The Plaza in San Juan Cosala

The plaza in San Juan Cosala is rarely this empty. It's recently had a lot of work done to make it more attractive, and it's really very nice!

A friend of ours from San Juan Cosala who is currently working in the US asked us for a photo of the plaza. It happened that Kelly walked through the plaza very early one Sunday morning and got this picture... that's why it's so quiet.

Esta es para ti, amigo al norte!

Being an Expat, in France or Mexico

The other day, Sam posted a comment on a recent blog entry which got me thinking. It says in part,

I'm a Mexican living in France since 2005, so I really know the feeling of being an expat. Every now and then I wonder if there are foreigners living in Mexico that might be feeling a bit like I do here. A quick google search brought me to your site.

That got me thinking about my years in Europe, mostly in France and Spain, over 40 years ago. (Geez, how does that happen? I won't dwell on that topic today.)

Ah, France... I was first there as a university student. I loved the country, the food, the architecture, the culture. I wasn't that wild about the French people, though, as most of the ones I met were pretty aloof. I actually had better French then than I have Spanish now, but my pronunciation in both languages leaves a lot to be desired. The French were not kind about it. I remember meeting my younger sister at the airport in Paris when she came to spend a vacation with me. We got in a taxi and I told the driver to go to "Huit, Rue de la Harpe."

"Non, mademoiselle," he said curtly, "Huit, Rue de la Harpe."

I thought I'd said that, but evidently my pronunciation of that elusive French u was not acceptable. So much for showing off to my sister how fluent I had become in French! The driver and I repeated the address to each other several more times -- I don't remember if the taxis had meters there and then but if so, I'm sure the the meter was running -- before he deigned to drive us to the left-bank hotel at that location.

With that kind of memory of the French contrasting so strongly with the warmth and friendliness of the Mexicans, I've been wondering what it's like to be a Mexican expat in France. I hope Sam comes back and posts something about that.

Also, Sam, I wonder how you feel there. Is it much like how I feel here? Sometimes I love being here and feel blessed beyond measure, sometimes I wonder if I will ever feel really at home here, and sometimes I am achingly homesick for the US -- increasingly, I fear, for a US that doesn't exist in the form I miss. (That, too, is a topic for another day. Or not.)

For some reason, Sam's comment reminded me of a blog post I did three years ago, when Kelly and I were renting a house in Bernal, Queretaro, and it got me thinking about the time I had rented a house in a small coastal town in southern Spain. It's one of my better blog posts, I think, so here's a link to Nerja and Bernal.

I also hope this post today will get comments from some of the various Americans and Canadians who live in Mexico. How would you sum up your feelings?

A Week in the Life Of

Today I'm going to give you an idea of what our lives were like this week, hoping that this will be helpful to people thinking of retiring to Mexico or simply living here, whether it's by Lake Chapala as we are or anywhere else.

After I wrote last week about how hot it was, we had our first really significant rain, complete with thunderstorm that had me turning off our router and unplugging my laptop. It's been cooler since then, hitting the mid 80s or so, cooling down at night. We're rarely using our fan at all. Nice!

Meanwhile, we're eating out of our garden quite a lot. Our lettuce is bolting and we will replant, but I am letting some of the plants go, in order to collect seeds... we use non-hybrid seeds so we can do this, bringing them down from the US.

We've got our first-ever artichokes, and in fact two of these are steaming right this minute. We've been eating squash, snow peas, broccoli, cucumbers, and more.

In the technological world, we had computer challenges this week. Our "spare" laptop running Windows Vista had some problems. We found a retired foreigner who loves to fix computers, and it is now in his obviously capable hands. But then, with no spare in the house, my laptop did some weird things. Freakout time! Even worse, it happened while Kelly was in Guadalajara at the dentist where he was having work done on an implant. (We do normal dentistry here at Lake Chapala.)

I've run a complete scan on my computer and it's not a virus. I will do further work but not till after my whole "My Documents" finishes uploading to an inexpensive online service I found called datadepositbox.com. Computer problems south of the border are even more of a challenge than up north!

It's been quite a social week for us, as we've been out and about some plus we had people over twice. Once, some good friends we hadn't seen for ages came over for dinner. Yesterday, we had a great time with a young family we are getting to know. Speaking almost entirely in Spanish for some four or five hours is great for our fluency! And whenever kids get into our swimming pool, I think of the family from Guadalajara that originally built this place and the pool, as their kids were growing up. Do I hear echoes of their laughter?

Hot Summer and Scorpions, Here by Lake Chapala

It always surprises people in the US when I tell them that our hottest season is about now.... April, May, and early June, until the rainy season begins sometime in June.

It's been plenty hot this year. Lately it's been getting into the high 80s and low 90s every afternoon for weeks now. Being at about 5000 feet, it does cool down at night, into the high 50s or so, but our lows have been gradually rising. The net result is that our one-level brick house has been getting a bit warmer, day by day. I'm sitting at my computer now just after 8 in the morning, and it's already rather warm here at my desk. Our big window fan is sucking in the fresh morning air from the yard, cooling things down a bit, at least with the nice air flow. We don't need air conditioning.

