At the Ajijic Tianguis

A few weeks ago, we strolled through the Ajijic tianguis (weekly street market) with a visiting friend. I had a new toy with me, the Flip video recorder which is about the size of a small camera. It does surprisingly well at capturing video, though.

Here's the page with the video I made from that stroll:

http://www.mexico-with-heart.com/videos/ajijic-tianguis-flash.html

I haven't put it up on youtube or anyplace like that because I am still figuring out the technical details of doing videos. (There are a few wobbles in this one when I watch it online that I don't see when I watch my original.)

But I think this captures the feeling of the Ajijic tianguis. It's really quite an institution! You can buy all manner of things there. And you'll hear English as well as Spanish in the background.

Near the end, Kelly and our visiting friend Dave are chatting with a Mexican woman we know. Blanca and her husband Carlos come to our tianguis in San Juan Cosala on Tuesday mornings, after getting up around 3 AM to drive into the huge abastos market in Guadalajara, where produce and other food products are sold wholesale. Then they sell in Ajijic the next day. You can't get produce any fresher than from Blanca and Carlos!

People sometimes complain that the gringos have taken over Ajijic. This video shows a more Mexican face, even with the bi-cultural aspects.

Globos in Ajijic

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Kelly and I sat on a rooftop in Ajijic, at the home of some friends who live right in the village. We enjoyed the company of a variety of other people, but there was another reason we spent most of the time on the roof rather than two floors below, where the delicious food was.

Globos!

The annual balloon competition takes place every September, around the Independence Day celebrations. Believe it or not, this lovely thing is made mainly of tissue paper. People work together on their globos, whether it's a family, a neighborhood or a business.

We were several blocks from the soccer field where the globos were being launched, and that was fine with me because while most of them got off to a good start, I'm not very Mexican in my ideas about what is safe.

They go aloft -- and some go very high indeed -- due to being little hot air balloons, and the heat is supplied by kerosene-soaked cotton or rags that are set on fire just before blast off.

I'm glad that all this takes place in the middle of the rainy season. Here is the pretty one above, crashing and burning.

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This is one of the more elaborate globos. To see a whole slide show of the many photos Kelly took that day, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/kellyhart/sets/72157607290460439/show/ and click on "slide show" at upper right.

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.

Doing Errands in Ajijic, as Life Gets Back to Normal

Yesterday was the first time I'd left San Juan Cosala since the big storm last week. Kelly had gone out once but I'd been busy that day. So today I thought I'd write a sort of "day in the life of" entry. It was a very nice day, mostly sunny.

Most of the roads in San Juan Cosala that we drive on still have dry or drying mud on them, or alongside. There's no problem driving, though. About noon, we drove along the highway east of San Juan Cosala and the line of restaurants along the shore called the Piedra Barrenada, places very popular with Guadalajarans on the weekends. As we continued east toward Ajijic, we noticed huge piles of dirt and rocks that had come from the excavations and been dumped on the lake side of the highway. I was interested to notice that they were not just in our municipalid (kind of like a county) of Jocotepec but also in the neighboring one, Chapala.

Traffic in Ajijic was slowed to a crawl, not unusual along the carretera in Ajijic, but it will be even worse when the snowbirds arrive in another couple of months! We continued through the center of town, along the tree-shaded boulevard as we passed through La Floresta, and made a quick stop at our favorite ATM. We went on past one of the most popular grocery stores for foreigners, Superlake, and on to the area known as Riberas del Pilar. There our destination was the Animal Shelter, where we often buy our pet food as all profits go to this worthy cause. They were out of the dog food we prefer (Diamond for large breeds) but that was okay, we were shopping for it before we really needed it. It might come in on Monday, they said. They did have my favorite clumping cat litter, so I got a couple of month's worth. Things being in or out of stock is a rather common occurrence in shopping for imported or speciality items, at all the stores here. Just a part of life.

We returned to Ajijic on the highway, and parked near several places we were going. We ordered lunch and I went to pay our internet bill at Lagunanet and get more minutes put on our Mexican cellphone before the food came.

We got to chatting with our waiter, whose English wasn't yet fluent but was pretty good. He said he finds English difficult and wondered (jokingly, I hope) if Chinese would be easier. We asked him friendly questions about his life, in English, and soon learned that he is 27 and has a passion for photography -- not digital as much as old black and white darkroom work. He is from Mexico City and has been here less than a year. He misses it but he does like seeing the stars and the mountains, which he didn't see there. When our food came, he politely withdrew but I was so much enjoying the interaction that I asked him some more questions. He was a very sweet guy, and chatting with him was one of more interesting bits of the trip. When he learned that Kelly had done a lot of black and white work years ago, he asked if Kelly would look at some of his work sometime. Kelly said sure and gave him his card.

While Kelly went to the hardware store, I stopped in at a well-stocked farmacia for dental floss, Q tips, and lip gloss. I didn't know all the words for these things but the clerk had no trouble understanding my descriptions and pantomime. Then I popped into a second-hand clothing store which has a lot of stuff from foreigners, but nothing spoke to me. I skipped the bookstore with its selection of books in English -- travel guides, books on learning Spanish, books about Mexico, some novels etc.

Noticing that my favorite beggar wasn't there, I wondered if she was over at Superlake. I hoped her stomach trouble wasn't any worse. I passed the other beggar I know, a friendly blind man who speaks English. There aren't that many beggars around here, and the usual ones don't have the desperate and whiny attitude that I've seen in Guadalajara and in cities all over the 3rd world. I suspect they have learned that you can catch more flies with honey.

I did our grocery shopping for the week at El Torito, right there with the other stores. It is another grocery store that caters to foreigners though it has fewer imports than Superlake. Since the weekly tianguis (market) hadn't happened in San Juan Cosala on Tuesday, we were about out of produce so I stocked up. A few things, such as Washington state apples, come from the US, but mostly it's Mexican. I also got meat and other odds and ends.

Kelly joined me, and when done we drove the car over to Prasad, a small shop on the other side of the carretera where we get our vitamins. This actually took some doing as it was about 2 PM, one of the times the highway is most crowded with Mexicans going home for lunch. There isn't a traffic light there. Eventually we got across and I bought some American and some Mexican brands of nutritional supplements from Gil, the Brazilian owner and a very friendly fellow. The imported things do cost more here in Mexico, as a general rule.

We had thought of going to Barbara's Bazaar, an interesting secondhand store, but they were already closed for their Mexican-style lunch break from 2 to 4. So we decided to head on home, about a 15 or 20 minute trip from Ajijic.

Back on the carretera in San Juan Cosala, we had to wait till we could pass a pickup truck stopped in our lane of the highway, with a large crowd of people around it. Packets of rice, beans, and other things were being given out.

Home, our Rottweiler puppy went wild with joy. We were pretty glad to be back ourselves.

Sad News, Happy News in Ajijic

We recently had lunch with a friend in Ajijic, at the Secret Garden. This is a delightful vegetarian restaurant, one of our favorite places to eat. As the name implies, most of the tables are in a nice garden area in back of the building.

One of my happiest memories of the Secret Garden was a dinner last November, a festive Saturday evening with our friends who were here adopting their daughter. There were four or five couples (mostly Irish) who were here doing adoptions, plus all their babies and assorted friends and relatives. We were a jolly crowd, and I enjoyed the young Mexican man who was playing Andean music on his guitar and Andean flute.

Our waitress was the ever-vivacious Fran (Francesca) who spoke English and knew my friends well. I have a lovely mental image of her dancing to the Andean music in between keeping us supplied with food and drink.

My sad news is that Fran died recently. I don't have the details, but she had been ill for a couple of weeks or so, and one day she died, at home. She was 49.

My happy news is that the friend we had lunch with the other day is an American woman who was here about a year ago, checking out Ajijic as a place to retire to, and she loved it. She went back to California, figured out a way to get early retirement, and just came back now to find a modestly priced long term rental. She timed her visit well, on purpose, as things are relatively quiet around Ajijic with all the snowbirds having flown. She got in the flow and had her choice of at least a couple of places that would normally rent for about $600 US per month but were offered to her for about $450. She's signed a lease on a very sweet and private one-bedroom place within walking distance of everything. She'll go back to the US soon to get her stuff, and likely will be back before we return from our trip!

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.

At the Ajijic Clinic

Recently I went to the Ajijic Clinic, a small private clinic/hospital located on the main highway in Ajijic. Kelly has been going to a similar clinic, the Maskaras Clinic a few kilometers further east in Riberas de Pilar, and he has been very happy with the health care he has received from Dr. Garcia, the director there.

I chose the Ajijic Clinic because I needed to go to a dermatologist and a friend of mine recommended the one at this clinic. Dra. Reyes comes out from Guadalajara a couple of times a week. She speaks English more correctly than I speak Spanish but I am perhaps the more fluent. When she suggested that we could speak Spanglish, I felt right at home, as I often make that very suggestion! We communicated perfectly from then on, in Spanglish.

On my first visit, she examined me and was able to assure me that I only had benign moles and such on my body. We scheduled a second visit for a liquid nitrogen session to remove a bunch of these from my face and neck for cosmetic reasons. She said it wasn't too painful.

When I went back for the procedure, I lay on an examining table, and she and a nurse were on either side of me. The nurse, Lulu, was very friendly and outgoing. She has a little English but we stayed pretty much in Spanish.

As the doctora sprayed the nitrogen on the various spots, she and Lulu kept up a running conversation which I joined at times. When two Mexican women estan platicando (are chatting) I am lucky to follow a third of it, but it wasn't hard to pick out ex-esposo (ex-spouse) so I commented on that. I don't remember exactly how the conversation jumped but I learned that when Mexican men find a woman attractive they may call her a mamacita and the reverse is true too: a good-looking fellow may be called a papacito. I will listen for these words in conversations I overhear. I told them the English expression "red hot mama," which they both chortled at.

