A Mexican Wedding, Part 1

Not long ago, we had the chance to go to a Mexican wedding. A friend of ours, Noe Lopez, a realtor who had helped us buy our house, is from our town of San Juan Cosala and was marrying a young woman from here.



One of the more interesting parts of the ceremony was that as the new husband and wife knelt together, ropes were draped over the two of them -- symbolizing the new bind between them, we guessed. That's Noe's mother next to him.

In the vows, both Noe and Olga vowed that they would be responsible for the care of any children that came from their union. I hadn't come across this before, and thought it would be a good addition to weddings in the US or anywhere!



There were quite a few pictures taken with various family members:

Good Friday in San Juan Cosala

Well, Good Friday has been behind us for a while but these pictures of Kelly's are still interesting. Pilgrimages are a very common feature of Mexican life that we didn't know about until we began traveling around Mexico a lot, several years ago. Often we would see people of all ages walking along highways, seemingly miles from anywhere.

Here the trip was shorter but it's steep climbing up into the mountains behind the town. People went up at least one street that leads into the mountains:



Some wore clothing characteristic of the Holy Land:


Here you can see the casual procession continuing uphill. In the upper left hand corner and all along near the top of the picture, you might just make out pilgrims higher up. They were going to a little chapel not visible in the photo.

Ajijic in the 1960s and the Lake Chapala Review

The other day, I read an intriguing article about Ajijic in the 1960s, reminiscences of an American who lived here then. It begins, "Most of what one sees today around Ajijic did not exist in the 1960s," and goes on to tell the tale of what life was like. Rugged, difficult, idyllic, fascinating.

I was going to summarize some of the high points. But then I went to the website of the Lake Chapala Review at http://www.lakechapalareview.net/ and was pleased to see that the whole issue is online, so you can read the article (and the whole magazine) from wherever you are.

Go to the Table of Contents of the April 2007 issue. I've copied part of that page so you can see the pages you'll want for this article, which is called "On Lake Chapala."

Clicking on the links for pages 28,29,30, and 31 will yield four separate one-page PDF downloads A little awkward, maybe, but hey, it works! I was delighted to discover that they've been doing this for several months.

The Lake Chapala Review has lovely covers and you can view them at
http://www.lakechapalareview.net/cover_photogallery.html

This magazine is free and widely distributed in the Lake Chapala area. If you aren't here but are thinking you'd like to, keeping up with the magazine would give you more of the flavor of life here. There are lots of ads, too -- and you can learn a lot about a place from the ads.

Living in Mexico or the U.S.: My Top Five Lists

This list would be different depending on my mood of the moment, but with that caveat, here we go... your list, or anyone else's, would no doubt be different. Here are my top five favorite things about living in Mexico, where I do, near Lake Chapala:

1. The glorious climate. Oh, how we gloated all winter, even as we wore warm clothes to keep warm here! We are grateful every day for the pleasures of the weather, even as it's hitting the upper 80s now.

2. What the glorious climate makes possible: year-round gardening (definitely better now than in the winter), and pleasant outdoor walking or water aerobics year-round. I'm distinctly healthier and a bit slimmer because of this.

3. The warmth and graciousness of the Mexican people. I've blogged a lot about this. We've made some wonderful Mexican friends here. It helps that we speak the language some, and it helps that we live in a more Mexican town too.

4. Well, I gotta admit that wherever I am, good high-speed internet in my home really matters to me! Here we have it. (Yes, we would in the U.S. too but this IS one of my favorite things about my life here.)

5. A lot of things are contending for this last spot, but I guess I'll go with the lower costs of life here, in most ways: medical and dental care, groceries (except imported goodies and nutritional supplements, and we buy plenty of both), property taxes and most other costs related to our home, lots of very nice restaurants where we spend well under $20 US total for two good meals, and so on.

Oops, didn't squeeze in the natural beauty or... oh well, onward!

My top five favorite things about living in the United States are:

1. Easier access to my family and dear friends. We do have the Verizon North American plans cellphone down here, and lots of other expats are very happy with Vonage and Skype and so on, so we do talk with our loved ones in the U.S. a lot here, but still I gotta give this one to the U.S. I know people who have lived here and left because of this, or who are snowbirds so they can watch the grandkids grow up.

2. Generally more sedate traffic, in wider lanes, with fewer unexpected pedestrians, livestock, dogs, etc. This is a personal one for me, but I do like driving much better up north.

3. The shopping. Amazon! All-organic cotton clothes! Lots of other speciality items that are hard to find here! I'm not really that big of a shopper but I do appreciate that abundance of choice there. Yes, I could buy things and have them shipped but generally I tend not to want to deal with the duty and the uncertainty. When people we know are coming down, we load them up!

4. Ability (albeit expensive) to eat organically and know it. Here, a lot of the produce at the local markets *might* be organic -- and when we find bugs in it, we rejoice -- but we don't know it. Heaven only knows what we are eating with our chicken, eggs, dairy, meat, fish, etc. (We're expanding our vegetable garden here in Mexico to improve this here.)

5. Being in my own culture. Yes, the U.S. has its problems (to make a major understatement) but still it's MY country. I miss seeing more younger Americans too, since around here I am one of the younger foreigners!

We do expect to go to the U.S. for a while this summer, so I will be able to have my cake and eat it too.

De Peluche!

"How was your vacation?" I asked a 25-year-old worker who has been helping with the project of rebuilding our stone wall. For Semana Santa, the workers got paid their normal weekly wage but didn't work after Wednesday.

I asked him this in Spanish, and he replied, "De peluche!"

I didn't have a clue what that meant, so he added, "Muy divertido!" (Very diverting.)

I looked peluche up in my Franklin electronic dictionary and it said it meant plush, like velvet. So I asked the fellow about that. He said, yes, or like a bear. The expression seems to mean generally terrific.

Well, I wasn't sure if this was a phrase just used by the young or if it was one I could trot out myself, so the next day I asked the stonemason on the job. He said it wasn't a very correct phrase, but that there was nothing the matter with it.

Would he use it in speaking to his grandmother? Sure, he said, it's kind of an intimate phrase.

So you wouldn't use it if you encountered a lawyer that you knew?

He laughed at the idea and said no, you certainly wouldn't.

How was our Semana Santa? De peluche, because the Mexican neighbors who came down from Guadalajara for the holidays were pretty quiet!

Spring by Lake Chapala

The climate by Lake Chapala is often called springlike year round, but it's certainly spring now and I haven't had a sweatshirt on in over a month. There are flowers in bloom all the time, but they are really glorious now. I just wandered around our yard for a moment and got these pictures.



This two-tone bougainvillea is a favorite of mine:

Last time we went to the pottery factory which I've blogged about, we got this interesting head with a lizard atop it. We just put it out in the yard but haven't planted it. And yes, that's a spider plant behind it. We have them here and there in the yard.


Here's the view from our front porch, which is essentially our living room. That's a pottery barbeque on the left. Our swimming pool has a cover on it but now that we have solar panels to heat the water, we should be able to take the cover off from now till the rainy season begins, usually in June. This will be hottest time of year coming up. It's already hot some days.

There's something that looks like a volleyball net beyond the pool. That's new, and it's actually a badminton net I came across at the Soriana chain store in Chapala. Kelly and I used to play a little tennis but I'm not sure I had played badminton since I was a teenager. It's perfect for us -- we play a little most evenings. The only rule is no keeping score. And we try to keep the birdie out of the bottlebrush tree where some black birds are nesting.

You can see Lake Chapala in the distance... it has more of a presence to us than you'd guess from the photo. A neighbor took out a tree that blocked part of our view and then Kelly trimmed a row of our junipers to give us more of a view than we've had. We enjoy it a lot.

Ah, Spring!

Mexico Now Offers Us Long-Term Mortgages

I think that headline is very significant. Since Felipe Calderon became President here, Mexico began offering long-term mortgages to foreigners.

As I see it, this is a wide-open door for far more boomers to retire in Mexico.

With real estate prices in the Lake Chapala area not exactly bargain basement, many people who might like to retire here or in other areas popular with expats will now be able to purchase a house. Renting first is a very good idea, of course, and rentals are often good deals, but if you've been a homeowner for decades as we have, owning a place comes naturally.

I read an article about this in one of the local papers right after Molly left, and so I stopped in at one of the many real estate offices in Ajijic to ask a few questions. The realtor said that these mortgages are already available, through Bancomer, one of the big banks. (I don't know if Bancomer is handling them nationwide or just here, nor do I know if they are offered outside of the areas where foreigners are numerous.) He said the mortgages are available with a 30% down payment on homes that sell for at least $100,000 US. They currently run around 7 to 9% and are for 15 to 30 years. I didn't think to ask what kind of income documentation might be required.

As I've blogged before, Kelly and I got very lucky in finding our charming tiny cabin for very little, and we own it free and clear. I must say this is a very nice feeling... but I still think mortgages will be popular here with Americans and Canadians. One friend of mine thought that a long-term mortgage could be risky business, but hey, in some ways it's less risky than having your cash tied up in an expensive house!

My mind is a little boggled by the thought of even heavier traffic through Ajijic on the carretera (highway), but I've tended to think that a lot more "gringos" would be coming anyway. By what amount this will increase the expat population, time will tell.