I wouldn't say this is any hotter than other years... memories are pretty subjective. We stay cool enough, most of the time. Our house is uphill enough from the town that we get whatever breezes come off Lake Chapala, about a kilometer away. We swim every afternoon now. Kelly has taken up wearing shorts regularly for the first time in his life! Who says people can't change?

Once the rains begin, it cools down enough that we will start sleeping under blankets again, and we'll get to stop watering the yards and garden so much. The highs will often be the high 70s and low to mid 80s, which I consider perfect.

Watering has been a challenge at times, because the city water was off for a couple of days. Getting enough water can be tricky at the end of the dry season, but part of the situation this year is that some new water mains are going in, a good thing in a town where the water system is sometimes called leaky. We take shorter showers and all that, but we did acquire a quarter-acre yard with lots of plantings. Everything is getting the minimum for now.

This is our first year with our vegetable gardens. We've had trouble starting seeds in the beds because of the midday heat, so we started seeds in yogurt containers and transplanted them. We've had great lettuce, just now trying to bolt. We've been eating lots of squash. We just pulled our broccoli plants yesterday, as we were getting more aphids than flowerets -- these plants were great producers when it was cooler. Our tomatoes are still green but getting quite large. Our lemon tree keeps us in lemons, and we have some bananas coming along.

Now, about the scorpions...

They come out of the ground when it gets warm, and for whatever reasons, they love to come indoors. We spray, with some pet-friendly stuff, and that helps. But in recent weeks there has been at least one scorpion a week in the house. One week there were four, and I muttered about moving to Alaska.

This morning, we had just finished making the bed when Kelly said "Get the dogs away," with an urgency in his voice. I figured it was a scorpion just from his tone of voice, before he even said the word.  I called the dogs and got them outside. Kelly scooped the huge scorpion into our dishpan and flushed it.

This time was a little different, though -- Kelly had been wearing just socks and he had felt a very slight sting. His foot showed nothing, though. He put our ice pack on the floor and rested his foot on it while he had his morning tea.

So he was lucky. I killed another one on the front porch just now.

And so it goes in our tropical paradise!

Learn to Speak Spanish... or Go to Jail?

A couple of foreigners who live in the Lake Chapala area committed a serious driving infraction. I'm not clear on whether they did this in one vehicle or two. In any case, they found themselves stopped by the local traffic police who insisted they go to court.

When their day in court arrived, they claimed that they couldn't have known they were making an error because they didn't read or speak Spanish.

The judge sentenced them to learning Spanish or spending a year in jail.

Their classes were to begin  within a week and they were to report to the court on their attendance each week.

I read this in a local English-language magazine (El Ojo del Lago, May 2008, page 40). It could be an urban legend, or more likely it really happened.

Don't risk jail! Beyond that, life in Mexico is MUCH better if you speak the language. Rocket Spanish is a great downloadable program for beginners especially.

Sometimes Blogging Slides Down the To-Do List

It's been that way for me lately. Just busy with other stuff, mostly a new website I will announce here later. (Not on Mexico.)

Luckily I can refer you to a couple of other bloggers... same ones I mentioned recently:

Here is an interview with a variety of foreigners living in Mexico about what their biggest adjustment was:

http://www.mexico501.com/interview-biggest-adjustment/75/

And here is our friend Peter again, this time with an excellent article on five things Mexicans could teach Americans:

http://peterbrice.com/five-things-mexicans-could-teach-americans.html

Taking Long Distance Buses in Mexico

If you've ever endured a long distance bus ride in the United States, you may not be inclined to think that taking one in Mexico could be a much nicer experience. But it really can be.

While Americans will typically fly or drive their own cars in the US for long trips, Mexicans are much more apt to take buses. Not necessarily the "chicken buses" of so many stereotypes, either... a long-distance Mexican bus ride in first class or luxury class can be very pleasant, with comfortable reclining seats, a reasonably clean bathroom, movies, and so on.

In any city of any size, you just go to the large bus station and it's like an airport, typically with local buses going from one part and long-distance ones from another. (In Guadalajara, local and long-distance buses have separate stations a taxi ride away.) You will see a variety of companies competing for your business, wherever it is you want to go. Chances are a bus is leaving pretty soon for that city. It can all be a bit overwhelming! I favor the higher class companies, in the perhaps erroneous assumption that they are likely to have better drivers.

Catching a bus from a smaller town can be a matter of going to a bus station or you may just ask around and find out where to get on the bus. When our friend Peter came to visit recently, he took the bus from Zamora, where he teaches English, to a highway intersection just outside of Jocotepec, a small city near us. Then he took a cab to our place. This was a second class bus route, no bathrooms and lots of stops, but he said it went fine. When his visit ended, Kelly took him back to that same highway intersection just beyond Jocotepec, and someone else was already standing there waiting for a bus. Peter had learned that one would come by about every half hour.

There are dozens upon dozens of Mexican bus companies. Here's an example of the website of one that does a lot of Guadalajara routes. You can play around with possible routes and see the times and costs:

 www.etn.com.mx

I know travelers who particularly like this company. Check out, for example, Guadalajara to Puerto Vallarta.