Around Manzanillo

When we were in Manzanillo for a weekend recently, we stayed in the older part of the hotel district... outside the city itself but closer to it than most of the tourism area.

We had breakfast with our friends from Colorado, whom we had arranged to meet there:

On a walk to a nearby cafe for lunch. I was intrigued by the semi-rundown, semi-posh quality to the neighborhood. I liked the look of this apartment complex, but as it was across the street from the beachfront hotels, it was not prime real estate. There's a "For Rent" sign on one of the balconies, and only one of the other places showed any sign of human occupation. Maybe these are getaway places for Mexicans who come more during the holidays.

Manzanillo is a major port, and there is a naval base. On a late afternoon walk, I was captivated by this street sign was in front of the naval base. There were lots of young Mexican men around, but we didn't see any bicycle groups!

This huge ship, at least a block long and carrying literally hundreds of containers, had glided out to sea while we were in the water and couldn't get a shot of its immense presence compared to the palm trees and buildings:

But this does show the containers piled high on piers:

Coming into the city you can see how the container cranes rise above the urban landscape. Manzanillo is an interesting combination of busy commercial port -- it's Mexico's largest container port -- and tourism attraction. We know more Mexicans who come to Manzanillo for beach trips, from where we live by Lake Chapala, than ones who go to Puerto Vallarta. It's more economical here, it seems, and also a shorter drive, not requiring going through Guadalajara.

It's always good to relax after a vigorous outing...

... or enjoy the sunset from our hotel room. That's a kite, not birds, flying.

 

On the drive back home, we stopped at a couple of roadside stands. At the first one, we bought several green coconuts for 2.5 pesos (about 20 cents US) each. At the one below, we loaded up on melons...

... after accepting tastes of several kinds and chatting with the stand owners. They have been there 27 years and their family grows the melons nearby.

Historic Tour of San Jan Cosala Coming Up

On Monday, January 4, there will be walking tours of the history of San Juan Cosala, taking about an hour. I took this tour last year and it was terrific. Gerardo Tolantino, who will lead both tours, was born and raised here in San Juan Cosala. He speaks good English -- in fact, he teaches English -- and he is a really fine person. I always enjoy talking with him when our paths cross.

The historic tour will be given twice, at noon and again at 2 PM.

There will also be a  crafts show, folkloric and pre-Hispanic dancing, mariachi music, and refreshments. Cost for the tour and refreshments is 100 pesos, which will benefit the soccer program for teenagers. Since Kelly and I have a teenage friend here who is passionate about soccer, we've come to see how very important this program is.

You can get tickets on the plaza in San Juan Cosala shortly before each walk, but if you know you are coming, it's helpful to the organizers to have an approximate head count. You can call any of these English-speaking volunteers for more information or for tickets:

In Ajijic, Marion 376-766-0665

In San Juan Cosala, Dee 387-761-0041, Marie 387-7610, or Sally 387-761-0324

Here's my blog entry about this event from last year:

http://www.mexico-with-heart.com/blog/2007/02/historic-tour-of-san-juan-cosala.html

Retiring in Manzanillo, on the Mexican Pacific Coast

Retire in Manzanillo?

How does life on a Pacific beach sound? With your home right on the beach, lulled to sleep at night by the soft whispers of the surf? Manzanillo is a small Mexican city right on the Pacific, down the coast a ways from the larger and much more famous and expensive Puerto Vallarta.

When we spent the weekend in Manzanillo recently, I chatted with Billy Hunter after he and his Golden Retriever stepped off their patio for a morning outing on the beach. The dog happily spent a lot of time in the water!

Billy and his wife have been living in Manzanillo for about four years. They are among some fifty foreign families, he estimated, who make this city their year-round home. He guessed that in winter the foreign population might rise as high as some 2500 people.

Billy loves it in Manzanillo. While it is not inexpensive to live here, there are many amenities such as good restaurants. Property values are rising as more foreigners settle here. The crime rate is extremely low -- "practically nonexistent," he said -- due in part to the full employment enjoyed by Mexicans here. He said employment is at 99.5% and that you see "Help Wanted" signs everywhere.

Manzanillo is a commercial port -- it's Mexico's largest container port, with many containers from Asia then being trucked on the mostly four-lane highway from here to Guadalajara and onward into Texas and many US and Canadian destinations. This means that a lot of the city is affected by the port. The downtown area has parts that nobody would call chic. Billy commented that the area is changing. Within the past couple of years or so, Walmart, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken have come in.

As in other parts of Mexico where foreigners cluster, they tend to do things to help the community. Billy and his wife have been involved in a pet spay-and-neuter project and there is also a project to help families with what they need to do when a foreigner dies here. This does happen, given the age of many of the retirees here.

Kelly and I had noticed the air pollution that you can see in the bottom of the picture above, Billy explained that electricity is generated by burning oil. There has been talk about ways to improve or change the air quality, but nothing has happened. Our friends from the US with whom we were staying at the hotel told us that the air quality had been considerably worse before we arrived.

But back to the beach. Had we seen the whales earlier that morning, Billy asked. No, we had missed them. There had been two, and this is the time of year that you are most likely to see them.

(Billy, if you see this, I didn't get the email you told me you sent... please try again!)

Colima: A Prosperous Mexican City

Recently we drove to Colima and Manzanillo for a few days. From Lake Chapala, where we live, it's less than three hours to Colima, mostly on a very good four-lane highway, partly on a two-lane highway. We passed an active volcano, with steam issuing out from its top.

We stayed overnight in Colima at the Maria Isabella, an attractive modern hotel. We were there with friends who had some business in the city, and we enjoyed getting to know it -- I had been there once before. At about a thousand feet above sea level, it's 4000 feet below our area, and the climate is distinctly warmer. On a January day, it was very pleasant shirt-sleeve weather, even into the evening.

In our hotel room, I read a well-thumbed Chamber of Commerce-type paperback about the state of Colima. In English and Spanish, and designed to draw investors, it described a prosperous state with high education and employment levels, low crime, many women in high positions, and so on. I'd already heard much of this from other visitors to the city, who also described it as being quite progressive. The population is about 150,000, and it is home to several universities. The state's economy rests on mining (including the largest iron mine in Mexico), agriculture, and industry as well.

Most of our fellow guests were from Jalisco, judging from their license plates. Here's a picture of cars in the hotel lot, not so much for its charm as to show how new and upscale Mexican vehicles often are. Sure, you see old clunkers on the roads at times, but the middle and upper classes are driving good looking things, not necessarily extremely recent but well kept up. There may be a parallel with the fact that the people are always well dressed too... the stylish sloppiness so common north of the border is extremely rare in Mexico.

In the morning, Kelly and I went for a walk. This traffic circle could have been a bit of a nightmare to drive around, but traffic lights controlled the flow of traffic. Our destination was the Museo de las Culturas de Occidente, (the Museum of Western Cultures), with much pre-Hispanic pottery, mostly from this immediate area.

This piece is a squash, a plant much represented, and the next two are the "Colima dogs" I was so enchanted with when I last went to Colima. Photos were allowed without flash at the museum.

This first dog piece has a human mask on his face, and it would have been buried with a human, to assist the human in making the journey to the next world.

Here are my two blog entries that explain the Colima dogs, with photos:

Pottery Dogs of Colima

Dogs in the Tombs of Colima

I'll have several posts about Manzanillo soon, with photos.

One Semester of Spanish Love Song

One of my main blog themes this year is going to be learning to speak Spanish. To see how far you can or can't get with a little Spanish, watch this... it really had me chortling when I watched it. It's under two minutes long, and became something of an internet video sensation.

If you can't follow all the Spanish, here's a version with subtitles (in Spanish):

And if this level of Spanish is beyond you so far, do take a look at my favorite program for learning the language, with mp3 files and downloadable book: Rocket Spanish

Visiting the Ajijic Clinic, with Reflections on Mexican Health Care

A week ago on Saturday afternoon, I realized that the earache I had was getting bad. Mid-weekend is not the ideal time for finding medical care, but off we went to the Ajijic Clinic, which states it has 24/7 care. Like many clinics in Mexico, it's more than a clinic -- this one is a small hospital as well, with fewer than a dozen beds. But a friend had knee replacement surgery there, with the specialists coming out from Guadalajara, and she can't stop singing the praises of the care she got.

Once there, I only had to wait about 20 minutes before I was seen by a young woman doctor. She checked my ears and confirmed what I suspected, that I had an infection. She gave me prescriptions for antibiotics, ibuprofen, and antihistamines, which we filled at the large, modern Farmacia Guadalajara (part of a chain) across the street.  She and I spoke in a mixture of Spanish and English.

On Tuesday I went back to the clinic because my ear was again getting worse and had kept me awake in the night. This time I was seen by Dr. Alfredo Rodriguez, who has worked there for many years and speaks excellent English. He said there was a lot of debris in the ear and so he cleaned it, excavating all sorts of yucky little bits of encrusted gunk, which he showed me as they came out. I appreciated seeing what each painful attack yielded. Made it more worthwhile! I wonder, would an American doctor have done that?

So now I'm almost totally healed and reflecting on the care I received. The costs were very different from what they would have been in the US: 150 pesos (about $14 US and that is not a typo) to be seen on the weekend, and 250 pesos for the office visit where Dr. Rodriguez spent more time doing the cleaning. The meds were about 800 pesos on Saturday, and 300 more on Tuesday, and without listing exactly what I got, you can't really compare those with US prices.

Something else I like is that when I went in both times, I didn't need an appointment. Like on the weekends, the Ajijic Clinic treats patients in the order of arrival during the week too. I waited closer to an hour, as Dr. Rodriguez saw a young Mexican woman cradling her obviously very painful arm and a Canadian woman I know. The clinic does offer appointments for seeing any of the numerous specialists who come out from Guadalajara part of the week.

By the way, Dr. Rodriguez is listed as one of the best doctors in Mexico in a book called Mexico: Health and Safety Travel Guide, written by some doctors. He and I chatted about the quality of care available in Guadalajara -- it is really top notch. For many things, it is among the very best places to go in North America.

We are SO rich!

I often feel rich in comparison with many of the Mexicans I know here in the Lake Chapala region. It's not just a feeling... it's a fact. Believe me, my fellow Americans would not consider me rich by US standards! But here it is different, and I am grateful that I never think twice about affording propane, electricity, two cellphones, or food...even the relatively expensive imports we buy at times. (No reason to give up tamari!)

While there is great poverty in some of the rural areas and in the slums around the big cities, Mexico does have a middle class (much smaller than up north) and of course a wealthy class.

Here by Lake Chapala, many Mexicans are better off than in other parts of the country because of all the work provided by the thousands of foreigners who live in the area: construction workers, maids, gardeners, pool caretakers, restaurant owners, shopkeepers catering to foreign tastes, Spanish teachers, and others benefit financially from our being here. Recently a taxi driver I talked with here said that this area is in a bubble economically, sheltered from the travails of the rest of the country by the presence of expats. He figured that this would also be true of Puerto Vallarta, San Miguel de Allende, and a few other parts of Mexico.

And while I'm aware that Mexico is far from being one of the poorest nations in the world, I don't think much about it...

When Marie McC posted a thoughtful comment to my blog post about learning Spanish, I got curious and found my way to a blog she had written about being in the Peace Corps in Togo ten years ago.

It's called A Handful of Memories: A Returned Peace Corp Volunteer’s tales of Togo, West Africa (1996-98). She writes of the extreme poverty there, families too poor to afford the cement to build a latrine, tires so bald that she vowed to stop looking at tires on vehicles she was riding in, and more.  It brought back the summer I spent on a work camp in West Africa when I was 20, and how amazed I was at the joyousness of the people there, considering the tremendous challenges they face in their lives.

We Americans are so rich, and I am so grateful for the freedom and flexiblity this has given me. At the same time, we are far from the richest country if you measure by joy.

A View of Mexico As Seen from the Expat Forums

Today's post is written by a woman I know who is thinking of retiring to Mexico in the future and has spent time on several expat message boards about various parts of Mexico. Her opinions are hers, not mine, but very interesting I think. and I've added my comments at the bottom of the post.

My friend says:

I've noticed that expat communities in each of the major gringo magnets are a little different.  All my observations come from regularly lurking on several message boards over a period of months and getting a feel for the personalities that frequently post there. Granted, it's a small and probably very skewed sample. But put the personalities together with what you can learn from the boards about that particular place itself, and you can definitely observe differences and form impressions. If you visit the boards for awhile, you'll see what I mean.

LAKE CHAPALA

The Lakeside communities attract more of the older, retired crowd. These communities self proclaim to be rather quiet with not much in the way of nightlife. The interactions on the message boards, both chapala.com and chapalaforum.com, are frequently aggressive, contentious and often just nasty.

I'm sure there are probably a lot of very nice people who live in these communities, but my impression from these boards is that there are too many with bad attitudes. Many have made Lakeside into gringolandia by importing their U.S. lifestyles there, then they complain about the next wave of new expats who do the same.

A couple of years ago I gave up on the idea of retiring in Mexico because of what I saw on chapala.com.  But I later found other Mexico expat boards and blogs where there was a more positive atmosphere, so I'm back to considering Mexico for retirement. However, without having visited and based solely on what I read on these two message boards, I don't think the Chapala/Lakeside area is for me.

MERIDA

The Merida Insider board at meridainsider.com, although at times showing some bickering and sniping, is a much friendlier place. There seems to be a steady stream of younger expats in their 40s, 50s and even 30s, some with children, moving there.  So the English speaking expat community here is not all retired folks. Far from it.

Merida is a city and thus has more cultural offerings in the way of music, visual arts and festivities. There's a huge renovation movement going on in the centro historico made up of expats buying and fixing up properties that Yucatecans can't afford to or don't want to repair.

The English speaking expats are a much smaller percentage of the community than they are in Lakeside. English is less widely spoken there by the Yucatecans, but that doesn't seem to stop many from moving there with inadequate Spanish. These same people then advise others not to do that on the message boards, but no one seems to be paying any attention and people with inadequate Spanish continue to move there on a regular basis.

This is a community which would greatly interest me if it were not for the relentless, punishing summertime heat. Been there, done that. I can take humidity better than I can tolerate temperatures over 90.

SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE

I have the impression that SMA is more artsy and expensive. There certainly seems to be a large number of expats with a large amount of money making large amounts of renovations and improvements on their Mexican homes. However, Carol, the board owner of Falling in Love with SMA, is a big SMA booster and lives very simply there on Social Security. Apparently apartments at "reasonable" rents can still be found, just not easily.

The board is small and doesn't have a lot of activity. Carol moderates it well and doesn't tolerate incivility. The people who post there do seem nice, friendly and helpful.

The arts are indeed huge here. It's a small city, so there is more to do than at Lakeside, and more night life. I might like it there, yet the fact that, once again, there is such a large amount of Americans living there doesn't appeal to me.

VERACRUZ

The Viva Veracruz board is small and doesn't have a lot of activity.  People are very nice in their message board behavior. There was only one sarcastic, nasty and insulting person posting regularly at the beginning, but he stopped posting just about the time when the board owner was probably going to ban him.

The people who frequent this board seem to be more interested in environmental issues. They seem much more independent and not to need to live in an area with a lot of other English speaking expats. For many of them, that's why they are in Veracruz: because it's not an area favored by most of the expat crowd.  This area interests me a great deal, especially Xalapa and the surrounding villages.

GUADALAJARA

I have yet to find a Guadalajara board, although I know there's a fairly large group of Americans and Canadians who live there. I've been told that there isn't really an English speaking expat "community" as such in Guadalajara. That says to me that these people are independent and not joiners. That's me all over. Maybe there isn't a board because the English speaking expats wouldn't likely participate even if one existed. The few who live there that I've run across on the net seem like nice people.

Guadalajara interests me a lot, also, for the availability of cultural offerings, activities, goods and services, in that order.

MY THOUGHTS (Rosana's)

My friend  doesn't mention the best expat board of all: mexconnect.com which does have a fee. It has sections for all the different areas of Mexico as well as a lot of general topics: learning Spanish, travel, etc. I love it.

And she is surely throwing the baby out with the bath water with regard to the Lake Chapala area. Seems to me there is lots of nightlife here -- live music, some theater... and lots of daytime cultural events too. However, since she wants an area with fewer expats, somewhere else would be better.

We liked Xalapa a lot ourselves, but it is quite a lot warmer  (though not as bad as Merida) and somewhat more prone to noticeable earthquakes than here at Lake Chapala.

I think this approach to choosing a region does have its pitfalls -- as the saying goes, the map is not the territory -- but since she wants a relatively expat-free zone but one that has some, it can help her week through her choices. If I had her tastes, I would take a good look at the city of Queretaro. Vibrant, clean downtown, lots of culture! When we lived in Bernal, an hour outside of Queretaro, we went there often. Here is a blog entry with photos that I did back then:

http://www.mexico-with-heart.com/blog/2005/03/day-in-queretaro-mexico.html

And one about the malls

http://www.mexico-with-heart.com/blog/2005/05/malls-of-queretaro.html

Teaching English in Mexico

When our friend Peter was here over the holidays, I interviewed him briefly about teaching English in Mexico. This is my first actual video on youtube -- I've done a couple of slideshows before --and I learned a few things technically in making it, so future efforts should improve. Anyway, if you are interested in teaching English, or if you are an old friend from Crestone who remembers Peter back when he was our "teenage slave" helping us build our house there, have a look!