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December 31, 2005
The Apartment
With invaluable help from my parents, we were able to get the eight months of rent via Western Union to pay the landlord. Once we get a bed, we can move in to our new apartment.
Having that large an amount of money in-hand really scared us. We went to the landlord's house, which is right down the street from us, with our gringo friend, Larry. He really helped out by translating and being a respectable acquaintance that lives in the neighborhood. As if it were not enough that we got the apartment, the landlord also had a copy of a past electric bill, so we don't have to wait two months to get one. Without it, we cannot open a bank account, get cable, get Internet access and many other things one needs to truly settle in down here. It's the golden ticket that legitimizes your Mexican life.
After we got the keys we stopped by the place, and Joseph, el otro gringo de la pareja, came over to measure the dimensions of the place. They then took us to a couple of stores to check out ranges, refrigerators and mattresses. After getting a good idea of what is available and how much it will cost us, we returned to their place, where they were kind enough to let us do our laundry, and after looking at some of Larry's older paintings over cocktails, we had a wonderful home-cooked meal. We rounded out the evening by walking to a nearby open-air restaurant for desert and coffee before heading back to our hotel in el centro historico for the night.
It was such a lovely day, and it was so wonderful not only to secure our place, but also then to get to celebrate with good friends. It was the kind of day we hoped we'd have, back when we were hearing on television how our being married will destroy the family but the war in Iraq will bring peace and security. It was so nice to sit on the patio and drink wine with our neighbors, all of us being welcome citizens in our new land. It was great for all of us to be home.
Posted by crispy at 12:06 PM | Comments (5)
December 27, 2005
Kevin Speeds Up the Blog
Thanks to Kevin, the wunderkind that manages the server on which all my stuff is located, the blog should be much faster now. He moved my sadly neglected Jack Benny Archives and did some reconfiguration so that the bandwidth limits are not imposed on this part of the site.
Thanks Kevin!
Posted by crispy at 06:06 PM | Comments (2)
Guggenheim Guadalajara
Chances are pretty good that we're getting a Guggenheim.
http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/050610norten.asp
Posted by crispy at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)
Yahoo! Groups: guadalajaraamigos
I have linked to the Yahoo! Groups group guadalajaraamigos before, but I thought I should include an explicit reference for it on the blog. If you are interested in Guadalajara, it's worth checking out the past posts, and you'll find very friendly members there, ready to answer specific questions that you post. That's how I met our first friends down here, and their help has been simply invaluable to us in getting settled here. So don't delay, JOIN TODAY!
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/guadalajaraamigos
Posted by crispy at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)
Grocery Shopping in Mexico
A stroll through the neighborhood supermarket showed us that not only the Japanese have funky product names. Then there are the products that we can get here that I wish we could have purchased in the United States.
A sugar substitute. Does it really taste like sugar? Well...it's similar:
Even if you're already svelt, you can always be a little more svelty:
Maybe Dave Chappelle has started a bakery in Mexico:
You loved the movie, now enjoy the refreshing tea-based beverage:
And last but not least, some truth in advertising:
These are not funny. In fact, I'm really annoyed that we could never buy these Campbell's Soups in the United States. Maybe because they don't have meat in them:
Corn Soup.
Squash Blossom Soup.
Homestyle Lentil.
Poblano Chile.
And how about this flavor of Tang?
Of course, it doesn't surprise me that you can't find this Ibarra product, since it's not all that easy to find the legendary chocolate para mesa that they produce in thick, unwieldy discs. Still, I thought for those of you that are familiar with that product, I'd include this photo. The bummer is that it isn't really "Mexican" chocolate - the kind with almonds and cinnamon that you get in the disc form - but rather, just chocolate powder like Nestle Quick.
Posted by crispy at 03:50 PM | Comments (3)
December 26, 2005
Restaurante Tai Spice
We fell in love with it when we came last year to check out Guadalajara, and we're pleased to note that it's still around now that we've returned. It's Restaurante Tai Spice, the only place we've found in town that has not only decent asian food that we can eat, but very good asian food we can eat.
It's located at Avenida Ninos Heroes 2966, in Colonia Jardines del Bosque. For those of you familiar with La Estancia Gaucha and La Tratoría, also on Niños Heroes, it's located between those two establishments.
The owners Robert and Kay are exceptionally nice people, the service is very professional, and the food is delicious. When we first moved here, we were a bit sad that it seemed like we'd never get to have decent Chinese food again (even the standard boring vegetarian dishes common in the US are absent here), but Tai Spice has a diverse menu that not only offers Thai cuisine, but dishes from all over Asia.
Go spend an unhurried evening there and enjoy yourself. The atmosphere is lovely and the food delicious.
Posted by crispy at 04:38 PM | Comments (1)
December 22, 2005
They wait, and wait, and wait...
A day after it was supposed to be here, we're still awaiting the wire transfer to pay for our place.
Posted by crispy at 01:41 PM | Comments (2)
December 19, 2005
No More Wire Transfers! EVER!
If you ever need a lot of cash fast in Mexico, bear this in mind: their banks will not accept foreign credit cards for doing a cash advance.
So much for "...but they don't take American Express." They don't take anything. Not a debit card, not a credit card. Nothing. This doesn't really make any sense to me. Our hotel would let us run up bills in the thousands, and then charge it all at once. However, a bank, a financial institution like the ones that issued my cards, doesn't trust other banks. I have heard from our gringo friends that some stores in Mexico will not take foreign credit cards, but banks?
You can use foreign credit cards in ATMs. I have yet to find one that won't work for me this way. However, you are limited to $3,000 pesos, which is around $300 USD. That's usually just fine, but when you need a lot of cash at once, you have to come up with something else.
We had to do a wire transfer, which is called una transferencia in Mexico. This requires a couple of numbers, one called the "swift" number and then an account number. The local bank did not give me an account number when I first went there. I suspect that for transfers within the country, only the swift number is needed. Yet my bank insisted on a swift number and an account number, so I went back. After a 15-minute wait for it, the man I had been talking to came back and gave me an entirely different name and set of numbers: an account number and an ABA number. These numbers were for the J.P. Morgan Chase Bank in New York City, where the local bank has an account. At least in theory, the deposit is made in their account for me, and then the local bank contacts the central bank in the D.F. to have the money transferred to them, then I can receive the cash, on the second day after I request the transfer.
Hopefully it will work!
Posted by crispy at 12:26 PM | Comments (1)
December 17, 2005
Andrés cumple treinta y ocho años.
Today we went to our first Mexican party. It wasn't altogether typical, as evidenced by the large number of people speaking English and the male strippers.
[WARNING: links within this entry point to images containing partial nudity!]
Our friends Joseph and Larry, whom we came to know online through a Yahoo! Group about Guadalajara, and who have been giving us immense and invaluable help getting situated in town, were invited to a birthday party. Upon their telling the birthday boy, Andrés, about us, he told them to bring us along.
In Guadalajara, people live very close together. Even most of the houses are cramped in together so that having a party in them would be very disruptive to the neighbors, especially because it seems that Mexicans like their music so loud that it neutralizes any conversation within a three block radius. To serve the demand of those who are giving parties, an entire industry surrounds event locations and services. While some exist in the city, there are others that are on the outskirts of town (and are quickly being swallowed up by the sprawl of the city as it grows). Andrés' family owns their own place outside of Guadalajara for the sole purpose of throwing parties. It is a large enclosed lawn with the gate on one side and a covered patio with a bar on the other. When they have parties, they hire staff to prepare food and serve drinks.
We arrived after a two-and-a-half hour car ride to cover the 15 miles or so from Joseph and Larry's house (it was a Saturday afternoon and there is only one road out of the city in that direction), we arrived at the party. When we got out of the car, a group of young children came up to Larry and pestered him for money to "watch" the car. He paid them some token change and we walked up to the gates. We were immediately introduced to Andrés, a beautiful man of French and Spanish ancestry, stylishly dressed and very amiable in his greeting. He escorted us to a table and made sure that we knew where the food and drinks were, and oh, what food it was. They had handmade tortillas to be filled with chicken and potatoes, frijoles, guacamole, calabacitas, nopales and mole.
We met a number of people that you are sure to get to know through upcoming entries, but an amazing number of them spoke English, either through study or living in the United States for a period of time. We met "Larry También," the partner of José Luís, with whom we went to see a film (along with Joseph and Larry) last week. He moved to Guadalajara six years ago from San Francisco, and is much happier with the more relaxed environment and the much lower cost of living here. We met Lili, a strikingly gorgeous friend of Andrés, and Roberto and his partner José. Roberto was an exchange student at Columbine High School. He and José were delighted to hear that we hate Bush, as have been most of the Mexicans we've met here. In the Mexico edition of the Miami Herald today, the latest Bush administration fiasco is detailed, in which the president of the most powerful country in the world launched an illegal domestic surveillance program to spy on American citizens without warrants.
It was a very relaxed, yet upper-crust affair. Everyone there was so handsome, charming and intelligent. I felt like Cinderella at the ball. Shawn and I could not help commenting several times on how our male friends would have been ga-ga over all the stunningly beautiful women in attendance. And then they turned down the lights and brought out the strippers. [image 2 | 3 | 4]
Soon we piled back into the car and came back to the city, leaving the others to party on into the night. Joseph and Larry were kind enough to drop us at a wonderful restaurant called Mio Cardio (Avenida Tepeyac 189, Chapalita, 33/35-87-57-90), where we dined on fabulous Mediterranean food and listened to a French woman playing sambas on a saxophone.
All in all, it was a perfect day, the kind we've dreamed of for months.
Posted by crispy at 08:58 AM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2005
Departamento, Dulce Departamento
Zapopan, Jalisco
Shawn and I found an apartment with two bedrooms, a dinky kitchen and a disappointing bathroom, but it's all ours. Well, as long as we put down an eight-month deposit next week. [View photo showing where our unit is and its features, or another angle.]
In Mexico, when gringos rent places, they are nearly always required to have what is known as a fijador, or in English, a guarantor. This is a Mexican professional that is pretty much what it sounds like: someone who will guarantee payment for the term of the contract. That is all well and good if you happen to actually know someone that will do this for you, but sadly, we don't. I knew that would be a problem, and since arriving we found only one place that said they didn't require that, and it was a residential hotel.
We figured that, as is the case with most things everywhere, cash would solve the problem, and so it did. I offered the landlord six months in advance, he insisted on eight, and we agreed to that. The place is in a great neighborhood, very near a Laundromat, fairly close to a grocery store and the price is nice for a two-bedroom place: $4,000 pesos per month, or at the current rate of exchange, $379 USD.
It has a decent walk-in closet in the main bedroom, a thin strip of balcony in the front that is accessible by the two bedrooms and another little square balcony that is accessible from the dining room area. The floors throughout the entire place are red tiles. The bathroom is tiled in a terrible café, which matches the color of the toilet and the washbasin. The front balcony railing has round extensions that line it, to hold large flowerpots.
We also get one of the little spaces on the top of the apartment that were designed to be slave quarters. Well, quarters for the domestic help, but I can't imagine that anyone ever lived there. They are like big rooftop closets with dinky bathrooms that are not closed off from the elements, and they have been converted to serve as utility rooms where tenants can have a washer and dryer if they want. I didn't see any such equipment in any of them, and the bathroom in ours has fallen into serious disrepair. A cluster of two-inch long cockroaches litters ours. Maybe we could use it for storage of boxes or something. It doesn't look like anyone in the building uses them at all. The coin-op laundry across the corner is probably a much better option.
The main drawbacks, apart from the disturbing bathroom (in addition to being brown, it is also dingy and the toilet looks like it was imported from the worst bathroom in Scotland), are kitchen related. As I said before, it's small; it's probably six or seven feet long and about four feet wide. It doesn't have a dishwasher, nor a place for a dishwasher. And in the place for the stove, well, there's a line for gas that you can run to your stove. Yes, we have to buy our own stove...and our own refrigerator.
In some ways, this is not so bad. In the past, I have always had terrible stoves in such cheap apartments, and at least this way, I will have one that I bought that is (hopefully) one that meets my high standards for things kitchen related. And there isn't much room for a fridge in the kitchen anyway, so I think I'm going to have to put that around the corner in the main area. This area is pretty big, so that will not be too much of a problem. But I was thinking that instead of having just one big refrigerator, perhaps I could have two smaller ones, locating one in the area we will use for our living room and another closer to the kitchen. Then we could keep water, drinks and other snacks in the living room one, and meal ingredients in the one near the kitchen. Why, I might even take a cue from Martha Stewart and rebuild the cabinets to have refrigerated drawers.
That is another thing about Mexican apartment rental: while any maintenance is up to the renter, they are permitted to do pretty much anything they want to the place. In our case, I'd like to retile the bathroom and replace the fixtures. I think that's going to be the first big project, well, after hiring an exterminator to give it a thorough going over, painting the walls and adding light fixtures. Currently all the lights in the place are bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling by wires.
One handy thing is that the place already has the electricity, gas and water turned on. The water is included in the rent, and we get a monthly bill left in our mailbox for electricity. With gas, the entire building gets a bill, and we pay some designated person. I don't quite understand yet how that is going to work, but we'll see. Apparently that is relatively common here for apartment buildings.
We are relatively happy with it. It is in the neighborhood we wanted, it's cheap, and it has lots of windows. That is something hard to find in apartments, and not only here. There seem to be a lot of places that have only one window to the world, and that is the sliding glass door on the far end of the apartment. This has windows in every room in the place, including our Silence of the Lambs bathroom. So we will try it out for a year and see what we can do with it in that time. With labor being so very, very cheap here, I suspect that we can whip it into shape pretty cheaply and make it into a decent place, where we might end up spending several years.
Posted by crispy at 11:36 AM | Comments (3)
December 15, 2005
Plan B
Despite our disappointment at Hewlett-Packard not giving Shawn a job at their local call center, we are standing our ground and going back to our original plan: getting certificates to teach English.
Guadalajara is lousy with language schools. If you want to learn Spanish, you can come here, stay with a host family for a few weeks or even a semester and study the language in a "native" setting. One of my friends and former classmates at Metro has done this on a couple of occasions, and while it isn't the best way to see the city (classes take up most of the day), you do get excellent exposure to things you just cannot learn in a classroom. You can also learn to teach English to those who wish to study it, and in Mexico, there are a lot of people who want to learn English for a variety of reasons. I'm not knocking love, but it is English that serves as the international language in more rational pursuits, like business and technology.
Given the demand for native speakers of English for teaching positions, one can walk in off the street with no credentials and no experience and earn $3,600 USD per year. Even though prices are much lower for most daily necessities in Guadalajara, that is not enough to live on comfortably, but if one has a certificate to be a teacher of English as a second language, the job prospects improve dramatically. With this certificate but with no experience, one can get a much higher paying job, and often schools will help you out with initial job placement. One school in town, the one Shawn hopes to attend, even offers their graduates job placement services for life.
The new semester starts in January, and the class runs for six weeks. Therefore, he will get his certification in February, and it is unlikely that he would be able to start working right away. More likely is the idea that he would be starting in the summer, and that is if he can find a job here in Guadalajara. While the school guarantees that they will get you a job, they guarantee only that it will be somewhere within the country of Mexico, not here in Guadalajara. We do not know the odds of getting a job in Guadalajara yet, nor do we know if the school will work with you to try and place you in the area of your choice. Demand is great throughout the country, but there are several places where we just would not want to live. We are pretty set on the idea of living in a big city, chock full of cultural amenities, so that really narrows it down. We might be convinced to go somewhere that was less fabulous for exceptionally high pay or great benefits, but I think we prefer to be either in Guadalajara or Mexico City, and at the moment, we're a bit afraid of Mexico City. It has a high crime rate, awful traffic and terrible pollution (I have read that if you live there, your lungs endure the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes per day), but oh what a fabulous city it seems to be.
The cost for the training is around $1,500 USD, so we are going to have Shawn go first and see how it goes. If he enjoys it, if it seems to be helpful and if things work out so that we can swing it, I will probably take the certification course there later in the year. I would rather be taking classes in Spanish, but given our need to bring in some cash and since we get a daily education in Spanish on the streets, it looks like that isn't going to happen for a while.
Posted by crispy at 11:20 AM | Comments (4)
December 14, 2005
The 044
I bought a cell phone yesterday and found out that it will be easier to get various utilities once we find an apartment.
We figured that if we were going to be calling around about apartments, we would have to have a reliable number where people could reach us, and that it would not be so good to make them call our hotel, ask for our room and, if we were not in, call back and leave a message at the desk. That's just much too messy.
While it will be best to get a contract deal for this eventually, we bought a prepaid package. To get a contract deal, we have to have documentation that we don't have yet, specifically, an electric bill. Apparently, an electric bill is the passport to a wide range of services, like cable. I was erroneously under the impression that we would have to have visas to get utilities, cable, Internet access and so forth, but apparently all we will need to get our electricity turned on is a passport, and then after that, we can get this bill to get other services. Of course, it may be a bureaucratic nightmare to go through this process, but at least, according to some fellow gringos that live down here, it is not necessary to have an resident alien visa to get these other things.
The interesting thing about cell phones in Mexico is how one goes about calling them. If you are using a cell phone to call another cell phone, you just dial eight numbers. If you dial a cell phone from a land line, you have to dial 044 first, then the city code, which for Guadalajara is 33, then the eight numbers. Therefore, if someone gives you his or her number, you must know whether or not it is a cell phone number or a regular one.
I made sure to get a phone that takes photos and has Bluetooth (a Motorola V330 GSM) so that I can quickly take snapshots while I'm out and about to place on the blog. In our quest for apartments, I can take a photo, enter the number listed on the se renta sign, then associate the two.
Check out the picture I took of Shawn with the phone at our favorite Thai restaurant, and another in our hotel room.
Posted by crispy at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2005
Hunting and Gathering
My freshman year at USC, when I had just moved into the dorms and everything was new and strange, I wanted to get a small refrigerator to make the cinder block cell a little more like a home. I didn't know where I'd find such an item - it was not a regular sized refrigerator, so I imagined it to be some great rarity - so I asked other students who had one, guys I'd known for less than a month, where I might be able to buy my own. I was told that Sears sold them, but again, in what was then entirely uncharted territory, I didn't know where the nearest Sears was located. With the Internet not yet a public asset, I had to look in the phone book to find one. The only one listed was in Costa Mesa, a good 45-minute drive away from campus, and that's where I ended up going. It seemed ridiculous that in the city of Los Angeles one would have to drive so far to get what one wanted, but I simply didn't have any better source of information to help guide me to it.
A couple of years later, after I had dared to venture out of the secure oasis of the campus to get a taste of all the exotic new things I had been hearing about in the sprawling asphalt jungle that surrounded me - ethnic foods I'd never tried, a funky coffeehouse named "Jabberjaw" and the exhilarating black market street shopping at Pico and Hoover - I discovered that there was a Sears only 10 minutes away from campus. Why that location wasn't listed in the phone books they gave out to students I don't know, but the experience taught me what stupid mistakes one can make, how much time one has to waste and how mediocre the experience of a new place can be when one lacks good information.
Knowing that we were coming to Guadalajara to check it out last year, we bought multiple guidebooks to Mexico and the city itself. We read them voraciously before we ever got here, researching every aspect about the city so that we would not waste any time in familiarizing ourselves with all the groovy stuff in town and could hopefully avoid such incidents as my freshman refrigerator fiasco. We built elaborate visual worlds in our minds (much like the ever-failing holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation) of the city and its many features, and on cold autumn afternoons we would escape there to stroll along the sidewalks and take in the phantom representations of the sites as we had imagined them. (I was usually escorted all about town by a 15-piece mariachi band.) There were some things that never got included in our chimeras (like the bullfights), but many of the images we conjured from the guidebooks seemed right up our alley, like Copenhagen 77, a well-known jazz club in town.
On the first day of our stay last year we hit the town with a guidebook written specifically about Guadalajara, to start giving our virtual image of the city some substance. However, the book began to frustrate us when we discovered that half the things in the guidebook were no longer around. In some cases, they were around but the addresses were wrong, and in others, the hours of operation were considerably different. Nobody expects a guidebook to be completely correct about everything, if for no other reason than the fact that they come out with new editions so infrequently. Yet it seemed that first week that we had picked a ghost town as our destination because so many of the places that we had pictured in our minds had vanished long before we arrived.
The guidebook even seemed to contradict itself, saying how one could find any type of food from around the world that he or she might want, but then it would only list a handful of places to get Chinese food and a couple of Italian restaurants. One doesn't expect a guidebook to be exhaustive, but surely, we thought, they could devote a few pages to a list of the top restaurants for each type of cuisine. Yes, it would be very subjective, but at least it would give people a place to go if they wanted, say, spanikopita instead of sopes for dinner. We went to the Internet café across the street from our hotel and after a bit of research found a couple of interesting places, but even though the Internet can be more current than printed books, Mexican businesses are not up to speed with the United States in putting their information out there.
On our return, I expected that we might find a few interesting places slowly over time, as we happened upon them or made friends that we could ask for recommendations. I figured that at first, we would miss out on a lot of things and waste a lot of time, like I did getting that little refrigerator from the Sears in Costa Mesa. I dreaded this, and hated the thought that for a while we would be stupid gringo idiots that didn't have a clue about the city. However, on our first day here, we picked up a copy of El Publico, a local daily, and as it was Friday, we found their entertainment supplement, Ocio tucked away inside.
This has been the source of hours of entertainment.
The diversity of restaurants in Guadalajara, for example, is astounding. Not only do we have more than a handful of Chinese restaurants (the guide lists 32 this week and most of the ones we pass on the street around here in el centro are not listed), we have ones that deliver, and one that is Mexicali-style Chinese. Continuing around that side of the world, we find 36 Japanese restaurants, one claiming to have over 1,000 dishes and a couple that specialize in fruit sushi. There are several Thai restaurants, and two Mexican-Thai fusion joints. Or if you prefer, you could visit one of the two Italian-Argentine fusion restaurants listed. In what I presume to be the Lebanese sector of town, there are four restaurants listed serving the cuisine of that region. There are delis, "diabetic" restaurants, and although we're not into it, hamburger stands where you can have it your way if you prefer buffalo or chorizo burgers. In some places you can play canasta while you dine, and one where you can have a tarot reading with your paella. Don't worry. For those of you that prefer "normal" food, you can go to Chili's or (shudder) Applebee's.
Reading the nightlife section I learned that the Univeristy of Guadalajara is showing a set of Fellini films in their weekly series and that if the Turner Classic Movies jones gets too strong for us, we can take in vintage American films at a Sunday matinee (this past weekend was the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire film Shall We Dance). There are two art theaters, which this week are participating in a French film festival. Of course, there is no shortage of the standard Hollywood fare, all very current, in English but subtitled in Spanish. The list of music venues deserves a separate entry, but this weekend we could have taken in an opera or the Genitorturers. And despite the fact that Copenhagen 77 is no longer around, it doesn't seem like we'll have to give up jazz. Why, there's even a place in town to get Dixieland.
This is not to say that this guide is complete. It lists only twenty Mexican restaurants, or perhaps I should say that they list twenty restaurants that specialize in Mexican food. The ones I can think of off the top of my head that I've seen just around the hotel number more than that. Yet I feel that this little weekly guide has given us a good six months jump on learning about things over the word-of-mouth method, and instead of the $15 USD that we had to shell out for the Guadalajara guidebook, it cost us less than $0.70.
I am sure that we will not be able to avoid entirely stupid trips that take us way out of our way or buying items and finding out later that a better version exists, but I feel a lot smarter now that I have a good starting point for discovering good places to eat in Guadalajara. Now if they only had a section in the Ocio for appliances...
Posted by crispy at 11:04 AM | Comments (4)
December 12, 2005
Bad News, Everyone!
Shawn received a very short email today from Hewlett-Packard telling him that they will not be accepting him for employment.
Whie this isn't the end of the world, it is a pretty major setback for Plan A. This job was a good one because the pay was high for local standards, it included health benefits (that would extend to me also) and it would have involved very little Spanish.
While we have not discussed it yet - Shawn just got the email while I was entering my blog backlog and merely let me know that he'd received that news - I suspect the next step will be to look into the other large American companies in Guadalajara, which include IBM and Texas Instruments. The bummer is that Shawn doesn't have any "in" whatsoever with other places like we thought he did with HP, so he'll be going in cold. It also means that we are starting again at square one with the application process, which means it may be months before we know if Shawn can get a job down here.
Of course, among the alternatives are my getting a job, but that wasn't really part of our agreement. I don't mind working, but I don't have any qualifications for anything cut and dried; I'll have to be a bit creative and convince someone that they need me for something that I can do: cook, write, be fabulous...
Stay tuned, as it's only sure to get more interesting now.
Posted by crispy at 06:34 PM | Comments (2)
December 11, 2005
Arrival: Guadalajara
It’s funny. Despite all the things we did between January and now, it seems like we went away for the weekend or something. Yet this time around, having already had some experience here, we’re a lot smarter about some things, but not, unfortunately, about where to buy batteries.
Our bus arrived late and the whole experience left Shawn swearing he’d never take a bus between Guadalajara and the United States ever again. Yet we both felt very relieved to be off the bus after the 38-hour trip and to be back at last in Guadalajara. The taxi that brought us from the bus terminal to the hotel was a small economy job that had room for one of our four suitcases in the trunk. The driver tossed the rest of them on top of the car and strapped them down with a puny strip of nylon cord, a common maneuver down here that had us both very nervous. Our whole lives are packed up in those bags, or at least all that we will have with us for some while. Losing them would mean losing our music library, years of notes from Dr. Doerr’s classes, all our various forms of radio, photos, wedding gifts, medications, and all those other things that make starting over from scratch with a new life a bit more comfortable. Luckily, we arrived at the hotel with everything intact.
We retraced the route we took by taxi when we left Guadalajara, but this time in reverse. Roaring in the cab down Avenida Revolución, I had the feeling one has when one returns from a long trip away from home, breathing in familiar smells, remembering small details that have slipped just beyond memory from not being seen daily, reviewing what new things have popped up and what things have since faded into non-existence. Maybe things feel so normal to us here because we worked so hard to memorize every detail during our scouting trip, or maybe because we daydreamed so much over our fond memories of that adventure that they got worn into our minds. Yet this time around, we don’t need maps to get around. We know what places will be open at what times, which corners have pedestrian signals and can live out the daily itineraries that we laid out just for fun while we were marking time back in the states before our return.
One thing that had slipped our minds completely was the omnipresent corps of pigeons that roost in the trees and on rooftops in the daylight hours. Standing on the sidewalk outside the hotel while the taxi driver pulled down our bags, Shawn got bombed by one right on the top of his head. I laughed, until moments later, when I received a similar strafing on my shirt sleeve.
Checking into our hotel the same staff that worked here before greeted us, but this time around, the desk clerk that was as warm as the Taliban last time welcomed us with a smile. This hotel has no elevators, so the poor bellhop that hefted our overstuffed bags was winded by the trip up two flights of stairs to our room. A 100 peso tip (about $10 USD) seemed to put a little of the wind back into his sails. We soon discovered that one of our favorite things about the hotel, the satellite television that received the de Película film channel (similar to Turner Classic Movies, but showing all films from the rich cornucopia of Mexican cinema) had given way to basic cable. We also no longer get KTLA, CNN or TNT, although it’s the inability to stay up late in bed watching old María Félix movies that we really feel the most.
We had lunch at La Chata and dinner at Sanborns Café, where we were delighted to find all of our regular servers still laying down the molletes and chilaquiles. We tried to go to Café Madoka for a late evening coffee, but found that they’ve trimmed back their hours, or at least they did so tonight. That's a real drag. It's the first instance we've seen down here in a reduction of service that we've noticed going on everywhere in the United States.
We picked up an El Informador and clipped out apartment rentals from the classifieds and glued them onto pages in our notebook, arranged by neighborhood. We want to be in a relatively nice area of town, and even so, we're finding places with two bedrooms to run between $400 and $600 USD per month. Some include gas and water (although we've yet to find one outside of a hotel that rents by the day, week or month that includes electricity). That would solve our problem of having to have visas before we can get utilities, which is a very big concern for us. It's possible that the landlord has the utilities in his or her name at some of these places, and we'd just have to pay them each month for whatever they are. We've heard this is relatively common here, but we'll just have to wait and see. But then, of course, there is still the problem of Internet access.
One area where we were not as smart as we should have been was buying batteries for one of our radios. We needed four C batteries, and we figured that they'd have them at Sandborns. Lots of places have AA batteries, but nothing else. Sure enough, Sanborns did have them, and at the astronomical prices we've come to expect in Mexico: 4 C batteries was $14 USD. Later, when we found Café Madoka closed early, we stopped in at the Super G, a supermarket down the street. We found that we could have bought the same four batteries for only $8 USD.
We thought that we'd spend the first weekend back just relaxing and getting reacquainted with the city, but mild paranoia pushed me to start doing such things as starting to research apartments, tracking down a Laundromat and going over some idiomatic phrases with Shawn. We are anxious to get things rolling. The suspense is killing me as to whether or not we’re going to be able make this whole thing work out.
Posted by crispy at 01:26 PM | Comments (0)
December 09, 2005
On the Bus
Our bus arrived about two-and-a-half hours late to Guadalajara, which saw Shawn pretty frazzled. The experience left him sworn off of bus travel as the means to do the trip between Guadalajara and the United States. However, it should be noted on our Marco Polo bus on the Elite line of Estrella Blanca, the seats reclined more than on our previous bus trips, allowing both of us to get a fair amount of sleep along the way.
The problem is that the bus stops at many bus terminals in many cities on the route, and usually the bus terminals are not located near the major roads. Diverting to reach a station within a city often adds over an hour to the trip as opposed to just driving straight through, because the bus has to wind its way around a circuitous maze of narrow streets at very slow speeds. One solution to this, if you are interested in taking the bus from the states to one of the cities deep within the Republic, is to plan your trip in stages, and go from one town to another, spending the night in hotels along the way and checking out what these other cities have to offer. We considered doing this, but decided not to, as it’s already taken us too damned long to get to Guadalajara as it is.
We did learn an important lesson: while seemingly all first-class buses have air conditioning, very few have heaters. This was not a problem in our trip last year, but this year, in crossing the Sonora desert at night, the temperatures on the bus got downright chilly. We started to be concerned about this just before the bus departed, when the bus driver asked me where my coat was. When I responded that I didn't have one, he warned me that I was going to freeze. I thought that this was a joke until around 2 AM, when I had to pull my arms inside my t-shirt to stay warm. But I was rather lucky. Being a fat guy, I have a lot of padding to keep me warm. Shawn, however, was shaking all night long and had to huddle up against me as best he could in a bus seat to stay warm. The poor kid was still shaking so hard the next morning when we made a brief stop at a station in Santa Ana that his spoon could not make it from the plate to his mouth without losing most of the granola that was on it. We later noticed that some buses at the terminals, but not many, list among their amenities calificación (heating). So if you ever make the trip by bus through the desert at night, remember to bring along a very warm coat. Or you could gain a lot of weight, but it's probably just easier to do the former.
We had been concerned that perhaps customs or security would go through our bags and find that we'd exceeded the officially allowed number of certain things – we have more than 5 DVDs and probably more than 20 CDs along with us, as well as electronics equipment that would be valued over $50 – but we also knew that last time we entered the country, we did not have to worry about that at all. Last time, at the bus terminal in Ciudad Juárez, we went through a gate before the bus platform marked aduana (customs), and as each person went through, a uniformed guard pushed a button that displayed either a red or green light on a device that looked like a traffic light. If it was green, you passed through without stopping. If it was red, they went through your bags. We both got green lights and didn't worry. But this time, we were afraid we would have to go through that and have our stuff discovered.
In Tijuana, the official customs is located at the border. You walk through a turnstile and down a strip of wide sidewalk that goes by the immigration administration office, then the immigration "storefront" for people who need to get tourist visas, then a currency exchange and finally a little archway where on occasion a customs officer stands and watches people go by. I suspect that if there were a flagrant violation of customs or immigration policies going on while the customs official was standing there (if someone with a gun walked by, for example), they would be stopped. However, we walked by with our four suitcases and two backpacks without even a glance in our direction.
This demonstrates a very important aspect of travel in Latin America: while there are certainly cases where innocent travelers are set up by authorities, usually to extort cash from them, if one does not cause trouble that has to be dealt with, minor breaches of the law, like bringing in more than 200 cigarettes, are tolerated. Is it consistent enough to be able to rely on this? No, probably not. Yet we were prepared to deal with it if necessary, either by returning to San Diego and setting up other arrangements or by simply abandoning things.
Things within the bus were not that exciting. The videos they played were the typical Hollywood fare: The In-Laws, The Patriot and Hitch. I always hope that the novelty of two gringos traveling by bus will spur the other riders to ask what in the hell two white guys think they're doing there and this will lead to an interesting exchange of cultural tidbits, but that didn't happen. And why should it? For us, the experience is new, exciting and exotic. For Mexicans, they get plenty of the United States pushed down their throats all the time. It's the ever-present stronger, better-dressed and more popular big brother. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that we might be able to show them that even though that brother is often a jerk, he can be rather charming at times.
Posted by crispy at 06:17 PM | Comments (0)
December 07, 2005
St. Petersburg Times Article on Guadalajara
Pretty brief and not all that interesting, but a good introduction for those of you that may not know much about the basic attractions: Guadalajara: Mexican flavors
Posted by crispy at 04:45 PM | Comments (2)
Camino Real Lame
The Camino Real chain owns some fabulous properties in Mexico. The one in Tijuana isn't one of them.
All the same, it's considered one of the best hotels in town, and it's the place where dignitaries stay when they're in town. And don't get me wrong. It's not terrible. It's certainly clean and safe, and the location, right next to the Plaza Río is damned convenient when you want to pick up some things that you forgot to pack. But it kind of fits the stereotypical image of a half-assed Mexican operation, and I suspect that perhaps that is why so many Americans have that image of all things Mexican: their image is based on the Mexico of Tijuana.
They claim to have a concierge, but it turns out that it's a couple of bellhops. The "Aquellos Tiempos" restaurant that they advertise in some of their online literature as "the most exclusive in Tijuana" seems to be so exclusive that it has slipped into non-existence. Their gift shop seems like a store from the former Soviet Union, with only a handful of items on each shelf, and it closes at 4 PM daily, despite the fact that the hours listed on the door say it's open until 6 PM. While sitting at the desk, the bulb in the desk lamp flashed and them popped into darkness. We exchanged the bulb with another in the room and it didn't work either. It turns out that the all the electrical stuff along that wall had shorted out.
So it's on to the Hotel San Francisco Plaza where they promise little and deliver a lot. But then again, maybe I'm just biased because we had such a delightful time there last year scoping out our future, uh, rather, current home.
Posted by crispy at 02:39 AM | Comments (1)
December 06, 2005
Unexpected Surprises
A few unanticipated surprises, both good and bad, awaited us in Tijuana.
On the good side, the Hotel Camino Real has wireless (for $10 USD a day) that works in the lobby. It comes and goes in the room so much that it isn't worth trying. Even in the lobby, every fifth click on a link takes you to a page for their service provider so that you have to back up and try again.
We ate at the hotel restaurant yesterday for lunch, where I ordered a pasta alfredo, forgetting until Shawn reminded me, that in Mexico, alfredo always includes pieces of ham. I was able to stop the waiter in time to get it without the ham, but it arrived with tons of mushrooms. Blech.
We went to the bus station to buy our tickets in advance, and we were hoping that we could take an executive class bus. We had read on the Estrella Blanca bus line that Turistar Ejecutivo runs between Tijuana and Guadalajara, but upon asking the ticket clerk we learned that there is no executive service whatsoever. That is a drag because we wanted the seats that recline all the way and the beverage service. Instead we're going to have to ride on a bus for 36 hours in seats that recline no more than those on an airplane, and Shawn simply cannot sleep sitting up. He's very annoyed about that, and I'm kind of dreading it myself, since I know he gets really cranky without sleep.
We had submitted a request for reservations at the Hotel San Francisco Plaza through their web site, starting on Friday. Yet to get in during daylight (the bus station in Guadalajara is not in the best of neighborhoods), we had to bump back our arrival to Friday morning. , soI sent a follow-up message to ask them to move our reservation to start on Friday. I have not received a reply from them about the first reservation request, but m. Many places in Mexico have online reservation systems that send them an email but they seem to check it maybe once a month. Hopefully if they receive the first request, they'll receive the other, but we may not have a reservation upon arriving in Guadalajara. Most likely, we won't actually need one, but it would be nice to know in advance. Oh well. That's definitely a drag about Mexico - reservations just don't seem to be something they handle well at hotels.
Now we're off to phone a guy we met last year in Guadalajara that was planning to return to Tijuana. If I can understand him over the phone (which proved mighty tough last year) and he's in town, perhaps we'll get together with him tonight.
Posted by crispy at 07:15 PM | Comments (1)
December 04, 2005
What a Rush
At every stage of this trip, our final moments in each place have been hectic. In Boulder we were up all night until the final moments packing haphazardly trying to make sure we made our train. In Los Angeles we were scrambling to get our stuff together to make it to Disneyland. At the Super 8 in San Diego, we thought check out was an hour later than it ended up being, so we were soaking wet throwing our items into a suitcase to get out before being charged for another day. I was hoping that the San Diego experience would not be that way, since it's our last day in the states and all, but it is shaping up to be another frantic farewell.
In some ways, this prevents much sad nostalgia about leaving, as we simply don't have much time to think about anything but making sure we have everything together and making it to the departure stop on time. Yet that also keeps us from being able to reflect on what is actually going on and have some final appreciation for this place that's been our home for our lives up to this point. After this, the United States will be a place we read about in the newspaper, hear about on the radio or have plans to visit like tourists. We'll not talk about "going home" and have it mean a trip to another state. Within 24 hours, we will call a new place home in which we do not yet even have "permanent" accomodations.
I try to be sad about it, or at least a little sentimental, but it just isn't happening. Perhaps I'm too caught up in the last minute things we have to get done first or maybe it has not hit yet that we are really doing it. But honestly, I think I just don't care. Apart from cosmetic details, I do not think that there is much difference. We don't have a home here, we don't have a home there. People are prejudiced against us there, but they're also prejudiced against us here, although the reasons are quite different. It's true that we leave behind a lot of friends, but they've got their own lives and are busy folks. We didn't really get to see them all that much anyway. Moving on is certainly overdue for us, and perhaps that's why it feels like ties to here are not all that strong.
It's time to go through to repack and inventory what we have in which bags. The whole trip we've frantically searched for something and only found it in the last bag we go through. We have agreed that it would be best if we have a master list that documented where each item is that we have with us, so when we freak out and wonder if we remembered to pack such-and-such from the last hotel, we can merely check the list.
One possible change in plans has given us a bit of extra free time to prepare in advance for our departure, and possibly lessen the chaotic last-minute check-out. We thought that we were going to be hanging out with our friends here tonight, but it turns out that one is feeling under the weather and the other is, as usual, late. Forty minutes late at this point, so I'm going to go take advantage of this lull in the schedule to get a jump on things. Maybe he'll show up to say good-bye or maybe we'll just get a phone call. We might get the chance to video chat one last time with a friend in Los Angeles before we hit the sack.
And thus ends our California odyssey.
Posted by crispy at 02:46 PM | Comments (3)
1 Day
With one day left in San Diego, our portable shortwave radio, which also serves as our only alarm clock, bit the dust.
Making it worse, it's a radio. A shortwave radio. I listen to shortwave a fair amount, especially when I don't have Internet access for my edification and entertainment. Shortwave isn't anything like FM or AM - you can actually still get decent news, not just inflamatory chat shows and corporate programming. Live human beings introduce the music and foreign correspondents do in-depth analysis of political situations around the world. Plus, there's a kind of magic in pulling in stations from exotic locales in other continents. The sound wafts in and out over the soft roar of static, the radio waves lapping silently against objects in space. There have been so many early morning hours we've spent trying to decipher through a weak signal news of talks between Chávez and Castro, the tofu stockpiles in China and the names of wacky Japanese pop songs with the help of our little receiver. It feels as if we've lost a very close friend. In fact, even though it no longer serves as anything more useful than a clock with no alarm, I don't think we will be able to leave it behind, or more unthinkable yet, throw it in the trash.
Replacing it before we leave will not be easy either. It's a Sunday. None of the places that sell good shortwaves are open on Sunday. I've already looked. We don't have a car here either, but the San Diego Metropolitain Transit System is very decent and can get us to where we need to go easily and within 19 minutes. But that is only if the Sony Style store has our intended replacement.
This will have to be done on Monday morning, and we have to check out of our hotel on Monday morning, take all our bags, cross the border and check in at our hotel, which supposedly has a waterfall in the lobby that gives it "a special touch of freshness."
That won't be the only freshness either. As of then we'll officially have started our fresh Mexican life, at long last. We're leaving so many other things behind, perhaps yet another won't be such a big deal. Yet the morale-preserving effects of a radio that can get in broadcasts from distant places when you're isolated, either physically or culturally, can be great. It's nice to watch Mexican cable, especially when you get to see old movies, but in Guadalajara, it seems the only news broadcast in English is either on Los Angeles network stations or CNN, both being a bit fluffy and pandering for our tastes. Besides, that's what we're trying to leave behind.
Otherwise, there's the International Herald Tribune in print. This is a paper out of France, but owned by the New York Times and allied with (among others) the Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, the no-nonsense newspaper of Germany. So it's decent, but you don't have the funny things you find on shortwave, like documentaries on yodeling or nuns repeating the rosary over and over with new-age music in the background.
That's why it's worth the effort to try to get a replacement. Well, that and the fact that it would be nice to wake up on time if we ever need to.
Posted by crispy at 02:21 AM | Comments (3)
December 03, 2005
Trying Really Hard
I just submitted a hotel booking form for the Hotel San Francisco Plaza on which there was a field for reservated by, and the response page said, "Your reservation had been processed." Those are not even the funny translations I've seen recently. Sadly for you, dear reader, I did not jot those down at the time for later use in this entry. But there is a great one I remember from our last visit to Guadalajara...
Shawn reminded me earlier tonight of one of the most accurate inaccuracies we've heard in translation, on the Tequila Express at the beginning of the trip. They give a little speech as the train heads out of the station, welcoming you, telling about the beverage service (¡all you can drink Herradura!), outlining the schedule and so forth. At the end, our guide closed his comments with, "If you need anything at all, please don't bother to ask."
We laughed about that being quite honest for modern-day service industries, but that's not really fair to the Tequila Express folks (it is quite a quality experience). In some ways, it's not really appropriate to joke much about these goofs because at least the people are making an effort to cater to me in my native language, even though it's in their country. And they are trying really hard. The rest of the speech was absolutely flawless, and the fact that this mistake is a mixing of two different similar phrases in English and not simply an ommision of the word don't, it demonstrates a pretty decent command of the language.
But it does show how hard it is to master a foreign language and causes me to think about how many similar flubs I'm going to make in Mexico. I wonder if I'll end up being quoted on some Mexican's blog in an entry discussing the funny things that foreigners say in Spanish?
Posted by crispy at 01:38 AM | Comments (0)