Mexican beach and border real estate update

I recently received this email, and have corrected the page in question:

I love your informative site...for those of us living in or considering living in Mexico it is an invaluable resource. I would like to point out an error in something you wrote. On the page that discusses owning land in Mexico... http://www.mexico-with-heart.com/rlestate/about-mex-rlestate.html you state that waterfront land can be held by a corporation but that none of the owners can be foreigners. That is no longer true....A Sociedad Anonima may be totally foreign owned...if none of the owners have their FM3 then there must be a person who is Mexican and acts as an agent for the SA who signs the documents for the land purchase but is not necessarily an owner of the corporation. I know this because I bought 3 hectares of waterfront land in Quintana Roo and none of the shareholders of the SA are Mexican and none of us had an FM3 at the time we bought the land.

Kathe Kirkbride

Personal Website www.whirledvision.com

Mexico Project www.maricasa.com

Recycling containers in Mexico

These are some of the nicest recycling containers I've seen in Mexico. They were in a nice neighborhood in Mazamitla and did not seem to be filled with garbage, which I have seen elsewhere... and not just in Mexico!

Mexican Independence Day parade in San Juan Cosala

Mexico's Independence Day is September 16, but in the small town by Lake Chapala where we live it is celebrated a week later, so local people can take part in the festivities on the 16th in nearby towns. This morning we went to the parade, which circled through town streets and along the highway, which is the only way for traffic along the lake to pass through town.

This float is in honor of Mexico's fallen soldiers (they have certainly had many in their history), and if you look closely you can see that there is one, in a modern-day camoflage shirt, lying at the feet of Liberty:

Schoolchildren made up the bulk of the parade, beginning with the very young:


Two Mexican Sunday bicylists, in typical bicycling cothing, are going the other way from the parade here. The second one is talking on a cellphone as he rides. Kelly (in the straw hat) and close friends from Colorado are just behind the guy in the red shirt.



The state of Jalisco, where we are located, is the home of mariachi music:
A very enjoyable parade!

Do you use bug spray a lot in Mexico?

I got this question from a reader in Atlanta:

I have been thinking bout moving to mexico, but the bug problem is a BIG problem 4 me. After wearing bug spray day in and day out, does that not take a toll on your skin as well as your health. Whudda think?

Hmm, I have never in my life worn more bug spray than I did in the Yucatan as a kid... oh, unless it was when I was in a malarial part of West Africa on a workcamp when I was a college student. But both those experiences are long behind me, and I got malaria anyway.

I don't really know the answer to this question, so dear readers, please jump in if you do.

Here at about 5000 feet elevation in the central part of Mexico, the only times I have been driven to use bug spray have been during the later part of the rainy season, which is just now beginning to wind down. There were mosquitos earlier, but not many and pretty lazy biters so I didn't use spray much. Now, if we decide to eat on the porch in the evening, I do spray my ankles.

When we have been at Mexican beaches, I have been more diligent about bug spray but we are rarely there more than a week or two. But if you were to live in a coastal area, you might be looking at the day in day out situation. In that case, it would be good to shower in the evenings, and scrub off the sprays. Also, I tend to use more natural sprays now, where before I was still a fan of better living through chemistry.

Hope this helps.

The Elusive Mazamitla Waterfall

Our Moon guidebook to Guadalajara had a few pages on Mazamitla in which a walk to a waterfall was mentioned. It sounded like a few blocks but ended up more like a couple of miles, up and down hilly cobblestone or dirt streets. The waterfall was in a quiet development of what seemed to be mostly second homes for Guadalajarans, like this:

Eventually we reached a sign that said it was still another kilometer to the waterfall, so we rested a while and I got a photo of Kelly. Then he and I went back to get the car while our friends hiked on a bit further.
I had chatted a little on the way down towards the waterfall with a couple of Mexican women coming back from it. When they passed us in their car as we hiked up and up a street near where we had turned around, they stopped a minute and asked if we had gone as far as the falls. We said no, that since our car was parked up by the church, we had been getting a little tired. In a flash, we were ensconced in the back seat of their car, and as we rode in style my feet were so grateful!

Our conversation was in a combination of Spanish and English. One of the women didn't seem to be comfortable in English, but the other one had often visited her father outside of San Francisco and her two brothers in Sacramento. I'm so often reminded of how closely intertwined our two countries are!

Mazamitla shopping

Mazamitla had quite a few souvenir-type stores. You had to look at a lot of cutesy stuff to find good things, but they were there. If I often served salad to a dozen people, I would have bought a beautiful wooden turned bowl, but I passed on that. My best find was a 35-peso foot massager. After I paid for it, the woman who ran the shop let me take her picture:



Once home, I laid out my purchases on our indoor dining table: a huge bottle of homemade pickles, the foot massager, and a couple of wooden spoons. The table, by the way, is made of pieces of marble. My mother probably turned over in her grave when I bought the pickles, as who knows just how they were preserved!

Frida Kahlo and Puerto Vallarta Tshirts

I've just created some new pages for this website, about tshirts on Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and on the famous beach resort city of Puerto Vallarta. There's a website called Cafepress which I love and have used for years -- anyone can upload jpg or other images and at no cost they can create a little mini-store with their design on a variety of tshirts, mugs, sweatshirts, and all sorts of other things. The pages I've created on the site show some of the designs people have uploaded. When someone wants to buy, Cafepress prints up the object, handles the credit cards, and ships anywhere in the world. Some of you photographers might like to do this yourselves! You make a few bucks per item sold.

So I created a page showing Frida Kahlo tshirt designs, and there were still so many good ones that I created a second page on Frida Kahlo tshirts. I also added a page about her life and work.

Here's a page of Puerto Vallarta tshirts.

Take a look! The Kahlo pages especially are interesting.

Tlaquepaque remodel: the beginning

On August 25, I blogged about Victor Cueto Valencia's remodel in Tlaquepaque, on the edge of Guadalajara. He sent me some photos which show the project as he got started:




He also sent me some interesting information about the place. According to the History and Anthropology Institute, the property dates from the nineteenth century, between 1800 and 1830. It will soon be in the Tlaquepaque Historic Houses Catalog.

The building is at 43 Reforma Avenue, in downtown Tlaquepaque:

Mexican directional signs

Kelly and I don't tend to get lost in the US, but we have some extra opportunities in Mexico. We went straight at this sign, but I suspect left might have worked better, considering where going straight took us. This was in the charming town of Mazamitla, but we've seen signs as confusing in many places where we couldn't stop to photograph them. The wiring behind the sign is not unusual.



This one offers a challenge too. You might logically think you were supposed to stop before going through the light, but nobody was doing that. Maybe the stop sign is left over from before the light arrived.

The Mexican political scene

I don't follow politics extremely closely, nor do I write about them much myself... my interests and skills lie elsewhere. But I am keenly aware that the politics of any country affect its guests. Here's an interesting blog entry from John Calypso on the presidental elections:

http://www.vivaveracruz.com/blog/?p=323

About Mazamitla

In yesterday's blog, I just barely mentioned Mazamitla, but we took enough photos for several blog entries. It's a really pretty mountain town a couple of hour's drive from our home by Lake Chapala. This past Saturday, we went up for the day with another couple, in our car. I'll be blogging more about it, but for today this link will take you to the page I put up on this site, with a few photos:

Mazamitla, Jalisco, Mexico

I was standing well to the side of that little ATV driver!

Inside a Mexican church

Here are some pictures from the church on the plaza of Mazamitla, Jalisco, a town we visited. There was a little alcove devoted to Mary, just to to the right of the front door:


Here's a closeup of Mary:
The window of the alcove continues the same theme:
Just outside the door to the alcove were these two. The first was labeled the Virgen of Zapopan, and the other was completely unlabeled. Each was in a locked glass case.






Across the aisle,on the other side of the church was this vividly done Christ: