Merida Real Estate: A friend was just there

I had a fascinating conversation with an American friend who not long ago spent a week in Merida, on the Yucatan peninsula. He had good weather the whole time. He was there to look at the city and at what was for sale. Merida real estate impressed him quite favorably, as did the city itself.

He was advised to go back and rent a place in Merida for six months or so and see how he liked it, and he's looking forward to doing that when he can. He speaks little or no Spanish, but communicated fine and feels he can learn enough when he goes back. He met a number of expats living in Merida: people from Ireland, Australia, the Netherlands, England, and the US. He met a lot of them at a jazz concert that was a benefit for New Orleans, which is Merida's sister city. After it, he walked quite a few blocks back to his bed and breakfast, about midnight on a Friday night, and felt perfectly safe.

He met with three different Merida real estate agents and in his time there went inside over two dozen homes for sale. He was looking to see if he could get something for under $50,000 US including any repairs or fixing up, and he said that he could. He looked at homes in the $23,000 US to $43,000 US price range, and said that the less expensive places could easily cost another $20,000 US to put in new electric, perhaps new plumbing, and so on. He said all of them had terrible kitchens. I could relate; when I first saw the kitchen in the house that we rent in Mexico, I thought it was the laundry room. (It had no stove or refrigerator.)

Another American man was staying at the same B&B as my friend, also there to explore the real estate and Merida. He was looking in a higher price range, up to about $100,000 US. My friend commented that he personally would be reluctant to spend that much since if he wanted to sell, he could have a long wait for a buyer. Mexican real estate does not tend to be financed, so you are waiting for a cash buyer. (The link takes you to a how-to page I wrote.)

I asked what the weather was like. It was in the high 80s and quite humid. Didn't seem to give my friend any real trouble. He liked the city, said it was gritty like Chicago and interesting in having a lot of different neighborhoods and lots to do within walking distance of the homes he liked. He also compared it to Tokyo, in having narrow, busy streets, with lots of different little shops and many people. It wasn't as clean as Tokyo, he added, but it wasn't dirty either. I had read comparisons of Merida and Paris, but my friend hasn't ever been to Paris.

Merida is something over half an hour from the Gulf of Mexico, so it's easy to get to beaches. He said beach front property wasn't that expensive, but he was more interested in the city. (This was before Hurricane Wilma, which didn't do nearly as much damage in this area as it did around Cancun.)

My friend got a very good price on a round-trip flight from the US to Cancun, then rented a car for the three-hour drive to Merida. He got into Merida around 4:30 PM, quite an initiation into Mexican city traffic! He said the car rental ended up costing him more than the plane ticket and that the car really wasn't necessary. Next time he will fly to Houston and then into Merida from Houston. The airfare would have been about $100 US more to go that way this time, and travel costs would have worked out to a lower cost without the car rental. Plus, he didn't really enjoy driving in Mexico! He met one American who has lived there almost twenty years without a car and never missed it.

I got his permission to write up about his adventures in Merida real estate. There must be Americans doing this all over Mexico!

Living with heart: Mexicans and Americans

"We in this country have lost our ability to live with heart," asserted a friend of mine at dinner the other day.

I wouldn't go that far, but her comment stayed with me. Mexicans surely know how to live with their hearts, and it is much of their appeal.

Of course, ideally you want a balance. Kelly and I are both very mental people, and when we named our business Hartworks it was not just a pun on our last name but also a deliberate reminder to make our choices with heart.

Now on to packing, sorting, and cleaning the house with heart!

We and our earthbag house will be on TV

Monday we cleaned and tidied our house to an unnnatural level. Yesterday, we spent the whole day with a two-man video crew working on a roughly five-minute segment for Home and Garden TV's show Offbeat America, which features unusual homes around the US. Our segment is likely going to air in January. I'll post the date when we know it.

We've long thought that our house would be a good one for a show of that sort, but we had never done anything since our house still had too many unfinished details. This time, High Noon productions, a video company out of the Denver area, contacted us after the producer read about our house in a wonderful book called Homework, by Lloyd Kahn. It's a full-color oversized book with many interesting homes in it.

The timing was perfect. We've finished all the unfinished details but haven't begun packing up things in the main rooms of the house yet.

The video crew knew that we will be moving to Mexico, but we did the shoot in a style as though we are living there indefinitely. That was a little odd, but it made sense. The house is the story really, and Kelly's and my commitment to sustainability will hopefully come through the editing process.

Since we've had our own video production company for over 20 years, we enjoyed talking technical details with these guys. Kelly is in the market for a digital camcorder and they had ideas. Also, I've been in front of Kelly's camera so much over the years, that I just act natural. Every now and then I thought about how my hair was a bit messy and my waistline a bit dumpy, but so long as I didn't think about that at the same moments that I recalled the show gets about 3/4 of a million viewers, I kept my cool!

Bernal friends concerned with global justice

I just received an email from an American friend who lives around the corner from us in Bernal, part of the time anyway. He and his wife are very active in the global justice movement, and with some other people have a website about global justice. Worth a look!

As they say, they are not interfering in Mexican politics, which is something to avoid, but they are working hard for what is important to them, with their new Global Justice Center.

On a more local level, Bob is also going to stop in and give our cat Misty more loving attention till we can get back!

Cancun as it was

We'll know a lot more in the near future about the long-term effects of Hurricane Wilma on the Yucatan. Last night, Kelly and I were web-surfing for pictures of the current situation around Cancun, and I remembered that I had a lovely photo of the hotel strip up, so I showed it to Kelly.

It's on my Cancun page. I'm very taken with the work of this photographer, so I did a page of the Mexican photos of Walter Bibikow and there are three Cancun photos on that page.

Guess I may have to rewrite that Cancun page. We'll see. We had been talking about going to the Yucatan for part of the winter, but since everything has been pretty hectic since we left Bernal last summer, we may just want to kick back, get to know people in Bernal more, work on our Spanish, train our dog to bark less, and so on. We'll see.

I'm thinking more about Mexico as the long to-do lists get a little shorter!

Hurricane Wilma

As I write this, Hurricane Wilma is very slowly moving across the Yucatan peninsula.

Last night, after being frustrated that CNN was covering murders and the dress code of the NBA more than the hurricane, and that its hurricane coverage was of parties in Key West, I went online. Google articles provided a few scant details of what was happening in Mexico, and just about all of that was about the American tourists there.

Then I went to the Mexican google:

http://www.google.com.mx/

and there I found a lot more news. I had to work at my Spanish a bit, but still I could fill in from the context. Here is the first part of an article I found this morning via the Mexican google:

Wilma, el huracán más peligroso que México haya enfrentado, dio ayer una primera muestra de su fuerza, con vientos sostenidos de 220 kilómetros por hora y rachas hasta de 270, que provocaron olas de diez metros de altura e inundaciones hasta de ocho metros en Cancún y Playa del Carmen.

Can you follow that? I'll translate it pretty literally: "Wilma, the most dangerous hurricane that Mexico has encountered, gave yesterday a first showing of its force, with sustained winds of 220 kilometers an hour and gusts up to 270, which provoked waves of ten meters of height and inundations up to eight meters in Cancun and Playa del Carmen."

I'm sending love to the people of the Yucatan, and wishing everyone there the best. Last night as I fell asleep, snuggled in my cosy bed and so happy to have heard that my Mexican cat is fine, I held in my heart the animals going through this huracán peligroso.

News of my Mexican cat

I spent this morning boxing up books and miscellany in my office. Now I'm faced with the daunting task of weeding my numerous files. Putting it off for a moment, I just checked my email.

Good news! An American friend who's in Bernal wrote:

Misty is fine, she was all over me the other night.
She was purring up a storm and being very frisky and
playful.

Ah! That's great news! I'll return to my tasks with new energy. Mexico suddenly seems much closer.

My tribe, my town

I greeted the Mexican tamale lady in Spanish the other day as I walked through our post office parking lot. She wondered if I wanted any tamales and I was pleased to get my verb tense right as I said, again in Spanish, that I had just eaten.

In the post office, a woman who cleans it and a man who who is on the volunteer fire department were chatting about dancing. I see them both at some of the local dances. I greeted a couple of other friends while I waited in line to send some packages.

When I got to the door of the post office on my way out, I didn't resist the bake sale that the Crestone Peaceworkers were putting on for KRZA, the public radio station in nearby Alamosa. I was acquainted with both the women working there -- one is an incredibly gifted painter.

As I drove home munching on a granola brownie, I reflected on how much I feel a part of the fabric of life here. We were beginning to get a good bit of that in our little town in Mexico, but this is something that takes time. Living in Mexico will take some time to show us how it works there. And will we feel as at home there eventually? It's not just knowing people, it's also feeling some pretty deep connections.

Stay tuned. I will!

Garage sale done with!

Our garage sale Saturday went very well. We had a lot of stuff for sale and sold much of it. It was fun to visit with a lot of friends who came by too.

And we didn't even have to haul much unsold stuff away to a thrift store -- a woman who runs a local nonprofit can use most of it for fundraising. The people who will be living in our house when we leave happened to be here at the same time she was, and they said it's fine with them if the things are stored in the garage. So we just have a few computer items she didn't want that we will take to Rainbow's End, a great thrift store in nearby Alamosa.

Several Mexicans who work in the area came by. Two men who have been working right near our house came and one bought some old video equipment of Kelly's, to videotape quincineras, or 15th birthday parties for girls, which are very important in Mexico. He had the natural warmth we are so fond of in Mexicans. He lives just outside Mexico City when he is home, and wrote out his name, phone, and address there for us, offering to show us around sometime! Heartwarming.

Ruminations on preparing for a garage sale

It's early on a Friday morning and today is dedicated to getting ready for tomorrow's garage sale. We've been working on it off and on all week.

We have some interesting challenges here in rural Colorado -- we don't want to leave our motorhome out of the garage overnight because bears come through the neighborhood from time to time, and they break into vehicles that have even a vague hint of food. So we'll take Cando out first thing tomorrow morning, and today we're working without our full space. We'll set the alarm for six tomorrow morning, ugh.

Going through our belongings brings up varied emotions. Happy memories come up about when I bought something or maybe Kelly gave it to me for a birthday. Looking through my box of old clothes that don't fit... Trying to decide which of my books on dogs and dog training I can part with... Wondering what in the world I was thinking of when I bought this or that.... Overall, the feeling of paring down is very pleasant.

Much as I think of myself as part of the alternative culture, I certainly do have some mainstream habits when it comes to possessions. I'm going through:

• Plenty of kitchenware
• Lots and lots and lots of books
• Quite a lot of clothing even though much of it is 10 years old or more and much comes from thrift stores
  
• Six file drawers of papers... actually, these can wait till after the sale
  
• A small dog crate that was Sunbeam's. Larry is too big for it but I am already thinking small dogs in the future
• An amazing assortment of little stuff in the bathroom

I did bite the bullet yesterday and actually throw out an old Windows 98 laptop. The screen has lines going through it, it won't go online or connect to a printer, so you'd think it would be a no-brainer. Guess I have more than a little packrat in me.

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I mention this computer because I learned something worth sharing. Even if you delete your files, even if you reformat your whole hard drive, data can be recovered. Old financial records of Paul McCartney hit the internet after he got rid of a computer. There's a market for interesting data from old computers.

So what to do? I found a free piece of software that would overwrite my old hard drive, and ran it. I'm not mentioning its name because there must be better ones out there. It was a nuisance to use, but there were credit card numbers, passwords, etc., on the old thing, so it seemed prudent.

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We're putting most of the stuff we keep into a storage unit near here and just taking a few things back to Mexico with us in Cando. Taking our medium-sized dog Larry will limit the number of things we can cram in -- and help protect those things, I suppose!

We don't know yet whether we will come back to the US and have a home here, whether we will live in Mexico for a good while, or ultimately both. Makes it challenging to decide what to do with stuff.

What about that mug I got in Ashland, Oregon, when we lived there? Easy, keep it... it has a dog-and-cat picture on it that reminds us of Dorrie, the Komondor who lived with our llamas, and Who, the shy barn cat.

What about the set of checked cloth napkins that commemorate an International Llama Association conference in the 1980s, which we used during the three summers that we led llama day-hikes on our ranch outside Ashland? Umm, the packrat rises up in me. I will never lead another llama hike, of that I am quite certain, but there's so much good feeling connected to those napkins, and we do use them... a few times a year. I didn't toss them out either.

Heigh-ho, off to sort things out! Our future is out there somewhere, shiny and bright, and somewhat less cluttered!

People who love Queretaro

On March 2, I wrote a blog entry with photos about a day we spent in the city of Queretaro.

Some time later, someone found it and wrote lovingly about Queretaro. Today, another entry was made, by someone else. It said:

What can I say about Queretaro? It's the best place in the world. I have been there more or less 100 times. My father was born there so my all of his family lives there. I can not say enough great things about Queretaro. Queretaro is where my heart is.

I don't know exactly how either person found that particular page. I got curious and my blog isn't listed in the top listings on google, yahoo, or msn if you search under Queretaro Mexico. But the internet is such a great mishmash of interconnections!

Chatting with Colorado Mexican Americans

The other day, we got a storage unit in a nearby town here in Colorado, another step towards heading south to live in Mexico. The young man who helped us is a third-generation Mexican-American owner of the facility. I asked if he spoke Spanish and he said not really... muy poco. He does go to Mexico from time to time, to San Carlos or Baja.

A woman working in the office said that she speaks Spanish well, and that her family here has relatives in the state of Chihuahua, not far from El Paso. Her boy friend's family has relatives in Chiapas, almost to Guatemala, so between them they cover the north and south of Mexico. I asked her how recently she'd been to Mexico, and she said it had been twenty years. She didn't look to be over 30.

I don't draw any conclusions from these chats, but thought they were interesting.

What's going on as we prepare for Mexico

I got an email today from one of my online friends. She'd noticed that I've been neglecting the blog, and wondered if there was a hesitation on actually moving to Bernal. She also asked about our cat who is being fed by our landlord there. I'll answer her here.

I'll start with the cat: I hadn't talked with our landlord at all till recently, when I needed to check with him about something. He reported that our cat is just fine --- I was quite sure of this intuitively, but it was good to hear! He says she's grown a lot. He also told me that he gave away his cat, Capullo, to someone in another town. When we left, Capullo had a pretty bad infection so I was glad to hear he survived that.

It's not a simple matter to leave behind a community here in Colorado that has meant a lot to us. We've spent a lot of time this summer hanging out with friends, savoring the connections. We kinda think we'll be getting visitors in Bernal! So that may have slowed things up a bit, but basically there's just an enormous amount to do in order to leave our house ready for the new owners -- Kelly just finished the solar hot water installation for our stock-tank hot tub -- and to get our small business to the stage where we can leave it. But I'll try to write more!

Air quality and living in Mexico

Last weekend I met an American woman who has spent a lot of time in Mexico, from Chihuahua to Oaxaca and in between -- mostly in cities, I think. She said she could have lived there for the rest of her life... except for one thing.

Air quality.

In particular, the fumes from diesel buses creating bad air that spreads over a large area. She thought that recently, with the Mexican middle class buying cars much more, it might be better.

That reminded me of some friends of mine who went to Costa Rica to check it out as a place to move to. They were quickly back in Colorado, saying the bus fumes were too much for them. But since then, they have made another trip there, to a more rural area.

We've noticed that living in Bernal in the state of Queretaro, Mexico, the air is better than in the cities. Bernal's population is only about 5,000. But still, there have been moments. Many Mexicans think nothing of burning plastic trash, and I remember one night in Bernal when a neighbor was doing just that around 10 PM, and we couldn't sleep for a while.

There are many pros and cons in moving to Mexico, and this is one of them. Not that our country has completely pure air!

We expect to be back in Bernal in a couple of months, and will continue our own evaluation of all the factors that go into moving to Mexico permanently. We're still weighing our choices.