Living in Mexico and Learning to Speak Spanish: Tales & How-to Tips

Would You Retire to the Mexican Coast or Inland and Higher?

2008-07-17T12:37:00.001-05:00

We had such a good time in Sayulita recently that we can really see how people love to go there. Sayulita is up the coast a ways from Puerto Vallarta, and right on the beach.

But would we want to live there permanently? No, thanks, and here is why:

We are much happier at over five thousand feet elevation here at Lake Chapala, as the climate is more comfortable. It was quite muggy when we were at the coast, though admittedly July through September is said to be the worst time of year for heat there. Our worst heat is March to May, and it is dry heat, much easier to take.
We like being tucked in between mountains that take a lot of the bite out of Pacific hurricanes. Sure, we can get a lot of wind and rain -- this month, we have already had all of the nine inches that are the average July total. But hurricanes on the coast can do a lot of damage, and if the ocean level does rise even a little, it wouldn't take much to devastate a lot of beachfront.
Our Lake Chapala area is more economical, at least in real estate. While Kelly's sister Alexandra was here, we were trying to get her interested in living here. I don't know if she ever will, but she did get a sense that she could find a nice rental in Ajijic that would suit her (and she has very good taste) for $400 to $600 a month. In Sayulita, it seemed that very few were available and that the prices might be as much as double what they are here.

This area and Sayulita are probably pretty comparable in terms of ease of access when flying in or out. The Guadalajara airport is about an hour's drive from our house, on this side of the city. I don't know exactly how far the Puerto Vallarta airport is from Sayulita, but it's not too far either.

I would give both the two areas top marks in terms of shopping, culture, access to really good medical care in the nearby cities, etc. With an edge to Guadalajara there.

Readers, if you have opinions on coast-vs-highlands, or related topics, please chime in!

Overlooking the Ocean at Sayulita

2008-07-13T17:27:00.001-05:00

When we were in Sayulita recently, we stayed at Casa Carricitos overlooking the ocean... that link takes you to the page with rental information and pictures of the attractive interior of the house. We were so entranced with the out-of-doors that we never got around to taking pictures inside!

You can barely make out the house on the hillside, its flat roof showing. My sister-in-law Alexandra is enjoying the little-used beach just a short walk from the house.

The 180-degree ocean view from the terrace was the focal point of our time there. Here, Alexandra is flanked by friends Leslie and Nancy.

Guess it's pretty obvious that my husband Kelly and Alexandra are brother and sister!

Kelly kept his camera handy. Here, one of the countless land crabs is eating a flower. We loved the faces on the land crabs -- you can see the two eyes -- and since they would come into the house, we also appreciated that they tended to scurry away from us!

But his biggest coup in the nature photography vein was getting the second of these pictures, as the lizard only showed that colorful bit for a quick moment:

The sunset went on for hours:

Many thanks to the owners of Casa Carricitos, Adele and Michael, for the gift of our stay there... they are friends of Alexandra's. We all had a wonderful, restorative time. And I didn't think I needed a vacation!

A Walk Around Sayulita

2008-07-04T18:20:00.001-05:00

Kelly's sister Alexandra has been visiting us recently, and she has quite a few friends in the charming small town of Sayulita, which is on the Pacific coast, not too far from Puerto Vallarta. So we took off for a few days.

I'll do another article about the beautiful place we stayed. But first, here are scenes from a walk we took on our first morning. These two young women were working at a coffee bar where we got lattes. It was part of an outdoor restaurant where we had breakfast. Here are Kelly and Alexandra, smiling even though it's before their morning coffees:

I greatly enjoyed watching the rest of the clientele, as there were many young American couples, probably in Sayulita for the surfing. We don't see enough young Americans around Lake Chapala!

Wandering through the downtown after breakfast, we saw surf shops, plenty of boutiques and crafts stores, and many little restaurants. I had read on the internet that there was a bookstore with books in English, and we set out to find it. A sudden rain came up, so we got a bit damp, but in the heat we felt refreshed. As for the bookstore, either it was closed for the off season, closed period, or we just didn't find it.

This hillside was a bit north (if I wasn't turned around) of downtown, and gives a hint of the lush tropical setting, with homes interspersed. We chatted with a young real estate salesman who said house prices were comparable to San Francisco, California, and that they had pretty much doubled in the past year. I picked up some free real estate magazines and saw that prices were way higher than around Lake Chapala. The fellow also said that people for whom Puerto Vallarta is too expensive are coming here.

