now that we pay our own utilities is the amount of electricity a house uses. You want to keep below 250 kilowatt hours or whatever the measurement is, or you get kicked up into a higher bracket and you could be charged rates like 4000 pesos every two months. We can tell from reading our meter daily that we're going to be close. We now are careful about turning off lights when we leave a room and disconnecting all the electronics and computer gizmos in our office at night and when we leave.
We've had two tile murals of the Virgin of Guadalupe put into our front and back walls that we hope will cut down on the graffiti. There was already graffiti when we moved in and we thought, how good that it's only a light turqoise, it will be easy to cover. Wrong, it was a fluorescent oil-based paint that needed a primer, not simple covering. And the paint that had been left for us to touch up the walls turned out to be a different shade than the existing walls. We kept hoping it would dry to match but it never did. And so we had to buy yet more paint and redo the front and back of the house completely, with more to spare for the inevitable future graffiti to come. Every time we go out of the house and come home we're hoping there is no new graffiti. So far so good. We understand there is more and more graffiti popping up all over San Miguel, probably young guys who had to come back to Mexico when the construction jobs disappeared in the US and the frustrations of the current economy. home.
The cats and dog haven't figured out their doggie doors yet. We shove them through, they wail on the other side. Pedro thwarted all the cats' escape routes so far. He moved the vent on our dryer to get it to fit inside the laundry shed, so Coco has no path to the roof and outside walls now. The pets are so much happier with all this room, two patios, and an upstairs, downstairs and garage to explore. They love it when Norma uses the grill on the front patio. They keep expecting a sausage or chicken breast to slide off into their mouths. We're going to add hanging hummingbird feeders to the front patio eventually, and that will be their movies and TV. We have to out-thwart both our pets and neighborhood kids.
I'm starting to have sympathy for Old Lady Duffy back in Detroit, whom we used to drive crazy with our pranks when I was in grade school. She fell for the tricks all the time and called the police on us constantly, which made us do more and more, until the cops stopped coming. I've turned into Old Lady Duffy.
Norma and I both came down with head colds that might have been a mild flu. Weeks of stress, moving, exhaustion, and living on too many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches will do that to you. I started out with diarrhea, a headache and scratchy throat that quickly turned into a regular head cold that is almost over now for me, and Norma is in the stuffed up head stage, another few days for her.
I wouldn't have even thought to call it a possible flu if it weren't for the H1N1 news, and we watched carefully to see if we'd get the high temperatures, severe coughs and difficulty breathing that seem to be significant symptoms of H1N1. But we didn't have any of those symptoms, so I think we can safely say it was very ordinary. We stayed in as much as possible for the week. I worked hard to stifle all coughs while on buses to be sure. If you want to get glares, just cough in public these days. Not every cough is H1N1. We still won't get the vaccination because we're not considered high risk, and why take one of the too-few vaccines when it could be used for someone high risk?
We went to The Tall Boys Band performance at Cerveza de San Miguel last night and had a great time. The Ajijic band was hoping for 150 people but the downpour right at the time people would have been heading to the restaurant and bar scratched that. Just as well--the patio couldn't be used in the rain, and when we got there a half hour early every seat was already filled anyway. There were at least 75 people there, maybe 100 considering those we couldn't see in an adjoining room, and everybody had a ball. The band promises to return to SMA soon, hopefully on a night when we can overflow onto the patio.
Very few men danced, as usual--I thought it was only Michigan where the men would never dance and so all the women ended up dancing together, which was always fine with me. Those who did dance were the Arthur Murray grad types, fun to watch. Norma and I strutted out and joined the first couple, who could have been auditioning for Dancing with the Stars. We were auditioning for American Bandstand, circa 1956. And soon a half dozen beautiful young women were on the floor, outdoing us in every way.
I sighed and told a friend sitting nearby, "Forty years ago I could have been right in there." And then I thought, it was more like 54 years ago when I was kicked off the dance floor at my elementary school dance for dirty dancing. My shimmy is better now but there's so much more to shimmy. I remember 54 years ago better than I do last week. Everything was new and intense back then.
The Tall Boys were having a great time themselves, it was clear. They performed their original songs, including "Somewhere in Mexico," and a lot of classic rock covers. Go to their website, www.tallboysband.com, and see their video and read their bios. Fascinating guys. I complimented one for his crazy life and he winked and said that he could only put a tiny part of it in his bio. Cervesa de San Miguel was a real road house for the night! And they have the advantage of all that free parking.
We'd brought a friend who was celebrating her birthday, and after she'd downed a very tender arracharra steak sandwich and onion rings and we'd shared nachos, we ordered Impossible Chocolate Cake for her. The waitress said, "That's impossible. We're all out," and recommended the mocha mud pie. Quite acceptable--plenty of crunchy mocha coffee beans throughout. No birthday candles, though. We sang "Happy Birthday" and I tried to remember the words to "Las Mañanitas" but we couldn't be heard over the band and crowd noise anyway. With Norma's singing, that's just as well. Friends use their one birthday wish to pray that Norma doesn't sing.
We walked outside through the parking lot to try to hail a cab and I stepped right into a puddle that oozed over my ankle. None of the few cabs on the Road to Dolores stopped at that hour. We had to go back inside and have the owner call us a cab, and then I had to apologize to the taxista for leaving muddy puddles inside his cab. The fare is double when you telephone for a cab anyway. When he started work again Sunday morning he had to do some major cleaning to do on his floor.
Today is the Feast of St. Francis, yet another Sunday procession. We saw pickups loaded with drummers and dancers headed for the Jardin. We were too exhausted to follow. Norma has been walking all the way from our new house into Centro all the time. I make it down to San Juan Dios mercado and start looking around for the next bus.
So far we've discovered one bus that goes right to Plaza Civica and another that goes out Calzada de Guadalupe, then out Canal and Calzada de la Estación to Bodega Aurrera and Immigration, then over on the Libramiento past Hospital de la Fe and on to Mega, and then it continues to La Luciernega and Tuesday Market and the Hospital General street and the city offices. What more could you ask for in a bus? If it took in Fabrica Aurora on the way home we'd have all our hotspots covered!
When we've got some time we'll take all the other buses in this area out to the ends of their routes just to see. Going up the Insurgentes hill from Guadalupe to Plaza Civica exhausts me so far. Soon I'll be able to do it right along with Norma, or at least only half a block behind, as is my usual speed. Going up and down the stairs inside all the time is getting easier. I should just follow the cats and dog up and down all day long! They like to stop right in the middle of the narrower steps in the middle at the turn, and wait for me to trip on them--especially when I'm doing it with the least light possible to save on electricity. We're dreading our first electrical bill, but loving our house.
And the boxes keep multiplying in the office and garage.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
October 5, 2009--Our proof copy of the book has gone astray; tourists are plentiful for the feast of St. Michael the Archangel; we sleep right through La Alborada 4 am fireworks; Cafe Iberica; painting the walls; our cats learn more escape routes; a law student offers to fix us both up with her male classmates; a neighbor gets arrested; we feel safe and comfortable in our new home even if the boxes keep multiplying as we try to get unpacked
Fedex documents that our proof copy of The Best How-to Book on Moving to Mexico hit our mailing service in Laredo Wednesday, Sept. 30. We should have gotten the proof Thursday, made sure the printing looked good, then sent off an email to the printer to start printing and shipping that very day, with books in the hands of those who made pre-sale purchases possibly Monday or Tuesday.
Instead, the Fedex envelope with our proof has gone poof. Our mailing service promises to track down the envelope Monday, among the thousands of pieces of mail, packages and Fedex envelopes it receives each day in Laredo for its four SMA customer pickup centers. We're sure hoping we don't have to order another proof copy-- more delays. Meanwhile, if you've made a pre-sale purchase, please hang on tight. We're even more anxious than you are to have the book in your and our hands.
We have a 250-word maximum for the promotional copy Bowker sends out to Amazon and other marketing outlets. Here are my 250 words:
>Thinking about moving to Mexico? This is the best book for in-depth answers to your concerns about what it costs to live in Mexico, the realities of health care, and your personal safety. You get not only the laws and technicalities but the ways expatriates handle the bureaucracy and inconsistencies, rules often applied differently from one official to the next, one day to another. You’ll learn about all 31 states and the Federal District (Mexico City) and how to find the best part of Mexico for you—whether you’ve got to have a beach, you love big cities, you must have cultural activities, you want the support of a region with many other English-speaking expats, or living your dream means finding an area undiscovered by tourists. You’ll find out how to make the move—passports, visas, car permits, pet regulations, furniture shipping. You’ll see what daily life is like—the ins and outs of keeping a car, finding an inexpensive apartment, building or remodeling, hiring employees, learning Spanish, staying in touch with family, educating your kids, getting a work permit, starting a business. Carol Schmidt and Norma Hair live in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, a UNESCO World Heritage site and expat haven, while Rolly Brook is the only gringo in Lerdo, Durango, and the three authors share their range of personal experiences. You’ll even learn some geography, history, and cultural differences—which can be a jolt or a delight as you explore complex, contradictory, charming, and always exhilarating Mexico. >
Back in San Miguel, we're happy to see all the tourists in town for the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel activities, though that means shortages of taxis and crowded sidewalks. We've been painting walls as well as still unpacking, and we were too tired to head for the Jardin at 3 am Saturday for La Alborada, the extensive dawn parade and fireworks. We planned to get up at the first barrage and view the fireworks from the tile-covered dining area on our rooftop terrace, but beyond a twitch at the first blasts we slept right through La Alborada. It is indeed possible to not hear two hours of fireworks.
We've seen many of the evening fireworks displays from our second story windows as we paint and type, though. And we couldn't help finding ourselves in the middle of some of the Jardin activities, including picking our way through hundreds of horses and riders being blessed in front of the Parroqua Saturday afternoon. Today, Sunday, there's another procession, and yet another next Sunday for the feast of St. Francis. Check out Que Pasa in www.atencionsanmiguel.org for all the events.
The internet was out all over town Saturday from around 8 am until early evening, and we'd planned to check the time for a party we thought was in the evening on the internet but couldn't. The hosts' local phone number was incorrect in Juarde, the expat phone directory, and our Vonage phone was down because the internet was down, so we couldn't call their Vonage number. Finally around 5 pm we thought to use our local phone to call their Vonage phone, which luckily was working for them. The party had started at 2:30 pm!
Trying to find an open taxi was impossible--finally one stopped and asked if we were going in the same direction as his current fare, which we were, so we shared. He had to back up a long tight block on San Antonio Abad when a parade cut us off. We arrived at the party as many were leaving but had a great time anyway. The host had made cheese grits--funny that this was the dish I kept coming back to before I got around to the jumbo shrimp-laden cocktails. And I'm not even from Texas or the South.
Other friends took us out Thursday for Norma's actual birth date, her 70th, to Cafe Iberica, a Spanish tapas place in Colonia San Antonio that was formerly Spanglish cafe. Now that was an experience, the six of us ordering 12 tapas and sharing: deep-fried avocado half, tiny bites of goat cheese with honey, chili fried shrimp, a platter of jamon serrano and manchego cheese, chorizo, mushrooms, Spanish meatballs--all delicious and surprisingly filling when finally all 12 little dishes were empty. We did share two salads and we couldn't pass up birthday dessert--coconut almond cheesecake, a candle for Norma's. Not a cheap eats, though most of the individual dishes would qualify on their own. (We're going to revisit all the "Cheap Eats" restaurants in SMA to verify current prices and details for our next book, probably starting our research in January.)
Being so close to San Juan Dios mercado, I got Norma a huge fresh flower arrangement--four birds of paradise, a tall red cockscomb, eight giant daisies, ten red roses, and assorted greenery. The tall bouquet would have been at least $75 in the US--here it was 180 pesos, about $15 USD. (Norma already knew the price so I can tell you.) She was going down to San Juan Dios herself that morning to buy our housekeeper a new mop, so I had to do some fancy maneuvering to avoid her.
Norma's father was a glazier and house painter, and she learned proper painting techniques at an early age. I'm the schlop and go kind of painter who painted the family house and garage several times in Detroit, and the driveway was multi-speckled for years afterward. Norma doesn't let me do much inside.
We found that the white walls in the two huge bedrooms and the 20 x 20' studio need a sealer base coat, or else it will take three coats of expensive paint to cover them with our golden curry, paprika and Mexican pottery colors. The golden curry is more like a light pumpkin, such a rich delight to write in. When I was a teenager my mom had me paint her kitchen a bright red, back when that color scheme first became popular, and I liked the richness and vibrancy of the kitchen that year. She made me redo it a pale yellow the next year when she tired of it but I didn't. I think there were still red and yellow streaks on the stove and fridge ever after.
I was born for Mexican colors. In high school I was chair of the senior color and motto committee, and I picked flame orange and teal as our class colors, which horrified everyone except my art teacher. (I was named Class Beatnik.) In the yearbook the officers renamed the colors copan and coral, which sounded less disturbing, back in that age when pink and gray together were considered daring, and the blue and green in Black Watch plaid made it an abominaton to many. Seeing all the vibrant colors as we drove into San Miguel in May, 2002, may have been my first hint that I belonged here.
The saga of the escape artist cats continues. Coco the Siamese mix was always a timid, tiptoeing princess in the apartment, having to check for boogeymen in the cabinet under the sink many times a day, barely daring to nudge open the door. jumping backward when she spotted the TP. In all this space she has turned into a despotic, conniving queen who saunters everywhere. "I am Siamese if you please."
The cats don't get to go out the front patio yet--the handyman, Pedro Romero, 044-415-111-5110, says he can wind the bougainvillea through the bars on top of the wall so that no cat can get through. Once the big black and white cat, Pico, learned to jump from the first ledge of the fountain to the lion's head where the water comes out of to the top of the ten-foot wall, where he considered jumping down to the street below before we could grab his tail and yank him to safety, the others learned that route, too. We don't think Pedro understands our cats' deviousness. A few bougainvillea thorns won't stop them.
Norma is going to hang the overhead pots and pans racks from our previous house onto the bars and attach chicken wire over the two half-circle racks so that when the cats jump up from the fountain, they run into the half-circle chickenwire overhang. We'll hide it all with the bougainvillea. That should stop them.
But the delicate little Siamese learned that if the shed holding the washing machine/dryer combo is left even a little ajar, she can sneak into the shed, jump up on the washer and then the dryer, and slink out the top of the ajar door onto the tile roof of the shed. From there it's a few feet to the top of the rear patio wall--which also leads to the neighbor's wall. She's been peeping into his windows and contemplating using his car as a jumping spot from his wall to the street. We've had to lure her back in with catnip and canned tuna, and now we absolutely never leave the shed door ajar. We're going to have to do something to thwart that escape route, too, in case one of us forgets. Or she learns to open the door. I wouldn't put it past her.
We're starting to recognize our neighbors that we see regularly as we walk down to San Juan Dios mercado and all the bus lines. We all do the usual joking around noon of whether it's "Buenos Dias" or "Buenes Tardes." Anyone who thinks Mexicans don't pay attention to time should notice how carefully we all note the noon hour when "Dias" becomes "Tardes"! The standing joke is kind of fun.
Taxi drivers out here are more likely to hear my first words of Spanish and think I'm fluent and then rattle off ordinary conversation that I have to struggle to understand. They don't assume as they do when picking up a fare in Centro that a gringo probably doesn't speak any Spanish. Here they assume I do. I'm doing my best. More and more taxi drivers we meet have worked in the US for many years, though, and are home because of the economic downturn that wiped out their jobs in Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Cincinnati. Some like to keep their English fresh by practicing on us as we practice Spanish on them.
A woman at Telecable who assumed I was fluent after I said the few appropriate sentences in Spanish I knew rattled off something, and when I looked confused she said in English, "You need to find a nice Mexican boyfriend to help you with your Spanish." She's studying law at the University of Leon and offered to fix us both up with some of her male classmates. Right. Wrong on so many levels.
Now we did have one incident--Colonia San Rafael has a reputation of gangs, though we feel pretty safe here. Women walk home at night here and young children play in the streets even a little after dark. Two young guys had been drunk out of their minds sitting on the curb one night when Norma walked the dog, and she looked at their faces well to remember them in case they turned out to be trouble makers.
The next day we were heading out the front door when we spotted four cops on foot knocking on a door kittycorner across the street from us. We dashed back inside our gate and peered out through a crack.
One guy answered the door. He apparently wasn't the right one, and he directed the police to the next door. They went to kick it in. I don't know whether they succeeded or the right guy came to the door, but the police grabbed him by the scruff of his neck so he was suspended in the air. They hauled him out to the police car and drove him off. I'd say Norma was right to consider the guys potential trouble makers. With any luck the guy will be in jail for a long time. Otherwise we'll know to watch out for him and his cohort just in case.
Norma had very little street smarts when I met her in 1979 and she had recently moved out of an Orange County suburb into LA. We were walking in West Hollywood one night when we spotted Ramparts police beating up a woman outside a bar, and Norma instinctively went to help. I pulled her back--we would have both been in jail, too, for interfering with an arrest. And there was no one else to call for help. We had many run-ins with Ramparts police in the years to come. The gangs in Silverlake/Echo Park at that time were really dangerous, as I've recounted here many times. The body of a gay man was dumped into a garbage bin across the street from our tax office at Sunset and Santa Monica Blvds., we had a homeless man with a knife living in the bathroom shared by five businesses in our office building, we had five robberies and burglaries and a murder in our back yard in our last four years in LA, etc. Colonia San Rafael is tame compared to what we experienced in LA!
Here we have three nice tiendas and a tortilleria very near us, we catch stray soccer balls that come our way as we walk, people are out on the street doing ordinary family things all the time, and the people actually smile at us and say "Buenos Dias"--or "Tardes," at exactly noon. I like it here. And our new house is incredible. I'm dancing through all the rooms right along with Coco the Siamese. We feel safe and comfortable here, even if the boxes waiting to be unpacked in the garage keep multiplying whenever we turn out the lights.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
September 28, 2009--Norma running after the garbage truck; she slices off her fingertip; we're still getting registered here and there; we finally have our FM2s and work permits after nearly six months; cats as escape artists; the books should be here in a week or two
I'm including some miniblogs I posted in the Living in San Miguel forum the past few weeks while I tried to get organized from the move, but for those of you who have been following the forum posts, there's new information here, too.
The proof copy from the printer for The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico has been shipped FedEx to our Laredo mailing service address. From the moment we have it in hand and can make sure everything is printing correclty, we send the email to the printer and the book starts to print and ship for all pre-orders. The pre-sale offer of a dolalr off and free shipping applies to all orders received on or before October 3.
And we found the baggie with all the nuts and bolts for the BBQ and we put it up ourselves! Of course we ended up with one funny-looking part left over and had to scour the incomprehensible directions to find out where it should have gone, many steps earlier. It was easier the second time.
Picture Norma running up the hill after the garbage truck at 7 am our first morning having to deal with our own garbage. Back at the apartment our housekeeper just hauled off all our trash bags to a common site for pickup and we never appreciated the ease. Now we see how the other half lives, those in houses.
The garbage trucks come to our section of Colonia San Rafael M-W-F at any time after 7 am, and from the moving we have lots of trash. (Our moving boxes, which we got from someone else who had just moved to SMA, are already spoken for.) Norma missed the truck and went roaring up the hill after it with the two most stinky bags the first time. Today we were ready, the garbage was near the door, and we set the alarm for before 7 am. Today the truck came at 7:30 am. Have I ever mentioned we're night people? We've never had to deal with hauling our own garbage to the truck and lifting it up to the guys who stomp it down inside the truck before. The joys of Mexico.
We're still tiptoeing through boxes in the studio/office and the garage, though the other rooms are shaping up nicely. Somewhere Norma has an efficient magnetic strip for hanging up all the knives, but until we empty that box, wherever it is, the knives are all over the kitchen, and she sliced off the pad of her left little finger last night.
There was nothing a hospital visit could do, though we certainly considered it. No way stitches could be done on the raw circle. It wasn't serious enough for plastic surgery, pig skin grafts, all the other alternatives a big city ER room would have on hand. In Phoenix with Medicare we would have simply headed to the nearest ER and something would have been done. Here, as usual with any medical problem that isn't a critical emergency, we did a cost and time analysis before deciding we knew enough about first aid to do a good bandage and watch the finger for any future swelling, pain, or redness. So far, so good. Hospital General wouldn't have cost much out of pocket, probably about $10 USD, but it would have meant getting to the hospital at midnight and waiting for hours, then finding a cab in the wee hours home. It was easier to just do it ourselves.
To change our address on all our newly acquired visas and work papers, we have to have documentation of our old address and our new address in the form of a utility bill, and we can't find an old Telecable bill, the only bill we have that Immigration will currently accept. The others are in our new landlords' name, just as the utilities at our old apartment were in our previous landlords' name. There we had to get a letter from the landlord to serve as a substitute utility bill, but suddenly now immigration accepts cable TV bills as proof of residency. For now.
But we don't have an old one. Yes, one is somewhere in a box in the garage or office. We had to go to Telecable and ask for a copy of an old bill--which was impossible. They were so efficient that all their records for us are now in our new address. We do have a copy of the service order to change service to our new address--but it doesn't specify the old address. The old address, of course, is all over seven years of Immigration records, but will that do? We'll see tomorrow.
We were complaining to a supervisor at Telecable who said finally, "You know it is much harder in the US." Yes, we know that, we assured her. Even though it took us nearly six months to get our FM2s and work permits, at least we were able to get them. We know of cases where Mexicans attempting to live in the US and get work permits have never succeeded, or it took years.
We briefly visited an accountant and have to go back when and if Immigration accepts our address change and does whatever it has to do to our new documents. We have our CURPs, the Mexican national ID numbers that are similar to US Social Security numbers, and next we have to go to Hacienda and register as tax payers, and then return to the accountant to set up a bimonthly tax payment plan. Of course almost all our sales are in the US through Amazon.com, but we have to file tax papers here every two months anyway. We have our choice of just showing up at Hacienda one morning and waiting it out, which can take many hours, or we can have our accountant make an appointment for us. We'll try the appointment route first. If not, I have to find the battery recharger for my Sony ebook reader before I contemplate spending all day in a waiting room.
I'm not really complaining, I am so delighted to have my little gray FM2 visa booklet with the fine print allowing me to work. It was such a shock last April to hear from the immigration officials who spoke at a "Coffee with the Consul" that, even if your customers are all in the US and Canada and your business is in the US, you have to have a Mexican work permit if you are physically in Mexico doing any work online. And Immigration considered all the hundreds of articles I'd done for Atencion and other publications the past seven years as volunteer work, also requiring a work permit. I talk about all that a bit more below in the forum posts I'm copying into this blog.
Twice a year my aunt sends me a check, for my birthday and Christmas, and I went to cash my latest check the other day, only to find that I needed to start a whole new file for Monex--complete with utility bill proving residency, which I didn't have. At first reading it looks as if my obviously spanking new FM2 has an expiration date that has already passed, the date I received it. You have to read carefully to see the real expiration date is in 2010. The simple act of cashing a US check can be a real hassle here. We've never had a utility bill proving our residency before, and now we have to see if a Telecable bill will suffice at more than Immigration, now that Immigration accepts it. Or at least accepted it the past few months.
We took the bus to Celaya to get our paint chips matched at Home Depot and took a cab home with more than nine gallons of paint for the studio and bedrooms--curry, paprika, and Mexican pottery are the colors. Thank you to everyone who offered to send us the Sherman Williams paint chips! While there we went to Costco, primarily for ground beef--Norma wants to make a huge Emeril Lagasse Kicked Up Meatloaf for the freezer, one of our standby meals. Costco had no ground beef. That day was one in which everything else went wrong, too. We felt so frustrated!
But then we talked about how lucky we are to have this wonderful new house and to live in San Miguel, and to have so many friends who have helped us so much with the move, that the frustration melted away. We walk into our new house and feel like royalty. Even if we do have to run after the garbage truck ourselves.
Below are bits and pieces of the forum posts I've made the past few weeks while the computer wasn't hooked up again yet and then I couldn't find my password to get into our website anyway!
....The most recent hassle is Immigration's crackdown on visa photos. I had to have three sets taken before my face in the photo was the exact measurement required and there was absolutely no hair on my forehead or covering my ears. Of course the photos that finally were accepted have beads of water on my forehead that look like warts, from all the water I squirted on my hair to keep it off my face. In the future I may have to tell some government official I had the warts burned off.
But now we have our gray FM2 visa booklets in hand with the all-important proviso that we can work--right now in anything related to publishing, but later we can add any other kind of work we want, just by notifying Immigration and of course paying more fees.
Besides getting us the best work permit category--general self-employed small business--immigration attorney Ubaldo Aguado, 154-5580, got us in as asimilados, a visa category for those who are totally assimilated into Mexico.
I don't know quite how we qualify since we're barely intermediate in Spanish, but there we are. I think the first book helped, though at one point Immigration was very angry at me for all the for-free writing I've done for Atención and for other print and online publications, even though it was all nice things about Mexico publicizing some important SMA programs like Hospice, Casita Linda and Hospital General. Once you come to Immigration's attention as a volunteer, you really do need a work permit, even for free services.
I made the mistake of doing my own letter of application in Spanish to point out all the good stuff I'd written about Mexico, with originals attached. Wrong: it cost $900 to have all those articles translated, and the weight of them made Immigration very upset. Ubaldo had to grovel quite a while on my behalf. My mistake--I should have let him handle it all, and say as little as possible.
Former tax preparer Norma always says, never say more than yes or no to direct questions asked by anyone legal, and never volunteer information since it will always be used against you.
Forewarned, everybody, and don't be surprised if you need several sets of photos for any kind of visa application lately during this crackdown.
And you definitely need a work permit even if your customers are all in the US. If you are working online for a foreign company or foreign customers, the law is that if your body is here doing the work, you need to have a work permit here.
I bet less than a hundredth of all the expats working online in Mexico do so, and I also bet they'll never be found out. The number one sport in both Mexico and the US isn't futbol/football, it's tax evasion.
The basic government fee for a work permit and FM2 is 2800 pesos, about $240 USD, and many people could do it all themselves. We had many special circumstances, including a lot of copying plus apostilles from all over the US on various documents and certificates, and all that groveling. Details later in a blog--we're off to Celaya Home Depot by bus to pick up things like more energy efficient lightbulbs and a doorbell-intercom and unusual batteries.
On our move, we see the light at the end of the tunnel of boxes that are still piled in our garage, and the footpaths through the boxes in the office are getting wider.
Some day I may find the gizmos that allow me to download photos from my camera, the camera battery recharger, the recharger for my Sony ebook reader, and the scissors. Last packed, first unpacked, first buried.
...Friends brought over the last bits and pieces from our old apt this morning and others helped make a path through the boxes for us. A friend always says when something is lost, "it's in a box in the garage," and she doesn't even have a garage. We do, and it's full.
We found the kitchen burners and the nuts and bolts to the BBQ, and just about everything else that's crucial. We find as we try to unpack that our housekeeper carefully packed up everything we thought we'd left behind as basura.
It didn't look like basura to her, so now we have to get rid of it here where the garbage trucks come at around 8 am M-W-F and we have to be outside to lift up our bags to the sanitation crew. The trucks seem to be running fine, maybe the garbage crisis is over for SMA for now, in this change of administrations period.
We left Maria a big soft ceramic pineapple scuplture/punch bowl, with four cups left out of six, and you would have thought we gave her a million dollars. It wasn't a very costly ceramic pineapple, we got it in a little town around Lake Patzcuaro, and it has many nicks from years of being moved.
It is so hard to clean, and not complete, and damaged. But she loves it. It probably will take up half her apartment, or more likely it will go in a garage sale. I just couldn't toss it in the trash and watch the soft ceramic crumble. Maybe it has a few good years left in it.
The cats are resigned to staying inside and standing guard at all the windows and balconies, until we have an ironworker outsmart them at all their escape routes on the patios.
Life is starting to get back to normal. Even though people haven't posted any questions or comments on these forums, they've continued to send me private messages and requests.
The latest--someone somehow got to SMA without stopping for an FMT tourist visa or vehicle importation permit at the Aduana about 20 miles below the border. I can't think of any way she can correct that mess without driving back to the border, hoping she isn't stopped as she crosses into the US for anything, and then she can retrace her steps, this time making the stop at Aduana for her FMT and vehicle permit. She is truly an illegal alien. Ubaldo may be able to help.
Another writer wanted to know about gay male social life and hot spots in SMA. If any gay males want to be interviewed for an online gay magazine, please send me a private message and I'll forward your email address on to him.
Another person wants to get a Mexican drivers license but her old US license and passport and visa were stolen and she's driving here with Xeroxed copies of the documents! I sent her to an attorney to help her get copies of her visa, passport and US license before she can go for a Mexican license, and stop driving on Xeroxed documents only!
....[This forum post was written in third person and posted by a friend onto the forums when we couldn't get our computers running.]
Telecable didn't connect Carol's and Norma's internet correctly--they seem to be plugged in to somebody in the neighborhood who has wifi, so they don't dare use anything with a password, including posting on their own website, until the mess is corrected. Carol is writing this and asked me to post it for her in the forums for now.
Saturday the movers spent 6 1/2 hours moving appliances, furniture and boxes, on top of the many dozens of boxes friends had helped Carol and Norma pack and move before that, and now the new house is a series of narrow walkways through boxes that keep multiplying whenever they look away.
The pets love it. Already the big black and white male who had been the scaredycat when he first arrived, not leaving the cat carrier for 14 hours, has discovered every way out. He was the first to discover that if he leaped from the patio to the fountain rim to the lion's head in the patio wall from which the water flowed, he could then leap three more feet to the top of the wall which still has bars and thorny bougainvillea rising three feet higher.
On that narrow ledge on top of the wall itself he could make his way through the bars and bougainvillea and look down at the sidewalk about 10 feet below. He was considering the great leap downward when Norma grabbed his tail and yanked him down. Now Carol and Norma are going to get an ironworker to build a sort of hanging gazebo over the fountain so that the cats can't leap up and out from that point. That wasn't in their budget.
The black and white cat, named Pico, also was the first to discover that he could exit through the automatic sliding garage door from the back patio into the garage, where he could lie in wait until the next time the garage door was opened and escape. So he has been banned from the rear patio until they get another fine grate wall made to cover the sliding garage door track exit route. They suppose they should thank Pico--any way he can find out is a way a very thin kid could find in.
The housekeeper packed up a lot of stuff in the old kitchen before they could get to it, trying to be helpful. But lost now, possibly forever, are the burners to the stove, a ziplock bag with the nuts and bolts to reassemble the BBQ, even their calendar which was on the kitchen table where they could check it frequently once the office was packed up.
And now they have no idea where they are supposed to be when, or how long it will take them to ever find all the odds and ends that were so carefully packed away by Maria to help them.
Just for added benefit, Maria didn't tighten the top on a big bottle of olive oil which now coats everything in one of the boxes and which dripped all over when the moving men picked up the box. They quickly put the whole thing in a trash bag for transport. But olive oil is still all over the old kitchen floor awaiting their return Monday for final cleaning.
Carol was in one of the bathrooms when she noticed all three cats were in the bathtub staring at the ceiling. Oh oh. A giant palmetto bug as they call one in New Orleans, or a flying cockroach, three inches long, was walking along the upper wall of the bathroom. Eeek! She got a paper towel and when it rounded the corner and came a little lower where she could grab it, she tried, but it fell down, behind a cabinet.
Under the cabinet was just enough space for Alejandro, the big orange male, who dashed under and then seemed to lose interest. He walked out of the bathroom, followed by the other cats. Norma and Carol swept under that cabinet and everywhere trying to find the cockroach, but decided it had disappeared down a crack someplace. Oh joys, knowing that thing was somewhere in the house.
But then Carol went to the other bathroom (brushes, toothbrushes, deodorant, all are scattered in three bathrooms) there was Ali crunching on the cockroach, cockroach "blood" streaming down his jaws. Double EEEK!
The cockroach was snatched from Ali's jaws and disposed of down the toilet and Ali's jaws were washed while he scratched and clawed, and now Ali isn't speaking to Carol, who isn't too happy either. No other cockroaches or palmetto bugs have been seen, and everyone, including the cats, is certainly on the alert for them.
Carol and Norma stood in the insect repellent section of Mega staring at the products trying to figure out the word for ants, since the landlord had reported seeing some in the garden. They knew the words for wasps, scorpions and definitely for cockroaches ("La Cucaracha") but a kindly bilingual woman pointed out the hormiga products. They'd thought hormiga was hornet, and who knows where the Spanish dictionaries have been packed, and they didn't have a laptop with them at Mega to check translations. So they bought a spray for hormigas and haven't seen an ant since. Do you suppose the ants could read the spray label? A few well-placed Baygon mosquito repellent plug-ins by the patio and that problem was solved, too. Bugs now are no problem, just finding their own pathways through the boxes and keeping the cats in and getting up enough resolve to tackle the boxes.
Meanwhile Independencia events swirled all around Carol and Norma and they couldn't pay a bit of attention. They were sound asleep at 11 pm Sept. 15 and missed El Grito, even the fireworks that night and the next that they'd planned to see from their roof. They're not even going to get to the Fair this year--read Atención at www.atencionsanmiguel.org for all the details. (The first half of Carol's article, posted on this website first, on the meeting at the Biblioteca with the Vice Consul General from the Mexico City US State Dept Embassy was published in Atención this week, too.The second half of the article, on the Q & A session with expats that followed the formal meeting, will run next week.)
They did get caught up in the Sept. 16 morning military parade when they were trying to get breakfast in Centro and find an internet cafe. And later they were trapped inside Starbucks when the crowds watching another parade passing at Canal and Hidalgo couldn't be breached. For some reason every internet cafe they tried wasn't working Sept. 16, and they couldn't even get a connection out from Starbucks. And now even at home they can't post anything requiring a password, even this post to the forums.
They always enjoy the Sept. 16 procession that is a reenactment of the peasant army, swept up under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, taken from the Atotonilco church by Father Miguel Hidalgo, as he led the ill-equipped, untrained army through the region and on to Guanajuato where they won their first major battle against the Spanish. But this time they were just frustrated, trapped inside Casa Canal until the parade ended.
They have no sense of their neighborhood yet, they're only coming and going with boxes, or in a rush to find comfort food when they stop for a meal. Tacos Don Felix is three blocks away but it isn't open all the time. There's a neighborhood restaurant that opens for comida some afternoons in a family's front yard, but they'll have to check more closely on whether the cooks are using bottled water, using plastic gloves or baggies on their hands to handle the money, letting food sit out, etc.
Harry's now has a thick Reuben sandwich for 100 pesos, with homemade thin waffle potato chips, big enough to split with an extra salad. The Reuben wasn't sky high like Stage Deli or Carnegie or Katz, but it was an inch thicker than any other Reuben attempt in town, and it's probably now their favorite sandwich in San Miguel.
Fish and chips for 75 pesos at the Longhorn Smokehouse Friday night was another comfort meal. One night they were desperate for just a big healthy salad and Hecho en Mexico has a gigantic spinach, beet and carrot salad that made up for at least some of their nutritional neglect.
At the two casas, either Carol or Norma at one place waiting for Telecable/Telmex/propane/plumber/electrician/ironworker, etc., and the other at the other place waiting for comparable workers, most of whom never showed when they said they would, Carol and Norma have been living on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bananas at both places. The fridge and freezer are both up and running in the new place since Saturday night, but there was still no hot water until Sunday morning, and they're still searching for the stove parts among the olive oil.
So that is why Carol hasn't posted anything on the forums or on her blog lately. Soon....
But they love sitting on the front patio surrounded by bougainvillea and plants enjoying the cool air, and the rooftop view of the Parroquia is superb, and the place is so big they don't know if they will ever get used to it, and it is great to be among Mexican families with two tiendas on the block for odds and ends and a fresh chicken shop a block up the street and their favorite kind of tortilleria down the street and San Juan Dios mercado a few blocks down a slight hill and buses from there to everyplace. People are friendly and curious, and they're saying the social pleasantries a lot but haven't talked to anyone in any more depth yet.
The taxistas who live in the neighborhood have driven them many times and now know a little bit about Carol and Norma from taxi conversations, and so the whole neighborhood probably knows by now a lot about them. Carol and Norma were sure to tell the local taxi drivers, in Spanish, that they've lived in SMA for seven years, and they love it, and that they're not the rich gringos, they're the Social Security gringas, and they're involved in the community, and they go to the local beautician for 25 peso haircuts and they patronize the local shops, etc. So they're doing their best to get the word out. When all the chaos is resolved they'll take some walks around the colonia and talk to as many people as they can. Soon....
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
September 2, 2009--The house is in chaos, the animals are hysterical, I can't find a thing, we move Sept. 18
I'll take a minute and write something but you won't get much sense out of me until we can unpack after the Sept. 18 move. We've already got much of the contents of the house in boxes, including everything I seem to unexpectedly need but it's gone until late September. Business cards, for example--I went to pull out my card holder and it was almost empty. Oh well, paper and pen came before business cards.
And I'm still trying to finish the index for The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico, the very last step now that pagination is complete, before we can get it to the printers. So that's the reason you're not seeing much from me on the website and won't until after the actual Sept. 18 move and then the unpacking.
We're using a guy recommended by a friend to move the big stuff and taking the boxes and smaller stuff in friends' cars from Sept. 14 to 24. Ths is one time we wish we had a car ourselves. We had the guy give an estimate and he said that he prefers to let his customers decide how much the work is worth to them. What do you say to that? He says it's the Mexican way.
Since it's "only" the fridge, freezer, stove, washer/dryer, living room set, entertainment center and a few chests of drawers and book cases, we finally said 4000 pesos. He looked pleased. I think it's fair, probably three hours work, and only a few blocks away, but here we have stairs. I don't know. This is one of the things you agonize over. We may give him a big tip moving day.
Someone who reads this website wrote and asked if she could have our current apartment. We checked with the landlord who didn't have anyone yet and she's coming down from Texas and moving in after we leave! She's a cat lover, so there will be someone else to take care of our feral babies along with our other neighbors.
I did want to mention an article by Chris Hawley that appeared first in the Arizona Republic, then in USA Today for which he also works, and now in hundreds of publications and websites, on what he says is the move of thousands of US citizens to Mexico to join IMSS, the Mexican social security health insurance system.
I talked to the reporter for an hour in early states of his research and pointed out the flaws of IMSS, particularly the fact it is already overloaded and underfinanced and unable to handle masses of expats joining it, and there can be resentment if we further flood this lifeline. Mexicans who can afford private care but who are covered by IMSS through employment will usually opt for private care whenever possible.
The article is being cited in liberal websites as proof that the US health system isn't all that great and certainly not accessible, if thousands of expats are moving to Mexico to join IMSS, as the article says. I give the link and first paragraphs in the Living in Mexico forum, and then cite one of the liberal websites that use the article as a basis for some commentary on the health care reform debate in the US.
I was one of the 45 million uninsured and mostly unemployed in the US from 1984-96 while I underwent dozens of hospitalizations, several life and death, and the medical bills that went with them. I know what a scramble and hardship it is to get covered through ERs and university and county hospitals. All those bills are why we don't own a house today.
But we're moving to a wonderful one. That's what's keeping me going as the dog huddles on my feet and the cats want to cling to my shoulders and deadlines slide past and I can't find my slippers.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
August 28, 2009--We're moving to a big house in Col. San Rafael for the same rent on a five-year lease!
Norma and I have always moved at around seven years in a place, and we were congratulating ourselves that we'd finally found a home in San Miguel de Allende that we would never move from again.
And then two artist friends who had to move to Ajijic for health reasons, who have had their Col. San Rafael house up for sale for two years with no luck, while becoming more and more disillusioned with their house sitters, decided to take their house off the market for five years and let us live there on the same rent as we are now paying for our Centro apartment!
It's about six blocks farther out than we are now, on a very slight hill, on a pleasant wide paved street in Col. San Rafael. We'll add some security measures but after our five burglaries and robberies and the murder in our back yard in Los Angeles, we don't mind bars on the windows at all.
We bought two Virgin of Guadalupe tile murals at San Gabriel on the road to Dolores Hidalgo for the front and back, to help discourage graffiti. We've been by the house late Friday and Saturday nights and women are out walking alone, young kids are playing in the street, and families are sitting outside, a very friendly feeling to the neighborhood.
A couple of tiendas nearby mean we don't have to go far when we run out of eggs or tomatoes, and there's a tortilleria that makes them just the way we like our corn tortillas--a bit thick and deep golden color with patches of char for more flavor. Only a few blocks away is San Juan Dios mercado, both the enclosed produce market and the dozens of small Mexican shops offering everything from shoe repairs to tattoos. A Pollo Feliz is on Guadalupe, and Tacos Don Felix is also three blocks away, though it doesn't seem possible from the maps to actually walk those three blocks. Many bus lines stop on Guadalupe/Independencia and Calzada de la Luz. We have to take the San Rafael and Santa Julia buses their whole routes and mark all the stops that are closer to the house.
The house itself was always on our wish list for the kind of house we'd like to have some day. Norma visited the virtual tour for the property frequently when it was for sale with a real estate agent, and we were sorry to see our friends reduce the price drastically. We were all sure the house would sell quickly. We told them so, and they knew we loved their house. We were shocked to get the offer and it was too good to refuse, even though we love our current apartment and Centro. There are tradeoffs for everything.
Our neighbors who have shared the feeding and sterilization of the feral cats here will continue to run our own little SPA; we'll have 30 pounds of Minimo cat food from the Alimentos Y Mascotas store on #18 Cinco de Mayo delivered to them every month as our share. In the new place, the high walls make it unlikely any feral cats can get in. Our three indoor cats sure hope not. They all started out as outdoor cats when we got them from various places, and they've adjusted to being inside here. But I know they'll love the doggie door to the patios in the new place. All hummingbirds and butterflies, be alert! New predators are coming.
Being artists, our friends included a 20 x 20 foot studio with plenty of light in addition to two large bedrooms and baths, and the first floor has a finished garage and half bath that could easily become a first floor bedroom if either of us needs it or if we need to move my elderly aunt here. Our pets will love the two patios--we're getting small doggie doors, and the traffic flow within the house is great for parties. The living room, dining room and large kitchen all flow together with the two patios. Now we have to get Norma's huge Weber BBQ off the roof and over to the new place and install it adjoining the kitchen so she can use it daily.
The steps to the second floor are wide and easy, with good handrails. No more narrow wrought iron circular stairwell to the roof, this house has regular stairs there, too. The roof includes a tile-covered dining area with a view of the Parroquia that can't be blocked unless someone builds a five-story house down the hill from us; the adjoining neighbor's roof is all rounded and raised boveda ceiling. Our new house has many boveda ceilings throughout, too. It was built in 2004.
For artists, the walls are now painted mostly white, but we have permission to repaint in our favorite shades, which somehow all seem to have food names: yam, curry, peppery, spicy hue, jalapeño. We found the colors on the Sherman Williams website but when we went down to the local Sherman Williams store on Salida a Querétaro near Plaza Primavera, we found that the Mexican color chips are different shades and names.
Comex at Home Depot will computer-match any color paint but we have to get the color chips from the US from a Sherman Williams store. Otherwise we have to find close matches from the color chips of Comex; we borrowed a friend's Comex paint chip book and found that Comex has a color called San Miguel de Allende that is excellent, too, surprise.
Any readers in the US live near a Sherman Williams store who would be willing to mail us paint chips? Email me at smacarol@hotmail.com and we'll send you the exact numbers of the chips we need.
As with most Mexican apartments, our current one had bare hanging light bulbs when we moved in seven years ago. We put in our own ceiling fans and light fixtures that we are taking with us when we go, just as Mexican tenants do. We can't bring ourselves to leave bare hanging light bulbs, we'll put in inexpensive plain fixtures. We've added so much furniture here through the years, each time shoving the old out on the porch so the landlord would have to take it, that we have plenty for the new house, even though it is largely furnished already.
Two friends had moving boxes to give away, and so half our house is now inside paper cartons all over our current apartment. The house sitter will be out Sept. 10, so for two weeks after that, don't expect to hear much from me on this website. I've always gone into catatonia at moving times, but I hope this time I can remain sane. I don't relish a month of not knowing where the can opener is, the bandaids, the paper towels.
The timing was bad for us considering all that was already going on in our lives. Rebuilding our website is now complete, and we've sent out initial pre-sale announcements to the 900+ registered forum members of our website. I've done many other parts of our marketing plan already, though much is left to do. I'm still working on the index to the book, which has to be the best index on moving to Mexico to match the book title.
Our housekeeper is going with us her three afternoons a week. We're adding taxi fare to her salary but I bet she'll still walk anyway, at least in good weather. She lives in a two-room apartment over on Canal, probably closer to our new place than she is to our current apartment. When we told her, I made sure that the first words out of my mouth in Spanish were that we wanted her to come with us when we moved, so she wouldn't keel over at the news we were leaving. She went with us to the new house and seems excited about the move, too. We told her she doesn't have to clean both floors every day, just one a day, and one day for the patio and roof. I'm sure she has a relative who is a gardener and who can use another afternoon work a week. All the plants and trees are in pots, there's no lawn, thank heavens. We even have a wall fountain which we'll probably never turn on but the green stone statue of a lion's head on the wall is nice.
Life goes on--Norma got punctured on her wrist, maybe in a vein, when she hauled one of the cats out of a moving carton, and it bled like crazy. Will we need to see a doctor? So far there's no infection, just a bruise like a badly done blood drawing, which it was. I've still got my red circles on my hands and neck that we thought were ringworm but Dr. Archer said it iwas granuloma anulari that would go away on its own once I wasn't having any more stress. Guess I'll have vampire targets on my neck for awhile.
We're still trying to find kosher salt, though Carey's gourmet imported foods store on Ancha at Cardo said they would have more on Aug. 22. Didn't happen. Anybody see kosher salt anyplace in SMA lately?
Both of us had horrid life experiences in our early years. We seem to be getting all our luck now!
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
August 24, 2009--Elsmarie Norby's Ojalá program to help her neighbors now has 70 children from Rancho San Miguel Viejo showing up at her doorstep every Wednesday, requiring her to ask for volunteer help
I wasn't going to do another blog so soon--we're working on telling more and more people about our new book--but we ran into Elsmarie Norby and she impressed us all over again with her latest project to help Mexican children.
She ran a music school on Quebrada for awhile, and has helped train the girls at Casa Hogar Santa Julia in music. She led their chorus in a concert with a professional women's chorale group from Los Angeles that performed here a year or two ago. She lives in Rancho San Miguel Viejo near the original San Miguel de Allende church built in 1723. The area is known for high levels of fluoride in the water, causing many children's teeth to turn brown permanently.
Here are her words on how helping a few neighbor children has turned into the Ojalá program for 70 children each Wednesday, for which she now needs help, hopefully four volunteers a week:
>It's safe to say that all the families live in very meager conditions,s ome more so than others. The children who come to my house for art, music and food come from houses without bathrooms, without stoves, with few doors and windows, hardly any furniture or kitchen supplies. There are no sufficient incomes for families here. They are my neighbors. They share all they have with me--real riches and joy.
Children in rural communities (called ranchos) all over Mexico tend to have all of their experiences in this kind of very limited environment. They are very shy and self-conscious. Yet, given paper, paint, scissors, glue, clay, and books, and by listening to music, singing, dancing, and playing instruments...the transformation is amazing! This happens every week at my house in San Miguel Viejo, usually Wednesdays, but it can be any other day. The children are always ready.
The age range is from 3 to about 13. There are never any altercations. They help each other and are always polite--full of appreciation for a trip to a real bathroom, as much clean water as they want, and a healthy snack.
More children come each week. How can I possibly turn them away? Because of the numbers and varying ages, I need volunteer help each week. Four of us would be ideal. Fluent Spanish or previous teaching experience is not required. When you arrive you'll fully understand the meaning of 'just showing up.' You'll leave with hugs and thanks, you'll feel humbly grately for your abundance, and you'll have a new awareness of the reality of poverty...but you will receive more than you give. If you do not have a car, transportation will be provided. It's a four-hour afternoon.
To sign up, or to just check it out, contact Elsmarie Norby at elsmarienorby@yahoo.com, 044-415-101-7757. Donations of art supplies, tables, chairs and food are also welcome.>
Her program sounds like a wonderful way for a newbie to ease into giving back to San Miguel de Allende and learning more about the rest of our community.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
August 21, 2009--"Broadway Loves Casita Linda"; the Los Frailes castle just keeps on growing; a bus trip to Casa Diana furniture store in Comonfort
One of the most professional productions ever staged in San Miguel de Allende wowed full houses at Teatro Angela Peralta Wednesday and Thursday nights, and no wonder, since all five actors have been in numerous Broadway musicals.
"Broadway Loves Casita Linda" grew out of an SMA vacation/conference trip by Colin Cunliffe, son of one of the Casita Linda activists, who wanted to do something for the organization. It builds very low cost housing for poor families living in the campos under tarps, sheets of plastic, and other insecure housing substitutes--see the new houses at www.casitalinda.org. So far 27 homes have been built, and the group hopes to build a total of 10 this year, each home changing a life of a poor family forever and inspiring hope for a better life for the children.
Colin had performed at the Sexual Diversidad Festival in SMA in 2006. He is currently working on The Addams Family starring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth, to open on Broadway next year, and he has been dancer for Jennifer Hudson and for the 2008 Tony Awards, among many other credits. He was responsible for bringing this production to San Miguel, and he hopes to bring a similar production here next year.
I have to mention Kathryn Mowat Murphy, a New Zealand native, whose sexy dancing was a hit of the evening. She's danced in such plays as Fosse, Chicago, Sweet Charity, A Chorus Line, and The World Goes 'Round, and she was on Saturday Night Live with Antonio Banderas. I have never seen such moves--suddenly she'd have a leg straight up in an impossible pose. She danced all over and around a flimsy folding chair for a number from Cabaret.
The other oustanding female singer was Stephanie Umoh, who has been a featured soloist with The Boston Pops Orchestra, and she has a BFA in musical theater from the Boston Conservatory. Ben Cameron and Austin Lesch, who also has a BFA from Boson Conservatory, were the other two singers/dancers. They performed a variety of numbers from Broadway shows as far back as Guys and Dolls to today. They raised the bar on the level of professionalism for future SMA productions. I have a photo of one of the numbers on this page as well as on the San Miguel Scenes album in our Photo Gallery.
We were in Los Frailes Wednesday night and "the castle," El Castillo, just keeps on growing. I learned a little more about it--it's being built by a lawyer who wants to be able to have the five famlies in his extended family live there. It's not going to be a hotel, as I had first thought when I saw all that space. I posted a photo of it in the San Miguel Scenes album, too, if you've wondered about the strange building arising in Los Frailes.
I posted a shot of Casa Diana furniture store in Comonfort, too, worth a trip if you're looking for traditional rustic Mexican wooden furniture. We took an economico bus from the SMA bus station, 10 pesos each with our INAPAM half off senior discount cards. The economicos run all the time--one was waiting when we reached the station--and the ride took half an hour.
The driver did leave us off right in front of the store, a flat orange building with blue trim. If you're driving, don't take the bypass to Celaya, take the old road to Comonfort, and the store will be on the right side just as you enter town.
It has so many cabinets, dining room sets, beds, nightstands, entertainment centers, coffee tables, coat racks, bars, every kind of wood carved furniture you can think of. You might miss the back room which has even more, and it is easier to miss the basement, equally jammed with thousands of pieces. They'll do custom work, too--we had them make a kitchen island for us a few years back.
We were just looking, comparing pricies and styles to see what's out there, for some unusual pieces we want, such as a covered, ventilated kitty litter chest that would have two openings and room for two litter pans. One of our cats is fussy, which is strange because she's a stray who was dumped at the SPA in a bag. And we hadn't been to Comonfort since the bypass was built.
The town still looks the same, dozens of cheap ceramics shops along the main street if you want mugs, flower pots, pitchers and glasses sets, rustic dishes and casseroles, etc. There was a covered bus stop right across from Diana's and so we were on a return economico five minutes after we left the shop and home in another half an hour. We checked out Bodega Aurrera while we were in the neighborhood--it hasn't changed since its opening, either, and we decided we were just fine shopping at Mega interspersed with our neighborhood mom and pop shops. It's the lower-end store in the Wal-Mex chain.
It poured tonight, thankfully--the rainy season didn't slip away on us already. Of course we were walking to Teatro Angela Peralta at the time. It caught us by surprise, though we should know better. Never leave home without your umbrella June-October. We left puddles around us when we reached our Palco seats on the mezzanine of the theater. Even the second level was pretty full. I couldn't see the third floor. It was such a pleasant evening I was inspired to do a blog tonight.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
August 17, 2009--A vegan raw foods brunch; a friend's new house security system; a little girl has a seizure on the bus
Who would have thought that I would actually enjoy a vegan raw foods meal? A friend is now into the raw foods movement and has bought a dehydrator in which she is busily turning fresh fruits and veggies into all kinds of meals. The raw foods movement starts with the belief that heating foods above a certain degree, something around 150 degrees F or whatever a dehydrator reaches, reduces the nutritional value of the foods. Our friend is also a vegan, no dairy or egg products as well as no meats, poultry or fish. I knew we would be having a salad of some sort for Sunday brunch at her house but didn't know what in the world she might also prepare.
The salad had all sorts of veggies including grapefruit sections, and the main meal included a curry walnut pate with pine nuts; a kind of uncooked tortilla made with some sort of dehydrated mixture; attractively julienned veggies to go in the sort of taco with an orange sauce; fresh raspberries and blueberries; a mango sorbet; and almond "cream." The nuts are soaked overnight before they are blended into the pate and into the "cream." It was all delicious.
She says the biggest concern people have about a raw food vegan diet is getting enough protein and calcium, but there is plenty of each in many nuts, veggies and fruits. Horses, cows, elephants and gorillas all are raw food vegans and they have no trouble getting enough protein to build muscles and body mass. I actally Googled raw food vegan and read a bit, out of curiosity. The movement has good arguments in its behalf. But it takes as long to prepare varied and tasty vegan raw food menus as it does to cook most meals; you don't just eat salads and carrots all the time.
Both Via Organica in Col. Guadiana and Natura, around the corner from Espino's and across from La Palapa Fish Tacos, have many vegan raw foods that you can buy for variety that you probably couldn't tell from the cooked alternative--like crackers that are from something soaked, blended, and then dehydrated. Our friend seems to be thriving on the diet. More power to her!
She has also recently installed a wireless security system on her home in one of the farther out colonias and she has used the panic button feature to summon help from both the police and the security company, both of whom came immediately. She pays around $28 USD a month for the wireless controls on all the entryways and for the portable panic button, to keep at her bedside at night and in her office, kitchen, living room or garden by day.
Many friends have installed electric fencing on their too-low back walls or other possible robbery entry points. The wires are almost invisible, and a sign in a prominent place warns people of the danger. They were unsure that their neighbors might feel insulted at the appearance of the security fencing, but soon others in their neighborhoods were installing the electric wires as well, especially on rear walls that abut open fields.
I don't know anyone with motion detectors because we all have cats and dogs that would set off any kind of motion detector. I do sense that many people, Mexicans and expats alike, are worried that there will be an increase in burglaries and similar crimes because of the hard economic times. With California and other almost-bankrupt US states considering letting many of those in jails and prisons to go free, and sending jailed Mexicans back to their home states, that's another part of the worry. I don't think we're being paranoid to think about home security these days. Mexicans are, too. This is global; crime goes up any time, anywhere that the economy is in bad shape. We couldn't afford security systems back in LA but we surely needed one there! Maybe we could have prevented at least some of the five burglaries and robberies in our last four years in LA. One more thing to think about.
Our friend sold me her Sony ebook reader when she bought the latest model, and she downloaded a dozen more books for me onto mine. I'm all up to date on the latest John Sandford and Lee Child mysteries now. Talk about scary! Reading about serial killers in the US is enough to make me glad to be in San Miguel de Allende!
Something much more real and immediate happened on the Unida Deportiva bus today around 11 am. We heard strange sounds from the back of the bus and saw a girl about three convulsing, maybe with an epileptic fit, in her mother's arms. The bus driver stopped and everyone back rushed to help. I haven't had a CPR class since 1996 and never worked on a young child, but I was ready to volunteer if the girl stopped breathing.
She screamed and twisted and went limp as her mother wept but the girl started to move again and seemed to relax a bit. Others on the bus had their cell phones out, ready to call an ambulance. There was a doctor's office on Ancha not much farther and the mother and girl got off at that stop and the bus resumed.
Norma said later I should not have even thought of volunteering because if something had gone terribly wrong, somehow it could have been seen as my fault, especially since I was no longer certified in current CPR and had never helped a child. I could have gone to jail for life. She's right, but I probably would have been right in there if the girl had stopped breathing anyway. I don't know how the Good Samaritan laws are in Mexico. I'll have to find out before we're in another crisis scene.
And then I thought, what if she'd had the H1N1 flu and had died? Mouth to mouth wouldn't have been a good idea in that case, either. We were a bit unsettled the rest of the day.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
August 16, 2009--The website is just about rebuilt; two presales already; a friend buys a horse and we visit the horse ranch; sunburned from swimming at El Encanto; a teensy parade messes up Centro traffic for much of a Friday night during which we get our nights mixed up; such a tragedy, having to eat two nights in a row at Tacos Don Felix
I think we're seeing the end of our website problems as I finish this page and a few others today. You'll notice most of the photos at the top of each page are different. I've deleted thousands of my old photos as I went along so that my computer can move rapidly again. The last 20,000+ photos had slowed it to near paralysis.
Our new website hosting service seems to be working well and isn't causing alerts to go out to all users saying it's our site that is the problem, when it was the old hosting service that had been hacked and that had caused us to find a new server and rebuild.
We're taking the opportunity to add info on the new book which is in the last stages with Jon Sievert, the book designer, before going to the printer. I do still have to put together the book's index this week, though. The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico should be out mid-September on Amazon.com, with presales starting on this website's front page in about a week.
We have had two presales already! (The new book will also be $23.95 USD, or two of either book will go for $44.) New friends we'd met invited us to their Centro house for drinks last week, and they said to bring along two copies of our first book and they'd also preorder two of the new one since they'd be back in the US in September. We had no idea we'd be visiting such a beautiful home! As customary with fine Mexican homes, you enter a beautiful garden courtyard, this one with a covered seating area where we had drinks, and then we moved into the outdoor dining area for dinner--"just leftovers" from a party our hosts had had the night before. Marinated giant shrimp, sliders on special-ordered small buns, hummus, salad, brownies...we were asked to eat as much as we could because they were leaving and most of the food couldn't be stored. I almost finished the shrimp for her; I did my best.
I just remember a few details of the house--the outside entrance had a large well-done Virgin of Guadalupe tile mural from Dolores Hidalgo to ward off graffiti, the bathroom off the courtyard was like an English bookstore with charming poetic details in Wedgewood blues and whites, the heated pool was being covered for the evening, three entire sides of the expansive garage were custom floor-to ceiling cupboards in glistening white for more storage. Our apartment usually seems so big to us, but waddling home, sloshing with jumbo shrimp, I could feel the difference when we plopped before our TV for the taped "All My Children" and Olbermann.
We ran into more friends the next day and went with them to visit the horse one had just bought. She's boarding it with Lucinda Johnson's "Granja Las Animas" ranch about ten minutes outside of San Miguel de Allende on the road to La Cieneguita in Ejido Los Lopez. Her website is www.sanmiguelhorses.com, and she gives lessons to the general public on basic horsemanship, trail riding, and dressage, as well as board and training for young horses. She's got about 18 horses at the ranch now, sleek Arabians and also a Portuguese variety--my friend's horse is a lightly dappled Portuguese gray mare, very friendly.
We'd stopped to buy a kilo of small carrots for the horses, who were eager to greet us for the treats. I have photos of my friend and her horse plus other shots of the ranch and of Lucinda's second business, a custom tile factory, on the Photo Gallery of this website, in an album called, "Horses and Tiles at Granja Las Animas." Lucinda's tile and mosaic business can be seen at www.animatile.com. You can tell animal lovers are at work in this tile factory, with all the very detailed artwork of horses, dogs, birds, and even insects, along with mosaic wall inserts of chickens, fruits, baskets, and other representational art. To see the horses or the tiles call ahead at 155-8002.
Being among the horses made me remember how much I wanted to be a Palomino horse when I was around seven. We lived across the street from a dairy that had a dozen Palomino horses, a shetland pony for the boy my age, and a grand black Arabian stallion that the dairy owner rode in all the parades in our rural Michigan county. He was also sheriff, and all the deputies formed a horseback contingent in the parades that was the most outstanding feature of the celebrations. How I wanted to be able to ride those horses!
But the boy my age would have nothing to do with the city kid who had just moved there from Detroit, and who persisted in showing off her superior reading and math ability to everyone in the one-room, eight-grade, 48-student school house, trying to be admired for my intellect if not for being one of the original German families in the town. I was a strange Catholic in a town of Methodists as well. You can guess how well that worked out for me. Insstead of appreciating me the other students beat me up on the playground each recess. I didn't learn people skills for decades more. And I never did get to satisfy my yearnings to be so close to my own horse that I could almost share souls with the animal.
I never even got to ride a horse, though there they were, just across the street, until I was an adult, and by then the magic was gone. When I did try to ride one, when I was working and could afford lessons, I didn't particularly like being jostled that high on a moving body, and I never went back after the first lesson.
But I still remember loving horses as only young girls do, wanting to be one with my horse, not seeing the animal as a mere sports utility vehicle but as a kind of god to worship. I wonder how my life would have been different if somehow I'd been allowed to have that kind of relationship with a horse as a kid. My friend has a plaque in her house, "Remember when we didn't have therapists, we had horses?"
Later we were invited to go in swimming at the pool in El Encanto and we both got sunburned, somehow thinking we were impervious to the sun since we'd lived seven years in Phoenix and the hottest part of summer is already over in San Miguel. My back and shoulders are itchy, I think I'm going to peel.
During the week few people are in El Encanto, so many owners are Mexico City families who come in for weekends. Only a few children were at the pool when we went out, and they were perfecting their best bellyflops and cannonballs, splashing us as we soaked in the hot tub area. Briefly I was irritated, then remembered what it was like to be around ten years old in a pool, and I turned my attitude around to enjoy watching the little girl and boy splash around.
One of the Spanish-speaking kids was the most beautiful lithe blonde girl you can imagine, magazine cover pretty. My 86-year-old aunt in Detroit keeps saying that all Mexicans are short, dark and fat, even though she saw for herself how untrue that was when she visited us a few days in 2006. People see what they want to see, what they expect to see. These kids were from upper middle class Mexican families, many tall and even blonde. I love to people-watch in San Miguel de Allende, wondering about other lives, other cultures, what others are thinking and hoping for and sorrowing over. And as I enjoyed watching the kids my shoulders got redder and redder and now itchier and itchier.
I'd written on my calendar that we were to be picked up by other friends Friday at 7 pm on the corner of Hernandez Macias and Mesones, to go to Tacos Don Felix. We were at the corner at ten minutes to 7, just in case they were early so that they wouldn't have to circle around in Friday evening traffic in SMA Centro.
Suddenly we saw a tránsito pickup approaching slowly, lights flashing, and we realized there must be some sort of procession or parade behind the police truck. Traffic came to a complete halt on Mesones, not allowed to turn onto Macias, and the procession slowly came toward us from Canal, cars backed up to where they were tiny dots as far away as we could see behind the parade. It was 5 to 7; our friends must be wondering what is wrong, as they're stuck far away on either Mesones or Macias.
The procession arrived in front of us: it was less than half a block long but somber and formal, a half dozen men in red shirts playing band instruments, a dozen little girls in long white dresses holding onto the arms of their mothers who carried their baskets of rose petals that no one was bothering to sprinkle; two pickups with slightly older girls in white dresses sitting in the back in blue-skied tableaus; and a few more older girls and women bringing up the rear. Teensy, but oh what they did to Centro traffic at 7 pm Friday night. I posted a picture of the entire procession on the San Miguel Scenes album in our Photo Gallery.
