Why Move to Mexico?

I'm riding on other bloggers' coattails twice in a row here. Mark just posted an interesting article in which he interviewed several foreign bloggers about why they live in Mexico. I'm one of them.

My answer was pretty short -- as I recall, I was half asleep late one evening and catching up with email. Still, it sums up my feelings reasonably well. If it wasn't fun, I doubt we'd be here!

Peter Starts Blogging, with Lemons and Limes

Our friend Peter, who is teaching English in Zamora, was by here for a few days over spring break, and I helped him set up a blog. It's at peterbrice.com and has a post I was thinking of writing myself, about limones y limas, that's lemons and limes... or is it limes and lemons? Maybe you''ll know after you read his blog!

Here's our tree, finally slowed down after its wild abundance of January and February. Then five or six a day was average, now it's just under one a day.

Learning Spanish

I've been reading the very interesting blog of David Rodriguez for a while now, and we have emailed a little. He is a Spanish professor and I asked him for a guest column on learning Spanish. He kindly obliged, and this is what he sent. I can vouch for his advice to read the Bible in Spanish -- I have a paperback of the New Testament with English on one side and Spanish on the other, and it's fun to read.

So you want to learn Spanish! Or, maybe you just want to improve your Spanish. Well, you will if you put your mind to it. I’ve been teaching Spanish for twelve years now and I’ve noticed that persistence leads to fluency. The secret to learning Spanish is to think in Spanish. You should always be learning Spanish. Continue doing whatever has been working for you, such as college courses, listening to audio recordings while you drive, or computer programs. But try a few new things, too. You need to expose yourself to Spanish in different settings.

Watch the news in Spanish. If you keep up with current affairs, watch the news in Spanish. You’ll be surprised how much you will understand. The pictures and films will give you a context that will help understand what they’re saying.

Watch DVDs in Spanish. What’s your favorite movie? I imagine that you’ve probably seen it a few times so you know exactly what the characters will say and what will happen next. Most DVDs of recent movies allow you to listen to the movie in Spanish. Turn on the Spanish subtitles while you’re at it. Just beware that sometimes the subtitles don’t correspond exactly to the soundtrack.

Read in Spanish. What’s your favorite hobby or topic? Search for it on wikipedia.org and read it in English. Most articles are fairly short, so reading it won’t take long. Now look in the left margin for the link that says Español. Click on it and you will be able to read the same article in Spanish. And this is proper Spanish and not this horrendous Spanish produced by some computer translator.

Read the Bible in Spanish. This is a good resource for learning to read Spanish because most people are familiar with parts of the Bible, Genesis, for example. You can find it on the internet for free. The nice thing about reading the Bible is that all the lines are numbered. You can look up the corresponding line in an English Bible and figure out what you just read.

Study Spanish grammar. That’s right, grammar. Most Spanish students hate to study grammar, so if you do, just skip over the grammar explanations, and study the Spanish examples provided. That’s all you really need. Memorize some of the sentence constructions and substitute your own words to suit different situations. I have some Spanish grammar pages on my website if you’re interested: http://davidrodriguez.us/espanol.html

Of course you should continue to practice speaking Spanish whenever possible because perhaps the most difficult part of learning any language is developing your ear for understanding what is said.

On the Shopping Bus to Guadalajara

The Chapala Red Cross provides a useful service and makes some money by arranging for a bus to go once a month to the Plaza Mexico mall in Guadalajara. Tickets are sold in advance at the Lake Chapala Society, and we foreigners go in for Walmart, a bit of mall shopping, and doctors' appointments in the neighborhood, as the Del Carmen hospital is nearby, and many doctors have their offices nearby. This happens on the 3rd Thursday of the month generally. We leave Ajijic at 9 and get back somewhere around 4. I've mentioned this before in this blog.

Well, now the Red Cross has added a second bus each month on the first Thursdays, and I recently went on its maiden voyage with a friend. (Definitely not the maiden voyage of the actual bus, but hey, its air conditioning worked and that was most welcome. Guadalajara is hotter than our area, as Lake Chapala has a distinct effect of moderating the temperatures.)

By the way, the Red Cross here is not like it is back home. It provides essential services that local governments cannot afford. It helps in disasters but its clinic in Chapala, staffed 24/7 with medical personnel including doctors, provides basic health care. Its ambulances are the only first response in its area. Find out more, in English or Spanish, at http://www.cruzrojalakeside.com/ Tax-deductible donations (in Mexico, the US, and Canada) can be made via Paypal too.

We went to Galerias, a three-story upscale mall in Guadalajara, anchored by Liverpool and Sears... in Mexico, Sears is much fancier than in the US. I was on a hunt for all-cotton queen sheets, not an easy task here since queen bed are rare and so are all-cotton sheets. But I found some at Sears. they had a nice Laura Ashley set for about $120 US, but the ones I found were about half that and made in Mexico. The young man who helped us was dressed to the nines in a nice suit, and I told him he looked ready to go to a wedding. He laughed and said it was about the presentation.

The sheets were my big splurge of the day. My friend found some darling outfits for her young daughters, on sale in one of the numerous chic little shops. Some Irish friends of hers live nearby and they came over for lunch with us.

"Is this really Mexico?" someone asked. Oh yes. It's easy to forget that there are many wealthy people in this country, but a quick stroll through Galerias proves that consumerism and designer name goods are alive and well here. Want to see for yourself? Here is the website of Galerias.

It doesn't take much of that to bore me silly. My eco-husband would have hated it. I said as much to a vivacious Canadian lady I met on the bus, and she said her husband would have taken a taxi home rather than spend much time there.

The mall was not the only attraction. Walmart and Sam's Club were in its parking lot, and right across the street was Costco and another general groceries-plus type of store called Mega. I got into Costco with someone who had a membership. Had I wanted to buy anything, I could have gotten a day pass, but I just looked around while my friend had a longer visit with her Irish friends. One nice thing about having a small house is that there isn't room for a lot of stuff.

It's good to get to know the resources here in Mexico, but I won't be in a hurry to go back. Coming and going, it was almost ten hours. I'd rather be blogging. Yeah, I blogged about this, but believe me I don't need an all-day shopping trip to find things to write about!

Hillside Fire on a Dry and Windy April Night

I looked out our back kitchen door last Thursday evening, and there was this fire. Actually, the flames were quite a lot higher then. I immediately called Kelly to come and take a look. Gusts of wind rattled our trees as we stared at it. It seemed that we were not in real danger, but we talked a little about it. The flames were less than a kilometer away, we guessed, in the steep hills directly behind San Juan Cosala.

By the time Kelly got his camera out, it had died down to this, and soon few flames were visible. About that time the smell of smoke came our way, and we closed up the house for much of the evening.

Evidently a farmer had been burning a field in preparation for planting corn, something that has gone on here for centuries. Our maid Rosa told us that the fire department came. We heard from Roberto, our pool guy and close friend, that several years ago a fire of this sort went up into the mountains and burned for four days. A helicopter fought that fire with water from Lake Chapala.

Scary.It has been a very dry winter and we are now in the last couple of months of so of the dry season. It's in the mid to upper 80s every day. Everything is dry. Cultural differences between Mexicans and North Americans towards fire safety are pretty big. Scary. Oh, I said that.

Yesterday morning Kelly and a friend went hiking in the hills, and the trail took them right through the burned area, which Kelly thought might have been 50 or more acres. Given the dryness and the gusty winds, that's lucky. Behind the burned area you can see houses of the Raquet Club, a nice development inhabited mostly by foreigners. There was a lot of damage there last September from the waterspout.

Lucky. Oh, I said that.

Roll Your R's!

I admit it, I'm terrible at rolling my R's in Spanish. So when our friend Peter gave me the URL for a website where I could learn to roll my R's, I was curious to see if I could overcome this limitation. Dubious too, but willing to check it out.

Peter sent me to: http://www.wikihow.com/Roll-Your-%22R%22s

It's one long page with lots of information. I was comforted by something I read at the very bottom: If you can't touch your toes today, it doesn't mean you are doomed to never touching them. You'll just need to get in better shape. Well, it turns out that rolling your R's is something like that, unless you happen to have some relatively unusual conditions such as missing upper teeth or a cleft palate.

I can't count the number of times that well-meaning friends have told me to put my tongue on the roof of my mouth and then to let it flutter. That bit of advice just doesn't cut it. My friends, no matter whether Spanish or English is their first language, then merrily proceed to roll long and magnificent R's. I can hear them fine; I just can't create them. A variety of awkward sounds come out of my mouth.

This webpage gives a number of methods you can try for getting a good rolled R. None of them worked for me on the first attempt, which the author says is to be expected. This is something that takes practice.

A list of ten steps begin the page, and while I did bog down on relaxing my tongue on step 3 and tensing it on step 5, it's a nice basic list. Things get more complicated after that with several different approaches outlined. I was intrigued by some of them:

• The Butter/Ladder method builds on something I CAN do, which is give the normal American pronunciation of those two words.
• The dR method did nothing for me at first, even though it helped Lenin. Maybe it would work with time.
• The Tiger method seemed beyond me.
• The Vision Dream method held out some hope.

The page ends with some useful tips and some warnings.

It's clear that practice is called for. If I muster up enough motivation to practice, I will report back in the blog. But there are an awful lot of other things I don't know how to do that don't seem as frustrating to learn. Maybe I will roll an R some day, but please don't hold your breath. Hmm, wonder if that's another way to roll an R.