el crispito

February 21, 2010

The Whole Enchilada

This recipe caught my eye in the aggregation of Google News, maybe because it had "Guadalajara" in the headline, or perhaps because enchiladas do not really seem like much of a news story.

In any case, I read through it and it made me think of some of the fabulous enchiladas that I have had here in Mexico that are similar to these in one way or another. Some had a sauce resembling this, a simplified mole poblano of sorts, and some - like the delicious enchiladas mineras I bought on the street of Guanajuato - with a filling that echoed the one in this recipe, although without the beef.

While I could never hope to compete with the amazing Mexican food blog Mexico Cooks! run by our friend Cristina, I thought this column's readers might enjoy taking a look at these, because the recipe illustrates the level of complexity that can be involved in traditional Mexican cooking, and who knows? Perhaps one of you might have the guts to give it a try.

This particular style of enchilada is not common here, but I can attest to the fact that the flavors and methods employed are the real deal.

Posted by crispy at 01:59 AM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2010

Breakfast Taco

I have been waiting for this day for several months, and finally today I am going to have El Cachorro tacos again.

While I was away and I would think of tacos, these would be the tacos I would see and taste in my mind. Two corn tortillas, soft to the point of breaking apart, wrapped around a little spoonful of delicious goodness, served up on a plastic plate that has been covered with a plastic bag for easy clean-up. Putting some onions from the chiles en escabeche on it, a little cabbage, possibly a drizzle of salsa habanera...it is like Mexico in your mouth.

Only the thought of these and my tea is keeping me warm this morning while I wait for the water heater to get back up to speed. The wind, infrequent but forceful when it comes, blew out the pilot light overnight. Luckily, Shawn took his shower when a little of the warm water was still remaining. Outside the rising sun is getting us back to our regular operational temperatures, but at the moment, the temperature is skulking around somewhere in the 40s. I am trying to time my shower to get the maximum hot water and still be ready when Charles arrives to pick me up.

Charles still takes me to run errands, when he is not too busy with his new business. He installs porous concrete, and is often traveling all over the country for work. Today we will go stock up on all the things I need to get the kitchen pantry back in operation. I will probably buy a new mop too. The one I have had for the past four years has earned a peaceful retirement.

But first, tacos.

Posted by crispy at 09:05 AM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2010

But oh, that magic feeling

A new year, a new decade. I still sit down to fill the white up with black and wonder what to write about.

I started out writing about moving from the United States to Mexico because I was sick of the place that the United States had become and I was excited about what Mexico was and had the chance to be. A passionate hunger to learn and understand my new city and her people swept me off my feet and kept my days filled with adventure. As if exploring all the quirks and charms of a new lover, I was obsessed. I spent every day with her. I woke up with a head full of plans for what we would do all day, and went to bed dreaming of what would be tomorrow.

My family and friends must have grown weary of hearing about nothing but my new infatuation, supposing it to be a fleeting whim. Nobody truly seemed to believe us when we told them that we were moving to Mexico permanently, or at least, leaving the United States for good. The ceaseless indoctrination one gets growing up as an American — that it is the best country in the world, that everyone else in the world ultimately would prefer to live there and that one has some God-given moral superiority by being lucky enough to have been born within its hallowed borders — develops an arrogance that does not readily admit any challenges. Yet scoffing doubt slowly gave way to dubious curiosity, and eventually that yielded to a hesitant acceptance.

"It sounds like you plan on being down there for some time then," people would write to us, despite our repeatedly stating upon our departure that we left with no plans to ever return.

To this day, there are no such plans. In fact, despite what many have suggested to be a change in the political landscape in the United States that would allow us to realize the deep-seated desire they claim we surely must have to return there, we are just as thankful to have detached and gotten away from there as we have always been. My year abroad only reinforced that feeling for me, even though I got to experience the new management. Many liberals ignored the tell-tale signs that President Obama would fail to pursue the implementation of the great changes implied by his rhetoric, and after so many dark years with no hope, it is understandable that they might get carried away on the intoxicating feeling that finally having a voice can bring. We were not among their number, possibly because as gays, a group that barely even gets lip service from the Democratic party, we know the pattern all too well. We did not expect much meaningful change from a new administration. It is the populace that needs reform. The bottom line is that the United States will have to undergo massive social upheaval before we consider any plans to return there willingly, and if what seems to be the current majority has its way, we will be gone forever.

Yet while our course has become, if anything, more determined, time has changed the situation, putting the relevance of this blog to readers in either country in question. For a while, that young infatuation with Mexico, felt through the heart of a defecting estadounidense, might have held some interest for others in the United States as a voyage of discovery through new territory. Some Mexicans told me that they enjoyed reading my blog because it let them see their country through the childlike eyes of an immigrant. However, I can no longer claim such a perspective. My jejune love for Guadalajara has grown into seasoned, intricate relationship. I still am charmed by her beauty and warmth, but a much more intimate knowledge informs our discourse, illuminates our way together and bonds us in a union that is at times harmonious and at others discordant. Pure observation and interpretation does not hold much interest for me anymore.

So what now for the blog in this new era? I am not yet sure. Maybe I will find that I am only capable of generating the same kind of material as you are used to here, but I think I need a change. I may need to throw off the limitation of having all the entries be about Mexico, Guadalajara or being an expatriate. I may need to just sit down and write without such a specific focus and see how it goes. It would probably make the most sense to move that to a different blog and keep this on-topic, but as I said, I find that a lot of the Mexico/Guadalajara aspects have been internalized now, and I suspect they will come out regardless of what I write about. Maybe it will turn out that this is the end of an era.

Watch this space.

Posted by crispy at 04:45 PM | Comments (1)

December 14, 2009

Last year, on el crispito...

Back in Mexico, the past year feels like a book I read and really got into. Characters were introduced, took shape slowly day by day like page after page in my mind. Events were scheduled, anticipated and passed, all year long winding together a framework for the story about the year I spent outside my life, back in my past, in an alternate universe that split off from the rails of my present course way back before I could have ever conceived of leaving the country. It was if I got a peek into what would have been if I had not decided to do something else, to not follow what I believed to be right. It was like The Last Temptation of Chris.

I got to explore what it would be like to live day to day in another reality that was not mine, just by being plunked down in the middle of it. I did things I had never done and learned whatever happened to people that had long since vanished from my memory. I found out things I should have known before but did not. I lived moments I could have never imagined that I will forever remember. I set into motion a thousand little events that will have consequences long after my departure.

Back home, I am now learning about the life Shawn lived here alone, the friends he made, the stories they have. Three sets of neighbors cycled in our apartment building during my absence, and the little boy that mows the lawn and trims the trees with his father grew a moustache and nearly a foot taller. Our neighborhood left its parent chain but retained most of their menu. The federal government allowed personal use quantities of all recreational drugs without penalty and a group of lawmakers in Mexico City proposed legislation to permit same-sex marriage. Charles' older daughter came to study at university but left to go back to Baja California Norte, and his younger daughter with Carmen started to talk. Larry and Joseph moved, again, and the city got another new bus line that everyone hates, again.

The gulf separating the two different timelines is impossible to merge, like trying to knit back together landmasses rent by continental drift. I do not bridge the gap. I did not have one foot in one place and another in the other. I was simply gone, living another life somewhere else for a year. Now I am back in Mexico, and my life has returned again to being so different from what I grew up with. It feels so good to be home where things are so unfamiliar. Sure, many of the wonderful things I remember about Guadalajara remain, like the fragrant, flowering trees that bloom at night, the music everywhere, the tacos…oh, the tacos! Still, my favorite thing of all is that feeling of not knowing what comes next. It could be anything. I just get to kick back and relax in this lush paradise and wait for it. I just know that something good is going to happen.

Posted by crispy at 05:34 PM | Comments (2)

August 20, 2009

Primero, pido disculpas por mi español muy feo.

Off the plane, things are immediately all switched around. The jetway splits left/right. Right and up goes to national flight baggage. Left and down takes you to an international processing plant.

There, another surprise. INM first, then get your bags. I am unprepared and have to set down in the hallway to retrieve the proper forms: my FM3 (the little green book I am back in Mexico to renew), a copy of a form filled out when leaving the country and held onto the entire time I was away, and my passport from the US of A. The quiet agent gives me none of the accusing questions or odd looks typical of an immigration officer. A couple of swipes with a rubber stamp and I am picking up my suitcase, just now coming around the carousel.

Last but not least, aduana. A cheery, young tapatia takes my form and greets me with, "Buenas noches." The words "buenos días" are already out of my mouth, having been calculated and configured in advance as the automatic standard greeting appropriate for the hour.

"Ay sí. Sí es la mañana," she says, correcting herself.

I briefly feel like an ass, not having meant to correct her; I smile sheepishly and nod. She scans the form and guides me to the stand with a buzzer and two lights, one green and one red. Pushing the button will result in my getting one or the other. If I get green, I can pass on through and make my way home. If I get red, I win an inspection of all my bags. This surreal game show always seems to me a perfect embodiment of the Mexican love of fun and frivolity, wherever it can be applied. I am a little surprised that they do not have bikini-clad girls attending each buzzer, ready to smile at you if you win, and offer a sad, melodramatic pout if you lose. I suspect if they had it in the budget, they would.

Green it is! Another happy traveler wins the chance to come back again. I pass through the sliding doors of the processing area leading into the main terminal, where a bubbling crowd awaits, held back by stanchions and belts to allow a pathway for the newly arrived to make our way through. Even though nobody is waiting for me, the throng make me feel like a rock star having come for a grand tour. There is an electricity in the air. ¡Bienvenidos a México!

Having dealt with Americans for the past few months, I am expecting counter personnel to be surly and gruff. I step up to the taxi counter prepared to rattle off a string of various descriptions to indicate where I need to go - the neighborhood, the closest major intersection, the zone number on the map. Before I can even reach the booth, the attendant sees me coming, smiles and waves me closer.

"¿A dónde vas?"

"Aaaaaa...voy a Colonia Chapalita Sur..." I pause to look on the zone map to see what number I need to tell him, but he beats me to the punch, pointing straight to my neighborhood. He shows me the price of MXN $230 indicated on the rate sheet. For this, I am prepared. I pull out a $200 note, a $20 note and a $10 coin and pass it through the window. We exchange the "¡Gracias!" and I am out the front door to the line of waiting taxis.

Drizzle. There is brief confusion because I presume the airport taxis work like the other taxis in Guadalajara, but the last in line, not the first, is the one slated to take the next passenger. The driver takes my bag and says something in a string of rapid Spanish that I cannot make out at all. From his gestures at the puddle on the ground next to the passenger door, I understand that he is going to pull out so that I do not have to walk through water to get in. Ah, yes. Thoughtful courtesy. I had forgotten.

He puts my suitcase in the trunk, hustles to get in the car and pull from the curb, I step in, shut the door and tell him where my apartment is located, again ready to explain in more detail where he needs to go. Once again, it is unnecessary. The driver throws the car in gear and we are off.

Here it is, the moment for which I had been trying to prepare myself. My first real conversation in Spanish in five months. Incidents leading up to my trip - forgetting certain words, days of the week, common expressions - have me worried. I consider feining exhaustion and staying quiet, but I know this would be inappropriate, and actually, quite rude.

The driver does not give me the chance anyway, and asks me how long I have lived in Guadalajara.

I tell him, nearly four years, although I have been in the United States for the past seven months. I beg his forgiveness for my bad Spanish, as I have had little opportunity to practice in the United States. He asks me what I do, and being tired of explaining that I am a homemaker, I fib a little and tell him that I am a freelance writer in a very roundabout way because I do not know the proper way to say 'freelance.' He delves deeper into the subject and I begin to suspect that I am going to have to explain the whole situation anyway.

"¿Con quién vives aquí?" he asks. I find it odd that he presumes that I live with someone, but maybe it is presumed when one lives in an apartment, or more likely, he knows that a freelance writer is unlikely to make enough money to support himself properly. Or is he trying to hit on me?

I hesistate briefly, a holdover from growing up gay in the United States. Me, him, alone, driving through the outskirts late at night, I have the obligatory flashback: Matthew Sheppard, Sean Kennedy, Jack Twist. The paranoia passes. I am, after all, back in Mexico, where I have never had any trouble.

"Vivo con mi esposo. Aparte de ser escritor, soy 'el ama de casa'," I explain, getting closer to the real truth of my daily life.

He does what they always do, presuming that the silly gringo is mixing up genders. He repeats back a correction, "Ah, vives con tu esposa..."

"Pues, no. Con me esposo. Es hombre."

"Bueno, bueno. ¿Hace cuánto tiempo estás con él?"

He seemed to take that in stride.

"Dieciocho años. Casi dieciocho años...este fin de semana es nuestro aniversario."

"Y cuando regresas, no van a dormir esta noche."

I suspect I know what he is getting at, but it is not like Mexicans to jump into a discussion of such a personal issue, at least with strangers.

"Ah...mmmm...¿Mande?"

"Cuando regresas a tu departamento, ustedes van a estar en la cama esta noche, pero no van a dormir."

Despite any wish to seem Jack the lad, I know the truth of the matter. Plus I am not sure I want to go down this road, wherever it might be going.

"No, no. Él tiene que trabajar muy temprano y tengo mucho sueño por el viaje. Esta noche, vamos a dormir en la cama."

After a brief pause, he further delves into my nocturnal habits in a way I am not expecting.

"Y cuando te duermes, ¿llevas un camisón?"

I do not understand what a camisón is, but I hesitate before asking him to repeat himself.

"¿Mande? ¿Camis-qué?"

"En la cama, tu ropa. ¿Llevas ropa de dormir femenina?"

Wacky. I encounter this in Mexico far more than any kind of homophobia. Mexicans, at least the straight ones, often have a fascinated curiosity about how the other half lives. The notion still persists here that gay men are men the just want to be women. Maybe I should say, that is the only way a lot of people can get their head around the idea. He wants to know if I - no, he presumes that I - wear a woman's nightgown to bed.

I laugh a bit, seeing yours truly dressed up in lacy undergarments, then explain that I will just be wearing mis chones. I never wear anything else.

"Pero él, ¿sí?"

Yeah, surely one of us must be wearing women's clothing at some point.

"No. Él es más recatado. Siempre lleva un playera y pantalones cortos en la cama."

We sit quietly for a while, until we get close to my neighborhood. I tell him where to turn, how many more blocks until he turns left. It is at the stoplight, then right there on the corner.

I get out, he jumps out to help me with my bag. I hand him a tip and wish him a pleasant trip. He thanks me and says good-night.

I haul my luggage up to the door to the apartment building, trying hard not to disturb the still of the night in our quiet neighborhood. I notice that the lights are on in the bedroom of the young man that lives downstairs from us. I have missed him so much, I am tempted to go rap on his window to say hello, but I decide against it.

After fumbling to find the right key, one works and lets me in. I pause at the bottom of the stairs to read the notice about the payment for gas being due this week. The price has not gone up any since I left. I stand there, thinking about the new neighbors, friends of ours from before, that have moved into the apartment at the bottom of the stairs since last I was in the building. That happened several months ago.

I hoist my suitcase up the stairs, and see that the door to my apartment has been decorated by the neighbors with ribbons, balloons and a sign that reads, "¡BIENVENIDO CHRIS! TARDASTE MUCHO". Indeed I have.

I open the door, half expecting Shawn to be on the couch, having fallen asleep waiting up for me, but he is not there. He is back in the bedroom where the nighlight of the Virgin Mary that my friend Brian bought for me in Tijuana is shining on my nightstand. On the table I see a pie that was surely made for my return by Marta, yet another of our wonderful neighbors. I decide to save it for the morning, and I open the door to the balcony and turn on the ceiling fan.

I go out on the balcony and watch the empty intersection glowing in the rain and the light of the stoplight. I think about the last time I stood on the balcony, looking out on the street and thinking how much I was going to miss this place, the people, my life. I did not know then how long I would be away. I feared that when I stood out there once again, everything would be different.

In some ways it is, but life goes on. I think of my father, who would have loved Mexico if he had ever made it down here. I think about Charles and Carmen, and their little baby girl. I think about what it will be like when it is time to elect the next presidente. I think about the cab driver getting back to the airport and telling his compañeros that he just had a fare that was a gay guy that does not wear a nightgown to bed.

Posted by crispy at 11:20 AM | Comments (4)

January 17, 2009

What's going on?

Hey folks.

I don't know who might be reading this blog that doesn't already know, but I have returned to the United States for a while. My father is very sick and the folks wanted me to come home and help them out.

It seems rather inappropriate to write about Mexico from southern Illinois, but I may be able to do a little of that. I may change the blog over to have some different kind of content, as I have been thinking about that for some time. For now, I'm so busy helping my dad with stuff like taxes and accounting, I am not going to be doing much writing at all.

Check back again in a month or so.

Posted by crispy at 03:51 PM | Comments (4)

December 31, 2008

Tabula Rasa

My apologies to those few of you still left checking my blog every now and again, for the blank space you have been experiencing.

Shawn and I are on vacation in Mexico City, and I have learned that it's easier to do as he says and save all the writing about the places we visit until we get home. That is difficult for me, as I like to feel as if I'm filing timely, insightful reports on the current conditions on the ground in all these wacky places we visit for an audience that is waiting on the edge of their seats to read all about them. Furthermore, as my father has noted, I'm no spring chicken, and my memory simply does not retain all the odd bits and pieces the make the experience interesting once I move beyond it. More often than not, the post-mortem article becomes an analysis of the events through a lens tinted by one single stand-out experience, either terribly negative or exhilaratingly positive. It is not good travelogue.

Even so, Shawn's argument has its merits, and it is easier to just not to need any arguments in the first place. I will pick up again when we get back from our holiday trip to Mexico, maybe not even commenting much at all on where we went or what we did. Does anyone really care about a middle-aged gringo's take on the modern comforts (or lack thereof) in a remote, rustic mining town? Maybe. Perhaps the truth is, I really do not have much need for it anymore.

I will leave you with this one tidbit to welcome in the new year. In Mexico, there is a tradition on New Year's that I find particularly charming, which is the eating of the twelve grapes at midnight. A wish is cast on each of the grapes, one for each month of the coming year. This is often part of a family celebration, but in the past, when we have gone out to clubs, the glass of champagne passed out for the 00:00 toast is accompanied by a little plastic cup with the grapes. One is to toast with the champagne, then consume the grapes, one by one.

Here is wishing you all a happy new year, full of 12 wonderful months!

Posted by crispy at 01:32 PM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2008

The Decline of Western Civilization

Shawn and I returned home last night to find that we again have no running water.

This comes on the heels of our television dying. And losing a boatload in our investment funds.

We are sitting around in our apartment, unshowered, unshaven and with a sink overflowing with dirty dishes, unable to watch anything on television and too broke to go out and spend money on entertainment.

I told Shawn that I feel like we are experiencing the decline of western civilization first hand.

Having been a Cinema/TV student, he countered with, "Having no running water makes me feel like we're living in Little House on the Prarie. Having no money makes me feel like we're The Waltons, living in The Depression. And living with no TV makes me feel like the Kramdens in The Honeymooners."

Posted by crispy at 10:49 AM | Comments (22)

October 12, 2008

Yes, We Have No Water (Revisited Again)

Sigh.

Once again we have a sign on our door telling us that the building is out of water. We had some left in the tank before we left for dinner tonight, but upon returning home after midnight, the tap was dry.

This is getting really old.

I don't know if we can get water delivered by truck tomorrow because it's Sunday.

Posted by crispy at 02:58 AM | Comments (4)

October 08, 2008

Yes, We Have No Water (Revisited)

Just to let you all know, it seems the water is working again, but there has been no official follow-up. We asked the lady downstairs about it and she said that it was working again. She did not know what anyone did nor why it was not working, but it seems to be working again.

It should be noted that it was apparently working later in the same day that I posted the previous update about our having to get private water delivery (which I have learned from Cristina's comment, is called a pipa - thanks Cristina!). That means that we were with little to no water service for about three days. That is not great, but it not a tragedy from which we will never recover.

In fact, I have already moved on to my next nightmare, and in case the tamale lady brings some nice, hot churros for our one-legged taxista, I'll tell you about crispy and the story of renewing the big bad FM3.

Posted by crispy at 01:15 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2008

Yes, We Have No Water

Notice: "We have no water. Please conserve it."

Shawn returned from working out yesterday and told me, "we don't have any water."

I didn't understand exactly what this meant, so I asked him to clarify. He explained that the sign seen above had been taped to the door of our apartment building. Then I understood. The apartment complex, made up of eight apartments, has run out of water and none is coming in from the city supplies.

We received a different notice a week ago from our colonos. That is like the neighborhood association, and responsible for various civic issues in the colonia where we live. Last week's notice talked about several homes being without water north of La Ermita, one of the two streets that make up the interection at which we live. Supposedly, it was not a problem for us, since we were below that boundary, and indeed, last week, we had plenty of water. However, this week, the problem seems to be ours too.

There was water in the storage tank on top of the apartment building up through this afternoon, so we had a little water. We were, as the sign above asks, conserving it. Now though, it seems all that water has been used up and there is not a drop to be had for anything. Not for washing the dishes, not for taking a shower, and not for using the bathroom.

We have been without water on a few other occasions, but usually that has been because the switch on the pump that pumps water from the tank below the building up to the tank on top of the building needed to be reset. In those cases, when the guy that knows how and where to do that stuff came home from work, he would reset it and we'd have running water again within the hour. This time, the water from the city has just stop running, so who knows when we will have running water again.

I'm trying to roll with the punches and not get to annoyed with it. After all, my getting worked up about it will not get the problem fixed any faster. It isn't such a big deal to not shave for a couple of days, or even to go without a shower. I am pretty sedentary and do not work up much of a sweat.

But not having a working toilet in the house, now that starts to get inconvenient...

Posted by crispy at 04:27 PM | Comments (6)

September 18, 2008

The American Society of Jalisco

On Wednesday, I joined the American Society of Jalisco.

It is an organization that was formed 63 years ago to provide local information to expatriates and visitors from the United States, and to offer them a social outlet with fellow English-speakers. Nowadays one does not need to be a United States citizen to join, and they are actively trying to recruit a more diverse membership. Anyone can join and take advantage of the services the group offers.

Among the primary benefits of membership are:

• one of the largest English-language lending libraries in the city
• weekly get-togethers and holiday events
• weekly classes in things like languages and aerobics
• mail service to the United States every few weeks by members taking trips up there
• referrals for members seeking local services

The membership does tend to consist mostly of retirees, although they welcome anyone. The person that signed me up was completely cool about the fact that I have a husband living here with me, but I tend to find that homophobia is far less common among Americans living abroad than it is within the country itself. The organization also does a fair bit of charity work for local causes, and it serves as the meeting place for other groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Toastmasters.

Annual membership dues are MXN $300 for individuals and MXN $600 for families. The American Society of Jalisco is located at Avenida San Francisco 3332 (a few blocks off the glorieta where the Escultura La Estampida is located), and their phone number is (33) 3121-2395. They can be contacted by email as well: amsoc@megared.net.mx.

Posted by crispy at 04:20 AM | Comments (2)

September 10, 2008

Our Cable Sucks

I used to like our cable. Maybe it's because I didn't know any better and at first, the wide array of Mexican television thrilled me. I could see old Mexican films, wacky game shows, over-emoting telenovela stars and music channels that actually show music videos. Maybe I liked the company because they kept greatly increasing our Internet access speeds with only token (90 cents a month) price increases. Maybe I had better things to do with my time than watch TV.

I know. Everyone hates their cable company. Yet I have started to note that it is not just our cable company, but the channels themselves that are in fact responsible for a large share of the frustration.

We upgraded and paid extra to switch to digital cable. It is not yet going to be mandatory here in Mexico like in the United States, but the package allowed us to get Turner Classic Movies Latin America. Shawn really missed getting to see good films on TCM, and from the moment he learned that basic digital cable offered the Latin American version here (and confirmed that they carried the original soundtracks on the SAP), he was determined to get it. When we decided to finally get a digital video recorder, we decided it was time to upgrade to digital cable.

Since getting it, my biggest frustration has been the slow loss of SAP in English on nearly every channel that had it when we first signed up - Discovery Channel, The National Geographic Channel, Retro, and Fox. Calls to our Megacable's customer service to complain about this only get us the response that they are not to blame; they just pass on what they get from their upstream provider to their clients. For some reason, they can not be bothered to take it up with their upstream provider that they are no longer getting the level of service that they paid for. No, because the vast majority of their customers do not have a need for the SAP, they will do nothing about it.

Having to watch programming dubbed over into another language, scorched free of any ambient sound into a a sterile, lifeless soundtrack where the words do not match the lips of the actors is disturbing. Having nothing but that kind of viewing experience slowly makes you feel like you are going insane. Imagine if all the shows you could watch were like Hong Kong action films or the judging panel from Iron Chef; there is no connection between what your eyes see and what your ear hears, even if you understand what is being said.

As maddening as that is, our most recent annoyance with our cable comes from the Latin American versions of popular channels themselves. One would think it might even bother the majority of their customers, although I still doubt that many will complain about it.

This fresh hell comes in the form of channels carrying programs for which they show only a handful of episodes, repeating the same ones over and over, even though many more exist. We first noticed this with Discovery Travel and Living. They run one of our favorite shows, Globetrekker, an hour-long, in-depth travel program. The promotions for the show that they run even push the fact that there are over 100 episodes of it, but it seems that they only show, say, 10 different episodes in any period of 3 or 4 months. When they add new programs, they do not cycle all the old ones out. They add the new ones in drips and drabs, taking an old show out of rotation here and there.

We recently started getting The Big Bang Theory, which I watch because I think Jim Parsons is super hot. The only problem is, WB Latin America, the channel that shows it five times a week here, shows only four different episodes. Shawn and I have numbered them, and we make bets on which one will be the one on when they show it. "Will tonight be episode one again, or episode four?" What is even more frustrating is the fact that they run lots of ads showing scenes from episodes that are not these four. They tease us with thinking they are going to show a new one, but then it is just one of the four we have seen time and time again.

Just recently, we were delighted to find that we could watch Charlie's Angels at 2 am, Tuesdays and Thursdays, on TCM Latin America. We would wait up, snuggle up on the couch at five to two, and prepare ourselves for those golden opening strains of the theme song and the narrative explaining how the three little girls from the police academy came to work for Charles Townsend. It was the best 70s cheese we had gotten since they started carrying Wonder Woman. But soon our late-night ritual was soured when we realized they were only showing the first season, and even then, repeating the same few episodes over and over again.

I had been grousing about how we should switch from Megacable to SKY TV or maybe even some other alternative, but when the channels are the same on the competing carriers, what use would it be?

It is maddening because it is yet another case where, coming from the United States, one can see that the foreign product of American companies exported to Latin America is often astoundingly inferior, and they just do not seem to care. The green tea frappuccino at Starbucks® here is made without the melon syrup (and thus sucks rocks). Wal-Mart carries Gatorade® here, but only the nasty lemon-lime kind, not the more palatable orange. One can buy a T-Fal® iron here, but the warranty is only good in the United States and Canada. They want our cash and warm bodies in front of the tube, but they cannot be bothered to provide the same level of service and selection that they provide in the United States. It is imperialism of the worst kind.

As a citizen of the country where so many of these businesses come from, it is embarrassing that they have such terrible offerings in their products and services, especially when they are so expensive relative to local buying power. Of course, nobody here complains, so there is no reason to expect that foreign companies will shape up and improve their service. A couple of years ago, when Mexicans organized a one-day boycott of American products referred to as nada gringo or "nothing gringo," to protest the treatment Mexican immigrants to the United States were receiving, people just went out the day before and stocked up on all the American products they were not supposed to buy on the official boycott date. With consumer consciousness like that, what else can one expect?

Posted by crispy at 10:39 AM | Comments (4)

June 08, 2008

The Photograph That Helped al-Qaeda

MBTA Advisory, Riverside Station

I was snapping this very photo of a sign at a train station for a collage I'm going to make once we return to Mexico of signs telling of all the things Americans are not permitted to do when I heard a voice asking, "May I help you?"

"Oh!" I exclaimed, having not seen him walking over. "I'm just taking a picture of the sign."

"You're not supposed to take any pictures of the equipment," he told me.

"No photos of any equipment?" I asked, not exactly sure how a sign was equipment.

"No," he replied with a sigh, indicating a mild annoyance.

I suspected I knew the reason for this, despite its being utterly ridiculous. Recently, I have been stopped from taking any number of seemingly innoccuous photographs like the one above.

The first time we ever ran into the phenomenon, we were in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Shawn was going around to see the locations used in the opening credits of one of his favorite shows of all time, The Mary Tyler Moore Show - the house where she supposedly lived, the park where she walked, the street where she tossed her hat in the air. When attempting to take a photograph of the escalator she rode in the Nicollet Mall, he was stopped by a private guard that wouldn't allow him to take a picture "for security reasons." At that time, it actually took us a while to figure out how a photograph of an escalator could be a threat to anyone's security, but by now, we've heard it as often as we've heard the one about putting your liquids in three-ounce bottles in a clear Ziploc® bag in your carry-on luggage.

All the same, I like to hear them say it. I put the camera down and asked him.

"Why is that?"

He looked at me for a moment with a corner of his mouth raised and issued a brief snort, and replied simply, "9-11." He stopped just short of following that with, "...smart-ass."

I thought I'd try to lighten the mood a little, so I asked him about what caused us to notice the sign in the first place: to reach the exit of the station, one has no choice to cross the tracks (visible at the lower left) about five feet from the location of the sign telling riders it is FORBIDDEN. I asked him how one was to get out of the station if they adhere to the mandate of the sign.

He was not amused.

"You exit down there, in the yellow zone," he said, pointing to a strip painted on the ground.

It was late. He didn't need some joker taunting him about the rules; people probably hassle him about the contradictory signage on a daily basis, each one thinking they're the genius that was the first to notice it. I abandoned my hopeless mission to turn his frown upside down and exited the station as he had indicated.

In my defense though, I wouldn't have joked with him about it if I could have just taken a photo of the sign. In his defense, he seemed, by his manner and tone of voice, to realize that it was ridiculous that I couldn't take a picture of signage at the station.

It made me wonder exactly how long people will continue to actually enforce such ridiculous knee-jerk prohibitions in the United States that were pushed on them in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. I mean, honestly. Even if I took a photograph of the entire station, it's a train stop in a suburban town in Massachusetts. It's unlikely to be a high-priority target on even the most unambitious terrorist's list. I would be open to consideration of the idea that high-resolution photographs of more serious targets (Grand Central Station, airport terminals, Fort Knox) might be of aid to those wishing to do harm to the United States and its citizens, but one would be an idiot to think that a tourist's snapshot taken in a train station, especially one that simply shows what a sign says, is helping terrorists.

I know, it's easier to just write a blanket law that uses language like "transportation facility" and "equipment" than to exhaustively list which manifestations of those things are subject to a law and which are excused from it. I understand that such vague terminology has certain advantages to legislators writing the laws and those who enforce it. Yet when will the old chestnut of selective enforcement of such laws start to kick in and give people a little relief from the martial law effect in the United States?

Even the guy that told me to stop taking photographs seemed to find it ridiculous, but he had to do his job. Will life in the United States be like this for the rest of my life?

Posted by crispy at 10:59 PM | Comments (8)

June 01, 2008

Toronto: What I Liked

CN Tower, Toronto

Two and a half days in Toronto is not much time. It is not enough time to experience a decent sample of what the city has to offer, let alone to get a good feeling of what the city is really like.

Given that our stay at the Sheraton Centre Toronto was the worst part of our trip (I won't go into that here; let's just say that the $18 veggie burger was not the only rip off there), I wanted to talk about some of the great things I liked about Toronto.

View from the CN Tower, Toronto

Toronto is a huge city. It is big not only in population and area, but in vertical space as well. Unlike Shawn, I am not a huge fan of high views, so I let him go on his own to the CN Tower to get his fix. The pictures he took there show how massive the city is, in terms of big, tall buildings. I have yet to reach New York City, but Toronto is in many ways how I picture it: skyscrapers cluttered together perilously close and teeming with surging masses of people betweent them.

View from the CN Tower, Toronto

I also liked that the people here are of all different types. Half of the population here is foreign-born. We had a cab driver from Kenya that told us about being thrown into jail in the United States at a border crossing and being held for six hours in a crowded cell just because the country where he was born (but hasn't lived for more than 20 years) is on "the list." We heard all kinds of different languages on the radio here, many that I couldn't identify, and of course, the ubiquitous French.

Multilingual Signage, Royal Ontario Museum

I love Mexican food. I have found a number of places in Guadalajara that have tasty delights that I miss already, having been on the road for a couple of weeks. Yet the ethnic diversity results in a great diversity of ethnic restaurants, the likes of which I'm not even sure they have in Mexico City. We didn't eat there, but yesterday we passed an Eritrian restaurant. We were so taken with Full Moon Vegetarian Restaurant (638 Dundas Street West, 416/203-1210), a place that serves a huge selection of all-vegetarian Chinese dishes, that we ate there twice. We also had great Indian and Thai food too.

Full Moon Vegetarian Restaurant

This was a sauteed eggplant with vegetarian ham, which had a beautiful palette of rich colors.

Eggplant with Vegetarian Ham, Full Moon restuarnat

Big cities always have the best graffiti, and Toronto has some of the best I've seen in a while. Moreover, one doesn't tend to see all that many boring, crappy tags, but when there is graffiti, it's almost always the elaborate kind that demands real artistic talent.

Graffiti, Toronto

I don't like to see Shawn in pain, but this was one of the funniest unexpected things I saw on the trip. I looked up from taking that last shot and saw him bent over and rubbing his back next to this sign. I quickly snapped another shot just because the symmetry was so funny.

Shawn In jured, Toronto

Posted by crispy at 11:45 PM | Comments (3)

April 30, 2008

Querétaro: Part Three

Paper Head Guy, Querétaro

I wanted to see the place where Emperor Maximilian was executed, El Cerro de las Campanas, or "The Hill of the Bells." We set out on foot this morning before noon to check it out.

It was already hot, and I was in semi-dressy clothes. At first, it wasn't so bad. Walking down Avenida Hidalgo, I saw a bunch of stuff that struck me as funny or cool, and I was able to snap some photos of them.

Lavandería/Tintorería Veronica, Querétaro

I don't understand the one below. It's a sign for a place that sells medical implants and prosthetics, and I'm sure their products help their clients to live fuller, more satisfying lives. Yet I suspect most of them do not go on to be communications directors on the crew of an open-wheel, off-road racing team.

Adventures in Prosthetics, Querétaro

I mean, where did they get this photo? Did they make it themselves? It looks like a poster for a Hollywood summer blockbuster about a racer that loses an arm in a terrible accident but whose courage allows him to take his former teammate to the championships as the tough but caring crew chief that inspires everyone that gets to know him.

A reward is being offered for this lost dog.

Perrito Perdido, Querétaro

Why, I'm not exactly sure. It looks like Darth Poodle to me, but then again, I'm not a big dog fan.

Is it just me, or does this...

I AM A MONEDA!, Querétaro

...remind anyone else of Don Hertzfeldt's "Rejected"?

Soon enough though, we started having to go uphill to get to the summit, and site of the historic stuff I wanted to see. This was annoying because I was a little dressed up, and I was sweating like a pig the whole way. As we got nearer and nearer to the top of the hill, Shawn noticed that all the gates to the park were closed. He started to worry that one had to go in through one specific gate to get in the park, but there were no signs whatsoever anywhere to direct one to the proper entrance. The gates that were closed didn't even have a sign telling one which gate to go to.

This isn't entirely unusual in Mexico, but one would think that, at one of the biggest tourist attractions in the city, they'd have signs telling you where to go to buy your ticket to get in. Of course, our friends Larry and Joseph would argue that this is where you make your first mistake, presuming that people think about such things here.

We finally got to the top, and found that we were in a big empty parking lot, unable to get in through the fence that encircles the whole park. Luckily, Shawn spotted a gate that was ajar, although it said (in Spanish), "EMPLOYEE ENTRANCE ONLY!" They can't afford the time or expense to put a sign up telling you where to get in, but they can somehow manage one to tell you to keep out. I was annoyed, hot and sweaty by this point, so I squeezed in through the gate after Shawn. I wasn't about to go back down the hill just so that I could go back up to get to the proper gate.

View from El Cerro de las Campanas, Querétaro

While climbing the hill, I was quickly losing interest in the park, cursing our even thinking of going there. Yet once inside, I was glad to have made the effort, because it was quite verdant and beautiful.

Shawn at El Cerro de las Campanas, Querétaro

There is a great, enormous statue of Benito Juárez in the park, which is kind of funny because he was a pretty short man.

Monument to Benito Juárez, Querétaro

Shawn commented that it looked so severe as to seem Russian.

Monument to Benito Juárez, Querétaro

You can't really tell in the above photo as resized for the blog, but Shawn's giving old Juárez the Lynndie England.

The Lynndie England, Querétaro

Emperor Maximilian was Austrian, and had been appointed as Emperor of Mexico by Napoleon during a period when France had conquered Mexico. His reign was brief though, as Juárez and the resistance movement overthrew the monarchy and had Maximilian executed. The family of Maximilian sponsored the building of a chapel to commemorate the re-establishing of diplomatic relations between Austria-Hungary and Mexico in 1900.

Chapel at El Cerro de las Campanas, Querétaro

It is a nice little chapel, but it does not seem like people are allowed to enter, but they do have the doors open so you can see inside. When we arrived, a bunch of school kids on a field trip were all bunched up at the entrance checking it out.

Chapel at El Cerro de las Campanas, Querétaro

There's also a fountain that is dedicated to children, their learning, and being the future. Yada, yada, yada.

Child Reading Sculpture at El Cerro de las Campanas, Querétaro

We didn't notice until posting the picture, but it looks like the kid in the above sculpture is missing a foot. Maybe he needs to visit the prosthetics store and make something of himself, instead of just moping around reading all the time!

We exited the park, buying the entrance tickets as we left. I suspect they thought we were crazy, but I didn't want to explain our whole gate-crashing earlier. We hailed a cab and went to Harry's, a New Orleans-style restaurant and oyster bar in the Plaza Constitución.

Shawn at Harry's

Harry's was a pretty nice place, and they had a handful of things on the menu that we could eat as ovo-lacto vegetarians. Meat-eating fans of Cajun and Creole food would probably enjoy it even more.

I was delighted to discover that they had pecan pie listed as a dessert on the menu, but I was disappointed to find that it was more like a Mexican pay de nuez than a southern US style pecan pie. Instead of having a layer of glazed pecans over that delicious sugary, gooey filling, it was more or less all crushed up nuts in a crust. Not awful, but not at all what I was expecting (and craving).

Harry's of Querétaro

It's in the same building as the Gran Hotel, and seems to be the most happening night spot in the Centro Histórico. We went back later at night, around midnight, to have a nightcap and celebrate our last night in town, but there wasn't a free table in the whole place.

Yet before all that, still in the afternoon, we walked over to try and hang out for a while in the Alameda Hidalgo, a huge park with lots of trees and grassy areas. We had driven by it last night, and it looked beautiful. Yet when we got there, we found it closed. There were maintenance people inside, but all the gates were locked up tight.

Alameda Hidalgo, Querétaro

Again, there were no signs anywhere telling visitors why the park was closed, or when it would be open.

Alameda Hidalgo, Querétaro

We suspected that, since they had maintenance crews inside doing things like watering areas of the grass and sweeping the walkways, they do open it up at some point.

Alameda Hidalgo, Querétaro

Yet since we had limited time in town, we didn't stick around to find out. We took photos through the fence and then decided to get our shoes shined. We asked the shoeshine guy what the deal was with the Alameda being closed and he explained something about how it actually is open at certain times, but he was old and a bit mumbly, so we didn't fully understand his answer. We think it's open on most days but only after a certain time. If visiting Querétaro, and if you want to visit the Alameda, be sure to inquire as to when it is open, or you may be very disappointed when you show up and can't get in.

Alameda Hidalgo, Querétaro

We hoofed it back to the center and walked up Anador Libertad, a very pretty street that is now a pedestrian walkway, to reach the Plaza de Armas.

Anador Libertad, Querétaro

Shawn went about taking photos of the plaza while I got off my feet in a seat off to the side of the plaza.

Plaza de Armas, Querétaro

We had coffee at Gloria Jean's Coffees, where the staff was exceptionally friendly.

Plaza de Armas, Querétaro

As we were leaving, Shawn spotted a restaurant next to the coffee place that said, 'COCINA HINDÚ' - an Indian restaurant! That's our favorite national/regional food, so we were thrilled to find such a place. They were obviously not open, as they had all their tables and chairs stacked outside, and were doing some remodeling inside. Shawn went in and asked if they would be open for dinner, and a man told him, yes, at 8 pm.

Plaza de Armas, Querétaro

We were excited and immediately decided to return for an Indian feast that night for our final dinner in Querétaro.

Plaza de Armas, Querétaro

As we left the plaza, we were surrounded by a bunch of school kids who wanted to interview us in English for a school project. They had some 20 questions about genetically-modified foods. It was incredibly hard stuff for non-native speakers, but they did a pretty good job.

We walked back to our hotel and relaxed for a while in the air conditioning. Eventually we showered (again), shaved (again), ironed our clothes and went out for our Indian delights. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the restaurant, the furniture that had been piled up outside was piled up inside. We entered and a bunch of people were all sitting around talking. We asked if they were open, and they said that they were opening on Friday. I was a bit miffed. I said that someone there had earlier told Shawn that they would be open at 8 pm for dinner, and the woman that seemed to be an owner apologized to us. We were really bummed because we were really looking forward to Indian food. It's very hard to find it here in Mexico.

It was nice however, to actually get an apology for being misinformed by someone on their staff. That usually doesn't happen. Normally you get a shrug and a laugh, and nothing more. Because people think it's better to tell you what you want to hear rather than to tell you something that will disappoint you, people lie to you all the time here, and nobody thinks there is anything wrong with that.

While we didn't get the chance to eat at the place because we're leaving Thursday afternoon to return to Guadalajara, I submit to you the information on the place in case you are going to Querétaro and would like to try it out. The place is called "bhaji" and is located at Pasteur Sur #8, in the Plaza de Armas. Their phone number is (442) 224-2814.

We ended up taking a chance on an Italian place called Trastevere (16 de Septiembre #28; 212-1472) and were positively surprised. Instead of the exact same boring three or four vegetarian dishes that they offer at seemingly all the Italian restaurants in Mexico, this place had interesting dishes that we have never seen anywhere else in the country. We had a cheese fondue with artichokes and grilled tomatoes that was out of this world, followed by a spinach and cheese ravioli in pecan white sauce for Shawn and a spinach lasagne for me. The service was excellent and the atmosphere quite nice: an open courtyard adorned with several interesting paintings. After our Indian disappointment, it was an absolutely delightful end to the evening.

Tomorrow we head back to Guadalajara, but we have had a great time here in Querétaro. I would recommend it highly to anyone interested in a good mixture of the historic charm and modern 'conveniences.'

I just wish they would get a little better about their signage telling visitors details like where the entrances are and when places are open so one doesn't end up wasting a lot of time.

Posted by crispy at 11:31 PM | Comments (5)

March 27, 2008

Apartment Hunting

Our friend Aaron returned to teach English in Guadalajara, so we have been helping him find an apartment.

After looking through listings online and in El Informador, he generated a list of 5-10 places and Charles took us around to look at them. Some were apartments and some were rooms in family homes, and the prices and amenities varied greatly. One apartment had no gas line whatsoever, but it did come with ceiling fans. One of the rooms he was shown had its own private bathroom, a 36" TV, and an instant surrogate family provided by many framed photos arranged on the walls and the dresser, but it turned out the guy that took him upstairs was showing him the wrong room.

He decided to take an apartment that is across the street from our local grocery store, only about six blocks from us. It is an interior-view, two-bedroom apartment on the second floor. He will be paying MXN $2800 (about USD $260) per month, plus gas and electricity. Now he has the fun of going about and shopping for all the things he needs to fill an apartment here: mattress, refrigerator, stove, table, chairs, pots, pans, towels, sheets, lights, etc.

I thought it might be helpful to anyone looking for housing in Guadalajara if I provided links to the online resources we used to look for Aaron's place. These generally require a fair knowledge of Spanish (or at least a dictionary), but if you are looking for a place to live in Guadalajara, you probably have that already.

• El Informador - This is the online classified section for the local paper with the most complete listings for houses, apartments and rooms.
• MexPlaza - Part of the University of Guadalajara network, this lists houses and apartments.
• Arkredi - Until recently, this worked fairly well. Now it gives only a photo and a blank listing for each property. Maybe it's under repair and will return to being a helpful resource again soon.

Posted by crispy at 03:49 PM | Comments (3)

March 03, 2008

Know Your Rights! Part Two

Back and Forth

Arbitration is used a lot in Mexico because the courts are overburdened with too many cases, so a resolution to a labor case takes around four to seven months at the present time. Because a lot of employees have labor issues with their employers, but many lack the time and/or expertise necessary for a court case, they will go to arbitration to reach a settlement with their employer.

Officially, it is called the Junta Federal de Conciliación y Arbitraje or JFCA. This name makes it sound like some specially conviened panel that is drawn together from the four corners of the earth to resolve problems with the swiftness of Mercury and the wisdom of Solomon. In reality, it is a crowded, hot bureaucratic office building with people nearly piled on top of each other in the halls as they await their turn to be low-balled or even blown-off by their employers, without much more assistance from the arbitration lawyers than being told they can go through another four worthless, yet time-consuming steps that may still not result in any resolution of the complaint.

Let me be more concrete. A worker who feels they have been dealt with unjustly by their employer can file a complaint with conciliation and arbitration, which in turn schedules an appointment for a meeting between the employee and the employer, mediated by an arbitration lawyer. A document is generated by the conciliation and arbitration office, and that document is presented to the employer by the employee, or by someone else they send to deliver the document. The employer's presence at the meeting is entirely voluntary. That is, if the employer decides to simply not show up, there is no penalty for ignoring the arbitration notice.

If the employer decides to attend the meeting, she will be in the room with the employee and an arbitration lawyer. The employee presents his argument and the employer might answer with her own argument, all in front of the arbitration lawyer, who takes notes on what both parties say. The arbitration lawyer does not seem to perform any advocacy function for either side during the meeting, instead taking notes and basically facilitating the meeting of the two sides. If a second meeting is called for, the arbitration lawyer will help schedule that meeting. The employee can take his lawyer along to arbitration meetings; the employer take a lawyer or she can send a lawyer or other representative along in her stead.

If a monetary amount is in dispute (as it usually is), the employee will ask for an amount up to the maximum permitted by law. If the employer or her representative shows up for the meeting, they will usually offer the employee only a fraction of the reward he is due by law. They might be prepared to make this offer at the first hearing, or they can request time to consider the demands before responding to the offer. If a second meeting is requested, there is again no penalty for failure to appear on either side. It is, of course, a disadvantage for the employee to miss the arbitration meetings, but it really has no negative impact for the employer to skip out on them.

Whom Does Arbitration Benefit?

If the offers made to the employee in arbitration are so low and if the employer does not even have to show up, why do people go to arbitration?

First off, it takes a long time to get a case resolved through the courts. A lot of people do not have the resources available to them to wait for a resolution that way and need some kind of immediate financial solution for paying the next month's rent, buying food or keeping the lights burning. For this reason, arbitration, which gets the employee a meeting date in three or four days compared to the six to eight weeks it will take before the first date in a court case can be scheduled, is much more attractive to people that need cash fast.

People here see the court system as corrupt, bloated and just plain worthless. The courts as a system for allocating justice historically have not been that effective in doing anything meaningful for the average José, and in fact, they usually sacrifice him in exchange for bribes from those who are more rich or powerful. Arbitration has been promoted as some force of change for the common man, and people here seem to think it will be more effective than the court system that way.

I am suspicious of that. It seems to me that a lot of people here have fallen for some propaganda put forward, either by the government, business interests or both, which tells people that arbitration is a faster, less complicated way to get what they due when their rights have been violated. In reality, it seems to be a way to give jilted employees less while making them feel like they got more.

As we discussed last time, 90% of the court cases brought by employees against their employers (or former employers) are won, eventually, by the employee. Because the cases can take a long time to be resolved, and because the employer found guilty in court has to pay full daily wages to the employee for the entire period of time the case is in court, this puts the employer at a great disadvantage if cases go to court.

If a company fires an employee without cause, the law says that they are bound to provide her with severance as described in the previous entry. This amount is due on the day they let the employee go. However, the company can easily break the law and refuse to pay the employee severance upon letting them go, betting on the idea that they will pay less if the employee has to go through the legal channels to get their due. If the employer simply refuses to pay, the employee has two options for getting the money owed to them. They can (1) take the employer to court, or (2) to try and reach a settlement through Conciliación y Arbitraje.

If the employee has no savings nor a new job that can support her while the court case is being settled, she will most likely opt for arbitration because it can provide her with some money, sooner. Because arbitration does not involve any determination of the legal validity of the arguments on either side, neither employee nor employer is found guilty or not guilty. A compromise is made to which both sides agree, and it will be neither a full vindication for a victor nor a complete punishment for the vanquished. In short, nobody leaves entirely happy. On the other hand, as compared to settling the matter in court, which is an all-or-nothing proposition, both sides get a little of what they want.

Well, maybe. Like I said, the employer could choose to just not show up for the arbitration hearings. Then the employee has no further recourse but to go ahead and take the matter to court, if he wants to get the money he is due.

After Arbitration

To file through the court, the employee has to hire a lawyer, prepare and make copies of various documents, and wait for several months for the first official hearing. Before the case is taken before a judge, a meeting is scheduled between the employer and the employee (and in which the employee's lawyer is not permitted), where the employer can make an offer to the employee to resolve the matter, like a pre-trial settlement. If the offer made is the full amount allowed by law in the three different components - the indemnización, the prima vacacional and the prima antigüedad (see previous entry) - the court case is immediately dismissed and the employee paid off. This is the amount the employee should have been paid on the day she was fired, but instead it is being paid out several months later, with no interest or other compensation for the delay paid to the employee and no fine or penalty given to the employer.

Usually, the delay in receiving the three components of the severance payment to be rewarded is compensated to the employee by the payment of the salarios caídos, a full day's pay for every day between the date of the firing and the date the decision is handed down (if it is in favor of the employee). Yet if the employer offers the full amount of the three components in the pre-trial meeting, the employee does not get any salarios caídos, despite having to wait months to get the severance package.

Betting Odds

If the offer is less than the full amount legally outlined for the three items listed above, the employee can refuse the settlement and the case goes before a judge. From then on, if the case is decided for the employee, she gets the three items listed above as well as the salarios caídos. If it is decided for the employer, she gets nothing.

If the employee can pursue the matter through the court, she is more likely to get a better settlement. As we mentioned before, 90% of the cases taken to court are decided in favor of the employee. An offer made through arbitration is faster and can be obtained without having to prove ones case, but it will also be for considerably less money. The offer made to Shawn was only 50% of the indemnización, with no prima vacacional and no prima antigüedad. If the case goes to court, the employee might win nothing, but if statistics are any indication, there is only a 10% likelihood of losing.

Since the salarios caídos is based on the time between the date of firing and the date of the court decision, it can easily be much higher than the package of the indemnización, prima vacacional and prima antigüedad. Usually those amount to about 100 or so days of pay. Yet when two months are allowed to pass before the court case must be filed, and since it can take four months between filing and the first hearing date, that is already closer to 180 days. An average case might actually go on for about 7 months. Some will go on even longer. In many cases, the salarios caídos rewarded ends up being over several times the amount due in the severance package of the basic three components. With a 90% success rate, that makes going to court a pretty good bet for jilted employees who can wait it out.

Posted by crispy at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2008

Rent

By law, a landlord can raise the rent on a property here each year by up to 10%.

Our landlord is very considerate of the tenants. When we first inquired about the apartment, he asked what we did. I said that I was a student, because at the time, that was the most recent thing that I had been: a student of Spanish at a college in Denver. He was concerned to hear this, he said, because we were asking to live in a building with many families, some with small children, and he didn't want there to be any loud, late night parties. I assured him that he didn't have to worry about that. If a need for a loud all-night party arose, we would have it elsewhere. I really liked the apartment, and would have promised a lot to get it.

The first year we lived here, there was no raise in rent. Our neighbors across the hall, Alberto and Roxana, who moved in a year before we did, had just had their rent raised for the first time. It seems the landlord doesn't raise the rent after the first year, so all tenants have the same rate for their first two years. That is a nice gesture on his part; it is not the typical practice here in Mexico. Yet at the beginning of this, our third year, we were notified that the rent would be raised.

Our rent is due at the first of the month, and the procedure is the same every time. I walk it down to the landlord's house, which is a block away, and I ring the doorbell. The landlord and his wife are an older couple, but they are successful enough to have a very lovely house and two servants. The servants are two women that seem to have been with the family for a considerable time. As far as anyone living here knows, they have always been with them. One of them usually shouts out a window at me - "¡Oye!" - and I answer back, "¡Buenos tardes! Tengo un pago de renta..." They come out, we exchange brief pleasantries, and the cash is traded for the reciept.

This past year, it became relatively frequent that the lady taking the cash and handing over the receipt would inform me of some caveat, such as the fact that the receipt had not been signed, or the printed receipts were not yet ready, so I could either wait to pay or accept a "provisional," hand-written receipt. The reason for this was always that el señor was away being treated for cancer. When he returned home, he would fill out the receipts or sign them; it was our choice as to what we wanted to do.

We always paid right then, accepting either the receipt that had not been signed or the hand-written receipt. We were a bit overly cautious for the first few months we were here, but it soon became obvious that the landlord, his wife and the two servants were not out to swindle us. In fact, in a couple of occasions, they were outright generous in their offers. When we were going to be gone for a month to Buenos Aires and would return two weeks after the regular date on which we turned in the money, I was trying to explain that I wanted to come by the week before we left to drop off the money in advance. I made it only to the point in my brief speech explaining that we were leaving the country and would not be home for a month before the woman I was talking to presumed that I was asking if it was okay to pay after we got back, nearly three weeks late. She said that would be fine. I was shocked and explained that I was actually giving them notice of an intention to pay in advance, knowing that they liked to prepare the receipts ahead of time. She said that would be fine too.

When we took our payment over in January, one of the ladies answered the doorbell and explained that the receipts were not signed, because el señor was in the hospital again, and we said that was not a problem. She told us that there would be a rent increase this year for us, but they did not know how much it would be, because el señor had not yet decided. They said they would come by and notify us when they found out, but the month went by and we had no notice. We took some extra bills over when we went to pay in February, but they still did not know what the increase would be because el señor was still in the hospital and had not been able to decide on the rent.

On Thursday night, one of the servants stopped by and notified us that the rent increase would be 10%, the full amount allowed by law. Shawn commented that he was a bit surprised about that, but I noted that they might well have a lot of hospital bills to pay, since the landlord had been in the hospital a lot. It had been two years with no increase for us, so it woked out to be about 5% a year.

About five minutes Alberto knocked on the door and came in to talk to us. He told us that the servant had come by to tell them that their rent would be 10% higher this year, and apparently it would be 10% higher for everyone in the building. Since inflation this past year was only about 3.5% and wage increases have been 4%, everyone was upset about this and felt it was unfounded. They also received an increase last year too. I commented to Alberto my suspicion about hospital bills and he said that he did not think that was the problem. The general opinion of the residents is, that with el señor in the hospital, his children were advising their mother on all his business dealings, and are very avaricious. Unlike their parents, they are not interested in maintaining good relations with the people who are both their neighbors and tenants.

The rest of our neighbors had already come up with a plan. Each of the tenants would go over to the landlord's house one at a time to protest the raise in the rent. The neighbors right below us would go that night, and then Roxana was going to go talk to her on Saturday. Alberto would let us know if it ended up being necessary that we would have to go over there; being that Spanish is not our first language, it would make sense for us to go last. Maybe she would be reasonable and change her mind before all eight of the apartments sent delegates over.

Last night Alberto came over at around midnight, and he told us that he had some unfortunate news. His wife was going over to have her talk with the landlord's wife, and while she was waiting, they received a phone call. One of the servants answered and then broke down into a fit of crying. Roxana excused herself and returned home. This morning, we have yet to hear anything official, but the general thinking among the neighbors is that our landlord died yesterday.

We are very sad about it. As far as landlords go, he was very fair and understanding, but beyond that, he was a very nice gentleman. We will miss him.

Posted by crispy at 09:48 AM | Comments (4)

February 10, 2008

A Not-So-Quick but Definitely Dirty Guide To Customs

A recent experience with FedEx, wherein packages were being shipped express mail to us from the United States at a cost of several hundred dollars and for which we are still waiting after thirteen days, has inspired me to write about international shipments and customs.

Yes, that office invariably staffed by sunny, cheery and professional folk whose job it is to monitor and control the flow of goods in and out of the country, and to collect taxes on various imported and exported goods called "duties." That is how their job description reads on paper. I suspect that there is a secret book somewhere that details it more like it is:

to do whatever they can to keep people from entering the country with any interesting items whenever possible, and when not possible, to charge the offending party exorbitant taxes for their impertinence, at all times performing this duty with discourtesy, obscurity, uninteligibility and incompetence, so as to provide the maximum amount of inconvenience possible.

Just like finding out the truth about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the policeman being your friend, the realization of the real nature of customs can be shocking. The experience of dealing with customs has reduced me to tears even when things go perfectly well, just from the amount of paperwork to be filled out, the time spent waiting, and the fistful of pesos extracted from my wallet without even the courtesy of a quick cuddle afterwards.

In hopes of easing the pain of that first time, I have decided to share the benefit of my experience with the world here on the blog. My experience is by no means expansive; I am no Art Vandelay. Before embarking on any international shipping program, you should always consult your local parcel professional for guidance in your particular case. Yet it is my hope that this article will give you some idea of what to expect when sending things to someone in a foreign country.

Know Your Enemy

Bureaucrats do not like to do their jobs. They will do anything they can to keep from doing their jobs, and any mistake on your part gives them the excuse to not do their jobs.

If the rule is that you need to have three copies of a form and you only have two when you arrive at their window, they'll shut you down right there because you did not follow instructions. Because you need their help and they don't need you, you are entirely at their mercy and must do things exactly as they dictate, even if their requirements are ridiculous and completely non-sensical.

It's a lot like dealing with the Soup Nazi. You must know the rules before your number comes up and you must follow them exactly, or no soup for you! If there is an exception or a problem with how you have completed your paperwork, or if you have included any forbidden, restricted or even questionable items, customs and shipping companies dealing with your international shipment can hold your package for days, or they might even send it back undelivered.

When sending an international package, make sure:

• everything you are sending is allowed into the destination country (not 'forbidden')
• you have all the proper certificates from the relevant agency in the destination country documenting clearance of any items on the 'restricted' list for that country
• the values declared for the items are realistic
• all the proper paperwork is filled out neatly and in full
• all the information (names, addresses, phone numbers, etc.) are 100% correct
• your documentation lists every item in the package individually, and when possible, include the Harmonized System Code numbers (see below)

Failure to do any of these things can cause huge delays and possible rejection of your package. Allow me to give you a personal example of the chain of errors that have kept our current package in a near two-week limbo.

First, the FedEx employee serving my mother when she went to send the package instructed her to write simply "Christmas and birthday presents" on the list of the box's contents. As I mentioned before, this is a big no-no. You must always list everything as well as a stated value for it. Yes, one would think that a FedEx employee would know this, but apparently she did not.

Still, it made it from southern Illinois to Guadalajara in one day, where it was turned over to an in-house customs broker. A customs broker is an expert in customs processing that prepares a shipment and all its paperwork before the package goes to customs. Large shipping companies with international service tend to have their own in-house people that do this, but you can hire independent customs brokers. Our customs broker immediately saw that the list was not acceptable for customs, so the package was held for days until a full, itemized list, complete with prices and country of origin for each item was provided to him. If the full list had been sent in the paperwork with the package, this delay would have been avoided.

Unfortunately, the recipient's phone number (my phone number) listed in the paperwork was incorrect. It was not incorrect like it had wrong numbers in it; it was wrong because it was written as it would be dialed from the United States, not written as someone would dial it within Mexico. Because of this, FedEx did nothing with my package for two days, claiming that they could not get in touch with me to request necessary paperwork, because the number on the form was incorrect.

It is simple for anyone living in Mexico (unless they've never dialed phone numbers before) to look at a number written to be dialed from the US and determine how it should be dialed from within Mexico, but having it not exactly as it should have been on the form gave them the excuse to not do their jobs and delay the package for days while they got the 'right' number.

Once customs got the package, they found that there were ceramics from Asia in the box. These are restricted items and only allowed into Mexico with the proper clearance from the Mexican Department of Health. Because getting the proper clearance through that other bureaucratic nightmare would take a month, and because the deadline had already passed for the package to be submitted to customs after arriving via FedEx in the country, the only two options were to surrender the items to customs to have them sent back at my mother's own expense or 'destroyed' (customs claims they destroy such restricted items, but the rumor is that customs agents just take them home themselves because no documentation that they actually have been destroyed is ever provided).

Federal Express has a book, called the "Fedex Global SRG" that details what items are forbidden and restricted in the different countries to which they ship packages. Every international shipping company should have something similar, and confirming that that everything you want to ship is actually allowed into the country with such a book will let you avoid unnecessary delays and the destruction or return of any forbidden or restricted items in your shipment. If you print out your own shipping labels at home, generated through a shipping company's web site, they will usually present you with the necessary information in the process.

The lady at the FedEx office should have gone over each item with my mother to make sure that it is allowed into the Mexico, but since she thought it was okay to ship an international shipment with only "Christmas and birthday presents" written on the packing list, it doesn't surprise me that she didn't think to look in the SRG to see if any of the items in the shipment were forbidden or restricted.

Duty Now for the Future

Customs offices charge indirect taxes called "duties" on things brought into the country. If you send something to someone in a foreign country, chances are high that either you or the recipient will have to pay duties on it. It does not matter that you paid taxes on the item when you bought it. You did not pay those taxes to the government of the country into which you want to send the item, and they want their taste. Customs agents are the goons they send to collect.

I have yet to see any place that does this easily, like charging a set percentage of the value on everything, or a flat-rate for everything. Instead, different items are charged differently, with some things being charged by assessable value and others by volume, and the rate and form of duty varies from country to country.

To make it easier for someone in one country to fill out the paperwork for the entry of goods into another country, a universal set of numbers for different product classes has been developed, called the Harmonized Systems Code (or H.S. Code). It divides everything shipped between countries into around 5 thousand different classes of commodities, identifying each by a six-digit code. With these uniform descriptors, the need to translate "watch" to "reloj" or "montre" is eliminated, as it is "910211," no matter what country it comes from or goes into. These are also used for comparison of trade statistics, so that analysists can be sure they're comparing apples to oranges.

If you look up the Harmonized Systems Code number for each of your products before taking the list to the shipping company, they should be able to provide you with a book showing the duty rates for each item, so you know how much duty must be paid on your shipment.

It is probably a good idea to look up how much duty will have to be paid before sending something to another country, or ordering something from a foreign country. I made the mistake of ordering some stuff to be delivered from the United States before checking with the duty rates for those items once, and I'll never make the mistake again.

Because I'm much bigger along every axis than your average Mexican, it is very difficult for me to find clothes in stores here. For a long time, I didn't know where to buy any fat-person clothes in Guadalajara, and my clothes were getting ripped and stained at a rate that I figured I'd soon look like a bum if I didn't get some new ample duds. I was delighted to learn that a company I'd used in the United States, one which specialized in clothes for the huge and enormous, delivered worldwide. I understood that the shipping would be considerably more expensive than I was used to from ordering from them online, but I was ignorant about the fact that duty rates can be obscene.

When the shipment arrived, the FedEx guy told me that I owed something like MXN $550 (around USD $50) for the two t-shirts that I'd ordered, which only cost USD $25 each. I could not believe my ears. Since Spanish is not my lengua materna, I asked him to repeat the amount. Sure enough I heard him right. I asked him what that was for. Did I somehow mistakenly have it shipped C.O.D. or something? I thought I had already paid for the shipping on my credit card when I placed the order. He explained that it was for import duties, but could not tell me why the duties were 100% of the cost of what I'd ordered. Usually, import duties are not that high, but your average Mexican doesn't have the need to order clothes through the mail from the United States, and being an average Mexican, the FedEx delivery guy didn't have any idea why the rate would be that high.

I found out later that the clothing union in Mexico City is incredibly powerful, and therefore, they have been able to get a ridiculous duty rate enacted for the import of any new clothing to the country. Therefore, people only get clothes from America when they go there and can bring them back in a suitcase. That is the only way people in Mexico get clothes from America. Thanks to the import duties, clothes sent in the mail cost double, and on top of that, the shipping rates are ridiculous.

A side note: The only shipping 'speed' available for private shipping companies like UPS and FedEx between Mexico and the United States and within Mexico are only express for some reason. This seems funny to me, since they have slower service available in the United States and in Canada, and having been in both those places, Mexico seems far more laid back and slower in general pace of life than either of those two countries. No representatives of the shipping services know why their companies do not provide regular, standard 'ground' service here either. I've asked, and I always get the same blank stare and shrug of the shoulders. I even wrote to UPS and asked why they don't provide their 'Standard' (ground) Service in Mexico like they do within and between Canada and the United States. I was told that such information is "not in the system."

Your Wallet or Mine?

If you are sending someone in a foreign country a gift, it is considerate to pay any duties yourself. Otherwise, you are putting the recipient in a position where they have to pay to get the gift. At a minimum, you should warn them that they should have cash on hand to pay the delivery person when the package arrives.

Most shipping services allow you to indicate whether or not the duties are to be paid by the sender or the recipient. For example, on a FedEx International Waybill form, there is a checkbox (line 7-B) that can be checked so that the sender, not the recipient, gets billed for import duties. If one uses Federal Express and does not check this package, when the delivery person shows up at the recipient's door, they will insist on cash for the payment of duties before handing over the shipment. If you don't have the cash, you won't get your package.

Do Used

While the process of paying ridiculous duties to customs is unpleasant for everyone, it is worse for some than others. If you are a commercial importer, bringing products into the country to be resold, you usually have to pay higher duty rates than someone having stuff shipped to them for personal use. Customs agents are especially suspcious of anything that is brand-spanking new and still in the original wrapper, because they think it is going to be resold. Sure, it is completely understandable that Aunt Tillie from Cleveland might go out and buy you a Nintendo Wii for Christmas because you cannot get one in Peru, shipping it to you in the sealed, pristine box it came in from the store. Why wouldn't she? After all, it's a present. However, this would raise all kinds of red flags to customs agents, and it might cause her shipment to be rejected by customs or to be charged higher duty rates.

When sending things to someone in a foreign country that are intended for their personal use, it is best to take all the items out of new wrapping and have them in a condition that would make it difficult to command full price if sold. This does not mean that you have to tie things you are going to send to a foreign country to the back of your truck and drive around the block several times. It just means that you should take things out of their boxes and original packaging, and remove any non-essential stickers or twist ties as well. This will also cut down on the space and weight demands of the package, so it is a good idea for making the shipment more economical anyway.

Sending used things is also helpful. Many countries charge less for the importation of used items than they do for their brand new counterparts. Mexico used to charge a lower rate of duty for used books than they did for new books, although I think that has now changed. This varies from country to country and from item to item, so be sure to check with your shipping professional if you are not sure.

Live globally. Buy locally.

I hope this entry has given those of you who have never had the delight of dealing with international shipping and customs some idea of what they do and how they work (not very well). It can be a real treat when living abroad to get a care package from back home, but it truly does exact a high toll, both from your wallet and from your mental well-being.

If you have to send a gift to someone outside your home country, you might want to consider buying gifts that can be purchased, delivered and redeemed over the Internet. iTunes credit has become a very popular gift in our household, and with it, we can even get a taste of the home country, buying a season or two of American television shows.

Alternatively, if your loved ones live in more economically developed countries, you can probably find online stores for businesses in their country that can ship domestically, thereby cutting down on shipping costs and completely eliminating the need to put anything through customs.

Posted by crispy at 09:56 AM | Comments (2)

January 28, 2008

You've got scam!

Today we got a one-ring phone call, and ten minutes later, a text message from the same number. It read:

    TELCEL URGENTE
    ESTIMADO USARIO EL DIA 
    DE HOY SE REALIZO EL 
    PRIMER SORTEO EN APOYO 
    FUNDACION VAMOS 
    M E X I C O DONDE SU 
    LINEATEL SALIO GANADORA
    DE UN AUTOMOVIL JETTA 
    2008 100 MIL PESOS M. N Y 
    UN TEL. CELULAR PERMISO 
    DCDSRT. 2241.2008 
    COMUNIQUESE A 
    BOLETAZO Al TEL 
    0456621122563

Basically, for those of you that don't read Spanish, it says that we've won a 2008 Jetta, MXN $100,000.00 and a cell phone. We are instructed to call a number about it; it is a different number than the one making the call.

I always get suspicious when we are told we have won contests, lotteries and raffles that we have not entered. I looked online to see if I could find anything reporting such messages as a scam. I found a blog article that confirmed that it was a estafa. In English, a scam.

Using a web-based form to look up phone numbers, I found that the call originated from number in Hermosillo, as had the one in the scam discussed in the other blog article. I didn't call the number back to find out what I had to do in order to claim those prizes, but I suspect that they would have directed me to phone a certain number that charges per-minute fees (like a 900 number for those of you in the United States), pay out money for "processing" our awards, or require us to buy cards for cellphone airtime and give them the codes listed on the cards (thereby giving them the airtime).

The original blog entry was written in 2004, and a follow up entry indicated that such scams were still going on two years later. I can verify that they are still going on here in Mexico, and without much change in the modus operandi.

The original site gives some tips on avoiding being ripped off by these scams. For our readers who do not speak Spanish, I will give a quick and dirty translation.

• It's unlikely that you are going to win a prize in a contest you did not enter or know about.
• If you are called about a prize, get the name of the company awarding the prize. Look up the number independently (don't take the number from the person offering you the prize on the phone) and call them directly to confirm your being awarded a prize.
• Reject the offer immediately if you have to spend any money to claim the prize.
• Be suspicious if they tell you that you have to call another number to claim your prize. It's probably a number where you are charged per-minute, and the per-minute charge can be ridiculously high.
• Report such calls or text messages. The second article says one can contact La Dirección General Adjunta de Juegos y Sorteos de la Secretaría de Gobernación to report them at this toll-free number: 01 800 005 8346 or this email address: denunciajys@segob.gob.mx.
• Do not be intimidated. These are crooks who will lie and tell you that they are important people in big companies in order to impress you. Be suspicious!
• Warn your friends and family members about these scams. Tell minors to never give out personal information to people they do not know over the phone or the Internet.
• Don't forget that you can get scammed in other ways too, not just by telephone. You can be scammed by email, visits to your home or postal mail too.
• Use common sense. Nobody gives things away for free.

It's too bad though. I wouldn't mind having a Jetta.

Posted by crispy at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2008

Turndown Service

Results of Turndown Service, Sheraton María Ísabel

Not all hotels do it, and among those that do, there is no consistent set of things that comprise it. Often it involves leaving a chocolate or some other little token on the turned-down linens. Also common is changing out towels that the guest might have used during the day. On occasion, I've had a hotel staff member just ask if everything is working properly, if we need anything restocked in the minibar, or if there is anything else we might want before bed.

If you have never heard of turndown service before, it's not a big surprise. Not all hotels do it. In fact, not very many seem to nowadays. Shawn had never heard of it until he went to Thailand seven years ago. Nowadays we only tend to get it when we stay at Starwood properties, and even then, it's ridiculously inconsistent.

For example, in our recent stay in Mexico City, at the Sheraton María Ísabel, we got turndown service on our second night there, but not the first. Even then, it wasn't much of a service. They didn't even turn down the linens. They moved the remote control for the tv and the guide listing which channels were which to the bed, and left us a solitary foil-wrapped chocolate. This is what confuses me: they know that there are two of us in the room, so why leave us just one chocolate? Starwood hotels are not exactly what one would call economy lodging. Can't they afford one chocolate per guest, not just one per room?

Solitary Chocolate, Sheraton María Ísabel

To me, it seems like if you are going to bother with turndown service, you ought to do it right. Why go through the trouble just to do something lame like leave a chocolate that people have to fight over. At least leave a knife so the two guests can cut it into halves. If I were running a hotel, I'd offer much more interesting turndown service. Maybe like the carts they have in prisons and hospitals, I'd go around with DVDs or books people could enjoy before turning in for the night. Heck, since it's my fantasy, I'll even throw in the option to have a story read to you if you want. You could also provide a short massage for those that were so inclined. Of course, if it was a big hotel, you'd have to have a fleet of massage therapists, and even then, you'd probably want to schedule each person's at a specific time.

I have also read that some places leave an aperetif on the nightstand in their turndown service. I don't tend to like apertifs, so I'd probably offer a fifth of bourbon and, since I'd have to be living and working where folks were not so uptight about drugs, a couple of valium or vicodin, delivered by a geisha that would also give you a good-night haiku.

So if you could design your own ideal turndown service, what would it include?

Posted by crispy at 09:45 PM | Comments (1)

January 20, 2008

Panama: Parting Thoughts

Now that we are back safe and sound in Guadalajara, I have time to post a few random thoughts about Panama that are too small or not funny enough to merit individual entries.

It should be noted that we did not venture beyond Panama City except when we went to Colón, the port city on the Atlantic side that is the destination of the Panama City Railway. I might post an entry about Colón, because it is probably the most dangerous city that I've ever been in, and it might prove helpful for those planning to take the train to know about it. We highly recommend the train trip, but the several hours that one must pass in Colón if one takes it (unless it's part of a tour package) might be enough to recommend against it. Note that it takes a lot for me to recommend not taking a train whenever possible. Colón is that bad.

Yet that experience aside, our time in Panama was limited to the captial, and there is a lot of beautiful country to visit outside the city. We prefer the amenities that cities provide, so we tend to stick to urban centers when we travel. Panama City did not disappoint. It is vibrant and exciting, rich with history and a very promising future. Shawn and I both expect it to become one of the world's premier destination cities within the next decade, and it is impossible to ignore the growing pains they are currently having along the way. They have gone from a city whose main reason to exist was to support the canal and the people servicing the canal to a city where people flock to enjoy the gambling, food, beaches, nightlife, retirement opportunities. They have not been able to grow fast enough to meet the demand, but it is not for a lack of trying.

According to our driver Roger, the Ministry of Tourism in Panama has been trying to educate service personnel on how to deal properly with foreign tourists. Unfortunately, employers do not want to allow the employees the time off to attend such training, nor do they want to pay for it, even though the Ministry of Tourism pays for half. Unfortunately, it shows in the level of service one receives at the restaurants and hotels there. Most of our complaints are about a phenomenon that we started to refer to as: This is what you want. This is what you get. You ask for one thing and you get what the service provider decides to give you.

Among our complaints about Panama are some of the following. The majority are about restaurant service.

Restaurants are often out of or do not really offer items they have on their menus, and servers do not seem to know about it.

Shawn and I had several experiences in restaurants in Panama where we would order something on menu only to be told a considerable while later that they did not have it. I believe that sometimes they had run out, but at other times, I think they just never stocked those items. As vegetarians, we order things that people never order otherwise in these meat-centric countries. It is amazing how frequently the things kitchens happen to have "just run out of" are the vegetarian items.

In one case, Shawn ordered a falafel sandwich from the menu. When it arrived, some 25 minutes later, it was a chicken sandwich. He called the waitress over to tell her, and she confirmed that he had ordered falafel. He opened it up to show her that it was chicken, and she just stared at him. We told her that we were vegetarians and could not eat pollo, and she silently picked it up and took it back to the kitchen. She returned a couple of minutes later explaining that there was no falafel; she offered no apology and no offer of anything else.

Servers that suck.

On another occasion, Shawn and I ordered the ravioli at a restaurant. The waiter came out after a while and told us that they did not have ravioli. At least he told us this before bringing us whatever the cook decided to serve us instead. He asked us if we would prefer to get spaghetti or fettucini in the sauce we had selected. Shawn asked for spaghetti and I asked for fettucini. When the food arrived, we both had spaghetti.

I would like to say here that we did have notable exceptions to this complaint, with excellent servers at Manolo's Cafe, the Four Points hotel restaurant and S'cena. However, Panama has a reputation for really bad service, and our experience generally supported that finding.

In general, Panamanians are not very friendly.

This was inconsistent, and we met a few people that were exceptionally friendly, nice and helpful. Yet on the whole, the people there do not seem very friendly. They are not mean nor rude. They just are not very friendly. It is hard to win a smile from Panamanians.

Almost any time that we would say thanks (or in most cases, "gracias"), people would not acknowledge it. Often when they did, it was with an "Okay." It seems the more educado of the people there would say the equivalent of "it is nothing," or "it is my pleasure," so I do not think that it is a cultural thing where the concept of "you're welcome" doesn't exist.

It's not cheap.

Again, there are some things that you can get pretty cheaply in Panama, but on the whole, it's not a bargain. Well, compared to traveling in Europe, it's a steal, but there are a lot of things that are as expensive in Panama as they are in the United States.

Our hotels that we stayed in ranged from USD $90 to $155 (including taxes) per night, and none of them were five-star establishments. Cushier places like the Bristol Hotel run about $300 per night. The Marriott is USD $280. Dinner out at Habibi's cost us USD $60 for two.

Shawn, as he is wont to do, looked into real estate listings to see how much propery costs in Panama. He saw many condos listed for USD $500,000, and he saw homes ranging from USD $250,000 to $750,000. Another source claims that new housing costs have doubled in the past two years, but apparently if you buy a used place, it is cheaper.

It is really hot, humid and rainy.

We went for the coolest time of year, and even so, it was constantly above 80° F (26° C) with 70% humidity. We were also there for the driest time of year, yet it rained 7 out of the 9 days we were there. I was not as bummed out about the heat as Shawn, although I was not crazy about the humidity, and the rainy aspect was a little inconvenient when we wanted to get out and about.

Despite all that, we loved our time in Panama, and hope to go back again sometime soon. Hopefully after they get a decent service ethic, but even if not, we would go back for the following.

The city is beautiful.

Panama City skyline, from Casco Viejo

It has some places that are less beautiful than others, but the skyline is magnificent and getting better all the time. Everywhere you go it's nice and verdant, with lots of beautiful, old, spreading trees and lush grass. It's right on the ocean and nestled up against mountains. Certain parts of it have architecture that looks like the Vieux Carre in New Orleans. There is no shortage of scenic beauty in Panama City, and we hear it's even better if you venture outside the city.

It is hopping.

After being in the relative snoozearium that is the second-largest city in Mexico for two years, it was THRILLING to be in a city that parties all night long. Sure, Guadalajara has clubs where you can dance to dreadfully repetitive techno or the same moldy Reggaetón hits you've been hearing everywhere for the past three years until 5 in the morning, but in Panama City, you have that plus bars and British pubs that are open late, late, late, clubs that play rock music, several chains of 24-hour restaurants and a handful of completely independent ones and casinos that never close.

It's racially diverse and the various ethnic groups are well-integrated.

Mexico seems really tolerant to us after coming from the United States, but a lot of times, I have to wonder if that is because they do not have a lot of racial diversity. That isn't to say that there has not been a lot of mixing in Mexico's past, because there has been. It's just that you do not see a lot of ethnic diversity here nowadays, at least not in Guadalajara.

In Panama City, you do. According to recent estimates, some 70% of the inhabitants are mixed Amerindian and white or mixed white and black while 14% are West Indian. Some 10% are white ('European'), and 6% are Amerindian. There is also a Chinese community of about 100,000. That might not be a big plus to a lot of people, but it is to me because I find diversity (ethnic or otherwise) to make a place more interesting.

The food is diverse.

This has a lot to do with the previous item, but the culinary side of travel is such a big thing for me that I think it deserves its own specific item. We had Italian, Chinese, Indian, Lebanese and Mexican food while we were there, and had we more time, we could have enjoyed several other national cuisines.

Of note, Panamanian food is very heavy on meat. For this reason, we didn't have anything that was specifically Panamanian, but those that eat meat would probaby dig it.

Everything is within walking distance.

Given that it is awfully hot and humid, one can get really sweaty walking around. Yet it does seem that one can walk easily from any one place to any other in town. That's not really true, but compared to the scale of some cities we've been to, it is a walkable city. One night we dined out at a great Italian place (Napoli), walked over to El Pavo Real for a few drinks, then meandered back to our hotel, stopping in a casino to lose ten bucks in a slot machine along the way. Traffic can be very bad in Panama City, and the buses are crazy. Therefore, being able to walk around to a lot of different things for an evening's entertainment is quite handy.

They have a great selection of booze.

Living in Mexico and being involved in NAFTA, you'd think that we'd be able to get the vast array of alcohol that people can access in the United States, but unfortunately, that just is not true. I have only seen Bushmill's Irish Whiskey once in this country, and that was in a hotel bar in Mexico City. In Panama, the selection is very good. It is a little slanted towards European bottles; they do not, for example, have a great variety of bourbon, but you can get some very decent gin or Scotch.

We had a very good time in Panama. I would recommend a visit there to nearly everyone I know, but I might add the caveat that it would be better to wait a few years first. They have a ways to go before they have refined their service ethic to properly deal with tourists. Even so, if you were to go tomorrow, you would be sure to find a lot to love about Panama.

Posted by crispy at 04:20 AM | Comments (2)

January 18, 2008

Shawn Gets Fired

Because he had the impertinence to ask a supervisor that promised him three extra days of vacation per year to sign off on his taking two of them over my birthday, Shawn got fired from his workplace. Maybe he should have seen it coming. He had earlier been branded as a troublemaker for suggesting to the owner of the school that the weekly essays in English that she wanted all the children to write - including the first grade and kindergarten students - were possibly too much work for them along with their current, already full, schedule.

In Mexico, legal foreign workers are granted all the same rights as workers that are citizens. Having been fired from his job, Shawn is due a severance package of three months pay as well as one day for each month that he worked there. The boss that let him go refused to give him this severance package, although he was legally entitled to have it immediately upon being let go. The boss guy said, "You'll have to take me to court!"

Silly boy! We're Americans. Like we would think twice about suing someone.

Just when things were getting tedious, I get some new and dramatic material for this blog. I never thought I would get the chance to write about exciting courtroom drama, especially the type that is likely to have big cash payoffs. In Mexico, the vast majority of labor cases are won by the employee, because labor laws definitely favor the worker. We won't be able to retire when we get the money Shawn is owed, but it will give him some greater flexibility in being able to find a decent job.

If any of you readers en este lado know of any possible prospects, let us know.

Posted by crispy at 09:22 AM | Comments (3)

December 20, 2007

Panama: On the Ground

View from the Torres de Alba, Panama City

We arrived in Panama last night, after a relatively pleasant flight on Copa Airlines.

Our one observation about Copa, having now flown on them three times, is that one should arrive at the airport about three hours before the departure of the flight, because checking in to a Copa flight seems to take a little over an hour. Their check-in desks are always understaffed, the employees tend to waste a lot of chatting amongst themselves, and when they are servicing clients, they're very slow.

The flight was pleasant enough though, and they did remember to serve us a vegetarian meal, consisting of a little dish of honeydew melon and an alfalfa sprout and tomato sandwich. Because, you know, vegetarian = rabbit.

We took a cab from the airport to our hotel, the Torres de Alba for USD $28.00. The cab driver told us that this would be the price without tip, and he knows that Americans always tip. The listing of the price in United States dollars in this and subsequent Panama entries is not for reader convenience; they not only have a currency pegged to the dollar, like many other countries. They actually use United States dollars as their national currency. As for values below a dollar, they seem to have their own coins, but they also use U.S. coins too.

View from the Torres de Alba, Panama City

The Torres de Alba thankfully has industrial-strength air conditioning, because it's hot, hot, hot here in Panama. It's not even 10 am yet, and it "feels like" 30.5°C (87°F) outside. It is located right next to the enormous Veneto Hotel and Casino, and about a block down the street from a 24-hour restaurant, and even the restaurants that close do so no earlier than 11 pm.

The Torres de Alba also has kitchens in all the rooms. The one in ours is easily four times the size of my kitchen in Guadalajara. Unfortunately, we will probably not be making many meals here in the hotel before we check-out tomorrow.

Kitchen, Torres de Alba

This city is exhillarating. It is hot, crowded, bustling and falling over itself with new growth. Whereas Buenos Aires seems much more like an older, European metropolis, Panama seems fresh and positively Pan-American. Shawn says it reminds him a lot of Miami. The joke here goes that Panama City is like Miami, except people here speak English.

Yeah, a lot of people here do speak some English, but don't be fooled. They prefer to speak Spanish, but it is surprisingly a very Caribbean form of Spanish, where the letter "S" before a consonant apparently costs extra. Our cab driver told us that there are a lot of English speakers here because they have a large number of immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean islands. Given the sound of their Spanish, I'd guess they hae a large number of Cubans and Dominicans here too.

I've been here about twelve hours and I already love Panama. It even has one of my favorite things about Colombia...

Colombiana soda

...Colombiana soda.

Posted by crispy at 07:30 AM | Comments (1)

December 09, 2007

Björk, Live at the Dust Bowl!

We went to the Sonofilia Festival this past Saturday night.

Charles drove us in his cab, and it took 90 minutes to get there. It was out in the middle of nowhere, and the last third of the travel time was spent on rough dirt roads.

We were lucky to have made arrangements with Charles. The buses that the organizers arranged to take people from our local shopping mall, Plaza del Sol, for MXN $110 each, which were supposed to depart every half hour or so, never showed up, leaving those who had already paid for their bus (and show) tickets stranded. Earlier in the day, several such people had hired cabs to take them out there for MXN $500 one way, but after those drivers made the trek and dealt with the road conditions, they hiked their prices to MXN $700, and then started refusing to go for any price.

On our way, we saw several cars from Mexico City, but there were representatives from many other Mexican states as well. We even saw plates from Nuevo León, which is up north, bordering Texas.

The roads were sprayed with water at some points, but it was not enough to dampen the dust on the roads. At times there was hardly any visibility, and it was bumper to bumper traffic. Once we reached the festival, Charles had to drop us off some 200 meters from the entrance gate. That was after he had passed a couple of other points beyond which vehicles were not being permitted, by telling the guards that he had Americans he had to escort or that he had a passenger who had trouble walking. I am usually not one to go for that kind of thing, but since the drop-off point for everyone else was a kilometer from the gate, and it allowed us to stay in the car and out of the dust for a little longer, I wasn't going to complain.

We soon discovered that one could not just walk straight up to the gate to get in. There was a 400 meter long line snaking around to get into the gate. It moved fairly quickly, but we were stuck the whole time in a windy dust storm, and no way to keep from breathing in heaping lungfuls of powdered dirt. That was just great for Shawn, who had just recovered from a sinus infection, and I was equally thrilled, having come down with chest congestion and a sore throat the night before.

We finally made it in the gates, and were able to get up to where we could see the stage. Björk started 30 minutes earlier than scheduled, but thanks to Charles, we arrived in time to see the start of her set. She was about as tall as a dime from where we were, but the performance was spectacular. Her set list is available online, but it isn't entirely accurate. I wish she had done "Oceanea" in her encore, as it is one of my favorites. She only did "Declare Independence," which was still pretty fantastic. The set lasted an hour and twenty minutes, and featured a brass ensemble.

After she finished, we decided to take off. Our sinuses were packed with dust and we had Charles waiting for us. We had arranged to give Charles a call on our cell phone to let him know we were leaving, but we were not able to get any service at all for our Telcel phone. I am really surprised that they didn't have the foresight to put a temporary mobile cell out at the festival site to have coverage there, but we didn't get any signal until we were headed out on the road again.

We talked about whether or not it was worth it, as it cost us about USD $230 for the tickets and unexpectedly nearly that much again for the transportation. We decided that it was worth it to have seen Björk perform live. I cannot stress enough how incredible she was. Yet if there is a Sonofilia Festival next year, we're not going back.

In fact, if there is ever a concert that we want to see, held at that location ("El Aguacate") again, we are not going. In the day following, it has become pretty clear that we have both developed sinus infections from breathing in all that dust, and my lungs hurt more than if I'd sat down and chain-smoked two packs of Lucky Strike straights. It's ironic since Björk supposedly wanted to perform in a place that was more 'natural' than a concert hall, but maybe it is just a reminder that nature can kick your ass.

The bottom line: Björk gets top marks for a wonderful show, and the way she can make such a big sound come out of such a little body. The organizers of the Sonofilia Festival did a really crappy job at picking their location and making sure that people had reliable transportation to get there. Furthermore, they really should have taken some proactive measures to control the dust issue.

We didn't take any photos, but you can check out this other person's photostream on Flickr if you want. They were closer than we were able to get anyway.

Other reaction en español @ cierra la puerta al salir, Defiéndete, L.C. Boxset, Robotania8a, Bitácora de una drama queen, pastelazo

Posted by crispy at 11:10 PM | Comments (2)

December 05, 2007

Mandú

Exterior of Mandú Restaurant, Plaza Galerías

Mandu
Plaza Galerías 360
33/3673-2319

As vegetarians in the United States, Shawn and I usually found Asian restaurants to be a pretty safe bet when dining out. At best, they were among our favorite places (Taki's and Tra Ling's) and at worst, they offered the same four or five ubiquitous, boring, yet meat-free, dishes. I can't tell you how many chefs seem to think that vegetarians not only avoid meat, but also variety.

When we moved to Guadalajara and tried out a couple of Asian restaurants, we were shocked to find that they usually did not offer any vegetarian dishes at all. I do not mean that they didn't have tofu dishes. I mean they didn't even have any dishes that consisted of just vegetables. When we finally did find our little slice of heaven, they understood our plight. They said that their tapatio customers would order something like beef with broccoli and pick out all the strips of beef, leaving anything green behind to be dumped into the trash. When that restaurant closed, we felt like we'd lost the only restaurateurs in town that understood us. It was a dark day indeed.

That left us with the sushi restaurants that serve kappa maki, avocado rolls, vegetable tempura, stir-fried vegetables and vegetable fried rice, but it seems like almost all the sushi restaurants offer these five dishes and only these five dishes, with very few exceptions. We like sushi, so we do go out for it often. Yet it seems that Japanese food, and particularly the sushi side of Japanese food, is one of the few socially-acceptable ethnic foods that the people of Guadalajara will dare to eat. It is by far the Asian cuisine most represented here, with Chinese being a distant second. Then all the other contenders - Korean, Mongolian, Vietnamese, Thai, Malaysian - simply do not exist here. At least, that's what we thought.

The discovery of Mandú, through a friend of Joseph and Larry, did not drastically change the situation for us, but it did offer us a couple of new dishes that we liked and can enjoy now and again when we want vegetarian Asian food that isn't sushi. (Actually, their sushi is pretty good too, and they have a chamoy roll that emulates the pickled plum roll, ume maki.)

Sushi at Mandú

Shawn likes their bibimbap, a Korean dish that they will make for him with tofu instead of meat. Unfortunately, the tofu they use is always the salad kind that comes in vacuum-packed aseptic boxes, so the best they can do with it is to put uncooked slices on top of the dish. Still, it's rare to find tofu of any kind in a restaurant here, so he is happy to get it. Personally, I don't like fried eggs, unless they're scrambled first. On my first trip to Mandú, I ordered the bibimbap and asked for my egg scrambled, and it arrived with a fried egg diced up and sprinkled around the bowl. Not exactly what I asked for, but even if it had been, I wasn't all that crazy about it. Not that it wasn't well-prepared. It should be noted that their execution is quite good with everything I've had there. I just didn't like bibimbap all that much.

The next time I went there, I got the Thai noodles, and asked them to hold the meat. They did, and the noodles were very good. When we went last week with Joseph and Larry, I got the udon with vegetables and tofu, and it was the best thing I've had at Mandú yet. I think next time I'll get that again, but I'll not get it with the bland tofu. It would be better if it were just noodles and vegetables. They also have a dish that is breaded fried cheese on skewers, served with a chipotle sauce.

Interior of Mandú

The first time we went there, we went with Charles, and he asked to see the chef. The chef came out and Charles explained that we didn't eat beef, pork or chicken, nor even seafood. He asked if the chef could make something vegetarian, perhaps something that wasn't even on the menu, for us. He said that he would be sure to prepare our food vegetarian, and he suggested the bibimbap to us. That's when we tried that. He then said that he had a cookbook at home with many vegetarian Asian dishes, and that he'd work with it to come up with some other dishes for our next visit.

The next time I went, I went with Charles again, and he asked to see the chef. He asked if the chef remembered us, and he did. Charles went through the routine again about all the things I don't eat, and asked what the chef might be able to make for me. The chef asked if I'd had the bibimbap. I had. As I mentioned, they didn't really make it like I'd asked. I didn't really want that again. He suggested the Thai noodles that were on the menu, but he could make them with vegetables instead of meat. I figured anything Thai with noodles has to be good, so I decided to try it. It was good. Yet I was getting the feeling that if I didn't get that, we were going to start running out of options. I did not get the impression that he had been looking into cookbooks to come up with anything new.

Of course, I don't hold that against him so much. He is a chef at a restaurant in a mall. I'm sure he has more interesting things to do with his free time than find recipes for two freaks that don't eat meat. I just wish he had not told me a story about cookbooks and being into discovering some new dishes, because I really got excited about it. If he wasn't really planning to do it, I would have preferred that he answer like the owner/chef at the Italian restaurant we went to with Charles, who upon getting the story about how we do not eat beef, chicken, pork, nor even seafood, and being asked if he would make something vegetarian for us, perhaps something that wasn't even on the menu, replied quite simply:

"No."

Larry, Shawn, Joseph and Chris at Mandú

Posted by crispy at 08:27 PM | Comments (2)

November 15, 2007

Beirut

Beirut at Night

Restaurante Beirut
Avenida López Mateos 1308
esquina Lázaro Cárdenas

Shawn and I walked by this place many times while we were on our way to Tai Spice, and we would always say, "We should check that place out sometime." Since we were on our way to have Robert and Kay's delicious Asian dishes, we were never tempted enough to stop. A recent disappointment with one of our regular Lebanese cuisine outlets lead us to finally try Beirut, and we were pleasantly surprised.

It is a small restaurant with about 12 tables and a bar, but the bar is not one where you can actually sit at the bar. A few of the tables are outside, where they also have drive-up service for tacos arabes, which is what Mexicans call any of the various things that come stuffed in pitas like gyros. They also have hookah service, which they call shishas, with flavored tobacco that lasts 30-40 minutes per order.

The food there is relatively standard Lebanese food for around here, although their drink list has several items I've never seen on a Lebanese restaurant's menu before, like agua de flores and yogurt drinks. It seems a little expensive. For example, an order of four falafel with a little salad is MXN $67, although they are larger than average. The quality of everything we have had there has been top notch. They have a vegetarian plate with five items for MXN $99, and everything on it is quite tasty. The service is also very attentive, and they seem pretty quick in the kitchen.

Interior, Restaurante Beirut

They play funky belly dancing videos on the TV and they have a couple of odd fountains with colored lights. On the way out the door, you can stop and check out the items they have for sale, like music CDs and incense. They are open most nights until 11 (I believe on Sunday it is considerably earlier), but they are closed on Mondays.

Posted by crispy at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2007

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bus

Local Area Bus, Guadalajara

Today, almost two years after moving to Guadalajara, I took the bus by myself for the first time.

Before, I usually took taxis or walked to my destination. On a couple of other occasions, I took the bus with Shawn. It was not that I thought I was above taking the bus, nor that I was afraid of the bus being dangerous. The drivers do tend to gun it then slam on the brakes, so it is not necessarily the smoothest ride one will ever experience. Still, I can handle that.

The main reason that I previously avoided taking the bus here is that the one time I took the regular bus with Shawn, it violently and completely disillusioned me of the notion that Mexicans are always sweet and polite. Before taking the bus, I found most Mexicans (apart from the one "Gringo Go Home!" driveby shouting we managed to survive) to be unfailingly friendly, kind and welcoming. In almost all other situations, Mexicans seem very polite and nice. On the bus though, they have some socially acceptable licence to be complete jerks and they revel in it. That is not to say that they are in your face, what-are-you-gonna-do-about-it jerks. It is a lame passive-aggressive rudeness that has a particularly Mexican (or is it tapatio?) flavor.

When I went on the bus with Shawn before, we had to stand because all the seats were already taken. No big deal there; I don't mind that much at all. I did not expect any of the people on there to give up their seats for us. Yet when old people boarded that were barely able to remain standing on terra firma and not a single able-bodied person offered them their seats, I was aghast. Mothers with infants and bags of groceries got on, and nobody offered up a seat. When someone got up from an aisle seat to exit the bus, the person sitting in the window seat would quickly slide over to block access to the empty seat. Riders are instructed to board through the front door and exit from the rear, but even when politely asked, people would not budge to let others move from the front or middle of the bus to the rear exit door. I suspect a frail, blind abuelita who was missing an arm could board carrying a hacking Tiny Tim on her back and nobody would surrender his seat to her.

No, because of the dog-eat-dog atmosphere of the regular bus, I was not all that keen to use it. Yet with Charles out of town, the need to start trimming the budget, and my desire to get out and about more, I decided it was high time for me to start using the bus in Guadalajara.

There are two primary types of inner-city buses, the TUR/Turquesa line and regular lines. They differentiated by their service class, with TUR and Turquesa being more upscale. That just means they have cloth-covered seats, air conditioning that usually works, and best of all, they are rarely full. I am not sure if that is because their price being double the cost of the regular lines keeps their ridership down, or if that is because they have a policy of not stopping for new passengers if all the seats on the bus are taken. We have heard that the latter is the case, but I've seen Turquesa buses go by with people standing now and again. The problem is, there are a very small number of routes (like 2-4) served by TUR/Turquesa, and the remaining hundred or so are served by the regular buses.

A regular bus costs MXN $4.50 (about USD $0.40), and there are no transfers. If you need to take only one bus to get where you are going, the trip costs you MXN $4.50. If you have to take two buses, the trip costs you MXN $9. If you have to take three, it is MXN $13.50. You get the idea. There are so many different routes though, it is unusual to have to take more than two different buses to get to your destination. Of note is the fact that here, bus drivers make change for you. You don't have to have exact change or forfeit any extra.

Local Area Bus, Guadalajara

The TUR/Turquesa buses are turquoise in color, and the regular buses are white or tan, for the most part. Each bus is numbered for its route, although some numbered routes are split into "A" and "B" or "Via 1" and "Via 2" because they have slight differences somewhere along the route. The routes are all loops, although it is often the case that the loop is just turning around at the end and tracing the first half backwards. I'm not sure if a passenger could pay once and just ride around indefinitely, or if they charge you each time you pass the start or end point of the route. Most routes start in the early morning (between 5 and 6 am) and stop between 11 and 12 pm. Much to my annoyance, there are no late night or 24-hour bus routes.

To catch the bus, one must go to a designated bus stop, and when the desired bus comes along, put out her hand to flag it down. Most stops are used by multiple routes, so the driver does not know that a person wants to get on his bus unless they signal in this way. From inside the bus, a request to stop is made by pushing one of the little buttons on one of the handrails that run along the aisle.

Shawn has had buses fail to stop at a designated stop even though he has his hand stuck out to signal the driver. Did they not see his hand? Did they not stop because he is a gringo? Were the bus drivers just being jerks? Any one of those is possible. Sometimes if the bus is in the left lane and there is other traffic in the right lane, the driver will just skip the stop, just like our water delivery guy will sometimes skip bringing us water if there is no good parking spot right in front of our building.

Bus Stop, Guadalajara

There is a book for sale at newspaper and magazine stands called the Guía de rutas del transporte público, which details the bus and light rail routes. It is about 5" x 7" and costs about 15 pesos. In the front of the guide, it has an indices of colonias (neighborhoods), major streets and sites of interest. Each entry in the index lists the route numbers that run by that neighborhood, street or attraction, so to go from point A to point B, one must find a route number that is common to both. If both places do not share a common route, the map of the route must be used to determine where two routes, one for each point, intersect. The hard part about doing that is that the route map shows the route on a map of the entire Guadalajara metro area that is like 2" x 2". It is nearly impossible to really determine what streets the buses run on by looking at the map, so they just give you a general idea. Then one has to verify that the routes actually do cross (or to which they come close) by reading the list of streets the each route takes, also listed for each route in the guide. They do not make it easy.

Macro Shot of Route Map, Guía de rutas del transporte público

At times, people get on the bus with guitars and sing for tips. The guy on my bus today was not too bad. Shawn, on the other hand, tends to score people that bang on guitars not set to any recognizeable tuning with no recognizeable rhythm while they yell along. It would be really cool if they had a 15-piece mariachi ensemble strolling up and down the aisle playing music like on the Tequila Express, but I do not think that is likely to happen any time soon. Nor are they likely to have go-go dancers or geishas serving tea.

It would probably take something like that to make me sincerely love taking the bus in Guadalajara, and as it is, I am not sure that I will ever be able to stomach how inconsiderate people are on it here. Maybe I will just try the old chestnut that is so good for dealing with crazy people that yell at you on the bus in the United States: plug in the headphones, crank up the iPod and just pretend they are not even there.

Posted by crispy at 01:48 PM | Comments (4)

October 30, 2007

Score!

Ticket for the Sonofilia Festival, December 2007

In typical Mexican fashion, we lucked out and noticed the announcement in the Ocio this past Friday, which finally explained what was up with Bjork's announced, yet mysteriously vague, appearance in Mexico. She will be the headlining act at the Sonofilia Festival, to be held in Huentitán on 8 December 2007. As far as I can tell, this is the first Sonofilia Festival ever.

The tickets are rather outrageous: MXN $1200 for general admission (the only ticket available), and the sales outlet (Super Boletos) charges a 5% commission on top of that. That's better than the 10% commission and additional per-order fee charged by TicketBastard, and I suppose by international standards, that's about right for a festival with five bands (Claude Von Stroke, MSTRKRFT, Ratatat , Jay Jay Johanson and Björk).

According to a map of the event on the Super Boletos web site (unable to be linked here because for some reason they've done it as a stupid Flash file linked to with Javascript), the grounds will have restaurants and bars scattered about, which will be nice since the event runs from 6 pm to 3:30 am. I was annoyed to read that we will have to bring our passports to the event in order to gain entry. It's so smart to take such important documentation, especially if it is difficult and expensive to replace, to crowded events where everyone is whacked-out, including you. Yet I was impressed by the fact that their Frequently Asked Questions explicitly (and rather shockingly) state that they will have vegetarian food available.

I guess if I lose my USD $67 passport while in a drunken stupor from a couple of MXN $100 shots of tequila and have to forfeit my USD $600 air ticket for our Christmas vacation in Panama, I can console myself with a MXN $150 veggie burger. Cool!

Posted by crispy at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)

October 20, 2007

I went on a date with a real clown last night.

I was looking through a newspaper while in San Luis Potosí, San Luis Hoy. I turned the page and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw what I thought were personal ads for something like Clown Seeking Clown:

Clown Classifieds, San Luis Hoy [larger image]

It was one of the most surreal things I'd ever seen. But, I figured, clowns need love too.

On closer investigation, I saw that they were just clowns for hire, advertising their services...

...as clowns.

I hope.

Posted by crispy at 12:18 PM | Comments (3)

October 18, 2007

FM3:3

Cover, Non-Immigrant Visa

In the last entry on this topic, I had a list of other things I had to turn in to get my FM3, the non-immigrant visa for living in Mexico. I turned those in last week, and this past Tuesday I was able to go pick up the little book shown above. This makes me an official, legal, non-immigrant visitor to Mexico, who can be in the country without restriction on coming or going, for a full year. It is renewable (without the whole long application process I went through to get it) for up to five years.

Inside Page, Non-Immigrant Visa

The whole thing is pretty simple. On the first page inside, on the left, there is a list of rules and limitations for the visa, and on the right is the date of issue, government seal and the signature of the head of our local immigration office.

Inside Page, Non-Immigrant Visa

Then on the next page there is all the information specific to me, such as various dates (the date I entered the country, the date I applied, the date the visa was issued, my birthdate, etc.), the number of the visa, my birthplace, my gender, my marital status (in Mexico), my signature, a photo and even my fingerprint.

Note how in the photo, I have the "wet look" that is ever so popular down here.

There's another official seal and once again, the signature of the local immigration chief. I don't know why they have to sign and stamp it twice, but if you've been in or around bureacracy in Mexico, you'll know they're really big on that. I suspect that's pretty common worldwide.

But that's it. Now I'm legal for a year. A year from now, I have to go back and renew it, but I don't have to go through the whole process again. I'm glad for that. It involved so many trips: 4 to the immigration office in the federal building, 2 to the bank, 2 to the photographer's studio, and 3 to a copy shop.

Posted by crispy at 01:22 PM | Comments (4)

October 12, 2007

San Luis Potosí: Part One

360° Panorama of the Plaza de Armas, San Luis Potosí [larger image]

Shawn had a four-day weekend, so we decided to visit another Mexican city that we had not yet seen: San Luis Potosí, the capital of the state of San Luis Potosí.

In 2005, it had a population of just over 685,000, making it only the 15th largest city in Mexico. It is known as la ciudad de los parques because there are so many parks here. We had to ride five hours in a bus, heading northeast from Guadalajara. If you have Google Earth, you can call it up.

It is not high on the list of tourist destinations within Mexico, and to be honest, we did not decide on it as our next domestic destination because of any particular attraction. We selected it simply because we could get to it in a relatively short time (less than a full day) and we had never been there. It is outside what is considered Mexico's colonial circle, but then again, some say that about Zacatecas. Like Zacatecas, it has its own particular charm, no small part of which is the fact that it is not a big tourist destination. We were not expecting much, yet we have been very pleasantly surprised.

First off, it lives up to its reputation as a city of parks. It seems that the slogan is taken as a guiding philosophy, for one sees many spaces of only a few square meters about town where a mass of plants or cacti have been squeezed in to spruce them up a bit. The more formal parks offer a diversity of trees, plenty of benches, well-maintained sidewalks, verdant lawns, and fountains that are operational.

The city is a pedestrian paradise. Large sections of the historic center have been closed to vehicles, providing safe, wide venues for foot traffic.

In other places, they have nice shaded walkways set apart from the streets, like this one (pictured below) that stretched so far we could not see the end of it.

Walking is not the only thing to do in the city, however, and just because they are not known as one of the colonial gems of Mexico, it does not mean that they do not have their fair share of historic attractions. Along this walkway is a famous historic and architectural icon of San Luis Potosí, el caja del agua.

Because I learned caja to mean''box' or 'cage' in English, I hear this in my head as "box of water" or "cage of water." Both seem funny to me. It is actually a colonial-era water tank, which is notable for its size and ornamentation. A sign, printed in Spanish and English, located next to the caja del agua, tells that there are others about the city, but they are all smaller and not ornate.

There are things like clock towers...

...non-traditional (for Mexico) architecture...

...gargoyles...

...theaters...

...gazebos...

...and temples...

...in San Luis Potosí that we passed while walking around the centro histórico. We passed by this ice cream shop, and I had to go in to try their coconut ice cream.

Stepping inside was like stepping into the 50s.

It was part of this larger building, which is the Mercado Tangamanga, a typical market where they sell all kinds of stuff from religious candles to seafood. The design was so reminiscent of the Pan Pacific Auditorium from the golden days of Los Angeles that I stood there a while looking at it, thinking of what all it would take to find an old musician who would help me turn it into a hip nightclub/roller-rink.

The old metal furniture inside the Fonda Doña María looks like its as old as the building itself (and it probably is), but it's in great condition.

La Cubana is a tienda de abarrotes, the Mexican version of a corner convenience store, and is just up the street a block or so from the Mercado Tangamanga.

This convenience store has been open here since 1875.

After all that walking, Shawn and I both decided to shell out the MXN $10 (just under USD $1) each for a shoeshine.

They let you read the newspaper for no additional charge.

I considered buying a donut-making machine, but I just don't have the room in my kitchen.

Posted by crispy at 11:33 PM | Comments (3)

October 09, 2007

Oh, wait...

Cinépolis coupon, 10 October 2007

I went to the cinema tonight and noticed on my box of popcorn an eye-grabbing notice that said "Don't forget to peel off the coupon on this box!" (but in Spanish, of course) I turned the box around, found the coupon and peeled it off. I was excited to get a pretty cool offer, like reduced-price movie tickets any day of the week (instead of just Wednesdays like Cinépolis usually does)...

...until I noticed that the coupon's validity ended nearly two weeks ago.

Posted by crispy at 10:19 PM | Comments (3)

September 19, 2007

The FM3 Process Begins

Today I went to the federal building downtown to start the process of getting an FM3, the non-resident alien visa that would allow me to live in Mexico for more than 6 months.

There are a few different types of visas for traveling and living in Mexico. As an American, you do not need one to travel into Mexico's border towns, but if you plan to go 18 miles (30 kilometers) or farther into Mexico, you need to have an FMT, also known as a "tourist card." That lets the visitor stay in Mexico (or make repeated entries and exits, for that matter) for up to 180 days. If you fly into Mexico, the fee (about USD $20) is included in your ticket price. If you cross by land, you have to pay this fee either to the agent at the border (in Tijuana, for example) or at a bank, once you are in the country.

The FM3 visa allows one to stay for one year, and it can be easily renewed each year for five years (after which one must re-apply). One can apply for an FM3 while one is in the United States, or he can 'upgrade' from the FMT to an FM3 after arrival in Mexico. The requirements for the application differ between doing it in the United States and doing it in Mexico, and interpretation of the requirements may differ from consulate to consulate.

Only those readers considering living long-term in Mexico will be interested in what follows, but for those folks, I hope it might give them a better idea of what is really required for an FM3 application (in the Guadalajara immigration office, at least, in September of 2007). When I looked things up online, the answers about the prerequisites only seemed to raise more questions, but I have now been to the immigration office and have found out exactly what they want. It should be noted that this is only half of the process. Officially, I have only submitted a request to apply for an FM3 visa, which means I have submitted all the paperwork, it will be reviewed for compliance with the regulations, and in about 10 days, they will inform me what I need to do to have the application processed and approved.

I will list what the instruction document says (typos and errors in grammar included) first, then I will relate what that actually means.

Fill out the application form, correctly and signed by applicant.

There is a form that one must get from the immigration authority (here in Guadalajara, it's the immigration office in the federal building downtown). It asks very basic questions, like the applicant's age, his address in Mexico, and country of origin. I filled this out while I was in the office waiting for my turn at the counter.

Original of the unexpired Migratory Document of the foreigner.

For me, this was the FMT that I got the last time I entered the country (in this case, flying into Mexico City as we returned from Buenos Aires). For nearly everyone applying for an FM3 within the country of Mexico, it will be the FMT that they got when they entered.

Original valid passport and submit a photocopy of each page, even if the pages are in blank. (You should submit BOTH the original and the photocopy to compare them)

Before going to the immigration office, I went to a papelería (paper store - these almost always can make copies for a fee) and had a copy of every single page of my passport made, including the cover. Yes, most pages were blank, and I had a big stack of copies as a result, but they will require it. You must not skip any pages or they will send you off to the papelería to try again. Bring along your passport to the office when you submit your paperwork, so they can verify that the copies turned in match the genuine article. After verification by the agent (while you wait at the counter), the passport will be returned to you.

Original and three photocopies of the receipt of immigration taxes payment of the corresponding fee of $444.00 per foreigner, for the concept of revision, exam, and study of the procedure, this payment shall be made with the form, key number 400001. Must be payable in Mexican pesos at any Financial Institute in Mexico.

(See how this can be confusing?)

There is an processing fee of MXN $444 for the application (distinct from the fee to be paid when one actually gets the FM3) that must be paid at a bank. It cannot be paid at the immigration office. We went to the bank with the form, filled out the form (again, just name and address stuff) at the counter, paid the 444 pesos and got a receipt of that payment. We were lucky in that the immigration office in Guadalajara has a copy center. We didn't have to stop somewhere else to get the three copies of the receipt, we did it as we waited to be called to the counter. They keep the original and two copies, and they let you keep one copy as your receipt of paying the fee.

NOTE. If your procedure is authorized, you must pay the correspondent fee.

This just means that if the request for an FM3 is granted, there is another fee. The aforementioned fee is only for processing the application.

Letter in Spanish addressed to the proper immigration authorities, the body of the letter must include your full name, current address, a request to change your immigration status and the reasons you decide it.

This is where it starts to get weird. Luckily, the woman at the counter told us verbatim what to write. I provide my letter here merely as an example; other applicants in other places at other times might have to write something completely different. It is advised that you ask someone in immigration what the letter has to say, and they will probably be very helpful.

I transcribed the following down by hand on a blank sheet of paper as the agent dictated it (and Larry and Charles repeated it as necessary). I turned it in just like that. It did not need to be typed.

Instituto Nacional de Migración

A quien corresponda:

Por medio de la presente me dirijo a ustedes, yo John Christopher Coen con domicilio en Avenida Cubilete [specifics deleted], Colonia Chapalita Sur, Zapopan, Jalisco 45050, de nacionalidad estadounidense, requiero mi cambio de características de turista a no inmigrante visitante rentista.

John Christopher Coen
19 septiembre 2007

Note there are really no reasons stated as to why I am applying. Perhaps that would be different if I were involved in a business. Then I might have to state the name of the business or the nature of the work I would be doing.

Proof of monthly income. The minimum total monthly needed is the equivalent of 250 times of the actual minimum daily wage in Mexico City.

Yeah. I don't know exactly how one would go about finding the current minimum daily wage in Mexico City [note: see link in comments below], but I'm presuming that 250 times that would be under USD $1500. Several sources I've seen cite this as the figure in dollars that foreigners have to have, although they never show their math. I suspect that the immigration office agents could tell you what this figure needs to be, but USD $1500 should cover it for the time being.

I took in printouts of the PDF files I download from the Wells Fargo site each month that are the only monthly statements I receive from them. It seems this is now very common - people apply with only computer printouts of their financial records - as the agent asked us (in Spanish, of course), "These are from the Internet?" They are obviously not statements mailed out from a bank; they are on 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of unfolded plain white paper, but those are the only statements I can get. Banks in the United States are not going to mail their account holders in another country. I'm not sure they even still send out print statements when their customers are in the United States.

There's a little note that says that if you own property in Mexico, you only have to have 1/2 of that amount monthly, but then you have to turn in notarized copies of the deed or trust. I don't own property here, so I can't say anything more about that.

There is also a section at this point that talks about the requirements if someone else is acting on behalf of the foreigner applying for the FM3. More or less, the representative has to have identification and power of attorney. Again, I don't know about that stuff because I did it myself (with a fair bit of help from Larry and Charles, of course).

You must present a photocopy of valid proof of address of the foreigner, such as Gas bills, telephone bills, water bills or electricity bills. (No more than 90 days old)

Long-time readers may remember my writing about how the electric bill is used for all kinds of identification and validation purposes in Mexico. Here it is being used to verify that I live where I claim to live. Nevermind that the electric bill is not in my name (it is in the name of some person that lived here before us, and not even the last person to live here before us). The fact that I have the electric bill in my posession is proof enough that I live at the address stated on the bill. Otherwise, how would I have access to it? (At least, that is the thinking behind it.)

I went with both a photocopy and the original, again for verification purposes, and they returned the original to me before I left.

The agent reviewed all my materials and upon noting that they appeared to be complete, she gave me a document that replaces the FMT she took from me. It is more or less just a letter, albeit a very official one, stating that I am in the process of applying for a visa, and this is why, should any official stop me and ask for my FMT, I do not have one. It also says that I am to return to the immigration office a week from Friday, on the 28th of September, when I will be given further instructions.

My understanding is, on that day, I will be told whether or not I will be getting an FM3, and what I need to do to finalize the procedure. This will include getting photographs of a specific size (similar to, but different dimensions from passport photos) and paying the fee for the visa itself.

The fee for the visa itself is rather high - on the order of a couple of hundred bucks, if I remember correctly. Even so, it's cheaper than airfare in and out of the country twice a year.

[continue reading part two of three in this series]

Posted by crispy at 08:23 PM | Comments (3)

September 14, 2007

Subtitle and Subtext

I indulge myself with the electricity it takes to have the television on while I write. It's mostly at night, and it accomplishes the softest light we can achieve in the apartment, barring those adventurous nights when the electricity goes out for hours and we have to rely on a bunch of candles. I often turn the sound down because Shawn is asleep. When I get deeply involved in what I'm writing - thinking about it, looking up references, checking the spelling, far too infrequently proofreading - I fail to look at the television for long periods of time. The darkness and the quiet that we get here throughout the wee hours gives an enveloping shell to my writing environment that helps me get the black on the page.

At times my writing involves my talking to myself in an empty room or an otherwise vacant apartment. After hours though, I try to keep any such conversations down to a minimal whisper, like I'm trying to impress myself in a dark corner booth of a dim lounge over a Scotch with my saucy reparté. Usually, it's a terribly unpolished pick-up, and I'm not having any of it. It's disheartening to be both flailing around uselessly in pathetic lines as you listen to how they make you sound like a corny hack. I can avoid that by turning off the volume and thinking the lines.

When I'm writing with the volume on the television turned up and I say what I'm writing or what I'm thinking, the program or commercial on television will chime in at a frighteningly appropriate moment with something amazingly prescient or beautifully non sequitur. When it is turned down, the Spanish-language programming doles this out in visual form, but programming originally done in English with subtitles in Spanish also gives it to me with silent words, mouthed like inaudible whispers.

Who can resist listening to a whisper? It demands that you listen. If it is intended for you, it often relates information of the utmost importance or maybe an offer of extremely titilating interest. If it is not intended for you, you feel like you're in on something. Delicious double entenres can be used in both spoken and written language. In subtitles it happens both ways: unintentionally funny words get used from time to time, and at times, the subtitle puts the tongue in the wrong cheek and blows the humor of a double entendre that is intended in the original. Sometimes it's amusing.

Last night, Diamonds are Forever was on one of the movie channels as I worked. I looked up at the end of the film, after James has saved the day and Jill Saint John has bounced herself voluptuously into the hearts of all the straight men in the audience with her inpired machine-gun and bikini bit, to catch a scene featuring the straight-as-Smithers assassins Misters Wint and Kidd. Wint and Kidd play the role of the villains (like Jaws in Moonraker), who come back in a comedic coda to tie up their not having been neatly dispatched through the carnage of the final fight scene. True to form, this mincing murder machine is trying to kill James Bond again, even though Blofeld is out of the picture and it is not clear that they have any motive other than their commitment to the bit.

The sequence opens with Bond and Tiffany Case Jones jousting with wordplay on the balcony of a luxury liner stateroom when they are interrupted by a knock at the door. Mister Wint and Mister Kidd are disguised as stewards, bringing an elegant gourmet room service meal that they claim is with the compliments of the rich Texan that James saved earlier. Mr. Wint details the menu while Mr. Kidd does theatrical reveals of each dish as it is detailed. For desert, they have a bombe suprise (pronounced like "BOMB-bh soo-PREEZ"), which, Mr. Wint briefly exposes to the audience as a fake, with a time bomb hidden inside. Cute.

Yet the Spanish subtitles render "And for dessert...bombe suprise" as:

Para el postre...un explosivo sorpresa.

or "For desert...a suprise explosive."

So much for subtlety.

Posted by crispy at 02:16 AM | Comments (1)

September 07, 2007

Mala Noche

Shawn and I went to see Gus Van Sant's first feature film, Mala Noche (1985), last Sunday. It was showing at the Videosala [previous entry], and it was our first time seeing it. That is not much of a surprise, given that it has only just recently been released on DVD, and it did not get wide circulation in 1986.

It is based on a novel by Walt Curtis, a street poet from Oregon. It is an autobiographical tale, wherein Curtis has an unrequited love affair with a young illegal alien from Mexico and experiences all the thrill, frustration, and hassle that comes with that relationship. Curtis is much older than Johnny, who claims to be 18, but might even be 16, a detail that Van Sant changed because he felt people would be disgusted by a gay autumn-spring romance - no, obsession. I disagree with that, but I admit that it is easier for me to assert that now, 23 years after than Van Sant had to consider the matter, in the world after L.I.E.

It is interesting to watch the film in Mexico, because it deals with Mexicans outside of their country, living as aliens among gringos. Watching it as an alien gringo in a Mexican context, it takes on the air of a State Department production featuring the pitfalls of coming illegally to the United States and not choosing one of the acceptable, socially prescribed paths for living and working illegally. It's melodramatic. It's black and white (for the most part). It's done on a low budget, but it has a beautiful style. Viewing it abroad, I was reminded of Soy Cuba. The foreign land seemed exotic, in an earthy, sexy way. There is a celebration of freedom, but the foreigners are excluded from the party, even though, through their history, the two countries go way back. To them, the message is: you'd better watch your step.

That is not Van Sant's intention. He exposes inequities that exist in the United States in the simple telling of the story, and they are not rationalized away by the end of the film. There is no more sinister subtext. He just tends to do stories about social misfits, and life can often be gloomy, the situation can often get quite grave, for misfits.

Furthermore, I do not expect that any Mexicans would actually take that away from the film, although to be honest, I have no idea what that dozen or attending my screening thought of it. They all got up and left at the end without much fanfare. Maybe they were miffed because it was obvious to them that the role of Johnny wasn't actually played by a Mexican, but rather a South American Native. Such slight of hand works easier in the United States where, to a lot of folks, all brown people look alike. Mexico? Guatemala? Ecuador? What's the difference? Maybe they were shocked to see poor and homeless gringos portrayed in the film. That is not something we see down here every day.

Mala Noche will join the Criterion collection shortly.

Posted by crispy at 12:16 AM | Comments (1)

August 29, 2007

El Cachorro: Tacos al Vapor

El Cachorro at Work

El Cachorro
Tacos al Vapor
Mercado de Abastos
Calle Trigo esq. Nopal

View in Google Earth

I have not gone into detail about the various types of tacos that exist here in Mexico; it's worth a dedicated entry, because they are numerous and diverse. It's not just hard vs. soft like you usually find on el otro lado, where the difference is usually the kind of tortilla (flour or corn). In Mexico, the type of taco is usually determined by the method of preparation.

One of my favorites is al vapor, which more or less means "steamed." This denotes that the person making the tacos has made a bunch of tacos with pre-cooked fillings in corn tortillas the night before, loaded them up in an enormous steamer pot, and is selling them directly from the hot, steaming pot. It should be noted that the stuff inside the tacos is not cooked by the steaming process; the steaming process keeps them hot for serving. An additional aspect of this process is that they come out nice and moist.

I learned about El Chachorro one day because I was talking with Charles about potato tacos. He told me that some of the best were to be found at a particular al vapor taco stand in the Abastos Market, the market where people go to buy stuff in large quantities. (abastos means "supplies," and this is where corner store owners go to buy cases of soda and kitchen managers go to buy 40-pound boxes of tomatoes) The problem was that tacos al vapor are a morning-to-noon thing, and I often do not even wake up until then. Yet the Abastos Market is a great place to buy top-notch produce at very cheap prices, and if you want to get the good stuff, you have to get there pretty early. Not like crack-o-dawn early, but like 10:00 early. Even I can manage that. So as these things eventually work out, I ended up at the Abastos Market one day at just the perfect time for tacos al vapor, so we made a preliminary stop at El Cachorro.

I've been a fan ever since.

El Cachorro Tacos al Vapor

Like a lot of food that fuels the machinery of the working class, El Cachorro is street food. Opinions vary widely on whether or not it is safe to eat street food; some people that will not touch it, yet many know it as their primary source of sustenance. There are a handful of things that validate a street food source for me, like the food being served hot, a considerable number of people at the stand, or the recommendation of a friend. This place had all three.

You can see the different varieties they offer in the top photo: cicharron, lengua, frijol, papa and huevo con chorizo (pig skin, tongue, bean, potato and egg with sausage). You can get a soda, or an agua fresca for MXN $7, which is just under USD $0.70 to go along with it. It says "agua," but this means agua fresca, and at El Cachorro, that means de piña (pineapple), always.

The family makes up a huge number of these tacos every day, in the wee hours of the morning, and then loads them into the steamer pot to keep them warm all through the morning as they're being sold. They keep the different types in different areas of the pot, but they are all mixed in together so the grease from one kind drips down over the others. I suspect that I've ingested pig skin or tounge grease that has dripped onto my potato tacos, and I don't even want to know if the frijol version has some kind of animal fat in it. For an El Cachorro taco, I'll deal with it. (I don't make such blanket exceptions often. The last time was with miso ginger soup at Taki's on Colfax.)

El Cachorro Serves it Up Piping Hot

The thing that really sets apart the El Cachorro taco al vapor is the double tortilla. Everywhere else I've had them, they come as a single tortilla encasing the filling. At El Cachorro, you get two fine quality corn tortillas wrapped around your tongue or potato, and it makes it not only a lot more filling, but easier to eat. The taco al vapor is by nature a very soft, mushy taco, given to splitting and losing its filling. This never happens with an El Cachorro taco because if the inner layer comes apart, the outer layer still holds it all together.

This also lets the lucky consumer of the El Cachorro taco load on more of the delicious salsas that they have at the taco stand. They have three different kinds, which they distinguish as mild, medium and hot, but they are three entirely different types of salsa. The hottest kind is made with tomatillos and habañero chiles, but I usually go for the mild kind just because I like the flavor the most. They also have the ever-present minced cabbage and the carrot-jalapeño-onion in escabeche. That's one of the great things about taco stands in Mexico - they inevitably have all kinds of delicious things you can add to the tacos or eat on the side. I have yet to see the range of condiments you find at taco stands here in Mexico equaled in the United States. It's not a selection of five or so hot sauces. It's pickled red onions, escabeche, avocado salsa, various chile salsas, cole slaw, chipotles en adobado, grilled serrano chiles, diced fresh tomato-cilantro-onion-chile (known often as pico de gallo in the US, but more often called salsa mexicana here), jicama, limes...the list goes on and on.

Oh, and note how, in the above picture, they serve you on a plastic plate, but it's covered by a plastic bag. This is done at nearly all street food vendors though; it is not limited to El Cachorro. This lets them reuse the plastic plates without their ever getting dirty. When you're done with your food, you (or the stand attendant) strips off the dirty plastic bag from the plate, throws it in the trash and slides a new bag over the plate. Voila! It's a fresh clean plate for the next customer.

Some of El Cachorro's Salsas and Condiments

El Cachorro is so popular that he has expanded this year. He now has a couple of other stands located in the Abastos Market, and this original stand has a self-contained lavamanos, a little sink where you can wash your hands before eating. You can see a corner of it in the left side of the photo below. For a street food stand, that's getting really fancy.

El Cachorro Draws a Crowd

Oh and for those of you interested in the language, cachorro means "puppy," and that's the owner's nickname. I do not know his real name. Charles always refers to him simply as el cachorro, and I always know exactly who he's talking about.

Posted by crispy at 11:53 AM | Comments (1)

August 22, 2007

The Trees of Guadalajara

Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur

It seems like in Mexico, trees are the enemy, as if they are to be feared, avoided, and whenever possible, hacked apart until they are barely alive. This might not be the philosophy throughout the entire country - Mexico City does not seem to share the maniacal tendency to slice and dice their trees - but in our neck of the woods, any time any part of any tree gets within a meter of power lines, phone lines, fences or buildings, out come the men with chainsaws to remove not only the limb that threatens to offend, but all the main limbs. It is as if the whole tree is being punished for its impertinence in trying to grow.

Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur

Although the cutters seem ready at a moment's notice to lob off all the limbs of a tree, conversely they seem hesitant in their slaughter once they have set to it. One rarely sees a tree cut off at the bottom of the trunk. Instead, they leave the center of the tree standing, stripped of all branches and foliage, leaving only segments of the limbs, like a deciduous Venus de Milo.

Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur

This poor specimen below stands across from our apartment building. It provided nice shade for the woman that sells tacos every weekday on the corner, but the branch on the far right began to grow too near the power lines that you can see in the shot. Even though it was the only branch that threatened to come anywhere near the wires, all the limbs of the tree were cut off.

I walked outside one day to wait for my cab, and I saw the crew of three men starting to dismantle the whole thing. By the time I returned from my errands, this is all that was left.

Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur

Nobody seems to know why they cut trees like this in Guadalajara. Nobody seems to find it attractive. Everyone I have talked to finds it ugly, and none can explain the logic behind stripping trees down so severely but not removing them entirely.

Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur

There are many neighborhoods in Guadalajara that have no trees whatsoever. Apart from little ornamental tokens here and there and a couple in Plaza San Francisco, the centro histórico and surrounding neighborhoods have no trees. Starting around Avenida Federalismo as you head west from the downtown along Avenida Vallarta, you start to see a few more here and there. Parque de los Colomos has a lot of trees, but it is clearly set apart from the ritzy, tree-free residential areas that surround it. It is as if it were a tree ghetto where trees are tolerated and not as viewed as threatening as long as they are kept isolated in a self-contained area.

Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur

A shopping complex for Wal-Mart and Sam's Club near Plaza Galerías has a few ficuses littered about throughout the enormous parking lot. On the hot days before the rainy season comes, when the sun blazes in the sky and there is little breeze to cool things down, customers treasure the little islands of shade created by those trees in that sea of baking asphalt. All the spots in the shade fill up before any others. Even if people have to walk from the far edge of the parking lot where there are no other cars, they will take park in the shady spots to keep their cars cool.

So why do tapatios not plant more trees, and why do they do this to the trees that already exist?

Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur

I have heard it argued that after the trees are savaged like this, that new growth will start again and the tree will soon be just as leafy as it was before. This is a load of hogwash.

To the extent that the leaves do come back, they come back as shown in the photo below. A few twigs grow out of the side of the hacked off branches and start to put out leaves. This is hardly as leafy as the tree was before, and it results in a weird combination of poofy/gangly, like a recently trimmed French poodle.

Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur

After a few years of struggling back, it might get to where it looks like this.

Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur

This is an example of a tree that survived pruning and managed to slip under the radar thus far. It's safe, but for how long?

Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur

Others are not so lucky.

Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur

The ones that do not make it are left to stand like this for years on end. This one, across the street diagonally from our apartment, has been like this since we moved in, coming up on two years now. Who knows how long it stood like this before we got here?

Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur

Posted by crispy at 03:32 PM | Comments (5)

July 14, 2007

How to Survive in Buenos Aires on $20 a Day

Don't come here, wait until the next economic crisis, or best yet, adjust your expectations appropriately.

We have been wondering where all the super-cheap stuff is we heard so much about from our friends that have visited Buenos Aires over the past couple of years. When we were planning our trip here, we heard fantastic tales of steak dinners for two complete with desert and a bottle of decent wine for under USD $15. Clothes, at a third of the cost of their equals in the United States, could be snapped up supposedly everywhere. One could even get a 10-day vacation package that includes a breast augmentation performed by world-class doctors cheaper than a weekend in Vegas! Ah, the promise of such deep discounts in a recovering economy beckons like an irresistable siren, especially if, as it does for us, his work schedule forces the traveler always to travel at peak times when the cost of getting to and from the destination is at its highest. He thinks, "Sure it will cost three months' salary to get there and back, but once I get there, staying there will cost practically nothing!"

Countries with an unstable economy can be cheap if one visits from another country where the economy is stronger, but unstable economies can fluctuate wildly. When travelers start to flock to a place in droves for its low prices, eventually there are enough tourists that the demand for goods and services become high, even if the demand for such things is low among those that live in the place. With high demand come higher prices, and if the economy is unstable and the cycle of inflation and recession does not happen smoothly, those high prices can come in dramatic spikes.

Last night we attended an English-speaking group in Belgrado. This is a group of porteños that get together to practice every week, and they often have visiting English-speakers dropping in to get tips about the city from the locals. We told them how much we liked their city, how beautiful we find it, how excellent the food is and how much nicer people seem to be than we had heard. Yet we also told them of our dismay that things are not as cheap as we had heard. They explained to us that yes, things used to be much cheaper, but inflation is on the rise. According to one of the group members, prices for everything have gone up about 30% since April.

That is quite a hefty jump, but that does not seem to be uncommon here. Deby Novitz, author of the TangoSpam blog says that inflation during the year of 2005 ran about 30%.

It should also be noted that these are not official figures. Official figures are supposed to look at a wide range of goods and services in the economy, whereas annecdotal reports tend to focus on the things people use on a regular basis. That often translates into a marked difference between what people see as a price jump at their local market or gas station and the numbers reported by official agencies that monitor the economy. The Buenos Aires Herald reported (6 July 2007) that 12-month inflation was 8.8% through the end of June, although the same article notes that critics of the present administration suggest that the politicians are tampering with the figures to make themselves look good.

In any case, porteños are being hit even harder than tourists who are, despite inflation, getting very good exchange rates. At present, the exchange rate for us is about 3.1:1, or ARS $3.10 to the dollar. Six months ago, it was ARS $3.06 to the dollar. One year ago on this date, it was ARS $3.08 to the dollar. Furthermore, compared to Europe and North America (including Mexico), the prices here are still cheap for a lot of things, especially things that you need on a daily basis.

Just like in Mexico, certain things are cheaper than they are elsewhere, and other things are more expensive. For example, in Mexico, the prices for electronics seem obscene to us, but the prices for produce are generally cheaper. It is when one starts looking for specific items that he tends to suffer sticker shock, and that is exactly what happened to me in Buenos Aires.

I needed to buy some shirts with long sleves when I came here because it is winter here and I could not find long-sleeve shirts in Mexico before we left. That was just as well, Shawn told me, because a student of his, upon hearing that we were going to Buenos Aires, advised him to buy clothes here because they are so much cheaper than they are in Mexico. I had to find a fat-clothes store in Buenos Aires, and through the help of the Internet, I did, before we even left Guadalajara.

We went there shortly after arriving, and it was the kind of place where you have a personal attendant that pulls items with no price tags down off of shelves from behind the counter when you ask to see them. Maybe that should have been a hint at what I'd end up paying, but at the time, I just figured that is how they do things here. I liked several things that they had, and I ended up buying several nice shirts, some ties, a sports jacket and some slacks. These were all things that I either needed for the trip (the shirts) or have not been able to find in Mexico (oversized sports coats and longer ties just for gordos). Then they handed me the credit card receipt to sign and I almost passed out. It was multiple thousands of Argentine pesos. To give you an example, the shirts ran from USD $80 to $150 each. They are all store brand shirts made in Argentina. They are not designer imports. Do not get me wrong. They are decent enough shirts (dress button-down, the most expensive claiming to be of "Egyptian thread"), but I know, having bought several over the years, that they would cost less in the United States. They would cost a whole lot less in Mexico. It certainly was not like what Shawn's student said about clothes costing one-third what they cost in Mexico.

It seems that there is a fat tax for finer men's clothing, but there might also be a tourist tax in the sense that, as a tourist, I was only able to find information on that one store, and perhaps there are others with much better prices that I might know about if I were a fat guy actually living here. One should also bear in mind that these are things I have not even been able to find in Guadalajara. It seems that there are a lot of things that are a trade-off like that; in Mexico, there are certain things we just cannot get that we have been able to find here. Is it worth paying a little more for greater selection? Yeah, I hate to have to admit that I'm this much of a consumer whore, but for me, yes, it is.

The problem is, one often hears amazing tales of unfathomable bargains in other countries. It is my experience that these should be taken with a grain of salt, for many different reasons. Prices go up. Economies fall and come roaring back. People forget to include other indirect costs when telling about their experiences. What constitutes good quality to one person is utter garbage to another. People have widely-differing priorities. The list of factors that can make a memorable cheap trip for one person an expensive waste of time to another are endless. Yet it is alluring, when considering a trip somewhere, to believe all the hype and convince oneself that, not is it only a sound financial choice to go there, but that one would be a complete idiot to not take advantage of such ridiculously good deals. The fact of the matter is, with travel, like with everything else, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

In closing, let me give you a few prices, converted for your convenience to US dollars, for things about town in Buenos Aires. Unless a location is stated, these prices are the going rates in multiple places about town.

• a shot of Jack Daniels: $6.50
• pad phai (choice of chicken, beef or shrimp) @ Empire Thai: $9.36
• Sprite Zero (600 ml/20 oz bottle): $1.30
• Sprite Zero (600 ml/20 oz bottle) @ Richmond Café (see Graham Greene's "The Honorary Consul"): $1.97
• double espresso: $1.61
• double espresso with cream: $2.25
• tapas plate (8 different tapas) @ Artemisia: $8.72
• order of 2 egg rolls at Cinco Corderos: $0.65
• oversize men's sport coat (silk) @ Big & Tall: $708.64

Posted by crispy at 07:38 AM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2007

Think Again

Time and travel give us new perspectives on our lives. Sometimes it is subtle, like realizing that at a certain point, all the signs have gone from saying "SPEED LIMIT" to "MAXIMUM SPEED." At other times, it will change your outlook on the world completely, like looking down one day and realizing they are your father's hands reaching forth from your arms to tie your father's shoes on your feet.

In our daily lives, the mind tries to assimilate everything it gathers into some world view that makes sense, and in doing so, fabricates illusory connections and divisions that are not really there. It is too complicated and requires too much effort to constantly discriminate the shades of difference that actually exist in nature. A line is drawn in the sand to divide 'same' from 'different,' and we start to sort things to one side or the other to make thinking about them easier. Once we have decided what the relationships are between things, we consider that job done. We move on to other taxing mental chores, acting like all those things will remain in stasis because we have clustered them into neat little packages.

We stay in the same place for a long time and we used to things being a certain way. Time passes slowly enough that we fail to notice all the slight changes that occur constantly. An ironic consequence of assuming such permanence develops where we tend to not see the things that are right in front of us every day. As David Byrne says in one of the best films of all time about man's (illusory?) relationship to place, True Stories:

When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is.

Traveling is like a good dose of amnesia. It shakes you up and makes you forget, so that not only do you see a new place for the first time, but you see all the places you have been with new eyes.

This blog is supposed to be about Mexico, the place I have lived for the past year and a half. I admit, at times I have strayed into diatribes about the things that motivated me to leave the United States and how I have found things upon my occasional return trips there. I have also written about other Latin American countries, comparing and contrasting them to Mexico. If I were more goal-oriented, I might be very good at sticking to just talking about Mexico, but the fact is, I have a lot of strong opinions about other things too. I just cannot shut up about those things, and I do not like to deny myself.

I indulge in a lot of things I should not, and writing about other places when we travel, even if it has nothing to do with Mexico, is one of those things. For the next few weeks, I'm going to be in Buenos Aires, Argentina. and I'm going to write about it. Up to its old tricks, my mind is constantly comparing this place to both the United States and Mexico, in ways both favorable and not-so-nice. I cannot help it. That is just the way the mind works, and it is just the way I work to shoot my mouth off about what I think.

For those of you that might be considering moving to Mexico or some other Latin American country - maybe Argentina - you might find the 'Crispito Goes to Buenos Aires' articles informative about this slice of South America. For those of you who come here to read about Mexico, dammit...do not despair. This trip has already wiped my slate and made me notice things anew about Mexico, even though we are thousands of miles away from it.

Many people, especially in Latin America, think the Argentines are snooty wanna-be Europeans. One of my friends and former Spanish teachers tells the following joke:

Q: What is the most lucrative job in the world?
A: Buying Argentines for what they are worth and then selling them for what they think they're worth.

If you find that more true than humorous, you might want to tune back in around August 6, when we return to one of my favorite places: Mexico City.

Posted by crispy at 06:17 AM | Comments (0)

June 28, 2007

La Dentista

I had to have a filling. It was multi-surface, which in the United States is like having two entirely different cavities, or at least that is they way they bill for it.

I had not yet established a relationship with a dentist here, so I was long overdue. Unfortunately, I am leaving for Buenos Aires next week, so I needed to get in to see someone rather urgently. I tried to get an appointment with the English-speaking dentist that is popular here, who also has an office in Ajijic, near the large gringo community at Lake Chapala. He only works in Guadalajara two days a week. This week he was booked solid, and next week he is going to Venezuela.

I asked Charles for help, and he suggested his dentist. When we went to see his dentist though, he told us that he didn't have the proper equipment in that office to do the work, so he called up a collegue, scheduled us for an appointment later that day and asked her to give us a discount, as we were friends.

The only drawback for me personally is that she doesn't speak English, and when your mouth is stuck open with dental instruments inside, it's hard to express that you do not understand something that the dentist is telling you. This time, Charles went along with me and translated as necessary, so that worked out. I think that I probably could have managed on my own, but when you are dealing with things like the law and medicine, it's important to understand fully what is going on.

She did a very good job and after about two hours of examination and work, she charged me only MXN $300. That is just a little under thirty bucks. I'm going back for a cleaning this afternoon, and that's going to cost me a whopping MXN $350. She did discount the rate for us because we were sent to her by a friend, but I do not imagine that the regular price is anything near what one would pay in the United States. I'd have paid my previous dentist in Boulder at least USD $600 for the visit.

I can recommend her highly, in case you ever need a dentist in Guadalajara. Her information is:

Dr. Adriana Preciado Fregoso
Nuevo Mundo 2500
Fracc. Colón
Guadalajara, Jalisco
(33) 3812-1885 office
(33) 3115-2350 cell

Posted by crispy at 06:46 AM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2007

Low Power

A couple of days ago we had low power for about four hours. It happens now and again, and what exactly causes it, I don't know. We don't fully lose power, but there isn't enough for stuff to work. If you turn a light on, it glows a dim orange. If you turn a fan on, it spins very slowly.

I never experienced this in the United States. It seemed like there, if your power goes out, it goes out completely. If the power is on, it's on all the way. Here in Mexico, we can lose some or all of our power.

At one point during the dimness, Charles called for some reason, and Shawn told him about it. He called the CFE for us and they told him that there had been four other reports of the problem made from our neighborhood, Chapalita. Yet in our apartment building, it was only affecting the people upstairs. The people downstairs had full power, just like normal.

Posted by crispy at 10:27 AM | Comments (1)

May 27, 2007

Midnight cinema in Mexico

Musicians from La muerte cruzó el río Bravo

Alberto thinks Mexican cinema mostly sucks. It's a widely-held belief here in Mexico, especially among those that don't remember the good old days when stars like Andrea Palma and Ramón Novarro graced the screens.

But I've mentioned before that Mexicans tend to think their own stuff is crap. Shawn's students don't want to get candies from Mexican marcas, the only kind that will do is something like Hershey's® or M&M Mars®. I hated to see Mexicans with no pride in their national products. I mean, who doesn't like candy?

I've had a lot of types of Mexican candies now and I have to say, I can see where they might be coming from. Some Mexican candies are hideous. I am sure some are just an acquired taste, but there seems to be a trend in Mexican confections for things that are perhaps very sweet, but also very bitter, sour or burning. Maybe there is a cultural subtext behind it and coming to love those candies is coming to terms with the national condition. Maybe kids hate them because they've not yet learned to courageously smile on through the sour of the tamarind paste or to maintain a graceful composure through the searing of your mouth lining brought on by the powdered chile dusting. There might be something there that speaks directly to the resigned calm of the Mexican spirit in that. Maybe there is no psychology involved, and we all hate them simply because they suck.

Mexican cinema has the same thing going on. There are films that are breathtaking additions to world cinema and some that would make Ed Wood recoil in horror. And just like I enjoy some exotic Mexican candies that taste a little strange, I also have a strange fondness for some trashy Mexican films because they're so alien to me. I often cannot sit and watch one paying full attention to it, nor usually do I make it through a whole one before I change the channel. Still, I've seen enough in bits and pieces that I feel comfortable making a few comments on some interesting aspects of midnight Mexican cinema. (I call it that because it's usually shown late at night before 6 or 6 am, when the Mexican movie channels go back to showing classics from la época de oro or "golden age" of Mexican cinema.)

I have difficulty accurately judging the age the films. They look to be about five to ten years older than they really are. Sometimes you can date them properly from products, advertisements or fashion, but the film stock itself will look like a bad 70s movie when it's really a bad 80s movie. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe the cameras and other equipment used were old? Perhaps the processing was not as cutting edge as what I'm used to seeing from the 80s? In any case, when watching Mexican color films from the 60s through the 80s, they're usually a lot more recent than you think they are.

Grieving Wife, Mil caminos tiene la muerte

Contrary to the oft-heard complaint, there is no shortage of roles for older women in Mexican films of this (or any) era. It tends to always be the same role: the elderly grandmother or the devastated wife crying at the side of the coffin of a recently murdered innocent during a wake or funeral.

The imminent threat, La muerte cruzó el río Bravo

Younger women don't often fare too well either. They're usually the victims of rape. Whether this serves as a twisted gratification in the male gaze or merely as the realization of the ultimate national masculine nightmare, I am unsure. During the era of these films, all good guys are macho and all the women in their lives chaste and pure. Contrary to popular belief, machismo does not dominate contemporary Mexican culture. You see those stereotypes nowadays once in a while, but more often than not, they're the subject of gentle mocking.

The destiny of a young female character, La muerte cruzó el río Bravo

Not so in the midnight movies that take place in the countryside or desert, with a cast of all cowboy-clad males. They look like cowboys everywhere, but of course, they're Mexican. They don't necessarily have to be cowboys. They might ride horses or they might use motorcycles. They might be the toughs of no specific career other than initiating random violence and criminal escapades. In any case, the cowboy otfit means tough and macho.

I once saw a movie here once where the enemy was the gringo hydrological engineer that came to a small agricultural pueblo to help with their irrigation problems. He was tall, skinny, white, blond and wore glasses, and while he had a ridiculous accent in his Spanish, when things turned ugly in a town meeting and the crowd (dressed in flannel, jeans and cowboy hats) threatened to lynch him, he understood every word they were saying, even in the heat of the moment. Maybe he was a highly educated spy or a plant from a multi-national narcotics ring. I don't know because I stopped watching.

This type of film usually plays upon the fear of a violent disturbance to domestic tranquility in a family or small town by an outsider, like Shadow of a Doubt. In a similar vein, you have films wherein a group of outsiders, like a gang of ruffians on motorcycles, comes to a place simply to terrorize it. Sometimes this involves violence committed for kicks and other times it is an orchestrated plot like a kidnapping or attempted robbery of a poor family mistakenly thought to have money hidden somewhere in their house.

Motorcycle gang rides into town, Mil caminos tiene la muerte

Often in the end of these fearmongering movies, the love interest gets killed. I don't mean they are killed in the beginning of the film, giving the hero or heroine cause to take up a mission of avenging their deaths. I mean that at the very end of the film, they're killed by some pointless tragedy or accidental oversight, like not making sure that the bad guy is really dead and he comes back to life just long enough to aim his gun at and fatally shoot the girl whose father has just been rescued by the hero-boyfriend from the gang of maniacal kidnappers. It seems that films of this era needed to have an unhappy ending for some reason, even after all is said and done and the day has been saved. The moral is that you should never be too happy, I guess.

A more lighthearted genre popular in the 70s and 80s is the sex romp. These are just like the sex romps in the rest of the world, but in Mexico they have Sasha Montenegro.

Sasha Montenegro

She's interesting because she was born (1950) in what was then Yugoslavia, moved to Argentina, then ended up in Mexico, but best of all, she had a 20-year affair with a president (1976-1982): José López Portillo y Pacheco. He was still married at the time, but he got a divorce and the two married in 1995. She had two children with him. He was taken sick though, and she had to struggle with his children from his former marriage for visitation rights in the hospital. Since his death in 2004, she has been battling them in court for her part of the estate.

De todas todas (1985) demonstrates a common feature of the Mexican sex romp: the male lead can look like Ron Jeremy, but he's always surrounded by beautiful women.

Dinner scene from De todas todas

Yet despite these ridiculous aspects of Mexican films from the 70s and 80s, they are not without their charms. First off, they do more with less. They are obviously low-budget productions, but it seems that a lot of thought has gone into their production. Even in cheap movies with absurd storylines, you will come across creative blocking, breathtaking lighting or incredibly sharp editing.

Maribel Guardia and Rafael Inclán, De todas todas

In Mil caminos tiene la muerte, from 1977, the group of toughs is a little more nuanced than in most films. The group is detained by the inevitable Man, who is acting as the man does and threatening the toughs. As the toughs are pushed into a corner by the Man, they strike back. First we see the faces of individuals in the group just as they are starting to act, punching a cop or hitting a townsperson over the head with a chair. Before the blow lands, we cut to a scene in which that particular character is having a very bad previous experience with a prior Man (an abusive father that beat on the individual and his mother), then cuts back to the individual landing a punch on the Man in the present day story. This way the characters are developed, and you identify and sympathize with the individual. You know that in attacking the Man, they're accomplishing the greater social feat of breaking with the will of authority.

These films often evidence Mexicans' love for their country, or more specifically, for the diversity to be found within it. The various cities in Mexico are all renowned for their own particular characteristics or attractions. For example, Guanajuato is known for its tunnels and mummies, where as Tijuana is historically famous for bordertown excitement. The midnight movies you see here often exploit those characteristics in their locations, and it's a fun way to find out about the different regions of of the country and their specialties. It's especially fun to check out, say, Tijuana of 1975.

There is no shortage of music in Mexican movies from the 70s and 80s. Whether it's a mariachi ensemble or two drunk guys singing off key in a roadhouse, you hear all kinds of stuff. There are a lot of films from the 50s and 60s that were showcases for that hip new music that all the teens were listening too. These often have juvenille deliquency themes also, which makes them doubly entertaining for me. (My favorite is La edad de la violencia from 1964, which has a Spanish-language version of "Moon River" and the classic Sonora Santanera, "La boa.") The films of the 70s and 80s do not live up to the quality of these classics, but you can see how they're similarly throwing in music to try and liven it up a bit and give the audience a little more pow for their peso.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the trashier side of Mexican cinema is taking screen captures of the outrageous things they do and posting them on my blog. Someday, maybe I'll figure out a way to take motion picture clips from the tv and post them on here, so you can see their nuttiness in action. Until then, if you want to check it out, maybe you can order it through your local provider.

Posted by crispy at 02:13 PM | Comments (2)

May 07, 2007

Mexico Cooks!

Once in a while, I get exasperated with my chosen life as a vegetarian. It's not that I regret not eating animals, but rather, I'm infuriated with the fact that the world seems hell-bent on adding meat products to things that don't really need them. One big example here in Mexico is the caldo de jitomate (tomato broth) that one can buy in the stores here. It's a big component of many Mexican dishes. The grocery stores all offer multiple shelves and multiple brands to choose from, but every single brand contains chicken stock. You can't buy any tomato broth that is just that: tomatoes. Why they don't call it 'chicken stock with tomato,' I don't know.

Of course, it's the same situation in the United States, where you specifically have to buy vegetarian vegetable soup from Campbell's because their standard vegetable soup is made with beef stock. One can't eat the miso soup with tofu at any Japanese restaurants because it always has an undetectable, but for some reason manditory, addition of bonito. Onion gravy? Think again! That just means someone looked at an onion from across the room while they fried up flour and beef fat.

You would think that after 18 years, I'd be used to it, but I'm not. Day in and day out, I have to deal with meat bias, just like I did in the United States. Otherwise tasty enchiladas have their rich tortillas fried in lard. Those frijoles would be melting in my mouth, if only they didn't have big chunks of pork in them. Then there are the delicious potato tacos I could eat, if only they didn't have chorizo thrown in. There are times the whole experience just makes me want to lock myself in a room with a stack of rice cakes and a bunch of k.d. lang CDs, telling the rest of the world to go beat their meat elsewhere.

Then, a wonderful woman we have been most fortunate to befriend here in Guadalajara steps up to the plate, rolls up her sleeves and lets loose with a torrent of the good stuff that completely restores my love for the miracle that is Mexican food. Her name is Cristina, and she is the author of Mexico Cooks!, the most informative blog on Mexican food you'll find. With well-crafted first-person accounts and photos, she leads you around La República to sample the national staples as well as regional delicacies. She tells you the names of all those things you love but don't know how to ask for. She explains exactly what is in that curious stew that you saw but were afraid to try. She holds your hand and guides your lily-white behind through the market, removing the mystery behind things like chapulines and escamoles. Best of all, she reminds you of the sacred link between food, family and history that runs strong here in Mexico and makes the people so passionate about it.

Even after the most frustrating food experiences I encounter here in Guadalajara, Mexico Cooks! always lulls me back into a state of warm, bubbly love for the people and the food of our new country. And don't worry meat eaters. While she frequently writes about things that I can eat, she doesn't shy away from all those rich meaty treats for which Mexico is so well known. If reading Mexico Cooks! makes you so hungry you just can't stand it anymore and you want to come to Mexico to try out all the things she so lovingly describes, you're in luck. In addition to sharing her experiences through her blog, she also leads specialty tours here where you can go about and sample some of the delicious dishes she details in her blog.

Well? Why are you still here? Go check out Mexico Cooks!

Posted by crispy at 07:03 AM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2007

The Tequila Express

Tequila Express, photo courtesy of Ian Morich

Yesterday we went with our friend Ian on The Tequila Express, one of only two passenger trains still operating in Mexico (the other traverses the Copper Canyon), which goes to the town of Amatitán, where riders are given a tour of the Casa Herradura facilities.

It's a lot more than that though, and for MXN $850 (around USD $78), one would hope so.

First, you get more or less unlimited tequila, beer, or this stuff, sold only in Mexico, that is tequila combined with a soft drink in aluminum cans called "New Mix." (If you prefer, you can get plain soft drinks too.) You also get seemingly non-stop mariachi from an exceptional ensemble, a lunch buffet of traditional Mexican food, and a floor show offering folkloric dancing, ranchera singers, and a father-and-son team performing impressive lasso tricks. For the Latinos among my readers, rest assured that you also get the opporunity to dance during and after the show.

We signed up over a month ago, because, as we found out when trying to get tickets to take our friend Tara, they sell out in advance. They currently run only on Saturday and Sunday, but they are going to add a Friday tour, starting this summer.

The train is immaculate and well-maintained. There were a few seats where the trays in the back would either not stay up or would not come down, but other than that, there were no technical problems that I spotted. The staff is well-informed and not only fills you in on the process during the tour, but they give you some interesting background on the way out to the hacienda. The material is presented in both Spanish and English (although for a tour of the facility, an English-speaking group had to be arranged, but it only took a request to the guy in charge of our train car), and they go to great lengths to make sure that all their passengers are comfortable and that any special needs are met. All in all, it's one of the most professionally run things I've ever seen or done in Mexico.

The biggest drawback is that it can get hot. The train is air-conditioned, but the buses that take you from the train station in Amatitán to the hacienda (and drive around a bit on the grounds) are not. You don't usually have to wait for more than 5 minutes on the buses in the heat, but you might be smart to board the bus last, if you can swing it. The lunch buffet and the show takes place under shade (the first time we went, they had event-style tents; this last time they had it under a structure containing some actual agave ovens), but even so, you want to dress in light clothes and maybe bring along something with which you can fan yourself. The booze doesn't necessarily help you cool down either, so you might want to come up with an alternating tequila and non-alcoholic drink regimen and stick to it on the trip.

People can get kind of wasted too, so if that's unpleasant for you, you might not choose to do this activity. As we pulled into the train station, an obviously drunken woman latched on to Shawn's arm, and he at first thought it was only because she needed the physical support. When she started rubbing his backside amorously, he realized that wasn't all she needed. On the whole though, we're talking mostly about Mexicans, who as a rule, are pretty well behaved in public, whether drunk or sober.

Last but not least, I would warn against the fact that this is in no way a tour where you truly get to have a sampling of a wide range of tequilas. You only get to try products by Casa Herradura, and even then, they don't really offer you any of their higher-end stuff. It's decent stuff, for sure. However, if you are looking to get a wide sampling of the national beverage in its many diverse incarnations, you need to look elsewhere.

For a single activity that covers a lot of the Mexican experience, this is a great ride. I've now done it twice and I would not hesitate to do it again. In fact, they announced at the end of the trip that they are going to start doing nighttime tours before the end of the year, and I can't wait to check that out. Yet as it stands, it is a wonderful way to see part of the beautiful countryside of Jalisco without having to deal with driving and traffic, learn about the process and history of tequila, and party down with a bunch of Mexicans. And if you've not yet had the pleasure, let me assure you, Mexicans really know how to have fun at a party.

For more photos, you can check out the gallery at Ian's blog, soswell.com!

Posted by crispy at 09:44 AM | Comments (2)

April 18, 2007

deTWOur

Longtime readers may remember when our street was used as a detour for a major street nearby, detailed in some of the entries from when we first moved in. That lasted for about five months while they basically moved that main thoroughfare underground into a tunnel. After they finished that, the tunnel opened and we were back to living in a quiet residential neighborhood.

When we returned from Texas, we found that we were again on a detour route, and this time, they are allowing buses on the detour. The incredible number of cars was bad enough, but the buses are loud and dirty. I was already complaining that it's the dry and dusty season here, requiring the place to be dusted, swept and mopped a lot more often, but now, with the unregulated exhaust of the buses, it's ridiculous. And the buses start running early.

Usually, we will be notified in advance when they're going to re-route traffic through here, but this time, we were taken by surprise. It was further confusing as to why they didn't do the necessary planning in advance to reroute the buses on major streets instead of through our little dinky residential ones. We learned last night why, from our ever-informative neighbor, Alberto.

It seems that when they put the tunnel in, they somehow forgot to put in necessary plumbing or drainage. Realizing this after they fact, they had to come up with a fast plan to rip out the existing stuff and put it in again, this time with plumbing.

The rumor is that we'll be stuck with it like this for the next three months.

Posted by crispy at 08:33 PM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2007

Deep In the Heart of Texas, Part Three

Topo Chico Beverages From La Grange

Many of you know how I love Topo Chico products, and have read how it has been impossible for me to find them in Guadalajara (despite the assurances of many a Mexican that one can buy them there). It is one of the sad aspects of the relentless Americanization of Mexico that one can find Coca-Cola® products everywhere, but finding domestic sodas can be tricky. That seems to be by consumer choice; most Mexicans feel that domestic products are inferior to American brands.

When stopping to get a soda on our day trip to La Grange, we went to the convenience store next to Guadalajara Mexican Restaurant (403 North Jefferson Street, 979-968-5935). They had a cooler full of Topo Sabores (pictured above), which you can't even buy in Mexico. The kid behind the counter overheard me telling my sister Carol about the oddity that one can only buy Topo Sabores in the United States, and he assured me that they were in fact available for purchase within Mexico. But as I said, I'm used to Mexicans telling me how easy it is to find particular things there. I asked him where he'd seen them and he said Guanajuato and Guadalajara. When pressed on where in Guadalajara he'd seen them, he told me, "Near the center. San Juan de los Lagos." I verified that he didn't mean "San Juan de Dios," the big mercado in the center of Guadalajara, and he said no, "San Juan de los Lagos, in downtown Guadalajara." I had never heard of such a colonia, but since I'm not a walking directory of the neighborhoods within the city, I figured I'd look it up when we got back.

Upon returning to Carol's house, I looked up the Topo Chico web site to see if I had been mistaken after all. Maybe in my relentless skepticism, I'd misunderstood the web site before. No, it turns out. I had not. The web site indicates that the Topo Sabores are sold in the US only. One can get sangria and grapefruit flavors in Mexico (as well as plain mineral water), but not the range of flavors shown above.

And San Juan de los Lagos isn't a neighborhood in downtown Guadalajara. It's about 75 miles north of the city.

Posted by crispy at 07:16 AM | Comments (5)

March 17, 2007

R&R

The Angel of Independence, public domain photo by Eric Shalov

We finally made it to Mexico City. We made it in pretty early, after about three hours of sleep, and after checking in, we went straight to the delicious Kohinoor in Santa Fé. ["tourist" cab from hotel to restaurant: MXN $250] After getting so little sleep, having dealt with airports and taxis, then topping it off with a huge meal, we were crashing hard.

A double espresso at Starbucks didn't help to get me going. I could have dozed off for a while in the cushy chairs there for a few hours, but instead we came back to nap at the hotel. [cab hailed on street from restaurant to hotel MXN $70] At 9 pm, I got up and ironed my clothes in case we want to go out for a Saturday night on the town. We had planned to go visit Papa Beto Jazz Bistro but I think that may not happen; Shawn's comfortably snug in bed and shows no signs of resurrection for the evening. I've been jonesing for jazz a lot lately, but if we don't get to go, it won't be a big deal. It will leave us something fun to do next time.

Instead I may end up just ordering room service and enjoying our front-row seat at the Angel of Independence.

Posted by crispy at 09:08 PM | Comments (1)

March 10, 2007

Guest Room: Painted!

Before/After Painting

Jorge came over and helped me paint the guest room today. Although the color reproduction isn't the greatest in the photos, I think you can see the difference.

I'm much obliged to Jorge, who not only sat in on roller while I did the brush work, but also helped replace the curtain rod and re-hang the curtain. ¡Muchas gracias, Jorge!

Chris and Jorge

Posted by crispy at 03:40 PM | Comments (6)

March 09, 2007

Painting Preparations

Furniture with Plastic

We're expecting a guest at the end of April, and I have reached the conclusion that I must stop procrastinating in regard to setting up the guest room. The first step was to clean it out. Shawn had cleaned the apartment for another event we had, which meant the guest room got loaded up with boxes, old magazines and extra ketchup bottles and cans of beans.

Next is painting. I went out and bought all the paint and supplies on Thursday afternoon with Jorge.

Plaster, Tape, Cable

Now I'm doing all the setup stuff to paint: spackling and sanding bad surfaces, taping off the trim and even masking off the cables that run around the floor. Mexican walls don't tend to have space between them for running cables, so they're always run around the floor and fastened to the wall. This is a real pain in the neck when you want to paint, because you have to decide how to handle that issue. Should you paint them? Painted cables, even if they match in color, always look crappy to me, like the proper time was not taken to deal with them and they just had paint hastily slopped over them. I'm kind of into the technical asthetic anyway, so I prefer to have cables look like cables, even if I'd prefer they were not there in the first place.

Taping Off Cables

The worst thing about this is that these cables pictured here have no real use at the moment. One is the cable for what I presume was the former cable TV hookup. Because this leads in and terminates in the bedroom (and perhaps for other reasons of which I'm unaware), when the cable guys set up our cable, they ran entirely new eyesores along the walls from new holes they punched in the wall.

You also see a phone cable there, the one that's halfway taped off in the photo above. As you may know, we don't even have phone service here. Again with the tech thing, I hate to pull any pre-existing wire, ever.

Tomorrow, Jorge is going to come over and help me paint the room. It's going to be in the 80s.

Posted by crispy at 06:02 PM | Comments (2)

February 27, 2007

Spanish Immersion

There is no experience that teaches you a language better than immersion, and living where that language is spoken as the primary language is the best way to accomplish that. Living in a country where the primary language is not the same as yours is far from easy though, and even if you can swing that, you might be surprised how often it can be difficult to accomplish immersion in the language of that place.

There are a few things that are universal, no matter what native language, foreign language and country are involved. These things are helpful to bear in mind even if you originally speak Farsi and are going to learn Albanian while living in Kosovo.

Do not spend all your time with your peers.

If you have come in a group from your home country, or have met up with a bunch of people from there after you arrive, try to reach an agreement that you will not speak in your native language. That is trickier than it sounds because the tendency is to 'fall back' on your native language when you encounter difficulty in relating to each other in the second language. If a wide range of capabilities exist between the members of your group, it becomes difficult because the advanced speakers get tired of waiting for five minutes to understand one thought finally generated by a lesser-advanced speaker. That brings us to the next point.

Be sensitive to your status as a learner within their culture.

We find that speaking even a little Spanish gets you a lot of credit here in Mexico, as opposed to speaking a little English the United States. There, all too often, people learning English are given no credit for their attempts to speak the language and are often told, "Learn English! You're in America." No, people in the United States do not seem to be all that excited to help those learning English in their efforts, feeling that everyone that comes to the country should be fluent before touching that sacred ground.

In contrast, in Mexico, people are much more patient with gringos (and others) trying to learn Spanish, and they will often try to help you by gently correcting you or offering you pointers. However, it would be wrong to paint all Mexicans as jovial folk that are only too delighted to help Gringo figure out his por and his para.

Often, you will get a taste of what those learning English have to go through in the United States, with Mexicans that are not amused by your broken Spanish and the fact that they do not understand what you are trying to say. They will be obviously annoyed and angry that you are wasting their time. I have found that in some cases, even though I can probably deal with a situation okay, it is better to ask a friend along that is more fluent than I am, so that if this situation comes up, I have someone there to help out (or even take over for me) if I become flustered.

This will most often happen when you get off the beaten track trampled by tourists to the country, and deal with the more mundane things that you have to do when you stay for an extended period of time: paying the gas bill, trying to get a particular kind of medicine at the pharmacy or riding on the bus. ¡Ay! Riding on the bus... From my experience, that's where you will find Mexicans on their worst behavior, but that's a topic for another entry.

Yet it does help illustrate my point. On the bus, people are busy doing the most mundane of daily chores, doing one of the more unpleasant things they must do during the day to just get along. In situations like that, the foreign language learner abroad should be prepared to find native speakers less helpful. I have run into this in places where usually I am treated kindly despite my language difficulties, like at the grocery store down the street or the music store in the mall. Who knows what kind of a day the person you are dealing with has had by the time you get to them? You may be the last straw of a pile that has been building up on their back all day, or even weeks.

Whenever possible, try to practice your conversation with people that are in situations where they are not a lot of pressure to get something done or to get somewhere quickly. Parties, for example, are more likely to have people willing to take the time to help you, than are places like the bureaucratic office that deals with drivers' licenses.

Sometimes it is not appropriate to talk at all.

We have no car down here, so we take a lot of cabs. In general, when riding with others, Shawn prefers to sit in the front seat and I tend to prefer sitting in the back. This works out for us with taxis, because I put Shawn in charge of dealing with the taxi drivers when we first moved down here, so that he could have some relatively consistent, basic interaction with people for which he could practice in advance. He would follow a basic routine, approaching the taxi driver, asking if they were available, asking them if their meter worked, giving the street and number, and as necessary, detailing any local landmarks.

I am very pleased that a year later, he has improved so much that he usually engages the cab driver in pleasant small talk on a number of things, and he can even respond to novel conversations initiated by the drivers themselves. With this, he occasionaly needs help, and in those cases, I can chime in from the back seat. However, it is often a delight to just sit back and enjoy the view, while Shawn handles the chit-chat about the inevitable questions: where we are from, how long we will be visiting, why we prefer living here, etc.

Yet there are times when the cab driver really is not in a mood to be chatty, or maybe that particular driver never feels like chatting. A good sign is when they do not answer the second or third time that you ask them, "¿Cómo está?" or when their response to your questions or comments is to turn up the radio to a conversation-suffocating volume. That is when maybe you should sit back and just relax, respecting the fact that silence can be golden.

Obviously there are other times where it is not appropriate to talk, like during the middle of a film, even if you are doing it in the local language. Those things tend to be more universal, and you will know when to keep your trap shut then. Yet just bear in mind that there are situations that you get used to having be 'talking situations,' and once in a while, people will not agree with your assessment. Do not be hurt or offended by this.

Be careful! Even native speakers make mistakes.

I had some great teachers. I had teachers from different countries where Spanish was spoken and some countries are more strict about their Spanish than others. Not that they will turn you away from the border if you use the direct object pronoun where you should use the indirect object pronoun, but there are places where such 'modifications in everyday usage' are more culturally accepted than they are in others.

In Mexico, I hear native speakers make mistakes. I hear them put plural verbs with singular nouns or use the wrong pronouns. This takes very careful listening, but it also takes some tactful handling. Nobody likes a language snob, so you do not want to make a big deal of that kind of thing if it happens. Your best bet is to remember what you heard, and then later confirm whether your suspicion that the person said something incorrectly is right or not.

I have, on a couple of occasions, with cute guys that are very excited to help me practice my Spanish (that's really sexy, by the way folks), corrected them by asking (in Spanish), "Wait - don't you mean...." with a sly smile. That usually gets them to laugh, smile and correct themselves, and it gives me the chance to smile back and say (in Spanish), "Don't worry about it! English speakers make a very similar mistake all the time..."

Mexicans enjoy a little teasing, so this can be a good way to get them to laugh at themselves. And Mexican guys can be so cute when they smile. Yet again, that is probably best kept for a different entry.

The thing that bugs me most about Mexican Spanish is that they all (around here anyway) seem to make decades plural, as we do in English. According to my upbringing, this is the worst of Spanish gaffes. You say los sesenta (literally in English, "the seventy") and NOT what they say here, "los sesentas. This drives me nuts. I can hardly hold my tongue when I hear it, but unless I am conversing with someone I know very well, I do not say anything. Not only is it rude, but the person is going to turn to a nearby native speaker and ask, "Hey, it's los sesentas, not los sesenta, right?" (in Spanish), and of course she will agree, making you now look like a rude jackass that does not know what he is talking about.

People will presume you speak better than you do.

It is nice when you get good enough that you can achieve some conversational flow. It first starts to happen around subjects that you talk about a lot, like with the cab drivers that ask the same basic things of gringo tourists. Then you start to have conversations at parties that start off similarly (Where are you from? How long will you stay?), and ones competence in answering those questions implies that you have a pretty darn good grasp of the language. People will compliment you on how well you speak, and it will go to your head a bit before you come crashing down when they start talking faster, about things like avant-garde baking and its relation to domestic stocking production and why that is the number one criteria for voters that prefer to bathe themselves in kneecaps. Or at least that is what it suddenly seems they are talking about.

This will happen to you eventually once you are immersed long enough in a culture, so be ready with a little speech to tell people that while you may have mastered certain basic things, you are completely lost about what they have just said. It does not pay to act like you know what people are saying when you really have no idea. It is one thing to try and fill in the blanks with context, but you will know when you hit the point that you are completely lost when all of a sudden the person talking to you is waiting for a response and you are still trying to figure out if they are talking about bats or tariffs or short-shorts.

Even people that correct you will not always correct you.

Conversation in real life is not always about speaking correctly. It is about communication, and communication relies on many different aspects besides just proper grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. All that is required for communication to take place is that one person tries to express something to another, and the other person has some understanding of it. Of course, the accuracy of the understanding on the part of the recipient will vary with many different factors, but often ideas are communicated sufficiently without all the component parts of the expression being performed accurately. In other words, sometimes people understand what you are talking about even when you make a lot of mistakes in saying it.

Therefore, when you are involved in a conversation in a foreign language, you may make a lot of mistakes that the native speakers with whom you are talking do not correct for you. This is especially true if they have a lot of exposure to people from your native land that speak the same native language as you do and tend to make the same exact mistakes you do. This happens for English speakers a lot in Mexico (and I suspect in Spain), because they tend to be exposed to a lot of English speakers. If you make the mistake of saying you were really embarazada when your skirt blew off when that strong wind hit, people may not tell you that what you actually just said you were pregnant when the wind came along. They know that English speakers make that mistake a lot, even if they do not know it is because for us, the word "embarrassed" is a false cognate.

It is more fun for native speakers to have a conversation with someone learning their language than it is for them to play the role of a teacher and correct them on every single mistake. It is more fun for you too, but there will be times where you later realize mistakes you made in talking to people, and belive me, you will be plenty embarazada. Do not let it get to you. Just try to figure out a way to remember the right way to say it, and try to do it right the next time.

Immersion is not limited to conversation.

I have been told on a couple of occasions here that my pronunciation is my strongest point when it comes to Spanish. (God knows it's not my conjugation.) I think a big reason for this is that, even though I do not get out and about all the time, I tend to watch TV and listen to music that is in Spanish, even when I have no idea as to what is being said. We are lucky to have many channels that broadcast old Mexican films from the 50s and 60s here, and I love to watch them for the way they look, even if I cannot understand everything going on. I also love old Mexican music, so I will often put on some Trio Los Panchos while I am cleaning the house or cooking lunch.

The point here is this: you can learn a lot from just hearing the foreign language, even if you are not listening to it. A whole different kind of learning takes place when you are following along, trying to figure out the words and understand their relation to each other. Yet even if you are mindlessly making up a shopping list while you have Molotov on in the background, that mere exposure can help you.

I do not have any scientific evidence to back this up, but I think it really does help. Plus, you get cultural exposure that is also good to have. All of a sudden one day, you realize that you know that song on the radio, or you hear a voice coming from the TV and without looking up, you know it is María Félix. This is a kind of cultural learning that really enriches your language learning because you can start talking about the stuff that people speaking the foreign language actually talk about.

Mexico is a splendid, living example that language has deep historic roots that shape its development. A proper study of Mexico and her history is integral to your coursework so that you can classify words that have been integrated into what is considered Spanish (or at least acceptable in daily use of Spanish in Mexico). It is a big part of what makes Mexican Spanish different from all the other forms.

Mexican Spanish is crazy different from other forms of Spanish.

If at least to the extent that it merits its own phrasebooks and dictionaries, Mexican Spanish differs from Spanish used in Spain as well as Latin American Spanish. Even within the country it varies, as Spanish spoken in the Yucután incorporates sounds and words from Mayan, making it much different from the Spanish spoken everywhere else. In Veracruz, they pronounce words more like Spanish-speakers of the Caribbean. Near the border with Guatemala, they supposedly even use el voseo.

Here I tend to notice mostly the influence of Náhuatl, the language of the Aztecs, mostly in terms of vocabulary.

This is not to say that other countries do not have indigenous influences or regional variations, but the ones present in Mexico are unique. If you intend to work on your Spanish here in Mexico, you will quickly notice a lot of things that make it different from the general Spanish taught in classrooms.

Pobre México, tan lejos de Dios, y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos.

In my Spanish classes in the United States, we were frequently told that we would see used words that were not really Spanish, but rather English loanwords that have crept into Spanish. Depending on who was telling us about it, the feeling about this ranged from respect for the dynamic nature of language to absolute disgust.

Mexico might well be the biggest violator, being so near the United States and getting so much media from there. For example, we do not alquiler our apartment, we rentar it. If you return something to a store, you need to bring along your ticket, because a recibo is something else. And if you need to go up several stories and do not want to take the stairs, you would take the elevador not the ascensor (again, that means something else here). This is not to say these words are wrong, but just that they have been assimilated into Mexican Spanish in the strange ways these things work with languages.

Whether or not you bristle when you hear it, you should get used to hearing versions of words in Mexican Spanish that sound more similar to their English counterparts than the words you learned in Spanish class. On occasion, with certain words, the forms that are not common in Mexico will still be understood, but you cannot really count on that always being the case everywhere.

The formal is too formal.

Another thing I was taught in school was to always use the formal form of address in certain situations. With new acquaintances, I would tend to use the formal address until it was either ridiculous to do so or the other person told me that I could use informal address. With certain people, like teachers or older people, I would use it always.

That is not done in Mexico. In fact, it is considered strange and verging on rude to use the formal address with most people. In many situations, people will walk up to you and use the informal form of address right off the bat.

The thing that bugs me most about it is that advertisements always use informal address, and for some reason, that just drives me nuts.

Posted by crispy at 06:19 PM | Comments (6)

February 09, 2007

MegaInestable

I love my cable Internet access, and my provider, MegaCable. Maybe I should say that I used to love them, anyway. After about six months of our having service with them, they doubled all their customers' speeds for no extra cost. Paying for 6 months in advance, they give me an extra month for free. But starting about three weeks ago, we started having problems with our service. So did our neighbors across the hall. The Internet access would go out completely for hours. For our neighbors, who have digital cable, their cable would go out too.

We called to get them to come fix it, or rather, I asked Charles to do this for me. (I'm just not nearly good enough to go through a tech support issue over the phone in Spanish yet.) They told us that they were aware of the problem; they could tell from their monitoring software that we'd been dropped some 31 thousand times (in what period of time, I don't know) and that indicates a definite problem. They sent a guy out to check on it, and he said that yes, the signal was low, so he fixed it. Then later that night, it went out again, for the entire night. They have now sent a guy out five different times, and each time, they admit that the signal is low, and they tweak something to fix it, only to have it go out again around 7 pm.

A supervisor told Alberto last night he would finally send out a "night crew," which is usually only reserved for emergencies; they don't have normal night crews working standard problem reports, so if your stuff goes out after 7 pm, you are stuck with it not working until 9 am the following day (at least...usually, they send someone out a day after the business day on which you call them). He was supposed to talk to Alberto again tonight, but I have not since spoken to Alberto to find out if there is any news about that. However, he told Alberto yesterday that they had done extensive testing and there is no problem with their equipment. They suspect maybe it's some external problem, like interference. That does seem possible, since it always seems to go out around 7 pm, fails more or less only at night, seeming to work pretty consistently during the daytime.

Supposedly whatever it is, it's causing problems for the entire neighborhood. The guy that came out yesterday (that would be the fifth guy) said that there are six people consistently complaining of this problem in our area.

I know that's not all that interesting to read about, and a problem like that could happen anywhere, not just Mexico. I'm not really writing to shed any light on how that stuff works here. Yet because it is impacting my ability to get new entries up, approve comments, do research and answer email, I thought I'd let you all know that we've got ongoing problems with our access and ask for your understanding and patience.

Posted by crispy at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2007

¡feliz cumpleaños a mí!

I don't go on and on about how our neighbors are really cool, but it constantly surprises me how friendly and generous they all are, as well as the lengths to which they go to make us feel welcome here. That's significant because it seems there are so many people in our home country that are going to such great lengths to make us feel unwelcome there.

Today is my birthday, and someone posted a little sign on the utility closet door where all the important building notices go announcing it. To be completely honest, it's not just because I'm particularly popular and adored. At the most recent party for the whole building, someone had the idea to pass around a notepad where we would all write down our birthdays. I suspect that is going to be a new thing that is done for everyone, and it just so happens that I'm the first one to have a birthday. Still, the fact that anyone would go to the trouble for someone that they're connected to pretty much only by living in the same building is very nice and gives me further support for my theory that these tapatios are some of the friendliest folks you could ever hope to meet.

Of course, with the beautiful weather, delicious food, fabulous music and awesome art, it's hard to not be in a good mood.

Posted by crispy at 12:11 AM | Comments (4)

December 25, 2006

Starstruck!

We used to live in Los Angeles. Anyone who lives there for a certain period of time experiences the phenomenon where they'll look up and see someone they recognize, only to subsequently realize it's not someone they know personally, but some celebrity that they know from television, movies, newspapers or tabloids. It's a strange phenomenon, but after a while you get used to it.

Then you move away and it just doesn't happen in other places. You get used to being in Zanesville, Ohio and not running into Kelsey Grammer with your shopping cart as you round an aisle in the grocery store. Life goes back to normal and famous people stay where they belong, on those screens and pages.

Shawn and I were out having dinner in Condesa and I wanted to go by Cinnabar, a hotspot in Condesa that is reported to have good cocktails. We're walking down Nuevo León toward the bar and chatting about our impressions of the neighborhood when no one other than Uriel del Toro walks by us in the other direction. URIEL DEL FREAKING TORO. The drop-dead, gorgeous, absolutely perfect Mexican fashion model that also has a show on Telehit, the Mexican music channel.

If you know me, you probably know what a thing I have for this guy. And unless you're a lesbian, straight man or dead, who wouldn't?

Uriel del Toro, on Telehit

After he walked by, I was utterly speechless. Hell, I was utterly breathless. Shawn turned to me and started to mention how that guy was really hot. Finally, I was able to mouth "DO YOU KNOW WHO THAT WAS?!" and Shawn wasn't sure. I had to try about three sentences, but at last I was able to get his name out, and Shawn didn't recognize that, so I had to tell him it was the guy I'm crazy about on that video show. Then he recognized who it was.

That will probably be the incident I remember most about this trip: seeing my favorite Mexican sex symbol in the flesh, not more than two feet from me.

You can say all you want about the evils of big city living, and I've been grouching about Mexico City the whole time we've been here. Yet there is a certain magic to moments like those, that only happen in big, glamorous, sexy cities like this one.

¡Viva México!

Posted by crispy at 12:34 PM | Comments (8)

December 14, 2006

Take My Cash, Please

It's amazing how hard it is to get people to take your money in Mexico.

Many places charge a surcharge (I've paid up to 10%) for using a credit card. I'm sure they officially call it a "discount for using cash," but the bottom line is that you have to pay more if you pay with plastic.

In some cases, one cannot pay by check because there's no place to send a check. With these types of businesses, such as the electric company, you go to designated places that receive payments for them, such as satellite offices in malls, banks, or even the convenience store chain, OXXO. Since there is an OXXO on nearly every corner down here, you'd think that would be handy, but in trying to pay our electric bill the other day, I found that it's not that easy.

The problem started when we didn't receive our electric bill. The truth is that it had fallen down behind someone else's mailbox, but until one of our lovely neighbors brought it to our door, I didn't think we had received it. Not receiving one's electric bill, we are told, happens often. When that happens, one has to go to the CFE offices with a previous bill so they can look up the amount due. The offices are only open until 3 pm, but luckily, they have CFEmáticos, things that are kind of like ATMs for looking up your account and paying bills.

Our regular taxi driver drove us over to the CFE office, and we arrived at around 2:30. When we walked in, I noted that there were several employees in the office, but none of them were doing anything. They were sitting around chatting and one teller was doing her nails. A manager walked up to us and told us that if we were there to pay a bill, that could be accomplished either at a cashier window, or at the CFEmático. We told him that we didn't have our bill, and he said that we could look up our account with the CFEmático. We walked over to the machines where some other people were milling around, and waited behind them, because it seemed they were waiting to use the machines. After a couple of minutes, we scooted around these people and looked at the first of the two machines and saw that it said it was out of service. We moved over to the other machine and it said it was re-initializing. The office was closing in about 10 minutes, but we were told that one could make payments with the CFEmáticos 24-hours-a-day. But of course, that's only when they're operational.

We then went over to the cashier that had been doing her nails and explained that we wanted to pay but didn't have a bill, and she told us that if we had a previous bill, she could use it to look up the account and tell us what we owe. However, 'the system' was down throughout the Guadalajara metro area at that time, and they didn't know when it would be up and running again. Until the system was back online, we would not be able to pay the bill. Why the manager that initially talked to us didn't explain this, I don't know. That kind of thing happens a lot in Mexico, so you get used to it.

They were locking up the office around then, so we left. The next day or so, the aforementioned neighbor found our bill and brought it to us, so I went out to pay it at our local OXXO. Upon trying to pay, the cashier ran the bill over the scanner and there was no response from the system. He told me that I would not be able to pay until the following day, and explained something that I didn't completely understand.

I've also had problems at Home Depot here, where they won't accept payments with my Edward Jones Visa, because it indicates that it's a debit card on the front. In the United States, I have run into this problem with places that use a credit card for a deposit, but never with payment for a set amount at a retail store. Yet in Mexico, the processor that they use for Visa credit cards will not do processing for Visa debit cards. Period. To their credit (no pun intended), when I wrote to Home Depot customer service for Mexico to complain, they wrote back apologizing and explaining the situation, whereas the CC I sent to Home Depot customer service in the United States got only form letter response telling me about how to apply for a Home Depot branded Visa.

Posted by crispy at 06:02 AM | Comments (3)

November 09, 2006

La época de oro photos: part one

Andreas and Salvador

As promised, a few photos from our recent party.

José Luis, Andreas and Larry Foster

Alberto, Shawn and Roxana

These folks (above) are our neighbors from across the hall. Those poor people.

Hector (Shawn's trainer), Alejandra and Rubi

Fernando and Brenna

Posted by crispy at 03:56 PM | Comments (3)

November 07, 2006

The Right Choice

At USC, I took a course in African-American literature. I was one of three or four white kids out of some 30 students, which kind of made my experience like the center of a bull's-eye target. I was a minority in a group that was in turn, a minority within the scope of the greater lilly-white campus population.

I got to read a lot of great books in that class, books that are American classics, despite the fact that they tend to be kept off the reading list of general American literature classes under the guise that they appeal to 'special interests.' Unlike the students in the class that had been dealing with that kind of systematic racism their whole lives, I was getting pissed off for the first time that Zora Neale Hurston was talked about as a great Black anthropologist but not a great American anthropologist. I could be incredulous that Hemmingway is considered American literature but Ellison isn't, while most of my classmates had learned long before that their literary tradition was considered literature of dissent, standing against, not among, our national literature.

Coming to understand how that little trick is used to foster the perception of minorities as being on the fringe made me angry. I had not been dealing with that anger all my life, so I had the ferrocity of a convert. I had not spent my entire life being beat down repeatedly by people who smiled and claimed only to be trying to preserve American values, the intention of the founding fathers or God's 'Master Plan.' I was fired up and ready to fight. So you can imagine my surprise when one day in class, one of the more opinionated and feisty students in the class said he had had enough and couldn't wait for the day that he could pack it up and move to Africa, abandoning his place among the ranks of the struggle.

At the time, I wondered if he was a coward and a quitter. This guy was really smart and had the charisma of Don Juan; the idea that he didn't want to exploit the American system for all he could shocked me. Thinking that he would be happier in a continent plagued with poverty, disease and war instead of in America, even as a member of the downtrodden minorities, really stunned me. In a classroom where we spent most of our time discussing the struggles of people against prejudice and hatred in order to bring about a more just society, he seemed to be admitting defeat and calling the sacrifices of all those people before us into question.

Yet his position was not one of defeat. In fact, it was because he was strong that he refused to stay in a country that didn't appreciate what he had to offer and instead only wanted to put up road blocks in the way of his doing what he wanted to do because of stupid insignificant crap like skin color. He was going to do great things and enjoy his life, and it would be a lot more efficient to go somewhere that he could accomplish that without all the unnecessary barriers. There are, after all, enough hurdles in life that you can't avoid, so why waste time bothering with ones you can simply leave behind?

I've thought of that guy and his convictions many times since then. I often wonder as I sit here at my computer writing about Mexico if he ever made it to Africa. Before, as a good American, I didn't want to lose someone like him, but now that I look at things with older eyes, I hope he did make it to Africa. Sure, Africa isn't free of problems, including racism, but at least he'd not be having to live as a second-class citizen, de facto or de jure, in the land of his birth.

In watching the returns from the elections in the United States, I feel justified all over again in leaving the United States, and Colorado in particular. One hears time and time again people who rail against same-sex marriage indignantly protesting their being called homophobes, claiming that they don't hate gays, they just believe that the word 'marriage' should apply to one man and one woman. Often, as was the case with George W. Bush, they claim that they endorse offering same-sex couples rights made available to heterosexual married couples, but through 'civil unions' and not 'marriage.'

Given the opportunity to do just that on Tuesday, voters in Colorado both added a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage (Amendment 43) and rejected a referendum (Referendum I) that would have created a new legal relationship that would permit same-sex partners to enjoy some of the rights enjoyed by heterosexual married couples. Again, this would not be all the rights straight married couples have, like being able to file joint tax returns. No, it would have just been basic stuff like such as being able to visit your partner in the ICU if they were critically ill, or being able to retain ownership of jointly held property in the event that one partner dies.

I can't begin to count the number of people that have told me that they don't think it's fair that gay couples don't have those rights, even if they don't 'believe in' same-sex marriage. I mean, if I have the right to visit Shawn in the ICU if he's in a severe car accident, how does that hurt anyone else or their marriage? Yet this referendum lost in Colorado, 54% to 46%. Interestingly, polls before the election suggested that this referendum would pass. Were the polls just wrong about the voter turnout? Or did people not want to look like homophobic bigots to pollsters, but didn't mind letting their true colors show in the privacy of the voting booth?

Reasonable people can disagree as to what constitutes a marriage, and not everyone that would vote against allowing same-sex marriage is a homophobe. Yet on Tuesday, seven states (last election: eleven) added constitutional amendments to bar same-sex marriage when isn't even necessary, since the state constitutions already consider marriages to be between a man and a woman only. For example, in Colorado, C.R.S. 14-2-104 states that, "a marriage is valid in this state if: [...] (b) It is only between one man and one woman. [...]" Why add an amendment to the constitution if not simply to send a message to same-sex couples that they are second-class citizens and that the voting majority has decided that it is okay to discriminate against them?

So to the voters of my former home state that voted for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages and voted against the creation of the new legal relationship of civil unions to provide only some of the benefits of married couples to same-sex couples, I call you hateful, small-minded, homophobic bigots. I think it's high time to hold these people accountable for how they vote, and to not let them hide behind a polite smile, denying that they're not bigots, and that they only want to 'protect families' or 'uphold traditional values.' They want to discriminate against a group of people systematically through the law, and that's just mean-spirited and hateful.

To our friends that argued that things aren't so bad in the United States, I say that yes, they are. The people of the United States are making their voices heard, and a whole lot of those voices say that they hate gay people. They also hate Mexicans, Asians, Blacks, poor people, Muslims, Jews and a whole slew of other folks that threaten them because they're from somewhere else or they believe different things. All these people are made to be second-class citizens in the United States, and instead of decent people standing up and saying that it's wrong, there's no end of justifying their bigotry. It's disgusting.

Instead of engaging in what seems to be an increasingly futile fight, I too said enough is enough and abandoned my place in the ranks. I cut my losses and moved to Mexico, and now I face a bunch of different challenges. But at least here, people aren't voting to take away my rights, or worse yet, smiling at me and telling me what decent people they are while they do it.

Posted by crispy at 10:23 PM | Comments (4)

October 31, 2006

La época de oro

I've not written much lately because I've been very busy, planning our first party here in Mexico.

Our friend Charles is having to move out of his house, the one he grew up in. It's a great big house (okay, at least it's huge to us, since we live in an apartment) in Colonia Chapalita. We live in Chapalita Sur, so it's very nearby.

Shawn wanted to throw a party, and we can't really do it properly here in our place. It's is too small and Mexican parties tend to run late, like until 5 or 6 am. Since our building is mostly families and there are several young children and older people, we were considering doing what a lot of people do here: renting a terraza for an evening. That costs money though, especially if you want to have the party on a night when all Shawn's coworkers can come: a Friday or Saturday.

We were talking about this with Charles and he offered his house as a place for the party. Because he's moving out, it's more or less vacant of furniture, so we can set up our own stuff and have lots of space. We're hiring a company to provide other details: a bartender, furniture, waiters, and a taquiza, which is a taco buffet with servers. At the moment, I'm working on getting a couple of go-go dancers. The party planning place doesn't offer those.

We're calling the party La época de oro because it's the end of an era for Charles and still the start of a new one for us. Also, Charles' place has chandeliers, a garden in the back and it's got kind of a plush feeling to it, like those old classic films of Mexico from the 50s. That's the era in Mexican cinema known as la época de oro, with classy stars like María Félix and Pedro Infante.

So please bear with me while I get our little borrachera together. It goes down this coming Saturday night and Sunday morning, and I'll post pictures afterwards. It may well end up being a couple of days afterwards, since I anticipate having a considerable hangover.

[view a reduced-size pdf version of the invitation]

Posted by crispy at 12:18 AM | Comments (4)

October 15, 2006

Zacatecas, Zacatecas

Zacatecas, Panorama From Hotel Argento Inn Balcony [larger image]

No, it's not the new Mexican musical staring Bette Midler. It's the city (and state) that we went to this past weekend because Shawn had three days of vacation and we thought we should take that opportunity to explore our new country a bit.

Street Scene, Zacatecas

We traveled by bus (ETN, "la línea más cómoda") between Guadalajara and Zacatecas, going through Aguascalientes (again, both the city and the state. We like ETN because they have only 24 seats on the bus, which translates to more room per seat. This is generally referred to in Mexico as 'executive class.' They also give you a bag with a ham and cheese sandwich and the soda of your choice (as long as it's made by Coca-Cola®) as you board the bus. Luckily it's not so hard to peel the ham off the sandwich, because they don't offer vegetarian or kosher alternatives. Like most first class (and the higher, executive class) bus lines, they showed movies during the trip. All but one was dubbed into Spanish, and it was subtitled.

We only stopped in Aguascalientes for about 20 minutes, so information on that capital will have to come from another trip. It's interesting to note that it is known for wine and brandy production, although it's not like there's a lot produced there nowadays. It seemed to have a much bigger bus station than Zacatecas, though.

We arrived at the central camionera at sunset, and hopped in a cab to wind our way through the pink and gold maze of city streets to get to the Hotel Argento Inn where we were staying (pictured on the right in the photo above). We had a friend call to make reservations for us, because it was a complicated call. All the rooms in hotels around the city seemed to be booked up for some reason we couldn't figure out, and whether or not we would take a room in a hotel depended on the combined answers to a series of questions: Did they have rooms available? Did they have rooms with windows facing outside (compared to having windows that only face an inside courtyard, which usually results in the room being very dark and gloomy),? Were they located in or near the historic center? Did they cost less than $1500 MXN per night? Did they have one bed? Double beds? Private bathrooms? An iron an ironing board? The task of calling around to several hotels and struggling to get answers to these questions (and understanding those answers) was daunting to me, so I asked for help. I'm not proud of that, but I did. Unexpected surprises with hotels in Mexico can be quite disturbing, and I didn't feel like suffering (and making Shawn suffer) them gladly just to guard my pride.

Street Scene, Zacatecas

Zacatecas is known for having a lot of its colonial architecture still intact. It is, along with places like Cuernavaca, Puebla and San Miguel de Allende, one of the "colonial jewels" of Mexico. Like most of Mexico, you will find some crumbling about the edges in Zacatecas, but there was less than I expected. It isn't that all the old colonial stuff has been restored to its original beauty, but it seems to have been kept clean and the ravages one notices are of time, not the hand of man.

Guadalajara is considered one of the "jewels" as well, and it certainly does have lots of colonial gems that are still in good shape and worth visiting. However, Guadalajara, being a bigger city and having developed to serve the business economy, doesn't rely on the colonial and historic elements about town as much as Zacatecas does. In fact, much of the old colonial stuff here was torn down long ago to make way for more modern facilities. In turn, many of those have been torn down even more recently to make way for even more modern facilities.

The net effect of this is that in Guadalajara, the colonial and historic sites seem to pop up here and there within the city (granted, the centro histórico has a large concentration of colonial stuff), and one does not get a sense of being back in colonial Mexico as much as one does in the smaller cities such as Zacatecas. No modern buildings exist beside the old posadas, government buildings and cathedrals in Zacatecas. Those are all located outside the city center (which is the centro histórico), and even then, they are not of the steel-and-glass type, but rather just one or two story cement blocks common to more rural Mexico.

Street Scene, Zacatecas

That being said, the colonial stuff in Zacatecas is fantastic. There's the cathedral:

Cathedral, Zacatecas

As you can see, it is very ornate, and the detail is breathtaking. Across the street from the cathedral is a little plaque that identifies the various saints perched about the front.

Cathedral, Zacatecas

The town is buit among a set of large hills, so if you go there, be prepared to do some incline walking.

Uphill/Downhill Stroll, Zacatecas

There is a large mountain known as La Bufa hemming the city in to one side, and at the summit, they have a few shops, telescopes, a temple where a statue of the everpresent Virgin is housed and some statues commemorating the revolutionary battles that took place in and around Zacatecas. If you are strong of nerve and stomach, you can take the teleférico to the top, a cable car that runs every 15 minutes.

Teleférico to La Bufa, Zacatecas

Some of the very old buildings in town have collapsed in spots, but they have had their usable bits turned into useful spaces. That is the case with the Museo Rafael Colonel, which houses a lot of contemporary art and an enormous collection of masks.

Grounds of the Rafael Coronel Museum, Zacatecas

The most impressive thing to me about Zacatecas is its wealth of art museums. You can read all about the silver mine and the significance of the town during the revolutionary war all over the Internet, but those things do not interest me so much. I may have mentioned on these pages that I'm less of an antiquities guy and more of a fine arts guy when it comes to museums, and that came into play during our visit to Zacatecas. We elected to go to various art museums instead of the traditional historic hotspots, and we were not disappointed.

We visited the Museo Rafael Coronel, the Museo Pedro Coronel (they are brothers) and the Museo Manuel Felguérez. All of these are modern artists from Zacatecas, and their works are included along with those of other famous modern artists in their museums.

I liked the works of Rafael Coronel at his museum. The number of Miró pieces at the Pedro Coronel museum was astounding (just one set of pieces numbered 36), and they also have a Dali and a few Picassos. The best part of the Felguérez museum was the entire collection of the 12 murals painted for the Mexico pavillion at the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka.

The parks in Zacatecas are very lush and they keep them in great shape, like their old buildings.

Park, Zacatecas

Of course, those of you who know me well know that when I travel I'm most interested in funky and fine foodstuffs, restaurants and general lifestyle things that are not so much on the tourist's "Must See" list. In Zacatecas, I found plenty of things that I thought you all would find interesting, disgusting, or both.

Cow Stomach Tacos, Zacatecas

Yes, tripe tacos. Seeing this made Shawn remark about Carlos Mecía's bit about why they don't have Latinos on shows where people have to eat wacky stuff, like "Survivor": because they eat disturbing things on a daily basis. It would be no challenge whatsoever for them.

(I'd like to point out here, although I don't have a lot of photos showing it, whoever paints the signage in Zacatecas for all these businesses is a master. There are various styles of lettering all over the place and they're all machine perfect.)

Jicamoy, Zacatecas

This isn't so gross as just strange. It's a stand that sells jicama, that big root vegetable that is kind of like a bigger, sweeter water chestnut. They're popular all over Mexico, peeled, stuck on a stick, and dusted with chile. This place, Jicamoy, offers something like 15 flavor variations of the jicama-on-a-stick concept.

Jicamoy, Zacatecas

Then you have these places that have a simple menu and simple atmosphere.

Restaurant, Zacatecas [View Enlargement of Wall Photos]

Here you see the famous Mexican actor and singer, Pedro Infante pictured on one of the motorcycles. At the top in the center of this photo, you can see the hole in the wall that opens to the outside, covered with a tarp.

Restaurant, Zacatecas

My favorite spot to eat in Zacatecas turned out to be a Greek cafeteria. Here "cafeteria" is used in the Mexican sense of the word, which translates into the American lexicon as something more like a diner with a very extensive selection. It is the Café y Nevería Acrópolis, located right next to the cathedral.

Shawn at the Café y Nevería Acrópolis, Zacatecas

Don't let the name and the ownership fool you. This place is 100% Mexican, and pretty old school Mexican at that. They have all kinds of platos you can enjoy alongside shakes, raspados (kind of like a real fruit slushy at the Acrópolis - like a snow cone in some other places) and ice cream floats. It's the first time I've seen an ice cream float on a menu in Mexico, and the first time I've seen something I've heard about elsewhere: the excessive torta barrio.

We enjoyed ours in the ahogada ('drowned') style, so the whole thing consisted of a chile relleno made the right way with chile poblano, diced tomato, onion and crema, all on a bolillo (and not the birote common to Jalisco), then smothered in a spicy tomato sauce. DELICIOUS!

Also cool about the place is the fact that they display artwork drawn by famous local artist/customers on their walls, and they have a display of plates embellished with artwork made out of leftover Turkish coffee grounds.

The Café y Nevería Acrópolis also sells their coffee by the kilo, as well as some other, um, things.

Muchas Nalgas at Café y Nevería Acrópolis, Zacatecas

Some other visual things caught our eye in Zacatecas, like these school girls on their way to an event being held in front of the Palacio del Gobierno.

School Girls in Transit, Zacatecas

Run little girl, RUN!

School Girls in Transit, Zacatecas

This house was built with unusual bricks. I bet when they built it, the neighbors were shocked and appalled.

Bricks, Zacatecas

In Mexico, people still send telegrams, although with the growing popularity of email, business is falling off.

Telegrams, Zacatecas

'Street of the Sad Indian.' Given what white folks did to the natives in the Americas, there are a lot more than one, I'm sure. Which one qualifies as 'THE' sad one, I don't know. Iron Eyes Cody perhaps?

Esquina Indio Triste y Hidalgo, Zacatecas

One parting glance of Zacatecas that Shawn took from the bus station before we left, thus ending our Zacatecan odyssey.

View of Zacatecas from the Central Camionera, Zacatecas

Posted by crispy at 06:18 PM | Comments (5)

September 15, 2006

Washer & Dryer

Up until recently, I've been completely satisfied with doing our laundry at the laundromat, or as they're called down here, lavandaría automática. However, with Shawn having to wear a specific uniform provided by his school, and as they only delivered on three of the seven uniform shirts he ordered, that means washing a lot more frequently and with smaller loads. The inconvenience factor convinced us that we needed to get a washer and dryer, and I'm waiting at the house for the delivery guys to bring them.

The lavandería is fun for me actually. The guy that owns it is very nice and very smart, and we often get into interesting discussions, or (to borrow from Oscar Wilde) at least they're interesting to me. I am sure that he often struggles to understand the nonsense I'm babbling, but I am very grateful for the practice with discussion about something other than where a certain restaurant is, or the number of bottles of water I want on any given week.

Yet while going there is relaxing and the Spanish practice is helpful, it's still inconvenient. They are open from 8 am to 2 pm, then they close from 2 pm to 4 pm, then they open again from 4 pm to 7 pm. Because I'm not usually up that early, I tend to go in the afternoon, but because it takes over an hour to wash and dry the laundry, you have to figure in that you need to get there by 5:30 pm. Having only an hour and a half window for arrival is often inconvenient for me, and it would be nice to be able to do laundry at night, or at 2:30 pm if I wanted to.

We bought the items at a place called Ekar de Gas, and they included installation as well as delivery. But the process is not necessarily simple. First, I have to call a certain number after 9:15 am to find out the time at which I am to expect the arrival of the delivery men with the washer and dryer. Then I have to call the service technicians to set up a time that they can hook up the equipment. You might think that would be simple, and that I could do it myself, but no. It's a gas dryer, and in Mexico, propane gas is used instead of natural gas. The burner in the dryer is made for natural gas because it's made in the United States. For this reason, the installers have to change out a certain part of the burner so that it can efficiently burn propane.

I don't have the machine yet, but the installers have told us that we need to give them the serial number of the stove so that they get the right converter. So after the machines are delivered and placed upstairs in our little roof enclosure, I have to look up the serial number and call them to tell them what it is. Then they're going to come on Monday to hook it all up.

Posted by crispy at 09:16 AM | Comments (3)

September 10, 2006

Independence Day

Although in the United States, 5 de mayo is more celebrated among Mexican-Americans than 16 de septiembre, it is the latter which is Independence Day for Mexico and is the one that gets celebrated.

The facts behind it are this.

In 1810, the same year that King George III was found to be insane and Frédéric Chopin was born, a priest named Miguel Gregorio Antonio Ignacio Hidalgo y Costilla Mandarte Villaseñor y Lomelí (but called Don Miguel Hidalgo for short) lived in the town of Dolores, near Guanajuato. Shortly before dawn on the morning of 16 September, he rang the bell of the church, calling both indigenous and mestizos to mass. When they arrived, he made a passionate argument for a revolt against the Spanish who had been exploiting Mexicans for more than 200 years. This call to arrest or force from Mexico all Spaniards became known as the Grito de Dolores ("Shout from Dolores"), which ended with "Mexicanos, ¡viva México!"

Hidalgo raised an army that was very successful at first in ousting the Spanish, and they even got to the edge of Mexico City within a year. However, he retreated for reasons that still today are unknown, and was eventually captured by the Spanish and executed. For several years, his severed head hung in a cage from the granary in Guanajuato, put there by the Spanish as a warning to others who might get uppity.

For those that are interested in history, it should be noted that the situation was much more complex than stated above, involving criollos, gachupines, Ferdinand VII and Napoleon. If you want to read about such nuances, see this article at MEXonline.com.

In practice, the celebration is one of the major celebrations in Mexico where people party down for the whole week before the actual holiday. This past Saturday, one week before the 16th, fireworks (and I mean serious fireworks, not just bottle rockets and firecrackers) were going off all over town, all night long. People have started selling homemade flags on the streets from little carts; Shawn bartered a vendor down from $300 MXN to $200 MXN to buy me one that's probably about 5' x 3' and on a nifty stick that has been whittled to have a point on the end that you can stick into something so it will stand up. I was delighted with it. It's tied to the stick with three cloth strips, one red, one white and one green.

Shawn also scored us an invitation to the party being given by our downstairs neighbors next Friday night thought being the charming social butterfly that he is. I don't know what is typical at such events, but I'm going to be researching to find out if we should bring something in particular, if there are any customary rituals or if you're supposed to wear anything specific. It will be the first party that we've been to in our apartment building, so I want to be sure that we make a good impression.

Posted by crispy at 10:33 PM | Comments (3)

September 06, 2006

The Mariachi Gala

Monday night we went to see the Mariachi Gala, the formal performances of the Mariachi Festival, where they have three mariachi groups, the Orquesta Filarmónica de Jalisco, and a guest performer. The event stretches from 8 pm to around midnight. The mariachi groups performing for us were Mariachi de América, Mariachi los Camperos de Nati Cano, and the group widely regarded as the best mariachi group in the world, Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán. The invited artist was Eugenia León.

It was the first time we've ever been to the Teatro Degollado, and that alone was fantastic. It was first opened in 1866, and is in great shape having been well-maintained and regularly renovated. The entryway to the theater has a beautiful chandelier, and for these events, atendees are greeted by an stunning array of lovely young ladies in very formal evening gowns who have been selected as queens of the festival or representatives of the corporate sponsors. For example, Miss Zeta Gas was in attendance, handing out little pocket shoe polishers.

We took our seats and marveled for a while at the artwork on the ceiling and what was surely hundreds of dollars worth of flowers ringing the stage before the show started, but it didn't take long before the emcee took the stage and brought on the orchestra, which played one song solo before being joined by each mariachi group in turn. Those combinations played for about an hour and a half. There was an intermission, then León sang with Mariachi los Camperos. She sang nine songs, and then was presented with a plaque (by the aforementioned festival queens). She left and each mariachi group played solo for a while, then they all got together and played a couple of songs. It was kind of like what I would imagine a show called Monsters of Mariachi to be like.

The atmosphere was of Mexican high-class to the hilt. While some people came in relatively casual dress, many were decked out in incredibly sharp suits and gowns. Yet demonstrating the relationship Mexicans have with mariachi music and musicians, people would call out to the performers on stage with comments, despite the high tone of the event. Mariachi is an integral part of la vida mexicana, perhaps not obviously on a daily basis for some, but every Mexican has grown up with it. Even if one thinks it is corny or old-fashioned, he still inevitably knows all the words to certain songs. Most people know many mariachi standards by heart.

Such was the case with Amor eterno, a sweet slow number which stood out as my favorite part of the performance at the gala. It was the most popular hit by a Spanish singer named Rocío Dúrcal, often called "the most Mexican of Spaniards" by Mexicans because she recorded a lot of Mexican standards throughout her career. Earlier this year, Dúral finally lost a long battle with various forms of cancer, and while this year's festival is dedicated to women, it is especially dedicated in memory of her.

At the gala, during the part of the program where Mariachi de América played with the orchestra, one of their members came out from backstage into the audience and sang the song under a follow spot. Then, after the chorus, he pointed the microphone at the audience and stopped singing. The musicians played along but only the audience in the theater sang, until at last the singer came back in for a last go at the chorus before turning the singing back over to the crowd for the "la la" part that ends the song, which they all knew to fade out slowly, as is done in the popular Juan Gabriel version of the song. It was breathtaking.

I was so unhinged by it that I cried, and I wasn't even drunk. That would be perhaps my biggest criticism of the gala, which I can't make with much seriousness: you can't sit around drinking tequila while they play. Usually, in the events where you have mariachi, you also have considerable drinking going on. It seems odd without it. Joseph suggested that next year I take a hidden flask of something so I can sip on it throughout the show, but I think I'll just have to get it out of my system before the week of the festival next year by going out to places that have the two together. It will be like a warm up to the big event.

Posted by crispy at 05:32 AM | Comments (3)

August 08, 2006

The Road to Bogotá: Part Four

[part three]

We had only five of our original seven planned days in Bogotá, thanks to our flight being cancelled two days in a row. Instead of giving a day-by-day account of the rest of the trip, let me just comment on some of the more notable things we encountered.

Bogotá is delightfully cool, especially after the end of the pre-rainy season month of May here in Guadalajara. We had endured a long stretch of considerably hot weather, taunted by the promise of those refreshing and reviving rains, but as of the end of May, we'd not seen much of them. However, upon our arrival in Bogotá, we were welcomed by a slight drizzle on a nice cool night. Delicious!

The forecast said that we were to get serious rain the whole time we were there, but that didn't turn out to be the case. While it did rain now and again during our stay, we had a lot of relatively dry weather. It was pretty overcast the whole time, but we were told that the week before, it had been sunny and hot the whole week. The point of all this being, Bogotá has weather changes. That and the fact that it's beautiful to look up from the city streets and see the lush green mountains about the city, shrouded in clouds.

Bogotá

Bogotá

Bogotá

The fact that the city was not drenched in rain the entire time we were there allowed us to check out some of the city, which is exactly what we went for. On our second night in town, we went to a bar that charged a fairly hefty cover. When we got inside, we found out why: the cover bought you unlimited drinks from the bar for the entire evening. When this concept completely bewildered us, the bartender explaining it to us in Spanish thought we did not understand what he was saying. He sent over another bartender that spoke English, so that he could explain it to us. This bartender turned out to be one of the friendliest people we've ever met, a young Bogotano named Alvaro who is so proud of his city that whenever he has vacation time, he spends it in town going to the different attractions and excellent offerings that the city provides for entertainment.

He hung out with us for the rest of our trip as our friend and tour guide, and this absolutely made the trip an excellent experience for us. Without him, we would not have enjoyed our time in Bogotá at all like we did, and his being such an excellent human being helped to make up for my bad shoe cleaning experience and our discovery that Bogotanos are generally not as friendly as we'd expected them to be, after living in Guadalajara and having heard that Colombians are some of the nicest people on the planet. Alvaro certainly fit that description, making it so that we could say that at least some Colombians are the nicest people on the planet.

Alvaro playing before a statue of Giordano Bruno

Alvaro at the Museo de Oro

I believe I should say a word or two about the Museo de Oro. I will not say much because you can read all about it all over the place. It's a museum that showcases artifacts found in various regions of Colombia made and used by various cultures. The presentation is excellent, the artifacts themselves impressive, and the experience one that is called a "must-see" in every reference on Colombia that exists.

Exhibit, Museo de Oro

I think that is probably true, but my interest in museums tends toward those displaying fine arts, and usually even then, only more modern works. I do occasionally like to look at Indian (from Asia) artifacts, but for the most part, artifacts are not my cup of tea. Were I someone else, I might rave about the Museo de Oro, but it wasn't my favorite part of the trip, and it certainly didn't compare to the works we saw at either the Donación Botero nor the Museo de Arte Moderno (known as the MAMBO, tee hee!).

I recommend both of these places wholeheartedly. If you don't like modern art, you might not like the Museo de Arte Moderno, but I can't imagine anyone not enjoying the works at the Donación Botero, which include an overwhelming number of works by Botero, as well as spectacular pieces by Renoir, Dalí, Chagall, Picasso, Miró, and Bacon. You can't use a flash, but you can take pictures in the Donación Botero. Here are some of our photos, but without the flash, most turned out blurry.

Casa de Moneda, Bogotá

Casa de Moneda, Bogotá

Casa de Moneda, Bogotá

Donación Botero, Bogotá

Donación Botero, Bogotá

Donación Botero, Bogotá

Donación Botero, Bogotá

Moonlight II, 1997
Alex Katz, New York, 1927
Oil on Canvas

Moonlight II, 1997
Alex Katz, New York, 1927
Oil on Canvas

Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá

There were many more attractions to see around Bogotá, like the salt cathedral and the view from Monserrate, but due to a combination of time limitations, motivation and rainy weather, we didn't see any of these. I know this may disappoint some readers, but for us, there were more basic cultural things we wanted to discover, like the food of Bogotá. That is what we'll talk about in the next installment.

Posted by crispy at 01:38 PM | Comments (4)

July 27, 2006

I've Got Some Junk Food That's Better Than That

Shawn noted on his recent trip to the United States that sugary cereals like Kellog's Corn Pops® have 1/4 of the protein in the United States compared to the very same brand (Kellog's Corn Pops®) in Mexico. I noticed a while ago too that cookies (the really sweet kind that are like Oreos®, not the panadería kind that are more like homemade) also have considerably higher nutritional content in Mexico than their United States counterparts.

For example, Marinela is a brand of cookies here. They're owned by Grupo Bimbo, which is a vast bakery empire (think Wonder®) that started in 1945 in Mexico and has since gone worldwide. Their USA division owns brands you're sure to know: Oroweat®, Entenmann's®, Boboli®, among others. There are several types of Marinela cookies, including sandwich cremes and chocolate chip. But the Marinela cookies are quite different from the same types of things that you buy from Kraft-owned Nabisco in one detail: they have vitamins.

I'll grant you, they're not something that any nutritionist is going to include in a healthy diet regimen. However, compared to their American counterparts, they have a measurable amounts of vitamins. Check out Oreo® Cookies which have 4.7 calories per gram and do not meet any percentage levels for the RDA of Vitamin A, Vitamin C or Calcium. They do have 10% of the iron and 2g of protein per serving, so that's something.

In contrast, Marinela's "Principes" cookies (a chocolate wafer cookie with white chocolate filling) has 4.8 calories per gram and 3.1 grams of protein per serving. Yet a serving also gives you 15% of the vitamin A, 11% of the vitamin B1, 12% of the vitamin B2, 10% of the vitamin B3, 13% of the vitamin B6, 25% of the vitamin B9, 14% of the vitamin B12, 22% of the vitamin C, 15% of the vitamin E, 29% of the iodine, 15% of the iron, and 12% of the zinc that you're supposed to have daily.

What's up with that? Why doesn't the most powerful country in the world have junk food that's healthier for you than the junk food in Mexico? Granted, it's probably not all that important to most folks. But don't you find it a bit odd?

Posted by crispy at 07:11 PM | Comments (4)

July 24, 2006

Rainy Season

I think it's safe to say that we're firmly within rainy season here, so at last I can tell you what it's like.

I know. You were just waiting on the edge of your seats.

But it's a considerable thing that looms in the back of your head when you hear it: rainy season. We always know what that term means where we live and we're kind of used to what it means. Surely though, we've all heard stories, seen representations in movies or watched footage from obscure places that show weather that is extreme for what we're used to. I hear rainy season and I think of towns going through their annual season of inaccesability by motor vehicle because the road is washed out or constantly covered by too much running water. I hear that and think of rain measured in days or weeks, not minutes or hours.

Luckily, in Guadalajara, the rainy season isn't so bad. On occasion, you get amazingly heavy downpours, where the streets fill with standing water and you'll be soaked to the bone if you're caught outside. Most of the time that lasts for about 30 minutes, but then it can drizzle on for another four or five hours. Often, that's all you get: nothing but light drizzle for hours.

The streets can flood, and in fact, a couple of weeks ago, that stranded me at a restaurant. It started innocently enough, with normal, even rain that gave way to heavy rain. The streets started to fill with inches of running water and traffic was making a great splash passing through the intersection. Suddenly, the flow of water from the drainage grates reversed and started to gush back out and into the street. These geysers made the intersection a huge river through which traffic could not pass. We stayed at the restaurant, having dessert, then coffee, then a tequila on the house. Eventually it let up, officials came and opened up some other drainage and the water cleared out of the roads. Luckily, we had nowhere else important to be, because we'd not have been able to get there.

Most of the time, the rain happens at night, after 10 or 11. That isn't a steadfast rule though. Right now it's raining at 2 pm, and has been raining since 11 am. But often it will rain lightly for several hours at night, cooling things off the following day. It also helps to wet things down so we don't have so much dust in the air.

Our friends Larry and Joseph have warned us that if we're out somewhere and it starts raining (or if we're home, planning to go out and it starts raining), we should just stay put and wait it out. From what I've seen of the rainy season so far, that's good advice.

Posted by crispy at 02:47 AM | Comments (1)

July 17, 2006

Leaving Las Vejigas

My houseguest who was staying for a bit over a month to check out Guadalajara and take a couple of intensive Spanish courses will be leaving early tomorrow morning. I'll miss having her here, but I will be writing more in the blog after her departure. We might even finally make it to Bogotá, where we will eat more things with cheese in them than you ever thought possible.

Posted by crispy at 06:11 PM | Comments (7)

June 25, 2006

My Kind of Fundraising

In the tradition of "rent parties," some local folks who are going to China threw a party to raise funds for their trip. They charged $10 pesos for entry and $10 pesos for each beer. Shawn and I were fossils compared to all the other guests, but we can still get down.

Our friend Fiona warned Shawn that she's 'directionally challenged' when she gave him the instructions on reaching the party. In turn, Shawn kept reminding Tara and me of this when we were asking him over and over where we were supposed to be going. When it started to sprinkle as a huge cloud slid in to swallow up the stars above us, we knew we didn't have much time to find the place before getting very wet.

We turned around and went the opposite direction on the street, looking for our one solid clue: a sign that said "BIENVENIDOS" and had some Chinese characters on it. We ran into a snag when Tara spied a rat crawling around in some garbage on the opposite side of the street and was nearly paralized with fear. I did some scouting while she and Shawn stayed behind, but within two minutes, I'd located the sign. Tara and Shawn scurried around the far side of the corner to cross the road and meet up with me, and a few moments later we were standing under the sign at a locked iron door.

We were admitted to the party by a charming Chilango who escorted us up the dark stairwell, a run of concrete steps with nothing along the side to keep one from falling to certain injury below. That's not entirely true. At the top of the stairs there was a yellow warning sign with that poor anonymous man in silhouette that always runs into trouble, in a free fall from an unguarded platform. That wouldn't help the unfortunate schmo that never made it to the top of the stairs.

We entered the second floor area to find that there were already several people already there. We paid the entry fee and bought a couple of drinks. I had feared that they would not have any tequila, so I brought my own; alas, they had tequila so I just looked like a jerk bringing my own stuff when I could have been buying theirs. Still, I was glad to have brought Herradura, because they had José Cuervo, Satan's own tequila. I gave them my bottle and they said they'd guard it for me. To make myself feel less guilty, I paid them the price they were charging for José Cuervo for a couple of drinks, before they started to refuse my money.

We started in to chat with some of the people there, and the regular small talk ensued, leading to the inevitable question of how we like Guadalajara. I replied with my standard praise about the people being friendly, the weather being beautiful and the food being delicious, then followed with my constant complaint about the fact that, apart from loud dance clubs and Sanborns Café, there's nothing to do after midnight in this town. At first, the people we were talking to responded that we just didn't know they places they knew of to go for such things, but then when I asked them to tell me of such alternative places, every suggestion was trumped by someone else saying that it was a loud dance club and reminding the other that such a place was exactly what I said I didn't want. I gave my email address to one woman so that she could email me when she thought of some of the places that fit my demands. Four days later, I'm still waiting for that email.

Shortly thereafter, the people we knew arrived and scolded us for not attending the Guadalajara pride parade. We were watching Mexico being knocked out of the World Cup by Argentina and didn't know that anything of the kind was going on. Apparently, a great time was had by all, but you'll have to read another blog for coverage of that event. Soon we were joined by other people that Shawn either works with currently or met through his course at ITTO, and while Shawn caught up with them, Tara danced and I talked a bit with a young Mexican guy about the fact that one might earn more in the United States than Mexico, but it comes at a cost - a lot more stress and a lot less time to relax.

There was a lot of music, drinking, dancing, smoking and talking. One of the funniest moments at the party was Shawn's realization after talking to someone in Spanish for several minutes that the person didn't speak any Spanish. It turns out he is from Switzerland and speaks German and English.

Before we knew it, the people in our group were the last ones there, and although we'd been told there would be some live guitar from the Chilango after 4 am, when that hour rolled around, he was nowhere to be found, having made a quiet exit alongside the señorita with whom he'd been dancing earlier in a manner most intimate. The hosts reassured us that we didn't have to leave, and in fact, we could crash there for a while if we wanted. We figured it was best to get a cab and head home before the sun came up. It's just depressing to wake up at the pary place hours after everything has come to an end.

Somehow we all made it safely down the perilous staircase. Maybe the warning sign was helpful after all. We jumped in a cab and were completely quiet the whole way home. We were worn out. Shawn commented later that the ride home seemed to take forever.

Two days later, when Tara and I were going out to do some shopping, we were crossing the street when we heard someone honking at us. We went over to the car and saw that it was one of the women we'd met early on at the party. It turns out that she lives a block away from our apartment. Later that day, while shopping in La Gran Plaza, we ran into two more people that had been at the party - the Swiss guy and the guy he came with.

It's a small world.

Posted by crispy at 03:43 PM | Comments (3)

May 29, 2006

No Va

This weekend marked the fourth time we had made plans for un mexicano to come over for one reason or another and they never showed up. Didn't show up, didn't call before to say they'd not make it, didn't call after to explain why they didn't come.

Q: Why would anyone tell us they were coming over and then completely blow us off without calling?

A: Because they were being polite.

I'm trying to be culturally considerate here, but it does chap my hide. Don't get me wrong. I don't find it charming, understandable or even acceptable that people would make plans with us, saying that they were definitely going to show up at our place and then not even call afterwards to apologize for not showing up. Yet apparently, this is not uncommon in this culture, because it's considered rude to not accept an invitation, even if you have no plans whatsoever of showing up.

In our case, this is a real pain in the neck, because one of the people we expected to see this weekend was someone who had arranged to take English lessons from Shawn at 2 pm on Saturday. For this reason, we didn't make plans on one of Shawn's two days off per week to do anything interesting. We sat around the house waiting for the student that never showed up. We shot a whole afternoon waiting for this guy, and of course, Shawn's also out the cash he was expecting to earn for giving the guy lessons.

The other flake-out this weekend was invited to dinner with us, a dinner for which I went to a lot of effort - buying new flatware, cocktail glasses, being sure we were stocked up on drinks and botanas, cleaning the house, not to mention fixing a relatively elaborate meal. He indicated to us on two different occasions that he'd be showing up for dinner, but when the time came, he wasn't around. Nor did he ever put in a follow-up call to explain why he didn't show up.

Upon asking about this, one of our more experienced gringo friends here explained that Mexicans will never turn down an invitation. They'll tell you that they'll be there, even if they know they're getting married on that same date, or have travel plans already, or have an audience with the Pope scheduled. To turn down an invitation would be rude, far more than not turning it down but never showing up and never apologizing for not following through on what they promised.

I don't know that I'll ever get used to that. There are things we can do to work that out for Shawn's English lessons, like charging in advance for the lessons. However, there's nothing I can think of that will ensure that people I invite for dinner will actually show up, thereby justifying the work involved in planning a menu, getting special ingredients, cooking the various courses and making everything just right for guests.

Am I culturally insensitive? Should I just never try to have guests for dinner?

Posted by crispy at 04:40 AM | Comments (11)

May 26, 2006

Mona's Does It Again

Guest Room Curtains

With someone coming to visit us from the states, we figured it was time to get another set of curtains from Mona's (Juárez 205, Tlaquepaque, 33/3635-6681) for the guest room.

I can't say enough about Mona's. They have an incredible selection of fabrics, they do some of the best work I've ever seen any place do with anything, and they will work with you to get exactly what you want. Just like the bookcases discussed in the previous entry, every aspect of these curtains was selected by us.

They don't just do curtains either. Anything that takes fabric and can be sewn together they'll do, as long as you have the proper measurements. You can find pre-fab stuff considerably cheaper, but for custom work that comes out as beautifully as their work at Mona's does, the price is great.

If you live in, move to, or even visit Guadalajara, you are an idiot if you need this kind of work done and you don't go to Mona's. Okay? I am not getting paid to say that, nor did I get any kind of discount from them. They're just that good.

Guest Room Curtains

I need to re-pin the hooks, as they're a little high up on the curtains. After getting them installed, I wished the print was a little bigger. With that much of that busy a pattern, I'm afraid it's a little nauseating, but it is in keeping with our nice retro look. Perhaps once we get other stuff in the room it won't seem so busy.

Guest Room Curtains

We also got a nice hand-woven runner for our dining room table:

Dining Table Runner

...and some placemats that go to cover the end tables we bought from Mueblería de Jesús:

End Table Cover

Posted by crispy at 05:43 PM | Comments (2)

Mueblería de Jesús

For great custom made bookcases and some pre-designed end tables/night stands, we went to Mueblería de Jesús (Hidalgo 857, esquina Jesús 33/3826-2202). They do very nice, reasonably priced work. Keep reading to see the photos.

Four Bookcases, Connected

The folks at Mueblería de Jesús are very friendly, and they will work with you to get just what you want. We measured our wall and had them build four identical bookcases to fill the space. We selected every single aspect of these: the color, the fact that there's a back on them, the fact that they connect, the depth of the shelves, the number of shelves, how much they can adjust up and down, the thickness of the wood facing the front, etc.

The night stands we selected were very similar to the end tables we bought (shown below), but we chose a lighter color and a style with three drawers instead of a drawer and a door.

End Table

I'm not incredibly happy with the round ball style of feet on these, but after going through all the discussion of the bookcases, I was a bit exhausted. Maybe they'll grow on me. Or maybe I'll go back and have them make me some different feet. Little brushed stainless posts might be nice...

Posted by crispy at 05:28 PM | Comments (2)

May 08, 2006

Yogurth

Yogurt is big in this country. In our local market, the yogurt section is twice the size of the milk section, and as you might expect, they have a few things that are unusual. Today I bought a low-fat kind that is flavored with carrots and almonds by the same company that makes the beet and pecan flavor.

All yogurt here is sweet. In the US you can buy "plain," but here, "plain" just means it doesn't have some other flavor added; it's still sweetened. The most common way to eat it is with granola, although you often see people eating it with fruit or just by itself. Even though it's always sweetened at the dairy, some restaurants serve it with honey on the side.

The best thing about the Mexican yogurt is that it never contains gelatin, so as vegetarians, we can eat it. Never knew that American yogurt is virtually never vegetarian? Try finding yogurt in your local groceries in the US that doesn't have gelatin.

Last but not least, some people here spell it with the "h" on the end and some don't. It doesn't matter much because in Spanish it doesn't get pronounced.

Posted by crispy at 05:29 PM | Comments (4)

May 02, 2006

What to Do About Yahoo!?

Although it's not strictly related to my living in Mexico, I'm considering whether or not I should give up my Yahoo! Mail account and this blog is the easiest way to put out a 'request for comments' from you.

Why am I considering giving up my Yahoo! Mail account that I've used for several years and switching to another provider?

Recently, the Yahoo! brand has come under fire for providing information to the Chinese government which has lead to the arrest and conviction of a political dissident. According to a news release from Human Rights in China, Wang Xiaoning was detained in 2002 and convicted in 2003 of "incitement to subvert state power," which brings a 10-year prison sentence and a subsequent two-year period without political rights in China. Specifically, he distributed two journals, Democratic Reform Free Forum and Current Political Commentary through a Yahoo! Group, with articles written by himself and others, advocating democratic reforms and a multi-party system.

The court records fail to indicate whether Yahoo! Holdings Ltd., located in Hong Kong, or Yahoo! China, run by Alibaba.com in mainland China, provided specific information about Wang's identity to the government, but both utilize servers located within China. Chinese officials told Wang that if he pursued his right to appeal, he would be denied any opportunity for parole, reduction of sentence for good behavior or other privileges. He is currently detained in Beijing Municipal No. 2 Prison's second most severe level of solitary confinement.

This is the fourth time in recent years that Yahoo! has been accused of helping Chinese officials detain political dissidents; also in Chinese prisons are reporter Shi Tao and Internet activists Li Zhi and Jiang Lijun.

Yahoo! has stated that they and their subsidiaries must follow all local laws. Yet many had suggested that Yahoo! locate any servers for China outside the physical borders of the country to prevent just such conflicts and the company elected not to do so.

It can also be argued that the Yahoo! service I use is distinct from the Yahoo! China and Yahoo! Holdings Ltd. groups. Still, both derive benefit from use of the Yahoo! name and being a part of the Yahoo! constellation of services.

The bottom line is this: Yahoo! has chosen to make profits by dealing with a totalitarian government that restricts free speech. It is not a recent change in policy to which a company established decades ago is having to adjust. Yahoo! went in to China knowing that they restrict speech and censor Internet content. Chinese citizens should have access to the Internet, but should American companies sell out American ideals to make a buck? Even if you would agree that there is no reason why they shouldn't, should American citizens sell out American ideals by purchasing goods and services from companies that make no demands as part of doing business in foreign countries that such countries improve their human rights positions?

I pay for my Yahoo! Mail account to get services beyond those that are included in the free accounts. I believe that I cannot just spare the decision by dropping the services that cost extra. I need my account to have several filters, lots of storage, etc.

Should I stop paying them and switch to another provider for my email service? Your opinions would be appreciated.

Posted by crispy at 06:17 PM | Comments (7)

April 18, 2006

Cheap Roses

If you know the right places to go, you can get certain things here at unbelievably cheap prices.

Shawn With Roses From the Flower Market

On Avenida Federalismo, a ways north of Avenida Vallarta, there's a section of town where all the shops are flower vendors. You can get arrangements or cut flowers, depending on where you go. I picked up these 18 roses for $70 MXN (which at the time of this writing is $6.37 USD).

Store in Flower Market, Guadalajara

Flower Market, Guadalajara

Posted by crispy at 12:27 PM | Comments (3)

April 16, 2006

Crossing the Line

Okay, here's an overgeneralization for you that seems to contain enough truth to make it worth discussing: Mexicans have no respect for lines (or for what Shawn would call 'queues'). This is indicative of a more general trend where Mexicans, normally very civil, friendly and generous as a whole, exploit without hesitation specific situations in which they can get away with being entirely self-centered.

I do not base this on any formal study, although I'd love to conduct one. I have arrived at this theory solely through our experience here in Mexico, which I grant you is very limited. Furthermore, I do not wish to be misconstrued as saying that Mexicans are rude. Some are, just like there are some rude people in every country. Yet there are certain situations where you are likely to notice Mexicans throwing the idea of a social contract completely out the window, and while not all Mexicans might behave this way, enough do to make it shocking to your average gringo.

I first noticed this while standing in line to ask a question of an employee in a pizza joint. We just wanted to know what time the restaurant closed, and we walked and stood in line at the register, behind two people that were placing orders. As we were standing there, a woman got up from a table and came over to the counter, but she didn't get in line. She stood off to the side, and when the first person in line finished ordering and walked away, she just butt in, in front of the other guy that was waiting to order, and ordered a Coke®. The guy waiting in front of us didn't seem that bothered by it, and after all, she did just order a Coke®.

The guy in front of us starts ordering. At this point, we've been in line for about five minutes. Another woman enters from off the street and again stands off to the side. This time I was a bit suspicious, but I thought maybe she was just going to ask for directions or something. But no, before the guy in front of us received his change, the second woman pushed her way in and started placing an order. Shawn and I just walked out. The woman at the counter taking orders gave us a "sorry!" look as we left, but she wasn't taking any steps to prevent our getting the shaft.

Since that time, I've had the same thing happen in countless other stores. On a rare occasion, the clerk will tell the person butting in to wait while they take care of people in order. At other times, I've had people with lots of items insist that I go ahead of them in line because I have but a soda or newspaper. Once I had a man ask me if we were in line, and then he actually stood behind us when we told him that yes, we were. Yet in most cases, it seems that many Mexicans find the line at a register, paquetería or front desk to be an inconvenience that they have a right to ignore.

People are also very rude on buses. Admittedly, inner-city buses seem to bring out the worst in everyone, everywhere. Yet in Guadalajara you see a lot of passive-aggressive acting out on the city buses. It is as if your ticket is a license to be a bratty child and all the other passengers take on the roles of all authority figures of your youth: parents that wouldn't let you stay up late, teachers that made you stay after class for something you didn't do, neighbors that made you clean up their trees after a friendly toilet paper attack. You can exact a silent and indirect revenge against them by refusing to clear the way for them to board or exit, you can cut them down to size by sitting in the aisle seat and disallowing them to take the empty seat at the window, or you can put those pesky elderly people in their place by not offering your seat to them, all the while watching them pitched to and fro as the bus lurches along.

The bus drivers are equally awful. Last week, riding along with Shawn to his job so that we could meet afterwards for lunch, we saw a blind man get onto the bus. The bus driver would not have let him on had a traffic cop waved him down as he tried to pull away. Once he boarded the bus, as he was digging in his pocket for the fare, the driver sped off, nearly throwing him down to the floor. Luckily he fell into the seat where some riders were sitting, and they pushed him back up. After paying, he struggled to find a seat, and the people sitting in the seats that are supposed to be surrendered to the handicapped and elderly did not budge. Shawn and I got up and offered him our seats, while the people in the handicapped seats were needlessly explaining to us that he was blind. I guess they were just trying to do their part.

Posted by crispy at 05:09 PM | Comments (1)

April 03, 2006

We're Going to Bogotá

In order to renew our FMT permits (a tourist visa good for 180 days in Mexico when entering by car or on foot), we have to leave Mexico and return. Since we've already been to the boring, old, authoritarian, fascist United States, we decided we'd look into going somewhere we'd never been before. The cheapest national capital in Latin America turned out to be Bogotá, Colombia. We booked our tickets this afternoon.

We plan to get FM3 visas, but we've not done the necessary stuff for that yet. There are specific reasons for that, most involving the hopes of bring stuff down from the United States during decent weather and being able to avoid paying huge import duties. I won't get into that now, as it's tedious and lame. Besides, if you want to know about that stuff, there's already plenty online about Mexican visa requirements and the steps to obtain them.

Apart from my generally being terrified of flying, the trip will be very exciting. Bogotá is a metropolis of 7 million people, with all the modern conveniences as well their accompanying problems. Even so, really wacky stuff goes on there. Former mayor Antanas Mockus declared a "night without men" in 2001, when all men had to be off the streets by 8:30 pm in order to draw attention to the city's high rate of crime against women, an element of Bogotá life that leads 40% of husbands in the city to forbid their wives' going out at night. In 2003, MP Luis Eduardo Diaz was suspended for using a dildo as a prop during a debate in parliament where he was proposing the forced sterilization of the poor to curb birth rates.

Who knows if we'll see any such unusual bogotano behavior, but if so, you'll read it here. We are going for a week at the beginning of June.

Posted by crispy at 07:19 PM | Comments (2)

March 31, 2006

How To Make Friends and Influence Sofa Dealers

Want to know how to get a 40% discount on a sofa in Mexico? Just take a taxi.

We have made the acquaintance of a taxi driver (in Spanish, taxista or chofer) who was born in Baltimore, despite the fact that he's lived in Mexico for many years. This is handy for Shawn because he speaks English. Shawn has mastered a surprising amount since coming to Guadalajara, especially if it concerns something with which he is familiar, but when something novel and complex comes up, it's nice to be able to fall back on English.

In addition to being linguistically handy, our taxi driver is very friendly, a fun guy, and perhaps most importantly, doesn't rip us off with what Shawn calls "the gringo tax." For those of you who may not be familiar with this all-to-popular scheme on the part of taxi drivers from around the world, I will briefly explain it.

All taxis should have meters (in Mexico, medidor, but in other countries contador). However, sometimes they are missing, or legitimately broken. Yet many times you get in a cab and the meter is not on. In this case, you'll get to your destination and your taxi driver will tell you that you owe him a certain amount of money. In many cases, it's too much (even up to twice as much as it should be, in our experience). There are some honest cab drivers out there with broken meters that will charge you a fair price. However, many just don't turn their meters on unless you insist on it, and even then some will just not turn them on, telling you, "No funciona." In this case, you ask how much they will charge you to take you to your desired destination, and you decide if you are willing to pay it. If not, you refuse and find another cab. There are places where you have to worry about whether a taxi driver is licensed or if his photo on his permit matches his face, but Guadalajara is not one of those places. This overcharging thing is about all you really have to worry about here, and if you're right off the plane from someplace like the United States, even if they overcharge you, you still won't believe how cheap it is.

Shawn gets really upset by this practice, and I don't blame him. It's not ethical to exploit people for their national origin, their race or their ignorance. We know all too well about this scam, and dealing with it is uncomfortable because asking a taxi driver to turn on the meter shows that you know that they are not being ethical. It seems Mexicans do not really deal with confrontation or conflict very well, and furthermore, we're guests here. It's not polite to call your host a lying, cheating bastard.

Still, it's a rip-off, and if there is one thing Shawn hates, it's to have someone get by with thinking he's a fool. If we take a cab, he now always asks first thing if the meter works, but for the reasons I've explained, this does make for an awkward situation. With our regular cab driver, we never ever have to go through this. He either uses the meter, or if he forgets to start it, he tends to undercharge us, if anything. Most cab drivers will run the meter while they're waiting, but ours tends to turn it off. If we're going in somewhere to do business and he can help by translating, he comes along and serves as interpreter at no extra cost. This in particular is a ridiculously good deal.

When we went to buy our couch, I was prepared to handle the entire transaction. I did not anticipate it to be difficult. How hard could it be? "I want to buy one of your couches, this model, this fabric. Here is my address for delivery, and here is your cash." However, our cab driver came into the store with us, and allowed us to do the preliminary introductions and the telling of the model we wanted. The woman quoted a price which was a little lower than we had been quoted upon seeing the couch at the furniture expo, but we did not have a problem with that. While we looked through the book of fabrics to be sure that we had seen all the options, our cab driver chatted with the woman assisting us.

I don't know if other people do this, but when I'm in a situation where my native language is not spoken, even if I know the language well enough to follow along, I just tune out any conversation that is not directed toward me. Therefore, I was not paying attention to what was being said, but I did notice that there was a lot of giggling and smiling going on. When we stopped to tell the woman our desired fabric, our cab driver told us that we were going to get a very special price, the price given to distributors. This was over $300 USD less than the original price.

Furthermore, the woman, who certainly was friendly to begin with, became even more friendly with us, to the point that we got into a discussion about tamales. We were unaware that tamales, which I have always seen eaten "plain" (just out of the husk or the banana leaf on a plate), are placed inside a roll before being eaten in Mexico City. The woman said that her initial reaction had been the same as ours (referring to our look of horror and disgust), but she had tried one once, and it was actually quite good.

As we were riding back to our place with the cab driver, we thanked him for helping us out. Shawn commented that he didn't know what they had been saying, but that he knew enough to realize that the cab driver had been flirting with the representative. The cab driver has a fiancé to whom he is very attached, and she is quite beautiful. He was not trying to set up something on the side, but rather just "facilitating our transaction."

"And why not?" our driver asked. "I probably made her day and got you guys a better price on your couch."

Why not, indeed? Now we just have to wait six weeks while it is built before we have a couch. Yet maybe we could have our cab driver do a follow-up call to check, and maybe we could get it much, much sooner.

Posted by crispy at 02:06 AM | Comments (1)

March 27, 2006

Bad Jugs

Detail, Public Safety Announcement About Illicit Tequila Vendors

While I have not yet seen anyone selling homemade tequila on the street, the following PSA would lead one to think that it goes on.

I'm not going to provide a complete translation of this document into English at this time, but let me give you the skinny on what it says. You can also open a popup window with a large-sized copy where the text is legible, although Movable Type does not build image popup windows that scroll, so you might have to save the image file from the popup window to your desktop and open it in another image viewing application to read the entire thing.

Basically, the PSA warns people to not buy tequila from some random person in the street, tells them what all authentic (licensed) tequila must show on the bottle, and then describes different classes of tequila. It warns not only that tequila from street vendors in unmarked jugs could not only damage your health, but also that one is putting their "wealth" or "assets" at risk when they do not buy the real deal.

Bear in mind that this is printed in El ocio, the entertainment supplement that is included in the Friday edition of El Publico, a local newspaper, so it is aimed at Mexicans. Therefore, the line that reads, "Cuida tu patrimonio..." is aimed at them, saying, "Take care of your assets..."

To my knowledge, while it is true that the tequila industry belongs to Mexicans more than it does nationals of other countries, all Mexicans do not receive periodic dividends from any of the distillers. In fact, if Herradura were to sell out tomorrow to Coca-Cola®, I don't think Mexicans could do anything to stop it (even though I suspect they would not because they probably think it would make it más rico). So while it is true that certain Mexicans make money from real tequila, it's lame to imply that tequila is an asset like something the average Mexican can put down on a loan application to increase their net worth.

Most Mexicans I've spoken to about it are a little annoyed that the price of tequila has gone through the roof here in Mexico because very effective advertising and a suprising upward trend in the taste of Americans in their alcohol preferences have increased demand for tequila in the United States. Half of all tequila is produced for export, and of that, 80% goes to the US. That's great for the tequila industry, and in the long run, that's good for Mexico. For most Mexicans, it just means that the price for a bottle of good tequila is much less affordable.

Overall, I find the ad funny, for the icon if nothing else. Yet it's mildly annoying to me that the tequila industry is trying to keep people from buying cheaper, bootleg tequila through an appeal to their patriotism and some false notion that they participate in the profits. For many, the street vendors are probably the only means through which they can afford a bottle (or jug) of the national beverage, or a facsimile thereof.

Posted by crispy at 02:56 PM | Comments (1)

March 19, 2006

Crash

Non-injury Accident at Avenida Cubilete and Calle La Ermita

I told you people here drive like maniacs. Here's the aftermath of an accident that happened here a while ago, in the intersection just outside our apartment. The Volkswagen (left) ran the light when it was red and hit the truck. The two drivers are examining the damage to the passenger side of the truck in this photo.

The idiotic thing is that the guy driving the truck, which worked well enough to drive away later on, just stopped in the middle of this busy intersection in order to deal with the Volkswagon driver, which nearly caused two other accidents when other drivers speeding along the street nearly plowed into him. Notice that he hasn't even turned on his lights or hazard signals.

Posted by crispy at 01:53 AM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2006

Olney

I've been alerted that the band Oblivion has a song about the punk scene in the town of my birth, Olney, Illinois.

Posted by crispy at 02:17 AM | Comments (4)

Wacky Mexican Television

It's 1 am on a Tuesday and I'm watching one of Mexico's most revered female authors, Elena Poniatowska, being interviewed on a show called "Show del Insomnio." Yet she's not being interviewed in a studio or any place befitting her stature in the country's literary landscape. She's being driven around what I presume to be Mexico City in a flatbed truck that has been set up like a bedroom, complete with bed, nightstand and a television.

Elena Poniatowska on Show del Insomnio

This is the only aspect of the interview that is so campy; she is discussing other authors, recounting her early days as a journalist, and talking about the advantages of being small.

Elena Poniatowska on Show del Insomnio

Although we get it on channel 80 here in Guadalajara on Megacable, it's a Canal 22 production.

I love this country.

Posted by crispy at 12:13 AM | Comments (5)

February 28, 2006

El cine

With the Oscars® rapidly approaching, it's time to discuss going to the movies in Mexico.

First, it should be said that the range of the theater-going experience is broad. They have theaters where they serve sushi and cocktails, and they have old spaces that are like warehouses with fluorescent tube lights as the only illumination. Some offer seats that are like recliners you have in your home while others have old creaking metal beasts with wires that stick up through the upholstry to rip your pants and give you quite a pinch. You can see the latest Hollywood crap or an interesting documentary from France.

The top of the line theaters are run by Cinépolis, and are a special deluxe brand known as "VIP." These are the ones where you have barcalounger-side service for food and drinks. The tickets are slightly more expensive than the regular cinemas, and the food isn't cheap, although overall, things like popcorn and sodas at the cinemas here are not as ridiculously expensive as they are in the United States. For example, a large popcorn at a theater chain that is comparable to the major ones in the United States, is $28.00 MXN, which is roughly $2.68 USD. It also isn't as enormous, though.

The regular Cinépolis theaters are still quite nice, and seem pretty much like the googleplexes of the United States, with all the amenities and at times a few more (like capuccino out of a gas-station style machine, variations on popcorn like caramel-coated), but a little cheaper. The VIP theaters are $90 MXN (around $8.60 USD) at the most expensive, and the "plain" Cinépolis tickets are $44 MXN (around $4.20 USD). They run matinee discounts like you're familiar with in the US, but on Wendesdays, all day, tickets are half-price. Films are usually shown in their original lanuage with subtitles, and only a few of the bigger ones are dubbed into Spanish. When this is the case, the fact is noted on the marquee.

One thing I really appreciate about theaters here is that the screens are almost always normal size, and by that, I mean big, not what is becoming normal in the United States, where you have 25 theaters crammed into one location and the screens are squeezed down into the approximate size of a garage door. I have been to one screening here that was on a relatively small screen, but this was a film series that shows old and more unusual films for very cheap prices (like $2.50 USD).

Then there are older theaters that are not as new and shiny as the Cinépolis theaters and their rivals, but that were built in like the 70s and 80s. These are certainly decent theaters, but they are a little worn at the edges. There are several theaters that pre-date those, and these run from well-preserved to wacky.

In all these older theaters, the experience is interesting, and sometimes very disappointing. You certainly see things you'd never see in a Mann Theater. For example, we went to one theater where you could buy a bag of homemade potato chips in the lobby from behind a small display counter that, despite its size, still looked barren because they offered just these chips and a few candy bars. The woman attending the counter was actually sitting at a table in front of the counter smoking a cigarette and chatting with a friend when we passed through. That was in the place with the fluorescent lighting in the theater. Last night we went to see Transamerica in a theater where they show one film in the afternoon and another at night. It was done up in earth tones from the 70s (although those have never gone out of style here in Mexico), and three times during the film, a huge notice stretched across the screen that was burned into the print and read, "BAFTA SCREENING ONLY! NOT FOR SALE OR RENT." Tonight we went to see North Country, and the theater actually had ushers with flashlights. About halfway through the film, the house lights came up and they turned off the film for a 5 minute intermission.

In these slightly-less-modern theaters, one consistent thing really annoys me. After the film ends and the credits start to roll, they just switch off the film and turn up the lights. Nobody really seems bothered by this.

I'd like to close with a request of you folks: Would you be so kind as to add comments giving the ticket prices for movies where you live? I know you folks in California are being taken to the cleaners, whereas Mr. Allen can probably still afford to see a recently released film at the Arcadia for a fraction of that cost.

Thanks!

Posted by crispy at 10:57 PM | Comments (8)

February 22, 2006

Wild Parrots

Wild Parrot in Tree

Our friend Larry that you've read about on these pages as someone with great advice and excellent Spanish is also a painter and photographer. He took these photographs of the wild parrots that wander through our neighborhood every day to eat things from the trees.

Wild Parrot in Tree

These are Lilac-Crowned Amazon Parrots, one of the favorite parrots to have in captivity. On any given day, you can walk outside and see a number of them (usually at least ten) in the trees like this.

Wild Parrot in Tree

Their average adult size is 13 inches, and each wing is 7-8 inches long.

You have to be a little careful around them, as they drop the shells from the nuts and sticks from the tree as they eat.

Wild Parrot in Tree

They are not at all spooked by people walking around, even though they are wild birds. After their meal, they fly off somewhere else to do who knows what, but to see a bunch of wild parrots in your trees for even just ten minutes a day is quite a trip.

Posted by crispy at 03:27 PM | Comments (4)

February 20, 2006

Illumination

Living Room Rack, With Fluorescent Lighting

I added fluorescent strip lighting to the metal kitchen rack in the living room and it makes it look a little more stylish or something.

Fluorescent Light Tube on Mounted on Rack

These light fixtures are supposed to be mounted with plastic clips that you screw into the wall. Since I can't screw the clips into the metal of the kitchen rack, I tied the clips on with wire trash bag ties. Classy, I know.

And this towel that I had on the rack so that the things I had drying on the top of the rack would not drip all over Shawn's papers looked kind of cool lit up from beneath, so I took a picture of it too.

Towel Illuminated by Fluorescent Light

It reminds me of the Mr. Roboto video.

Posted by crispy at 07:13 PM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2006

On the Street Where You (We) Live

Across From Our Apartment

As requested, some photos of our neighborhood. They're not very interesting though. I snapped them on my way to do laundry at the laundromat across the street and didn't want to leave my clothes unattended to go do a more thorough expedition. This shot shows (from left to right) the laundromat, the paper store, the beauty salon and the little store that sells phone cards and candy bars. The shadow of the tree that you see in the street is from the big acacia that shades our balcony.

Looking Down Calle La Ermita

This is to the right of the previous photo, looking down the street that now serves as a detour for a very major street. We get loud traffic at all hours of the day from here.

Looking Up Calle La Ermita, Westward

Our apartment building is on the other side of the road pictured here, off to the left.

A House on Calle La Ermita

This is a house viewed from the street on La Ermita, just to give you some idea of what the places look like right around us.

Posted by crispy at 02:54 PM | Comments (4)

February 10, 2006

It Holds Stuff

Our "Entertainment Center"

I'm not overly delighted with the look of the thing, but hey, it will work, at least for the time being, to prop up our new printer/copier and our television set...when we get one.

The Ever-Sexy Side View

It's two stainless kitchen racks bought from Sam's Club (that's right, I bought something at the source of all evil, but I figured it might help out Ellyn Rucker) and joined together with a little creative adjustment of one of the shelves. We owe Joseph and Larry for that bright idea, which worked out rather well.

It does seem a little dormroomesque, but it's so hard to find something you like when you have no car to go comparison shopping easily. I'm thinking of putting in some Dan Flavin style fluorescent installations behind it and along those side walls. Or maybe I should just go hardcore with the look and put a Kitchen Aid and big stainless bowls on there.

It reminds me of the old priavteI days when we used one of those for our modem rack. Yeah, modems. I said it was the old days.

Posted by crispy at 03:01 PM | Comments (3)

January 30, 2006

A Wireless of Our Own

After a week of waiting to have the cable run, then another two days to have the cable modem delivered, we finally have our Internet access in our apartment.

We were out shopping when the central office called to tell us that the installer would be arriving within 15 minutes. We were 30 minutes away from our apartment on foot, so we called our friend Larry and, waking him up from a peaceful slumber, asked if he'd be so kind as to go over to our apartment (it's three-and-a-half blocks away) and be there so that the guy wouldn't show up and find nobody home, thereby probably making us start over again from scratch scheduling a new appointment. We jumped in a cab and raced back to the apartment ourselves, where we found Larry by himself. We hung out and chatted a bit, and after a little over an hour, Larry called the central office to see what was keeping them. Of course, they have no contact with the installers, and we were told that they were probably delayed at the previous job.

Larry went home. At 5 PM, the installers show up at our apartment and take a look around. They tell me that they can't run the cable between the walls, so we will have to have a cable snaking around the entire living room to get it where we want it, in the middle of the room. Fine. As long as we have Internet access, I'm cool with that. They drill a hole in the wall next to our side balcony, running the cables in through there. They have run them down from the roof around the side of the building, where they are equally obvious as they are running across the top of the kitchen doorway, around the entryway, over the front door, down the side of the entryway and across the "floorboards" (what do you call them when they're tile?).

They tell me that the Internet access won't be set up until the next day, or the day after that, maybe. For some reason, they can only run the cables; they cannot hand you a box with the cable modem that takes maybe two minutes to hook up and notify the central office that you've got it going. No, different guy has to come out and do that. Before leaving though, they did share some of the soup I had made during the nearly three-hour cable running process, and we chatted about Guadalajara and the metro area. They were really nice guys. Unfortunately, I only had dinky little prep bowls and plastic spoons to serve it with.

All day on Saturday I waited and hoped. I'm getting pretty good about not really expecting things to happen, not when I want them to, nor when they're supposed to, so fortunately, you are spared a long-winded yet possibly witty description of my eager anticipation of the "big event." Yet what I didn't expect was that they'd show up on Sunday, and I certainly would have preferred that they not show up at 9:30 AM while we are dead asleep. Still, to get Internet access at home, I'd suffer much more and gladly, so we let the second string in to set up the modem.

Open box. Remove modem. Plug modem into the wall. Screw in the coax. Call the central office.

The second part took less than five minutes, and while it was very slow at first, after 30 minutes or so I reset the modem and boom! We had high-speed connectivity, put into radio waves by my nifty little AirPort Express.

From the time of placing the order, it took nine days and seventeen hours to be up and running. Not exactly speedy, but probably still better than Qwest...especially since it worked the first time.

Posted by crispy at 06:26 AM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2006

Curtain!

Our custom made drapes from Mona's

Today we picked up our overdue curtains from a place in Tlaquepaque called Mona's, who sewed them together from our custom specifications and a fabric we selected.

They have "blackout" on the back so that the sun won't shine through, and pinch-pleats at the top.

Closer View of Curtain

The work on them is incredible. They stuck the hooks in them at the place, but I think we're going to have to repin the hooks because they don't quite go up to the ceiling, instead revealing our tacky curtain rod. The curtain rod needs some work too. At present, the only way we can get the curtain to move all the way open is to have one person pull the cord and another pull the curtain back by hand. That is, it sticks a lot in certain spots.

Fabric Print Detail

Now I can walk around in my underwear without getting cat calls. Yes, cat calls. That has been an all-too-frequent occurence.

Posted by crispy at 12:30 AM | Comments (4)

January 22, 2006

The Coriat of Oven Khayyam

I finally got a stove in the apartment. While it takes up half of our dinky little kitchen, it's sure a beauty.

It's a Mexican professional stove brand, Coriat. It takes gas, but they don't seem to use natural gas much in Mexico, and . Instead, we use propane from the huge tank on top of our apartment building that they fill every once in a while.

The bummer is that the supply of gas coming through the stove depends on who else is using gas in our building at any given moment. I have found that this can seriously increase the time between when something is done and when it should be done, but at least it works enough to allow us to eat at home. And when it gets enough gas, boy does that thing cook!

The thing sticks out about a foot from the rest of the counter around it, but it's in a corner, so that isn't too bad. The problem is that our kitchen is lilliputian, and with the stainless kitchen rack that I bought at Costco to hold all our various plates, glasses, cooking tools and so forth, there's barely room in there for a human being.

Next will be our Internet access and cable, that is to be installed sometime in the future. We have an installation "date," although we do not yet know what the date will be. They are supposed to call us the day before, but we'll see if that happens. We're still waiting for the drapes that we were told would be ready mañana, and that was on last Tuesday.

Posted by crispy at 02:34 PM | Comments (1)

January 13, 2006

Settling In

We have now been at the apartment for six days, during which we've managed to acquire a bed, a Maytag refrigerator and a bunch of things that will eventually be useful when we have a stove, a dining room table and other furniture that makes our place a home suitable for living and entertaining: pewter and ceramic serving dishes, ashtrays, a set of basic tools, buckets, a mop, a broom, knives, plastic storage containers for leftover food, a set of coffee cups and a space heater to take the chill off the high desert nights. We have also selected some fabric for a custom-made set of drapes for our bedroom, along with a coordinated bedspread. A Mexican Edith Head is sewing them: small in stature, bobbed hair, glasses, and draped with a tape measure around her neck. They should be ready next week, which will put an end to the peepshow I'm constantly giving to the people walking by and the poor traffic cop on our corner.

He has been located there to handle the traffic on our small road that has become the detour from a major street nearby while they complete a major construction project. This project is to last for another two years, so what would normally be a quiet little corner in Chapalita Sur is actually a very busy thoroughfare, with loud traffic passing by until very late at night. We hope the drapes also help to cut down the noise we get in our bedroom late at night from the street, because the wall facing Calle Cubilete is a solid wall of windows with a door that opens to one of our two balconies. The guest room/office is the same way, but we're taking it one step at a time.

I am writing this entry from our other balcony, which opens from the dining room area and overlooks Calle La Ermita. La Ermita is the street with all the traffic, and at times, especially late at night, it's like having a box seat at the drag races. When the traffic cop isn't around (after dark), people tear down the street at amazing speeds. Yet right now, at around 3:30 in the afternoon, drivers show a bit more control. A flock of doves that live in the nearby trees is currently perched on the wires running in front of the balcony, watching me intently, as if I were about to do something interesting. They will be disappointed, ultimately. Once Shawn gets out of the shower, I will fold up the laptop and we will head up to our local restaurant that has free wireless Internet access, La Terraza de la Abuela, so that I can post this entry over a steaming Ibarra served in earthenware mugs.

But the balcony, equipped with two plastic porch chairs and a table generously loaned by our gringo friends Joseph and Larry that live just a few blocks away, is the only place other than our bed where we can sit, since we have no other furniture at the moment. On it, I have passed many pleasant hours of the new Mexican life, drinking apple soda and reading Chekhov, watching the doves fly back and forth between the wires and the trees, and following the many maids dressed in their cleaning smocks as they walk to and from the apartments and houses that they maintain. Two nights ago, at about midnight, I was sitting out here and waiting for Shawn to return from a film, and suddenly a quartet of mariachi (strings and voices only) broke into song at the house next to our building. I sat and listened, enraptured by their old Mexican refrains about love and waiting, delighting in the fact that life here is so different, so imbued with an appreciation of art and music that seems to have completely vanished from the daily life of your average Joe in the United States. The musicians crooned on for about 40 minutes, not once getting any complaints from the neighbors for playing at such a late hour. I do not think that I will ever tire of hearing such beautiful music, even after years of living down here; perhaps all the neighbors were just as mesmerized as I was by the sweet music on a clear yet warm winter's night.

The next day we went to lunch at Larry and Joseph's house, where Joseph had prepared an impressive Chinese meal and we met a woman that has lived in Mexico off and on for decades, now relocated to Guadalajara. At one point, there was a riotous squawking of birds and Jospeh commented on how it must be that time of day for the "parrot migration." I laughed, thinking it did sound an awful lot like parrots, and then Larry said that the gang of wild parrots flew over their house every afternoon about that time, in some inter-city migration, taking a brief rest along the way in their trees. I didn't believe it and asked to see them, so he walked me out to the street. Sure enough, we saw a bunch of them climbing around on the branches of trees lining the streets, beautiful bright green parrots that rested for a few minutes before taking off for parts unknown.

Posted by crispy at 04:36 PM | Comments (1)

December 31, 2005

The Apartment

Shawn on the roof of our new apartment building

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 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 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

Cubilete 193
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 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 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)

November 30, 2005

5 Days

I know. It's getting old.

Shawn forgot that he had to renew his driver's license and realized it just this past weekend. It will otherwise expire while we are in Mexico and then he'd have to renew an expired license, which is much more involved.

In California, they take appointments at the DMV. Shawn called, and the earliest appointment he could get was Thursday.

Now we're staying through the weekend so that we can travel through Mexico during the week. We figure maybe it's less crowded. Why we care that it would be less crowded, I don't know, except for the fact that we're just going to the bus station the day we want to leave, buying tickets for the next bus out and heading south. I'm finding that it's as often worse to make advance reservations in Mexico than it is to go in cold. Still, you don't want to run the chance that you won't be able to get seats.

We expect to stay in Tijuana overnight and then head on to Guadalajara so that the bus station experience doesn't have to share the stage with the crossing of the border with tons of luggage experience and any potentially long and drawn-out goodbyes.

Hopefully Shawn will pass the test.

Posted by crispy at 02:38 AM | Comments (3)

November 23, 2005

5 Days

With the adjustment of our schedule to spend Thanksgiving with friends, we're back at five days until we enter Los Estados Unidos de México to head down toward Guadalajara.

We just might stop over in Puerto Vallarta to check it out. It will be our most easily accessible coastal town while we're in Guadalajara and it might be nice to have some prior experience there if we end up playing tour guides to people that come to visit and want to go to the coast. Plus, it would be nice to have a break somewhere in that 36-hour bus ride.

That puts us arriving in Guadalajara in the first few days of December. We will most likely arrive and check in at the Hotel San Francisco Plaza for a few days. We have fond memories there from last year, and we think it might be a nice way to ease back into being in Deep Mexico. Then the plan is to probably relocate to a place closer to Chapalita where we want to get an apartment.

Posted by crispy at 11:09 PM | Comments (0)

San Diego Revisited

After an aborted attempt to save money by staying in Tijuana, we came back to San Diego and will spend Thanksgiving in the states. The new date for departing for Guadalajara is Tuesday, 29 November.

We went down on Wednesday (16 November) to make reservations at the Hotel Villa de Zaragoza for Friday night (18 November). We asked for a room with one bed and the clerk seemed to think we were mistaken, two men wanting only one bed, so he asked us if we were sure we wanted only one bed. I repeated that we wanted only one bed.

We got a ride down there from Brian and Nicole, who had decided to spend the night in Tijuana. They figured they'd get another room at the same hotel.

When we arrived, we were given a room with two beds, and a higher class of room than we had reserved. The desk clerk had written all the information down on a Post-It note on Wednesday, and I had not thought it would be important to look at it to be sure it was correct. I told him that it was okay, that we would take the room with two beds because it ended up that we needed them. He kept insisting after this that I had asked for a room with two beds, but I know I didn't. My Spanish isn't so rusty that I'd not know the difference. I certainly didn't ask for the more expensive handicapped room. He said that we could change to a room with one bed in the morning, and that was fine by us.

However, upon going to the desk in the morning, I was informed that they didn't have any rooms with one bed available. We'd have to stay where we were if we wanted to stay in the hotel. That made me feel like they'd really pulled the old bait-and-switch on us, so we opted to come back to San Diego, and after a bit of looking, settled in at the Super 8 Bayside, which was about what you would expect, but I did find the staff there to be very friendly and super helpful.

Now we've returned to the W San Diego because they're running a special during this Thanksgiving week. I guess they don't get many business customers over the holidays. We will spend Thanksgiving at the house of Brian's mother Jinny, along with that clan.

I'm not as mad about our Tijuana hotel experience as I am disappointed. It is annoying to me that so many Americans think that everyone in Mexico is out to con tourists, and it's a bummer to have an experience that puts evidence behind that argument. Oh well. It was an isolated incident, and I've been the victim of much worse rip-offs in the United States. But I feel pressure, just as I feel pressure to make things work out in Mexico for Shawn and me because we've been so often told how crazy it is for us to move there, to have Mexicans not live up to all the prejudiced stereotypes that people in the United States have of them.

I've put all my faith in you, mexicanos. Don't let me down.

Posted by crispy at 07:50 PM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2005

10 Days to Mexico (?)

According to the original schedule, we will be entering Mexico in 10 days. But will we be heading to Guadalajara, or ¿will we be staying in Tijuana por un rato?

Having confirmed that we can stay with Brian's mother for a few days, we can spend the money we save and stay in the area for a few more days. Brian, who is very anxious to have us spend two weekends here, is happy about that prospect. Yet we might be able to save some money staying at a cheap but secure hotel in Tijuana. At the moment, we're not sure. We found another place that charges $225 per week in San Diego, two blocks from Balboa Park, but they don't take reservations and they only had one room left upon our last check.

Posted by crispy at 03:25 AM | Comments (0)

November 05, 2005

At the Edge of the Continent

For 12 years I have thought of Los Angeles as home, despite the fact that my body has been elsewhere. Yet since we have left behind our place in Colorado, it is as much "home" as anywhere else. And for the first time, being here this time around I realized why I consider it more my home than any other place I have been, before or since.

Our room at the Hollywood Standard overlooks the city that stretches out below, and standing on the balcony, one cannot help but wonder about all the things that are going on out there in that sprawling metropolis. If they are anything like the things that used to go on for me when I lived here, and I'm sure some of them are, it would not be polite to transcribe them for a mixed audience. Some are surely exciting, some are doubtless shocking and many are undeniably tedious. Yet there is an electricity in the air that permeates everything here, perhaps a static charge that is generated by the friction of the racial tension, political corruption, glamour and heartbreak constantly rubbing against each other in the heat. Even in the most boring of moments, one feels it here, raising the hair on the arms and tingling throughout the whole body. It is the potential that anything could happen here at any time.

Los Angeles has a great metaphor for this feeling in its vaunted "big one" - the hundred year earthquake that is expected to flatten huge sections of the city within seconds and overshadow whatever was the celebrity scandal of the moment for at least a week. Angelinos (why not angeles?) do not waste much time worrying about that potential energy waiting under the earth's crust to shake them into oblivion like an enormous British nanny. And why would they? Nothing can be done to prevent it; when the time comes, it will just happen.

And that is what I love about Los Angeles. Things happen here. Big things.

I recognize the value of a slower-paced life, and as a matter of fact, one of my favorite editors has brought me to understand its benefits and that it isn't just boring. But a life such as that requires a great deal of focus and drive. You have to concentrate all the time on where you are going and what you'll do next. In a place where anything can happen at any time, you always keep your eyes straight ahead for the next thing that's coming at you.

But here, far from being merely a tense struggle against the rat race, an element of sublime beauty imbues even the most mundane objects and breaks through to the surface at the most unusual times. In the depths of winter, you can smell jasmine throughout the city. The fog rolls in and chills the valleys late at night as you wander down a wide, sweeping street alone, with a eerily obscure song playing somewhere out of someone's window that you have not thought of in what seems like a few years but actually calculates to be half your life ago. You can be standing in line at a grocery store and someone says something that has nothing to do with you, rather, the fact that her daughter got a bad perm, and you actually feel your life shift beneath your feet. It's like that kind of Zen Buddhism where you can be instantly enlightened by being hit with a stick.

But in Los Angeles, the elements are beautiful. Beautiful weather. Beautiful people. Beautiful coastline. Beautiful mountains. Beautiful smog. Beautiful tragedy. Beautiful life.

That is why I have felt like Los Angeles is my home, even when I've not been located here: only when I am here does it feel like life is actually happening. Everywhere else, it's just like I'm taking a vacation from my normal life. I'm hemmed in by limitations on what there is to see and do. I'm not really able to be myself because I'm not in the right environment, where anything could happen at any time.

I hope that our new life in Mexico will be as exciting and exotic. I think that just our being strangers in a strange land will certainly increase those odds.

Posted by crispy at 06:03 PM | Comments (0)

November 04, 2005

Arrival: Los Angeles

We arrived at Union Station in Los Angeles at 8 am on Friday, 3 November 2005.

It's so good to be back.

Posted by crispy at 08:30 AM | Comments (1)

October 28, 2005

20 Days

Two days of driving brought us to southern Illinois, where I will leave my car at my parents' house.

Along the way, we heard this story on All Things Considered, and it just made me more embarrassed about my country's behavior in the world arena.

Posted by crispy at 10:25 PM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2005

Adrift

Losing home is like a bullet in your heart.

All our things are packed and in storage. Because we're in a place where people will be staying after us, there is still furniture, cooking equipment and a few books, but all the things that have made this building our home for the past 12 years are hibernating until they see the light of day again in Mexico.

So barren is the house that last night I had a hard time getting to sleep, even after being up for 40 hours straight packing and moving our things. Where there used to be the soft gurgle of a fishtank and the warm glow of my Virgen de Guadalupe night light there is now only absolute silence and darkness. In that void, it feels like I've died and come back as a ghost to haunt whoever will next inhabit this place. Driving around town, I feel like a visitor who has returned to his home town to see that everything has changed, as if all the new development of new buildings and the demise of my favorite haunts were sudden rather than happening over the past decade.

It's true. You can't go home again. Sometimes it seems like a myth that you were ever there in the first place.

Miss Liberty tells me Aztlan's gone. As if I didn't know that, as if I didn't know my own back yard.

Now I start to notice that my perception of myself must change. Since coming to live in the southwestern United States, I have felt deeply a unity with this place, less this arctic fringe than the parched desert, but all the same, I have not only been an "American," but very specifically one of those in the frontier. In Los Angeles, you feel as if you might as well be in Mexico, but even so, it's still the frontier of Mexico. For many years I've lived in a Mexican territory, because this area has been shaped by the influence of its once being a part of Mexico, and before that, the land of the people that didn't have to deal with that scar of a river cutting us into two countries.

I've realized that I'm not only crossing the border, but I'm leaving that border region behind to go deep into the interior. I'll no longer be a self-declared Chicano but merely a gringo. I can no longer feel like I'm in the set of a people who have gotten with the times and speak English and Spanish because those are our languages that we speak here. I'm an expatriat that manages to eek out a few phrases in order to survive. My perspective on this place will be so different now. I'll see the border not as the southwest but as the north. I'll be on el otro lado.

And I'm trying to get back to a place I've never been. I'm trying to cross over.

No longer will the Mexico I live in be the mesquite smoke and adobe of Santa Fe, the saquaros of Tucson, the missions of California. In leaving the southwest, I am also leaving behind a certain cultural Mexico that is completely foreign to Guadalajara. I'll be leaving behind the cradle that not only holds El Paso, Nogales and San Diego, but also Chihuahua, Hermosillo and Tijuana.

I'd never thought of that before, until now. I'm already leaving what is to me a part of Mexico for another, and for the first time, I realize how much I'll miss her.

Eleven generations, she's lived there. It's the just land and name that's changed its borders.

Lyrics: El Vez, Aztlan, from the album "Graciasland"

Posted by crispy at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2005

25 Days

The lesser grain borer beetle, one of the smallest and most destructive beetles infesting grain in North America, grows from an egg to an adult in 25 days. In the same amount of time, Shawn and I will have gone from living our relatively opulent lives in Boulder to living out of a couple of suitcases and sleeping on a bus.

The adventure awaits, but it seems so distant. It doesn't help that today is our last day of packing, so things are strewn all over the house. After we move it all to storage tomorrow, I think we will feel like we're living in what is only the husk of our former lives.

One positive aspect of our hurried schedule is that I've not had much time to be sad about going. While I look forward to waking up one February morning and looking out the window onto a sunny, 80-degree day, right now the thought leaving friends behind is sad. And despite the best intentions that everyone has to stay in touch, you know that you'll lose a few along the way. Which friends will we never see again? It's strange to walk through the moments that you suspect in the future might be your enduring memories of a place, the way it feels, the people that populate it. It feels like you should be paying so much more attention to all the details. You catch yourself immediately after the moment regretting that you didn't make more of it.

At 25 days left in the United States, that is how it feels. Like I'm living not in the present, but in what are already memories of a very significant time in my life: my last days as an "American."

Posted by crispy at 03:49 AM | Comments (0)

October 20, 2005

Everything In Its Right Place

While some aspects of our preparations are in utter chaos, others are starting to come together just as planned.

While our house still looks like it was hit by a tornado, with stacks of half-full boxes piled in every available cranny, today I received two important packages in the mail: a replacement part for my soda siphon that I've been missing for years and a box full of clothes with the newly selected uniform, appropriate for Latin America. Unlike the jeans and t-shirt look that has served me well for so many years, the new ensemble is more like that of the Blues Brothers, sans sunglasses and jacket.

I also picked up my car today, which I had taken to the body shop to have fixed. Over a year ago, I was rear-ended and I figured I'd better take care of the damage before retiring the car to Illinois or I'd never get it fixed. Besides, my ability to claim it on my insurance would expire in April. But it looks beautiful again. There will be times when I really miss that car, but I just don't think it's a good idea to have it in Mexico. At least not yet.

The majority of my kitchen tools have been packed, apart from the things I will be using before we go. But the vacuum sealer, decorative peelers, Silpat sheets, pastry bags and tips...all have been boxed up. It will be interesting to see just how much I've come to depend on such things once we get an apartment and I don't have them with me. I feel like I'll be "getting back to basics" as I will only have things like a cutting board and a sole kitchen knife at first.

Ah but for now, it's back to packing away the old life to get to the new.

Posted by crispy at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2005

Packing

Shawn nears the breaking point as he sorts through twelve years of accumulated stuff.

With the house so cluttered with things to be sorted through, one can barely walk around. We have packed over 30 boxes of books, 3 boxes of DVDs and a few boxes of miscellaneous other items, but much remains to be reckoned with, as the photograph shows. This is a very educational experience for us, although we never seem to learn the lesson: DON'T COLLECT THINGS.

We have already started to think that perhaps in searching for an apartment in Guadalajara, we should not only get a guest bedroom, but also another room to store all this stuff. I almost feel like we should have an open house and let people in to pick over things and take what they want, like in that story by Bukowski where he lets all the neighbors take things they like from his recently deceased father's house.

Leave the whisky.

We have eight days left in our planned packing schedule, and hopefully at the end of those eight days we will have everything moved into a storage unit, packed to take with us, or packed to be freighted to us after we get an address. Then we go to Olney, Illinois (where my folks live) to drop off my car. We hope to return on Halloween, and as we depart on the 3rd of November, we'll have a couple of days to finish anything left, if we need it.

Posted by crispy at 01:57 AM | Comments (1)

October 11, 2005

The Going Gets Tough

While we've read countless places that Americans live on FMT visas (the simple tourist kind that allows you to be in Mexico for 180 days at a time), leaving the country to renew them as necessary, recent reports from a new online acquaintance who lives in Guadalajara claim that we will need the official FM3 visas (for longer stays) to get such things as utilities, bank accounts and health insurance.

This is a real drag because the requirements for that type of visa is much more stringent and not something we can come up with easily. While Shawn would get one if he ends up getting this job he wants with Hewlett-Packard in Guadalajara, it's much more difficult for me since I don't have obvious and easily demonstrated income. In any case, it's not something that we're going to be able to get before we go.

We read up on the gritty details of what we need and decided that we should consult with a lawyer about it. I sent an email, but so far today there has been no response. I think I may whip up a brief letter and FedEx it to her, just to cover all the bases. Hopefully she will be able to suggest some alternatives for us; I'm starting to fear that we'll be living in an apartment with no electricity, gas or water.

On the positive side, the same online acquaintance gave me a pointer for finding apartments online in advance. El Informador has classified ads online that you can access by clicking on "Alquileres Departamentos." This has been very encouraging, as they list two bedroom apartments for $400-$550 USD and entire condominiums for only $600 USD per month in the section of town we like. Of course, we won't do any actual apartment hunting until we arrive, but it's reassuring to be able to look at the listings and see that they're available and cheap.

But for now, it's back to packing. Our train pulls out on 3 November, and we've got to be all boxed up and stored away in Colorado before then.

Posted by crispy at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)