This fish store had finished sales for the day and they must have scrubbed the counter, as this fellow was relaxing and watching TV. I asked his permission and Kelly got this photo:

Alexandra and I did some shopping, with Kelly browsing a bit too. I was delighted to find a small wooden heart covered with milagros (miracles), which are tiny metal shapes of arms, legs, hearts, and other body parts as well as animals -- you see them in churches and shrines around Mexico where someone is asking for a healing or giving thanks for one. Here, I am discussing this with the young saleswoman. I had asked her in Spanish if they were real milagros attached to the heart, and she was astonished. "How do you know about milagros?" she asked, also in Spanish. I told her we had had the opportunity to travel in many parts of Mexico and had seen them many times. I had another conversation in that same store. A different young woman was at the cashier's desk, and she was wearing a bright pink t-shirt which said in English, "Too Many Social Engagements, Too Little Time!" I asked her, again in Spanish, if she knew what her shirt said, and she had no idea. My rough translation was "Tantas Cosas Divertidas Que Hacer, Tan Poco Tiempo!" and she got a kick out of it, thanking me several times for telling her. I wondered to myself how many other foreigners had seen the shirt and not thought to tell her its meaning or had not had the Spanish to do so. It is so easy, and so rewarding, to chat with Mexicans, and in a place like this many of them speak some English.

On the edge of downtown, we walked past a store that was closed while the walls were being painted. These things were piled on a table in the middle of the room. I like the surreal quality that the rain-splotched window and the reflections of plants across the street gave to the pile, specially since we had been chatting the night before about how surrealism is an essential part of Mexican culture.

Learning Spanish: Words I Don't Plan to Use

2008-06-30T09:05:00.002-05:00

I recently came across a website that you shouldn't go to if it will gross you out. The alternative dictionaries site has two pages of coarse Spanish slang and usually indicates which country or countries the slang is used in.

The link takes you to the page where all the words are listed. I was dismayed to see quite a few words I thought were innocuous on the list, but happily when I read their definitions, few of the ones I checked were used in coarse ways in Mexico.

Here is a sample entry, which I might actually use:

mala semana (adj., fem) (noun, fem.) menstruation note Literally, means "bad week". It is pronounced "MA-la say-MAH-na".

Don't say I didn't warn you.

For actually learning usable Spanish, I continue to be a big fan of Rocket Spanish... the link takes you to their sales page.

A Watercolor by Lake Chapala

2008-06-27T15:12:00.001-05:00

When our friends Janet Woodman and Kizzen Laki were here from Colorado back in January, Janet did this watercolor from the malecon in the city of Chapala, looking west along Lake Chapala.

I was going to put it up on the blog then, but somehow it slipped by me. I just now noticed it on my hard drive and said, "Aha!" So here it is.

I sometimes wish I could draw or paint; Janet says she gets a lot of pleasure from it. (She did add that she had people watching her work over her shoulder much of the time in Chapala.) I've even wondered about taking a very interesting intensive art class, given mainly in the winters by local resident Karl Barnhardt, teaching you to draw no matter what you know to start. In just a week! But then I thought, I don't have time for all the writing I want to do, better stick to what I already do. At least for now.

Living in Mexico: I Did an Online Interview

2008-06-23T17:25:00.001-05:00

Recently I did an online interview about living in Mexico. I just wrote answers to a variety of questions. Here is the link:

http://mexicorealestateinvestment.org/2008/06/16/interview-with-rosana-hart-author-of-mexico-with-heart/

It's a website about real estate investing in Mexico, done with a lot more thought than you typically see in that field, it seemed to me. You might want to look around a little while you are there!

At a Mexican Baby Shower

2008-06-18T21:50:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I had the opportunity to go to a baby shower for a young Mexican woman I know. The printed invitations requested punctuality, so I turned up at 4:15 for a 4 PM event and was still the first guest to arrive. The pregnant woman wasn't there yet, as it was a surprise for her, though when she and her husband arrived, she didn't seem astonished. Maybe a hint had leaked out.

I wonder if all Mexican baby showers are so much fun... I think that the sister-in-law who organized this one has quite a talent for it. Maybe some of the things we did are commonly done; I have no idea!

When we arrived, a name tag sort of thing was pinned on our clothing and it was explained that if you saw someone crossing her arms or legs, you could take the tag off and pin it on yourself. There would be a prize at the end for whoever had the most. I was pretty diligent but habits are habits, and soon I lost my tag. A few minutes later, one of the young Mexican women caught my eye and significantly nodded toward the woman sitting on the other side of me. Sure enough, her arms were crossed, so I gained a tag back -- only to lose it an hour later in an unguarded moment. Two women were very good at spotting people and soon were festooned with tags all over their blouses.

Before the mother-to-be arrived, some 20 or 25 other women did (along with a bunch of babies and small children), and we were issued blown-up balloons and instructed to put them under our clothing to simulate pregnancy. We wore these for the entire party, in solidarity I suppose. The party was outside under a large canopy, at the home of the grandparents-to-be. A few drops of rain didn't bother anyone, and all the brightly wrapped gifts were on a table set up safely away from rain.

Once the guest of honor arrived and had been greeted warmly, we played another game. I was chosen to be one of three women sitting in chairs, in a row. Three other women were blindfolded, brought over, and handed unopened jars of baby food and spoons. Getting the drift, I said to the blindfolded woman standing in front of me, "Eres tu mi mama?" That gave her a chance to hone in on where I, her baby, was. At a signal, they opened their jars and started feeding their "babies." She and I won that game hands down. She could sure spoon it out of the jar fast and skillfully. Only a little went up my nose or onto my blouse, and I gobbled up the rest fast. If I had been the mother, no way would we have won! We each got a kitchen spoon as prize.

After a rousing game of musical chairs won by another gringa to her surprise, rolls of toilet paper made their way around the tables. We were each to take the length that we guessed would go around the pregnant belly of the mother-to-be. Almost all of us guessed too long, but two women tied for the prize of some plastic glasses, so it was divided between them.

There were more games, all of this accompanied by lots of jolly conversation and laughter. I really enjoyed being there, being included. I knew few of the women, but it didn't matter. I joked and chatted with the ones near me, but when a group of Mexican women get into rapid, joking repartee, I only understand a word now and then! I had the chance to chat quite a lot with a sweet young woman with a baby and a four-year-old, as she was the second guest to arrive. Her husband is working in Canada, on a program organized in Chapala, and she is hoping to join him with the children.

There had been snacks on the table all along, and then food was brought out -- plates of tortillas with pasta and sausage in a mayonnaise sauce piled on them. I had a little, and as it was approaching 7 PM by now, I decided to get out before the presents began being opened, which seemed likely to be a lengthy affair, as it was to involve guessing what the things were... we had already provided written clues. There was also something on the wall that looked liked a version of "Pin the Tail on the Donkey" was in the works. So I said my goodbyes and thanks, removed the balloon from under my blouse, and was given the little memento you see.

As I walked home, I thought about all the different women who had gathered together. Young, middle-aged, and beyond. Slender, medium, and large. Quiet and lively. Mexican and American. Mothers and not. There's a saying here, "Cada cabeza un mundo," or "Every head a world." I had really felt that, and also the sense of connection that was palpable at times, from the fact of being women together, celebrating a woman's event.

Home Exchange Program Offers Glimpses Into Expat Life in Mexico

2008-06-15T15:33:00.001-05:00

A while back, I got an email from the folks at Mexico Hospitality, a new service starting up all over Mexico.

It sounds like a great way for people anywhere to exchange homes. I poked around the Lake Chapala section of the site, where homeowners have signed up. I knew several of the people. You can sign up to offer hospitality to people when you are still at home, to exchange homes, or both. Very little money changes hands, just a suggested donation to homeowners.

Interesting Even If You Wouldn't Do It

We won't sign up for a couple of reasons. We don't have much of a guest space... I doubt that our vintage Toyota motorhome, guest quarters for family and close friends, can compare with the charming spaces you'll see on the site. And I'm not keen on the idea of people I don't know swapping with us, where the various quirks of our dogs and cats might not get the level of attention I give them! Letting strangers into the house while we go to theirs wouldn't bother me at all, though... it's just the pets! The site explains how it all works in a most reassuring way, and it's up to you to communicate with the other people before deciding anything.

But apart from all that, I think the site is really very interesting if you are thinking of living in Mexico, or specifically retiring to Mexico, because you get a real "slice of life" feeling from what the various expats write. Most have pets. Most are busy. Most have lovely homes, you can tell from the photos. And who knows? There might just be a perfect exchange that would turn up! If that happens, please come back and post a comment.

Some Bad Luck Brings Out The Characteristic Kindness in Mexicans

2008-06-10T18:33:00.001-05:00

Recently my friend Suzanne Forrest, who lives in Ajijic, had quite an adventure when she went to the charming mountain town of Tapalpa. Here it is in her words, with her permission:

Do you remember the old rhyme that starts "for want of a nail, the shoe was lost?'" Well, the last time I had my car serviced the mechanic put in the wrong size oil filter and that was the cause of all that happened next..

Last week I drove several friends from my Mexican Train group to Tapalpa for a little outing. We stayed in a lovely brand new cabana built to rent to vacationers from Guadalajara, Colima etc. The second day of our visit while we were touring around the area my car hit a rock in the road and began losing oil. It turned out that the oil filter had been knocked off.

We were in the middle of nowhere and none of us had a cell phone! Well--don't let that happen to you. It is the first lesson I learned from this experience. But we were amazingly lucky that a police car just happened to come down the road. The policeman radioed for a mechanic but the only one in Tapalpa said he couldn't help us for a number of hours. So the policeman, and later his commandante, who he radioed for help, figured out the problem and took one of my friends into town to buy a replacement oil filter and oil to refill the tank. Then the police replaced the filter and accompanied us back to town to see that we were all right.

The next day, however, when we went out in the car, the new oil filter fell off and again we lost our oil! This time the owner of the cabana came to our aid with some of his friends and they discovered that a large bolt that attached the oil filter to the motor was broken. Later the mechanic told us that it was because the oil filter that the mechanic in Ajijic had put on was too big that it broke when I hit the rock.

Anyway, Carlos Barba, the owner of the vacation cabanas, spent hours trying to find a replacement for this part. Since we knew it would be days before the car would be fixed, three of our group made arrangements for a driver to come down to Tapalpa to pick them up. One friend and I stayed behind. The next day when Carlos arrived to tell us the status of my car, I was so eager to greet him that I fell over the rockers of a rocking chair and broke my shoulder.

So then this poor guy had to get an ambulance for me. I must report that the little village of Tapalpa not only had an ambulance, but paramedics who stabilized my arm, got me onto a stretcher, and drove my friend and me to the hospital in Guadalajara--and didn't charge us a peso! So if that isn't a testimony to the kindness and wonderful care one can find in Mexico I don't know what is. And I know some beautiful vacation cabanas with a very obliging owner if anyone is interested. They are Cabañas del Pastor in Tapalpa, Mexico. The proprietor is Carlos Barba. His cel phone is 333-189-2675.

Walls and Birds in Riberas Del Pilar

2008-06-07T08:08:00.001-05:00

Riberas del Pilar is in between San Antonio Tlayacapan and Chapala, and between Lake Chapala and the two-lane lakeside highway or carretera. It's a rather suburban type area, in that it has no central plaza, nor is it densely built up. The homes there are often on larger pieces of land than you'll find elsewhere. I know quite a few people who live there, and the church I go to -- St. Andrew's Anglican -- is located there. So we get over that way quite often.

One Sunday recently, we were there together and Kelly went for a walk while I was at church. First, here are a couple of walls he photographed. He was attracted to the texture of the red one. It had been plastered over something, rocks maybe, but he wasn't sure what. Notice the mural on the second one.

He wandered down by the lake and got these photos. Herons or egrets? Kelly thinks egrets but isn't sure. If you know, please comment. Whatever they are, these two photos below are now up in our kitchen rotating art gallery.

Above and Below San Juan Cosala

2008-06-04T09:05:00.001-05:00

A longtime professional photography and videographer, Kelly loves to roam around with his camera, a Canon S5IS Powershot. Here are pictures from two different walks he took from our home in San Juan Cosala.

Last September, the mountains above the town were hit by a huge amount of water in the form of incredibly heavy rain, a waterspout or tromba of water from nearby Lake Chapala. Here, our friend Jack picks his way through a much changed landscape in one of the arroyos in the mountains.

Another day, Kelly caught this action along the lake shore.

The Plaza in San Juan Cosala

2008-05-31T14:48:00.001-05:00

The plaza in San Juan Cosala is rarely this empty. It's recently had a lot of work done to make it more attractive, and it's really very nice!

A friend of ours from San Juan Cosala who is currently working in the US asked us for a photo of the plaza. It happened that Kelly walked through the plaza very early one Sunday morning and got this picture... that's why it's so quiet.

Esta es para ti, amigo al norte!

Being an Expat, in France or Mexico

2008-05-25T14:17:00.002-05:00

The other day, Sam posted a comment on a recent blog entry which got me thinking. It says in part,

I'm a Mexican living in France since 2005, so I really know the feeling of being an expat. Every now and then I wonder if there are foreigners living in Mexico that might be feeling a bit like I do here. A quick google search brought me to your site.

That got me thinking about my years in Europe, mostly in France and Spain, over 40 years ago. (Geez, how does that happen? I won't dwell on that topic today.)

Ah, France... I was first there as a university student. I loved the country, the food, the architecture, the culture. I wasn't that wild about the French people, though, as most of the ones I met were pretty aloof. I actually had better French then than I have Spanish now, but my pronunciation in both languages leaves a lot to be desired. The French were not kind about it. I remember meeting my younger sister at the airport in Paris when she came to spend a vacation with me. We got in a taxi and I told the driver to go to "Huit, Rue de la Harpe."

"Non, mademoiselle," he said curtly, "Huit, Rue de la Harpe."

I thought I'd said that, but evidently my pronunciation of that elusive French u was not acceptable. So much for showing off to my sister how fluent I had become in French! The driver and I repeated the address to each other several more times -- I don't remember if the taxis had meters there and then but if so, I'm sure the the meter was running -- before he deigned to drive us to the left-bank hotel at that location.

With that kind of memory of the French contrasting so strongly with the warmth and friendliness of the Mexicans, I've been wondering what it's like to be a Mexican expat in France. I hope Sam comes back and posts something about that.

Also, Sam, I wonder how you feel there. Is it much like how I feel here? Sometimes I love being here and feel blessed beyond measure, sometimes I wonder if I will ever feel really at home here, and sometimes I am achingly homesick for the US -- increasingly, I fear, for a US that doesn't exist in the form I miss. (That, too, is a topic for another day. Or not.)

For some reason, Sam's comment reminded me of a blog post I did three years ago, when Kelly and I were renting a house in Bernal, Queretaro, and it got me thinking about the time I had rented a house in a small coastal town in southern Spain. It's one of my better blog posts, I think, so here's a link to Nerja and Bernal.

I also hope this post today will get comments from some of the various Americans and Canadians who live in Mexico. How would you sum up your feelings?

A Week in the Life Of

2008-05-19T11:24:00.001-05:00

Today I'm going to give you an idea of what our lives were like this week, hoping that this will be helpful to people thinking of retiring to Mexico or simply living here, whether it's by Lake Chapala as we are or anywhere else.

After I wrote last week about how hot it was, we had our first really significant rain, complete with thunderstorm that had me turning off our router and unplugging my laptop. It's been cooler since then, hitting the mid 80s or so, cooling down at night. We're rarely using our fan at all. Nice!

Meanwhile, we're eating out of our garden quite a lot. Our lettuce is bolting and we will replant, but I am letting some of the plants go, in order to collect seeds... we use non-hybrid seeds so we can do this, bringing them down from the US.

We've got our first-ever artichokes, and in fact two of these are steaming right this minute. We've been eating squash, snow peas, broccoli, cucumbers, and more.

In the technological world, we had computer challenges this week. Our "spare" laptop running Windows Vista had some problems. We found a retired foreigner who loves to fix computers, and it is now in his obviously capable hands. But then, with no spare in the house, my laptop did some weird things. Freakout time! Even worse, it happened while Kelly was in Guadalajara at the dentist where he was having work done on an implant. (We do normal dentistry here at Lake Chapala.)

I've run a complete scan on my computer and it's not a virus. I will do further work but not till after my whole "My Documents" finishes uploading to an inexpensive online service I found called datadepositbox.com. Computer problems south of the border are even more of a challenge than up north!

It's been quite a social week for us, as we've been out and about some plus we had people over twice. Once, some good friends we hadn't seen for ages came over for dinner. Yesterday, we had a great time with a young family we are getting to know. Speaking almost entirely in Spanish for some four or five hours is great for our fluency! And whenever kids get into our swimming pool, I think of the family from Guadalajara that originally built this place and the pool, as their kids were growing up. Do I hear echoes of their laughter?

Hot Summer and Scorpions, Here by Lake Chapala

2008-05-12T08:41:00.001-05:00

It always surprises people in the US when I tell them that our hottest season is about now.... April, May, and early June, until the rainy season begins sometime in June.

It's been plenty hot this year. Lately it's been getting into the high 80s and low 90s every afternoon for weeks now. Being at about 5000 feet, it does cool down at night, into the high 50s or so, but our lows have been gradually rising. The net result is that our one-level brick house has been getting a bit warmer, day by day. I'm sitting at my computer now just after 8 in the morning, and it's already rather warm here at my desk. Our big window fan is sucking in the fresh morning air from the yard, cooling things down a bit, at least with the nice air flow. We don't need air conditioning.

I wouldn't say this is any hotter than other years... memories are pretty subjective. We stay cool enough, most of the time. Our house is uphill enough from the town that we get whatever breezes come off Lake Chapala, about a kilometer away. We swim every afternoon now. Kelly has taken up wearing shorts regularly for the first time in his life! Who says people can't change?

Once the rains begin, it cools down enough that we will start sleeping under blankets again, and we'll get to stop watering the yards and garden so much. The highs will often be the high 70s and low to mid 80s, which I consider perfect.

Watering has been a challenge at times, because the city water was off for a couple of days. Getting enough water can be tricky at the end of the dry season, but part of the situation this year is that some new water mains are going in, a good thing in a town where the water system is sometimes called leaky. We take shorter showers and all that, but we did acquire a quarter-acre yard with lots of plantings. Everything is getting the minimum for now.

This is our first year with our vegetable gardens. We've had trouble starting seeds in the beds because of the midday heat, so we started seeds in yogurt containers and transplanted them. We've had great lettuce, just now trying to bolt. We've been eating lots of squash. We just pulled our broccoli plants yesterday, as we were getting more aphids than flowerets -- these plants were great producers when it was cooler. Our tomatoes are still green but getting quite large. Our lemon tree keeps us in lemons, and we have some bananas coming along.

Now, about the scorpions...

They come out of the ground when it gets warm, and for whatever reasons, they love to come indoors. We spray, with some pet-friendly stuff, and that helps. But in recent weeks there has been at least one scorpion a week in the house. One week there were four, and I muttered about moving to Alaska.

This morning, we had just finished making the bed when Kelly said "Get the dogs away," with an urgency in his voice. I figured it was a scorpion just from his tone of voice, before he even said the word. I called the dogs and got them outside. Kelly scooped the huge scorpion into our dishpan and flushed it.

This time was a little different, though -- Kelly had been wearing just socks and he had felt a very slight sting. His foot showed nothing, though. He put our ice pack on the floor and rested his foot on it while he had his morning tea.

So he was lucky. I killed another one on the front porch just now.

And so it goes in our tropical paradise!

Learn to Speak Spanish... or Go to Jail?

2008-05-09T16:25:00.001-05:00

A couple of foreigners who live in the Lake Chapala area committed a serious driving infraction. I'm not clear on whether they did this in one vehicle or two. In any case, they found themselves stopped by the local traffic police who insisted they go to court.

When their day in court arrived, they claimed that they couldn't have known they were making an error because they didn't read or speak Spanish.

The judge sentenced them to learning Spanish or spending a year in jail.

Their classes were to begin within a week and they were to report to the court on their attendance each week.

I read this in a local English-language magazine (El Ojo del Lago, May 2008, page 40). It could be an urban legend, or more likely it really happened.

Don't risk jail! Beyond that, life in Mexico is MUCH better if you speak the language. Rocket Spanish is a great downloadable program for beginners especially.

Sometimes Blogging Slides Down the To-Do List

2008-05-02T16:01:00.001-05:00

It's been that way for me lately. Just busy with other stuff, mostly a new website I will announce here later. (Not on Mexico.)

Luckily I can refer you to a couple of other bloggers... same ones I mentioned recently:

Here is an interview with a variety of foreigners living in Mexico about what their biggest adjustment was:

http://www.mexico501.com/interview-biggest-adjustment/75/

And here is our friend Peter again, this time with an excellent article on five things Mexicans could teach Americans:

http://peterbrice.com/five-things-mexicans-could-teach-americans.html

Taking Long Distance Buses in Mexico

2008-05-01T10:37:00.001-05:00

If you've ever endured a long distance bus ride in the United States, you may not be inclined to think that taking one in Mexico could be a much nicer experience. But it really can be.

While Americans will typically fly or drive their own cars in the US for long trips, Mexicans are much more apt to take buses. Not necessarily the "chicken buses" of so many stereotypes, either... a long-distance Mexican bus ride in first class or luxury class can be very pleasant, with comfortable reclining seats, a reasonably clean bathroom, movies, and so on.

In any city of any size, you just go to the large bus station and it's like an airport, typically with local buses going from one part and long-distance ones from another. (In Guadalajara, local and long-distance buses have separate stations a taxi ride away.) You will see a variety of companies competing for your business, wherever it is you want to go. Chances are a bus is leaving pretty soon for that city. It can all be a bit overwhelming! I favor the higher class companies, in the perhaps erroneous assumption that they are likely to have better drivers.

Catching a bus from a smaller town can be a matter of going to a bus station or you may just ask around and find out where to get on the bus. When our friend Peter came to visit recently, he took the bus from Zamora, where he teaches English, to a highway intersection just outside of Jocotepec, a small city near us. Then he took a cab to our place. This was a second class bus route, no bathrooms and lots of stops, but he said it went fine. When his visit ended, Kelly took him back to that same highway intersection just beyond Jocotepec, and someone else was already standing there waiting for a bus. Peter had learned that one would come by about every half hour.

There are dozens upon dozens of Mexican bus companies. Here's an example of the website of one that does a lot of Guadalajara routes. You can play around with possible routes and see the times and costs:

www.etn.com.mx

I know travelers who particularly like this company. Check out, for example, Guadalajara to Puerto Vallarta.

Why Move to Mexico?

2008-04-21T12:25:00.003-05:00

I'm riding on other bloggers' coattails twice in a row here. Mark just posted an interesting article in which he interviewed several foreign bloggers about why they live in Mexico. I'm one of them.

My answer was pretty short -- as I recall, I was half asleep late one evening and catching up with email. Still, it sums up my feelings reasonably well. If it wasn't fun, I doubt we'd be here!

Peter Starts Blogging, with Lemons and Limes

2008-04-18T12:51:00.001-05:00

Our friend Peter, who is teaching English in Zamora, was by here for a few days over spring break, and I helped him set up a blog. It's at peterbrice.com and has a post I was thinking of writing myself, about limones y limas, that's lemons and limes... or is it limes and lemons? Maybe you''ll know after you read his blog!

Here's our tree, finally slowed down after its wild abundance of January and February. Then five or six a day was average, now it's just under one a day.

Learning Spanish

2008-04-13T21:24:00.002-05:00

I've been reading the very interesting blog of David Rodriguez for a while now, and we have emailed a little. He is a Spanish professor and I asked him for a guest column on learning Spanish. He kindly obliged, and this is what he sent. I can vouch for his advice to read the Bible in Spanish -- I have a paperback of the New Testament with English on one side and Spanish on the other, and it's fun to read.

So you want to learn Spanish! Or, maybe you just want to improve your Spanish. Well, you will if you put your mind to it. I’ve been teaching Spanish for twelve years now and I’ve noticed that persistence leads to fluency. The secret to learning Spanish is to think in Spanish. You should always be learning Spanish. Continue doing whatever has been working for you, such as college courses, listening to audio recordings while you drive, or computer programs. But try a few new things, too. You need to expose yourself to Spanish in different settings.

Watch the news in Spanish. If you keep up with current affairs, watch the news in Spanish. You’ll be surprised how much you will understand. The pictures and films will give you a context that will help understand what they’re saying.

Watch DVDs in Spanish. What’s your favorite movie? I imagine that you’ve probably seen it a few times so you know exactly what the characters will say and what will happen next. Most DVDs of recent movies allow you to listen to the movie in Spanish. Turn on the Spanish subtitles while you’re at it. Just beware that sometimes the subtitles don’t correspond exactly to the soundtrack.

Read in Spanish. What’s your favorite hobby or topic? Search for it on wikipedia.org and read it in English. Most articles are fairly short, so reading it won’t take long. Now look in the left margin for the link that says Español. Click on it and you will be able to read the same article in Spanish. And this is proper Spanish and not this horrendous Spanish produced by some computer translator.

Read the Bible in Spanish. This is a good resource for learning to read Spanish because most people are familiar with parts of the Bible, Genesis, for example. You can find it on the internet for free. The nice thing about reading the Bible is that all the lines are numbered. You can look up the corresponding line in an English Bible and figure out what you just read.

Study Spanish grammar. That’s right, grammar. Most Spanish students hate to study grammar, so if you do, just skip over the grammar explanations, and study the Spanish examples provided. That’s all you really need. Memorize some of the sentence constructions and substitute your own words to suit different situations. I have some Spanish grammar pages on my website if you’re interested: http://davidrodriguez.us/espanol.html

Of course you should continue to practice speaking Spanish whenever possible because perhaps the most difficult part of learning any language is developing your ear for understanding what is said.

On the Shopping Bus to Guadalajara

2008-04-10T13:28:00.001-05:00

The Chapala Red Cross provides a useful service and makes some money by arranging for a bus to go once a month to the Plaza Mexico mall in Guadalajara. Tickets are sold in advance at the Lake Chapala Society, and we foreigners go in for Walmart, a bit of mall shopping, and doctors' appointments in the neighborhood, as the Del Carmen hospital is nearby, and many doctors have their offices nearby. This happens on the 3rd Thursday of the month generally. We leave Ajijic at 9 and get back somewhere around 4. I've mentioned this before in this blog.

Well, now the Red Cross has added a second bus each month on the first Thursdays, and I recently went on its maiden voyage with a friend. (Definitely not the maiden voyage of the actual bus, but hey, its air conditioning worked and that was most welcome. Guadalajara is hotter than our area, as Lake Chapala has a distinct effect of moderating the temperatures.)

By the way, the Red Cross here is not like it is back home. It provides essential services that local governments cannot afford. It helps in disasters but its clinic in Chapala, staffed 24/7 with medical personnel including doctors, provides basic health care. Its ambulances are the only first response in its area. Find out more, in English or Spanish, at http://www.cruzrojalakeside.com/ Tax-deductible donations (in Mexico, the US, and Canada) can be made via Paypal too.

We went to Galerias, a three-story upscale mall in Guadalajara, anchored by Liverpool and Sears... in Mexico, Sears is much fancier than in the US. I was on a hunt for all-cotton queen sheets, not an easy task here since queen bed are rare and so are all-cotton sheets. But I found some at Sears. they had a nice Laura Ashley set for about $120 US, but the ones I found were about half that and made in Mexico. The young man who helped us was dressed to the nines in a nice suit, and I told him he looked ready to go to a wedding. He laughed and said it was about the presentation.

The sheets were my big splurge of the day. My friend found some darling outfits for her young daughters, on sale in one of the numerous chic little shops. Some Irish friends of hers live nearby and they came over for lunch with us.

"Is this really Mexico?" someone asked. Oh yes. It's easy to forget that there are many wealthy people in this country, but a quick stroll through Galerias proves that consumerism and designer name goods are alive and well here. Want to see for yourself? Here is the website of Galerias.

It doesn't take much of that to bore me silly. My eco-husband would have hated it. I said as much to a vivacious Canadian lady I met on the bus, and she said her husband would have taken a taxi home rather than spend much time there.

The mall was not the only attraction. Walmart and Sam's Club were in its parking lot, and right across the street was Costco and another general groceries-plus type of store called Mega. I got into Costco with someone who had a membership. Had I wanted to buy anything, I could have gotten a day pass, but I just looked around while my friend had a longer visit with her Irish friends. One nice thing about having a small house is that there isn't room for a lot of stuff.

It's good to get to know the resources here in Mexico, but I won't be in a hurry to go back. Coming and going, it was almost ten hours. I'd rather be blogging. Yeah, I blogged about this, but believe me I don't need an all-day shopping trip to find things to write about!

Hillside Fire on a Dry and Windy April Night

2008-04-06T15:29:00.001-05:00

I looked out our back kitchen door last Thursday evening, and there was this fire. Actually, the flames were quite a lot higher then. I immediately called Kelly to come and take a look. Gusts of wind rattled our trees as we stared at it. It seemed that we were not in real danger, but we talked a little about it. The flames were less than a kilometer away, we guessed, in the steep hills directly behind San Juan Cosala.

By the time Kelly got his camera out, it had died down to this, and soon few flames were visible. About that time the smell of smoke came our way, and we closed up the house for much of the evening.

Evidently a farmer had been burning a field in preparation for planting corn, something that has gone on here for centuries. Our maid Rosa told us that the fire department came. We heard from Roberto, our pool guy and close friend, that several years ago a fire of this sort went up into the mountains and burned for four days. A helicopter fought that fire with water from Lake Chapala.

Scary.It has been a very dry winter and we are now in the last couple of months of so of the dry season. It's in the mid to upper 80s every day. Everything is dry. Cultural differences between Mexicans and North Americans towards fire safety are pretty big. Scary. Oh, I said that.

Yesterday morning Kelly and a friend went hiking in the hills, and the trail took them right through the burned area, which Kelly thought might have been 50 or more acres. Given the dryness and the gusty winds, that's lucky. Behind the burned area you can see houses of the Raquet Club, a nice development inhabited mostly by foreigners. There was a lot of damage there last September from the waterspout.

Lucky. Oh, I said that.

Roll Your R's!

2008-04-01T09:11:00.001-05:00

I admit it, I'm terrible at rolling my R's in Spanish. So when our friend Peter gave me the URL for a website where I could learn to roll my R's, I was curious to see if I could overcome this limitation. Dubious too, but willing to check it out.

Peter sent me to: http://www.wikihow.com/Roll-Your-%22R%22s

It's one long page with lots of information. I was comforted by something I read at the very bottom: If you can't touch your toes today, it doesn't mean you are doomed to never touching them. You'll just need to get in better shape. Well, it turns out that rolling your R's is something like that, unless you happen to have some relatively unusual conditions such as missing upper teeth or a cleft palate.

I can't count the number of times that well-meaning friends have told me to put my tongue on the roof of my mouth and then to let it flutter. That bit of advice just doesn't cut it. My friends, no matter whether Spanish or English is their first language, then merrily proceed to roll long and magnificent R's. I can hear them fine; I just can't create them. A variety of awkward sounds come out of my mouth.

This webpage gives a number of methods you can try for getting a good rolled R. None of them worked for me on the first attempt, which the author says is to be expected. This is something that takes practice.

A list of ten steps begin the page, and while I did bog down on relaxing my tongue on step 3 and tensing it on step 5, it's a nice basic list. Things get more complicated after that with several different approaches outlined. I was intrigued by some of them:

The Butter/Ladder method builds on something I CAN do, which is give the normal American pronunciation of those two words.
The dR method did nothing for me at first, even though it helped Lenin. Maybe it would work with time.
The Tiger method seemed beyond me.
The Vision Dream method held out some hope.

The page ends with some useful tips and some warnings.

It's clear that practice is called for. If I muster up enough motivation to practice, I will report back in the blog. But there are an awful lot of other things I don't know how to do that don't seem as frustrating to learn. Maybe I will roll an R some day, but please don't hold your breath. Hmm, wonder if that's another way to roll an R.

Visiting the Ninos y Jovenes Orphanage

2008-03-27T10:44:00.001-05:00

Ninos y Jovenes in San Juan Cosala, Jalisco, is an orphanage which has existed for many years. Founded by Padre Macias, who was for a long time the priest at the church in San Juan Cosala, it is located on the edge of town, with the mountains right behind it. This photo, which Kelly took during the rainy season, shows the entrance to it. I don't know whose horses these are.

The orphanage is just a few blocks from where we live, so recently I have gone there a couple of times to visit the priest. Padre Macias, or Padre Beto as many call him, is in his early 80s and still sharp as can be. He knows some English, but we conversed in Spanish, which he was adept at slowing down for us. If he thought we didn't catch a particular word, he often tossed in the English one. Our young friend Peter was with us yesterday, and his Spanish is more limited than ours. Padre Macias told a couple of jokes. Kelly and I got one but not the other, and I think Peter missed them both!

The priest told us that Ninos y Jovenes currently houses about 120 students. Some 40 of them are indigenous: Huicholes, Coras, and others. When the indigenous students first come, they often don't speak Spanish very fluently since it isn't their first language, but within a few months, they are doing great, he reported... most of them would have studied it in school for up to three years in primary school. The other students are from San Juan Cosala and other areas. Some of the students are indeed orphans, but others may have living parents who cannot care for them for one reason or another.

I have no idea how the orphanage operates financially, but I am sure any help would be most welcome. So far as I know, neither the government nor the church is a major factor. I have heard that there are some local people who help in various ways. There is a staff, including an English teacher I met briefly.

At the time of the waterspout, when there was some damage to Ninos y Jovenes, I linked to a website about the orphanage but my emails to that site have gone unanswered and the US phone number given there doesn't work any more. My guess is that the people moved to the Lake Chapala area, as they said on the site that they intended to do, and just haven't gotten back to the site.

If anyone reading this knows more about the foreign involvement with the orphanage, I would like to know more... both regarding people who volunteer and regarding any organized way of donating. Please email me at rosana at mexico-with-heart.com or leave a comment here. (I do know about Ruben, the local restauranteur who helps out.) Thanks! I found it very inspiring to meet and talk with Padre Macias.