Last blog from Bernal, for now

We're packing up, cleaning house, and all the rest of it. Hoping that if it rains, our clothes on the line get dry first. Tomorrow early, we are heading back to the US, via Zacatecas and north to Chihuahua. There's a hot springs we may check out, unless the weather is so hot that we can't bear the thought of hot water. So we'll be in Mexico a few more days. We have a few acres outside of Deming, NM, just half an hour from the border, and we plan to camp there a night or two and reflect on things. We may set the internet satellite up there, before visiting family en route to our Colorado home.

I woke up this morning feeling happy and sad all mixed up together. I'm so grateful that we came back to Bernal, which we weren't going to do till we happened to run into Jay and Lucy, who lent us their house here. I'm still astonished that we found a livable house for $108 US/ a month and that we have turned into something very homey. (The kitchen awaits our return to become really good.) I'm excited about the future in a way that I wonder how many 62-year-olds are. Bernal is now a place I feel at home in, and I'm glad that we'll be coming back here. I've already got a plan to do photo-essays on different people around the town for this blog and possibly for a book later.

It's kind of amazing to me how much I have grown personally too. Fear has less of a grip on my subconscious than it did. I haven't needed tranqulizers in traffic in months. (I will have them with me as we head north, just in case.)

Beyond that, there is something about stretching beyond comfort zones that I can highly recommend. For some reason, I really had a bee in my bonnet last fall to go somewhere foreign for the winter. We researched Panama, Nicaragua, and other places before deciding that we'd come back to Mexico this time. We really like the ease of access between Mexico and the US, as well as the tremendous diversity within this one large country. There are things I don't care for here, sure, but there is so much love in people here. That's probably what I like best of all in Mexico.

Our Mexican FM-3 Visas

Here they are! As you can see, they are little booklets about the size of a passport.



We got to the Instituto Nacional de Migracion in Queretaro just after nine this morning, having come in from our town of Bernal, about an hour's bus ride away, with a 15-minute taxi ride from the bus station. We waited about an hour before it was our turn, and then we gave the woman helping us the temporary papers we had. She went upstairs.

We waited, standing at the counter. After a while I said to Kelly, "Maybe they are doing them right now." Kelly burst out laughing and agreed. Or maybe they were looking for them... with all the folders that are everywhere, they must misplace some now and then.

Finally the woman came downstairs with our folders. When she brought our FM-3s to the counter, I did a little dance. Then we had to sign a bunch of papers and put our thumbprints on the FM-3s and on some documents. I asked if Kelly could take a picture, and that was fine:



On the counter in front of me is a box of candy, a goatmilk candy that Bernal is famous for. I had put a note on the box in my bad Spanish which will give them a laugh or two no doubt. Basically I said "Thanks to everyone in the Instituto Nacional de Migracion for your patience and help. Would to God that one day the US government will be as welcoming to Mexicans as you have been to us."

If you've been reading my blogs about the FM-3 process we have gone through, you know that it's taken patience on our part as well. But repeatedly we have received great kindness from the people at the counter in explaining things to us over and over and in helping us figure out what to do.

So we had our Mexican FM-3 visas, giving us residency in Mexico and the freedom to come and go at the border. What a thrill! We took a taxi across town and I told the cab driver that we had just gotten our visas to live there. He congratulated us and welcomed us warmly to Mexico. Mexicans are generally quite pleased that we like living here.

Our next stop was the fancy mall I showed photos of recently. We went to the Lloyd's office and opened an account there. Then we had lunch and took another taxi back to the bus station. It was cool and overcast today, looking like rain. We had a short wait for the bus to Bernal. I've mentioned before that the bus stations resemble airports in the U.S... here's a picture in the local bus section. The waiting areas for long-distance buses are cushier. When the clerks at the counters aren't busy helping customers they call out the names of cities that they serve.



So now we are wrapping up details at home and packing up. We left some money for the electricity and water bills, and for cat food, with our landlord and friend Francisco. He thought we'd left more than we needed to, and then told us a Mexican saying that I may have written down correctly: "Mas vale que sobre y no que falte." So it's better that we leave too much than too little.

That reminded me of another saying he had told me once before, and I asked him to say it again. "Quien es mas rico? El que mas tiene o el que menos ncesita?" which translates as "Who is richer? He who has more or he who needs less?" Kelly and I like this one a lot, as we have done so many things in our lives because we generally need less.

UPDATE: Here's a link to a list of all my blog entries on getting our Mexican FM3 visas, in case you want to read the story in order.

A Scorpion, a Procession, and a Friendly Neighbor

Today I spent much of the morning cleaning and organizing things in our little Toyota Dolphin motorhome which we call Cando, in preparation for heading back to Colorado for a while. Tomorrow will be yet another trip to Queretaro to see if our Mexican FM-3 visas are ready, and we are optimistic enough that we plan to take our camera to get a picture or two of the great moment, if that's permitted in government offices... and if it occurs!

The visas might have been ready this past Monday but they weren't, and Kelly has used the time since then to work on getting his office further along. He used a variety of colored whitewashes after drawing the design on the walls:





He found company in his office first thing this morning... this scorpion was right in the middle of the ceiling. It's about an inch and a half from end to end, pretty good sized. My immediate reaction was not "Yikes!" but instead "Get a picture of it for my blog!" So Kelly kindly did, getting much closer to it than I would have.



On one of my trips up the street to the lot where we park the motorhome, I saw some of the neighbors decorating their house with white and yellow things. "Good afternoon, a birthday?" I asked. No, they said, there is going to be a procession from the church for Corpus Christi. They explained a little more that I didn't follow.

It was getting on toward dusk when the procession came by. I stood in our doorway to watch and sure got stared at. One man I know smiled at me, and a young woman did, but for once smiles were not the main expression. The singing was lovely. I recognized a friendly woman who lives up the street.

Kelly was hanging out the upstairs office window with the camera, and he said he got stared at too. Here are some pictures of the event:







Just now, someone knocked on our door. I went down and it was that friendly woman who lives up the street. I don't know her much at all, don't know her name. She was coming by to invite us to a "terceda edad" event which happens every Friday afternoon. The "third stage" begins at age 60. She isn't that old but said it's so much fun that she goes... practicing up, she grinned! "We sing, we exercise, we play..." I explained that we are going back to the U.S. for a few months but that I would be delighted to do it when we get back. Kelly just told me that he walked by the meeting last week and this lady waved him in, but he had other things on his mind.

In our conversation, I mentioned that I am over 60, and she immediately asked if I had gotten the card that enables me to get discounts on all sorts of things. I had read something about that a few months ago, but it had completely slipped my mind. So that is something else to do when we get back. I'd better start a list!

The Rains have begun!

Central Mexico has essentially quite an arid type climate but it rains from roughly May or June to September or so here in Bernal. It normally rains from time to time outside of these months, but in the three months we've been here, it's only rained a couple of times. Once I noticed that adults were acting like kids, so happy to see the rain.

Then it rained a little last week, and again yesterday, but this afternoon it really let loose for about half an hour... not just rain but hail too. I sat happily watching it for a while downstairs. Kelly was upstairs, which you get to via the great out-of-doors so I didn't see him till the rain diminished.

It poured in our front door, which is lower than the sidewalk outside:



Our back yard turned into a big puddle, especially where all the rain was coming off the roof Kelly added:



The roof that Kelly put over the patio wasn't designed to stop all the water, though it does stop almost all of it. The remainder came in along the side walls:



Soon the sun came out and here's the view from our upstairs deck:



Looks like rainy season here is mopping season in our living room! We got our big stringy Mexican mop and got most of the water out in a few minutes. Then I went out walking to do some errands. I asked one Mexican woman if this was a typical rain.

