Bernal, Queretaro, is a charming, upscale Mexican town about an hour from the lovely colonial city of Queretaro. A few foreigners live there, and we were among them for several months in 2005. But of the 5,000 or so inhabitants, fewer than two dozen were foreign… and we never met many of those! Our Spanish improved a lot while we were there.

Bernal is clean. It has a distinctly New Age flavor, which seems to have its roots also in the pre-Hispanic culture which is still strong in Mexico. For example, see my story of first going there and meeting Anna, in my page, The Magic of Bernal.

What makes Bernal so special is the mountain above it:

This mountain attracts rock climbers from all over the world, and is also the focal point of many tales about UFOs, crystals inside it, and more. Actually, my husband saw a UFO there, after attending an all-night temescal, or sweat lodge. See Kelly’s Hot Night Out.

Everyone told us we had to be there for the spring equinox, and we were once. We joined the pilgrimage up the mountain:

And we took part in the festivities and ceremonies on the plaza:

To find out more about this wonderful little town, just choose Bernal from the category list on the sidebar. It’s under PLACES > Queretaro > Bernal.

Bernal, Queretaro: Does This Fit Your Stereotypes of Mexico? is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Our first evening in Bernal was a bit surreal. When we left there nine months ago, we thought we would be back to live in our rented house within three or four months. Now we won’t be living there at all. It was like a dream, a visit to a might-have-been reality.

We had left our cat in the care of our landlord, with various friends promising to pop in on her from time to time. The minute we arrived, I went looking for her. She wouldn’t look at me. Oh well, not too surprising even if disappointing.

We had dinner in one of our favorite Bernal restaurants and chatted with the owner, then went for a walk around town. The surreal feeling was heightened by the eerie blue light shining on the pena, the rock outcropping above the town. It’s something the town had experimented with before we left, and now they do it on weekends.

The cat pointedly ignored us till the next afternoon, then she let me pet her and deigned to purr a little. She got friendlier as the weekend wore on. We had a small cat carrier with us, and she was a very good traveler today. Now she’s ruling over the bathroom. We’ll get her spayed and examined in a couple of days, and there will eventually be pictures. It’s great to be back with her!

Back to Bernal. We packed up our stuff and filled up the motorhome, alternating those task with visiting with friends in Bernal and Queretaro, having several wonderful meals and many wonderful conversations. It was bittersweet, to get a taste of the life we might have continued. But both Kelly and I have an inner sense that we made the right choice for us. I thought many times of Robert Frost’s poem which begins:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

He ends the poem,

I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

In this case, living near Lake Chapala seems like we are (uncharacteristically!) choosing the road more traveled, in the sense that it’s an area with a huge expat population. We’ll see what roads lie ahead. I’ve certainly had enough travel for a while.

2 Comments from the old blog:

• At March 02, 2006 11:14 PM, macmember said…

  I am so glad to hear that you brought Misty home with you. While you were gone, did she have any kittens?

  Beverly

• At March 03, 2006 9:57 PM, Rosana Hart said…

  No, she didn’t have any kittens. She was pretty well confined. There are birth-control shots available for cats in Mexico and Europe and most countries other than the US, and she had those before we left, though the vet who was supposed to come one more time never did. (I forget the name of the product.)

  Yesterday she was spayed and today she is amazingly perky, busy telling our dog Larry who’s boss (not him) and checking out the house. She was about to see how far up the chimney she could get a few minutes ago when I decided I didn’t want a sooty cat and pulled her out.

Back from Bernal is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Here’s the result:

A Panorama Photo of Bernal, Mexico is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

The visas might have been ready this past Monday but they weren’t, and Kelly has used the time since then to work on getting his office further along. He used a variety of colored whitewashes after drawing the design on the walls:

He found company in his office first thing this morning… this scorpion was right in the middle of the ceiling. It’s about an inch and a half from end to end, pretty good sized. My immediate reaction was not “Yikes!” but instead “Get a picture of it for my blog!” So Kelly kindly did, getting much closer to it than I would have.

On one of my trips up the street to the lot where we park the motorhome, I saw some of the neighbors decorating their house with white and yellow things. “Good afternoon, a birthday?” I asked. No, they said, there is going to be a procession from the church for Corpus Christi. They explained a little more that I didn’t follow.

It was getting on toward dusk when the procession came by. I stood in our doorway to watch and sure got stared at. One man I know smiled at me, and a young woman did, but for once smiles were not the main expression. The singing was lovely. I recognized a friendly woman who lives up the street.

Kelly was hanging out the upstairs office window with the camera, and he said he got stared at too. Here are some pictures of the event:

Just now, someone knocked on our door. I went down and it was that friendly woman who lives up the street. I don’t know her much at all, don’t know her name. She was coming by to invite us to a “terceda edad” event which happens every Friday afternoon. The “third stage” begins at age 60. She isn’t that old but said it’s so much fun that she goes… practicing up, she grinned! “We sing, we exercise, we play…” I explained that we are going back to the U.S. for a few months but that I would be delighted to do it when we get back. Kelly just told me that he walked by the meeting last week and this lady waved him in, but he had other things on his mind.

In our conversation, I mentioned that I am over 60, and she immediately asked if I had gotten the card that enables me to get discounts on all sorts of things. I had read something about that a few months ago, but it had completely slipped my mind. So that is something else to do when we get back. I’d better start a list!

A Scorpion, a Procession, and a Friendly Neighbor is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

I woke up this morning feeling happy and sad all mixed up together. I’m so grateful that we came back to Bernal, which we weren’t going to do till we happened to run into Jay and Lucy, who lent us their house here. I’m still astonished that we found a livable house for $108 US/ a month and that we have turned into something very homey. (The kitchen awaits our return to become really good.) I’m excited about the future in a way that I wonder how many 62-year-olds are. Bernal is now a place I feel at home in, and I’m glad that we’ll be coming back here. I’ve already got a plan to do photo-essays on different people around the town for this blog and possibly for a book later.

It’s kind of amazing to me how much I have grown personally too. Fear has less of a grip on my subconscious than it did. I haven’t needed tranqulizers in traffic in months. (I will have them with me as we head north, just in case.)

Beyond that, there is something about stretching beyond comfort zones that I can highly recommend. For some reason, I really had a bee in my bonnet last fall to go somewhere foreign for the winter. We researched Panama, Nicaragua, and other places before deciding that we’d come back to Mexico this time. We really like the ease of access between Mexico and the US, as well as the tremendous diversity within this one large country. There are things I don’t care for here, sure, but there is so much love in people here. That’s probably what I like best of all in Mexico.

Leaving Bernal For Now is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

We had been invited to go to a temescal, or sweat bath, out in the country near our town of Bernal in central Mexico. It was to be Saturday afternoon. I had an intuition not to go, for whatever reason, so I honored that. Upon reflection, Kelly decided he would go. Saturday he went down to La Chicarroma, the shop in the plaza where Juvenal does healings. Juvenal would be leading the temescal. He told Kelly that some people couldn’t make it in the afternoon, so it would be at night. Kelly was to meet Juvenal at the shop around eight, and he was not to eat anything from that moment on.

When Kelly got there around eight, Juvenal was deep into doing a healing on a woman in the shop. He works right in the middle of things, chatting with other people at times while at other times his concentration on the person is total. Kelly took a seat and waited with some other people on a bench. It turned out that all three were waiting their turns for healings. They all got them, and it was about ten when Kelly got a ride with someone else. (In the Mexican sense of time, a two-hour go-with-the-flow is quite normal.)

Logically enough, Kelly assumed they were going out into the country, especially since he was riding with the man who owns the land they were going to. But the car went about two blocks and stopped. “You want to go to the ceremony, don’t you?” the man asked. Logically enough, Kelly assumed he was speaking of the temescal and said yes.

They got out of the car and went into the home of some people we know slightly. There were about 50 people there, and several of them were people whom we know pretty well. There was a little surprise at seeing Kelly there, and people asked after me.

A ceremony was going on there: a wedding. It was a civil wedding and there were lots of papers for both sets of parents and the newlyweds to sign. After our encounters with Mexican bureaucracy, I can believe it. The bride was a daughter of the people we know slightly. Soon food appeared, but Kelly, the man he had come with, and Juvenal declined the food and visited a while.