Traffic cleared by 7:30 and our friends didn't appear even when the cars were moving smoothly again. Did they give up? Should we have gone up to Canal to meet them and get them detoured around the jam? What if they'd come via Mesones? What if they were figuring we'd know enough to just take a cab when we could and meet them at Tacos Don Felix? That was the most likely scenario.
And so we took a cab. They weren't at the restaurant. Oh well, the seven varieties of small tacos on the Don Felix special platter with grilled onions for 75 pesos, and their pollo verde enchiladas for 55 pesos, are always good, and we dined well.
When we got home I wrote a short email to our friends about the parade and how we were sorry to have missed them, when I happened to glance at our calendar. There it was, a little arrow pointing to Saturday. We'd changed the date and I hadn't remembered. How to feel really stupid over my own mistake, two weeks in a row.(I still cringe when we go into Mega and see the boy I falsely accused of short changing me. He seems to have forgiven me, though, and gave me a smile that I think was meant to reassure me he knew anyone could make a mistake, and at least I did make a point of clearing his name and apologizing profusely to all who had been involved.)
Oh well, tonight we'll have the chiles en nogado at Tacos Don Felix (www.tacosdonfelix.com). They're wonderful, too, and only available at many restaurants before and shortly after Independencia. (For those who have never experienced this dish that is often made in September for Independencia because its colors represent the Mexican flag, it's made of poblano chiles stuffed with usually a meat, raisin and other fruit filling, the platter covered with a sweetened white sauce thickened wtih ground walnuts, and sprinkled with red pomegranite seeds--exquisite! Bugambilia has them year-round, either hot or cold.)
How terrible, we have to eat at Tacos Don Felix two nights in a row! Such tragedies befall us in San Miguel!
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
August 7, 2009--Update on our website do-over; Norma falls twice in three days
I'm going through all my new photos since we first posted the website three years ago, to get fresh photos for the pages, and there are 20,000 photos! Who knew I could take so many photos in three years? I'm almost done with that stage. Next I have to run all the old website copy through several malware detection programs to make absolutely sure it's not me importing anything harmful into the new website, and then I get to put all the text in the right pages and update everything.
Meanwhile I'm reading page proofs for The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico, and starting the index for that book, which we still expect to come out mid-September. We'll have pre-order info on the new website. Norma did the hard work of finding a new website hosting service that had a good reputation and also used Site Studio so our revised website will have the same format, and getting all the specifications from the old site put into the new pages and weeding out rarely-read pages. Now it's my turn to finish the rebuilding.
We thank all of you for hanging in there with us. May you never be hacked!
Norma has fallen twice in three days, only bruised each time, and now she has a five-inch diameter black and blue spot on her hip from one fall (she didn't see a hole in the sidewalk on Mesones) and a swollen black and blue chin and jaw from the other fall (she missed one of the places in front of Mega where the sidewalk goes from flat to an incline with no warning). So if you see her limping on the street with her vivid swollen chin, I didn't slug her, no matter how much that's what it looks like! I've never hit anyone, even a few times when I probably should have!
She'll be okay, she's just living on Advil for a few days. It could have been far worse. The first fall, she rolled out into the street through mud in the gutter and luckily no cars were coming.So everybody, keep watching where you're walking, both your feet and head level so you don't run into forehead-height windowsills.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
July 30, 2009--Estoy Estupido again, my bad with cambio at Mega; Lucy Nuñez to meet with expats today; a famous Mexican actress opens Expresiones en Corto short films festival surrounded by mojigangas; wonderful weekend with John Davidson concert at Patsy's Place and DJ night at Cervesa de San Miguel; posting on the AARP newsletter about San Miguel
I feel terrible. I horribly embarrassed a Mexican kid at Mega by accusing him of not giving me my correct change and brought him to unmanly tears. We ordered two drinks at the coffee bar and I put a two hundred peso note on the counter while he started work on our drinks. I knew he wouldn't have change and it would take him awhile to get our drinks, so I sat down and didn't pay much attention any more.
He finally brought our drinks as we were talking to two friends and he motioned he had to go get cambio up front, as I knew he would. Nobody in Mexico has cambio, ever, it is a constant struggle. He ran up front and dropped a one-hundred peso bill on our table when he returned as he headed back behind the counter to wait on some more customers.
I kept waiting for the rest of my 42-peso change. It never came. It was taking him forever to make four more drinks for the next family of customers, so I went up to the counter. When he looked up I said, in my best intermediate Spanish, that he hadn't brought the remaining 42 pesos. He said he had.
I waited until he finally finished with the family of four, all of whom were glaring at me by this time. He insisted he had put down the 42 pesos when he brought the drinks. I was absolutely sure he had not.
Norma and I counted the money in my change purse and the 42 pesos was not there. I'd had almost no change with we'd left for Mega that morning because we'd counted out bus fare, so I knew how much I'd had. Norma got a woman from Security who counted out his change drawer. The money wasn't there either.
Norma was flabbergasted that Mega actually knew how much money was supposed to be in the change drawer--it doesn't seem as if even the banks balance out their tellers' drawers or the ATMs every day, much less know how much is supposed to be where at any moment.
I was still using my best Spanish but the security woman went to get a manager who spoke English. I told him my story, and the kid insisted he had given me the 42 pesos when he brought the coffees. The manager finally gave me 42 pesos. I apologized to the kid and left him a five-peso tip. He was in tears.
We felt so badly that he was crying that, around the corner in the lettuce section, Norma went through my change purse again. Peeking up from the credit card section was a 20-peso bill. We had gotten the change and I had stuffed it in the wrong section, not paying attention because we had been engrossed in conversation with our friends.
Do we let it go, having embarrassed ourselves enough? No, there was a black mark against this kid, who looked about 12 though he had to be older than that. He was still sniffling, hiding his tears. Bite the bullet, Schmidt, and apologize and make it right.
The family of four was still glaring at me when I returned, and they kept glaring all the while I made my apology. The kid kept wiping away tears. I said I would tell the woman from security and the manager that it was my mistake, and I would pay the money back to the woman from security who had handed me the extra 42 pesos.
I deliberately called myself stupid, "Estoy estupido, lo siento," knowing you never use the word estupido unless it's something really, really stupid. This qualified.
He never looked up at me, still hiding his most unmacho tears. The family was muttering about me. I didn't want to know what they were saying. A man at another table came over and intervened in English, even though I thought I was being perfectly clear in Spanish. He told the boy that I was going to the woman in security and the manager to make things right, that I would be sure they knew I was the one who had made the mistake and not him.
I left the kid another ten peso tip and tracked down the other two supervisors to make sure they knew it was my fault, the clerk had done nothing wrong. They kept saying it was a simple mistake, it happens all the time. Everyone was embarrassed. You don't confront anyone directly in Mexico, it's a major faux pas. Gringos complain all the time that we are shortchanged deliberately by Mexican cashiers. We have a reputation for being unreasonable over simple mistakes and always assuming we are being cheated. Sometimes it's our own damn fault. I'm still cringing at the memory.
Today the mayor-elect Lucy Nuñez is having her first open meeting with the expat community, at 4 pm at Teatro Santa Ana in the Biblioteca. Even though foreigners can't get involved in Mexican politics, now that the election is over we can certainly get involved again in helping our community. I'm glad she is reaching out. I am looking forward to hearing what she has to say.
Gringos complaining about every little thing again--she's speaking first to the SMA chapter of Democrats Abroad, which means some gringos who are not Democrats are complaining she's showing favoritism. It's only her first meeting with expats since being elected, and SMA Democrats Abroad is one of the best organized, most active, largest groups in SMA that could get together a big meeting at her request on short notice. I'm sure in the future that she'll ask the SMA Republicans Abroad to host a meeting for her, too.
Up until we started having the trouble with our website, we'd been having a great time. Last weekend were three fun events, starting with opening ceremonies for the Expresiones en Corto short film festival Friday night at the Jardin. We showed up at 6 pm for what was to be the start of a parade featuring mojigangas (the 10-foot-tall paper maché puppets) and Locos dancers. Our former neighbor who had moved back to Monterrey was sitting alone and we plopped next to her to wait.
She speaks no English so I was glad for the opportunity to practice my Spanish on someone who was a captive audience. I managed for almost an hour, though we couldn't get deep into any topic. She kept looking at her watch--was it something I said wrong?--and explained that she was worried she wouldn't make it to pick up her dry cleaning before the shop closed at 7. She thought the parade would happen at 6 and she would be able to see it before going for her laundry. So it's not only expats who unreasonably expect things to happen on time in Mexico.
At 5 to 7 she rushed off. The parade didn't start until after 7, and it was only a few mojigangas and Locos dancers plus a small marching band, but you can never see too many mojigangas and Locos. I took lots of photos, of course, as if I'd never seen a mojiganga before. (Our photo gallery section of the website is also still functioning fine, it's on the different server that our forums are also on, and I'll post photos of all these events in new albums after I finish this blog.)
Norma had noticed that there seemed to be a lot of police around, and they weren't the expected tránsito traffic cops to handle the crowds, either. We thought we even could identify some plain clothes cops--solo mariachis with no musical instruments standing around talking on cell phones, for example. Had the city gotten a warning of some sort?
Suddenly we saw the heavily-guarded attraction, a movie star surrounded by mojigangas and the plain clothes types, riding in the back of an open convertible. Of course we had never heard of Meche Carreño, but upon spotting here, Norma compared her to the Erica Kane of Mexico. Carreño was a film star in the late '60s who always played the role of an innocent young femme fatale who drove older men nuts with her beauty. She has to be around 60 today but she was in a loosely woven white top with lots of skin showing, and she looked as cute as she could be. The police and solo mariachis followed her car as it left.
One of the mojigangas was outrageously busty, even for a mojiganga, and of course her blouse managed to slip off her breasts and show some nipple as the parade went on. Standard procedure for a mojiganga. Everyone always acts as if it were an accident, and mothers bury their young boys' faces in their skirts so the boys won't see.
Saturday night was a freebie '50s and '60s DJ Dance Night at Cervesa de San Miguel, just outside of SMA on the road to Dolores Hidalgo. The road to Dolores is indeed all torn up as the entire highway is widened to four lanes for the 2010 anniversary of the 1810 War of Independence from Spain and the 1910 War of Revolution from Mexico's own dictators. (Eerybody keeps joking that Mexico is due for another revolution in 2010 since it's been another 100 years.)
We got there early and the music was already started, songs from the '50s that I went on my first date to, got kicked off the school dance floor to for dirty dancing, fell in crush to, had my heart broken to. "Come Go with Me" by the Del-Vikings, "In the Still of the Night" by the Five Satins, "Earth Angel" by the Penguins, "Help Me Rhonda" by the Beach Boys... But no one got up to dance.
It wasn't until the DJ put on "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" that Norma and I said enough is enough, and we pranced onto the floor and got the ball rolling. What a blast! I even won a contest for being the first to identify one of the long-ago tunes, the prize being a DVD of some of the early music.
The very first competition to identify an oldie had us all puzzled for awhile, and I noticed singer John Davidson humming along in the corner with his wife Rhonda. Why isn't he going up to claim the prize, he'd be the one person who would know all the songs from that era, Norma whispered. We both remembered all the John Davidson TV shows rotating with Perry Como and Andy Williams, in our and his youth. He went on to star on "Hollywood Squares" for years, and we knew he was still making the rounds of Las Vegas, Branson, and the cruise ship shows, appealing mostly to audiences of our age, doing many oldies tunes as well as his comedic updates of new songs and original material.
We were already looking forward to his concert the next day at Patsy's Place. We were delighted to see him ahead of time, in person and close up, at this '50s-'60s DJ dance, and we even talked to him and his wife Rhonda earlier in the evening. He said Norma and I were cute dancers. I used to be a sexy dancer. Oh well, at our age cute is good.
He is as gorgeous as ever, those great dimples and that thick wavy hair, even if it is snow white now. And so we were staring at him, wondering why he didn't recognize this somewhat familiar tune that the DJ was offering up to us.
And then someone got it. It was a John Davidson song! Oh well, not every song is an A side. Since eight-tracks there haven't even been A and B sides.
We were exhausted after dancing all night, and all of other old fogeys were gone by 10 pm when we finally left, the last ones on the dance floor. All across San Miguel and Mexico, Mexican parties were just starting at 10 pm.
The next day we were really looking forward to hearing Davidson sing now, and we were not disappointed. He opened with "Down Mexico Way" and did a half dozen songs in Spanish. He handed out lyrics sheets in Spanish and English for three of them: "Reloj," by Robert Cantoral, on wanting the clock to stop ticking because when the night ends the singer's love will leave forever; "Como Imaginar" by Chico Novarro on how can the singer imagine that life will go on the same when his love is gone; and "Solamente Una Vez" by Augustine Lara, on giving one's heart only once in a lifetime. Mexicans do love their over-the-top romantic ballads.
Davidson had even written a song especially for San Miguel de Allende, and he did comedy routines specifically around SMA topics as well. There are no gays in Texas...long pause... they're all in San Miguel, he said, as he introduced a love song to the boy serving coffee at Starbucks. He did many jokes making fun of himself and the aging process, and his patient wife Rhonda kept the camcorder running as she smiled and listened to his schtick as if she was hearing it all the first time.
Wonderful time, and wonderful Sunday brunch at Patsy's Place, with her signature rehydrated and frijole-stuffed ancha chiles, grilled veggies, salad, fancy rice, artichoke heart and shrimp/mango salsa hors d'oeuvres, lemon and chocolate cupcakes, watermelon and fruit coolers besides the margaritas, and much more. Another great time was had by all.
Monday the AARP online newsletter arrived in my inbox with a feature on retiring to Mexico. Of course the comments on the article included the usual misinformation and nasty stereotypes about Mexico, so I posted quite a few responses to specific distortions about expat life and answered some reader questions--plugging our website and books along the way.
"Lady, your website is infected. Better clean up your act before you send anybody to your site," some guy posted, and that was when I first learned that we were having trouble with our website. The rest of the week went to hell as we coped with this mess, and finally decided the only solution was to rebuild our site on another server. And that is what I am off to do right now. I'll transfer this blog over to our new site when it's running.
July 12, 2009--A beautiful home overlooking Charco, July 4th Democrats Abroad party, "Kid's Incredible Journey," the fighting over what to do about the overabundance of egrets and herons (garzas), new drug crime close to SMA, our response to it
How did it get to be two weeks without writing in my blog? So much happens here all the time that I'll try to recapture the best and worst of the two weeks. We were invited to a new home built in Los Balcones overlooking El Charco botanical gardens, and I had to say as I walked through the door, "Has Architectural Digest been here yet?" I won't give any details to protect the owners' privacy, only to say that without a whole lot of money they built a showcase around a large, lush garden and fountain, and took advantage of some of the spectacular views in abundance in the hillsides around SMA, and made every nook a gallery for Mexican folk art.
A grand piano was the centerpiece of the living room built in tiers down the hillside to lead to a picture window wall for the formal dining room view of the lake. And the owners were good enough cooks so their food could stand up to the spectacular backdrop.
While we talked, one of those rainy season downpours hit suddenly, and they had an instant waterfall on the adjoining hillside to show us. We took a cab home and I was sure it was going to float down the winding roads of Balcones in the water surge racing down the streets. Once again we appreciated SMA's deep curbs so that we could find our way back home as water crept up onto the sidewalks during the half hour or so of the deluge. We're still wearing flow-through Tiva sandals, designed to be worn by river boaters, for the duration.
The 4th of July Democrats Abroad party was fun, the Hotel Real de Minas putting on a traditional spread of hot dogs, hamburgers, potato salad, cole slaw, carrot cake, brownies and more. The Dems had tables out to make it easy to sign all the petitions currently in play, including an ever-optimistic push to get Medicare benefits extended to expats, with Mexico as the first demonstration project. Who knows, in this time of economic crisis and the entire US health care system under scrutiny, this could be the right time. We aren't holding our breath.
We were sorry we couldn't be in two places at once because the Chili Cookoff at Villa Antigua also sounded like a lot of fun. Some Mexicans also happened to set off a few fireworks that night, though I'm sure the timing was coincidental. So many events have been going on that we have missed because we're deep into finishing our book.
We did take Saturday night off to see "Kid's Incredible Adventure, of the Journey of the Soul," which the writers Ken Bichel and Tim Hazell call, "A Classical Ethnic Rock Musical-Morality Play." It was presented at St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Cardo, and I was sorry only about 70 were in attendance. It was presented once a few months ago so I'm hopeful it will be given again in the future. Ken Bichel has to be one of the most creative, talented musicians in SMA, and he has the Emmy statues to prove it. His recording credits include Aretha Franklin, Luciano Pavarotti, Billy Joel, Placido Domingo, Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, Judy Collins, Paul Simon, the Orchestra of the Sorbonne, and the American Symphony Orchestra. He's performed in La Scala opera house in Milan, the American Music Festival in Geneva, an audience for the Duchess of Kent in London, the bicentennial in Hong Kong, and repeatedly at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York. And he still puts his whole soul out there for his audience even if it's only 70 expats in San Miguel.
Tim Hazell has an equally long list of credits in painting, music, poetry, theater, education, writing, and research with a focus on Latin America's indigenous roots. I first saw him seven years ago when he had organized a group of children to play pre-Hispanic music on authentic historic early instruments as diverse as turtle shells.
The rock musical was fun, with the church's minister making a cameo appearance as a Buddhist monk, Hazell doing a descent into madness wearing a red devil mask, and Wendy Bichel (who has her own lengthy resume as a professional actress and singer and who now performs her own one-woman shows in SMA after having previously appeared on Broadway, the Copacabana, and throughout Europe) was the expressive narrator. She delivered such lead-ins to the scenes as, "Kid discovers the infamous quote by Billy Joel, 'Anyone who says they're not in it to get the girls is lying!'"
We've been following the ongoing controversy in SMA over what to do with all the garzas, the Mexican word for the herons and I think also for the white egrets that have been reproducing like rabbits in the various SMA parks. When we moved to SMA in 2002 we first walked through Parque Juarez and noticed all the bird feces all over everything, and we saw overhead that the trees were full of birds' nests. The park was pretty run down back then. Friends of Parque Juarez, the SMA Garden Club and city efforts under Bob Haas and Don Patterson helped bring Parque Juarez around to become a beautiful park, with an extensive children's playground, basketball courts, and a kiosk for musical performances.
And along the way the tall trees were topped to get rid of most of the birds' nests. There was a great uproar then by many at the dislocation of the birds. But the birds moved to Guadiana Park and to several schoolyards. The controversy over what to do with them moved right along with the birds.
We didn't see it ourselves, but one day last week the Department of Ecologia moved in and topped out the trees in Guadiana Park, too, leaving dozens of baby birds fallen to the ground among the sawed off branches. Many expats were horrified and scooped up the surviving babies and brought them to their homes for hand feeding until the birds are old enough to survive on their own. Other expats who live near the park hate the birds for their feces and for their all-night raucous sounds that resemble nothing like any bird you can imagine, and for driving off the song birds who used to be in their backyards.
Linda Whynman, president of the SMA Audubon Society, gave a history of the conflict to those who were upset at the devastation, noting that the Audubon Society and others have been working with Don Patterson, who is now head of the Department of Ecologia, to try to find solutions to the problem that might satisfy everyone (not likely).
"You must realize that there are people in the community, Mexican and otherwise, who have asked for the removal of these birds, as a nuisance and health hazard," she wrote. "What we all, of course, object to is the manner in which it is handled." She noted that Ecologia is working on all aspects of the problems of birds in SMA. "During the last two months Ecologia has confiscated approximately 60 birds from illegal vendors. Local or native birds they release. or, if they are very young, turn them over to a local vet for their immediate care. The more exotic species like parrots and macaws they call the Federal Prosecutors office and they send inspectors to take the birds.
"Don and his group have a total of 8 inspectors to cover over 1,500 sq km and 540 communities apart from the urban area of San Miguel. The Department of Environment and Ecology currently handles between 60 and 70% of all the 066 emergency calls that come into the municipal government. These calls include reports of illegal activities such as deforestation, extracting of sand and gravel, barking dogs, excessive levels of music in clubs and restaurants, clandestine dumping of black
waters, etc., etc., etc. In reality they also handle themes that really have nothing to do with the environment or ecology, like panteones (the cemeteries), dog catching and parks and plazas, etc. He has been trying to get the city council to restructure the department to eliminate these themes from that department as well as to include 7 more inspectors...so far without support. Nevertheless, before the end of the month he is planning to present to the city council another petition for this new structure....
"The problem with the garzas has been going on for over 12 years. Don estimates their population numbers are increasing at least 30% each year. In the beginning the problem was in Juarez Park. As you may recall, The Friends of the Park tried just about everything imaginable to resolve the problem of where they nest, for example: artifical owls, sticky substance on the branches, squirrels, fireworks, and high-tech predator sounds with speakers (the birds only nested in front of the speakers). A few years ago the department spent a thousand dollars for someone that came from Celaya with a hawk. That did not work either. Some wanted them shot. Finally, during the last municipal administration they decided that the best approach was to prune the trees. Eegrets nest in the highest nesting spot available.
"Hence, they continued with this practice when Don became the director of Environment and Ecology. The only thing that did was get them to move from one nesting area to another. First they moved from Juarez Park to El Chorro, then to the school Fuego Nuevo. After that they moved to the park in La Guardiana and then on to Villa de los Frailes and now they are nesting in other areas. In short they chased them all over town. Needless to say, at each location there were complaints that "Ecology" was not doing their job.
"Finally, last year Don had a meeting with members of Audubon and after research, we suggested creating artificial habitat down by the dam. His department searched for material in order to do this and even offered to buy the poles from Telmex. However, we needed poles of 8 meters and they could only find poles of 5 meters which were not of sufficient height to protect the birds. Even if we found 8 meter poles and the birds used them we were not resolving the problem of population growth.
"Don has complaints from the parents of the schools that come to his office with documents from the health department saying the combination of the bird droppings and fish droppings are affecting the health of the children. The last complaint was from the school Negromante. They requested that he prune the trees. They did this and then received complaints. Anyone who has additional suggestions and expertise please contact me, Bob Haas and Don and we can work together to help create solutions. None of us proposes to be experts in this situation and therefore have been contacting Cornell and other Audbon organizations for assistance. If someone out there has alternative solutions, please come forward... and while you are at it, join Audubon."
This extensive reply quieted the protests as everyone realized we have to work together to solve this problem, a common one throughout the world, and as expats we must work with the citizens of Mexico whose decisions must be respected. The pigeons were ousted from Trafalgar Square in London. They still rule St. Mark's Square in Venice. In rural Michigan the orchard owners used cannons that set off loud bangs every five minutes. Helped some, but the sounds of the cannons also upset tourists. (These were fruit orchards near Lake Huron and the beach cities.) All along the beaches Canada geese came by the thousands, increasing in population each year, and the statistic I remember was that three Canada geese living on your lawn put out the equivalent amount of feces as one homeless person living on your lawn. 30 geese=10 people pooping on your lawn.
Eventually some government group started shooting them and giving the geese to soup kitchens. Lots of goose soup and roast goose on the menus that year. They also tried birth control in their feed, which did seem to be the most successful. Canada geese are still a big problem in much of North America. Remember that Canada geese were responsible for a recent airline crash, and they cause numerous near catastrophes at many airports. Airlines have been trying to find a way to keep birds off the runways for years, to no avail.
Even where we live, one day a Banty rooster showed up and then someone bought him a hen, and next thing we knew we had 37 chickens, mostly roosters, perched in the trees overhanging our courtyard walkway, pooping on our heads when we walked, keeping everyone up all night (roosters do not only crow at dawn). One day they all disappeared, probably caught and sold for food. We learned chickens are a cash crop, not pets.
I doubt garzas are tasty or someone would have discovered that by now and the problem might be over!
I do know that many Mexicans and expats shoot the garzas that settle into their back yards. Their horrid squawks all night are supposed to be even worse than the poop. Birth control in the birds' food sounds like the most reasonable approach, though that doesn't solve the problem of those already here.
So that is another aspect of living in San Miguel de Allende.
Meanwhile, a far less interesting part of living in Mexico is the drug cartel violence. The state of Michoacán is the center of La Familia, a fairly new drug cartel that has aspects of a religious cult to it, and which is expanding into the state of Guanajuato along the main highways that lead to the US border. All over Mexico the main highways are the center of the fighting between the cartels to control territory and routes. This region used to be under the Gulf Cartel, which has as its enforcement wing the Zetas, whose members started out as specially trained Mexican military personnel. La Familia has its own assassination squad, called Mata Zetas. Matar is the Spanish word for murder. The narcos are busy killing each other and have even dumped bodies in San Miguel. The latest victims, according to local Mexican newspapers, include three unemployed young men who live in SMA, one a lawyer, the other a design student, the other the son of a tour guide. There have been recent cartel incidents in Celaya and throughout Michoacán, including in the pleasant touristy arts and crafts town of Pátzcuaro.
I've been asked how I could still be writing a book about moving to Mexico, and am I including this kind of new information in the book. We still love it here and still find living here to be safe. In the book we don't sugarcoat anything, we don't wail and emphasize the bad parts, or downplay the good parts. We give our own experiences of a wonderful new way of life that is still safer and more enriching for us than we ever felt in LA, Detroit and Phoenix which certainly had major gang violence and murders.
Reading about a beheading in Michoacán is no different than reading about a serial murderer torturing our neighbors in LA. In fact we're less likely to the the target of a drug cartel/police war than we were of a random serial killer in LA, Detroit and Phoenix. We don't worry any more about the possibility of somehow being caught in crossfire between narcos and police than we did about being caught in crossfire during a US bank robbery or convenience store robbery. My parents never got shot by the Purple Gang violence during Prohibition in Detroit, either.
Yes, we still love it here! And we still encourage people to move here, letting them have all the facts, to make up their own minds. Taking all factors into consideration, moving to Mexico still makes a whole lot of sense for many US and Canadian citizens, both retirees and younger. Of course it's not for everyone.
No one thinks twice about visiting or moving to New Orleans, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Houston, Miami and other high-crime cities in the US, and their daily lives will still be safer in most places in Mexico than in high-crime areas of the US. We're not telling anyone to move to Ciudad Juarez or the other high crime areas of Mexico!
Sure, we don't like the drug cartel wars and wish they would end, but I think they're here for awhile. The drug gangs are still active in most US cities, only a few miles away from the most desirable areas in the world to live. South Central (Watts) is 15 miles from Santa Monica.
It's true, more and more expats are realizing that the drug cartels influence so much in Mexico--and in the US. The US's role is also becoming more known. When those who are casually plopping down a hundred bucks for some weed or cocaine realize that their dollars are going to buy the machine guns that will kill Mexican police, maybe it will stop.
Meanwhile, all the wonderful parts of living in Mexico are overshadowed, the crime news reinforcing those who are already bigoted against Mexico and Mexicans. It is the delightful aspects of living here that will continue to draw those who check out moving to Mexico. If you read this blog, I describe our day to day life here, which is still the best we've ever experienced anywhere.
And meanwhile, I'm missing the upcoming Independent Festival of Classical Guitar, the Chamber Music Concert Series, the International Short Films Festival, all sorts of art openings, workshops on everything from belly dancing to Tai Chi, a tango festival, several more tempting plays, a Beatles commemorative concert, salsa classes, yoga and meditation and metaphysics programs, community choir practice, guitar fest, a harp and flamenco guitar concert, a circus summer camp, literally hundreds of events I might choose to go to, if I had the time and my life wasn't already so packed.
The skies are blue, the wonderfully cleansing and usually short thunderstorms have cooled the air, good movies keep coming to MM Cinemas (just saw "Public Enemy," eagerly awaiting the last "Harry Potter"), all kinds of new "Cheap Eats" keep opening in town while old ones close, our friends keep organizing fun events like Mexican Train parties (a kind of dominoes game), we keep meeting new friends and making time for the old, and life goes on, very happily indeed.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
June 27, 2009--Final editing, final arguing; the freezer door left ajar; the shootout an hour away from SMA, one of those delightful SMA days
Norma and I are still in the last throes of editing The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico, Norma insisting I write specifically all the visa and car permit info as if we're writing The Complete Idiot's Guide to Moving to Mexico, while I like to tell all my stories. When someone is about fall off a cliff, don't tell them about the history of the discovery of gravity and the archaeological and geological stratas they will pass as they fall, just tell them where to stop! I like to ramble, life is so interesting, and it all ties together in the end. Norma says tie it together--now.
It doesn't help that nothing is final or certain about dealing with Mexican bureaucracy, and what happens to one expat one day, at one crossing, may have nothing to do with what happens to another two lanes over, or that afternoon in the same lane, and not necessarily anything to do with law anyway. And so we spend our days at our computers.
We did lose two complete days. We left at 11 am for our usual walk to Mega Wednesday, its giant cheap produce sale day, along the way taking notes on all the restaurant comings and goings on Ancha, discovering that the little produce stand on the steps of Espino's has the small yellow tender ears of fresh corn in season instead of the huge white tough ears of corn usually on sale in Mexico, stopping to talk to lots of people, checking out the Aunt Jemina corn meal and Chinese spicy black bean chile sauce now at Carey's, having a limonada at the Longhorn Smokehouse, having a cappuccino when we finally get to Mega, having another decaf when we run into more friends just arrived in town for three weeks as we're about to leave, and finally taking a taxi home with all our packages accumulated along the way and at Mega. We didn't get home until 4 pm. What do we do all day?
Our housekeeper ran downstairs to help us with the bags, and sadly breaks the news to us: the door to the upright full-sized used freezer we keep in the back bathroom that we use only for storage had somehow been left ajar. Norma admits she did it, she's the one who was in there last, and the cats must have distracted her as she was trying to keep them from running into the storage room and hiding under the Christmas tree ornament boxes. They think it's a game to hide from us and then wail at the door to come out at midnight.
Maria noticed the problem when she saw water leaking out into the bedroom from under the door, she tells us hesitantly. It's really time for her to leave, but she stays over for another hour as we all go into high gear. Norma goes into corporate accountant mode, organizing our plan of attack, barking orders. We think of nothing else, not even dinner. Norma and I don't stop working furiously until after midnight, trying to save as much as we can.
We fill five big trash sacks with the obviously defrosted stuff right away. Maria is running up and down the stairs taking the soggy bags out to the garbage. A big package of defrosted berries from Costco splits and shoots red juice all over the three of us and the bedding. Quick stop to rub stick stain remover over all the spots and change clothes and carry on, the change of sheets to wait until later. Maria mops the floor continuously before she leaves. (It wasn't until after midnight that we finally got around to putting stain remover on the sheets and coverlet and starting another wash load. Hope the raspberry stains come out.)
One way we can live fairly thriftfully and eat well is with the help of that freezer and Norma's ability to cook six meals at once and freeze them. Out we tossed five meals of Emeril LaGasse's kicked up meatloaf, several kilos of hamburger, chicken and turkey casseroles, turkey soup, pizza sauce, six freezer containers of homemade BBQ sauce, Kung Pau sauce, chile peanut sauce, dozens of breakfast-sized portions of homemade sausage, hand-squeezed orange and lemon juice, homemade pesto...
We reach a layer in which there are still ice crystals in the food. This level can be saved but all the food will have to be cooked right away and refrozen where possible. There's no way we can do it all. Maria says shyly that she's having a birthday party that night for her youngest son (he's in his 30s). Aha! Her whole colonia will have a feast!
Into four plastic shopping bags go the Costco packages of spring rolls we'd been doling out four at a time to accompany Chinese meals--her son will have 44 spring rolls for his party. Out comes a slab of salmon and some salmon patties and dozens of portions of catfish. Not foods you can cook and refreeze. Her son will have salmon and catfish for his birthday. He gets chicken wings, hot dogs and hot dog rolls, biscuits, pumpernickel bread, cake. Maria is giggling in delight. She'll invite everyone who lives on Canal to his cumpleaños.
We send her home in a cab and we get to work cooking what's left. Norma makes an all-purpose marinade for all the pieces of chicken, steak, thin arrachera and pork and heads for the BBQ on the roof. I'm handing her up cookie sheets of meats to be grilled, then washing out the pans well to receive the BBQ as each load finishes. We slice the various kinds of poultry and meats into taco and fajita sizes and put them in freezer bags and label them all, noting on several batches, "Too salty"-- these will be mixed into salads or cream sauces with no more salt.
While she's grilling I'm slicing open homemade and Costco-sized packages of at least four kinds of sausages and putting them all together into one big pot to be brought to a boil and repackaged. We now have very interesting flavored packets to be stirred into omelets--so what if there's a bit of an andouille flavor here, an Italian flavor there, a little kielbasa over here. We couldn't tell some of the packages apart so we now have a new combo flavor of sausage in the house, dozens of meal-sized packages. It actually is quite tasty. Some interesting omelets and pizzas lie ahead. Tasting the meats and sausage was dinner.
We found two meals worth of gumbo we didn't know we still had--Norma had been grumbling she needed to clean out the freezer some day to see what all we had, but this wasn't the way we'd envisioned doing it. The gumbo, too, was reheated to a boil for ten minutes and repackaged.
We lost hundreds of dollars of food. But at least the freezer is cleaned out. And Maria's son and colonia had a fantastic birthday party. And Norma won't have to cook for quite a while.
We were so keyed we never could get to sleep until around 6:30 am. And then the construction noise from a project adjoining our apartment complex started. (Never count on a view lasting forever--our neighbors now have a very dark house because the house behind them is getting a second and third floor that blocks all their light.) We were shot the entire rest of the day and our sleep patterns have been messed up ever since. In fact I'm writing this at 4 am Saturday morning. Another day will be shot.
I was going to write about all the little restaurants we've checked out lately, but I'll do that later. I do have 26 new pictures in the Food Scenes album in our Photo Gallery of this website that you can scan in the meantime. Note especially Suryaluna, a great little Indian restaurant on Hidalgo 17. It deserves special attention later.
But I will repost what I wrote in the Living in SMA forum as my reaction to the latest drug cartel shootout, this one only an hour's drive from San Miguel, east of Celaya in a town I'd never heard of. Twelve cartel hitmen were themselves killed by police and only one policeman was hurt seriously. I call that a victory for the good guys, though the news story is already all over the world, from Taipei to Australia and Bangkok, spun as just another shootout in Mexico, implying that civilians are in constant danger. And I will finish with another of those perfect days we just had in SMA, totally unaffected by that crime an hour away:
The Houston Chronicle is describing this town of about 70,000 as an hour's drive east of San Miguel. I never heard of the place until today. Again, I never worried about gang and drug violence an hour's drive away from me in Flint and Detroit when I lived in rural Michigan, nor about gang and drug violence in downtown Phoenix when I lived 35 miles away near the Superstitition Mountains, nor about violence in South Central when I lived in Santa Monica when I first moved to LA. Now the violence and corrupt cops all around me when we moved near downtown LA, yes, I was afraid with good reason, as I've described often.
For those political campaigns for the July 5 elections wanting a return to the "gold old days" under the 71-year reign of the PRI, when government just let the narcos do their thing and everyone took payoffs and all seemed fine on the surface, President Calderon just said, “To turn one’s head, to act as if you don’t see the crime in front of you, as some politicians want to do, is no option for Mexico." Mexico has got to do this, terrible as it is during the fighting. It will never achieve the greatness Mexico is capable of while it is still rotting from corruption and drug wars.
My view is to know and acknowledge the drug wars going on throughout Mexico, and even close to San Miguel, but to also know that it is almost all drug cartels and police shooting each other and the cartels fighting each other for markets. Our daily lives are not affected at all, unless you are selling drugs, in which case be afraid, be very afraid. The cartels are now picking off independent street drug dealers as they tighten their market share within Mexico to pick up the small stuff. We lived our lives and still had a good time in Los Angeles where there actually was crime all around us.
Meanwhile, we had an absolutely lovely day today, though it started with an emergency run to Dr. Vargas who saw us within an hour and charged only $16 to repair a broken dental plate, then a wonderful visit with friends who showed off their new garden in their three bedroom home with a hot tub and fully equipped brand new kitchen and more for which their property taxes are $100 a year, and then we met friends up on the roof of La Posadita restaurant and enjoyed Las Tunas Renaissance-costumed musicians marching past us below accompanied by a burro decorated with bright flowers, and then a brass precision band on the Jardin celebrating what seemed to be the kickoff of some sort of endurance motorcycle race, and a pleasant long walk home on a Friday night in which the newly arrived rainy season has left us cool again, and so many more so-satisfying little sights and sounds and smells and touches all day long, a truly wonderful life.
Yet friends back in Phoenix are emailing again, petrified for us, even as Phoenix and Tucson are experiencing far worse crime all around them than we have here in San Miguel.
Know crime is out there, take common sense precautions against the usual street crime like purse snatchings that you are far more likely to experience, watch your feet since you're even more likely to fall on the cobblestones, and don't sell drugs, and you'll be safer than in many cities in the US. How many crimes are committed each day within an hour's radius of Philadelphia, New Orleans, Atlanta or Houston?
I'm not going to lose any sleep over the deaths of 12 narco hitmen in a police shootout. Luckily no police died, though one is in serious condition.
Is it a terrible thing to still enjoy life fully even while there are pockets of drug cartel violence going on in many areas of Mexico? Should we wrap ourselves in shrouds and beat our chests and start wailing and living in fear while the Mexicans all around us are going on with their daily lives, too?
We didn't stop living when we were in LA where the Crips and the Bloods and the Diamonds and the 18th Streeters and a dozen other gangs were shooting our office parking lot full of machine gun spray many nights and a gay man was dumped into a garbage dumpster behind the gay bar across the street and the local gang had us scared to even go down the hillside of our own property...I've told it all here before. The Hillside Stranglers and then the Night Stalker were far more scary to have operating in our downtown LA neighborhood than anything we feel here.
I'd rather remember the green pozole soup thick with chicken breast chunks that I had for dinner at La Posadita, served with a lazy Susan of diced onions, minced jalapenos, oregano, cayenne pepper, fried pork rinds, tortilla strips, and avocado to decorate it with, and the shared flan for dessert, and the walk home past the crowded Jardin at night with that brass band playing and the spiffed-up motorcycles raring to go for whatever race it was, and the Mexican couple dancing to the music, and all the tourists snapping photos of the Parroquia lit up at night, and the toddlers tugging at their balloons and pull toys, and the fancy poodles and Chihuahuas strutting with their owners on their walks, and the crowds at Harry's as we walk past enjoying their 2 for 1 drinks, and the taco stands on the streets filling our senses with great smells and sights, and the artists' gallery openings where we can duck into Galeria Izamal and sneak some of Henry Vermillion's homemade chutney and chips as we check out the latest paintings on our walk...
Life is so good here. I absolutely hate it when the Taipei Times makes it sound as if all of Mexico is one giant shootout. It's not.
More soon on the great little restaurants we've discovered lately. Check out the Food Scenes album of the Photo Gallery in the meantime.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
June 15, 2009--Our eighth Day of the Locos; we finally get to celebrate our 30th and 5th anniversaries
Another confirmed H1N1 flu case popped up in San Miguel, giving us 37, including the bedridden woman with heart and kidney disease who died of it last month. It's been more than a week since the last case, so I suppose we needn't worry, though when I read the story I couldn't help realizing that we'd been in the middle of crowds all day for Day of the Locos. Atencion predicted 10,000 would march in the parade, and we were so close we could touch most of them and had to watch our feet from being run over by the sound trucks.
The parade reached us on Hernandez Macias near Mesones at 12:30 pm, from its 11 am start in Colonia San Antonio near the church, and it was mostly over by 2:30 pm. As usual I took far too many photos--483 in those two hours. Why do I do that? My photo software program is so overloaded it barely budges. I need to take some time and delete thousands of photos from the past seven years. I'm so overwhelmed with photos to edit and resize that I've paralyzed myself.
My latest camera, $140 USD at one of the big box stores, allows me to take 640 photos before downloading or recharging. It's a curse. Day of the Locos is our favorite parade--or do I say that about all of them? We staked out our spot right at the sidewalk's edge at 10:30 am and hid under sunbrellas and read until we could hear the drums. We picked out the child least likely to be able to collect his or her own candy and donated everything that landed in our laps or at our feet to him. A shy boy of maybe three, he was behind our plastic patio chairs and watched the parade wide-eyed between our shoulders. It was the least we could do, we were blocking his access to the street, or rather his mother had chosen to stand him behind us. We were there first.
Two boys of about nine were on either side of us, scooping up everything that came near them, grabbing candies even out of our laps if we didn't move fast enough. One of the boys kept sitting down on the arm rest of my chair and slipping down into my lap. It was that crowded. Mexicans' spatial sense is far different from Anglos.' The other one kept running out into the parade and grabbing hold of the paraders who were throwing candy so that he got even more. Some of the marchers were so irritated they shooed him away with nothing and didn't throw anything in our direction for any of us, punishing us all. So many of my photos ended up with him in them, tugging on the costumes I was trying to shoot. Many more have his hand and baseball cap in them, waving in front of my camera to catch more candy. I wanted to smack him.
But the parade was not designed for me to take photos with an uninterrupted view. If I'd been more aggressive myself I would have jumped out into the parade and asked those in the best costumes to pose for me--a Mexican guy with a camcorder had no hesitations in doing so. In others of my photos he's inserted himself into the scene and I have photos of him taking photos.
Oh well, out of 483 shots I'm sure I have more than enough--to do what, I'm not sure. Am I a photo junkie? I never did this when a roll of film had a tidy 36 shots and it cost money to develop them. How will I ever organize my thousands of shots? I have them filed by date taken and a short blurb in the file name, but you can't exactly describe hundreds of shots taken over a week with a file name. I can't even imagine getting myself down to 140 characters to Twitter successfully. That's another time-consumer that I'm afraid would develop into an addiction. I have quite enough to do already, thank you. Don't send me any more invitations to Twitter with you! I can barely get a blog out once a week! And don't bring up how overdue I am on our next books. I'm even overdue on some library books.
Our housekeeper has told us definitively that the Running of the Bulls will be back this September. She heard it on the radio from Lucy (Lucy Nuñez, candidate for SMA Mayor, for whom our housekeeper feels a first name friendship though she's never seen Lucy except in political posters and she didn't know Lucy was married to the owner of the radio station). Our housekeeper is thankfully usually wrong. She and her friends, the housekeepers at the Hotel Sautto, can build up a rumor until it is from "The Twilight Zone." But I keep asking those who might know if they have heard anything about a second coming of the Pamplonada, and they all shudder at the thought and say no. If you by chance have heard anything about that possibility please let me know.
I'm sure the restaurant, hotel and bar owners would love to have it return because of the terrible business decline right now. But would they pay for their share of the increased security, cleaning, and portapotties that would be needed? They never paid before, even when they were told that the city was going to cancel it unless they chipped in their share. It wasn't fair that they made a lot of money each year on the crowds of mostly young men and their girlfriends who came to town for the running of the bulls and they didn't pay anything toward their cost of doing business. The money was drained instead from the poorer folks who desperately need city funds to extend running water and sewers into the areas they have started to live on, around the outskirts of the city. They're not paying taxes, either. Where should the money come from?