"Hay lluvia fuerte y lluvia suave," she said: There is strong rain and soft rain. This was a soft one in her opinion. It must be quite something at times! I've heard that the countryside becomes quite lush and green. Too bad we'll miss it this year.

Conversation with a Mexican Lesbian

"It's genetic," proclaimed the gray-haired Mexican taxi driver as we hurtled through the streets of Queretaro. "Man must make the decisions about everything... about sex, about politics, about money. Woman must nurture. Patriarchal philosophy is correct. Matriarchal philosophy is responsible for many of the bad things that have happened here in Mexico, like lesbianism."

I held my tongue. This guy wasn't going to be persuaded by anything I said. I was glad we were entering the grounds of the bus terminal and would soon be out of the taxi.

As Kelly and I walked away from the cab, we commented on what a dinosaur the guy was, but also more interesting than many Mexican cab drivers. He had certainly voiced his position clearly.

"I'll put him in my blog," I said. "He'll make a good lead-in to the piece I've been planning to write about that conversation the other day." Kelly and I had met a lesbian couple who live in Queretaro and are active in matters of women's health and self-esteem.

As we have long had friends and family members who are lesbian and gay, there is no doubt about where Kelly and I fall on the spectrum of opinion. We both respect and celebrate the rights of all individuals to create their own lives. For a while we took part in PFFLAG (Parents, Friends, and Family of Lesbians and Gays).

So when we met the Queretaro couple, I was curious to ask them what it was like for them in Mexico. I had the chance to talk a while with one of them, at a private gathering we were attending. I received her permission to blog about what she told me. She said that Queretaro is a very conservative Catholic city, and that people are very polite. She and her partner have many friends who are Catholic. They have a good life here.

I commented, "I've noticed that many Mexican Catholics don't believe everything their church tells them to."

She nodded. "Of course. For example, not to use birth control, but it's necessary."

I asked what kind of reaction a trans-sexual would receive in Mexico, or someone whose gender wasn't totally obvious. "We have a friend in the United States who is reluctant to travel in rural areas of the U.S.," I said. "This person is concerned that s/he could get beaten up for using the wrong bathroom at a gas station, for example."

"That would not be a problem here in Mexico," she replied. "As I mentioned, people are generally very polite here, no matter what their views are. They prefer to avoid confrontations."

That certainly fit in with what we'd seen here. In almost half a year in Mexico, I had only heard one loud argument, and that was one that wafted into our house around 3 in the morning from somewhere in the neighborhood.

Also, I was reminded of a conversation I'd once had with a gay man from Mexico whose English was excellent and who had lived in the U.S. "The Mexican culture is so much more demonstrative than yours," he had said. "It is natural for any two people to show some physical affection in public. So while my partner and I prefer to be discreet in public, we don't have to worry that a spontaneous gesture will seem out of place."

The lesbian and I wrapped up our conversation and went over to join a larger group of people. Her last comment was, "Tell your friends to come to Mexico. They will receive a warm welcome here."

I believe it.

The Mexican FM-3 Saga Continues

This morning we got up early and walked across town to catch a bus to Queretaro, an hour away from the town of Bernal where we are living. The buses generally come on the hour, but they can come early, so we left our house at 7:30. As we walked up the last block to the highway, we saw a large bus go by, too fast to catch it. It was from a company called Primavera Plus, not our usual Flecha Azul (blue arrow) or Flecha Amarilla (yellow arrow). So we figured we hadn't missed the regular bus.

Another bus came and stopped. It had people standing in the aisles, and the thought of standing for an hour didn't sing to us, so we let it go by. We had been told that we could always take a local bus from Bernal to the crucero (crossroads) a few kilometers away, so we said to each other that if necessary we would do that. From there, you could catch a Queretaro-bound bus much more often.

Within five minutes or less, three more Queretaro-bound buses came along the highway. All were full and none stopped. This was definitely something different. I wondered if today was some sort of holiday, but then it dawned on me that it was Monday morning. I asked a young man who was also waiting for a Queretaro bus if that was why there were so many people and buses. He said yes.

Just then another bus came along. He got on it, and so did Kelly and I and a couple of other men. It was full of sleeping Mexicans but no empty seats. So we stood after all. Usually people going a short ways get off, so I figured we would get seats. A woman got off who had been sitting right behind the driver, and one of the standing young men motioned me into her seat. The young man sitting next to me rearranged his large tote bag to be out of my way. I asked him if he was going to work in Queretaro, and he said yes and he wouldn't go home till Friday.

Nobody else got off the bus, but quite a few more people got on, so Kelly did end up standing all the way. I had noticed that there is an art to holding on in a bus going around curves at the speed limit, and Kelly had plenty of time to refine his technique.

I liked my location right behind the driver. There was a divider and a curtain so I couldn't see the traffic straight ahead, but I had an open view of the fields and houses on our right, through the windshield on the passengers' side. The most unusual sight was a dead horse beside the road. As the bus filled up, my view changed to the stitching on people's jeans at hip level. One fellow was wearing a t-shirt with a motto I liked: "No pierdas el animo." Animo means pep or spunk according to Kelly's electronic dictionary, and the motto exhorted us not to lose it.

I noticed that above the door were several personal items of the driver's: a baby shoe, a nicely detailed drawing of two sunflowers, a Virgin of Guadalupe, and a couple of snapshots. He was a good driver, as all the bus drivers and most of the taxi drivers have been. I blogged a few months ago that I was taking a tranqulizer before traveling on Mexican highways, but that need has disappeared, gracias a Dios.

Every now and then, we'd hear a couple of sharp beeps. The first time it happened, I thought someone was getting off and Kelly would get a seat, but then I noticed that a light flashed up front in connection with the beeps and it meant the driver was going over the bus speed limit of 95 kilometers an hour, which is 59 miles an hour. Our driver was making good time and there were plenty of beeps till traffic got thicker and slower. Once we were on the freeway for the last 15 minutes into the city, there were beeps galore.

As we rode along, I reflected on how we were part of a huge influx of people heading for Queretaro, no doubt from every direction, along every highway large and small that led into this city of about a million people. There is work in Queretaro, at factories and in construction. Most though certainly not all of our fellow passengers were young men. No doubt this same influx was happening at the same time in many cities around Mexico. Work is in the cities.

It was a very Mexican experience, being part of this vast movement of humanity via numerous large buses, and I enjoyed it. Then I wondered wryly how long the thrill of exploring another culture would outweigh some of the inconveniences, like not being able to phone to find out if our visas were ready.

We quickly caught a cab at the bus station -- it's well organized, you buy a ticket at a kiosk and the taxis are in line. City traffic was no heavier than usual, to the historic central district which is all we really know of Queretaro. But it was a little later than usual when we got to the Instituto Nacional de Migracion, so we had to wait a little over an hour until it was our turn at the counter. We've been there so often now we know which of the characters on the morning TV show they have running softly in the waiting room are the regulars.

Our visas? Come back Friday. They should be ready.

Well, they had told us that today was mas o menos -- more or less.

So we had a nice brunch in a former convent hundreds of years old, took a taxi, took the bus -- practically empty going out of the city -- and got home around 2:00PM. As we walked back across Bernal, we saw another foreigner who has lived here for some time. I told her what we had just been doing and she said that she always just phones to make sure her FM-3 is ready. We said we had been told we couldn't phone. She said she always does and promised to find us the phone number. I don't know if it will do us any good this week, as our business at home needs us back and if we waited on Friday to phone when they open and then went into to town, it could run us too late in the day for some other errands that depend on the FM-3. We'll see.

UPDATE: Here's a link to a list of all my blog entries on getting our Mexican FM3 visas, in case you want to read the story in order.

Kelly's Hot Night Out

"You won't believe where I've been and who I've seen, " Kelly said to me around six this morning when he arrived home. I made some hibiscus tea, and we sat and talked.

We had been invited to go to a temescal, or sweat bath, out in the country near our town of Bernal in central Mexico. It was to be Saturday afternoon. I had an intuition not to go, for whatever reason, so I honored that. Upon reflection, Kelly decided he would go. Saturday he went down to La Chicarroma, the shop in the plaza where Juvenal does healings. Juvenal would be leading the temescal. He told Kelly that some people couldn't make it in the afternoon, so it would be at night. Kelly was to meet Juvenal at the shop around eight, and he was not to eat anything from that moment on.

When Kelly got there around eight, Juvenal was deep into doing a healing on a woman in the shop. He works right in the middle of things, chatting with other people at times while at other times his concentration on the person is total. Kelly took a seat and waited with some other people on a bench. It turned out that all three were waiting their turns for healings. They all got them, and it was about ten when Kelly got a ride with someone else. (In the Mexican sense of time, a two-hour go-with-the-flow is quite normal.)

Logically enough, Kelly assumed they were going out into the country, especially since he was riding with the man who owns the land they were going to. But the car went about two blocks and stopped. "You want to go to the ceremony, don't you?" the man asked. Logically enough, Kelly assumed he was speaking of the temescal and said yes.

They got out of the car and went into the home of some people we know slightly. There were about 50 people there, and several of them were people whom we know pretty well. There was a little surprise at seeing Kelly there, and people asked after me.

A ceremony was going on there: a wedding. It was a civil wedding and there were lots of papers for both sets of parents and the newlyweds to sign. After our encounters with Mexican bureaucracy, I can believe it. The bride was a daughter of the people we know slightly. Soon food appeared, but Kelly, the man he had come with, and Juvenal declined the food and visited a while.

When they finally got out to the land, about eight or ten people were waiting around. A fire got started, rocks got heated, people stripped to bathing suits, big t-shirts, or underwear, and the temescal got underway. Neither Kelly nor I have been to sweat lodges in the United States, but Kelly had prepared himself by reading this article on temescals in Mexico. He said he was glad to know what it said and that this one he attended was much like that. It got started around midnight and went on for at least four hours. Kelly generally enjoyed it and was glad to notice that he handled the intense heat and steam pretty well. He did have to stand up a couple of times to avoid getting charley horses.

When the ceremony ended in the wee hours, they had some fruit and other food. La Peña, the huge rock monolith, was beautiful in the setting nearly-full moon. It is known as a place of cosmic energies and UFOs, and Kelly and the others saw some lights around its sheer cliffs for which they could think of no human-caused explanation.

Kelly began wondering how he would get back to town. The man who had given him a ride was staying on the land. Juvenal would be quite a while longer. So Kelly got a ride in a small pickup with a man and two women. He wondered why both women got in the back of the pickup, but he joined them there. It turned out that the long private road went steeply uphill, and the light truck needed the weight of all three of them far in the back to get up the hill. Once that was done, the two women hopped into the front seat and Kelly wrapped himself in a blanket that was conveniently there, for the fifteen-minute ride back to Bernal. They dropped him off a few blocks from here and he walked home through the quiet streets.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I had not been surprised when Kelly didn't turn up, but it was my first night alone in the house and I didn't sleep well. Saturday nights are the noisiest, and this one was no exception. The usual Saturday-night dance had ended well after midnight, and there had been a fair amount of traffic past the house. My mind came up with fear fantasies from time to time, involving Kelly or me. I did a kind of meditation, and that helped a lot, as did the deepening quiet. I finally slept, only to be awakened three separate times by the big booms of some sort of fireworks, a normal Mexican sound. When Kelly came in at six, I woke immediately. After talking, we went back to bed for a few hours.

Kelly is very glad he went, and he's been in a very peaceful state today. I'm glad I didn't go; it was good for me to see how I felt alone at night here. I could get used to it.

Tale of a Mexican Cat

A couple of months ago, I dropped by our friend Rob's house. He was away, but Carolyn, another American, was there. She showed me a small kitten, looking to be two months old or so. A few days earlier, Carolyn had come upon the kitten on the lookout of the house, with a large tomcat about to attack her. Carolyn ran off the tomcat and fed the very thin kitten, who had the good sense to stick around the patio.

"She's the sweetest little thing," Carolyn said, picking her up and stroking her. "I'm sure she'd turn into a great pet in no time." The kitten was a soft orange color and displayed the mellow qualities that often go with orange cats.

I was enchanted and took a turn holding the wary but purring little fluffball. Carolyn (a great cook) gave me some little bits of chicken for the kitty.

"She can't stay here," Carolyn told me. "Rob is allergic to cats."

"He knows a lot of people in Bernal," I said. "I bet he can help you find her a home."

"He said the only people he could think of were you guys."

Uh-oh. Should I have said "No, thanks" at that moment? Kelly and I are animal lovers but we have never taken in strays. I gulped and started to say no but the kitten was so happily curled up in my lap with such a loud purr that I agreed to at least think about it.

I went home and told Kelly. After some discussion, he agreed to at least go look at the cat -- provided our landlord and next-door neighbor Francisco would agree to feed her while we went back to the United States.

Francisco agreed. Kelly met the kitten. We thought about the lack of other choices for the cat. And we agreed to take her.

Carolyn brought the kitten over the next day. She soon acquired the name of Misty, discovered several places where she could get behind things and be safe, and purred so much and so loudly that I called her the motor of the universe. She sometimes slept with us on our bed, and other times preferred her own little cat basket we'd found at the crafts market in nearby Tequisquiapan.

After we'd had her about a week, we went out for a couple of hours in the afternoon, leaving her with the run of the patio, which hadn't yet been enclosed as it is now. When we came home, she was crouching wild-eyed in a corner and there were bits of her fur and her poop scattered around the floor. She had been attacked by one of the many free-roaming cats in the neighborhood. Was it Francisco's cat from next door, Capullo, who was a frequent visitor, or another one of the toms we'd seen in our yard? We had no way of knowing. Misty was pretty traumatized and we were more careful to keep her in. She had already been wary around Capullo but also played with him. He would sometimes play with her, despite his adult status. I think he's a young adult.


Capullo

Her wariness toward Capullo did a complete about-face one night when she began uttering mournful little cries. Our baby was in heat, and oh how she yearned for Capullo, who of course stayed around our place almost all the time, deftly navigating roofs and walls to come see us. He is part-Siamese and seems to have inherited all the genes for talkativeness, so we always knew when he was arriving.

We revised our estimate of her age upwards a bit and borrowed a rabbit cage from Rob. Misty spent a few days in there. It had been years since I had been around a cat in heat, and she was so soft, so beguiling... it was fascinating.

With time, Misty was less afraid of Capullo but he did attack her quite often and she would usually run under the bed where he couldn't go. He sprayed a rug by the bed to mark his territory. Kelly had put the roof on the patio, and we were glad when he got the doors and glass in, and we could keep Capullo out. We slept a little better without his early-morning visits. He still came in the yard.

I wished we could take her back to the United States with us, but I had agreed to leave her here when we decided to take her. Kelly was very clear that she would greatly complicate what is already going to be a very busy time. We will be doing some traveling in the U.S. as well as deciding what to do with our two other cats and our dog before we return here. My mind could easily see his logic, but my heart ached. Misty would lie on my chest as I napped in the afternoon, keeping the universe on track with her purrs, while I shed more than a few tears.

It is not simple to create a life where you have animals and also have a lot of freedom to travel. I knew that, but now I was staring it right in the face. Things turned around emotionally for me one day when in a kind of meditative state, I received the message from Misty that she wanted to stay here. Over ten years ago Kelly and I had produced a video, Telepathic Communication with Animals, featuring Penelope Smith, and ever since then we had become more telepathic ourselves.

So I paid attention when Misty said she belonged here. She went on to say that I had been her second mother but that she was growing up fast and would not need a mother soon. She reminded me how attached cats are to their places, and she said she loved living in our house here in Bernal. She loved feeling safe and she loved having food to eat. She had already told Kelly once that she had chosen Bernal to be born in because she was interested in what's going on here, the healing energies and the people that are drawn to them.

Over the years, Kelly and I have come to trust these kinds of communications. So we worked out our plans. Francisco will feed her a couple of times a day. A Mexican friend will spend some weekends here. An American friend will come by to play with Misty now and then when he is in town. We will be in touch telepathically. Kelly built Misty her own totally enclosed yard and she can come and go from the house via the cat door. This also eliminates the need for litter boxes. Capullo and any other cats can visit but not get to her.



Misty in her totally enclosed yard, seen from above

She has the balls she loves to play with.



There was also the matter of ensuring that she doesn't get pregnant. A retired veterinarian was going to spay her, but he was away and when he returned, he had broken bones in his hand. While the first vet was away, we had found a local veterinarian who was of the opinion that birth-control shots (not available in the US but widely used in the rest of the world) were the way to go, and we had had him come to the house and give her the first shot.



I phoned a veterinarian in Tequisquiapan, and he said he could do the spaying the next day. I got directions to his clinic -- my first successful phone call in Spanish -- and then asked the price. "Mil seiscientos," he said. I couldn't believe it. Sixteen hundred pesos, about $150 US? I said no thanks. Later I found out that the concept of doing low-cost spays is not common in towns though some of the cities have free programs. For now, we will stick with the shots, and when we come back we will see about spaying. Misty had her second shot yesterday and will need one in a month, then every six months. We favor spaying. Misty has told us she might like to have kittens. I must admit that Misty-Capullo babies would be enchanting but we have told her that we are not into kittens and that's part of the deal for living with us.

Every time there has been a frustrating delay in getting our FM-3 visas, the silver lining has been more time with Misty. Soon we will part from her... and knowing she is here will help keep me on track in getting down the various tasks that await us north of the border.

Three Travel and Mexico Blogs I Like

Here are a couple of other Mexican blogs for your enjoyment, while I'm off in the northlands (though I plan to keep blogging about Mexican-related topics) plus another very exciting travel blog:

billiemercer.blogspot.com/
Billie contributes comments on my blog here and has a delightful personal blog herself. I know she also has a bunch of photos up at flickr, a fascinating website where Kelly has a lot of photos up too. That's how we met online. We still haven't met in person, but I'm sure we will as she is in San Miguel de Allende, about an hour's drive from here. Billie, would you post a link to your flickr pages in a comment response to this? Thanks in advance.

http://ranchocalypso.com/travellog/
John and Anita Wilson lived near us in Ashland, Oregon, years ago, and have a home just over the mountains from ours in Colorado. Now they are buying a house in Xico, a town outside of of Xalapa, Veracruz. Xico and Bernal were the two towns that stood out for us on our trip two years ago. Parallel lives! Enjoy some of the best mole I've ever eaten, John and Anita... it was from a little husband-and-wife shop in Xico, on the right side of the street as you go towards the main (only?) church in Xico. Of course, that may describe a dozen shops. Their peanut mole was heavenly.

Anita got her FM-3 in a few hours in Denver... [jealous moans]. They are in Xico now. I gasped when I read John's reactions to the cops who hit him up for mordida on their way down. They got through aduana (customs) at the border very easily, which kinda fits in with what we have heard from other Americans who have FM-3s. We are not going to be bringing a gazillion things down when we come back, so we will just spread our stuff around our little motorhome Cando and if we have to pay a little duty, that will be easier than creating a menaje de casa in 5 perfect copies in Spanish listing in detail everything we are bringing in. It would be different if we were going the moving van and tons of furniture route.

http://www.imagesoftheworld.com/medtrip/medhome.html
Bruce Junek and Tass Thacker are two of the most adventurous people we know. We've seen them in our town of Crestone, Colorado, a few times when they have come to see some good friends of ours who also live there. Chinle sent me this link this morning, and I've just been reading about the beginning of their bicycling in Egypt. They have written books about previous trips, including a round-the-world bike trip. I am far from being an adventurous soul like them, but I greatly enjoy reading about how welcoming the Egyptians are, why they are there, and much more. If you read their blog, take a little more time and look around their whole site. They are superb photographers and earn their living in part from presentations they do to students in schools.

After living in Mexico, how will the U.S. Feel?

As our time living in Mexico is just about up for this trip, I find I'm looking forward to going back to the U.S...

I'm eager to have long phone conversations with family around the country, and to get together with them.

I'm looking forward to seeing our dog and two cats and to being in our Colorado home a while. We're going to clean out a lot of stuff we don't need and have a garage sale, and consider our options with the house once we're there. (I blogged a while ago that we had it rented for a year. That particular situation fell through.)

I'm curious what it will feel like to speak the same language as practically anyone in any store or location. And I'm curious what's on people's minds back home.

I'm looking forward to Oriental food without MSG. (There are a variety of Oriental restaurants we've seen in Queretaro but we haven't tried any yet. When I eat MSG, I itch afterwards.)

I'm looking forward to clothes-shopping in American stores, including my favorite thrift stores.

Even more, I'm looking forward to book-browsing where the books are in English.

Oh yeah, and health food stores! So far in Mexico, I've been able to find herbal teas, Mori-Nu tofu, and Emergen-C, plus lots of vitamins and supplements. But a large, well-stocked health food store? Haven't seen one yet.

I'm not overly thrilled at the prospect of dealing with business and personal papers that have piled up for nearly six months, nor at the idea of all the work our business will take to get it to the stage where we can travel freely. But I know that will feel great to be done with.

Most of all, I'm curious: after the joys and sorrows of living in Mexico for nearly half a year,

Will I feel like I want to stay in the United States mostly?

or

Will it have changed to "a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there"

or some combination of the two reactions?

Malls of Queretaro

Today Kelly and I went to Queretaro with our friend Rob. It was more for fun than anything, though we did plan to open an account with Lloyd's, an investment firm that has many of the functions of a bank. Rob parked his car in the parking garage of the mall where Lloyd's is located. When we went there about three months ago, Kelly could hardly believe we were in Mexico, so this time we took a lot of photos to show the world.

First, we had coffee in the mall. The man on the left is on his cellphone, a common sight. Rob had just bought a new Sony Ericsson cellphone here last week and he stopped in to ask for help in figuring out some of the advanced features, like sending photos. It turned out that there was some kind of glitch, I'm not sure whether it was nation-wide or just in the region, but nobody had been able to use those features for two weeks! Nobody had thought to tell Rob when he bought the phone.



Rob went off to a meeting for a few hours. Kelly and I went to open our account but the bank manager suggested we wait till we get our FM-3 visas soon, as we will be able to get a more versatile account.

So then we walked a few blocks to the Prisa paint store of a friend of ours, singer-guitarist Luis Estrella of Tequisquiapan. He and his family have turned up in this blog several times before. He had just opened this store recently -- we met them at another store of theirs, in Ezequial Montes, near where we live in Bernal. Luis happened to be at the other store, so we just left him a note. Then we walked along a main street which has a lot of chain stores. And we thought we'd left Suburbia behind! Note Costco just beyond it.



We walked about four long blocks to... Wal-mart. We wanted to find out what it had, as a help in deciding later what we needed to bring to Mexico from the United States. We didn't take any photos inside, but just picture your local large Wal-mart and that is exactly what it looked like. Except that things were in Spanish.

We walked back and still had some time, so we went inside a mall across the street from the mall where we had started out and where we were to meet Rob. I was really glad we did, because I explored the Commercial Mexicana store and found it had most things that Wal-mart did. While I did that, Kelly took a picture inside the mall:



Then the security man asked him not to take any more. So he didn't until we crossed the street to the original mall, Plaza Boulevardes, where he took this shot at my request:



And this one... there are about ten movie theaters just to the right. You can see the CINE sign high on the wall, along with the Food Court sign.



It's not that I'm so enamored of malls -- I rarely go to them in the US -- but I do think this set of photos shows a different Mexico than many Americans would expect. I'm often struck too by how many of the cars are late model and kept gleaming:



When Rob rejoined us, we had lunch at "California" in the mall, where Kelly and I had the Executive Package. For just over $4.00 US each, we had a delicious creamy corn soup which was subtly hot, followed by a main course of chicken or fish with rice, with iced tea or iced herb tea, plus a simple dessert. Rob chose the buffet, and when he came to the table with his dessert plate, Kelly jumped up and took a photo:



The mall had a special feature going on. Over a dozen vendors from Oaxaca, far to the south, had been invited to have booths selling handicrafts and clothing. My favorite part of the whole day was when I began chatting with a woman selling clothing at one of these booths. She was so friendly, real, and direct. She said she loved talking to us because it was fun to meet people from everywhere, and that no matter if people were brown, white, or black, we were all equal in the eyes of God. My sentiments exactly. I asked her if she was from the city of Oaxaca, and she said no, she was from a town in the mountains an eight-hour bus ride from there.

I was looking at some of the hand-embroidered blouses when I suddenly remembered that last night I had had a dream about turquoise clothing. So I ended up buying this outfit from her for about $22 US total, plus $6 more for the necklace and earrings:



The photo is taken back home in Bernal, glad to be back in our quiet little town after a full day out.

Reflections and Smiles in Mexico

As our time in Mexico is approaching its end for now, Kelly and I have been reflecting on this trip. It's been five months since we entered Mexico this time. We spent about three weeks at an old hot springs resort outside Ciudad Valles, a month in Guanajuato, a few days in Mineral de Pozos and San Miguel de Allende, all of that in our little motorhome, Cando. Then three months ago we came to Bernal, camped in Cando in a friend's yard, and soon after rented a funky little house here for practically nothing.

Had we been planning to rent a house? No... but we were definitely on a quest to see if we could find a community in Mexico where we would like to live. Guanajuato had a lot going for it, but was rather large for us.

Bernal at times seems a little small for me, usually when we need to buy something that either isn't here or we don't know where to find it. (I just spotted Kikkoman soy sauce here the other day. I'd rather have a preservative-free, more natural brand, but hey, at least it's two blocks away.) Bernal is also quite slow during the weeks. I went downtown yesterday for an ice cream cone, and the plaza had a grand total of two people in it. Mondays are like that.

If we weren't both writers and used to a lot of solitude, we might be climbing the walls. It isn't far to other towns and cities, though, and that helps. Sometimes I have wanted more English-speaking friends (Mexicans or foreigners) and usually someone has turned up within a day of two of that wish.

Now and then I have missed going into the post office in the small town in Colorado where we come from, and running into a good friend... or eating lunch in one of the local cafes and chatting with the other diners, usually folks we know. But then I remember that we are gradually building these kinds of connections here. Also, when I think of the gloom that runs through our largely Democratic-to-radical Colorado community these days, I'm happy enough to be here instead. Actually, most of the Mexicans we have talked politics with tend to share the same views as folks in that town back home.

But as I have written before, there is such a fundamental joy to existence here that it gives a different context. One of the more interesting surprises here is that the people we've met in Bernal who are the most ecologically-minded are also among the wealthiest. And they are acting on their convictions, in a variety of ways.

Sometimes I wonder how many Americans realize that just next door and very accessible is:

• a country where kindness and happiness are way off the charts compared to what they are used to
• a country where you can live well on way less than in the US if you make some adjustments in your expectations
• a country with very good health care at affordable rates
• a country where virtually everyone welcomes you as an American and tells you that they or their cousin drove a taxi in Chicago or picked onions in Tennessee
• a country full of fascinating markets, glorious beaches, lots of art and culture, and a bus system that whisks you anywhere in hours
• a country where your efforts to speak Spanish, no matter how minimally, are greeted with enthusiasm and encouragement
  

An American friend who lives in Mexico recently made a several-week trip to the US and reported back that everywhere, people were worrying aloud -- about their health, about their jobs, about their money or lack of it, about politics. On and on. It made conversation rather dull.

I am certainly not saying that Mexicans don't worry. I have heard some of their problems. But here is a culture where most people walk around with a little smile on their face, most of the time. There are popular songs that tell us to do that and we will feel better. There are scientific studies that show that smiling even when you feel terrible will increase your endorphins. Mexicans all seem to know this. Even the surly tattoo'd teenagers in black! Well, most of those.

Some of the Mexican tourists who come to Bernal on the weekends look as though they could be from the US. I often wander over a little closer to them. If I don't hear them speaking Spanish to each other, it is the little smiles on their faces that tell me that they are Mexicans.

Another outing to water

Yesterday our friend Rob had a hankering to go to a favorite little area of fish restaurants not too far from here, between the towns of Toliman and Colon. I was happy to stay home and hog the computer while Kelly went off with Rob.

Kelly said people were having a good time all around them. Mexicans really know how to have fun! The water is low on this reservoir at least partly because the rainy season is due to start in the next few weeks.



This group of teenagers had been having a terrific time, dancing and joking.



The reservoir and the spillway are in the background, a bit of Kelly shows in the rear-view mirror, and the crops are green with irrigation water:



On their way back, they stopped at a little lake near Colon:



A few months ago, I made a list of what my ideal spot would be like. Bernal comes mighty close, but I grew up in D.C. and Maryland, and I do miss lush greenery sometimes. I would love to live somewhere with a view of water.

I imagine I'll get my water views at other places in Mexico... we are talking about spending part of next winter in the Yucatan.

Another watery place that intrigues me is Uruguay. A bit far from home, of course, but it's got some 500 km of shoreline along the Atlantic and many large rivers. There are no earthquakes, hurricanes, or tall mountains. It's been described as "Iowa by the sea," as it has lots of rolling hills, mostly grassland. The population is mainly Spanish, with about 1/4 of Italian background, and it has a more European feeling than many other parts of South America. Hmm, I wonder if that means it's less joyous. I've read that Uruguayans are devoted to their dogs, always a plus in my eyes. Their average income is second only to Chile in South America. I found out all this, and a bit more, from surfing the web last night when I was too tired to do anything practical. I started at escapeartist.com, an expatriate site with lots of links, and meandered from there.

Really I'm very happy here in Bernal, all the more so as our time for departure draws nearer. Kelly and I had a big planning session this morning, for how we are going to transform our publishing company so we don't have to have an order fulfillment office at home anymore. We are pushing the technology a bit, but it looks possible. Lots to figure out!

Well, I snuck the computer away from Kelly because I hadn't blogged yesterday either. Guess I'd better let him have it back.

Out for a drive to a Mexican dam

This afternoon, I went out for a ride with our friend Rob. He had an impulse to see some water, and I love lakes especially.

We drove about 45 minutes from Bernal, through the very dry Mexican countryside. We've started getting just a little rain here lately, but the rainy season hasn't really begun. We drove generally southeast, I think. Anyway, there were fewer cars as we went. There are many parts of Mexico that are thinly populated, and this was one.

Before we saw much of the water, we got to the dam itself:



It's narrow and very deep;



The dam is cared for by the national commission for electricity, and its workers had created this lovely dry garden by the dam:



Here's the view of the lake from the dam:



A little further down the road, we stopped for a soft drink by the water's edge, with this view. The owner of the cafe spoke quite good English. He had worked for 10 years in Tennessee and other southern states. I said that many Mexicans had worked that long in the US but hadn't learned much English. He said he had mostly worked with Americans rather than Mexicans.

No matter where you go in Mexico, there are always Mexicans who have worked in the US.



And here are the reflections of the hills on the water:



This deck is part of a restaurant being built. They expect to open in a couple of weeks. You can only see a bit of the support for the deck, but there really wasn't much more! At the workers' invitation, Rob and I went out on it, but we didn't linger.

Back in the flow toward our Mexican FM3 visas

Maybe the subtitle of this entry should be "The Human Face of Mexican Bureaucracy."

A week ago today, as I blogged, we went to the nearby city of Queretaro to the Instituto Nacional de Migracion. We thought our FM-3 visas might be ready, but instead we each got a letter saying what they still needed from us. We each needed to pay the annual fee for the visa, of about $100 US. We were expecting that. They also wanted our bank statements translated into Spanish, and we found a translator that day.

That was all Kelly needed but because I was being listed as his dependent, they wanted an official copy of our wedding certificate and it had to be apostilled and translated into Spanish. Apostille may not be a household word in your family, but it has become one in ours lately! Basically there is an international agreement that different countries will accept apostilled documents from other countries as valid. There was one more thing they needed for me, a relatively simple form where we said that we were living as a married couple and two Mexicans had to sign it and we had to have photocopies of their national voters' cards for ID.

So after that meeting with the bureaucracy a week ago, we were not sanguine about my getting an FM-3. It turned out that there was no way we could get an apostilled wedding license in the 14 days allowed, as it involves two different offices in California and then expressing it down here via DHL (said to be the most reliable courier service), not to mention that we were planning to leave for the US a few days ago anyway.

Our translator had some out-of-town work so it wasn't till today that she was going to have our translations done. Early in the week, I wondered about going in to Queretaro myself to ask some questions about other choices, but the day I thought of going, I didn't sleep well the night before, so I just waited till today.

Also during the week I've received emails about two other American women whose marriage licenses just like the one I have HAD been accepted by Mexican officials -- but in other places. Each Migracion office has the power to require what they want. I know of other Americans who have had to have apostilled birth certificates even though they had passports. This was not in Queretaro.

Yesterday we went over our papers and had one of our rare squabbles, due mostly to the stress of this surreal situation. It didn't last long, and we did do the form saying we live together where two Mexicans had to sign and provide ID. A friend who runs a grocery store down the street and his assistant know us both and were happy to help out. We didn't know if we would need it, but at least we would be showing good faith efforts to do all we could.

A neighbor of ours up the street a little ways makes his living with his pickup truck which has stock panels in it. We've most often seen a big water bin or hay bales in it, but yesterday in the late afternoon, he pulled in with two sheep in it. They proceeded to B-A-A-A for hours, and I wondered how we would sleep. Well, the sheep slept fine after dark so we did okay too.

This morning we left Bernal on an early bus and got to Migracion in Queretaro before 9:00AM. Our wait was short, and there we were with the woman who had gotten a little stern with me last week when I said we didn't have apostilled documents in the U.S. (She was right, I just hadn't heard of them.)

This morning, I explained our dilemma. There wasn't time to get an apostilled copy of the wedding certificate. I began to ask something but she cut me off. All smiles, she said that there was no problem.

She said I could submit a letter saying the apostilled wedding certificate, translated into Spanish, would be coming within a month.

I said but we can't stay a month more in Mexico. We have to get back to our business in Colorado ASAP, so will I need to get my tourist visa back?

She said you can go with your FM-3.

I said that there wasn't time to get it. Kelly had by now caught on to what she was saying but it took me a few moments longer to catch on.

She was saying that I could get my FM-3 without the apostilled wedding certificate. My jaw dropped as she explained that if I wrote the letter, then they would go ahead and give me the FM-3. I could have a friend here in Mexico bring in the papers when they arrived.

The human face of Mexican bureaucracy!

So we left quite happily, to go pay our fees at a bank, have a meal, and pick up our translated documents. Our translator kindly whipped out the letter I needed -- in impeccable Spanish.

This Migracion office has a take-a-number system for people waiting their turns, and if you come back on the same day, you don't have to take a new number but can basically cut in line. So practically the minute we walked in the door around 1:00 PM, we did that. A friendly man we hadn't seen before began going through our papers with us. I was pleased when our benefactress of the morning came in with a huge pile of folders and immediately called out to him that I only needed a letter today. Was this a standard Mexican way of getting around the bureaucracy, or something she had invented on the spot? We don't know.

Soon, the man was smiling at us and saying that they had everything they needed. I am not sure what came over me, but he was quite jolly so I asked if he was sure that they didn't need the name of our cat. He assured me that would not be necessary.

Our visas should be ready in ten days, more or less. Ten days is a week from Monday, so I asked if more or less might mean the visas would be ready next Friday. No, they doubted it.

So here we are in Bernal for at least another ten days. What a fate. Can we stand it? Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Here's a link to a list of all my blog entries on getting our Mexican FM3 visas, in case you want to read the story in order.

Getting My Groceries in a Small Mexican Town

This morning, I left the house my husband Kelly and I are renting around ten, and went downhill to get some groceries. I was on a mission this morning. I'd heard that there was a lady who sold chicken, and I'd been told more or less where she was located. We've been living in Bernal, Queretaro, a town of about 5,000 people, for three months now, and so far I had only bought chicken in the larger town of Ezequial Montes not far away. But I really love shopping on foot even if it means lugging my purchases uphill to our house.

I went to the street where I thought the chicken might be sold. Ten in the morning is still early for a lot of shops here to open, and many of them don't open at all during the week, as it is on the weekend when tourists come from Mexico City and elsewhere. The only shop open where I expected to find chicken was a small miscellany shop, of the type so common all over Mexico, with public baths behind it. I had seen a line of people waiting to bathe there another morning, but today nobody was around. In response to my calls, a boy of about eight came out. He had some trouble understanding my thick foreign accent, but eventually assured me that nobody sold chicken in the neighborhood.

Undaunted, I went to Miscelanea Silvia, my best source for yogurt and information. I was in luck. Silvia had several flavors of yogurt this morning. I bought a couple of one-liter containers and some fresh rolls, and then I asked her about the chicken. Of course, she knew exactly where it was, directly across the street from where I had been looking. (Next door to the Cooperativa on Calle Independencia, if you are ever looking for raw chicken in Bernal, Mexico.)

The chicken lady had a small booth just inside the front door of her house, otherwise unmarked. She had a few wings in a case and a bunch of whole chickens in a big bin. I decided to get a whole chicken, as my plan was to boil it up, freeze some of the meat, and make a soup with the rest. She held one up for my inspection, I nodded, and she whacked it into about a dozen pieces. I wanted to know how fresh it was, but couldn't think exactly how to say that in Spanish, so I asked her when the animal had died.

"This morning," she smiled. "It's still warm." She explained that they raise the chickens behind their house and have fresh chicken for sale every morning. She showed me a package of Milanesa -- chicken breast pounded very flat and breaded, ready to fry a few minutes. That's made fresh daily too. I assured her I'd be back to try it soon, and with a few more friendly words, I left, my chicken securely double-wrapped in plastic. That had been 51 pesos, just under $5.00 US. When I get to know her better, I will ask what kind of feed the chickens eat, and whether they get any hormones.

It was in this neighborhood that I'd found a sewing notions shop, so I went down to see if it was open. It was, and I got the bit of ribbon I wanted for some mending.

Next, it was back past Silvia's and a few doors down to the produce place that has the best selection in town. I was struck by a gorgeous huge bunch of radishes, and asked if I could buy half of it. Sure, the fast-talking young man said, along with a joking comment I didn't catch. My bunch of radishes turned out to be about two dozen large ones. I got a selection of other produce. As usual, when leaving a shop in Mexico, I said "Adios." A chorus of goodbyes came from the fellow and the other customers. As I started my trek back up the hill, I passed a very old man slowly going along the sidewalk carrying a small container of the homemade cheese they make here, and then I said hello to a woman of about 40 standing in her doorway. She had an astonishing haircolor, mostly her natural black color, streaked with a bright red-orange.

I hadn't gotten everything I was after but my shopping bags were full and heavy. Guess I'll have to go back out this afternoon! Each time I go shopping in a Mexican town is an enjoyable adventure.

A few more Queretaro photos

I was browsing through our photos on the computer and found a few from the delightful old city of Queretaro, near us here in Bernal, Mexico.

I like how the people are seemingly oblivious to the harpist in front of them:



View from our interior balcony, in the hotel where we stayed a night, on a walking street near downtown Queretaro:



An elaborate bit in the church dedicated to Saint Clare, friend of Saint Francis. While I can only wonder what she would have thought of it, I also enjoy its ornate beauty:



This poster offers free help to students with problems of any kind. It was posted on the wall of a restaurant where we had lunch one day:

Kelly's blog about our house and more

My husband Kelly recently did a little more finish work around our house and then took a bunch of interesting photos, by climbing on the roof and up a rickety antique ladder. Here's the link to Kelly's blog about Mexican architecture. He doesn't blog as often as I do, but when he does, it's interesting!

Reprieve: We are still living in Mexico

We were going to leave our small town of Bernal, Mexico, today. We were planning to drive north to Texas, visit in New Mexico, and go on home to Colorado. We'll still do all that, but later.

We have a reprieve.

It's got two causes: we are in the midst of trying to get Mexican FM-3 visas so we can live here, and that is taking longer than expected. I've blogged about this.

Also, we have a young female cat who needs to be spayed. The veterinarian who was going to do it last week broke his hand. We will likely be going to another town, or at least we have the name of someone to phone there. But not tomorrow -- May 10 is Mother's Day, and while businesses and government offices are open, we've been told that employees are distracted, getting last minute little gifts, making restaurant reservations, calling their mothers and all the rest. Motherhood is big here.

Anyway, once the cat is spayed, we will stick around till she's okay. Neighbors and friends will be feeding her, playing with her, and sometimes staying overnight. Taking her back to the US with us is possible in terms of government regulations -- easier than people! -- but with all we have to do, and the animals we have there, it is better to leave her here. I shed some tears over this, but am accepting it now. Misty will be a beacon to get us back here ASAP!

So it will be at least a week more, maybe two, here in Mexico. There are some frustrations in dealing with papers and cat. We feel a growing desire to go back to the house in Colorado that we called "home" to see how much we feel like it is home and how much Bernal has become home. Not to mention all sorts of things that are waiting for us to do, specially since we were originally going to be home in April.

"Now that we're about to leave for a while, living in Mexico is beginning to seem normal," Kelly said to me this afternoon. I had just succeeded in finding dental floss at a local pharmacy, waxed for me and unwaxed for Kelly, and these small shopping triumphs do make me more at home here.

We are generally enjoying our reprieve, savoring the view from our patio, the unexpected extra time with friends, and the sweet warm evenings here. It's usually shirtsleeve weather till bedtime.

In looking for something else on the internet today, I came across a remark that moving is one of the most stressful things that people do. We are still at the stage of sort-of-moving, and yes, it is sort-of-stressful at times. Maybe that's why a lot of people don't live their dreams. But I know from other experiences that being true to our visions has led to some of the most satisfying parts of our lives.

The FM3 saga continues

I wrote some posts not long ago about how things were flowing along so smoothly towards getting our FM3 Mexican visas.

Well...

Yesterday we went back into Queretaro, to the Instituto Nacional de Migracion. It's an hour bus ride from our village of Bernal, but from the time we leave our house and walk to the highway, wait for the bus, and take a taxi across the city of Queretaro, it's more like two hours each way. The Migracion office does not accept phone calls asking about the status of your application.

Yesterday's ride into town went smoothly and we got to the Migracion office around 9:00 AM, rather sleepy as the Cinco de Mayo dance downtown had gone on to the wee hours. The music stopped sometime around midnight and was then followed by the jolly sounds of a lot of people walking home up our hill. If we hadn't had the Queretaro trip planned, we might have gone dancing ourselves.

To our surprise, the office was packed. We took a number, which was 11 numbers away from the one being served, and had a wait of almost an hour and a half. People kept pouring in (mostly Mexicans) and by the time we left, newcomers were about 25 numbers away from the current one. There were two people at the front desk, where we've only seen one before. It reminded me of when I was a librarian, that the day after a holiday was usually enough to almost make us wish we hadn't had a day off!

When our turn came, we spoke with a woman whom we hadn't met before. We were hopeful that we would get our FM3s on the spot. No such luck. Instead, we each got a letter telling us what steps we still need to take.

Kelly needs to pay the annual FM3 fee of about $100US at a bank, after buying a form at a stationery store in triplicate. We knew this routine, as we had done it already for a smaller fee to get our applications going. He also needs the financial reports I had downloaded from the internet translated into Spanish. I asked where we could get translations done and was told where in the government offices of Queretaro we could get a list of authorized translators.

The name on my letter was Rosana Lesley [my middle name] Linebarger [my father's last name] Snow [my mother's last name]. Hart, the last name I've used for 30+ years, was nowhere to be seen. Oh well, we know a Swiss man who came out Korean after getting his FM3.

I need both the things Kelly did myself, plus two more. One looks like a pretty simple matter, a form where two Mexicans sign that they know me. The other one is an offical copy of our wedding certificate, not the copy of our certificate at home that I had provided, and it had to be translated into Spanish and apostilled. I asked how to do that. The woman said go to Mexico City to the American Embassy. I said I couldn't do that. Then she said I could go to the American consulate in San Miguel Allende, not far away. She even had a little slip of paper with the phone number for the consulate. We have 14 days to get these papers together, after which they have at least 8 days to do whatever they will do next.

Quite discouraged, we stopped at the same stationery store we had used before, to get the forms we needed to pay the bank. They were out, but sent us a few blocks away to another place that had them. We went to the Queretaro justice department, where a peaceful sit-in is going on. We walked past it without noticing what it was for, a sign of how dazed we were. We got the list of authorized translators easily, and I asked if any of them were near the downtown area. One was, and we phoned her from a pay phone. Her English was excellent, and we got directions to her house. But she couldn't do the translation that day. So we gave up on getting everything back in to the office that day.

Then we called the US Consulate in San Miguel. Luckily, we got through on the third try. Someone there was able to tell me that they do not apostille wedding certificates and that since we got married in California, the Secretary of State in California would have to do it. Okay, no way would we be able to do it that day! In fact, we may not be able to get it before we leave.

We went and had some lunch. Kelly was cheered by finding some organic coffee beans with a grinder in a downtown coffee shop. (No, not Starbucks, but it doesn't sound very Mexican: The Italian Coffee Company.)

On our first trip to Queretaro, there had been a restaurant owner who was very helpful about our FM3s and spoke very good English. He had said at that time that if there was anything more he could do for us, to be sure and ask. Now Kelly had an intuition to ask his advice. So we did, and he asked if we knew anyone in Sacramento who could help. Well, not there, but we do have family and friends around northern California. Our advisor suggested asking for help at that end and then using DHL rather than Fedex or UPS to get the documents sent here. We'd heard before that they were good.

Cheered by his kindness, we walked to the home office of the translator. We got a bit confused by her directions but people in the neighborhood pointed us in the right direction. She turned out to be very knowledgeable and helpful. She showed us an Apostille from the California Secretary of State which she had for someone else. While you can live your whole life in the US without ever hearing the word apostille, it's much used internationally: it is a way that documents from one country are stated to be valid for other countries. She also looked over our downloaded bank statements and pointed out several reasons why they would likely not be acceptable even if translated. We agreed to see what a friend at home could find and then email her the jpg files.

Well, that was all we could do. We had walked two or three miles around the downtown area in getting that much done. We grabbed some cold drinks and then got a taxi back to the bus station. The taxi driver had more of an air of a professional man than most of them do, and his clothing suggested that too. I asked how long he had been driving a taxi and he said a year and a half. He confirmed that he had a professional background though he didn't say what, and he said the Mexican equivalent of "You do what you gotta do." It certainly put our own troubles in perspective.

We thought we were leaving Bernal day after tomorrow, to return to the US. We aren't. I guess that's a silver lining, but at present I'm in overwhelm. I am pretty happy with the way Kelly and I are dealing with this. Usually if one of us is discouraged, the other one can help.

I do believe that things happen for a reason. The reason here may turn out to be simply that dealing with bureaucracy calls for being more patient than is my style. We'll see. It's possible that Kelly might get his FM3 and mine would have to wait till we come back.

I'd better mention that every Migracion office has its own way of doing things. We were not asked for apostilled birth certificates, for example, which some offices have required. Other people have breezed through this process.

UPDATE: Here's a link to a list of all my blog entries on getting our Mexican FM3 visas, in case you want to read the story in order.

Fixing up our Mexican rental house

About two months ago, we rented a small house in the village of Bernal, Mexico, not far from the city of Queretaro. It's typical Mexican block construction, mostly about ten years old. The landlord told us before we saw it that it was "muy rustica," (very rustic) and he was right. But the price was terrific, about $108 US a month, and Kelly was intrigued by the challenge of making a normal house more ecological. Here's what it looked like when we rented it:



Much of what we have done is painting and whitewashing, the whitewashing being white, sky blue, and a color they call oxidized red... That's the complete range of colors that we have found for whitewash.

Also, Kelly turned the downstairs patio into a covered space by adding a roof of laminated fiberglass. To keep the sun out, he got a lot of palm branches that the local churches were finished with (right after Palm Sunday) at no cost, and those are on the roof.

Then our landlord (who is watching Kelly's efforts with fascination and pleasure) gave us an antique rusted metal door-and-window frame. Kelly cleaned it, installed it, painted it, had glass installed, and added screening over the one window that opens all the way -- more to control local cat activity than bugs.



We use a curtain made from a woolen bedspread woven here in Bernal to keep the living room cooler. We keep this across most of the morning:


Here's how the door looks from the small walled back yard. I like how the color on the walls ties the indoors and outdoors together.


The two upstairs rooms will be our offices. I whitewashed mine, painted the cement floor blue, and varnished two doors. Kelly installed them as a long table and added shelves. We're sharing it for now, as Kelly's office is still untouched.


The kitchen is pretty much as we found it, with a few shelves added. Remodeling it will wait till we come back. That sink is very low.


The bathroom still needs work too. I forgot to get any pictures of the bedroom. All it needed was whitewash, a bed, and some large bamboo poles we hang our clothing on.

This shows the living room with the kitchen and bathroom doors.


We're happy here.

When the US sneezes, Mexico catches a cold

The title of this post is a famous quote (though I don't know who said it) that a friend of mine used the other day when we were talking about the relationships of the Mexican and US economies.

We had been chatting about the conversation Kelly and I had in Queretaro last week with a couple of Americans who were thinking that Mexico would be a better place to live if the US economy does take a nose dive in the future.

I see how deeply intertwined the two countries are. In every place we have been, and especially in the smaller and poorer towns, many of the young and middle-aged men are or have been working in the US. Quite a few women too. They send a good chunk of their income back home. If work is harder to come by or pays less in the US, those towns will feel the difference.

But then my friend pointed out some differences between the Mexican and the US economies:

• For one thing, Mexicans use credit very little. Mortgages are rare here and houses are typically owned outright. Some middle-class Mexicans in cities are buying cars on credit, but overall it's very much a cash economy. So the kinds of crushing debt loads that many Americans live with are a rarity here.
• They are used to economic crises here in Mexico. The last big one was in 1994. People know how to deal with them. The kids may not stay in private school, the house construction will slow, but by and large people will get by.
• Mexican culture makes it natural for people to help each other out. This chiefly occurs through family ties, but also in a community context.

So if the US economy does come up with a big sneeze sometime, it sounds like Mexico may only catch the sniffles a while.

The Low Cost of Living in Mexico

As I totaled up what we had spent last month while living in Mexico, I realized our food and lodging costs would make an interesting blog entry. I hope this might encourage some people to consider living in Mexico themselves, who might have thought it was beyond their reach. Of course, your mileage may vary.

Before I get to the numbers themselves, I want to say that April 2005 was a month in which we mostly stayed in our village in Bernal. We did drive our little motorhome to a nearby town a few times for shopping, but mostly it just sat. We needed no health care last month. Also, I might mention that we have long had the habit of writing down our expenses. We get all the big expenses, but don't always remember the odd small grocery or miscellany purchase. Still, I doubt that the food numbers are more than 5% off, if that. I'm using 11 pesos to the dollar as the exchange rate, and everything below is in US dollars.

Okay... food first. We spent $92 on meals out, there are 12 different entries, and each event was for both of us. That's a lot of gorditas at the local gordita stand, a bunch of economical meals, and one fancier meal, the Italian one I blogged about recently.

Our groceries for meals prepared at home in April came to $141. That's a LOT of mangos, avacados, papayas, and other fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as eggs, beef, chicken, yoghurt, cheese, and canned tuna. Bread and tortillas add practically nothing to the bill. Because we haven't yet remodeled the kitchen of the house we are renting, our refrigerator is up the street a ways in our motorhome, and this has tended to keep our meals simple. We didn't buy any vitamins or other nutritional supplements in April, though they are available in Mexico. The nearby city of Queretaro has a GNC in one of the malls, we noticed. For comparison, in the US, this figure is rarely under $400 for us, including some supplements. TOTAL FOOD= $233 for a month for two people. Once we have a refrigerator, this will go up some and we will eat a little higher off the hog.

Lodging: we are renting a house (including parking in a lot up the street) for $108 a month. This is a very good deal, suitable for us only because Kelly has many fix-it skills. Most Americans would probably want something fancier. We went to Queretaro overnight one night and spent $24 for a room with a good bed and private bath in a well-located hotel. Our electricity is a two-month bill; the April part would have been about $1.80 and our monthly water bill was $2.40. Trash collection is free, to encourage people to use it. Propane, mostly for hot water heating, was about $24. TOTAL LODGING= $160.00 for the month for two people.

We had other expenses: paint and other supplies for fixing up the house, some nice clothing made in our village, a few art and craft purchases, gasoline and bus fares for travel, and the inevitable miscellany. I'm not totaling those up because they don't seem that pertinent to other people and no doubt they vary quite a lot for us from month to month. They totaled more than our food and lodging.

A bit more about lodging: don't plan to arrive in Mexico and come upon a rental in our price range. Three or four times that (and up and up) is probably more common. But if you stay in an area and get to know people, opportunities can arise. House-sitting for other foreigners or Mexicans who have second homes they aren't using is a possibility. We did house-sit our first two weeks in Bernal, back in February, and we have had two other house-sitting offers come our way since: one for a month while someone was away, and the other for a beautiful and very new house that is for sale and the Mexican owner has moved away. We didn't take either one, as we are happy where we are. This kind of thing happens when people know you.

Mexicans often ask what we are paying for rent, and their reactions vary. Some local people who were installing glass in some windows for us sniffed and said they knew a much nicer house across town for about $20 US less a month. On the other hand, a friend of ours from Queretaro gasped and exclaimed "A gift!" when she heard our price. She hadn't seen the house since we've been fixing it up, though! (And I do plan to blog about the house with a bunch of photos pretty soon.)