When they finally got out to the land, about eight or ten people were waiting around. A fire got started, rocks got heated, people stripped to bathing suits, big t-shirts, or underwear, and the temescal got underway. Neither Kelly nor I have been to sweat lodges in the United States, but Kelly had prepared himself by reading this article on temescals in Mexico. He said he was glad to know what it said and that this one he attended was much like that. It got started around midnight and went on for at least four hours. Kelly generally enjoyed it and was glad to notice that he handled the intense heat and steam pretty well. He did have to stand up a couple of times to avoid getting charley horses.

When the ceremony ended in the wee hours, they had some fruit and other food. La Peña, the huge rock monolith, was beautiful in the setting nearly-full moon. It is known as a place of cosmic energies and UFOs, and Kelly and the others saw some lights around its sheer cliffs for which they could think of no human-caused explanation.

Kelly began wondering how he would get back to town. The man who had given him a ride was staying on the land. Juvenal would be quite a while longer. So Kelly got a ride in a small pickup with a man and two women. He wondered why both women got in the back of the pickup, but he joined them there. It turned out that the long private road went steeply uphill, and the light truck needed the weight of all three of them far in the back to get up the hill. Once that was done, the two women hopped into the front seat and Kelly wrapped himself in a blanket that was conveniently there, for the fifteen-minute ride back to Bernal. They dropped him off a few blocks from here and he walked home through the quiet streets.

I had not been surprised when Kelly didn’t turn up, but it was my first night alone in the house and I didn’t sleep well. Saturday nights are the noisiest, and this one was no exception. The usual Saturday-night dance had ended well after midnight, and there had been a fair amount of traffic past the house. My mind came up with fear fantasies from time to time, involving Kelly or me. I did a kind of meditation, and that helped a lot, as did the deepening quiet. I finally slept, only to be awakened three separate times by the big booms of some sort of fireworks, a normal Mexican sound. When Kelly came in at six, I woke immediately. After talking, we went back to bed for a few hours.

Kelly is very glad he went, and he’s been in a very peaceful state today. I’m glad I didn’t go; it was good for me to see how I felt alone at night here. I could get used to it.

Kelly’s Hot Night Out is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Much of what we have done is painting and whitewashing, the whitewashing being white, sky blue, and a color they call oxidized red… That’s the complete range of colors that we have found for whitewash.

Also, Kelly turned the downstairs patio into a covered space by adding a roof of laminated fiberglass. To keep the sun out, he got a lot of palm branches that the local churches were finished with (right after Palm Sunday) at no cost, and those are on the roof.

Then our landlord (who is watching Kelly’s efforts with fascination and pleasure) gave us an antique rusted metal door-and-window frame. Kelly cleaned it, installed it, painted it, had glass installed, and added screening over the one window that opens all the way — more to control local cat activity than bugs.

We use a curtain made from a woolen bedspread woven here in Bernal to keep the living room cooler. We keep this across most of the morning:

Here’s how the door looks from the small walled back yard. I like how the color on the walls ties the indoors and outdoors together.

The two upstairs rooms will be our offices. I whitewashed mine, painted the cement floor blue, and varnished two doors. Kelly installed them as a long table and added shelves. We’re sharing it for now, as Kelly’s office is still untouched.

The kitchen is pretty much as we found it, with a few shelves added. Remodeling it will wait till we come back. That sink is very low.

The bathroom still needs work too. I forgot to get any pictures of the bedroom. All it needed was whitewash, a bed, and some large bamboo poles we hang our clothing on.

This shows the living room with the kitchen and bathroom doors.

We’re happy here.

Fixing up our Mexican Rental House is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Kelly said people were having a good time all around them. Mexicans really know how to have fun! The water is low on this reservoir at least partly because the rainy season is due to start in the next few weeks.

This group of teenagers had been having a terrific time, dancing and joking.

The reservoir and the spillway are in the background, a bit of Kelly shows in the rear-view mirror, and the crops are green with irrigation water:

On their way back, they stopped at a little lake near Colon:

A few months ago, I made a list of what my ideal spot would be like. Bernal comes mighty close, but I grew up in D.C. and Maryland, and I do miss lush greenery sometimes. I would love to live somewhere with a view of water.

I imagine I’ll get my water views at other places in Mexico… we are talking about spending part of next winter in the Yucatan.

Another watery place that intrigues me is Uruguay. A bit far from home, of course, but it’s got some 500 km of shoreline along the Atlantic and many large rivers. There are no earthquakes, hurricanes, or tall mountains. It’s been described as “Iowa by the sea,” as it has lots of rolling hills, mostly grassland. The population is mainly Spanish, with about 1/4 of Italian background, and it has a more European feeling than many other parts of South America. Hmm, I wonder if that means it’s less joyous. I’ve read that Uruguayans are devoted to their dogs, always a plus in my eyes. Their average income is second only to Chile in South America. I found out all this, and a bit more, from surfing the web last night when I was too tired to do anything practical. I started at escapeartist.com, an expatriate site with lots of links, and meandered from there.

Really I’m very happy here in Bernal, all the more so as our time for departure draws nearer. Kelly and I had a big planning session this morning, for how we are going to transform our publishing company so we don’t have to have an order fulfillment office at home anymore. We are pushing the technology a bit, but it looks possible. Lots to figure out!

Well, I snuck the computer away from Kelly because I hadn’t blogged yesterday either. Guess I’d better let him have it back.

Another Outing to Water is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Anyway, before going back to bed, I wandered over to the window and stood by the new screeened window panel gazing at fluffy clouds illuminated by the moon. Lovely! The town was quiet. What tranquillity.

Then I noticed that about three inches away from me, on the same side of the screen as me, was the largest spider I have ever seen. I jumped back, uttering an involuntary cry. I turned the flashlight on and watched it move rapidly down the screen.

It was all too easy to imagine how long it would be, at that fast pace, before the spider would have crossed the living room and joined us in the bedroom which has no door.

I briefly considered grabbing a yogurt container and scooping it up, but I am a klutz and Kelly is not. Laziness won out. I woke him up and he did the yogurt container bit, with a twist I hadn’t thought of. He climbed the steps to our upstairs patio and dropped the spider into the yard next door, where nobody lives. We both felt fine about that.

We curled up and went back to sleep. We may be in the mountains, but this is still the tropics! I was reminded of that fact again this morning when I got an email from a friend. Our town in Colorado is due to have snow, possibly heavy, in the next few days. Here in Bernal, it’s been shirtsleeve weather most evenings lately. I do prefer this, spiders and all.

Spider in the Night is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

We rented a large, furnished house for $50 US a month — the dollar ruled in Europe then! From our upstairs bedroom window, we could look out at the Mediterranean, which was a potato patch away. In the summer, the house got too expensive for us, so we roamed around France, then came back and lived in a diffent house in Nerja. This time we were in a very old house in the heart of the town, unfurnished other than the few bits of furniture we acquired.

What did we do? We unwound. Both from very high-achievement families, it was the first time in our young lives — we were in our early 20s — that we were completely free to do whatever we wanted to, as long as our money lasted — and we made it last and last. We both wrote. We took Spanish lessons. We spent a month in North Africa.

After 15 months, we returned to the US and some time later we went our separate ways. I went back to Berkeley, this time getting a Master’s in Library Science. Work, marrying Kelly, raising llamas, and all sorts of other things followed.

I’ve always remembered my time in Nerja with a special happiness. There was so much about that life that I loved… the people, the sense of community, walking everywhere except when we roamed around by bus or train, the music of the Spanish language, the delicious climate, the ocean, the joy of living in another culture. I can still smell the fresh bread that came out of the village bakeries around dawn, mixed with the smell of rosemary. I still remember Dolores, who cleaned our house once a week, listening to my boyfriend and me speaking English and asking us, “In your country, do even the children speak that way?”

Now it’s almost 40 years later and here I am, living in a small town of about 5,000 in another Spanish-speaking country. The standard of living here in this prosperous town in Mexico isn’t that different from how I remember Spain then. The house Kelly and I have rented is $108 a month, another bargain. We look out at a beautiful rock outcropping, hills, and distant mountains instead of the ocean. We make friends, we walk a lot, and I often think of Nerja.

How much certain experiences in our lives turn out to shape our later paths!

Nerja and Bernal is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico