Men and Women in Mexico

The great game of male and female is alive and well in Mexico. A few glimpses:

Shopping alone one day in a little shop in Guanajuato, I got to talking with the man running it. I hadn't met him before. He was about 40, I'd guess. I'm 62 but do look a little younger. Anyway, we were having an animated conversation about how much I liked the city and so forth, and I could understand his Spanish pretty well. Suddenly he said something about how cute I was. I was a bit flattered but didn't let on that I understood what he had said.

Another conversation with a shopkeeper was interesting. She was someone I enjoyed talking with, as she had a reflective mind. One day while buying bread, I commented that there were many problems between men and women in the United States. She nodded -- it seemed she knew that. I asked her thoughts on the subject in Mexico. She said she thought things were better here. "Hay respecto," she said: There is respect between men and women.

As I thought of that conversation later, I couldn't help but remember a contrasting viewpoint: one time two years ago Kelly and I went into a gas station that had an all-woman crew, something we see from time to time. I commented on it to the very pretty and lively woman who was helping us, and she went into a hilarious monologue about how men ("except you, of course, sir," she said to Kelly) were good for one thing only.

Quite a variety of impressions. And speaking of variety, one thing I really like about Mexico is that it is considerably more gay-friendly than most parts of the United States. So I've been told by both gays and lesbians here.

A Small Mexican Rodeo

Yesterday we were invited to a Sunday afternoon rodeo here in Bernal. It was a competition between this town and another one, all in preparation for the state fair later in the year. All the competitors were dressed to the nines, and it was clear that this really mattered to everyone involved. We saw some spectacular riding. The people-watching was great too.

Here the competitors enter the ring and ride around it:



An action shot. The horse they are chasing was very smart and got away a lot. We realized that the whole thing is a ritual where everyone knows their part, horses included!



This little boy was on a very big horse, riding back and forth for hours outside the ring, looking delighted most of the time. He'll likely be quite a rider in the future!

Traveling with Dogs in Mexico

A reader of this blog emailed me, "As much as you appear to love dogs, I was wondering why you didn't bring yours? Is it too difficult to bring them into Mexico, or just too hard due to uncertain camping conditions? How did you get a house sitter? We might do that, if we don't take the dogs with us."

It was an easy choice for us not to take a dog because we don't have a dog who is a really good traveler. If we had had one, we might have taken him or her along with us. Certainly a lot of people do. When we stayed recently at the La Fiesta campground in San Miguel de Allende, it seemed that almost everyone had a dog or two. I enjoyed that, as I got in some great dog cuddles with the dogs we were camped next to.

But there are good reasons to leave the dog(s) at home. It really depends on what your trip is for. If it's a vacation and you will easily make time to be sure the dog gets plenty of walks and regular attention (including not leaving it in a vehicle that could heat up), that's one thing. But we knew we would sometimes be away from our motorhome for most of a day, and that at other times the 21-foot length of our small rig would be rather crowded with a dog or two around and us trying to concentrate on the computer. (When we eventually get another dog, whenever that is, I am thinking small.)

Another factor is that many parts of Mexico are full of street dogs, either strays or more-or-less loosely owned by someone. The health and behavior of these dogs can be dubious. As I mentioned in a previous post, one of them bit Kelly (luckily so lightly that it only hurt his trousers). Another camper told us a story of a loose Rottweiler trying to attack his dog. I would not find it enjoyable to be walking a dog in areas where various unpleasant dog encounters were a possibility. Leaving the dog in the campground isn't an ideal answer either.

Admittedly I am more concerned about this sort of thing than many dog owners. I was rather surprised at how oblivous of the risks some dog owners were. In one campground, two very friendly dogs were being loosely supervised but the owners became much more attentive after both dogs' collars disappeared. Everyone's best guess was that someone had taken the collars off, not that they had somehow come off by themselves.

I'm also a little queasy about what my dog might be eating or putting its nose or mouth on (especially thinking of street dogs' droppings), so if I do travel with a dog in Mexico in the future, I would wash my hands more than I do now.

It's easy to take a dog into Mexico -- there may be some regulations but I've not heard of any travelers who were asked to provide any kind of papers. To get your dog back in the U.S., you need proof of a rabies shot within the last 30 days. Again, I don't know how often you need to produce those papers, but I do know of people who have adopted Mexican dogs and easily brought them back to the U.S. Seems like I read somewhere that the pet has to be in okay health, not carrying a contagious disease.

There are plenty of veterinarians in Mexico, so if your dog should need care, that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

We leave our cats at home (though people tell me that cats who are accustomed to it from a youngish age adapt easily to travel) and thus we need some sort of pet care while we are gone. We've usually found a friend to live in our house while we are gone, and that's our situation now. Once in a while we've paid a petsitter, but that can add up fast.

There are plenty of good reasons to take your dogs along. They are part of your family, and I surely miss mine on this long trip. A barking dog can provide a real deterrent to theft. It's really a personal decision, and one that may be different from one trip to another.

Bernal, a town we like a lot

Bernal is a town of some 5,000 people, located in the state of Queretaro and about an hour away from the city of that name. There's a new international airport going in roughly midway between the two places.

We were here in Bernal two years ago, and it was one of the places we wondered about living in. The link takes you to my tales of that trip and some nice photos, showing the volcanic plug, La Peña, which rises above the town. Rock-climbers are drawn to it, and its electro-magnetic energies are said to have a calming influence. A fews days ago, out walking alone, I asked two different local women about this, and they said they definitely felt it. I hope we are still here (or come back) for the spring solstice, when there's a huge ceremony and people come from all over Mexico. This is not yet a town much discovered by foreigners.

We hadn't decided if we were going to come here on this trip when "coincidence" took a hand. Around Christmas, while we were staying at an old hot springs resort in the Hustaca near Ciudad Valles, we ran into Jay and Lucy, who have a house here in Bernal -- we had met him here two years ago. So now they are roaming around in their van, and we are happily ensconced in their house! It is charming, a short walk to the center of town, and has a washing machine, quite a pleasant thing to have the use of.

We've been busy working on our websites and getting a sense of the region. Even looking at real estate! Our friend Rob McMullen, whom we also met on that earlier trip, has been showing us a few things and filling us in on the picture. Here's the English introduction to the Bernal Magic website, mostly in Spanish. It includes some of the real estate we've looked at.

Kelly found some other interesting Bernal links, so I will add them...

Here's an article in Spanish about some of the mysterious things that happen around Bernal.

An article by Christina Nealson, who passed through Bernal briefly. It's also about her camping experiences beyond the town.

A longer article about Bernal by another American. It's disbelieving about the energies here, and as I commented above, the local people I talked to (both this week and last time) DO believe in them.

More about the energies, and the town, in future blogging. We'll be here a while!

The Mexican Telephone System

Kelly had the phone number for someone in San Miguel de Allende whom we wanted to get together with, and I had bought a Ladatel/Telmex phone card, good for both local and long distance calls. We hadn't used the Mexican phone system before, but how hard could it be to make a call?

There are clear directions in English and Spanish on the pay phones. First you lift the receiver, then you insert your card. An LCD screen shows you how much money is remaining on your card. You dial and talk, then remove your card. Piece of cake.

But the pay phone near our campground didn't work. Neither did the three payphones directly in front of the phone company office down the street. I guessed that it might be because the phone card, newly purchased in another city, said 2003 on it. Since this was 2005, maybe I had bought an out of date card?

Then some friends, wise in the ways of Mexican phones, said that probably the phones in the neighborhood weren't working. They offered the use of their cellphone, but its batteries needed charging.

So the next morning Kelly went to the phone company for help. After standing in the wrong line a while, he finally got a chance to explain the problem (in Spanish of course) to an employee. She confirmed our friends' guess that the phones weren't working. Kelly asked if there was a phone in the office he could use, and she took him to one. He tried dialing the number, with and without the area code and with and without 01, which is used in front of numbers in I don't know what circumstances.

No dice. So he asked the lady to dial it. She looked at the number and immediately said, "I can't dial this. It's a cellphone number."

"How do I call it then?" asked Kelly.

"You have to use a pay phone."

"But they aren't working."

The lady shrugged her shoulders.

Kafka is alive and well in Mexico! And our phone card worked perfectly the next day in another city, calling someone else.

San Miguel de Allende: Conversation with a Mexican

We are in San Miguel de Allende to visit friends, and a couple of days ago I walked downtown from our campground. Signs of the large English-speaking population are everywhere: many ads are in both languages or in English alone, and a lot of the people I saw (though well less than 10% in most places I went) appeared to be Americans, Canadians, or Europeans.

San Miguel de Allende became popular with foreigners after World War II, when the Instituto Allende was formed for artists. Over the decades, more and more foreigners have come here, for the flourishing arts scene, to learn Spanish, or simply because it was a place with a large expat group. As a result, real estate prices have gone up and up. I heard them compared to San Francisco prices yesterday.

I wrote about San Miguel two years ago, examining its pros and cons and telling the story of our time there. In the only conversation I'd had with a Mexican about the effects of all these gringos, she had been very happy for the prosperity and work they brought.

This week, I heard a different side of things. I was looking for the market, which was not where the map in my Frommer's Mexico said it was. I stopped in a little grocery store and asked directions. Then when I had been to the market, I remembered I wanted a jar of mayonesa (tastier than our mayonnaise with a bit of lime juice in it), so I stopped back in the same store. The woman who had given me directions was probably in her 50s, and spoke pretty clear Spanish. So as I paid her, I asked her what the Mexicans thought of the foreign presence.

She began diplomatically, saying everyone was welcome as a visitor. But, she said, it was wrong that the government allowed them to buy homes and land. The prices were now so high that most Mexicans couldn't afford to buy in their own city. "Where are we going to go?" she asked with indignation. She assured me that I and my fellow foreigners were truly welcome, that the Mexicans were very glad to have us see their life and culture. But again she returned to the theme of being forced out by people whose wealth they couldn't compete with.

So that's another take. Two conversations hardly provide a total view, but it's food for thought. I must admit that it wouldn't stop me from buying a home in Mexico if Kelly and I decide at some point we want to do that. But if we do, I would feel the need to give back to the community in some way, by teaching English as a volunteer, or something.

San Jose Iturbide: A Clean and Pleasant Town

After we left Pozos a couple of days ago, we came to San Miguel de Allende, to visit friends. But first we went slightly out of our way to go take a look at a town of some 55,000 people, San Jose Iturbide. I didn't see it in our Lonely Planet guidebook, but I did see a mention in the Rough Guide to Mexico. There were just a few lines about its history and a mention that it was a very clean town.

Well, we had time so we went there. It's a farming town with some industry on the outskirts. Located just off the major north-south highway 57, it's well positioned for factories.

We drove into town on the road from Pozos and promptly went the wrong way down a one-way street. Not an uncommon mistake of foreigners, and one that Kelly realized immediately. He easily did a U-turn, and we took a one-way street with the arrow pointing the way we wanted to go. It took us right past the market and directly to the town square. Cars were parked at a diagonal around the square, and a pickup pulled out of a spot as we approached, with a couple of men directing it. They signalled to us, did we want the spot? Kelly nodded, and they guided us in with a flourish. Then they told us it would cost 5 pesos an hour to park there... they were city employees. We paid for our first hour, about 45 cents, and wandered around the town.

The plaza was clean, the streets were clean, traffic was light, the land was pretty level, walking was easy... hmm, this was looking good. We went for a walk around the town, for maybe 45 minutes, going several blocks away from the plaza till we got to the edge of town, then coming back a different way. There was less graffiti than in Guanajuato, and we saw no street dogs.

A boy approached us, selling a sort of magazine. I asked him what it was, and he showed it to me. It was a a glossy chamber-of-commerce type publication about the city, called El Heraldo de San Jose, hot off the press. Lover that I am of information, I bought one -- and grinned at it being presented to us just as we were getting curious about San Jose Iturbide.

We walked past a little gated community with modern-looking houses and signs saying that some were for rent and some were for sale. The gate was open and we stepped just inside, looking for an office. A gray-haired man on the street asked whom we were looking for. We explained that we were just curious and were wondering about living in Mexico. What was his city like? He chatted with us for several minutes, before apologetically explaining that he needed to go on his way. In that time, he said that it was a very tranquil place, and that many of its young men were working in the U.S. When we commented on how clean the city was, he said that the Mayor made it a priority.

A little later, we went to the market and got a bunch of food. I bought a bag of nopales, cactus that has had its sharp thorns removed and been cut into pieces for boiling. The woman I bought it from was very friendly, and we joked about how long it would take me to prepare it.

Back at the plaza, I stopped in at the one Artesanias shop. I asked the man working there if there were foreigners living in the city. He didn't know of any. I commented again on the clean streets, and again received the reply that the initiative came from the Mayor.

We popped into another shop on the plaza, one selling new houses on the edge of town. Small one-story affairs with a little front yard, two bedrooms, a parking place, a living room, a dining room, one bathroom, a kitchen, a TV room, and a back patio for doing laundry and hanging it up cost 265,500 pesos, which is something over $24,000. There was bank financing but the young woman wasn't used to talking with foreigners and simply couldn't slow down even after I asked her twice, so we missed some of the details. Total external dimensions were 6 meters by 15 meters. (A meter is 39 inches.)

San Jose Iturbide is located less than a 45-minute drive from San Miguel de Allende, which is chock-a-block full of foreigners, and has real estate prices sometimes compared with San Franciso's. This clean, friendly, and prosperous town seemed to me to be a good candidate for expat life. But if there were any foreigners there, we didn't see them, nor any signs of anything going on in English. There were some hotels around the plaza, but we saw no indications of campgrounds.

To live here at this time would be quite an immersion in Mexican life, but if more folks from the U.S. do move to Mexico as I tend to think will happen in the coming years, I wouldn't be surprised to find San Jose Iturbide "discovered."

A Visit to Pozos

We just spent a couple of days exploring Mineral de Pozos, a delightful old mining town with a small group of dedicated artists living there, not far from Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende. The link goes a page up on my site, so I won't repeat myself here. If you like beautiful old ruins and/or contemporary art scenes, take a look!

Those of you who are following our adventures may know that we are kind of looking for a place that might become a winter base for us. You may wonder if Pozos could be it. The best answer I can give to that is "I don't know." We still don't really even know if that will happen at all!

Leaving Guanajuato... for now

We're leaving Guanajuato this morning, going on to Pozos, an old mining town not far away that is beginning to be restored.

We've been here a month, a full and complex month. I won't miss the graffiti everywhere, the street dogs (not as bad here as in some other Mexican places we've been to), and the long, steep climb back up to our campground from downtown.

So many sweet memories will go with me:

The people we met, and their friendliness: the fellow in our favorite coffee shop, the Conquistador by the Santa Fe tunnel... the shy girl in the panaderia (bakery) who was thrilled with her photo... the American woman who gave me a great rundown on Guanajuato when we first arrived... the Mexican massage therapist who un-knotted my legs after the hills wore them out.... the campground manager whose rapid Spanish became easier to follow... the older German couple who had literally never touched a computer before I helped them get a yahoo account... the busy professor who had us over for tea... the architect who invited Kelly to address his architecture class at the university... the American-Mexican couple who are building a bed and breakfast here... the young couple from whom we bought our produce, and their interest in what food cost "over there"... the pharmacist whom I've blogged about, who went out of her way to be helpful... I could easily double this list.

Another sweet people memory is something that happened several times, always when I was alone and walking through the busy city streets. I would get into a delicious sense of flow, as all sorts of people walked past me, old and young, male and female, adult and child, Mexican and foreign, and I felt myself part of this amazing river of humanity. I'm sure you can have an experience like this in many places, but I particularly enjoyed it here in Guanajuato, with its narrow sidewalks and the pedestrian nature of much life in this city of winding streets and walking streets.

And there are memories of the city itself, the jardin with the its deep shade and mariachis, the many little plazas and parks, the views from one hill to the next...

If you haven't seen them yet, you might enjoy the several pages on Guanajuato that I put up on the site while we were here, with photos.

I have a feeling we'll be back. Now, time to pack up and head out for new adventures. We may be offline a while, but as soon as we're back, I should have some new blog entries!

Photos of a Mexican Apartment for Rent

Click the title of this article to go to a page I did, showing and discusssing an unfurnished Mexican apartment for rent.

Two people, one computer

Living for months on end with one's spouse in a small metal box (motorhome) presents certain challenges. We've done it enough that we have things pretty well worked out.

This trip presents a special challenge.... the computer, complete with internet connection. On purpose, we only brought one laptop to be sure we didn't work too much. (We are both admittedly workaholics and happily so.) Often, one of us uses it while the other one goes out exploring the town or surroundings. We do go out together too, with some usually good-natured kidding about whose turn it will be when we get back.

The early mornings are a special case. Whoever gets up first gets it. This has gotten us up as early as 5:30. One morning recently, I was up before Kelly and I was doing my email when I went into the bathroom for a bit. I felt the motorhome shaking and knew Kelly was getting up.

But I wasn't prepared for what I saw when I emerged. Kelly had moved the computer to his side of the table, and was sitting there without a stitch on, with a big grin on his face. We both howled with laughter, and I made him stay there till I got a photo of the moment. I've made it presentable for you, by giving it a bit of a radial spin in Photoshop Elements.

Books on Mexico and Spanish

I've just added a bunch of book reviews of Mexican guidebooks, general books on living or traveling in Mexico, and books and CDs on learning Spanish.

As a former librarian, I do enjoy writing this sort of thing! Since that was 15 pages, guess I will make this entry short.

We're getting down to our last few days in Guanajuato. It's been a lovely month.

Solar electricity on our motorhome

I asked Kelly for some notes on our solar setup on our motorhome, a 21-foot 1983 Toyota Dolphin, and he wrote:

We enhanced the basic 12 volt DC system for our little motorhome by first adding two extra deep cycle 12 volt batteries (wired in parallel) to give us much more capacity than the just the original single coach battery. This was initially only charged when we were driving, so if we stayed anywhere for very long, we would run the batteries down, although they did last several days with just running the lights, fans, and water pump.

For this current trip we decided to add a couple of 75 watt solar panels to the roof of the RV (lying flat), connected to those same batteries via an inexpensive charge controller. This allows the batteries to gain a charge whether we are driving or not, as long as we are parked where the sun shines on the roof, expanding the time we can stay at any one place without the need to be plugged into "shore power". We have found that this new system keeps the normal coach requirements for DC electricity covered nicely (except for long periods of grey weather). However if we want to have intensive use of our computer system (which is usually the case), then we do need to be plugged in for that usage.

He added that if someone were to buy the componants now, it might run around $800. We had the solar panels already (see Kelly's site about his solar car, sunvee.com) and he says you could get by with one panel. He guesses that something like this might cost about $500. It wouldn't save you that much in electricity for a long time, but sometimes the difference between being able to stay in a great place or not is how your utilities work.

Posters of Mexico

I've had some fun the past few days adding posters of Mexico to my website. There is a page of travel posters, one of National Geographic posters of Mexico (mostly of great ruins), and one on posters of Mexican cities by photographer Walter Bibikow. I had never heard of him, and so I did a little research which is also on that page.

Now back to the book reviews I want to finish soon. There are nearly 20 of them, and they're a bit more work than playing with the posters.

Both of these projects are partly because I like doing it and partly in order to make some money from this site. If you are in the market for any posters, here's a link (with my affiliate code in it) to nearly 200 posters of Mexico at AllPosters.com which also offers something like 100,000 posters on all sorts of topics. As with all affiliate programs on the net, you (the customer) pay no more, while webmasters like me get a percentage.

I told Kelly what I was doing, and I must say he has really one-upped me! He found thousands of lovely images which relate to his architectural site, greenhomebuilding.com. So far he's done pages on adobe, stonework, architecture of India, and architecture of Asia. And he's just begun...

Guanajuato Real Estate

I just updated my page on real estate in Guanajuato, after discovering a weekly shopper(called Chopper, an interesting example of words going from English to Spanish) that had a lot of ads for rentals, houses for sale, and land for sale. Fascinating reading.

On that page, I comment about the lowest prices I noticed, not that the places would be anything desirable necessarily, but they might be. Mexican policy for foreigners who apply for a FM-3 visa to live in the country on income from outside Mexico is evidently that if you own a home, they will require you to show half the amount of income you otherwise would. It's a variable amount (even varies from one Mexican consulate to another in the U.S.) but is somewhere around $1,000 US per month for one person, $1,500 per month for a married couple. So a low-cost purchase could be cost-effective in that way.