Expats who are homeowners are thrilled to pay only a couple hundred dollars a year in property taxes for a house, compared to the thousands they paid in property taxes back in the US, but we would be a likely source of additional revenue. We want the city services same we had in the US but are glad to pay almost no taxes for them. For some of us, Mexico is indeed the land of the free lunch. But the government can't exactly discriminate against expats and charge us higher property taxes or it would be seen as another "gringo tax." I don't know what the solution to Mexico's economic situation is. All I know is that they need more money to solve their massive problems, and they don't take in enough taxes, and many people can't afford to pay more taxes. And, the hotels, restaurants and bars are hurting, just as everyone is, and everybody is scrambling trying to find new sources of income. It's a global recession.
So what did we do but splurge on an anniversary dinner Saturday night since Doc Severinson and Gil y Cartas were at Bella Italia for this weekend. They were traveling for our actual April 27 anniversary, our 30th of being together, and Norma was sick that week anyway and we didn't really celebrate, even though 30 years is a biggie. They were going to be gone again for our actual June 21 fifth anniversary of our legal marriage in Provincetown. So we combined the two celebrations into Saturday night. Money may be short for many things in San Miguel, but Bella Italia was packed. The ony two empty tables were behind pillars.
Gil y Cartas were always good but Doc Severinson has snapped them into total professionalism. When he waves his hand, that band moves along in perfect timing. You could cut a tomato on their precision stops. Jon Davidson and his wife Rhonda were in town and dropped in for the evening. The youngest of you wouldn't remember that Jon Davidson alternated with the Andy Williams Show on TV and was a major force in popular music 30 or 40 years ago, and then he was on Hollywood Squares for years. He still tours Las Vegas and many venues catering to those of us who do remember. And he remembered meeting us at a party last year! How to feel like a big shot when Jon Davidson comes over to your table!
Our meal wasn't exactly a cheap eats night, but our total bill for a fine meal, drinks and two hours of big-name entertainment was the equivalent of $54 USD. We started with two excellent appetizers: pate fois gras on small breads around lettuce topped with a blueberry salad dressing; and three big rounds of smoked provolone that I think was baked. Our entrees were a pasta with clams, mussels, shrimp and calamari for Norma, and an oxtail sauced pasta for me (it reminded me of the good old German beef gravy over noodles of my childhood).
We try not to order anything that Norma would cook at home because she probably cooks it better and then we feel cheated of our dinner price. But there was no way Norma was going to cook all those kinds of seafood, and she surely would never cook an oxtail. She left all that good old poverty food behind. But sometimes I like to remember. She won't eat beef liver or tongue, either, and I consider them delicacies. We split a dessert, a bombé of chocolate coated homemade vanilla ice cream over a coconut cream center. With two Margaritas and two soft drinks the bill was 700 pesos. I doubt if we could have bought one ticket to a Doc Severinson concert in the US for that.
If you've been reading our forums you know that two guys made a wrong turn off of the toll road into Monterrey at 2:30 in the afternoon on the same day that federal police and Monterrey police were clashing over Calderón's attempts to not only bring down the drug cartels but also to find and fire all corrupt police and government figures. The local police were in a standoff against the federal police at the same time that two officers stopped my friends and tried to shake them down for a mordida. When they didn't have enough money the corrupt cops took them to a spot they said was behind the police station and demanded their ATM and credit cards and PIN numbers. So it was an express kidnapping more than a mordida attempt.
They were threatened with jail and with the loss of their car, and they gave up the cards and PIN numbers. The police took them to an ATM and then were angry that they had so little in their accounts. One of the men feigned a seizure--he recently had cancer surgery, and the medical papers were right there to be shown to the cops. The cops brought the guy into the station and a breathalyzer was run on him--zero. The one who did the breathalyzer was angry at the two cops and finally my two friends were released. They had hidden one credit card that had just enough to get them back into SMA and to survive for the rest of the month.
Five police officers witnessed this shakedown and did nothing. No wonder Calderón has targeted Monterrey as one of the cities for his crackdown on corruption. Some 80 cops have been fired there so far. Another area is the state of Michoacan, and the governor there is still furious that he was not alerted that a raid was going to happen that seized 10 Michoacan mayors and 17 other officials. If he'd been alerted ahead of time, would the men have still been there when the federal police came?
Mexico definitely has major problems right now, and this is the first time people I know have had this kind of shakedown and express kidnapping happen to them. They're recovering but are still very upset, understandably. Will they stay in Mexico? They were from LA, and Norma and I had far worse stuff happen to us in LA; we still feel much safer in San Miguel. But if we were driving still, we'd stick to the toll roads through the cities where there have been drug problems in Mexico, just as we knew not to use many streets in LA, Phoenix, and Detroit.
I email them about what they went through, and then Norma and I go out and enjoy the Day of the Locos and Doc Severinson at Bella Italia. We walk to Mega and pass the dozens of "Cheap Eats" restaurants we love, and we chat with friends at every cafe and corner along the way, and we have parties and lunches with so many more friends than we ever had anyplace we lived in the States, and we feel closer to Mexico's spirit and soul and all the problems and all the joys of this complex country far more intensely than we ever felt connected to anyplace in the US.
We loved LA, warts and all, too, and it took five burglaries and robberies and the murder in our backyard and the rape and brutalization of a woman two doors from us and so much more that was in our face every day before we started to feel afraid there. I don't feel anything like that fear here, even though so many relatives and friends up north think I should. I get so tired of having to defend Mexico's warts when instead I want to be telling people about all the good stuff. If only they could spend the Day of the Locos and a Doc Severinson night with me, they'd shut up about the newspaper stories. Maybe.
The LA Times did run a nice column calling for some "empathy tourism" for Mexico right now, as we still reel from the flu, the drug wars, and the economy. US citizens flocked to New York City after 9/11, and they supported New Orleans with their tourism dollars after Katrina. Mexico could use a little help here now, folks.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
June 7, 2009--World Environment Day; supporting our favorite restaurants hurt by the economy; a lazy evening at the Jardin; more kittens
Ever since we went into Olé Olé last Friday night and found we were the only ones there, and began to realize just how seriously hurting many of our favorite restaurants are, we've been trying to go out more to our favorite "Cheap Eats" in particular, to do our bit to help them survive. We'd run into the owner of Tacos Don Felix (www.tacosdonfelix.com) at Bonanza and he said he was doing okay, but there was just a little pleading as he invited us to come by any time.
This popular restaurant which is usually packed on Friday and Saturday nights had only one other couple there from 6 pm until 8, when finally a foursome showed up. I have photos of the empty dining room and of our favorite entrees, the taco sampler platter of seven different kinds, and the green chicken enchiladas, and other recent restaurant experiences, in the Food Scenes album of the Photo Gallery of this website.
Please make an effort to support all your favorite restaurants right now. After the flu closing in Mexico City, 20,000 restaurants never reopened--they'd been living that close to the edge financially. The SMA restaurants which can do so are offering great deals--Harry's New Orleans even has three-for-one drinks of all kinds from 4 to 5 pm. I guess you'll be too drunk to leave at 5 and you'll stick around to order a meal to sober up. Whatever works.
It was a lazy Friday evening, perfect weather, so we walked down hill from Tacos Don Felix, smiling to the families sitting out on their doorsteps enjoying the evening. We ended up at the Jardin for what we thought would be casual people-watching, to find ourselves in the middle of World Environment Day. We hadn't bought this week's Atencion yet and so were unprepared for the events going on in the Jardin, and throughout the city, for the weekend.
Norma said as we got closer to the Parroquia, "I see feathers." I squinted. Yes, there were conchero dancers with their six-foot-spread peacock feather headdresses, on a temporary stage, dancing and talking to the crowds throughout the Jardin, not just the 100 or so people in folding chairs in front of the stage. An ecological film of endangered landscapes and animals filled a screen on the stage when the dancers left, and the audience stayed, actually interested in the ecological presentation.
Behind the chairs a dozen mojigangas, the ten-foot-tall paper mache puppets who show up for just about every celebration, danced to music coming from a sound truck, and workers on an Ecologica pickup handed out plastic bottles of purified water, a bit of a mixed message.
We kept running into people we knew in this small town of San Miguel, sharing pleasantries, news, and, well, gossip. One mariachi band was doing its best to get some paying customers to shell out 100 pesos or so for a song by wiggling their hips and throwing their whole selves into some sample songs. Another band was singing their hearts out for no particular customers we could see, and from nowhere a gringa with a guitar showed up and slipped into the group, joining right in with all the traditional mariachi tunes. They didn't seem surprised.
She was the first gringa mariachi player I've ever heard. A restaurant in Tlaquepaque promotes its all-woman mariachi band, but this was a gringa who for at least a few songs joined right in with one of the regular SMA mariachi bands. If anyone knows the story about how that happened I'd love to hear it.
Everybody joined in on "Cielito Lindo"--Ai, yi yi yi! Oye vey.
It was a typical Jardin evening, Mexican families who often have small houses using the park as their living room. A few scattered fireworks erupted occasionally, and groups of teenagers of one sex eyed the groups of teenagers of the opposite sex, while toddlers scampered after bubbles their parents blew for them and dragged their clackety plastic wheeled horses around behind them on strings, and dogs met and determined who was alpha and who was going to hide behind their owners' legs, and the aromas of steamed corn, mayonnaise, cheese, lime and chile spread throughout the Jardin, and kids tried to sell packages of gum, and balloon vendors showed off their Spongebob and Hello Kitty unlicensed balloons, and wide-eyed tourists snapped endless shots of the mariachis and the Parroquia and each other.
A donkey with a big wire halo of brightly colored flowers and hearts wandered past the arches, led by a newly married couple as their wedding celebration continued into the night. A full moon beamed down on the scene as we sat on a bench and reflected on how glad we are to live in San Miguel. Just another evening in the Jardin.
Check out the photos of these scenes in a new Photo Gallery album I created for the evening, "A Lazy Friday Night in the Jardin June 6, 2009."
Otherwise, we're still working on The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico, trying to make sure it lives up to its title, and living our lives. We took the bus to Celaya this week for staples like 36-roll packages of toilet paper, canned smoked oysters, grape tomatoes, Italian chicken sausages half the calories of regular Italian sausages...the necessities of life.
First we went into the new Sam's and there couldn't have been more than 10 people in that whole gigantic store. A few more were in Costco where we did most of our shopping, but it was dead compared to a few months ago, even considering it was a weekday. The economy is hurting all over. We keep running into taxi drivers newly returned to SMA who had been construction workers in Dallas, Austin, Cincinnati, for a dozen years or more. No jobs in the US, no jobs in Mexico.
And some gringos complain about paying a cab driver 25 pesos, under $2 USD, for a ride within town, cab drivers here averaging under $100 USD a week to support their families by the time they pay for the rental of the cab. Someplace somwhere it's still written that 15 pesos is the correct fare within SMA. Nobody I know has paid that in six years. Actually we're adding a few pesos more in tips everywhere to try to help Mexicans recoup from the downturn in the peso in the past six months.
Remittances are down something like 18%, too, the second or third largest segment of the Mexican economy coming from the $16 billion or so that Mexicans working in the US send home to their families in Mexico. The only good point--the dollars they send back are worth more because of the devalued peso.
Speaking of paying less than full price for cabs, Primera Plus no longer accepts the INAPAM Mexican seniors discount card on the directo bus to Celaya. We paid the full 38-peso ticket, not half price. It left this time on the hour at the half hour from the SMA bus station, which meant it would leave every hour on the hour from the Celaya bus station.
When we were finally in the check-out line at Costco we realized we'd just missed a directo, which meant we'd be sitting around on the bus stop benches in front of Costco for another hour. We were really tired, and our cart was loaded---we took a 300-peso cab home. The driver was thrilled with his unexpected big fare. He enjoyed the summer ride through the countryside to SMA as well. He'd never been to our town so I pointed out landmarks as he took us home. Turnabout--the passenger telling the taxi driver about the tourist sights.
We have been so exhausted since we started going to the gym three times a week for nearly two hours a visit. Any day we go to the gym is a lost day completely, we're too tired to do anything else. And we didn't lose a pound in the two months (minus the ten days when everything was closed down for the flu epidemic). It was no longer fun. The expected returns of being peppier didn't happen. We stopped going.
Anyone who knows us would have expected that to happen sooner or later. Anyone who knows human nature would have expected that to happen sooner or later, for most people, not just us.
So we're back to taking our long walks through all the streets of San Miguel again. We'd missed those walks. We'd been too tired to even get out for our favorite events the past two months. No more justifications or explanations, we just quit the gym. So you'll see us back on the streets again.
Saturday we joined two friends at M M Cinemas to see "Star Trek"--a young male action film to be sure. We were not its target audience. The entire "Star Trek" concept was brought back to the beginning days of Kirk, Spock and others when they were reckless teens and young adults, not sharing any deep concepts or heartfelt values or painful learning that we could relate to. It got a 95% favorable rating at www.rottentomatoes.com, but not from us. Not that films aimed at a young male audience automatically turn us off--we're awaiting the final "Harry Potter" as eagerly as any teenager.
We had a late breakfast/early lunch beforehand at the '50s restaurant in the strip mall across from Mega that has the Banamex and Italian Coffee in it. Cute little place, all decked out with 1950's movie posters, with background music playing from our teen years. I had creamed spinach soup with green apple slices and blue cheese crumbles, an unexpected pleasure. My body must have been craving antioxidants--I followed the soup with a spinach, mushroom and tomato salad. Norma had a burger which was not as good as the ones she makes, so she was disappointed. The waiter couldn't grasp the concept of putting blue cheese on a hamburger as Norma requested. Oh well, there's always cheddar. Other friends really like the place, I don't want to knock it. It just didn't really grab us...
...the way that Fenicia did on Zacateros 73 just north of Cafe Monet, across from La Cava, in the space formerly occupied by a Chinese restaurant. Fenicia is a Lebanese restaurant that I've already raved about in our forums. I posted photos in the Food Scenes album of our website photo gallery of Norma's kafta wrap and my combo platter of kibbe and falafel, and of the restaurant interior which is still fairly plain. Only one other couple was eating there when we were there, another example of a worthy restaurant which needs some support. Fenicia had the best baba ganouche and hummus I've had in San Miguel.
We walked past another new restaurant we want to try out, Sappo's next to the fish taco place, La Palapa, around the corner from Espino's. Sappo's is actually the other side of the parking lot, before you get to Parque Juarez. It's in one of those luxurious homes in the Parque Juarez area that you usually don't get to see inside of except on House and Gardens tours.
The restaurant is in a beautiful courtyard, and the food looks good though we haven't eaten there yet. Much of the menu is what you probably expect--varied breakfasts, sandwiches and salads, Mexican dishes, a few US style favorites. Much of it is "Cheap Eats," too, under $6 for a meal before drinks.
Saturday night we got a call from friends who were heading out to the Longhorn Smokehouse to hear Billie Rose sing while they ate Texas chili and chiliburgers. Norma and I joined them for a slider for me and a pulled pork sandwich for Norma as we enjoyed the blues and country music. I was expecting a glorified White Castle burger but my slider was just another hamburger. Shoulda stuck with the ribs.
A beautiful new B & B has opened up across from the Hotel Sautto, called Casa Florida, Hernandez Macias 60, www.casafloridasma.com, 415-154-8195. The owner waved us inside and showed us the three upscale B & B rooms and her dining area and kitchen where she talked brunch recipes with Norma. Great view from the roof, as you'd expect from anyplace in Centro. She, too, is feeling the economic heat and is offering $99 a night rates to introduce people to her new endeavor!
Seven or eight months ago three straggly kittens wandered into our courtyard for a few days, then disappeared again. Our housekeeper said that a street dog had killed their mother. One of the kittens showed up again a few weeks ago, looking a bit round about the tummy, and our neighbors took her to Dr. Vasquez to be fixed. They brought her back to the courtyard and she disappeared again.
A truly feral cat can never be converted to a pet; the humane societies say that the kindest thing you can do for a stray cat that won't respond at all to humans is to catch it somehow, have it sterilized, and release it back near where you found it, in as safe a place as you know.
So yesterday that cat was going in and out of a three-foot-tall decorative ceramic pot in our courtyard, and our neighbor peeked in and saw that newly fixed cat had a tiny kitten! Who did she steal that from?
It was going to die in that pot, since the kidnapper, or kittennapper, couldn't nurse it. We had a neighborhood phone debate and Norma went down to look at the kitten to see if there was any way to get it out of there without being attacked by the kittennapper.
Surprise, another of the three kittens now grownup was in there with her litter mate, and she had three kittens total, co-mothered with the cat we'd had fixed. The kitties had two mommies, we'd have to name one of them Heather.
Both cats hissed at us looking into their ceramic home, and we all retreated for another confab. When we went back downstairs to the courtyard, the ceramic pot was empty. No sign of any of the cats or kittens. Soon there will be even more cats to fix.
I've written about my lecture from our cardiologist Dr. Alvarez about relying on the internet for diagnoses and treatments. A little while ago Norma noticed I had a half-circle of red spots on the back of my hand. "Ringworm!" she yelled. "My kids had that and it was hell to get rid of. It's highly contagious!"
I rushed to the internet and the photos of ringworm looked a little like the C on my hand, and the gross photos of advanced cases scared me into following all the precautions from the internet advice. We washed sheets and towels daily, I used paper towels and alcohol gel constantly, I didn't touch anyone or anything with my hand, and we headed for Chelo's pharmacy to get some antibiotic cream for ringworm.
Chelo took one look at the red marks and nodded, it was ringworm, and sold me two tubes of creams for $20, one for morning, one to be applied before I went to bed. Nothing happened.
The mark didn't spread. Norma didn't catch it. Maybe it was a little less red. I continued to keep my hand discreetly away from people, though.
Then Norma noticed a little raised bump on her scalp and since two friends have had extremely serious cancer episodes that started with a raised bump on their scalps, we made an appointment with Dr. Carla Archer, the new dermatologist at Hospital de la Fe, who has been highly recommended to us. She's young, is moving here full-time this summer, and has been affiliated with a leading university in Mexico City for many years previously. She was born in Texas and her family moved to Mexico City when she was six, so she speaks perfect English. She has studied on both sides of the border.
Dr. Archer looked at all the suspicious spots Norma pointed out and at every one she said, "Age spot." It was embarrassing--how to feel really old. Better than the alternative, certainly.
And then I showed her my hand and asked if it was ringworm and if the two creams I'd brought with me were the best cure. "That's anuloma granulari," she said instantly. "The creams are worthless." No one really knows why anuloma granulari comes and goes, but it's not contagious and nothing topical will help. Sometimes injecting a bit of cortisone into each bump will help but mine was so minor it was to simply be ignored. Very possibly it had popped out because of the stress of getting our book out. Or not. Another relief.
Dr. Archer chewed me out for going to a pharmacy for a medical diagnosis (though much of Mexico does the same). Pharmacists in Mexico are not educated and licensed as they are in the US. Someone with a second grade education can call themselves a pharmacist, a pharmacy can open up with no one with any medical training of any kind on staff, only a chemist has to be on board for the original application for the store to open, and then that chemist can disappear and go on to help another pharmacy open. So much for my recommending Chelo for inexpensive routine medical needs. Medical bills have eaten us alive the past two months. But we're fine, so the bills have been worth it.
Oh, Norma has amoebas again and on Thursday goes to Dr. Barrera, the internist at Hospital de la Fe, to get another prescription for that. She decided to go in at the first signs of continued stomach pain rather than waiting until she was passing out as she did in November, 2007, when she had to be hospitalized for 48 hours of IV antibiotics. Another friend also let stomach pains keep on for months before she finally got medical care, and the doctor told her the amoebas had gotten into some of her major organs. She was hospitalized as well. Our new motto is, Preventative medical care immediately! Don't wait until we need expensive hospitalization!
Tomorrow we're going to make a point of getting out to the Jardin for Sunday morning, experiencing this town once more. It is too easy to get caught up in our daily lives, too busy to even leave the house, or rather, the computers. We live in a wonderful town! People come thousands of miles to experience the magic of San Miguel, while we sit around inside and keep checking email and political news sites and our forums and surfing the internet for all the diseases we most certainly have.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
June 1, 2009--Six arrested after gunshots in Centro; more of my memories of guns and drugs in Michigan and LA; it's the economy, stupid; daily life goes on with another spectacular 15-day celebration of the Holy Cross by the Valle de Maíz pious and locos
According to one of the local newspapers, which would as soon sensationalize a story as simply report it, gunshots were fired in Centro Saturday morning, no one injured, and SMA police soon after arrested six in a heavily armed van with Durango license plates. The story made a big deal out of the fact that three of the six were dyed-blonde-haired women in "trendy" blouses and jeans, the photo showing that their definition of "trendy" was a narrow black strapless, midriff-less top, and the women were transported separately using women police, all six escorted to the Guanajuato state facilities under heavy guard.
Okay, so San Miguel has survived another attempt by organized crime to infiltrate our city. Durango is where three drug cartels are battling for control, the worst of the cartels being the Zetas. They're former trained military forces who were the muscle for the Gulf Cartel but now seem to be striking out on their own, according to some US in-depth news stories.
Another of the cartels battling for power in this region is La Familia, which has a religious cultlike aspect. Members who drink or use drugs themselves will be killed. I have no confirmation of this but I hear from many sources that small shop owners in SMA are being solicited for protection money, one of the side businesses of these organized crime groups. It is likely that throughout Mexico repeated attempts will be made to expand the cartels, just as the Al Capone era saw organized crime expand and finally be thwarted in the US. My mother told me of the Purple Gang in Detroit that ran booze across the frozen Detroit river from Windsor each winter, hundreds if not thousands of cars cracking through the ice and sunk to this day laden with their heavy cargo. Dad and I used to pull some fat fish from that river.
People don't believe the stories I tell about guns, gangs and drugs in Detroit and LA, but they're true. A few more came to mind when I read the El Sol de Bajio article. My Dad brought home 60 rifles and guns from WWII and kept them in a gray wood chest in the attic. Whenever Mom would start a discussion he didn't like, he'd take that opportunity to bring down some of the guns and clean them. All my male relatives on the Schmidt side had many guns. During deer, duck and pheasant season in rural Michigan farmers would sometimes paint "COW" in orange letters on the sides of the smaller tan Swiss and Guernsey cows so they wouldn't be shot by Detroiters who barely knew how to handle their guns.
On New Year's Eve so many people would be out shooting their guns that I finally just spent New Year's Eves in my bathroom that had at least two walls between me and the outside, same as I did each night of the 1967 Detroit riot. And then of course Norma and I found ourselves living next door to members of the Michigan Militia who were friends of the Oklahoma City home-grown terrorists, when we escaped back to rural Michigan to get away from LA crime, stress, prices, traffic, etc.
One more drug story from LA, circa 1975 or so: my then-husband worked for a tropical fish store that sold drugs on the side, or maybe the fish business was the side. Marijuana was sold in Tetramin fish food containers of one ounce--the real fish food was out front, the more expensive stuff was in a back room. At first glance you couldn't tell the contents apart. Cocaine was sold in false tetracycline capsules, the real medicine in blue capsules out front, the ones that would make you forget your fish were sick were in the back room. If you wanted a whole lot of cocaine, that came packed in the bodies of empty plastic flashlights, no batteries included. That's how the rock stars bought it, or rather their limo drivers would come in to the store for it. One time the store was robbed of all the drugs and there was no one the store owner could report it to. My ex was furious and frustrated. And now you really don't believe a word I write. Back to Mexico:
President Calderón has not yet signed the drug decriminalization bill and the creation of a new national police force that will be a bridge between the military and the current federal police to specifically fight the drug cartels, though he asked for both bills. So much political infighting went into their passage in both parts of Congress (the Senators and Deputies) that the bills are now PRD bills rather than PAN bills, editorials have commented.
The decriminalization bill would make it legal to possess up to five grams of marijuana (an ounce has about 28 grams, so we're talking maybe three joints) and smaller amounts of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines--though to pass a joint to a friend puts the user back out of protection and into distribution. After being picked up on one such minor use, the person would have had to be evaluated for drug addiction, and after three times picked up for even these minor amounts, the person would have had to go to drug rehabilitation. That part of the bill was cut out before final passage by Congress. I wonder whose pork barrel included drug rehab centers?
The Mexican Congress passed a similar bill under President Vicente Fox, but after pressure from the US to veto the bill, he did. Now there is more support in the US in some political circles, for decriminalization of minor amounts of marijuana at least, so as to free drug enforcement from having to pursue these minor crimes and concentrate on the biggies.
It's come out that the US Mérida Act money of something like $700 million that was to help the Mexican government fight crime has been embroiled in US politics. The first money passed under President Bush specified Bell helicopters, built in Texas. The latest money specifies Black Hawk helicopters built in Connecticut, home to Joe Lieberman and Chris Dodd.
Local SMA politics are heating up. By the July 5 election probably hardly a square inch of fences and walls will not have a political sign on it. The four mayoral candidates are all addressing the expat community this week at the Biblioteca's Teatro Santa Ana. These sessions will be fair and supervised forums for expats to legitimately gain information about the candidates' views for SMA's future without violating the Mexican Constitution's prohibition on foreigners' participation in Mexican politics.
Lucy Zavala is speaking Wednesday, June 3, 2-3:30 pm; Cristóbal Franyuti on Thursday, June 4, 1-2:30 pm; Miguel de Jesús Rangel Friday, June 5, 2-3:30 pm; and Alberto Mendoza, Saturday, June 6, 2-3:30 pm. Mendoza is from the Nueva Alianza party and Jesus Rangel from the PT (Work Party). Cristóbal is PAN, the same party as Fox and Calderón, and Lucy is from a coalition of the PRI, the conservative party that ran Mexico for 71 years before Fox; the left-leaning PRD; and the Green Party.
Our housekeeper came in one morning and said Cristóbal is a thief, she heard it on the radio. She didn't know Lucy's husband owns the local radio station. According to this week's lead story in Atención (www.atencionsanmiguel.org), Cristóbal has lodged a formal complaint with the Electoral Institute charging the radio station is giving two hours to Lucy each day, and Lucy has lodged a complaint with the district attorney against the publisher of Ecos de San Miguel newspaper for publishing an article about a YouTube video that insults Lucy. I'm very glad to stay out of local politics. Let Mexico be Mexico, they certainly don't need expats telling them what to do.
Though that isn't stopping the usual complaints by some expats against fireworks, which are in great evidence these 15 days of the celebration of the Holy Cross, the Valle de Maíz colonia's big blow-out each year. Not only are fireworks set off from 4 am to dawn (La Alborada) the first weekend in October as the grand finale of celebrations honoring St. Michael the Archangel, there are several scheduled 4 am fireworks celebrations during the Holy Cross Festival each May. Not that any event comes off as scheduled. Friends went over to Valle de Maíz for a greased pole climbing competition that was set for 7 pm one night of the festival. It started at 10 pm.
We went down to the Jardin Sunday at noon for the Valle de Maíz parade that was to start at noon. We wandered around, talked to people, walked over to Bonanza to try to find corn meal for a catfish fry, meandered to Ramirez Market for some mint and parsley to put in some couscous for dinner, and got back to the Jardin at 1:30 pm. Nada. But we could hear drums and scoped out a good spot for photos--far fewer people in the Jardin than in past years--and as usual I took 300+ photos of the paraders before I knew it. I have at least ten photos of each of the parade costumes from previous years, previous parades, but I can't help myself. Love those Locos!
The Feast of the Holy Cross actually starts May 3. That's the day that all construction workers bring a blessed cross to the work site and expect their employer will provide beer and tacos and make it a holiday. Expat home builders who don't know about the tradition are sometimes caught short and have to rush down to Pollo Feliz or someplace for a quick take-out.
Valle de Maíz has developed partying to an art form. They're the main ones behind the Day of the Locos, which should be coming up in two weeks, though I heard rumors it would be discontinued this year because of the flu. A few new cases keep being confirmed every few days; we're not over this thing yet. When I hear for sure one way or the other, I'll post it on the forums.
It was a mini Day of the Locos for the second half of Sunday's parade. The first half was the religious celebration, floats depicting Christ on the Cross accompanied by concheros and other dancers with all the glorious feathered headdresses and jaguar masks and their flashing muscular thighs. Mexico has no problem making a distinction between the sacred and the profane--there is none. Only in marriage is there a clear distinction between church and state--the only legal marriage is the civil one. You can choose to have an additional church sacrament or ceremony or not. Legal gay marriages are being performed routinely in Mexico City and a few states, though not in conservative Guanajuato.
We've been so housebound getting The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico finished that sometimes we just have to get out. Friday night Norma was planning to make fajitas but we discovered the housekeeper had finished off the last of my salsa and the crema, and it was too late to go to a little shop and we just weren't up to taking the bus to Mega and back.
What else to eat--the freezer is always full, and we can always put together a big salad with a can of chunk chicken or make an omelet. But fajitas were on our mind--Olé Olé! The restaurant! We hadn't been there in a couple of years, and it's one of our favorites, it's everybody's favorite. Their fajitas are the best in town, 85 pesos for the chicken and arrachera combo. The over-decorated interior crammed with bullfight memorabilia is as cute as ever, and the stuffed bulls still reign.
Not a single soul besides us was in Olé Olé, at 7-8 pm on a Friday night. Now that is sad. I've talked to a few restaurant owners to see how they're doing, and most are hanging in there but it's very slow. They blame the economy overall, rather than drug violence or influenza scares. Tourists are still coming but in far fewer numbers. And even some expats are being affected--we know people who are seriously considering going back to the States to work for awhile.
To get a job in the US they'll be competing against some six million people who are on unemployment benefits, plus however many other millions are underemployed, working part-time, or their unemployment benefits ended and they pretty much gave up and went back to school or are tending relatives, whatever.
My Schmidt relatives who had great jobs in the auto factories in the 1960s (and mocked me for going to college and making much less as a reporter than they did) gradually lost them through the years. One cousin took 15 years before he went out and got another job, as janitor for a Catholic school. He had no qualms sitting around the house while his wife worked as a nurses' aide and he waited for the car industry to rise again. His wife finally lost her job and so he was forced to find something and he reluctantly took up the broom and mop. He's one who talks about lazy Mexicans, too. Anybody who says anything about Mexico, I have US stories to match and surpass! Believe them or not.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
May 23. 2009--Memories of our deceased best friend who lived in SMA 2002-2008; three movies this weekend; dealing with medicine side effects; Billie Rose at Longhorn Smokehouse
Nancy Gates' daughter called us this week to say Nancy was diagnosed with lung cancer a week ago Wednesday and died this Tuesday. This is the first person who has been in our inner circle in our age range who has died. She was 70, a few months older than Norma. Norma and Nancy had both started smoking heavily in their teens. Norma was able to quit in 1981 after I'd been in a hospital for a month and was having breathing problems when I got home. Nancy never could quit, though toward the end she was using Nicorette gum right along with the cigarettes in an ongoing attempt.
Nancy was the one I wrote about in our first book who dressed up as Fidel Castro for our first Day of the Locos Parade and made it only a few blocks before collapsing with heat stroke and insisting a cab driver take her right through the tied-up traffic back to her apartment. Nancy was the one who had her car stolen. Nancy was the one we got lost with on the buses a few times.
We met her at an RVing Women rally in 1993 and she trailed along behind us the next three years, sharing her experiences using Thousand Trails and NAACO membership RV groups to lower the costs of full-time RVing. Some RV parks are as expensive as motels. One on the California coastline was $100 a night! She got us into a membership group so that we never had to pay another night in an RV park again, though we could only use about 100 parks across the US and Canada and stay a maximum of three weeks per park.
She came from a German-Irish family that took its card playing very seriously indeed, and she taught Norma to play canasta just as her mother had taught her, a very genteel, intense game. Norma played around, would freeze the deck with no warning, would use a 50-point joker to freeze the deck, and in general messed with Nancy's mind. She'd be near tears after a game with Norma. We all played pinochle, and Nancy would go outside for a smoke break when it was time for Norma or me to shuffle between hands, and we'd often cheat and stack her hand with a double pinochle and family, but give one of us five nines so that we'd have to throw that hand in.
We'd watch Nancy getting more and more excited as she'd look at each card and realize she had a huge hand, both of us trying not to laugh, Nancy trying to keep a poker face. And then I'd sigh and say, "I've got five nines, gotta throw it in." She'd shriek and we couldn't hold our laughter any more. Finally she caught on to us and made us always sit by an outside indow so she could glare in at us while she puffed. We'd often still manage to cheat in the time it took her to run around from the window back to the card table.
We used to argue who had been raised the poorest (Norma would win) but Nancy would say she was so poor her family couldn't afford to buy her glasses when she was in high school. Then she'd talk about her winter ball dress, her summer dress, her spring and fall frocks. We finally got her to confess that her mother didn't want her to wear glasses because she was supposed to find a husband by the time she got out of high school (she did), and we all know boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses. We all knew each other just about as well as any three people could know each other.
We ended up buying lots in a Phoenix area seniors RV park in 1995--we'd all agreed it would be a really stupid thing to do, and then I got a $1,500 insurance check in the mail paying for my broken nose and new glasses when I had fallen on a broken sidewalk in front of a Kinko's in Michigan, and that very day Nancy had plunked down the minimum $1,500 down payment for a lot and on impulse so did we. The seven years we lived together in the same RV park were fun for the three of us but a disaster as far as living in a seniors homeowners association. She kept getting sicker and sicker with emphysema, and went back to live with her daughter in Ohio.
We came down to San Miguel for the summer of 2002. Norma called Nancy to tell her about our plans, and Nancy up and decided she'd join us in SMA! She even rented an apartment in the same building on Quebrada! We were furious, we were trying to escape everyone and everything and be nobodies in San Miguel, but when she arrived, having lost a lot of weight and her health was much better, we had a ball. She decided to stay on at the end of the summer just as we did. We found our fantastic apartment, she found a $300 a month place on Calzada de la Luz and fixed it up great.
Then her rent was going to go up 10% the next year and she found a $140 a month tiny studio on Callejon de San Antonio. She fixed it up great. (Mind you, her Social Security was higher than mine, and she had profits from a house sale in the bank.)
Then two adjoining apartments opened up across the hall from her and she rented both, at $280 a month, made them into one two-bedroom apartment, and fixed it up great.
Then the rent was going up to $300 next year and she decided she couldn't afford that, either, so she lucked into an INFONAVIT house near where La Luciernaga is now. Supposedly only Mexican employees who are in IMSS are able to qualify for these inexpensive government -built small homes that cost $35,000 back then, but some deals fell through and some expats were able to buy in by paying cash. She fixed that place up great, too.
But as we'd warned her, it was too far out, and she got lonely out there. We no longer had a car. She decided to go back to her daughter in Ohio again. And then we drifted apart. She stopped answering emails and phone messages. And then we got the call that she had died.
I can't believe it's been 16 years since we met Nancy, and that suddenly she is gone. I keep expecting to get a phone call from her suggesting a pinochle game. Her daughter asked that those who knew her make a donation to the San Miguel SPA in lieu of flowers.
With that sorrow in our lives, it is good that this is another heavy duty movie weekend at MM Cinemas at La Luciernaga. This weekend we've already seen "Angels and Demons," which made us want to go back to Italy somehow before we die--we only spent a total of six days in Rome, Florence and Venice on one of those "If this is Tuesday it must be Belgium" bus tours in 1981. We both threw coins in the Roman fountain that is supposed to guarantee that you will come back some day. Maybe.
The other movies we will see tomorrow are "Frost" on the Nixon TV interviews with David Frost, and "The International," which we'd never heard of before but the cast looks good.
Back in the early 1980s I wrote movie reviews for the LA Lesbian News and we often saw five movies on a weekend. In Phoenix we often escaped the 120-degree summer days by spending them in movie theaters. The A/C would be so cold that 120 degrees actually felt good for about 30 seconds when we finally emerged from the dark, back into the hot sun. The A/C was cold in the movies today, too. Our rainy season preview was short-lived, it's back to summer. Still waiting for the six months rainy season here to really begin after the false start.
Dr. Alvarez switched my heart meds around and the first day on Tenormin I was so dizzy and nauseous I spent it in bed. The next day it wasn't any better and I called him to ask if I could go off that drug. We'd had our little tizzy over suggestible me always getting all the side effects the internet lists for any new drug, so I knew he wasn't going to be a pushover. He insisted I keep up with the medicine for at least two weeks before he'd change it unless I started having trouble breathing. It was the best one to go along with my other meds and my rapid irregular heart beat. So I decided to switch taking the pill from the morning until evenings, and now I am fine with it. We'll even tackle going back to Fitness International Monday. I was all ready to go back last week when that pill knocked me for a loop. Never give up.
We went to hear Billie Rose at Longhorn Smokehouse tonight. She performs there every Thursday and Saturday night, 7:30-9:30 pm. Thursday night is filet mignon, baked potato and salad for 95 pesos, and Saturday night is T-bone, potato and salad for 75 pesos, which just meets our $6 a meal "Cheap Eats" category now that the peso is 13 to the dollar. We ended up with our usuals, the pulled pork sandwich, chips and cole slaw 65-peso meal for Norma, the ribs and pulled pork plus salad platter for me for 75 pesos. His prices have gone up but he still has several excellent "Cheap Eats" meals. We have enough pulled pork left over for lunch tomorrow.
Billie Rose has been plugging along at many restaurants the past couple of years, from the New Orleans place by Espino's that closed, to Romano's that closed, and now to Los Faroles and the Longhorn. Her repertoire has expanded--I hadn't heard some of her songs before, and was glad to hear some of my favorites such as "Hush now, don't explain," and "Summertime" with a few comments interspersed in the last verse--"your mamma's good looking 'cuz she's got a plastic surgeon in both Beverly Hills and Houston." Her low notes, and songs that are mostly in lower registers, are lush and rich. Some of the high notes are a big jiggly, but the meaning comes through with honesty, pain and humor. You can feel the blues. I especially liked one in which she sings that she's "better off with the blues than you."
Don't come before 7:30--the late afternoon sun this time of the year is shining right into Keith's. We had to change tables to avoid the sun in our eyes. Keith was displaying an ostrich egg he'd just gotten, along with his first purchase of ostrich meat, which he is experimenting with to find the most tender, flavorful cooking method. He's now trying a citrus marinade and thin slicing on this very healthy meat. One ostrich egg equals 14 hen's eggs, he's found out, as he plays around with recipes.
Norma saw a pork loin on sale last week and cubed it for the crock pot with several kinds of fresh and dried chiles and other seasonings. She put some of the finely sliced meat and veggies into an omelet this morning--I bet we had the best breakfast being served in San Miguel today. We won't waste the money on a restaurant meal that Norma can cook better and cheaper, but Keith's ribs and pulled pork are better than hers so he knows we'll keep coming back.
We have so many restaurants to check out for "Cheap Eats" soon, while they're still in existence. Not a good time for new restaurants to open. I read in The News this morning that 2,000 Mexico City restaurants ordered to stop serving sit-down meals for the flu closures never opened back up again when the epidemic eased.
On our Living in San Miguel forum page I have the link and a translation of newspaper stories on the first suspected flu death in San Miguel--a 32-year-old woman who has had severe chronic heart problems for 14 years and who was already bedridden and expected not to live long when she came down with the flu and died Thursday. Her death certificate lists the cause of death as severe heart disease, not the flu.
Anyone with flu symptoms these days is first tested to see if the flu is Type A, an easy and fast test, and if the case is, a swab is sent on for definitive testing on whether the case is H1N1 flu. That testing takes awhile and there is a backlog. No one is sure the woman had H1N1 yet. So far there have been more than 80 deaths in Mexico from H1N1. This isn't over yet, though you wouldn't know there is still a problem from the way SMA looks today compared to two weeks ago.
The cats chewed up our face masks. Many food handling employees are still wearing them, though, and occasionally your grocery cart handle will be wiped with alcohol gel, a few token preventive measures. I hope we've all got this epidemic in perspective now, remembering that a typical flu season in the US results in something like 32,000 deaths. The 80 in Mexico in two months is a lot to the families involved. But far more people have been killed in car accidents in the same time and no one is insisting you give up driving.
Or smoking.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
May 17, 2009--We celebrate all anniversaries, including our arrival in SMA in 2002, this time with a return to Tio Lucas; flu fears calming in SMA; seeing five movies in one weekend at La Luciernaga; responses on crime and noise in Mexico
We like to celebrate all anniversaries, birthdays, happy days, and so we didn't need much of an excuse Saturday night to go to Tio Lucas, one of the first restaurants we discovered when we arrived in San Miguel seven Mays ago. We were hoping Sybil Lee-English would be singing, but no such luck. We were treated like princesses, even though owner Max Altamirano hadn't seen us inside his restaurant in years (and he had no idea we'd written a book, everybody was treated like royalty).
It's pretty upscale--we looked for the less expensive items on the menu and came up with pepper steak for Norma, accompanied by a huge mound of steamed veggies, for 174 pesos, and osso bucco (called "bull calf shank" on the menu) for me for 142 pesos. We had leftovers to take home. Norma said it was the best pepper steak she'd had in SMA, and for sure it was the best osso bucco since I don't think I've ever had it in SMA before. We try to get menu items Norma doesn't already cook at home because that way we don't be disappointed if they're not as good as she makes.
Good jazz after 9 pm, the place was crowded, service was attentive but not intrusive, and Max himself goes table to table all night long to make sure everybody's happy. He and Bob Thiemann at Harry's, Lalo at Tacos Don Felix, and Keith Thompson at Longhorn Smokehouse are all examples of how active involvement by the owner with customers helps make a restaurant succeed. This celebration also helped make up for missing our 30th anniversary dinner April 27 because Norma was sick.
Though in our daily lives the flu scare is over, when we go out we see health department posters in many places urging continued caution, some people are still wearing masks (though employees forced to wear them by their companies usually have them down under their noses), and at some stores like Mega the shopping carts are swiped with an antibacterial wipe. At the movies you're given a squirt of gel from the ticket taker before you get a chance to dip into your popcorn.
H1N1 has been confirmed in 38 countries now. Of course it has become a political issue, PRI and PRD charging it is a PANdemic. (The elections are July 5 and the country is aflood with political signs, especially the wall-sized ones springing up every day on every empty fence and building.)
While Mexico internationally is being praised for its fairly quick and complete responses to the WHO and CDC urgings, inside Mexico everyone who can be blamed is being blamed, as usual. See the 100+ news links and comments in the "Living in San Miguel" forum on the website for the complete story as it has unfolded.
Many articles are commenting on Mexico's many-tiered health care system, just as poorer people in the US are either not insured or get less thorough care at general hospitals and clinics, while richer US citizens get the best health care money can buy. Poorer Mexicans who suspected they had the flu crowded to the IMSS and Hospitals General where they overloaded the facilities. They often were given antivirals and sent home without any report being taken. Sometimes they just gave up in the long waits and went home undiagnosed and untreated. Thos who went to the best private hospitals were usually treated very thoroughly and quickly. Some 3,000 suspected cases in which samples were taken have yet to be tested for final confirmation.
So no one knows just how bad this flu still is and may yet become. The confirmed death toll in Mexico was 66 last I heard. Nine states out of 31 didn't open their schools last week, including Jalisco which includes Mexico's second largest city of Guadalajara, even though the order nationwide was that schools and institutions could reopen.
We've had good showers four days this week and are hoping the six-month rainy season has come a month early. It's already a bit cooler. April and May are our hottest summer months. The rains usually make our June-October period feel more like a late spring.
Five good movies are on at MM Cinemas in La Luciernaga mall this week and we were so thrilled we decided to see all of them this weekend. Usually we get one good one a month. Wednesday tickets are now 35 pesos, with INAPAM Mexican senior discount cards you never pay more than 40 pesos, and the usual nightly ticket price is 45 pesos.
"Los Secretos del Poder" should translate as "Secrets of Power" but the English title of the first movie we saw was "State of Play." Never heard of it before. It starred Russell Crowe, Helen Mirren, Ben Affleck and Jeff Daniels so it had to be good. It was--an investigative newspaper reporter (Crowe), and his publisher (Mirren) of a struggling renowned newspaper very much like the Washington Post just bought by profit-oriented new owners, and a congressman (Affleck) investigating a company very much like Blackwater made a story with unexpected plot twists all along the way.
Next we saw "Duplicidad," with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen both as former government spies. It had us so confused we sat there at the end just as stunned as some characters were. We kept thinking the movie was badly spliced because there was repetitive dialogue at several points--for a reason. If this one ever comes out on HBO we'll watch it again, looking for the clues we missed.
"Doubt" with Meryl Streep concerned about the possible pedophilia of priest Philip Seymour Hoffman was as excellent as we knew it would be. Kendal Butler, an oldtimer in SMA I miss a lot, had the nun's role in an SMA theatrical production of the play before Kendal died. Norma sided with the priest's character, I believed Streep.
This afternoon we're going to see "Milk." I remember the night Milk and the SF mayor were assassinated, and I took part in the outpouring into the streets of LA in shock and protest. I'd come out in 1977 only because it now felt safe enough to be open without fear of being put into a mental hospital and lobotomized, a common "treatment" for lesbianism in the 1950s when I first suspected, back in grade school. (I did the research, hiding the books I was reading in the public library's adult section from everybody.) The assassination made me realize I still wasn't safe. I'm kind of bracing myself for that film, expecting it to hurt all over again.
Today I got an email from someone who used to live in Tijuana and who was upset by my comments on the four murders of US citizens in Tijuana last week. The four young people had come down to TJ to do the club scene. Their bodies were tortured in the same way drug cartels treat their victims. One of the tourists, all in their late teens and early 20s, all Mexican-Americans, had cocaine in her system. At least one of their friends told police that the group knew drug cartel people. How well did they know them? Were these just US tourists who got killed while doing the bar scene in TJ, or was something else going on? The investigators have already told the media that they have ruled out the possibility the case is innocent tourists being targeted, but the stories and news slants worldwide say that innocent tourists are being slaughtered in Mexico.
The person who complained that my report made it sound for sure as if the four were involved in drugs, as he repeated how unsafe TJ was, got the private response below from me. Some of this I've written about before, and I often get the reaction that I must have a black cloud over my head because of all that I, and Norma, have gone through in our lives. No, I just grew up in a poor area of Detroit, worked as a reporter in an inner-city African-American newspaper, never turned back from anything because of danger, and was on the front lines of a lot of potentially violent events, as a reporter and as a participant. Fearless, young, poor and stupid.
My response, which will be followed by another private response I wrote, the next one to someone worried about noise in San Miguel:
We saw "Gran Torino" yesterday. What a flood of memories. Clint Eastwood perfectly captured the racism of many older Detroiters. He could have been my Dad, but Eastwood's character was more courageous. My Dad had the guns but just ran and hid at any sign of trouble. Tell me about living at risk in a city where there are drug gangs. I reported on more murders happening in Detroit and experienced it in LA and luckily just read about it in Phoenix since we lived in a seniors only RV park where the only thing we had to fear was other retirees. (One shot up an HOA board meeting and killed a member in Sun City, while a disgruntled HOA member in our own park tried to drown Norma for having raised the dues $10 a month so that the park could remain solvent. Even in white-bread gated senior centers there is murder potential.)
All this same kind of fear and murder goes down every day in LA and nobody says, don't come to LA. We would return home from a day out and there would be police helicopters overhead shining search beams down into our backyard and the adjoining hillside, so that we would turn around and drive away for a few more hours, knowing we could be shot or taken hostage if we dared leave our car and go into our own yard. Possibly the person being hunted would be hiding inside our house. We did have those five robberies and burglaries of our house in our last four years in LA. (We left in 1985. Silverlake is thoroughly gentrified by now.)
Gang members stood in our driveway in Silverlake and demanded $5 protection money from our guests and clients not to vandalize their cars. My sister refused and her windshield wipers were broken off and dirt poured down into the windshield vents. More than once Norma would be interviewing tax clients when we had the office in our home and we'd all have to drop to the floor at the sound of gunshots nearby. I could give you hundreds of names of innocent folks killed in the crossfire of gang warfare in LA and Detroit if I took the time to research. Remember the movie "Detroit 2000"--not the year, the number of murders expected one year. I was reporting on them.
I remember standing on a corner on the East Side of Detroit the year before the big riot of 1967, with SWAT cars crawling by bumper to bumper, the cops yelling at me because I was on the corner alone interviewing the young civil rights leader the police shouts said they wanted to kill. He was a former SNCC leader turned more aggressive on civil rights back in the days when the very words "Black Power" sent a chill down many white folks' spines. Even the guy I was interviewing said, "You'll get killed too if we stay out here." We left to go to a church with a friendly pastor to talk, the cop caravan following us and waiting for us during the interview. They left me and followed him home when we were through. They finally did get him on what seemed like a trumped up charge and sent him away to Jackson state prison before the 1967 riot finally erupted.
I had the National Guard, young white suburbanites, spray the front of my brick apt building one night because somebody looking out a window lit a cigarette and the inexperienced National Guard boys thought it was gunfire. My apartment overlooked 10th precinct where most of those arrested the first hours of the riot were brought. There was a tank in my parking lot and I had to show ID to get into my own house. From my kitchen window I could have shot up the whole precinct. I saw the beatings going on in the station, and reported on them. I slept in the bathroom the five nights because it had at least two walls to stop bullets all around me. I worried more about overreaction by the young National Guard boys than from anyone rioting.
The first story on the 4 TJ murders said that their friends said they knew drug cartel people. That's more than one person having coke in her system. How many drug cartel people did you know while you were in TJ? So far every story I've read on US citizens being killed in these wars has turned out to be involved some way in drugs, except for a few people caught in gun crossfire, and for every one of those I can find bystanders gunned down in a Seven-11 robbery by some doper in the US. I'll match your Tijuana and raise you a Detroit and LA.
Now here's another private response I made to someone who is worried about moving to Mexico but is being told Mexico is so noisy she shouldn't do it. She asked me to rate the noise in our apartment on a scale of 1 to 10. I already posted this response on our forums, but for those of you who only read my blog, here it is:
Our apartment in Centro: usually 1, but when a car alarm goes off in a nearby parking lot, 10.
Many mornings at 6 am when fireworks are most likely to be set off to welcome the day: 10.
The three months or so when for some reason there were 34 chickens and roosters living in the parking lot: 10 (they were a food crop, not pets, and disappeared one day). None since.
No more cars have loud stereos than in the US, mostly weekend nights when the juniors come in from Mexico City with all their money.
Delivery trucks don't have loud speakers that your friends warned you about. But when a garbage truck comes, someone walks ahead announcing to get ready with your garbage with a specific bell. When the knife sharpener is coming he has a certain whistle to announce he's here. When the circus is in town, or when there's a political rally, cars with loudspeakers will wind through the city announcing the event.
Some blocks have an annoying roof dog who barks at everything. Feral cats may shriek outside your window. In the campos you may hear coyotes howling.
Fire crackers do go off all the time but it is almost always a specific celebration or holiday. That holiday may be personal--someone has hired someone to set off fireworks as a farewell to someone about to go on a journey, or to announce a birth or death or birthday or marriage--as well as for all the church, civic and national holidays. A very romantic suitor, or an apologetic husband, will hire a mariachi band to come sing at the woman's window either at midnight or dawn. This also happens sometimes on Mothers Day. The whole neighborhood gets a treat and turns out to listen. If you're one who would put a pillow over your head instead, Mexico may not be for you.
Many churches use bells to announce the hours and quarter hours, and to give a half-hour heads up when a Mass is coming, then again at 15 to, and again at five minutes to mass to remind those with no watches to get there.
If you live near a club or events hall there will be loud music and parties every weekend night. When it is a major fiesta you will hear drums announcing a parade with Conchero dancers, and then the sound of their seashells jangling around their ankle bracelets. Two very special holidays a year the fireworks begin at 4 am and go to dawn--La Alborada, the dawn fireworks.
The Day of the Locos mid-June the parade of 7,000 costumed people dancing to stereos on trucks will wind through the entire city for about four hours. The entire city will be silent during Good Friday processions, except for the solemn drums setting the pace for marchers.
If you're lucky you'll get invited to the neighborhood parties, though they'll start at your bed time.
Have you never lived in a US city? It's no worse than Detroit, LA or Phoenix, except for more fireworks and church bells. In Detroit and LA it was gun shots instead. I'd rather have fireworks.
And in US cities it was also angry car horns and yelling at every traffic light. Drivers here are pretty polite.
Mostly it depends on your particular block--and a quiet area when you're researching a prospective home site could still get an evangelical church moving in with gospel singing several nights and all day Sunday. Less zoning restrictions in Mexico.
When kids get out of school anywhere there is loud chatter for awhile. If you're on a convenient bus route, the reverse side of that advantage is noise and exhaust. If you're by the libramiento, the main roads that circle the city, you'll hear Jack brakes on trucks coming downhill.
And then there are those damned beautiful parrots and white egrets, and the grackles hitting the trees at dusk. The parks can get pretty noisy with all those people having fun.
We don't even hear any of it any more. If you absolutely hate noise, stay home. As I've said in early messages, you have got to come check out SMA for yourself before moving here. Spend some time, get a feel for the city, see if it resonates with you. If not, well, SMA and Mexico are not for everybody.
We've come to love most of it. This is a joyous, alive city. Mexico is a vibrant, exhuberant country. You may not be able to afford to give your kid celebrating a birthday a car but you can shoot off a few fireworks to alert the world that something special is happening.
Cemeteries are quiet. Thriving cities with people of all ages are loud.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
May 14, 2009--The crazy election season is upon Mexico, a potential danger to enthusiastic expats always ready to volunteer and "help;" a Mexican Train tournament; and mostly medical stuff
We've been going to one doctor after another, here and in Querétaro, the past few weeks and will give some updated doctor recommendations later. But right now I want to give my (purely personal) view on expat involvement in the political insanity going on all around us right now until the election July 5. (The wall-sized signs will remain unpainted for years afterward in many cases. I still see Manual Rosa wall signs from the 2006 mayoral campaign, especially in Col. San Antonio).
If you're one who can sit still quietly and observe, of course go to a political meeting and learn. I've gone to many in seven years and sat on my hands when I wanted to volunteer, or rather, Norma sat on my hands. I did advise one friend who I know would be jumping up, giving ideas, volunteering for committees, campaigning for the candidate, probably donating money to the campaign, to just stay home and stay out of trouble.
It is against the Mexican Constitution of 1917 for foreigners to interfere with Mexican politics, and you can get deported for giving money to a candidate, capaigning, going to a demonstration in support of a candidate, volunteering to help in any way. Quite possibly if you are telling a candidate what you think that candidate ought to do to better help the expat community, even if the candidate has asked for that opinion, you might be construed as inserting yourself into Mexican politics, shaping the campaign, "interfering." Of course a Mexican lawyer could give you a real interpretation. I'm no lawyer, I'm just sharing my impressions from what I've read and heard. Penalty is immediate deportation, enough time to gather some personal effects, not even enough time to make good arrangements for your pets.
Now as with everything else in Mexico, what is seen as "interfering" by one official one day and place may and probably will be different from what another official calls "interfering" another day and place. Mexican politics are easing up, it's not like 1968 where university demonstrators were killed by the hundreds and probably thousands for protesting before the Olympics. After 71 years of the one-party dictatorial rule of the PRI that ended with Fox's election from PAN in 2000, Mexico is learning to live with open democracy.
But even today the IFE, the Mexican election commission, just ordered a Youtube video against a mayoral candidate in another state to be taken down. Search Youtube for Mexican election videos and see what's going up, as crazy as the ones during US elections. A prime example is one someone just sent me against Lucy Nuñez, mayoral candidate from a joint ticket of the conservative PRI, the left-leaning PRD, and the Green Party, however she can represent those diverse interests.
The video opens with someone throwing up, then when the photo of Lucy is shown there is a piercing scream, she is called a "Ratera"(thief) and the world will come to an end if she is elected! Watch it for laughs, like the old Reefer Madness films from the US '30s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhDxJnq2hCE.
Will this video be allowed to stay on Youtube? Can anyone censor the internet? We'll see.
I can tell you that the campaign signs have only begun to erupt. Wait until just about every empty wall and fence in town is covered with political billboards. It was just as bad in the 71 PRI years when you would have thought there was a vigorous contest going on each election year, instead of pre-ordained election of the president hand picked by the outgoing president.
A political demonstration can turn in an instant. You may think you are just being an observer on the sidelines when suddenly you are right in the middle and possiby swept up in an arrest. The US State Department warnings on involvement in Mexican demonstrations make that point. I remember my civil rights, feminist, anti-war and gay rights demonstrations from the 1950's to... Hmmm, my last US political demonstration was in 2004 in San Francisco when we had an appointment to get married but the crackdown came before we could, so instead of getting married at City Hall we joined an anti-war demo that happened to be going on that day.
When I had a press card in Detroit I got swept up in several mass arrests but that little card got me out before the fingerprinting and photo stage. My ex-husband and I were in one of the huge antiwar demos in DC around 1970 and found ourselves hiding behind cars in an underground parking lot when police suddenly announced that anyone on the streets after 3 pm was under arrest. There was no way for us to get back to the buses before 3 pm so we crept through parked cars, making sure our feet were hidden behind tires as police looked under cars trying to arrest the thousands of us still on the streets. I didn't have a valid press card for that one.
Another time I was covering a Breakthrough/John Birch demo in Detroit and didn't notice the line had shifted and suddenly I was knocked to the ground by a guy whose name I still remember: Donald Lobsinger. Police recognized me on that one and only arrested him, another bit of luck. So I am very aware that you can start out to be just a bystander at a political event and suddenly you are in the middle. I am very cautious these days. I don't want to be deported, I have noplace else to go anyway, and I respect the Mexican evolutionary process enough to let it go its own way, let Mexicans decide what Mexico should do and who it should elect.
Once a new mayor is chosen, if that person wants expats' opinions, that will be wonderful. Luis Villarreal had many such meetings from 2003-06 that I attended. We always came away embarrassed by many expats' ignorance of basic elements of Mexican culture, such as you don't confront someone, tell them they're wrong, boo a university expert, talk out of turn, ignore social pleasantries, make demands. If you've paid attention, or done any reading on Mexican social interactions, you are gracious, you find ways to state a problem that doesn't blame somebody outright (even if it is obviously their fault), you offer alternate solutions on how you and the person can solve this problem that happens to exist without their losing face. Remember, the shelf fell, the other person didn't overload it. Ojala, God willed it.
At some of those meetings called by Villarreal I remember an expat demanding he put a stop to truck noise on the Libramiento, even though the highway had clearly been there already when the expat bought the house. One person demanded SMA start a full recycling program immediately, and what should she do with her recycled garbage until then? How can we stop the fireworks, another asked. The attitude of so many expats was me, me, me, rather than, thank you for inviting us to share our concerns, and we will do so politely and try to understand your side and your primary concern which is for your citizens.
Now it is okay for other Mexicans to dump on other Mexicans--former President de la Madrid just called Salinas, the man he appointed to follow him in the PRI "elections" before PAN won, some terrible names, accusing him of stealing hundreds times more from the secret political slush fund than de la Madrid did. Fox is being called a thief for making extensive renovations to his ranch after he left office, as though as former President of Coca Cola he didn't have enough money of his own to make the renovations. It is a long-standing tradition that politicians leave office with plenty of money.
Corruption runs deep throughout Mexican history, Mexicans freely acknowledge that. It is part of the sometimes fatalistic Mexican philosophy. All you can trust is yourself, your family and friends, and nobody better disrespect you or them.
Okay, these are just my opinions. Go to a meeting and see for yourself, but please, don't be an Ugly American. And don't get deported by accidentally getting caught up into the campaigns!
On other matters in our past two weeks, Norma and I went to a Mexican Train tournament, which apparently is a trend sweeping the expat community here. We RV'd fulltime for 3 1/2 years and had our fill of Mexican Train, a dominos game. We'd pull into a new RV park and everyone would head for the clubhouse after dinner and play pinochle, do jigsaws, watch the TV never set to anything we wanted to see but majority ruled, or play Mexican Train. Never again, we vowed. But with friends you actually like, it can be fun.
Friends got to see Norma's accountant professional side when rules kept being changed and her table was called "the slow ones" and she reacted. Don't change rules in the middle of a game, and don't impose a penalty on their table for being "slow." Norma showed them, she won the entire tournament, a 200-peso prize, which we spent on dinner at San Miguel Brewery where the tournament was being held. We're not sure we'll ever be invited back again!
Other than that, the past two weeks have been mainly doctor visits. We were so glad to get back to Fitness International after the ten-day flu closures here that the first Thursday I went an hour on the treadmill and 25 minutes on the bicycle and Norma did all 85 minutes on the treadmill. Then we spent another half hour on the weights machines on the first floor. I never thought I'd be happy to be back at a gym!
And then the next day I was 30 minutes into my hour treadmill run, clipping along with my heartbeat at the recommended cardio level of 122 beats a minute, when suddenly the machine went blank on the heartbeat measurements, then shot up to 178!
I stopped, got off, rested, and didn't know what to do. We took a cab home and talked about it. Hospital or not? I've gone into Hospital General I think four times so far with rapid and irregular heart beat, and after four hours or so on an IV I'm sent home. My heart rate this time got back down to 110 on its own but never got lower, until the next morning. We called Dr. Alvarez, the only board-certified cardiologist in San Miguel, who is at the Instituto de Corazon and Hospital Angeles in Querétaro Wednesday mornings and Friday afternoons, so he wasn't available until Monday morning. He told me Monday I should have gone to the hospital, and I should have insisted with the receptionist that I be put through to him immediately Thursday.
After a bunch of tests, an examination of the echocardiogram and Doppler Dr.Maxwell ordered last November when this happened most recently, a new treadmill stress test, and a Holter 24-hour echocardiogram, he is changing my meds. I told him I'd stopped the Cordarone given to regulate my heart beat after a previous hospitalization because my heart beat had gone down to 50, and the side effects listed on the internet made it sound like a really dangerous drug.
This made him stop in his tracks. He got out a drug reference book and started reading to me the side effects of a drug: terrible stuff, everything from jaundice to sudden death. Norma knew right away which drug's side effects he was reading: aspirin. Yes, that miracle drug has a scary list of side effects, too.
I told him I'd been PR director for the medical research programs at a UCLA hospital and he laughed, "You're the worst kind of patient. Dear sister, don't stop meds without talking to your doctor first. We'll adjust dose levels together."
I find out Monday what regimen he'll put me on, and then we'll go through a trial and error period to see what works out best. Both Norma and I really like this doctor. He even read every word of the single-spaced page of my complex medical history so that he could see my current problem in context.
His full name is Dr. Jorge Alvarez de la Cadena, at Hospital de la Fe, 152-2233. His hour-long visits have been 600-800 pesos, depending on what tests were done, and the Holter 24-hour EKG and the treadmill stress test were each 1,500 pesos. Can you get a treadmill stress test done by a cardiologist in the States for $112 USD?
We've been taking the bus back and forth to Querétaro a lot the past two week, too, for Norma's allergy problems. Dr. Gonzalez at Hospital Angeles determined she has no underlying lung problems (after quitting smoking in 1981 she still feared lung cancer could show up some day). Now she will be seeing Dr. Lilian Hernandez Garcia, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Hospital de la Fe, for followup on her chronic sinusitis, upon Dr. Gonzalez's recommendation.
I know many expats like to share doctor experiences and recommendations, which is why I went into this detail. Our address book keeps getting more and more names under "doctor." Bette Davis: growing old's not for sissies.
Carol Schmidt, Living Your Dreams in Mexico and San Miguel de Allende
[Blog entries more than a few months old are removed for a future book. For more about Carol and Norma's life in Mexico read our book Falling in Love with San Miguel: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security. For complete information on how to make the move, read our latest out in September, 2009, The Best How-To Book on Moving to Mexico, co-authored with Rolly Brook, both books available on Amazon.com.]
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