All this lively banter helped distract me, which was good, because the stings of the nitrogen did hurt at times. I'm glad to have that behind me.

I would definitely go back to that clinic in the future. In fact, I will be there next month for a CPR class that a Canadian woman I know has set up.

A friend of mine just had knee surgery at the Ajijic Clinic and she could not say enough good things about the quality of the doctors and of the care she received during her few days there. A specialist came out for Guadalajara for the surgery, and she was in the clinic for a few days after. She commented on how very caring the people were.

Costs: An office visit with the doctor was 350 pesos, about $32 US. The procedure was 800 pesos. Not bad. And I didn't have to wait more than about 5 minutes to see the doctor either time!

Why not Ajijic?

This question was in one of the comment threads, and I thought I'd answer it here where it would be more visible.

My wife & I visited Ajijic last year and are seriously considering doing what you have done, so we're keenly interested in your experiences. We looked at property in Chapala and Ajijic, and took the bus to Jocotopec (through your San Juan Cosala). Would love to know more about your decision to be there, instead of Ajijic. -- Fred, Oakland, Calif.

We are living in San Juan Cosala because a string of circumstances brought us here. This included Kelly breaking a rib, which is not recommended! But it forced us to spend more time lakeside. We *thought* (but what did we know?) that we would be returning to a town (Bernal, Queretaro) several hours east of here, where we had lived before and still had a house we had rented. We even had a cat there, being fed by our landlord.

We weren't planning to buy a place in Mexico till we had lived in this country quite a while, the standard good advice. We had sold our home in Colorado and were enjoying the sense of being more footloose and fancy free than usual.

As Kelly's rib healed some, just for fun we looked around a bit at real estate in the whole lakeside area. I think this is called playing with fire... We came across 1/4 acre lovingly planted many years ago with fruit trees (banana, papaya, lemon, lychee, pistachio, loquat) and other lovely landscaping, with a modest but charming two-room cabin recently remodeled, and a small swimming pool. This was for sale for $80,000 US, which was at least 20k below market value at that time (a year ago), in this location. We succumbed, justifying that it was very likely a good investment. Oh, and I forgot to mention the peek-a-boo lake views.

So that's how we ended up on the edge of San Juan Cosala. I'm sure this place if located in Ajijic would have cost a lot more.

At first, I kinda wished that we were in Ajijic, with walking access to more restaurants, shopping, the Lake Chapala Society, ATMs, medical, and all that. But it's only a 15 minute drive or a slightly longer bus ride, and we are really small town / rural type folks. We're both writers who are online a lot and we enjoy the relative quiet here. I say relative, because Mexico is not noted for its quiet. Like Ajijic, our town too has fireworks, live brass bands at any hour, etc., though on a smaller scale.

We have a routine of going to Ajijic and further east as needed for errands one morning a week, getting cash if needed out of the ATM at the corner of the libramiento and carretera (because we can swipe the cards there instead of inserting them), a few imported groceries at Superlake in San Antonio Tlay., meat at Tony's next door to it (the only place we've found good lamb), library books at the LCS, and having lunch at Pedro's, the Secret Garden, or one of several other favorite restaurants we've found. I'm always glad to get back home. Often something else takes us in that direction at other times during the week too. We like Jocotepec and go that way too.

This week we were amazed at how hectic Ajijic was and how everywhere you looked there were lots of Americans and Canadians. I like the more Mexican feeling of San Juan Cosala, with the plus that there are enough foreigners to have friends of our own culture nearby too. We're making good friends among the Mexicans, and this may be easier here than in Ajijic, from what others have said to me. I don't really know. But I do know that the longer we are here in San Juan Cosala, the more at home I feel here.

Upper La Floresta, Ajijic

One Saturday afternoon recently, we went to Ajijic to go to a nursery, Flora Exotica on the corner of the carretera and the libramiento, or bypass road for going to Guadalajara without going through the town of Chapala.. After my outing a while ago to the strawberry and raspberry farms, we're trying to find some berry plants for our own garden. We haven't succeeded yet but we did get some other nice plants. It's a huge nursery, and we enjoyed looking at all sorts of things.

Then we decided to go for a walk before returning home. We parked just off the main carretera, or highway, on the eastern side of Ajijic, by a neighborhood called La Floresta. It's a peaceful, suburban sort of community, with its own garbage collection and police, and popular with foreigners as a place to live. We had often walked last year through the part of La Floresta which is between the carretera and Lake Chapala, but we had never walked in this area.

Upper La Floresta is gated, though the lower one isn't. We liked these flowers cascading over the gate:

Here, the plants on the wall are metalwork:



Mexican tile work is often quite lively! These are from two different houses in the neighborhood: