Guanajuato Gringa

Cruz de Perdon

2010-09-26T14:19:00.000-07:00

Guanajuato is a mecca for walkers. I'm partial to walks that have a landmark to aim for, which is pretty easy here, as most hills have a cross on top. Cruz de Perdon (Cross of Forgiveness) has not only a cross, but several gravestones and a tile surface area. It's about a 20 minute hike up from La Panoramica. I have been told that sinners, er, pilgrims, walk up together at night by candlelight once a year, but I have never found out the date.

This week, I went there two days in a row: once with Barry, the next day with Jenny, with whom I acted as guide, thereby consolidating my knowledge of where the path starts, and making the trail "mine."

At the top today, Jenny and I ate almonds and raisins and looked down at the city below. You could say we had our own Mass there.

What is it about Mexicans and bears?

2010-09-25T13:12:00.000-07:00

So there we were, Mari and I, at the IMSS clinic in Leon, waiting for her "maxilofacial especialista" doctor. Even though she had an appointment for 3:00 and we had arrived at 1:50,there were already four people ahead of her. La Doctora finally showed up at 3:40, and Mari was seen for her jaw fracture at 4:30. The appointment lasted between three and four minutes. Then la doctora told her to come back when all the patients had been seen, around 6:00, when she would insert a brace to align the jaw that after four weeks, had not yet aligned on its own.

So there was a lot of waiting. Mari read her portable Bible, I rotated between Poemcrazy, a book on creative writing, and Buen Hogar (Good Housekeeping magazine in Spanish). She played with her cellphone, I listened to music on the ipod. We went out for a lunch of chilequillas, and a lot of the time wa talked.

Mari asked me how hiking is different in the States. I explained about backpacking, how you carry everything with you. "Have you seen a bear?" she asked.

"Oh yes." I grinned, wondering if she would be as entertained by our bear story as our former contractor, who was so entranced when we would talk about bears that Barry brought him a poster of a bear as a gift. We suspect it has pride of place hanging in his sala.

I told her the story about how a bear ate all our stash the second-to-last night of a backpacking trip in Yosemite, and how--all feminism aside for a moment--I urged Barry from the warmth of our tent to go out, protect us and make the bear go away, and how he clanged two pots to make noise and scare it, and we heard it thrashing away in the distance, and how I said confidently (famous last words), "The bear won't be back," and promptly fell asleep, and how five minutes later, we heard the bear coming back...

Mari was laughing and her eyes all lit up.

...and how there were two guys camping down the lake from us, and after we could hear the bear leaving again, we climbed out of our tent and woke them up because we still had a bit of food left and we had to re-hang the backpacks on a taller branch, further from the trunk, which we couldn't reach, so one guy, the taller one, got out of his sleeping bag, and how Barry had to stand on his shoulders to hang the backpacks in the dark, and how finally we went back to sleep and there was no more sight of the bear, and in the morning we discovered the bear had made a real mess of everything and about the only thing he hadn't eaten was our teabags.

And Mari was laughing and laughing, I've never seen her so animated, and that's how she and I whiled away five hours waiting for her appointment to materialize.

Bamboo Mural in Progress

2010-09-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

The high ceilings of our Guanajuato house are intimidating! What to do with all the looming walls? Last winter my friend Jenny, who paints, tiles, and does other aesthetic improvements (the words for which I don't even know) helped me paint two arches on one of the walls of the back bedroom. They filled the wall and transformed the room. This season, I was ready to work on the wall above the steps leading from the first to second floor. What to paint, though?

"Bamboos are easy," my mentor advised.

Unlike Jenny, I never assume a mural will be easy, but she was right. She painted the terra cotta pot and a few reeds, and soon we were floating in leaves of all shades of green, with yellow for variety. More density to come, but it already feels like a patch of garden right in our urban home.

"Stop!" I yell when a few drops of acrylic dribble down the wall. "Stop, you!" I grab a paper towel to stanch it. Jenny laughs. "It's only paint," she reminds me. She's fearless. As for me, the fact that an object is, in theory, inanimate, has never stopped me from yelling at it if it's not behaving. (Many a rant I have had with bicycles, walls, paint).

Sometimes we paint for an hour or two; other times, on my own, I take a break from another activity and perch on the staircase, adding a leaf here, a leaf there. We still haven't figured out how we'll reach the highest parts.

I would never have thought of painting a mural in our home in the States. There's a well-known muralist in Eureka who teams with at-risk kids to create community murals. A worthy challenge, but the murals look so complex and intricate, far beyond my lowly abilities. Yet here in Mexico, anything is possible. How I could have known I'd become a mural painter?

2010-08-26T04:14:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation with my Mexican friend Mari recently about housecleaning. I made the point that she (as other Mexicanas I know) has a much higher standard for cleanliness than I do. She said she would feel ashamed if her house were not kept straight, and then she repeated a line I hear often in Mexico: "it is the culture."

I never hear anyone in the US explain their actions by saying, "it is the culture." People explain they do what they do because of their parents, family background, genetics, part of the country they're from, gender, birth order-- but never culture.

I don't usually think of my everyday habits as the result of my culture. It never occurred to me that having, a relaxed attitude toward the standard of organization in my home, could be a reflection on the culture I'm a part of. Maybe what it points to is that American culture is very diverse, and there is lots of freedom to be straight, messy, clean, dirty, obsessive, etc. without shame or judgment.

Back in the city of color after a six-month hiatus

2010-08-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

I've decided to resuscitate my blog and without explaining the two-year gap, just plunge in.

Oh, my. Oh, my. My resistance to things kicked up yesterday. Dealing with things, understanding things, finding places for things, deciding about things. Please, no more things.

Even the word annoys me. Things. Or objects. No better. No poetry hidden in either word.

I brought down too many things because I couldn't remember what we have here. Now we have both more, and less, than before. More-- more spatulas (spatulae?). We must have four or five, and I hardly ever use a spatula. Tenants must have bought some. We have a new frying pan because a tenant didn't like the ones we had (which I admit were a bit scruffy, but I was fond of them!) Meanwhile we also have less...those cool clothespins that attached to the bathroom rail, handy for hanging undies: gone. Bathroom floor sponge: gone. One of my favorite bowls: gone. This is what happens when you have other people in your house, I guess.

Upstairs on one of the high windows facing the Serena hill, someone taped a newspaper at the top. And leftover bits of tape are strewn across the whole window. Why did someone need to put newspapers up there when there were curtains already? (not that anyone can see in from there) I haven't tried to get rid of the tape marks because I can't reach that high, but maybe I can with a chair. Several curtains need to be re-attached to a curtain hook. Again, with a chair later. Later too I'll try to get the hot water going. It's still dark, and easier to relight the gas in daylight.

So after a bout of irritation with things, I said, come on, sweetheart, one thing at a time. I had been helped by a blogger I like, an artist/minister, writing about how humility comes from the word humus, meaning earth. These are things from the earth, I told myself (well, all right, some of them are plastic and synthetic, but ultimately those trace back to the earth too, right?) Just take care of them one by one, I said. So I did. Shampoos (three? four?) into the bathroom. Papers and pens into my desk. Condiments, spices onto the kitchen shelf. Some objects to the throw away/ give away pile, which presents another difficulty. It's not that easy giving things away here. Oh for St Vincent's.

The computer. The monitor flashes briefly when I turn it off and back on. "Stay on!" I plead. knowing it won't. The laptop (new to me, but not to the family) starts humming noisily from time to time and this off-and-on rumbling makes me nervous. Why is it doing this?

I admire the older expat women around here who live alone, and are so independent. I am not that independent! I lean on Barry for all kinds of things, especially in the material sense of maintaining things and getting stuff to work.

But meanwhile order is slowly emerging. I am going to watch what I wear over the next few days and see which clothes I like to wear, and get rid of those I don't. And now the church bells are tolling, it's time to put a few more things into their homes. Soon it will get light and I will take a shower and head out to meditation.

One Day in Xalapa, Mexico

2009-01-19T06:12:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,

Barry and I are in Xalapa, a medium-sized Mexican city about an hour inland and uphill from Veracruz on the Gulf Coast. We are taking a road trip by bus around some new parts of Mexico.

We caught the bus to Naulinga, a small mountain town some 23 km from here but less trendy, much cooler (I wished I had worn my down vest) and ‘muy tranquillo’ compared to busy, car-infested Xalapa. It was Sunday morning, and that probably added to the lovely quiet. “This has to be Wales,” Barry kept saying, as we saw the rolling green fields. Naulinga turned out to be very pretty, with narrow geometric streets all fanning out from the main church. The cemetery (one of our favorite places to visit, wherever) was filled with row after row of carefully-maintained pastel-colored mini-cottages, like slightly larger dog houses. The colors were softer than the colors of the living, though not as gauzy and luminescent-looking as you see in traditional Biblical pictures.

A couple of hours later, we were ready to head back to Xalapa and decided to hitch-hike. I know, I know; hitch? I would never do it alone. But we find, maybe because we’re in our 50s and 60s, we probably disarm people by our age and end up having great conversations with folks. Within a minute a large SUV, Mexican plates, pulled up. “Mom” hastily got in the back with the two kids aged about 6 and 8. Dad spoke English. The family has lived in Madison, WI for ten years, but was back for an extended winter break visiting their families. Martin, the father, looked in his early 30s, and had worked in the distribution center of Famous Footwear and in different restaurants. He spoke English, not perfect, but quite good, and had a surprisingly good accent, too. The kids said their names with seamless English accents. “They speak English in school and Spanish at home,” Maria, their mom, told us in Spanish (who, we think also speaks English but was less forthcoming). I told them that my sister lives in Madison and teaches Spanish to young children.

They asked about our children, of course (question #1 in Mexico). “I find it odd,” I said. “People always ask us our where our kids are, and I always think, isn’t it obvious? They’re working and raising their kids at home. I could understand the question if we were in our 30s, but at our age?”

“See, grandparents are never alone in Mexico,” Martin explained. “They’re always with the grandkids, helping, babysitting. They’d never be by themselves.”

“But what if the kids are in school?”

“Even so.”

Actually, people of all ages are much more frequently in groups, than alone, in Mexico. Barry and I have observed that whole families go shopping together, with everyone but the family dog in tow. I sometimes wonder how introverts manage in Mexico; it’s such an intensely interactive culture.

He told us about a guy he had met in Madison who was ready to get rid of his kids, tired of paying their bills. In Mexico, you’re never rid of your kids. It was, we agreed, probably the biggest difference (among many) in the two cultures.

“Were you legal when you went to the States ten years ago?” Barry asked.

I was glad he asked. I also wanted to know, but felt embarrassed to ask, though the stigma is an American one, not Mexican. People here feel sympathy for those who fled to the States in search of a job, but not shame. Martin and Maria were not legal at first, but they are now. “If you want to emigrate to the States legally, the authorities always want to know what property you have, savings, money, and so on,” Martin said. “But if we had all that, why would we leave Mexico?”

This is something I’m always trying to explain to fellow Americans who seem to think that Mexicans are all hungering to live in our country. They want to survive, yes, and many of them feel unable to do that in their own country, but they don’t yearn to live in the U.S. for reasons other than economic.

“What is that?” Barry asked suddenly, as we passed a church whose entire roof was covered with exuberantly colored crowns and flowers.

They told us that the crowns were brought by people to celebrate el Dia de la Virgin, Dec. 12, the day Mexicans celebrate Guadalupe, their patron saint. “Do you want to see inside?” asked Maria. We all tumbled out and went into the church to see a rock painted with the image of the Virgin. Outside, the kids climbed up a pole, and Barry joined them, taking better photos of the roof, while I talked to Maria.

Back in the car, Martin said, “A guy in Madison asked me to go have a beer with him. I said, ‘Won’t your wife be upset?’ He told me, ‘She’s not my wife, she’s my girlfriend.’”

“Here, wife, girlfriend, it’s all the same. Papers, no papers, she’s still your wife.”

But they liked Madison, they said, though Maria, when I looked at her after I asked the question, looked a little uncertain. “Do you miss Mexico when you’re there?” I asked.

“Family,” said Martin. “That’s the one thing you can’t buy.”

They let us off on the fringes of town. I was glad they hadn’t tried to take us further when I saw the piles of traffic, even for a Sunday afternoon. We caught the bus to el centro, reading the advisory that today all buses would be on strike in the state of Xalapa, in protest against the federal government’s steady increases in diesel fuel.

Many Mexican towns we have visited have city centers that Americans can only dream of: safe, beautiful human-scale squares filled with people “paseando” (strolling), benches, trees, spacious sidewalks, pedestrian areas. I often daydream of U.S. cities sending their public works directors down here to learn from Mexico (dream on!). Xalapa, however, is not one of those cities, though it had enough cachet to draw us here. Some of its cachet is because it is the heart of Mexican coffee cultivation, and you actually get good coffee here in restaurants rather than the instant you’re often served elsewhere.

After we got back to town, I went off to get a cappuccino at the café that Ana, the 25-year-old Physics student who we met yesterday through couchsurfers, had taken us to.

I settled into a corner and began to color in my art journal. I was totally engrossed by the woman with an enormous crown of hair emerging on the page--hair curling in every direction like winding country roads, plants sprouting from her head. Judy Wise, a web artist who unbeknownst to her is one of my art mentors (and who is indeed wise) says every picture you color is in some way a self-portrait. If so, who is this woman and how is she me? I pondered. I often ask the question and never get a linear answer; my task, according to Judy, is to “study that vast mystery and absorb it.”

Meanwhile, below her, what was this? A bra! A pink bra with rhinestone, starry nipples. Jung with would have a field day with my art pages. They undeniably express the Feminine: breasts, nipples, vulvas, pelvises, all things rounded, soft. But I’m also obsessed with frames and borders. Always have been, ever since junior high school when I would doodle connecting cubes on the margins of my Algebra 1 pages.

Suddenly I looked up. “Oh! Are you closing?” I asked the waiter in Spanish. Yes. Unfailingly, sometimes oppressively polite, they hadn’t told me. “Waiting for me?” Almost, but there were a few other customers. “I’ll get my stuff together,” I told him. But meanwhile a young boy of about 10 was eyeing my woman on the page, my “Mother Mexico,” as Barry later pronounced her. “Are you painting?” he asked, very seriously.

“Not painting,” I said. “I use color pencils, colored pens, and I glue pictures from magazines. A mix.” I showed him a couple of pages.

“Collage,” said a man sit nearby. They use the same word in Spanish.

“Do you have an art teacher? Do you take classes?” asked the boy.

“No,” I said. “Well, I’ve taken a few workshops, but never any long courses. It’s taken me years to develop an approach.”

“Do you speak English?”

“I do.” I smiled.

“Will you tell me some English words?”

I helped him with, “how are you, my name is, what’s your name, how old are you, where are you from.” Unfortunately, English in Mexican schools seems to be pretty hit-or-miss.

He was an interested student. Last week, in another town, I inadvertently stumbled on a group of youngsters waiting for their English teacher, and I gave them an impromptu ten-minute English class. When they would practice a statement in English, I would make them speak up, because they spoke almost inaudibly, similar to my experience with Latinos in US trainings. “Voz alta!” I exhorted the group as I left.

I sometimes wonder if I should teach English to kids when I’m in Guanajuato. The business consulting I had hoped to do in Mexico is not jumping off much, and I feel anxiety/pressure about it on many levels (questions about the business itself, my good but inconsistent mastery of Spanish, and my own chronic self-doubt), but whenever I’m with kids, I feel relaxed, light-hearted, and easy. Is there a message here, I wonder?

I left the café and joined Barry at VIPS, a tacky Mexican chain restaurant similar to Denny’s or Shoney’s or Hardee’s on the East Coast, its saving grace being that it has wireless. Barry’s carrot cake had just arrived, complete with tufts of real carrot on the icing. It would be a café night, which was fine, since it was now raining seriously with temperatures that felt like Humboldt County. I called my sister Arabella in New York on Skype (yeah, technology). From VIPS I adjourned to the pasta/pizza restaurant we had found a couple of days earlier, where I found that the non-house wine cost half what the “house wine” we had ordered before. I guess “vino de la casa” doesn’t mean the same in Mexico. I finished my coloring there, thick into the tendrils of Mother Mexico’s hair and the question of whether to add a border to the page or not.

And from there, back to our Hotel Limon, where we have the best room in the house, the only room with a balcony and fresh air. Many Mexican pensions are built around a lovely courtyard, which is aesthetically pleasing, but which means the rooms have windows facing in with air from the larger hotel space, but not necessarily fresh air, and a lack of privacy. Our hotel room with private bathroom and balcony is costing us a mere $16 a night. One of the curiosities of the economic crisis (“la crisis,” as it’s called here) is that the Mexican peso has fallen against the dollar, which is good for Americans but terrible for Mexicans.

I settled into bed and my nighttime reading, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Fadiman. A heartbreaking, beautifully rendered story involving culture, medicine, psychology, and international politics, about a child with epilepsy, as we would define it, but named, understood and treated radically differently by her Hmong parents.

At times I find it difficult to be on the road, I worry that I’m being self-indulgent, that I “should” be doing something more worthwhile, though what exactly that is, I’m not always sure. But after a day like yesterday I feel grateful. It is good to be outside Guanajuato, a place I love, but where I feel somewhat insulated, where I too easily can convince myself that I know Mexico. When I’m away I remember I’m just a beginner, and that’s good.

A Mexican Family Watching TV

2008-07-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

I visited my friend Lupita yesterday. Lupita runs a pension in Guanajuato with one of the most spectacular views in a city filled with spectacular views. She's a good old girl. About 40, she was married for years to an abusive husband, finally got up the gumption to leave him, and now has a full-time clerical job while managing the pension. Her recent erstwhile partner was nice enough, but a freeloader, so awhile ago she ditched him. I remember once he took us to the airport, waxing romantic about an upcoming pilgrimage he was going to walk, how it offered time for reflection. "What about Lupita?" I asked him. "Is she going?" No, she wasn't. She would stay back at the pension, washing and cleaning and readying the rooms for the next guests, while he "reflected." Why wasn't I surprised?

We sat at her dining room table and caught up. I admired how she had rearranged furniture.

Next to us sat a family from Mexico City watching TV. They are staying at the pension for two months while the dad has a short-term business contract.

While Lupita went to the kitchen to get me a glass of water, I inconspicuously studied the body language of the family. The armchairs and sofa were in a U-shape configuration. Dad sat in one chair, holding a boy of about three. At right angles to him, on the sofa, sat Mom, holding a baby swaddled in a blanket. Her and her husband's fingers just reached between their seats. Next to her perched a son of about six, sitting close to Grandma on his other side. In the armchair opposite Dad, sat a daughter of about 12.

Six of the seven family members were touching or sitting close to each other, if not on each other.

Even while watching television--that great enemy of intimacy--this family seemed to be a tableaux of warmth and affection.

On the Other Hand...

2008-07-24T05:49:00.000-07:00

Oh dear. Once again we are leaving Guanajuato and I am filled with ambivalence.

I love hiking and being places, like Guanajuato, where I have both a regular everyday life, and I can start walking in beautiful hilly country right from my front door, no car, no bus, no nothing necessary. It's not like I'm on a special tour or a vacation set up for it-- it's just ordinary life. This is freedom!

While in Guanajuato, I feel less alive thinking about Eureka. On the other hand, I like the area around Eureka. Barry and I can venture out on fun van outings and go cycling on our cool folding bikes. We can go backpacking. The fall season is within spitting distance and I daydream of bicycling and hiking amid glorious fall colors.

And I am not ambivalent about having my new wetsuit and swimming in the bay.

Still, I hate leaving here and wish I had set it up to stay longer. Yes, I could stay longer, but it would cost a bundle to change the airline reservations, and flight costs are so high as it is. If I stayed much longer I'd also have to change several appointments in Eureka which I am reluctant to do. One is with a client who is notoriously hard to schedule with at all. I'm ambivalent about the contract I hope (?) to set up because it would tie me to Eureka on a monthly basis. On the other hand (I have a lot of hands), I always enjoy doing the work. Meanwhile I'm also ambivalent about getting the Mexican work visa I'm applying for because the process is long and tedious and filled with pitfalls and I'm not sure how commited I am anyway.

I'm ambivalent about being ambivalent, at least. Isn't that an oxymoron?

Shopping Everyday

2008-07-24T05:27:00.000-07:00

My sister Jane and my 16-year-old niece, another Louisa, visited us in Guanajuato last week, and the subject--as usual in my family--turned to food and related topics, like cooking and shopping. We discussed the dramatic differences in our kitchens. Jane, who is raising three children, keeps much more food around than we do: baskets of fruit, dried fruit, cereals, bread. Not a lot of starch or junk, but a generous amount of food you can nibble on without having to cook or prepare. Our kitchen looks anorexic by comparison.

But it's not that we deprive ourselves. If I want munchies, I will go out and buy it, but I don't routinely keep stuff like that lying around the house because I'm likely to eat all of it. And we don't buy a lot of fruit at one time because it goes bad quickly.

The beauty of Mexico is that within 2-3 minutes of our home are a variety of shops selling the foods we like. They are open early and late. I buy my almost-daily 35-cent bag of raisins at one shop, Barry buys his granola-based cookies at another shop. We can buy an ice cream cone at various shops, fruit and vegetables at a produce store, rolls for Barry (I don't eat bread) at the bakery.

It's the ideal way to have your snacks and eat them too.

Towards Life

2008-07-14T07:05:00.000-07:00

I went on my first early morning meditation walk in three days this morning, choosing the street called "Terremoto" (Earthquake) and some of its side alleys. As I walked along, I mulled on the friend who is visiting us. In 1977, when I met her, she was the girlfriend of one of my housemates in a group home I shared in Vancouver, B.C. We met when we began chatting one evening, only a day after I had returned to Canada from my father's home, where I had been for six weeks since my mother died. All she had been told was that the upstairs bedroom was occupied by an American who was away. No one had told her the circumstances. I was deeply disappointed that no one had deemed it important enough to explain my absence. But my hurt feelings were extinguished by her interest, her concern, her questions. That evening we ended up sitting on the shaggy rug in the house bathroom talking until 3:00 a.m. And thus was our friendship born.

Fast forward thirty years. For the last three years, she has been severely depressed. She has suffered through a harrowing series of medications, dosages, psychiatrists, hospital stays, electroshock treatment, and more, seeking a solution. Nothing has helped; she still suffers from acute and severe depression. At one point she overdosed but did not succeed at ending her life. She woke up deeply disappointed.

It has been a long journey for Barry and me, too, waking up to the severity of her depression. It is difficult to explain the jumble of feelings that co-reside within me about her situation. Some moments I accept that she probably will kill herself one day, and maybe that's better than waking up (as she does now), morning after morning dreading the long hours and wishing she could sleep forever. Other moments--like yesterday, when I heard her laughing, or watching her swill a cold beer after a long hike--I argue with her in my mind, saying, "See? You do too like life! Prove it to me that you don't!" Still other times, I feel an unbearable sadness at the emptiness that seems to fill her, an emptiness I cannot, no matter how much I wish I could, lift.

We were thrilled that she made it down to Guanajuato. None of us, herself included, was sure she would make it, so deep is her inertia.

So there I was this morning, on my meditation walk/sit, walking down Terremoto, watching the way the street curved, admiring the newly painted red/orange church, catching the sun just emerging from the hills, puzzling over the aquaducts below and where they were located. I watched a young mother as she wheeled her stroller along a steep incline, then carefully tilted the stroller backwards to negotiate a few steps. A man balanced in his arms a large wicker basket of baked goods. A woman in her bathrobe swept the area in front of her doorstep. A white-haired, delicate-framed woman passing the red church made the sign of the cross.

Later, I sat high on the steps of the large square of the Alhondiga museum for the meditation portion of my walk. I watched a train of young people below me jogging around the square. "Uno!" called the coach. "Uno!" they cried in unison. "Dos!" "Dos! "Tres!" "Tres!" "Cuatro!" "Cuatro!" "Uno, dos, tres, cuatro!" A man, dressed in a navy suit, strode briskly down the steps and crossed the square, just missing the joggers.

Life, I thought. I spelled it out in my mind: L, I, F, E. Everyone is expressing life. Ordinary scenes of life. Tears came to my eyes.

After a few more minutes, I got up off the stone step and headed in the direction of home. I passed a road worker adjusting the roadblocks of a street being repaved, a shopkeeper opening her door for the day's business, a guy walking his motorscooter along the sidewalk. Even the taxis cruising by seemed full of positive purpose, taking people to their meetings, destinations, connections, callings. Simple purposeful actions affirming life.

Everyone moving along their life's trajectory. I affirm life, I thought. That we have life, that life is at all, this is good. That I am life, and have life, this too is good.

Being an Expat in Ireland, Amsterdam, Mexico

2008-07-11T04:26:00.000-07:00

Mexico is the only foreign country where Barry and I have bought a home, but it is not the only country where we considered living, and stayed for several months to try it out. I have been musing about our experiences living in different cultures and why I'm happy that in the end we chose Mexico.

In 1999, we spent four months in Ireland: two months bicycling the West Coast and two months renting an apartment in Clifden, one of the towns we had visited while cycling, a village about 50 miles west of Galway. Our apartment on the "High Street," which we rented from Eileen, the butcher's wife, had a view of the ocean. Almost every afternoon we would go on a beautiful bike ride along the Sky Road or the Bog Road, beneath the majestic Connemara mountains. We joined a writers' group, I went to a 12-step meeting, we hung out at cafes, we invited people over for drinks or meals-- in other words, we planted the seeds to nurture friendships, but the friendships themselves did not grow. We began to wonder if the historic clannishness of Ireland still had a modern-day form. When the November rains arrived in full force, we decided it was time to leave. We were glad we had savored the many beauties of Ireland, but it was never a place where we thought of actually settling. Of course, we were in a small, remote village; maybe things might have been different in a larger town.

In 2005, we spent three months in Amsterdam, first house-sitting for friends while they went on vacation, then subletting apartments. Our friends helped us get started by introducing us to a few of their friends. I went to professional women's networking events and writers' groups. I joined a gym and tried to get to know my Pilates teacher, who I made a good connection with, but she was busy and not available much. I contacted every referral I had, even the more remote ones. But once again, we didn't find it easy to make friends. We found the Dutch politically liberal, but not particularly open to strangers. I thought it might be because we were American, but a Danish woman told me she had had trouble fitting in as well. I felt intimidated at times by the brusqueness I experienced--most of the people we met seemed efficient, self-contained, busy, and impatient if you didn't get to your point right away. Once again, Amsterdam was a beautiful city to explore, but it never felt like a place to settle.

Meanwhile, both countries were expensive, cold, and wet. That too had an impact. Barry and I love to be outdoors and don't want to huddle next to a gas fire (racking up huge heating bills) for months on end.

We had already visited Guanajuato when we lived in Ireland and the Netherlands, but had never considered buying a home here. Now that we have, I ponder why Mexico feels so "right." In some ways, we aren't a particularly good fit with Mexican culture. We don't like crowds, we aren't fans of loud music, we don't stay up late, we don't dance a lot, and despite our ongoing efforts, we still struggle to understand Spanish.

But the warmth of the Mexican people is a powerful factor. People are kind, patient, and forgiving. Despite the poverty level here, Mexicans are, according to one study, among the happiest people on the planet. We find them welcoming to foreigners. They may resent our government, but they have never showed resentment to us.

Psychologically, I feel in some ways closer to Mexican culture than that of Ireland or the Netherlands. Perhaps it's because we're on the same continent; perhaps because of living in California, with its large numbers of Latinos... I'm not sure why. Geographically we're positioned on a north-south axis rather than an east-west one. We are only two time zones away from California rather than the five, had we moved to Europe. I'm happy that we are no further away from my family members here than in Eureka. I like feeling accessible and close.

And of course, the fact that Mexico is much more affordable than Europe, and has great weather--you can't argue with those.

"Que Sera, Sera" Enshrined in Concrete and Stone

2008-07-07T18:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, while walking in Guanajuato, I climbed a series of steps several feet high, with no guardrail and no warnings of danger. It didn't surprise me, because I see potentially hazardous spots like this all over town. A five-year-old or even an absent-minded 55-year-old could easily miss a step and break their bones, if not more.

Sometimes I see a gaggle of schoolkids pushing and shoving and walking several abreast, the way schoolkids do, inches away from a dramatic drop-off, and my hearts beats a little faster. I think, "Accident waiting to happen!"

It's not that the government can't afford to erect guardrails or put up signs; it spends plenty of money on maintaining and restoring the colonial churches and other historic buildings that gave Guanajuato its UNESCO cultural heritage stamp. You could argue that the city puts its money in the touristed areas, and this is true, but I've seen dangerous drop-offs even in highly-visited parts of town.

I've noticed that city engineering codes in Mexico, and many other countries outside the States, Canada, Western Europe and Australia, are just much more relaxed. The engineering codes seem to reflect a more permissive cultural attitude of "que sera, sera," enshrined in concrete.

Reviving an Old Tradition

2008-07-07T04:31:00.000-07:00

Sunday mornings I see dozens of amas de casa (housewives) shopping for food for their family's mid-afternoon Sunday meal. The main meal of the day in Mexico is always around 2 or 3, but seeing them shopping on Sunday, with their bulging plastic bags of food, always reminds me of how when I was growing up, we'd have our main Sunday meal during the day, after church.

Wanting to be in the rhythm of the community, I decided I too would plan a Sunday pot roast--metaphorically speaking. I don't eat meat, but I would cook a more elegant meal and serve it midday.

Yesterday I made a delicious--even more delicious than usual--and bountiful salad made with chard, tomatoes, zucchini, sliced onions, mushrooms, pasta, walnuts, goat cheese, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I cleaned the dining room table, set a place mat, and poured myself a glass of wine.

I didn't mind eating alone. Ever since 1971, I've felt pretty comfortable eating alone, whether at home or in a restaurant, and going to movies and other performances alone. That was the year I was attending the University of North Wales in Bangor, and my friend Kim and I planned one Saturday evening to go see They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Before the movie we strolled down to the pier to eat fish and chips out of newspapers. "I've changed my mind," she said. "I don't want to go to the movie."

"But I do," I objected.

"Well, you can go," she said.

"By myself?"

"Sure."

Her confidence was so unambiguous, I thought, well, why not? Off I went to the movie theater and got so engrossed in the film, I didn't give my solitude a second thought. And I never looked back.

My Sunday dinner yeterday was a feast, as was the company. Me.

Rumblings

2008-07-06T04:05:00.000-07:00

I said to two friends of mine recently, only partly in jest, "After expats finish working on their houses, what do they do here?" (This assumes, of course, that people finish working on their houses. In many cases, that doesn't happen. Ongoing "arreglos" on the house become part of the landscape).

I can't figure out what our life here is really going to be. Making inroads into friendships with Mexican women seems a slow process.

There are two big volunteer projects here: Amigos de los Animales, which offers support to Guanajuato's huge number of stray animals; and a domestic-violence shelter. Neither of those organizations draw me much. I am sorry about abused women and abused animals, but neither issue is where my heart lies.

Among the gringos, there's a craft group, a bridge club, a wine-tasting club. Nope.

I keep following nudges. I called a woman who leads a breast cancer support group. I'm interested in body issues, healing, mortality, support, and facilitation, so this sounds promising. She sounded very happy to hear from me, and asked me to call her the last week of July. Of course, I leave Guanajuato on July 30. (Sigh!) I called another woman, who I have met before, someone who coordinates workshops for people with cancer and their families. I invited her to have coffee. She asked me to call her back next week.

I have the same frustration here as I do in the States. I find out about a person/group that sounds interesting and call them. Usually I could meet that very day. They never can, of course. Not only are they unavailable, they often don't even want to set the date yet. It just seems to take forever.

I am applying for my work visa, but I'm not sure how commited I am to working here; it's more that I want to keep my options open.

I spend a lot of my days here moving physically, either hiking or walking around getting things done. Of course I love movement, so this is one of the great draws of Guanajuato. But I can't build my whole day around movement. Or can I?

I keep plugging away at Spanish. I have a new tutor, a funny, eccentric, old-fashioned man in his late fifties. But even with Spanish, I do wonder: for what practical reason am I hoping to better myself? I can navigate fine with the Spanish I have.

Guanajuato is an ideal place to work on a book. And my blog writing does flow much more here than in Eureka. These last two weeks on my own here, without Barry, have felt very much like a retreat. Is that what it will be for us? It's a great retreat environment, though a costly one if you consider airfares. We have chosen to live in a remote and not very accessible part of the USA, and an equally not very accessible part of Mexico!

I have all these rumblings, and then I decide, well, sufficient unto the day. Today's task is to support Girardo, our tile layer, in furthering the tiling of the downstairs rooms.

Every once in a great while, I worry: oh dear, has the Guanajuato project been a mistake? Investing all this time, money, commitment in this house, and then -- what if we don't spend much time here? Barry takes a larger view. He says, "It'll be what it'll be. Maybe we won't spend that much time here. That's OK, too." And if all else fails, it is a good investment.

In the past, I have felt guilty and even defensive admitting I wasn't sure about Mexico, and awkward that I spent more time in California (or traveling elsewhere) than in Mexico. It's silly. I keep reminded myself that the lock of focus I feel here, which I also struggle with in Eureka, is a situation I face, not a moral failing.

The Challenge, Opportunity, and Practice

2008-07-05T04:53:00.000-07:00

The other day, I gave a small desk to a friend. She and I carried the desk down our street to her car. It wasn't that heavy, but it was awkward. The street where her car was parked was narrow and crowded. She carried her end of the desk behind her, I was in the rear. As we jostled along on the narrow sidewalk, we passed a woman coming toward us.

I expected the woman to make way for us, since we were, obviously, I thought, carrying something awkward and less in a position to yield than she was. But she didn't make way at all. Somehow we moved forward and she moved in her direction. "How rude," I thought.

The challenge--and opportunity--I find living in Mexico is that it is so easy to immediately blame her response on being Mexican, and to create a whole story around it. "Mexicans this... Mexicans that... It's so weird how Mexicans... You know how in Mexico, people..." And so on.

Maybe her response was "Mexican."

Or maybe it was a host of other possibilities. Maybe her mind was off thinking about her child's autism, or her husband's affair, or her mom's diabetes--or just her grocery list.

Maybe she had insecure footing and didn't like to step off sidewalks without a lot of careful forethought.

Maybe she had vision problems.

Who knows?

What I do know is, if this happened in the States, I would not think, "Oh, how American of her!"

When something I don't like happens in Mexico, it's very tempting to blame it on Mexico. It's a knee-jerk reaction for me to make as a foreigner always bumping up against cultural questions.

I see it as a challenge, an opportunity, and an ongoing practice to notice the places where my mind can go.

A Mexico Moment

2008-07-05T04:02:00.000-07:00

The other day I bought an ice cream cone at a shop on the Jardin, Guanajuato's plaza. There were two employees working, a girl and a guy. The girl gave me the change in a handful of coins. I counted them, put them in my pocket and left, licking my cone. Less than a moment later, I had a doubt--I was pretty sure I had been given the wrong amount. I re-counted--sure enough, I was owed two pesos. I felt OK going back to reclaim the missing change since I had only just left the shop.

I went back in, explained, and showed them the change.

"Maybe you dropped the other coins," the girl said. (Actually, in Spanish, you never say, "you dropped," you say, "it dropped itself." Personal responsibility is not a core teaching in Spanish grammar!) But that was the message.

"No, I'm sure I didn't," I said, shaking my head with emphasis. We stood there a moment and I thought the girl was going to get two pesos out of the cash register. But I felt around in my pocket, though I didn't think anything was there, and suddenly felt something metallic. I pulled out a two-peso coin.

"Oops!" I smiled ruefully, now feeling a bit awkward that I had been so sure a moment earlier. (Yes, "oops" is a word in Spanish). "Disculpeme," I said.

As I left the shop, the guy was laughing his head off. Not in a mean way.

There was something about his reaction that felt very Mexican. He wasn't annoyed at me for thinking they were in the wrong (as I might have expected him to react), he didn't get self-righteous, he didn't act curtly or coldly towards me, didn't scold me or give me a lecture--he just laughed at my silly human foible. I loved it. I waved goodbye, laughing too.

Adventures in Delivery

2008-07-03T07:32:00.001-07:00

I am getting three of our floors redone. These rooms have old, faded, tired and dirty floors that, despite professional cleaning, still look old, faded, tired and dirty. I hired Girardo, tile fitter recommended by our friend Tom. At Garo, the tile factory in town, I ordered lighter-toned ("Tuscany Beige") porcelain tiles. Two of the rooms are quite dark, and I'm hoping the off-white tiles will lighten them.

Delivery is included in the price...that is, delivery to a home the pick-up truck can access. But in alley-laden Guanajuato, you often can't access the street. Our home isn't accessible by car (one of its advantages, except when it comes to deliveries). Tom pointed out that many people spend as much on delivery charges as on the materials. While I was at the store, the salesperson I was dealing with had a long conversation with the manager about the feasibility of getting the tiles (and grout and cement) to our house. Finally they decided they would do all they could, but they couldn't promise, since delivery trucks at our nearest drop-off point are, theoretically, only allowed five minutes to park.

The driver and I spoke on the phone while I was at the store, and he asked if I could meet him at the drop-off point that afternoon (two days ahead of delivery), and we would walk through the process and see if it was workable.

An hour later we met. While he stayed with the truck, his helper and I checked out two drop-off places at the bottom of Tecolte, our street. He didn't think either of them would work, because delivering all the material would take at least an hour. The driver asked if we could access Tecolote from La Panoramica, the highway above town that circumnavigates the city. The problem, I told him, is you can only drive down a little bit of Tecolote before you reach the barrier that prevents entry of motor vehicles, and it's a longer walk to our house from that place than from the bottom. "Well, let's go check it out," he said. So we wound slowly around town--driving around the twists and turns of Guanajuato is always slower than walking--ending up at La Panoramica, where he turned the truck around and began driving in reverse, since there's no turnaround point lower down. We came to a low bridge, where another road intersects Tecolote above it, and...of course!...the roof of the truck got stuck. The guys were able to unjam it and get out, but obviously the truck wasn't going to be able to fit.

"There is another truck the store owns, but it's in the shop," the guy said. Well, that's no use. A car in a shop will take a long time for repairs.

The driver's helper and I headed down Tecolote on foot, leaving the driver with the truck, and I walked him from the bottom of the street up to our house, showing him the route. There was no other option but to hope they would be able to hover down at the bottom of Tecolote long enough before the traffic officer told them to leave or threatened to fine them. Traffic penalties are high. The driver told me that tipping the transit officer $5 U.S. might help.

The day of the delivery, the driver called me from the store, saying he'd be there in 20 minutes and for me to meet him at the bottom of the street. I went on down and spotted the truck. He talked to the transito and was told that for the time being, parking was OK. We were in a bit of a lull, it being siesta-time, so traffic was light. There were three guys all told. The distance isn't far, but the incline is very steep and they were breaking out a sweat at the first trip. I sat on the steps inside the house, keeping count of the tiles and watching them work, not really liking being the Little Lady standing by, but knowing there was no real atternative. For one thing, each of the cartons of tile weighed about 80 pounds, and for another, I couldn't leave the door of the house open and unattended.

Another gringa we know who lives deep in a callejon bought a burro to transport things. Maybe that's the solution.

They worked hard. I gave them more than we contracted for, $15 each and $5 to the transito. But good. It's done. And today Girardo arrives to start the work. By the end of the week we'll have newly tiled floors, and it'll all be finished.

Awkward Moment

2008-07-02T04:08:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to see Swan Lake at the local theater, because our friend Alfredo's daughter was one of the ballerinas. After a couple of dances, I thought, Tchaikovsky must have written this work in order to give parents the pleasure of watching their young daughters dance. There were dozens upon dozens of little girls in their green, white, and red tutus, pirouetting around the stage. You could smell the perfume from bouquets of flowers all over the theater. The second act, when many of the first-act ballerinas were off duty, got a little chaotic as the little girls joined their moms in the theater rows, at times standing, running, or leaping down the aisle. Not all of them had learned audience behavior.

Afterwards I met up with Alfredo, who is a meditator, and his wife. His wife and I chatted while he went off for a moment. They have 3 children: a girl, 17, who I had not met, a younger girl, 8 (both in the ballet), and a son, 5. Because Alfredo had a couple of times with Barry and me referred to his older daughter as "my daughter" (rather than "our") I had mistakenly assumed his daughter was from a previous marriage. This was not a logical assumption on my part. Children from previous marriages are often ignored and forgotten about by their fathers.

"Oh no, she's our daughter," his wife said, correcting me. "And there are no others, as far as I know!" she joked. "And you? Do you have children?"

"Yes, I do. My step-daughters."

Polite smile, silence. No further questions like how old are they, where do they live. I didn't volunteer information, though now I wish I had.

Step-children, I've learned, are a dark subject in Mexico. Blended families don't exist here. Fathers do not want to raise a child who is not their own, which is why single mothers have difficulty remarrying. Oh, sometimes life in Mexico makes me sad.

I do occasionally refer to my step-daughters as just "daughters," but I didn't want to gloss here. Alfredo is a lovely guy, I feel very warmly towards him, and I wouldn't want one of them to be visiting and him to find out otherwise. Plus, their mother is alive and very much part of their lives.

Resting While Awake

2008-07-01T04:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, after buzzing around town, I came back to the house and sat on the modified Lazy-boy in the room of our home that serves as both sala and my office. I leaned back, propped my feet up, relaxed my arms, and breathed deeply. I felt like I had just started breathing again after an intense period of being so caught up in life, I had almost forgotten to breathe.

My eyes rested on the red-and-blue picture hanging on the wall next to my desk. It's of two Latino women, very lush and sensuous-looking, dressed in blue dressing-gowns. Their fingernails and toenails are painted red. They're sitting on a plush red sofa, drinking tea. A silver tray of tea cups and a kettle fills the space before them. White lilies and a black cat add to the scene. It's all very resplendent-looking.

I sat looking at the colors and shapes, my body still, my mind quiet. No thoughts that I can remember. Just to gaze softly at certain pictures can be deeply soothing and calming for me.

I love rest. I enjoy sleep too, but I'm not talking about sleep here because I'm rarely aware of it when I'm doing it (I know there are some who lucidly dream, but I don't). Nor do I mean formal sitting meditation, though I think of softly gazing at a picture, or watching light and shadows, as a kind of meditation. Rest is something I I haven't always appreciated. I enjoy it more and more.

Messy Mangos

2008-07-01T03:24:00.000-07:00

I don't like my hands getting sticky or dirty. It's a silly thing, but it's true. Unfortunately this means there are a lot of pleasurable things in life I avoid. Like gardening, for instance. Or eating sticky fruit.

I eat dry fruit like apples and bananas, but I usually avoid sticky fruit like oranges. Figs I do like, and can tolerate them because even though they lean towards stickiness, they're small enough to consume without getting messy.

But the mangos in Mexico this season are so juicy and yummy that I have escaped my phobia and allowed myself to get sticky and dirty.

I peel the mango and dig into it over the kitchen sink. I don't usually approve of eating over the kitchen sink--it's kind of gross (like eating in the bathroom, another rule I have, which I have been known to break), but eating over the sink allows me to be messy and spill freely, without fear of repercussions. See, spilling is another of my phobias. I hate spilling on clothes, rugs, fabrics. (And wouldn't you know it, I married someone who seems to have a special tendency to spill. Go figure).

I'm eating a mango everyday, getting my fingers sticky, making a mess and loving it!

Tipping Epiphany

2008-07-01T03:00:00.000-07:00

I was at my favorite cafe the other evening having my favorite snack--totopos--chips with salsa, the delicious Mexican kind, fresh from the oven, with a Corona. I watched the action in the plaza, the people, the dogs. Classic Mexico evening.

But all good things come to an end, and before long I looked up and saw that my plate of totopos was empty. I signaled the waiter and asked for another plate. "It may not be authorized," he said, sounding reluctant. One serving of totopos is usually on the house; more than that depends.

Moments later he returned with a second heaping plate of totopos. I rewarded him with a big smile.

Another few moments later, I looked up again, and tragically, once again they were all gone. But this time even I was not going to order a third plate. So I got the check and paid.

Now, the existential question: How much to tip? The bill was only 15 pesos for a beer (about $1.50 U.S.). Normally I'd leave 5 pesos, or 50 cents. Sometimes, if you just have a drink, people leave nothing. But he had, after all, enabled me to have not one but two generous helpings of my favorite snack. Dinner, really. He could have found a way to charge me for the second plate, or denied me it.

I pulled out a 10 peso coin (one dollar), and left it on the table, stood up, and walked away, my head high, smiling at the waiter as I left, feeling a sense of pride.

This probably sounds ridiculous. But I'm not exaggerating. That is how I felt. Whereas usually I would have left 5 pesos or nothing, and skulked away feeling guilty and defensive.

See, I'm notoriously cheap, and I often do battle within myself over what I "should" leave versus what I can get away with leaving, and often the "get away with" family fighter wins.

But this particular evening, I suddenly had a powerful insight: I tip for me. I tip so I can hold my head high and walk away with self-respect and dignity. I tip so I can feel peace of mind and be free of arguments in my head the rest of the evening.

This insight feels profound. I hope it'll make it easier for me to tip in the future, knowing I'm doing it for me and no one else.

Mexican Gods

2008-06-26T14:03:00.000-07:00

I am back in Guanajuato. Yesterday and today I returned to the meditation group that meets based on the school calendar. We will take a break starting Friday, due to university vacation.

Both days, I felt so safe in the meditation room. So held. What is it? I wondered. Why do I feel so safe here, and less so when meditating with my Eureka group? It's not the personalities; I like the people in both places. Maybe it's because this group meets daily, 8:00-9:00 sharp. Whether I'm present or not, it's always there, and I find comfort in its steadiness.

For half an hour we sit facing outward. Today Ofelia sits next to me. Ofelia is a ballerina with a dancer's name and a body. She and her dance group performed in Panama in the spring, her teacher Lola, another meditator, told me yesterday.

The bell rings. We each relax in our own way for a minute or two. People stretch, do yoga poses. Another bell rings. We stand, bow. Another bell. We turn and walk slowly, barely moving. My feet cup the tiles. They "hug" the floor, I think, enjoying the image. They greet the floor, meet the floor, trust the floor, bask in its support, yield to it, lean into its strength.

But who is holding whom? The floor is holding me and I am also holding the floor.

Yesterday, meditating, I started with my usual greeting, the opening I hear myself say in most of my meditations: "Hi God, here I am." The words always remind of when I was 12 and 13, attending summer camp in the North Carolina mountains. After breakfast, the whole camp would assemble by the flagpole, and each cabin leader would respond, "All here or accounted for."

But this time my greeting felt like a challenge, as in, "OK, God, so? And? Just what are you expecting out of me this time? Huh?" As if I were arming myself, preparing myself to do battle.

Just who is my God, I asked myself. An Aztec god I have to fight? A lover whose arms I fall into? A soul friend? How do I approach You--warmly, tenderly, affectionately, with enthusiasm and joy, "Oh good! I'm so happy to see you again! It's been ages. I can't wait to catch up."

Or with fear, anxiety, suspicion, guilt? Are you the god who judges and absolves, twin sides of the same coin, from whom I beg for mercy?

We become the God we imagine, my Unity minister used to say.

An orange-red flowery garment, kimono-like, sways around my shoulders. The bell rings.

Direct Feedback!

2008-03-10T19:46:00.000-07:00

My teacher Chely and I were discussing a man we both knew of, but I had never met. She said, "He's prematurely gray, like you."

"I am?" I said.

"Yeah, your skin looks very young, but your hair is partly gray."

"Oh." I tried to laugh it off. I'm not used to being people being so direct about my physical characteristics.

I heard something similar the other night at a concert. The MC said, "Now the 'gordito' singer will perform." ('gordito' means plump).

About six men out of the chorus surged forward ready to fill the bill. None of them seemed embarrassed.

In Mexico, people think nothing of saying "You're fat! Stop eating so much!" One of our teachers, when she started graduate school in Mexico City, started eating compulsively out of stress. Her housemate scolded her, "You should never eat like that!" When our teacher told me what her housemate said, I felt very protective of her. "That's none of her business!" I fumed. "It's so inappropriate!"

Here we go again. Another cultural difference. We in the States have become so sensitive. We are so much more careful, and when on the receiving end, more easily offended. Here in Mexico, there are far worse things to worry about.

Daddy's Version of Guanajuato

2008-02-23T02:54:00.002-08:00

After returning to Harrisburg after his week's visit to Guanajuato, Daddy wrote a very personal, and emtirely accurate report to other family members about his experience. In his own words:

"...G. is a colorful town of narrow streets filled with people going some place (usually in a hurry), selling things, playing a violin, trying to persuade other people to let their car through, delivering huge (and heavy) bottles of drinking water, cooking gas, loading some 15-20 bricks on their backs with a wide band running across their forehead and then starting up a perpendicular street, drinking coffee from the numerous restaurants in each block, and on and on. Off of each narrow streets smaller streets and alleys, some so narrow that only one person can get through at a time, climb steeply into the stratosphere. The street running to B&L's goes up so steeply that what you might call the sidewalk is a series of long steps. It goes up about 150 feet, then turns sharply to the right and rises much more steeply about the same distance to B&L, after which it begins to climb seriously. B&L themselves hop, skip and jump through all of this, paying little attention to whether the street goes up or down, while Dottie and I pant and listen to our hearts pounding. When I declined to climb with Louisa to a heroic statue of a famed miner hero of the Mexican Revolution (there's a convenient funicular RR very handy to get to it), she retaliates by inviting me to go back to the house by another route, which could be called the SSS or "street of steep steps," Ladies using it are well-advised to wear slacks.

There is no open ground between houses, except for the occasional alleys, which are all paved over, so any bare ground is virtually non-existent. There are trees in the numerous small squares, totally filling small rectangles of what I suppose is earth, but which is never visible. Except for a few (probably owned by los gringos), all houses, which are almost all rectangular in shape, rather like blocks piled on each other, compete for the title of "most colorful," or "strongest color." House colors are like the food: the hotter the better. Red, yellow and sometimes blue, are the favorites. This applies both to exterior and interior walls. L&B have one wall painted a quiet, restful green. It's nice just to sit and look at it, but meanwhile you can almost hear the other "mas fuerte" colors surrounding it expressing their contempt.

Before arriving, I rather had the idea that G. reached up to a peak; well, it does, but there are several, all outside of town, except for the one at the top of the funicular. So the town itself sort of sits in a bowl with B&L maybe about half-way down the bowl. Oh, I forgot to say: not only are there all these houses, and from L&B's position on the bowl, you can get at good look at houses both below you but also on the other side of the bowl. And also, interspersed among all of these are numerous churches, each with its own set of bells, and each with a slightly different idea of correct time. Or maybe it's a matter of pecking order, but anyway the one closest to L&B seemed to begin first, followed by another a little distance away. Perhaps closeness to L&B determines the order.

L&B's day begins, naturally, with a meditation, performed by a Japanese monk (?), consisting of 20 minutes of kneeling facing one direction, then a walk-around, then 15 minutes in another direction. (I was allowed to sit, and the monk dutifully came and positioned my head properly so that I couldn't see my watch.) Due to confusion, I referred to the process as the Beatitudes, and I apologize, B, for my irreverence. I failed to reach any notable conclusions during my meditation, but I gather that's not really the objective. I've participated in two of these with Barry, the other one in Seattle, and given my age, I'm discouraged to report that the likely number of future such opportunities may be limited. Que lastima!

Well, enough of that, you get the picture. But then the activities. Most of Guanajuato's movers and shakers seemed to know L&B very well, because a bunch of them came almost every night for drinks. I discovered that tequila is not a bad drink after all, though I'm about to drop this report in a few minutes and have a martini just for old times' sake. Also, there were workmen applying "fuerte" colors to the walls, L&B's agent was in and out, as was a dignitary from the city, which is very suspicious of why they want to improve the place. But you should see it, A & R, it just glows. Their major problem is what to do with all the rooms they'll have when they finish fixing it up. My suggestion is extra guest rooms.

One unusual aspect of G. for a town that size is that it has a number of underground auto passages, which run every which way, and reminded Barry of "The Third Man," which I saw years ago but had forgotten the Vienna sewers (Barry reminded me). Oh, and another most unusual aspect: no traffic lights in all of G., and traffic proceeds without horns, with cars stopping continuously to let pedestrians cross.

All this activity was too much, Dottie and I took off (and of course that was required by the 3-day visit rule) and went to San Miguel de Allende on the bus (L&B were beginning to look a little harried). The bus was a startling contrast to US buses: the drivers all wore dark suits, white shirts and ties. The buses were clean and on time, and the agents were available and responsive. They even gave us a free soda and some crackers.

San Miguel, in contrast to G., has lots of Americans, many of them the arty type. Our motel was operated by one of them, who favored us with a collection of his paintings. Truly, I would have preferred that he not have done that. He's been there ten years, and is working up to the lean and hungry stage of artistic success. San Miguel is not as hilly as G., but otherwise has a good many similarities. We walked throuigh part of the town, ending up at the local cathedral, very reminiscent of Ecuadorean Catholic churches, replete with gold and silver. The park in front of the cathedral turned out to be the gringo hangout, and all through town there were a lot more Americans, who have made San Miguel much more of a US retirement community than is Guanajuato.

Another aspect of life in G: at night the whole town turns out for a party: a band begins to play at a small square near (meaning horizontally, you still have to go down and up to get there) B&L's; some danced, some drank beer, some sat around and listened. This wasn't because we were there, it just happened.

Every morning after meditation, L&B take Spanish lessons, though they are both remarkably fluent, so one morning I swallowed my pride and sat for an hour with Carlos. I offered him an hour of instruction in Hungarian in payment, but he politely declined that. But I did remember to tell him about my discovery years ago that Quechua and Hungarian have the same grammatical structure, I forget what the word is, but they both add pronouns at the end of nouns, not place them separately at the beginning. I didn't follow through on that enough to find out whether Hungarians came originally from the Andeans or the Andean Indians from Central Asia. Anyway, I was pleased to find out I can still count to ten in Spanish.

So, anyway, that's the report. Now, for the thank you part.

Thank you, Louisa and Barry. A wonderful experience. Thank you for meeting us at the bottom of your hill--that is, street and lugging our suitcases up to the top of the mountain. Thank you for all the tequila you laid out for me so I wouldn't have to drink the local water. Dottie says thank you for holding her hand goiing up all the mountains (you called them streets) and calling her "Sweetie." In fact, it was a Great Trip. When can we come back?"

Socializing

2008-02-18T12:29:00.001-08:00

We arrived in Guanajuato two weeks ago. Daddy and Dottie, his partner, arrived a week ago tomorrow. Last night Daddy made a list of all the people he had met.

--Carlos, our 33-year-old Spanish teacher. Daddy joined me in my class with Carlos, and subsequently took a class himself, to review his Spanish from 45 years ago.
--Chely, another teacher, also age 35
--Rebeca, our neighbor up the street, and Diana, her renter; both dear friends of ours
--Tom, our friend who drove us to Valenciana and Santa Rosa for a lovely day's outing
--Miriam, whom we have house-sat for a couple of times
--Alfredo, flautist in the symphony orchestra and meditation friend
--Ofelia, another meditator
--Jim and Jenny, our "anchors" who are artists, and have lived here 15 years
--Dean, artist, Marie, oboe player, Thomas, 5-year-old son, neighbors and friends

So in a week they met about 15 people. What amazes me is how active and social our life is in Guanajuato. In Eureka, we had a Boxing Day party the evening of the 26th, our annual tradition when we're there, and we probably had about the same number of people as Daddy and Dottie met here. But it all happened in one evening, whereas here in Guanajuato we run into people everyday as we walk here and there. Gatherings happen easily and spontaneously, without formality or much planning. In neither place are you more than a 10 to 15-minute walk away, but that is the point--in Guanajuato most people walk, whereas in Eureka/Arcata, most people still drive. I love the ease of mixing that is part of the culture here.

Another Cultural Assumption

2008-02-14T03:22:00.003-08:00

We have a huge window in one of our rooms that is completely exposed to the outside--no glass, frame, nada--so we asked Fabian to order acrylic to use as a temporary cover. Later, when we have permits, we can get a window frame built and glass it in.

I was so excited to start protecting this room. But my heart fell when I saw the acrylic Fabian had ordered. It was opaque. I had no idea opaque acrylic even existed; I have only seen transparent.

But it's such an obvious misunderstanding. Mexicans have an aversion to clear glass. Their homes are inward-oriented, with the goal of privacy; they have little interest in looking outside, much less allowing passers-by to look inside. Of course Fabian assumed I meant opaque acrylic.

Meanwhile I'm the opposite extreme. Half the time I don't bother with curtains. And opaque windows in bathrooms? Don't get me started. They seem prudishly Victorian to me. Where are all the people standing outside a bathroom trying to peer in, anyway?

I have not looked at houses enough in other Latin countries to know if this orientation towards privacy is common throughout the Latin world, or only Mexico. Now I'm curious. I sense it is a legacy from the Arabs.

I considered replacing the opaque with transparent acrylic, but since the acrylic costs $80, and is temporary anyway, my economic conservatism won out.

First Day Back

2008-02-08T11:20:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was our first day back in town since leaving in mid-December. We immediately noticed the sense of movement and energy in the streets, the colors, the warmth, and the way people inhabit the outside.

I spent much of the day doing errands. I bought a mirror at the glass shop and produce, yogurt, milk, and wine at four different shops; took my print of the two flamboyant sisters to the frame shop; bought curtain rings. By the time I had completed these tasks, I had accummulated 12,660 steps on my Pedometer. I love that! I love the way just going about my daily business in Guanajuato, in and of itself, provides a framework of fitness without doing anything extra or artificial. I try to walk in California too, but I always notice when I'm in Mexico how much more I walk here, and how interwoven walking is with everyday tasks. I don't plan a walk as "exercise"; it's just part of daily life. It's the way life was for most of human history, and I feel in keeping with ancient traditions when I copy my ancestors.

Guanajuato Gringa Goes To Turkey

2007-09-11T03:27:00.000-07:00

Merhaba! That's "Hello" in Turkish.

Talking to my friend Trisha yesterday, I told her I had wanted to keep writing my blog but I felt funny writing something called "Guanajuata Gringa" when I haven't been in Mexico, have not been thinking much about Mexico, and in fact, am departing for Turkey today for a long visit. Earlier, Barry had offered to build me another blogsite for my non-Mexico stuff, but that felt too complicated.

Trisha said, just call it, "Guanajuato Gringa Goes to Turkey."

Something shifted into a different slot in my brain. Duh! So that's the decision. We are flying to Turkey and I'll write about it.

Barry and I decided only about three weeks ago. We had just enough frequent-flyer miles to get to Frankfurt, Germany, from where we'll fly to Istanbul. We looked up what available days were left to fly on United's website, and--hmm!--the only day left in all of Sept. and all of Oct. was Sept 11. The little window on the calendar stood out in gray next to all the blank unavailable dates.

Funny. I know several friends flying today. We're all taking advantage of Sept. 11. I bet the airports will be quieter.

We've been to Turkey before, so we're not trying to cram everything in. This time, we'll take a train from Istanbul to Ankara and explore Hittite ruins outside Ankara. Later we'll hike part of an ancient route known as the Lycean Way. I'm excited about being in a Muslim country for the first time in 7 years. So much has happened geopolitically. Not good, of course, but from a traveling point of view, interesting.

Some people inevitably ask, "Aren't you nervous?"

Not for a second. It's a great time to go. Fall is a good season. There will be fewer Americans because most Americans are still afraid to go to Muslim countries, not that Turkey is all that Muslim. As a culture Turkey is at a crossroads, examining whether it wants to stay secular and join the EU, or whether it will become more fundamentalist. (Sounds familiar). I like talking to people about culture and religion, how they feel about their country and its future, what they are happy about, what their fears are. I hope Barry and I can offset some of their probable stereotypes about the U.S. We have signed up with a great organization called Couchsurfing (www.couchsurfing.com) where you meet people from other cultures for tea/coffee and sometimes stay on their couches, so we already have 4 people to meet and one person to stay with in Ankara.

I do want to describe my experiences; on the other hand, I've been trying to reduce some of my shadow life online, and live life more than write about life. Still, I'll post some blogs.

On the Mexico front, our house still has permit problems and our remodeling is still on hold. We have, however, moved along and are closer to resolution.

All right! Onwards!

Wake-Up Call

2007-07-14T04:46:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I was grocery shopping in Commercial Mexicana, Guanajuato's main supermarket. When I got to the checkout, the cashier informed me that there was a sale on wine, and I could actually buy three for the price of two. Yes, I said, I'd like that, and she asked another employee to get me a third.

After she ran up my purchases, I checked my receipt. Not infrequently I find discrepancies, although they're usually my error in misreading the price. This time, the yogurt price was considerably higher than usual, by about 4 pesos, or 40 cents. I asked the cashier if I could leave one bag on the counter, while I checked a price. I took my daypack, including wallet, with me.

At the dairy counter, I noticed another 3/2 sign, and realized I could get 3 yogurts for 2. Hadn't seen it before. I picked up another yogurt to add to the two I had, and was headed back to the cashier's when I saw a long line. Oh dear. This being Mexico, I thought, I will probably have to go through the whole line again, and perhaps have to return the previous two yogurts and repurchase them as part of a threesome. I might even have to get the refund at another line, then stand in line at the regular cashier's all over again to buy the yogurts as a set. Rules! Who needs them? So very quickly, I opened the zipper of my daypack and thrust the yogurt in. When I reached the counter, I picked up my other shopping bag, nodded to the cashier, and was heading towards the exit, when...

I was apprehended by a security guard. Oh God! What was I thinking? There are mirrors all over the place. Politely, he said, "you have a yogurt in your backpack."

I said, "You're right. I'm sorry," and told him the truth: saw the 3/2 sign belatedly, didn't want to stand in line, didn't think I was really being dishonest, etc., etc.

To my amazement, he nodded, said, "OK," and I left the store, trembling, kicking myself, wondering if I would be recognized again there, treated as suspicious, watched.

........

Later I told two of my Spanish teachers about the incident. Both of them laughed and made light of it. But they agreed, I was treated like royalty. If either of them had done this, a guard would have been upon them in a heartbeat, treating them roughly, scolding them, requiring them to open their whole bag of groceries. They might even have been handcuffed. I shivered, listening, not just at what I barely avoided, but by the sinister contrast between what locals would undergo, and what happened to me.

I have a long history of feeling above the rules. Many rules are stupid, I tell myself. I am very aware of that perspective I hold, and feel less and less comfortable with it, but I don't find it entirely easy to change. I've cultivated it for years, and in situations like the supermarket, I almost instinctively defy the rules.

But this attitude has implications that are more blatant here in Mexico. Why was I able to ignore the rules at Commercial? Because I'm privileged. I got off lightly because of being white and gringa.

I'm privileged in the U.S., too, but it's even easier there to not notice. When was the last time I was profiled? When was the last time I noticed I had never been profiled?

Intellectually I recoil from a sense of privilege. It's against everything I like to think I stand for. I abhor the class system; I believe in equality and justice.

Yet I often forget I am part of that class system, though I don't think of myself that way. The fact that I'm blind to my position of privilege is, itself, a sign of that very privilege.

I am different here. I'm in a different category. I rarely think about it, but I am. The incident was a wake-up call.

Home? My Life Question

2007-07-09T18:06:00.000-07:00

My father, a retired Foreign Service Officer, was recently interviewed as part of an Oral History project, and during the interview he was asked how his children looked back on the diplomatic lifestyle they were involuntarily part of. He emailed my sisters and me, asking how we saw it now: gain or loss?

This is the gist of what I said:

I'm often asked that question, and I always say, absolutely, gain. I doubt I'd be embarking on a life in Mexico had I grown up in Florence, S.C. (near where my dad was born and raised), or even Bethesda, Maryland, where I lived during junior high school. There were losses, of course. Moving from a small, intimate school in Quito to a sophisticated metropolitan junior high outside Washington D.C. was a hugely difficult shift, and I wasn't prepared at all, not that there was much he and my mother could have done to prepare me. The fact that I went to 7 schools between ages 13 and 18 left me with insecurities that dogged me for years.

Today, even as I am making a home in Mexico, I do wonder where 'home' is. But I notice a lot of people I meet who seem very confident about home aren't particularly interesting to me. I'm far more attracted to people who have had to adapt to differentness in environment and culture and language.

The world is teeming with people who have to invent their own definition of home. Every part of the world has its refugees, immigrants, displaced people. I am nothing like a political or economic refugee, and I would never pretend to be. But I am drawn to people like them. And I often feel more comfortable with them than with the people who lived in one place and developed roots.

The Poetry of Rooftops

2007-07-06T19:05:00.000-07:00

A rainbow before the rain? Who am I to argue with loveliness? Still. I thought a rainbow didn't herald rain, but announced its glory after. I'm sitting on my favorite perch, the step up to our room on the roof, the Sky Room. Gray heavy masses hover over chariot-like bundles of cumulus. Horns. Dogs. Distant music. Is "the environment" always as right here, in front of you, around you, to your left, to your right, above you, as it is in Guanajuato? I don't think so. I think that's one reason people move to Guanajuato--there's something muffled about many of the places we leave behind.

Dark sinewy lines thread through the breastlike curves of the clouds, swimming rapidly like sperm. What will the clouds do next? Are they alive, these clouds? Not by conventional definition. Yet they move, change, join, separate, are born, die. Meiosis in action. Isn't that life?

To my left, the chain link fence, filled with green plastic sheeting, that our neighbors built for reasons we've never understood. To my right, T-shirts, sheets, pillow cases swing on clotheslines. The poetry of rooftops. Ever since my boarding school days, when I'd find solace in the sanctuary of the St. Mary's School fire escape, gazing at the tops of houses in Raleigh, N.C., I've loved rooftops. So did my buddy Francie from "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."

Suddenly, without warning, the peal of church bells. They stop as soon as they start. And the threat--or is it the promise?--of rain.

Rock music and roosters co-habitate.

There are plenty of laws in Mexico, but they seem an abstraction, less about impacting daily life than do the laws in the States, like, say, zoning, or no smoking. You can play music as loud as you want here, and no one cares. Why would they? People breathe music here. Early one Christmas morning in the late 90s, Barry and I hiked from the nearest village, where we had spent Christmas Eve drinking tea with our pension owner, to the national park in Michoacan where the famous monarch butterflies gather after their long flight south from Canada. We walked in the early morning stillness, the silence interrupted only by birdsong. I felt like one of the Wise Men, soon to come upon my jewel. Suddenly an artillery of radio sounds blared out of a farm. We jumped, wanting to hide from the assault. The screaming announcer's voice followed us for half a mile before fading.

The thing about immediacy is, you don't get to pick and choose. You get it all, the sweet and the shit.

Between the moment when I was gazing out at the dusky world, and when I glanced down to scribble on my journal page, the evening lights went on.

God, may I be open to this smelly, earthy, lusty sensuality. May it steep into my worrying, restless, busy mind and rest me. May I be one with this coarse, beautiful world,

The gray sperm lines have merged with the breasts. And the rainbow, it went off to find another pot of gold.

The Bicyclist

2007-07-05T11:15:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I climbed La Serena, one of the hills around town. When I reached the cross at the top (there's always a cross on top!), I saw a lone figure perched in front of the cross, legs dangling off the painted white tabletop structure the cross sits on, mountain bike parked nearby.

I was racing against the last few seconds to touch the cross before my personal midnight hour. "I won!" I crowed in Spanish. He looked at me curiously. "I'm competing with myself to see if I can reach my goal before the deadline I assigned myself," I explained.

He laughed. I climbed up onto the platform and before long we were talking about his route up, my route up, my timing, his timing, where he got his bike, and how much bikes cost in Mexico ($1,000 for the high-tech mountain bikes you need on these rough, steep dirt tracks).

He--Diego--was born in the home in Guanajuato where his parents still live. Even in 1977, the year of his birth, babies were still born at home, though he told me most babies nowadays are born in the hospital. His grandmother was the midwife. I told him my birth story about being born in a car.

Now, he is embarking on his second Licensiada (B.A.) in English. (Studying for a second B.A. seems to happen often here. I think it's a way of avoiding the job market, which is notoriously discouraging). He told me he had an 11-year-old daughter, an ex-wife who worked at the University of Guanajuato, and a mother-in-law who also did.

"Is it awkward running into them?" I asked. No, he said, he got along with all of them. The next day, a Sunday, he would pick up his daughter from his ex's and take her to the park.

I told him I understood that single Mexican fathers often lost touch with their children. "Yes, it's true," he said. "It's a bad situation, and the children pay for it. The courts should automatically deduct child support because fathers won't pay it voluntarily."

"Was your daughter planned?"

"No," he said ruefully. "I was 19, my ex was 18. We were so young."

"It is hard for me to understand, even though it happens in my country too, when young people don't use birth control. It's so sad. Their choices are so limited, especially the woman's."

"Yes," he agreed. "It's the influence of the church, the family, the government. We are changing, but very slowly."

It was getting dark and I had some steep sections to negotiate, so I said goodbye, thinking as I hopped across a few rocks how I have often have this kind of conversation with women in Mexico--but rarely with an intelligent, friendly young man. Looking back up, I saw him climbing onto his bike, and gave him a wave.

Homework Assignments

2007-07-05T05:52:00.000-07:00

My teacher, Chely, gives great homework assignments. She hands me a list of idioms I have to learn, with the requirement not to look them up in the dictionary but to ask a person. This is a great tool for breaking the conversational ice, a device I could have used a week ago, when I was sitting in an audience of women waiting to hear a speaker on breast cancer. I couldn't get past, "Do you come to these talks often?"

So, last week I approached a guy sitting on a bench in the Jardin (the town square), named Jose. I learned a bunch of expressions using the word "pelo" (hair). "No tengo ni un pelo de tonta"-- "can't fool me" and "por un pelito"--"within a hairline"). Then Jose and I kept on talking about his unemployment, about the Americans who come and go, about where I was from in the U.S. As with most Mexicans I've met, he knew the names of many U.S. states, and knew there was both a Washington, DC, and a state of Washington (both of which are places I've lived). I believe Mexicans are well-informed for two reasons: one, many have family members scattered around the States, and two, generally people outside the U.S. know more about our country than Americans do about theirs.

Meanwhile, I also helped Chely. She was getting ready for her orals to obtain her degree in Teaching Foreign Languages (she speaks and can teach Spanish, English and Japanese). Since all three of the professors evaluating her were American, she asked for my feedback on her presentation skills. We went through her English-language PowerPoint presentation analyzing organization, structure, and delivery. I made suggestions on clearer linkages between concepts, reminded her to look at her audience and not at the slides, and suggested that SHE let the professors know when and how she would respond to questions (rather than just letting it happen).

In the last slide, she had a line that started, "Teachers should..." I suggested rewording it to take out the "should." As written, it sounded moralistic, which is a common and accepted tone in Mexico, but not in the States. My point of view is that many Americans don't like language that is over-directive.

She sailed through her orals, winning unanimous acclaim from all three professors. Yippee! I'm thrilled I was able to help her feel more confident, as I know she feels helping me master Spanish.

Making Friends in Mexico

2007-06-28T05:06:00.000-07:00

I went over to San Miguel de Allende a few weeks ago to hang out with an old friend and colleague of mine from Bay Area days. She and her husband moved to Mexico several years ago, bought a piece of land about ten minutes from town (within a few minutes' walk of the pilgrimage village, Atotonilco), and turned the two existing structures on the property into a home and a studio/workshop. Susan is the author of six nonfiction books and Mayer, her husband, buys, sells, and collects Mexican folk art. Their spacious, luminous home and garden, recently featured in a Phoenix home magazine, are studded with folk art. They share their home with the 21-year-old son of a Mexican couple who they befriended years ago, and his new wife, who is studying English in town.

We talked a lot about our lives. Susan, for as long as I have known her, has been the Queen of Organizing. True to form, she has been busy organizing since she arrived in San Miguel. She founded the San Miguel Author's Sala (www.sanmiguelauthors.com), a brainstorming group, and a women's meditation group that meets at her home. She was afraid when she left Berkeley, she told me, that she was leaving the garden that had nurtured and sustained her for 30 years--but in fact has found even richer soil here. She does not speak much Spanish, though Mayer gets by better.

I told Susan that some gringos in Guanajuato feel superior to those in San Miguel, taking pride in feeling we are more embedded in the culture, speaking Spanish, and living among Mexicans rather than in gated communities. The speaking-Spanish part I think is part fantasy; from what I can tell, many Guanajuato gringos don't speak much Spanish.

"We hate the gated communities too!" Susan said. "We would love them to go away!" She is concerned about San Miguel's growth, that the City Council isn't putting the brakes on development. She and Mayer have been involved in a project to clean up the Laja River that empties into San Miguel. Through fund-raising, the joint Mexican and gringo volunteer group have built a gray water treatment center, and are now raising money for the second stage, a sewage treatment center. There are over 50 charities that gringos get involved in in San Miguel, including teaching English, providing hot lunches to children in nearby villages, and reducing graffiti.

All three of my Spanish teachers love San Miguel, and they don't see much difference between the expats here and the ones there. "You're all gringos, wherever you live," one of my teachers said. "I love San Miguel," she went on. "Gringos bring money, they employ people, they help the economy. I think they're great!"

The afternoon I was there, we went to a potluck at a neighbor's home. I chatted with a Brazilian guy, who was a meeting planner married to a Mexican, and with his mom, a Trinidad-born ceramic artist, visiting from Rio. And talked to a young couple--he an engineer, recent grad of the Tech of Monterrey School of Management, she an art gallery owner in San Miguel. I enjoyed mixing in a cultural salad of professionals who were ambitious, liked to talk about work, and enjoyed international travel. I made several good contacts and enjoyed networking, which I don't do much in Guanajuato. While it's easy to meet artists and musicians in Guanajuato, I don't meet many independent consultants or entrepreneurs, because Guanajuato is not a business community; its industries are the university and government. I miss connecting with other consultants, as well as women in my age group.

I ask my teachers, "Where are the Mexican women my age in Guanajuato? I don't meet them very often."

"Most of them are at home takng care of their grandchildren, or cooking," they say.

I'm ambivalent about how involved I want be with other gringos in Guanajuato. I know I'm not alone. I often hear a gringo saying, "I don't associate much with the gringo community!" --said with an air of pride, as though not relating to gringos is a superior lifestyle than relating to them. I smile ruefully when I hear this tone, recognizing it in myself; I have that same sense of misplaced pride. Yes, I do see it as misplaced. As visitors to Mexico, I think we expats go out of our way to try to accept rather than judge the different ways people live and the different values here. I see less tolerance for those differences among our own tribe. Maybe we're afraid we will be judged by other expats' behaviors?

Susan and Mayer are welcomed in their community and invited by locals to activities in their neighborhood. They go to quinceaños, baptisms, and other family celebrations. But they don't pretend to have close, intimate friendships with local people in the same way they do with fellow Americans. I wonder if the San Miguel gringos aren't more honest in admitting they aren't likely to penetrate Mexican culture that deeply.

In Barry's and my case, it's early days yet. We haven't been here that long, and we're in and out of the country. But so far, I haven't found it that easy to form friendships with Mexicans. My best friends are my teachers, who are half my age, and whom I pay. My paid friendships! I have to laugh. I don't feel badly about it, but it is true.

Mexico, Captured

2007-06-27T03:35:00.000-07:00

I believe visual tableaus exist in every culture that capture the essence of that culture. Here is one scene I witness regularly that, in my mind, expresses the character of Mexico.

When I go to the MEGA supermarket, I walk through one of Guanajuato's darker, mustier tunnels. It's not my favorite landscape scenery, but it allows me to get to MEGA in about ten minutes, rather than the half-hour it would take heading the roundabout way, above ground, or (heaven forbid) taking a taxi.

On the other side of the tunnel, I approach a long, imposing, curving wall... a moat that separates the world outside from the castle grounds. I proceed along the wall to the parking lot, then cross it to reach the moving ramp down that will bring me to the door of MEGA.

And there, on the ramp going down, or on its neighbor ramp going up, is where I observe the scene that is a freeze-frame of Mexico.

Whoever I see, whether it's other customers or the young employees who MEGA generally hires, they are always standing still. They may be laughing, shrieking, chatting, hanging off the sides of the ramp, or playing with their shopping cart, but they are never moving forward toward the goal, not one inch. They do not keep to the right to allow others to pass. They do not position their shopping cart over to one side. They wedge themselves right in the middle of the ramp and stay right there, surrounded by their plastic bags, shopping carts, children, and friends. Even going downhill with a shopping cart that would wheel itself, they stand statue-like. If I indicate that I'd like to pass, they look surprised, as though it would never occur to them that someone might actually want to WALK on a moving walkway, whether to move their feet or to reach the destination faster.

This, to me, is Mexico.

Why Am I in Mexico?

2007-06-25T16:53:00.000-07:00

I was at a branch of the University of Guanajuato for an appointment when I found out, without prior notice, that the person I needed to see was at the Holiday Inn. Few taxis come to this more remote university branch, but a professor who I had been chatting with offered me a lift. I climbed into his shiny black car. As we sped off, he told me he taught economics at three different universities in the area, and did a lot of driving.

"Do you like Mexico?" he asked.

"I must," I said, smiling, "or I wouldn't have bought a house here."

"I don't," he said. "I lived in Spain for four years and France for three years, and I liked Europe much better."

"Why?'"

"There's so much more culture. People read a lot more." He didn't say they were more sophisticated, but that was the implication.

Soon we arrived at the Holiday Inn, and that was the end of the conversation. But it left me to ponder. He's right. Europe is literate and worldly; Mexico isn't. There are huge gaps for me, as well, between my own values and those of many Mexicans. So why did I buy a house here with the idea of starting a new life? What brings me here?

1. I wanted something radically different from the life I'd had in the USA. There wasn't much wrong with my life there, except that I was bored from time to time, and I didn't feel challenged enough. But basically I had a comfortable and reasonably interesting life. So unlike some people I know here, I didn't embark on a life in Mexico because of anger or cynicism about the USA (although I do have those feelings sometimes). I'm not blaming the States for my reason to look elsewhere. There are a lot of things I don't like about the USA, but there are many I do (the wilderness, for one).

2. I wanted to be accessible. I didn't want to move to Tunisia or Sri Lanka or somewhere so far away that people I love could rarely visit me or vice versa. Here, I'm actually more accessible to my family and friends than I am in beautiful but remote Eureka, my other home.

3. Much as I enjoy being in Europe, I am more attracted to being in a transitional economy like Mexico's than, say, France, England, Spain, the Netherlands, or the many other European nations that, like the USA and Canada, are the "Monopoly" nations. They aren't the countries standing outside, banging on the door, wanting and hoping to play. I'm more interested in being a place that hasn't figured it out yet.

At the other extreme, I can't see myself moving to a mountain village for the rest of my life, either. Mexico satisfies my need to maintain a foothold in the world I've always known, yet experience challenges I would never face in the USA. It's a strange mix, Mexico--a modern nation, and a medieval one. Cell phones and high-speed internet and text messaging co-exist with shovels and horses. This tension excites me.

4. I want to work, and I want to work in the areas where I've developed expertise, i.e., training, facilitation and consulting...putting my professional skills to use in Spanish and in a new and different culture. Living here in what is known as the "Bajio," central Mexico, whose cities of Leon, Queretaro, Irapuato, and Silao are home to many international firms, is the perfect incubator for me. Some expats I know move to a foreign country and keep on with the livelihood they already had--writing, editing, consulting and other jobs that can be done remotely and in English. Other expats get involved in the tourist economy by starting B&B's, bars, restaurants, and so on. All well and good. But I want to be involved not with tourists but with Mexicans themselves. Who are these people, and what drives them? Are they going to develop and move forward? Using business as my vehicle, I'm not only finding out, I'm part of that question and that story.

New Place, New Self

2007-06-24T06:01:00.000-07:00

"I'm a different person here," my friend J said last night. "I say outrageous things in Spanish that I wouldn't say in English. I'm introverted in my English-language self, but in Spanish I let it out."

I know what she means! It's so delicious to discover you aren't always trapped in that old familiar self, that a different place can make you different. I was in a meditation retreat last month with someone who said ruefully, " I thought if I changed my environment, I'd change myself." She laughed, mocking herself for such a silly thought. I wanted to say, "But it's true! Or it can be at true! It's not a silly thought!" I didn't say anything because it was a retreat where only the teacher responded.

I know, though, that it's also true that "wherever you go, there you are," at least in my case. I carry daily rituals with me and whether I'm in Eureka or England, Mexico or Mauricious, I like: coffee early in the morning, a pattern of early to bed early to rise, black felt tip pens (never ballpoint), lined journals. And sadly, I adhere to these rituals more now than I used to. I sometimes feel trapped by them. I feel sympathy for sufferers of OCD who HAVE to have a particular towel or object when they travel, or they can't relax.

Still I cling to the idea that we can be changed, that different landscapes, colors, elevations, sounds--natural or human made--have the power to evoke different selves.

I heard Isabel Allende say in an interview that she cooks and makes love in Spanish, she writes in English. When I speak Spanish, I feel the clackety clack of the sounds rising up in me, I hear the rhythm of the sounds, and I feel different, less linear. Is it any wonder that tango and salsa and rumba came from Spanish-speaking countries? And at the same time, speaking in Spanish reminds me how much I love English, with its lumplike syllables. English, my homeland. I can get tears in my eyes over English, I feel such appreciation for its richness.

Colorful cubist Guanajuato with its deep pinks and reds brings out different inner striations in me than flat, brown, watery Eureka. In Guanajuato I walk the crooked stairs and steps and alleys; in Eureka, I bicycle the farmlands and kayak the estuaries. One isn't bad and one isn't good. They each enrich and enlarge me.

Customer Service, Part Two

2007-06-21T16:20:00.000-07:00

I have now completed all four of the customer-service sessions I led for the fancy hotel. I definitely have to institute a ground rule: "no side conversations." I always do this in trainings in the States but forgot to here, and a few of the younger staff (boys who look like they're about 20) were whispering and cutting up a little. Not an inordinate amount, and they really are cute, but it does distract from the class. Plus it makes it much harder for me to understand Spanish when there's background noise.

I'm also going to tell everyone next time they don't have to ask my permission to go to the bathroom!

We made a list of complaints that cause stress, and role played them:
--Air conditioning doesn't work.
--Not hot water.
--Wine is acidic.
--Meal wasn't what was expected.
--Maintenance problems at night.
--We roared when a participant, a cleaning woman, told us that a customer complained that the bed, which had wheels normally held inside a container, got out of the structure and rolled all the way to the door.

I suggested to the participantes to offer sympathy not just solutions, especially when customers were annoyed or angry. Often, I said, people don't just want the situation fixed, they want a sense that the person who is serving them genuinely cares and is willing to listen. This is my theory. But whether in Mexico or the States, I have a hard time getting employees who are hired to offer solutions to get out of the "fix-it" mode and into offering sympathy as well, not just a rote, "I'll correct it."

We discussed the best way to let a client know you'll get back to them with a solution. I said, with business guests and/or clients from linear cultures (like the U.S. and Germany), Mexican vagueness can be frustrating. Giving some kind of precise timeframe would reassure the client. In my case, at a furniture shop recently, I asked when the manager, who I needed to talk to, would be back. I got the usual: "Ahorita" (means, "soon." But "soon" could be ten minutes or a couple of hours). You also hear "un ratito" (a little while. But again, you never know how long "a little while" means). Precision does not exist here!

I asked the participants if there were any cultural groups who predictably got annoyed--expecting it to be Americans. Wrong! They said Americans and Canadians were pretty forgiving; it was the Mexicans and Italians who got more irritated.

The action statements that several of them came up with delighted me: "I will not promise what I can't deliver," "I will offer solutions, not excuses," "I will communicate specific, concrete responses to guests," "I will not chatter with my coworkers in front of guests." I don't hear commitments like these very often here.

Customer-Service Training, in Mexico

2007-06-18T17:47:00.001-07:00

Yikes! I did it! I just led my first real training in Mexico. I say "real," because although I've taught 4 sessions of a masters-level university class, it didn't feel fully "mine," because I was sub-ing for a professor. In this case, I contracted with my first autonomous client in Mexico. I'm halfway through giving a customer-service training to a staff of 16 reception people, waiters, and cleaners in a small, luxury hotel in Guanajuato.

From my discussions with the General Manager I knew the clientele were Mexican, U.S., Canadian, some European (mostly German), and Japanese.

I told the participants at the beginning, how pleased I was to have the opportunity to work with them, because I deeply believed that focusing on their abilities in customer service would help them gain more success, reach a higher level, and earn a higher salary. I do believe that. Excellent customer service is still so rare in Mexico that those who do give it, immediately stand out.

We started with self-introductions. I asked each person to please stand and introduce themselves and tell us their role in the hotel. One by one, I gave them feedback. In most cases, I asked them to do it again, slowing down especially when saying their name. Latin names consist of several names (First name, father's last name, mother's last name) and I'm sure are easy to understand if you are from the culture, but can become a blur to the outsider. I asked some to also speak up because their voices were so soft.

The manager had told me he wanted them to be more approachable and warmer with hotel guests, and not to answer with just a "yes" or "no." Some, he said, felt intimidated by the well-off status of the guests (the higher-cost rooms are $300 U.S. a night). So I focused on warmth: showing warmth with your body language, taking initiative and approaching clients. I told them of my experience once in the States, of chatting with a colleague at a conference and hearing her describe her different houses. She had a house in California, a house in the Sierras, a third in Hawaii. With each house, I suddenly realized my body was crowding into itself; I was slowly but unmistakably withdrawing from her. Smiling, of course, nodding, but withdrawing. How could I have a conversation with someone who had three houses? How could I even be in the same room?

I was making the point that feeling small is a universal experience that everyone goes through somewhere, sometime, but the main point about customer service is thinking about the other person and their needs, not yourself.

I hope I didn't come across condescending. I do think "feeling small" is universal; on the other hand the gap between the employees' standard of living, and those of the hotel guests, is much wider than the gap I felt with my colleague.

When we were discussing body language, I learned that the Mexican custom in hotels and restaurants is for employees to keep their hands behind their backs. I was told this after suggesting in a role-play to practice opening the arms and revealing hands.

After the session I discussed this with the General Manager. He gave me full permission to share my expertise and not feel bound by hotel custom. But we agreed, a habit like how you hold the body didn't begin with employment at the hotel; caution, passivity--stances that apply everywhere in life, but start in the body--are learned in the home and family, years before adulthood.

It's so complicated! Maybe coming across more openly and confidently WOULD be seen as rude or inappropriate in Mexico. On the other hand, many of the clients are not Mexican and don't necessarily admire deference. My hope is that at the least, the participants will see more options and feel more open to trying different approaches. I'll have another session tomorrow; more will be revealed to all of us, I'm sure.

Nighttime in Guanajuato

2007-06-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

In the U.S., I never liked the night as much as the day. I'm an early riser, not a night owl, so my juice fades. I have never found much to do in the evening. I couldn't hike. Reading made me sleepy. I don't dance much, don't go to bars. I felt limited. I remember writing a theme in the weight-loss newsletter I used to publish, called "The Dark Night of the Eater," because nighttime snacking is so common among overeaters. One year, when I lived in Washington State, after the solstice passed, I checked the newspaper everyday faithfully for sunset times and would record the time in my journal, noting how much more light accumulated, slowly, a minute or two a day. It gave me hope. I sound like I have SAD, but I don't think I do.

I still feel more limited by night, but I'm affected less because I live in Guanajuato, a more southerly places. Here it is, 7:09 p.m., it's cooled off, yet it's still light. I love the soft air, as I sit on our 'front' terrace, facing the street. It's nighttime by the clock but not by the amount of light. In Guanajuato, the streets belong to the people. I can leave the house, go out awandering at 11:00 pm or midnight, and be surrounded by people and activities, whereas in Eureka if I went out past 9:00 in our neighborhood, though I wouldn't feel physically unsafe, I'd feel a little empty, a little sad, because no one's around. Being alone in the wilderness feels fine; being alone in urban environments feels 'off,' because I expect peoople. People are what make a town, a town.

Visiting San Blas, a coastal town north of Puerto Vallarta, a few years ago before Barry and I bought our house in Guanajuato, we met a German couple and had dinner with them. I remember so well what the guy said: 'In Germany, 'nice' people don't go out after dark. The only people out at night are the Turks.'"

In Guanajuato, nice people do go out after dark. The streets almost swim with people at night. I love living in a place where nighttime hasn't been abandoned. On the other hand, sometimes I walk around at night, like I did last night after the symphony, and I was so aware of how young everyone seems. All the chicas who could barely walk or even stand up with their boyfriends hanging onto them. The only 'older' folks looked like tourists. I wanted more middle-aged people out and about, like my neighbor R, in her 60s; she watches TV at night. Or another neighbor, N, same age: I never see her out at night.

Meanwhile I notice as darkness descends that the more powerful streetlights on Tecolote--the ones that, as one friend who lives up the street put it, "they make the street look like Costco!," are no longer in use. I don't know if the city just undid a switch somewhere, or, more likely, some part stopped working and they haven't gotten around to fixing it, but it's a blessing.

Oh yes. It's cooler at night. I like that, too.

Eureka, CA, USA

Showing Up

2007-06-16T07:00:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Guanajuato after seven weeks in California (doing training for clients there) and in England, visiting my in-law family, and hiking in beautful mountainous Wales and coastal Pembrokeshire. I have not posted in ages and ages because I am beset by house travails that have discouraged my writing spirit.

Yesterday, meditating, when I felt so disheartened by the house scene, I thought, "Well, I just show up." In periods of lowness, as I'm in right now, I show up. I meditate. I go to la prepa (the local high school, where, last spring, I signed up to swim) to re-enroll. (I was unsuccessful--the pool is closed til August), but I did go, and that's what counts. I join the gym. I do Pilates. I go to the "Lucha Contra Cancer"-- "Fight Against Cancer") center about scheduling the talk that the coordinator wants me to give on goal-setting. She wasn't there, but I was told when she would be, so once again, I didn't have success, but at least I went. I buy spinach. I clean up. I go through all the motions, even if I have to force myself to, and after awhile, lo, I feel better.

Teaching University Students in Spanish

2007-03-27T04:51:00.000-07:00

A professor friend at the University of Guanajuato has asked me to substitute for him while he is out of town. He teaches a course called "Contemporary Themes in Organizational Development." Last fall, I subbed for him twice, and this past Saturday was my third time. The subject he asked me to address was "Coaching Executives." I developed a six-page handout, mostly culling from material I already had from trainings I give in the States, and added some new information, and translated it all into Spanish. I had fun developing it.

The class was a joy--much easier and more fun, than last fall's. Having some experience now, I wasn't as nervous; it was a much smaller group (15 rather than last fall's 26); and the topic was particlarly rich. We focused a lot on how to give corrective feedback, a challenge I believe that all humans wrestle with, in and out of the workplace, and whether they're from Moldova or Mauritania or Mexico. How to tell someone in an effective way, without getting them annoyed and defensive, that they need to change their behavior? If, in a managerial role, you scold and criticize them--which, from what the participants have told me, is common and accepted in many Mexican workplaces--will you get the changes you seek?

We were deep into this topic when I got stuck. My Spanish, or lack of, got in the way. I had invited comments; a couple of people were sharing issues from their workplaces. Normally (meaning in English) I would listen, then offer my perspective on how to handle a challenging situation. With the first person, I was able to comment, but with the second participant, although I somewhat understood the scenario he described, I didn't feel that confident. I asked him to say it again--but once again didn't feel sure.

So then I was silent, but not an easy relaxed silence. I felt awkward. Oh dear.

It was only one moment out of three hours, so it didn't color my overall happiness with how the class turned out. Still, I wondered, how to help myself and future participants when this comes up again? I asked my Spanish teacher, C, yesterday. I explained to her how in the beginning of the class I had told the group I might need to ask them to slow down or not to use "modismos" (idioms and slang). C didn't think I should make either of these requests. "They won't remember to slow down," she said, "and they may not know which words are slang and which aren't."

I know what she means. If you ask most English speakers to analyze their language, they won't know how to. If you say, "Please don't use idioms," they'll look blankly at you, because they won't know which words are idioms and which aren't. Those of us who are language lovers can spend hours of mental time thinking about word choice and the structure of language. It's one of my own mind's favorite travel destinations. I'd rather look up at a rainy sky and daydream about language than lie on a beach in Hawaii. But most people I know speak without thinking how they speak.

C suggested I ask one of these questions:

"Could you clarify?"
"Would you repeat that in different words?"
"Would you synthesize what you just said?"

I'll have a chance to try out her ideas next week, when our theme will be on successfully working cross-culturally. Many multinational corporations are located in this part of Mexico, so it's a relevant topic. I'll test C's ideas and report back.

What America Can Learn from Mexico

2007-03-22T05:21:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was a "puente"--a word literally meaning "bridge," and informally referring to a long weekend. Barry and I decided to go out of town and explore some of nearby Mexico. We took the bus to Peña de Bernal, a small town about 3 hours away with the third-largest monolith in the world, which we of course climbed on Saturday afternoon, along with the rest of Mexico, it seemed. Bernal was a very small town, but still had the predictably ornate and preserved colonial church, a colorful plaza, and many festively painted buildings. On Sunday, we took a 45-minute bus ride to nearby Tequisquiapan (Tequis for short), a larger town of about 25,000 with narrow streets festooned with lush, plum-colored bougainvillea and small, sunny squares. "San Miguel without the gringos," I joked to Barry. We did see one gringo--finally--the last day we were there. Tequis is a getaway destination for Mexico City and Querétaro residents. It was once the home of many thermal spas, now gone "thanks" to industry, according to our Lonely Planet guidebook. And on Monday, en route back tok Guanajuato, we stopped in Querétaro, a large city and capital of that state.

All three towns are lovely. In each one, there are expansive downtown areas devoted to pedestrians, spacious brick or stone plazas with flowering shrubs and trees, inviting benches used by everyday folks to sit and watch life, watering fountains, and people of all ages enjoying the public space from early morning to late at night... a seemingly effortless and natural mix of people, landscape and public space. The atmosphere is safe, relaxed, friendly, easygoing. Mexico knows how to do it! Mexico seems to naturally do what urban planners in the U.S. devote costly studies to figure out, but even after thousands of dollars are spent, rarely get right. In Eureka, California, where I live when in the States, the benches in our small central square were removed by the City Council because homeless people sat on them, and now the plaza has a cold, friendless look, and is empty most of the time. The boardwalk along the bay is used mostly by street people.

I rarely see panhandlers or street people in Mexico.

"American planners and government officials should tap Mexican expertise on urban planning," I said to Barry. But of course, American officials would never do that.

Another thing we noticed in all three towns was all the families. Despite the outside world's pressures, the Mexican family is a strong and cohesive unit. I don't mean they don't have their share of problems...we hear the horror stories of infidelity, alcoholism, and abuse. But even so, Mexican families hang out together in a way that I often don't see in the U.S. I find it very inspiring and touching.

Another identity

2007-02-28T03:42:00.000-08:00

I've acquired a new identity over the last year: expat.

I'm always more aware of being an American when traveling outside the USA. This seems completely logical--to be more conscious of one's nationality when surrounded by the 'other,' whatever that is. When in England, which I often am because Barry is British, I'm more sensitized to being American than I ever am in California. Also, outside the USA (and often in England), people ask questions like, "What is the American point of view about...?" and "What do Americans think about...?" I never know how to answer questions like this; how on earth can I begin to represent over 300,000,000 people?

Here in Mexico, my identity stands up and greets me all the time. The group I'm part of is called variously "estadounidense," "extranjero" (foreigner), or "gringo." Recently a Mexican used the word 'gringo' with me, and immediately looked apologetic, because it can be a putdown. I have asked a number of locals just what exactly "gringo" refers to. It's used differently by different people, but it generally does NOT refer to white foreigners from European countries, or to other English-speaking nationalities like Australians or even Canadians. It means, simply, Americans. I've also asked folks whether it is used in other Latin American countries besides Mexico, and that I still don't know.

The expat community worldwide is a large and lively one, and now that I am part of it, I enjoy reading stories about moving to Brazil, or New Zealand, or Turkey. You can stay occupied for days reading firsthand accounts about living in different countries by checking out the following British and U.S. expat websites.

http://www.escapeartist.com/

http://www.guardianabroad.co.uk/

http://www.expatentrepreneurs.com

http://www.transitionsabroad.com/listings/living/index.shtml

http://www.talesmag.com/

http://www.boomersabroad.com

http://www.expatexchange.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/global/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/global/2006/08/15/expatmain.xml

First Artwork

2007-02-26T05:59:00.000-08:00

Six months ago I attended a party for a group of visiting artists who had just completed a week-long workshop on printmaking. I was walking around the gallery admiring the prints, when I came upon one whose splashes of green and gold specks of light I particularly liked. It had an open door, too, that invited me in.

I'm a sucker for windows and doors and frames in art. I speculate it's the sense of movement and transition that those objects represent to me.

Another person at the party pointed out the artist to me. She was an elegant 80-year-old woman who now lived in Santa Cruz, California but had grown up in Guatemala. When I told her I loved her print, she offered to give it to me! I was bowled over.

So I took it home and laid it flat on a shelf of an old built-in kitchen cabinet on the first floor, surrounded by, but hopefully protected from, dust, concrete, rubble, construction, and human interference.

Finally, this past Saturday, I decided it was time to get it framed. Enrique, my neighborhood wine store friend and bicyclist, told me of a framing shop down the street; the guy there advised me of a shop where I could buy readymade frames, and off I went to the papeleria. They had stacks of frames in piles, all tied up with string. I wanted to test the print against different sized frames so I requested that the frames be removed from their piles--an unusual request, I had the feeling. None of the frames had glass, so that would be another task. I deliberated through several sizes of frames, finally made my selection, and put the frame and print into the plastic shopping back, forgetting to place the print in its sheer paper folder.

On the way home, a few stains from the frame must have leaked onto the matting background. Tried to erase them. No luck. I could have searched for another mat, but that felt like too much of a bother, so I decided the stains weren't that noticeable, and if they were, well, I'd call them a 'feature.' (The simplest solution to a difficulty, I find, is to relabel the problem an asset. As my precocious nephew used to say at age 4 about a mole on his face, "It's a mark of distinction.")

It was now about 4:00 on Saturday afternoon, still working-hours. Barry knew of a glass store on the other side of the Embajadoras Market, so I took the frame there. The door to the shop was half-shut, with a guy repairing the deadbolt. He said he'd cut the glass if I waited while he finished fixing the lock. I sat on a stool in the musty semi-darkness surrounded by glass and frames while he worked on the door. Then he measured the glass and, using plyers (didn't he have a glass cutter?), jaggedly cut the glass.

Brought it home, Barry, who has great pride of workmanship, made a face at the cutting job, and we taped it up. Still didn't have anything to hang it with (dental floss?), but the next day on a hike in the hills above town, found some wire that I carried home in my pocket. It's not that you can't buy wire to hang pictures with in Mexico. I'm sure you can. But things are not as readily available here, and the right place to go to get the thing you want is not always obvious, at least to me. It might be partly my lack of understanding as a foreigner.

Now, the print hangs next to the refrigerator, in the pefecct location. Our first piece of artwork in our Mexican home.

The Art of Saying No to a Business Opportunity

2007-02-24T07:21:00.000-08:00

Recently I was invited by a nonprofit Mexican environmental organization to submit a proposal to consult with them to create a five-year strategic plan. Although the offer was tempting, it was a huge and demanding project, and the proposal alone would have been an enormous challenge to pull off. The project, even in the States and in English, would still have been a major undertaking for me. After soul-searching, I decided that smaller contracts, like the teaching assignments I had in November when I substituted for a local university professor, are a better fit for me right now, given my good, but not fluent Spanish, and my still-embryonic understanding of Mexican culture.

So, I needed to thank the client for the opportunity. In the States, this would be an easy task: thanks, but no thanks. But this being Mexico, I never assume it's that simple! I drafted an email and ran it by my teacher V, who said it was polite enough, but it needed a little more...in particular, I needed to give a couple of reasons for my decision.

Reasons? In the professional trainings I give in the U.S., I advise people in different communication situations to keep their reasons to a minimum, to avoid going into long detailed explanations about why this happened or why they want that. The longer the story, I say, the more defensive you sound. As I told V, if I were turning down a possible business opportunity in the U.S., I wouldn't be expected to explain why.

Not in Mexico! She recommended that I say that my technical Spanish skills were still developing in that area, and that "circunstancias personales" prevented me from taking on a project of this scale.

"But that sounds like I'm going through a divorce or something," I objected.

"No, no, not at all," she reassured me. "The client will understand."

I do what my teachers tell me to do. So I sent the email with V's added suggestions and knew I had done it right when I received a gracious and equally polite reply from the client, saying, "Thank you for your explanation. Definitely we will invite you to participate in future projects."

Eating Out, or Trying to

2007-02-23T06:01:00.000-08:00

Walking back from a suburban movie house recently (we had gone to see 'Babel'), Barry and I decided impulsively to eat dinner out. It was about 6:30 p.m. First we tried the one Indian restaurant in town. Sorry, the guy who was washing dishes and cleaning up told us--they had just closed. Next we tried the French restaurant, and were told it was open for snacks only. We tried one more restaurant before giving up. I had a nice orzo salad aleady made at home--yum--and nothing beats our view on the terrace in the twilight, so we had our own private dinner at home, watching the lights slowly go on in town. But it was a reminder that if you want to eat dinner in Mexico, unless you go to a tourist restaurant, you have to eat on Mexican time, meaning between about 2:00 and 6:00. La comida, the main meal of the day in Mexico, is eaten around 3:30. I find it comforting that Mexicans haven't adjusted their rhythms to us.

Exercise in Mexico

2007-02-23T05:27:00.000-08:00

I'm a compulsive record-keeper, and one of my favorite areas to record, wherever I am, is my fitness activity, which I track daily in the back of my journal. A unique aspect about life in Guanajuato is that most people stay in pretty good shape, by default, just because you end up walking everywhere.

So here is my record of the last week's exercise:

Fri Feb 16-- "intentional walk to Cerro de Gallos" (intentional meaning not just getting around, but a purposeful walk for its own sake, in this case, to the Hill of Chickens) -- 60 mins.

Sat Feb 17-- Pilates (I brought my own fitness ball down here and do Pilates at home) -- 20 mins.
Walk in country from the Amigos party outside Marfil (a suburb) to Marfil center -- 60 mins.

Sun Feb 18-- Hike to Mellado (a mining village in the hills above Guanajuato): hike portion (meaning on trails) -- 135 minutes; walk portion (on pavement through town to reach trails) -- 70 minutes

Mon Feb 19-- intentional walk to Pastita -- 50 mins.
Pilates 15 mins.

Wed Feb 21-- early morning pre-light intentional walk with Barry -- 60 mins.
Weight-lifting (I joined a gym) -- 30 mins

Thurs Feb 22-- swim -- 45 mins (I registered to swim at the local high school; another story)
walk to and from movie in evening -- 60 mins

For a grand total of 540 minutes cardio and 65 minutes other (meaning strength, flexibility, etc.).

How is my exercise different in Mexico than in California? I ride my bike in Eureka, whereas I hope to here but haven't brought my bike down yet. I walk in Eureka, too, but nowhere near as much as here. In Eureka I roller-blade, though not as often as I used to and would like to, because the street surfaces are rougher than I'm comfortable with (I'd never roller-blade here!) In season, I back-pack in California, which I have yet to do here. And I do yoga in California, which I don't here, though it is available.

Springtime in Guanajuato

2007-02-23T05:21:00.000-08:00

It's February and we are back in beautiful, charmed Guanajuato after six weeks in California, working to help pay the expenses of our new home. It's lovely here. Evenings are cool but days are cheerful and bright. The jacaranda trees have yet to bloom, but it feels like spring. In our absence, much of the reconstruction of city streets in el centro has been completed. The new governments--city, state, and federal--are in place. It's early morning now, and I'm listening to birdsong.

I'm Not Helping

2007-01-05T05:56:00.000-08:00

At the San Diego airport, on our way back to Eureka, I was browsing magazines at a newsstand, standing near another woman. "We look at the same magazines," she said, smiling, and we started chatting. She was on her way back to Oahu, where she lived; I explained I had just bought a house in Mexico.

She pulled out a house magazine. "Are you able to help some of those folks down there?" she asked.

I bristled. "Well, I like to meet people and connect with them," I said. "I don't know about 'help.'"

I didn't go into my soapbox, because I had only just met her and she meant well. But here's my riff on "helping." I am not living in Mexico in order to "help" people. I'm there to experience a different way of life, to immerse myself in another culture, language and world-view.

Besides, I could use plenty of help. In Mexico I notice, repeatedly, how inflexible and impatient and...don't tell anyone...arrogant I can be.

Of course I hope my being there will be positive for others; I hope I will do no harm. But I will be as "helped" as anyone will be helped by me. Even when I think of "service" roles I could play, like, for example, leading pro-bono workshops on goal-setting to the staff of a domestic violence agency, I don't think of it as "service." As soon as I call it service, I feel separate, like I'm a "good person" doing something for these poor folks who need me or someone like me. And they'd better be grateful, too.

Nope, doesn't work for me. I want to offer my skills, and I hope they'll be beneficial--but by the same token, I also want to improve my Spanish, get to know people, make friends, and learn from others. The benefits go both ways.

Back at Our Other Home

2007-01-01T04:14:00.000-08:00

The flight out of LAX is bumpy. A few minutes after we're airborne, the pilot announces that one of the baggage compartments has not been fully shut, so we will have to return to the airport to close it. "Too bad we can't just open a window, bend over and bang it shut," I joke to Barry. According to the pilot, it's a simple problem, but it still prolongs our flight an extra hour. We try to call SuperShuttle in Eureka to alert them to the delay, but get a recorded message. By the time we arrive at Arcata-Eureka Airport, it's 12:30 a.m. and no SuperShuttle in sight. Fortunately, we know another couple on board who give us a ride to our apartment. The advantages of a small town.

It's freezing! A day earlier a huge windstorm apparently caused power outages all over the county. I unlock the door to our apartment and climb the stairs to the second-story living room. There they are! Our nuzzling elephants, the wall-sized print called "Elephants in Love," they who have been our living-room shepherds for six years. I ordered the print directly from the artist, Wallace Ting, in Paris. My eyes take in our home. The blond dining room table we bought at a discount store in Palo Alto. The rose-red rug I brought from a vendor in Kazakhstan three years ago, when I was there leading a series of trainings. The lime-green and violet desk and office shelves I painted after taking a Feng Shui class. Above the desk, the print of kimonos hanging on a clothesline that's tied to cherry trees. When I look at the kimonos, I feel like I, too, am a beautiful garment swaying gracefully in the breeze on a fragrant spring hillside.

.....

Now, we've been back in Eureka for three days. I've gone through all the familiar re-entry litanies: turned the gas back on, revelled in daily queenly baths, picked up the mail, checked my messages, visited all my favorite food stores, bought foods I can't buy in Mexico, pumped up my tires and taken my bicycle out for a ride.

I can't stop myself from comparing.

Our kitchen in Eureka, small as it is, works for me better than ours in Guanajuato. Things are more accessible here. I blame myself. I can't seem to measure the right elevations for shelves in Guanajuato, I keep getting it wrong. I talk to Barry. "We'll figure it out," he assures me. He loves technical problems.

It's so much easier to get furniture in the States, and it's usually less expensive than in Mexico. It annoys me how costly furniture is in Mexico. And bulky, and heavy.

There's so much more selection and availability of food here. I feel happy to have access to it for awhile, and frustrated that I can't have it in Mexico. I don't feel at my most creative when cooking in Mexico, because I don't understand a lot of the local ingredients. I'm not sure I want to learn how to cook all those chilis, anyway. I'm not in love with Mexican food, I prefer Asian. I end up eating a lot of lentil and split pea soup in Mexico.

It sure is nice to drink tap water and not have to disinfect vegetables. And to be able to just toss toilet paper into the toilet.

It's New Year's weekend and suddenly my days loom emptily in front of me. Of course I can't expect my friends to turn around their schedules as soon as I get home. But I want them to! I want them to be thinking about me and calling me and telling me they can't wait to see me! One person did leave me a message, but I want more messages, more people calling me.

I'll have to take the initiative if I want to see people.

I have coffee with a friend and hear about how good her life is. She has healed several misunderstandings with others. She tells me about the intimate women's dinner at a mutual friend's home that I missed, how much fun it was. As she talks, I feel tears build up behind my eyes. I'm happy for her. She has close friendships and the sense of community and belonging that I'm looking for in Guanajuato. That, uh, I looked for in Eureka. Will I find it in Mexico? Or will the cultural differences be too wide? Was it a mistake to leave Eureka? (Wait a minute--I haven't left Eureka. Or have I?) Everyone who moves to Humboldt County from the big valley cities of the south raves about the life here; they feel so fortunate to have discovered this eccentric, affordable, scenically wild pocket of California. Why is it not enough for me?

She asks me about my life in Mexico. At first I stumble and lose my way, not sure what to say. She persists. She sticks with me, she's really interested. Eventually I find my voice again and the details spill out. When I tell her we are thinking of driving our van down sometime this year, transporting our bikes and our portable hot tub (our "spa-in-a-box"), her face scrunches up. "If you take your van, it feels like you're really leaving. I don't want to lose you," she says. "I don't want to lose you, either," I say. There are so many people I have left.

After our coffee, I drive home in our dowager Miata. It's late afternoon in December, and ribbons of light pierce the mist over Humboldt Bay.

"Homeward" Bound

2006-12-30T04:53:00.000-08:00

In a few days we'll leave Guanajuato for five weeks in the States. Recently I've heard Barry say to various people, "We're heading home for a few weeks."

"Home?" I'd think. "But is Eureka home? Or is Guanajuato home?"

"I don't think about it much," Barry said, when I asked him. "Does it matter? Heck, I feel like our van is 'home.'" He's referring to our beloved Westfalia van, which at the moment resides in California, but will be the conveyer of our belongings sometime in the next year when we move more of our worldly goods to Mexico.

But to answer Barry's question, "Does it matter if we know where home is?": I guess there's no reason it has to matter, but I'd love to know. I like decisions made, uncertainties clarified. Unlike Barry, who lives more lightly, freer of categories and definitions and labels.

Ironically, for a couple in our 50s and 60s, our "home" in Eureka isn't even ours. It's a funky second-story apartment that looks like somewhere a graduate student would live. But it is charming and cozy.

I'm looking forward to certain aspects of the States, and feeling a little guilty about that. I want Guanajuato to be completely satisfying in every respect, yet there ARE things I miss from time to time. Certain people. Baths. My bicycle. Our portable hot tub. Easy access to books. I have certain rituals, too, that I'm fond of in Eureka: the various places where I shop for food, the library, my favorite roads for bicycling, running or skating. These are my anchors. I'm in the process of creating similar rituals in Guanajuato, but they're less established.

We'll bring the hot tub and our bicycles down to Guanajuato in the van, but it hasn't happened yet.

"Are you moving to Mexico?" people ask. "I don't know," I answer. "It's a work in progress. Not just the house...but us, too."

I notice, however, that I WANT to feel like Guanajuato is home, more than I want Eureka to be home.

Making A Difference?

2006-12-29T07:58:00.000-08:00

The last few weeks, I've been working on translating a business column I wrote for my local newspaper in the U.S., into Spanish. The article is about how to motivate staff when you lack the budget to give raises or bonuses. I had given my teacher E a list of my columns, and together we chose this one as the best to work on. My goal, with E's help as teacher, writing coach, and editor, is to publish articles in Mexican business magazines.

The project is yet another interesting window into culture. For one thing, I have yet to find the business magazine that is the right fit. So far, Mexican business magazines seem to focus on high-level, abstract subjects such as what the economy might do, the effect of a new law on business, or a profile of this or that business leader. Nothing on anything as practical and fundamental as how to motivate employees.

Even without a clear target magazine, I wanted to translate the article, so I set about doing so, translating my list of bulleted examples of how people can be supported and motivated without financial compensation. The list included 12 factors including recognition, creativity, autonomy, authority, sense of accomplishment, sense of fun, and others.

In one paragraph, I made the point that different people are motivated by different things. A window view, for example, might motivate one person more than another. "A window view?" E frowned. That wouldn't be a motivator in Mexico. We discussed it, and ultimately I deleted it.

But the biggest stumbling block came when we reached my point that "making a difference" could be a motivator. "Haciendo una diferencia?" E asked. "What do you mean?" I explained the idea that you feel your work has positive impact, that you're helping another. "Like you," I said, trying to come up with an example close to home. "You're making a difference by helping your students learn Spanish. You not only are helping them learn the language, you're indirectly helping to narrow the cultural gap between the U.S. and Mexico. And you feel positive about that, right?"

Yes, she understood my example, but she still didn't think "making a difference" would be a valuable addition to the article. Neither did another teacher I consulted.

Was it a misunderstanding of language? If I had used a different phrase, would E have thought I should include it? I don't think so, because E is quick to offer other turns of phrase. I tend to think, rather, that the very idea of "making a difference" is a concept that has meaning in the U.S., in a way that it does not in Mexico.

I'm not drawing a firm conclusion here, but this is my hunch.

House Charming

2006-12-28T03:16:00.000-08:00

I have never been a person who had "dream house" fantasies. In the many apartments and houses where I've lived over the years, both before and with Barry, I've always wanted--and created--coziness and charm and a sense of comfort, but I never cared if the particular dwelling was perfect. In Vancouver, I lived in an apartment above a TV repair shop, next to neighbor loggers; in Boston's historic North End, in an "unremodeled" walk-up that at the time (late 70s) still had no bath or shower (I resorted to city-subsidized community showers, available from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., down the street, for a small fee). The last home Barry and I owned before Guanajuato, a Spanish-style house on Margarita Avenue in Palo Alto, had ugly stucco ceilings. Although I wasn't thrilled with them, I didn't think it was worth the expense to redo the ceilings. I was happy enough.

Barry and I joke about suffering from "Town Charming," the fantasy that some other town, far away in another state or country, will satisfy our every longing and dissipate our every problem. (Over the years, Boulder, Eugene, and Santa Fe were among our Town Charming candidates). I've also had Job Charming from time to time. And Body Charming! That one followed me around for years, er, decades. But House Charming, I never caught. A relief, I always thought; no room for envy, a state for which I'm easily disposed.

But then came Guanajuato and the only major remodel we have ever faced, and until recently (like, yesterday) I was, daily, catching the House Charming disease in ever greater increments.

"You really should go see other houses that David has done," we've been told. "The owners are always happy to show off their home and his architectural creativity." And I did see one. But when I suggested to Barry that we visit others, he balked. "We already have too many choices," he said. "We'll just start wishing we had done things differently, or feeling envious. We'll have more arguments." We had only just resolved an argument about what color to paint the Sky Room, our room on the roof, an argument that simmered and bubbled for days.

Our argument surprised me. I once read a story about a woman who fell in love with a man who said to her, over their first dinner together, "All colors make me happy, even gray." I would fall in love hearing that line, too, I thought. I love color. All colors.

Or do I? When it came to the Sky Room, I had no idea how stubborn and partisan I could be about the "right" color, the "only" color. It took multiple visits from David, bringing multiple sets of sample swabs, before we finally settled on a shade of green we could both live with. And here we've lived in a funky apartment in Eureka, California, with rooms a vague, uninspired off-white, that after six years we still haven't even thought about painting.

When it came to painting the outside walls of the Sky Room, we decided to ask David-the-mediator to choose the exterior color. He came up with periwinkle blue, the color of a house up the street. I had a suspicious feeling rumbling around me that he picked that shade because Barry said he liked it. "No, it was YOU who recommended it to David," Barry said when I told him.

"It's crazy," I said to Barry a couple of evenings ago as we sat on our new terrace, also painted periwinkle blue. "I never used to worry about choices in house design or color. It must be because we're spending money on every decision and I'm afraid of making a mistake." Already I have made mistakes; I forgot to ask Maestro, our foreman, to insert the beautiful tiles my parents gave me when my family lived in Pakistan during the Sixties, into a tile wall we created on the terrace. Barry and I discussed asking Maestro to redo part of the tile wall, but I felt it was too self-indulgent. There will be another place for the Pakistani tiles. But I still feel a bit rueful.

Barry said, "I'm sure by the time we're done, we'll look around and wish we had thought of something else we could have done here or there, and say, 'Oh, if only we had...' and 'Why didn't we...?'"

I keep reminding myself, a home is important. But it's not THAT important. It's only a home. It doesn't have to be perfect, which is good, because it won't be.

Goal-setting in Mexico

2006-12-23T06:55:00.000-08:00

I went to see L a couple of days ago. She is the manager of Casa Constancia, a pension where Barry and I have stayed several times. We sat in her kitchen drinking camomile tea, and I asked her if Mexicans made New Year's Resolutions. "Oh, yes," she said. "'Propositos.' Some make them, but don't keep them, others make them and do." She also explained that Lent ("Cuaresma") was a time, like for some in the USA, where people give up something.

Did she have a New Year's Resolution? I asked. Yes, hers was to take over the running of the pension by herself. Her ex-partner and now housemate, J, is affable enough, but leaves the bulk of the work managing the pension to her. L, like most Mexican women I've met, has rather minimal standards when it comes to men. If the guy works, doesn't drink too much, doesn't screw around, and doesn't beat her up, he's considered pretty good material. In J's case, however, though he's nice enough, is rarely employed. L, meanwhile, has a fulltime job working as a secretary for the Public Works Department of the state, on top of which she has the pension that she manages. She gets home from her job and cleans. And cleans. She has hired her sister to help clean too, though J complains about that.

One weekend when we were staying there, J took off on a two-day pilgrimage. "It's good for reflection," he said. "What about L?" I asked pointedly, since she wasn't going; she would stay back at the pension, cleaning."Doesn't she like reflection too?" He laughed sheepishly.

Now, I asked L, "How are you going to take over the pension?" I didn't see why J would be motivated to leave; he has all the basics covered. "I'm going to talk to him, and to the owner," she said. She also planned to upgrade two of the rooms--get rid of the moldy rugs, and spiff up the place. I encouraged her. Casa Constancia could be full every night. It has what has to be the best view in all of Guanajuato, but the quality would not meet the expectations of many tourists.

A couple of days letter, my teacher E and I discussed our respective resolutions: hers were to give up drinking Coke, meditate more consistently, introduce more variety when she teaches yoga, learn English, and learn to swim. Since she's moving to Mexico City to begin a two year masters' degree program, I wondered if learning English and swimming was a lot to ask.

My goals were at the seedling stage--not refined yet. But the areas, I told her, were to focus more on writing and publishing, continue my eternal pursuit of mastery in Spanish, build more variety into my exercise and movement, nurture friendships with Mexicans, and keep putting my skills to use in business and training in Mexico.

I love sharing about goals. I will be checking in on L and E and offering my support.

Sky Room

2006-12-22T05:17:00.000-08:00

We have a bedroom! No longer the temporary room by the kitchen that we were using (now my office), but a spacious, light-filled room on the roof, with window views in every direction. We can see the major churches, hills, La Bufa (a high rocky mountain ledge that we climb), rooftops, Pipila (a sculpture of the boy who helped start the Mexican revolution, and Guanajuato's most famous landmark), and much more.

"Do you have a name for the room?" our friend Tom from Texas asked us. He and Guille, his partner-turned-wife (just two weeks ago! a surprise!) were sitting on our new sofa and chair in the bedroom, overlooking San Francisco Church. They had come over to see the latest remodels. "I think you should call it the 'Sky Room,'" he said. "It looks like one of those view restaurants on the top of a high building."

A couple of days ago, after the last paint was swabbed, the workers hauled the bed and mattress up the narrow stairs to the roof. It was a much easier task than heaving the sofa and chair, which they did a few weeks ago by roping them one-by-one and using the pulley system they had created for hoisting up bricks and tiles and cement.

For now, the "Sky Room" serves as a combined bedroom, Barry's office and sala. We have no plans to install a bathroom up there, although a few of our friends have wondered about this. "Are you sure you can make it through the night?" one asked. (So far, yes). We discovered the pitfalls this week when it rained. When you enter the house, you go up one staircase that's open to the sky, and then to reach the roof, another open set of stairs. And when it rains here, it can rain hard! OK, we'll keep umbrellas handy at various spots.

While we're in the States in January, the workers will work on the patio we are creating facing the street, and rebuild the steps to the roof, which at the moment are an insurance company's windfall. For now, with the new bedroom, working kitchen, my office, and bathroom, the house feels palatial.

A Week at the Beach

2006-12-22T04:33:00.000-08:00

Just back from a week at the beach, our first vacation in Mexico as residents, not as visitors flying in from the cold US. We headed west in the direction of the city of Manzanillo. Spent three days in Barra de Navidad, slightly south, and three days in La Manzanilla, slightly due north.

I am more a mountain person than a beach person, but I had a delicious time. We had been to Barra three years ago, so returned to the same pension, now upgraded, still run by Cooki, who let me use her cocina to make my early-morning coffee. Enjoyed the 10 peso ($1.00) lancha rides across the isthmus to the area opposite Barra, where stands, tall and imposing, Mexico's most luxurious hotel (according to the brochure, rooms start at about $350). I bought yet another cheerful checkered Mexican tablecloth. Our favorite coffee shop, hitherto run by a British woman we had made friends with last time, was no more. Had she returned to London? "She died of a stroke, very suddenly," a local told us. "Everyone was shocked." He shrugged. "Too much partying."

One afternoon I sat at the town square and chatted with a woman sitting at the same bench, waiting for her two children, 17 and 11, who were walking in the school posada (procession), collecting sweets for the piñata that would take place later. A widow, she explained that she took care of the gardens of three wealthy women: one American, one Canadian, and one Mexican. More and more gringos are coming to the area, she told me. "How do you feel about that?" I asked. She hesitated. I told her she could say anything to me, I wouldn't be bothered. "Well, it's good because it provides work."

I had seen the real estate signs dotted all over town, the properties listed in U.S. dollars. I have mixed feelings about the gringos coming. Of course, I'm one of them, so who am I to complain? She's right; it does mean more work, and a higher standard of living. It also means higher prices and a real estate market that will be less and less attainable for the people who live there.

She told me her two children went to the "escuela especial," which I found out, means the same in Spanish as in English, i.e. education for the developmentally delayed. After 4 years in the "regular" primary school, her son still hadn't learned read or write. But he learned in the special school. "That's wonderful," I said. "Do you read and write?"

"A little. I only went to third grade."

"Why did you stop?"

"Poverty."

Her children arrived: the older boy removing his costume cape, the younger son looking only slightly odd; she had told me he had Down's Syndrome. These two were the youngest of twelve children. The married children all lived in the area except one in Enseñada. "Are they doing OK economically?" I asked. She wavered. The impression I had was, better than when she was growing up, but not great.

La Manzanilla, on the other side of the city of Manzanillo, had a banquet of things to do. While snorkeling, I made the acquaintance of a fish I called Polka Dot Mom, for her plump, inviting lap of a body and dotted skin, and another favorite, Surfer Fish. We whiled away an hour watching a family of crocodiles lolling in the lagoon adjacent to the ocean. Rented kayaks. Took a forest walk that brought us to rock pools where we could dive off rock ledges and swim under tree trunks. Stayed at both a high-end place run by a German woman (www.casamaguey.com) with views of pelicans and sunsets, and our more typical low-brow budget pension (Puesto del Sol) whose manager, Lupita, was a friendly young mom who chatted with me while she sat on the tile floor of the terrace sticking feathers on her 5-year-old daughter's angel wings for the school Christmas procession. I also learned from Lupita how to stop our sheets sliding around and never staying tucked in, a problem I've never faced before. The secret? A mattress pad. I had shopped for a mattress pad before, but wasn't using the right terminology. Thanks, Lupita. Where would I be without my network of women?

The ride home entailed three buses and 11 hours, which sounds grueling, but first-class Mexican buses make me feel like I'm on an airline, flying Business Class. Reclining seats, individual ear phones to watch movies, a selection of free liquids and snacks, immaculate bathrooms, and half-price tickets thanks to our photo ID "credenciales" from our Spanish language school. I watched two movies and finished a crime novel. It almost seemed unfair, it was so pleasant.

Over the years of living on the West Coast, I've noticed that most Americans and Canadians seeking a tropical vacation choose Hawaii over Mexico. I've never understood why, and I understand even less now. Mexico is affordable, beautiful, eclectic, easy, relaxing, and friendly. Of course, it helps to speak Spanish. But Barry and I enjoyed Mexican vacation spots long before we spoke Spanish.

The Underside of Mexico

2006-12-02T06:57:00.000-08:00

About a month ago the city installed small garbage bins along our callejon. Great! One way to reduce litter, a common problem in Guanajuato, where there's no garbage collection on the callejones since traffic isn't allowed. People walk their household garbage to a larger neighborhood depository. In our case, it's only a couple of minutes away, but if you live higher up the hill, it could be a longer walk.

The newly installed garbage containers were a welcome addition. After a few days, however, I noticed that the bin across the callejon from our front door was beginning to overflow. Another day or two later, predictably, the garbage was falling onto the pavement. My theory that litter attracts more litter proved true; before long, a puddle of litter had formed around the bin and soon dogs had successfully expanded the perimeter. I have no idea when the bins will be emptied, but they've been installed for about ten days, and I've seen no sign of removal.

Eventually I got so frustrated that I picked up the garbage on the pavement and took it to the large depository. But the area was still a mess.

This is one of those cultural gaps that is hard for me to breach. Don't people see it? I fume. Is all they care about their own private aesthetic? Don't they want our newly-paved, newly-beautified callejon, Tecolote, one of the most historic routes in Guanajuato, and arguably Mexico (the route where the fight for Mexican independence began) to look worthy of its history?

Rail on, Louisa. Other gringos have tried before me. One thing I have been told, and which I believe, is that although outsiders can support change here, it won't happen long-term and deeply unless it is driven by local demand.

My neighbor, N, had gone to the city authorities a couple of weeks ago, complaining that the workers redoing the lighting of our callejon had removed some of her outer house paint without repairing it. Somewhat to my surprise, the city had taken action on her complaint. So I was pleased, but not totally shocked, when she rang our doorbell a couple of days ago and told me she was furious. The trash bins were not only unsightly, they were unhygienic. She had talked to residents uphill who had seen rats near theirs. She was returning to the municipality to insist that they remove the bins, they were worse than useless. Would Barry and I be willing to sign our names if the city needed more proof? I assured her we would. Since then, Barry took photos of the bins for further documentation if she wants.

I told her I admired her citizen advocacy. "Una mujer fuerte!" I said ("a strong woman!"). Whatever you have read of protests overtaking the streets of Oaxaca and Mexico City, my experience of most Mexicans in Guanajuato is that of apathy and passivity. There's a Spanish verb used a lot in Mexico: "aguantar," meaning to tolerate and put up with. Mexicans tolerate and endure in a way that would be unthinkable to most Americans.

This experience is one of those shocks I get every so often, when I'm reminded of how radically different our cultures are. The litter, the graffiti on freshly painted walls, the absence of recycling. Every time I throw a glass bottle or aluminum can into the garbage, I wince. But, I remind myself, this is how much of the world lives. Only in the more prosperous countries does curbside recycling exist.

Meanwhile my neighbor is going to the municipality tomorrow. I've heard that Monday is "citizen complaint" day. Nothing has changed yet. But I'm heartened by her initiative.

"Relax? Are you kidding?"

2006-11-30T03:16:00.000-08:00

"It's great that you can relax in Mexico," a friend writes. Relax? What's that? Another friend writes that while her husband dreams of retiring in another country, she isn't sure she would have enough to do.

It is very interesting to hear people's impressions of what they think life in Mexico is like. It seems many think we're living a Puerto Vallarta kind of life (hmm… That's probably a stereotype as well!), lying on the beach, drinking margaritas.

I'm too stimulated here to call my life "relaxed." My life isn't stressful, but I feel engaged, challenged and deeply alive.

So here are some details about my daily life. In about an hour (it's 5:00 a.m.) I'll wake Barry and we'll take Mora, the Bouvier de Flanders dog we are taking care of in our friend's absence, for a long morning walk. Then we'll head over to the hour-long meditation (an 8 minute walk) that we do most weekday mornings. Today I'll wear business attire, because after meditation I'll go to the mayor's office where I hope to meet the Mayor's Private Secretary, and give him my resume and business card. (I re-slanted my resume yesterday to include my consulting experience with many city and county governments in the States. Even though Mexico doesn't have counties, this still shows my experience). Using the Private Secretary as an aperture is the advice of a new colleague I met who works in another branch of the government: unlike their bosses, the Private Secretaries (so far, always male) can be counted on to be in the office--they "practically sleep in their offices." I was also advised to go early or late, not in the middle of the day. I made a friendly connection with the Private Secretary I met yesterday in the State Government, so hopefully today's effort will also be successful.

After that, back home for breakfast. Then I'll prepare for my Spanish class with E. I usually take some material of my own. Today I will start to translate a recent business column I wrote, on the personal growth that can happen at work (the column is called: "Workplace or Workshop?") and/or an article I wrote on fitness. E teaches yoga and is interested in fitness and health. I also have an article from "Contendidos," a Mexican magazine, about a middle-aged woman who is advising young Mexican men on how to approach women, which I'd like to go over with E. I have two classes with E today because I'm making up a missed class on Tuesday, when Barry and I went with our friend Diana to the nearby city of Leon where we bought a sofa and chair. (Exciting!)

Ater my noon class with E, I look forward to making a big, generous salad using the organic lettuce that a woman I met at Thanksgiving gave me. Rare! Not only because it's organic, but she grew it herself so I don't have to disinfect it.

I'll also work on other projects related to writing and clients in the U.S. Then there'll be things to do with the house. I go up to the roof two or three times a day to take a look and comment favorably to the workers. David, our architect, may well drop by; we've been discussing colors for the room on the roof.

Food shopping and basic daily tasks take more time than at home. There's always dusting and sweeping, not that I'm great at those. Now that we have a washing machine (last week's shopping adventure!), I'm looking forward to doing our first full load of laundry and hanging out the clothes on the roof. It's so dry and bright here, they'll probably dry in 20 minutes.

Plus, I'll do some regular things I'd do anywhere like catch up on email, read, cook, socialize, Pilates, etc.

Around 5:30 Barry and I have a drink on our terrace, watching the lights go on in the city. (That's when we would have a margarita, if we were going to have it; but he usually has a "paloma"--tequila and grapefruit juice--and I stick to plain old white wine).

My life feels especially full because I want to better my Spanish, and because I'm actively trying to get business. But other people seem equally occupied. One friend takes singing classes; others take drawing and painting. A number of people I know are involved in the local nonprofit group "Amigos de los Animales," whose mission is to reduce the number of street dogs in Guanajuato, and another woman I know is working with a domestic violence agency.

It's a great life: full without being frenetic. But not exactly lying on the beach.

Business in Mexico!

2006-11-07T04:33:00.000-08:00

Finally, my first business in Mexico! I'm substituting for an HR (Human Resources) professor at the University of Guanajuato, leading two masters-degree level classes of three hours each on Leadership Development, and Working Globally/Interculturally. For pay.

Did I mention these will be in Spanish?

I wondered if business would ever happen, the process seemed so long and creaky. In Eureka, for weeks I would research large companies on the web, writing them, introducing myself… nada. In Guanajuato, I'd brainstorm with friends. Had my resume professionally translated. Decided what to say on my Spanish business card.

That was not simple. It says:
Lic. Louisa Rogers ("Lic" is short for Licenciatura, meaning B.A. It's widely used. My sense is, it doesn’t add much, but if you don’t put it in, it’ll be noticed by its absence).

Capacitadora y Consultora (Trainer & consultant)

Supervisión . Dirección. Liderazco (supervision, management, leadership)
Servicio al Cliente (customer service)
Facilitación en el Manejo de Reuniones (meeting facilitation)

Some areas, I could have included and didn’t. Women, for example. As a bilingual HR professor (who worked as a Dean at a university in Oregon) said, when I asked whether he thought the empowerment of women in the workplace would “sell,” “It’s not perceived as a problem. No one is going to pay you to help empower women.”) This rings true. I’m often been brought up short by the resigned attitude that many Mexican women have towards machismo, let alone the men.

I chose management and leadership because I love working in that area, and because it is a perceived problem. Everyone talks about it, though no one seems to have a solution. Great! Business is all about problems that need solutions.

I chose customer service because if Mexico is going to compete in the global marketplace, it has to improve its customer service. It’s not a perceived problem yet, but I believe it will be. As customers, Mexicans do complain, but usually after the fact, not assertively, and not to the right person at the right time. The sense of consumer rights that exists in the U.S., I haven’t seen here.

And I chose facilitation because I believe it’s a growing field. I also suspect facilitation might be easier for me than training—-less demand on my Spanish, more interactive.

In August, I wordcrafted the business card with my two Spanish tutors, who became my editors as much as teachers. The word that took the longest was “management.” I emailed two Mexican friends who are professionals—-one in Mexico City, one here in Guanajuato--asking their advice as to which Spanish word they thought would be the best cognate. I assumed I’d hear back in an hour, but it was two to three days before I heard from either. It turned out, both had polled their co-workers to come up with the right word. I was puzzled. Isn’t “management” an obvious term? No, evidently not. I wonder what that implies about the state of management here. Significantly, they did choose the same word: "dirección."

So, I arrived back in Guanajuato in October, after two months in the States, with my Spanish resume, my pack of Spanish business cards…and no sense of how to network. I hadn’t found the infrastructure of professional groups that have always helped me start a business in the States, i.e., Chambers, professional associations, career centers, networking groups, small business development centers, etc. Nada.

About a week ago, I was reading the Chopper, a local tabloid in Spanish that Barry and I buy to read the classifieds, as part of our eternal and, so far, failed attempt to find secondhand furniture (another story!), when I came across an announcement of a three-day conference for students of “Relaciones Industriales,” the phrase used here for Human Resources. Eureka! This was where I needed to be. I put on my outfit that passes for business attire (including business shoes rather than my normal athletic sandals), found the mini-bus that goes to the branch of the university in the suburbs, and arrived at the conference.

There was a break happening when I arrived. Live music, tables of food. I picked up a syllabus of the workshops. Long story short: I found the Director of the Division in which Relaciones Industriales is housed, a Brit who I had emailed a few months earlier. He combed through the list of presenters with me and told me who was who, highlighting the professors/consultants he thought I should approach. I left my business card and a note with the RI secretary, who agreed to give me the professors’ phone numbers but not their email addresses, and started trying to reach them by phone.

One professor ended up inviting me to his weekly masters’-level seminar on “Contemporary Themes in Organizational Development,” and asked me to substitute for him. I’m using my own material and experience. At the end of the class I participated in, he did a very nice job explaining that I'd be subbing for him; saying he believed things happened for a reason, that just as he needed to find a substitute, he received from my business card. He asked the class of about 30 working professionals to please help me out if I stumbled over Spanish (“Por favor!” I chimed in), and pointed out that this would be a chance for them to see someone taking on a challenge, facing the associated discomfort from risk-taking. We all laughed. Very sensitive way to smooth my entry, I thought.

So stay tuned for the post-seminar debrief next week. For now, I'm happy and excited, challenged and nervous, feet on the ground and head in the clouds...

Mexican Meditation

2006-11-05T14:20:00.001-08:00

Last week I found a Zen meditation group five minutes from our home that meets every week day, at 8 a.m. I had heard about it awhile ago, but had to track it down. It's in one room of a colonial-style building called the Meson San Antonio, which is a cultural center run by the university. The group is led by a ageless-looking Japanese man with the traditional shaved head and wearing the traditional black robe. He has lived here 20 years, one of the group told me. The format is we sit for about 15 minutes facing in to the room, then he rings a bell and we do veeeeerry slow walking meditation, then normal-walking in an oval formation for about 5 minutes, then another sit, a bit longer, about 20 minutes, facing the wall. (These times are approximate, of course. While meditating, I don't check my watch, though compulsive time-watcher that I am, I'm tempted to.)

We sit in a row against a wall, cushions provided. Scrupulous silence, and if you're not there by 8:00 a.m., you're out of luck... as I found out the first time I tried to go. I arrived at 8:01, and the door was shut tight and locked! It's all over by 9:00.

When meditating, the details of my surroundings--however flat and ordinary they might otherwise seem--come alive and have a surprising beauty about them. The heavy, brick-like stone columns in the center of the room look like they too are meditating, along with us. The high rectangular windows on the opposite wall offer their dusky light. I hear the occasional rumble of buses, their motors amplified against the narrow street of Alonzo. Walking, my bare toes try to curl around the slight arc in the cool natural Mexican tiles.

Akira, the teacher, gently adjusted my position the first day, and the second day told me after the meditation (in pigeon one- and two-word Spanish--I was told he doesn't speak much Spanish) that if I sat higher up, I would be more comfortable. Many folks bring blankets that they place on top of their cushions for added padding or elevation.

Folks have been friendly, coming up to me afterwards, introducing themselves and asking me my name, some with offerings of abrazos and besos (hugs and kisses). A few linger and hang out afterwards, or "convivir," as it's called in Spanish.

One afternoon, I ran into Akira in the Jardin Union, the main square. He smiled and touched my arm in a silent greeting. I wouldn't have recognized him in his street clothes if he hadn't acknowledged me. Our attempts to communicate didn't get very far, in one sense, but his warmth was unmistakable. He didn't speak Spanish or English, and I don't speak Japanese.

I'm delighted to have made some new Mexican connections. And no chance of language misunderstandings when you meet through meditation. What better a way to form a bond, in any culture, than through the hospitality of silence?

Day of the Dead

2006-11-05T13:59:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday was the Day of the Dead. It is an official holiday in Mexico. The evening before, the streets were even busier and more festive than usual. Vendors sold miniature doll-sized hard sugared bananas, tangerines, papayas, pineapple, watermelon, carrots, onions, corn and other fruits and vegetables, chickens, and more foods. These are made with a special sugar and glued together with lemon. People buy the foods that their loved one ate and place them on the altar (known as the “ofrenda”—or offering). Along with food, you include photos, the hot orange flowers called cempasuchiles that are the distinctive flower of the Dead, masks, candles, and other objects that say something about that person. I’ve seen tiny bottles of tequila, cups of coffee, cigarettes. The idea is that the dead are coming back to visit, so, of course, you want to provide their favorite foods.

In town, altars are all over the place, in public buildings, offices, libraries, restaurants, museums, private homes, and even on the university steps.

I didn't think about the Day of the Dead when I flew down to Mexico, so I was not equipped with photos of my mother and my brother Jay, who are my honored dead. But I created my own altar on our kitchen window sill anyway, with a veladora (candle in a glass), a bunch of cempasuchiles, and some of the sugared fruits and vegetables. Tiny replicas of canned vegetables would have more appropriate. My mother, like most people in the Fifties and Sixties, didn’t eat that well by today’s Whole Foods standards, but she wanted to eat healthy, and I figured, good enough!

On the Day itself, I took a local bus to the Pantheon (cemetery)—along with most of the Guanajuato population, it seemed, the bus crowded with people of all ages carrying flowers and picnic baskets and foods. We got off and walked up the hill to the Pantheon, the street packed and noisy with vendors on both sides selling fast food and trinkets. Inside the arched gate of the Pantheon, the atmosphere was different—still cheerful, but quieter, more respectful. Clumps of families gathered at gravesites, some praying, others singing, others quiet. Children, who are normally very rowdy in Mexico, were noticeable by their quiet and calm. I sat on the grass under the shade of a tree, near a few others doing the same. Watching, listening, remembering. Their deaths, my deaths.

Walking slowly back home, I pondered the approach to death here. It is not that Mexicans don’t experience grief when a loved one dies. My teachers and others have made a point of saying this. Grief seems to be a human universal. But I wonder how much the existence of an anointed day when everyone in the community together celebrates and remembers their loved ones tempers that grief, and allows the bereavers to accept it. It is the difference between grief expressed in the public arena, as it is here, and grief expressed very privately, as it usually is in the U.S.

I love the idea that the dead are coming back on a visit. How I have cherished the occasional dream I have had over the years of Mother or Jay, when I felt visited by them, my whole day afterwards tinged with a lingering sweetness from the dream-contact. How lovely it would be to visit with them ritually every year, not just on my own initiative, but welcomed and nurtured by the community. Now, of course, I can.

The Vertical Souk of Guanajuato

2006-08-09T05:02:00.000-07:00

Up I go. Up the steps, wide and narrow, up the ramps, up the long stony alleys that twist and wander and turn like locks of hair. What is this strange place, I still marvel, after six years of visits. The mysterious medieval haunting back lanes of Guanajuato. Today I am discovering a new callejon, Terremoto ("Earthquake"). Strangely named, but better than "Perros Muertos" (Dead Dogs Lane). I'm searching for the beautiful orange hanging flowers Barry and I plan to have on our patio, and see walls painted in fuscia, peach, even a bright hard orange, normally too brash for me, but not here where colors sing. In these alleys, in this vertical souk of a city, the beautiful and the sordid co-exist, the bursts of color, the litter, the shit, the mangy mutts with their anguished howls from the captvity of rooftops, the small kids running, playing, hiding, the women carrying plastic bags fat with groceries, climbing up to their homes from the abarrotes (grocery stores) down in the valley. No buses venture up here in these alleys. Signs on house walls scrawl “Bread,” “Sweets.” A man sits on a stoop, looking out vaguely, the empty stare of the unemployed. I hear the cry of the guy delivering pure drinking water in a huge cannister. “Agua! Agua!” His voice mingles with another shouting call, this man carrying an even heavier cannister of gas on one shoulder. “Gas!’

Still I climb, up and up. Finally I see la Panoramica, the highway that rings the city at the top. You go far enough up, you always end up there; you go far enough down, you always end up in el centro. Like other Latin cities, unlike the US or Europe, the higher you go, the poorer it gets. The less paint on the house exteriors, the more basura (trash).

Graffiti? It knows no class. It lives high and low, east and west.

Tony Cohan, who wrote the book "On Mexican Time," the book that put San Miguel de Allende on the retirement map—a town that has since become the Aspen of Mexico, with just as steep house prices—said of Guanajuato, the town he later moved to, the city I am calling my own:

“The town of Guanajuato, moody and faceted in a collage of dreams, a collapsed geography, a crumpled map of the soul. Lining a river valley gorge, above a cool stone labyrinth of subterranean roadways where once the river sluiced silver... its pale green and pink stone cut away to expose striated layers of memory.”

I pause and look out at the “collapsed geography,” at the triangle of churches: the brick-colored dome of the Templo San Diego; the custard Basilica cathedral where young couples get married on Saturdays; and the Templo de la Compania, a drip sand-castle of a church. Tightly wedged houses the color of watermelon, lime, tangerine, and violet crowd together in a poetry of rectangles and cubes. Beyond in the distance I see the dry, dun-colored hills Barry and I love to hike, dotted with white crosses.

I start down, but before long I see another thread of steps heading west. This is how it is when I go awandering. I start somewhere, who knows, it could be anywhere. It’s just a small barrio, I tell myself, won’t take me long. Before I know it, I’m in, I'm trapped, seduced, in love. OK, now, stop. I'm done. Really. But oh, look, there’s another twig of a callejon to the left. Might be only a private callejon leading to a home, but maybe not; it may go on and on, and sure enough it does, then again I think I’m at another end, but no, see, some steps on the right. I cannot stop. It often takes me over an hour to explore just a small area because there are so many tributaries within it.

Through a break in a wall I see the fire-red funicular on the opposite slope rumbling down the hill, a few lights of the city twinkling. It's dusk. In Spanish there is a lovely verb for dusk--"anochecer," the process, the becoming of night. Soon the streets will be crowded with people watching mime artists, eating hot tamales from vendors, sitting on the steps of the Teatro Juarez listening to music, strolling arm-in-arm, sitting close together on benches cradling in each other's arms.

I must head down before it gets too dark. Come, I tell myself, come. I must. I take one last lover's look at a melon-painted wall, and force myself to turn away.

The Cerveza Question

2006-08-03T16:08:00.000-07:00

The last three Friday afternoons, Barry and I have sat in our half-finished kitchen drinking beer and chatting with the workers about families, local customs, accents, legal and illegal immigration, Mexican vs. U.S. health systems (yes, Mexico does have a national health insurance), and much more.

A few days ago, Barry returned to Humboldt County, our other home (these days, I have a hard time knowing which "home" is home), leaving me here. With one Friday left on my visit, I assumed I would host our "Happy Hour" without him. I happened to mention this casually to an American friend, a cross-cultural consultant married to a Costa Rican. Her answer jarred me. "Don't," she said. "Trust me. It's different on your own. You'll give the wrong message. You'll come across as a slut."

Wasn't she exaggerating? I had thought the workers and I had good rapport. Was I so naïve? I decided to ask some other people. One of my Spanish teachers agreed it was not a good idea, saying that even if the workers didn't interpret it as flirtatious, they might lose respect for me.

I also asked a bilingual friend who was raised in Mexico, but who lived and worked in the States for 30 years. "The situation is awkward," she said. "It's not part of traditional exican culture for men and womenof different classes to drink together. Think about the men-only cantinas here."

She had some insightful alternatives, however. I could ask our architect to join us. Then the (female) client--me--and the (male) boss would be joint hosts, which would change the dynamic. Or I could invite the workers to bring their wives and children along for a party and provide Cokes and cookies (not beer!). Or I could buy the guys beer and tell them it was for them, but I wouldn't be able to join them.

I decided on the last option. The idea of inviting the families over is lovely, but it makes more sense at a later point, closer to the completion date, when Barry and I can co-host it.

Yesterday, I showed our maestro the beers in the fridge. Told him that "el senor" (Barry) and I wanted the guys to enjoy them, but I wouldn't be there. He nodded, smiling. And I went off to my writing group, happy to have cultural informants I can rely on. Without them, I might have never known there was a problem.

A Stressful Life

2006-07-31T06:25:00.000-07:00

Some of you have been interested in the continued story of my teacher E and her love life. Now that I've spent an hour a day with her for the last month, I know her much better. I realize I mistook her initially for a young Mexican bimbo, because she seemed consumed at first with her love life dilemmas.

To correct the record: she is very proud of her Philosophy degree and even prouder of the fact that she is the first member of her family to earn a B.A.

Last week, she told me--offhandedly--that six weeks ago, she donated one of her kidneys to her mother. My mouth fell open. "What?" I said. "but you look so healthy."

"I had to take it easy for a couple of weeks, but now I'm fine," she said.

"Why were you the one, rather than someone else in your family?"

"My brother drinks too much, my aunt on my mother's side has high blood pressure, and my two half-brothers are just kids. So I was the only one who could." She shrugged.

I've noticed this in Mexico, how life events that in the U.S., many would consider hugely intense or traumatic are not that big a deal. What she does find "pesado" (the Spanish word for "heavy," which, like in English, can also mean stressful and emotionally draining) is all the post-operation details, including accompanying her mother back to Mexico City for further tests and dealing with the hospital administrators. Although there is national health insurance here, it doen't cover everything and she's helping to subsidize her mother's payments. As part of the post-op medical care, her mother is driven to Mexico City in a hospital vehicle, but E has to take the often-crowded bus back and forth, a five-hour trip each way.

In another session, E told me she used to be very depressed, but eventually she went to a psychiatrist who prescribed anti-depressants which have helped a lot. The psychiatrist is expensive ($50/session), and not covered by insurance, so she can't afford to go every week. "What is the psychiatrist's approach?" I asked her.

"You know the philosophy called 'Epicureanism'? This is her method."

I nodded, vaguely remembering something from my History of Philosophy 101 class about happiness. I wondered if that translated into cognitive psychology, which as I understand it, is about retraining a person's negative and limiting belief systems.

E also told me her family is not very functional and she has found that the best route to a healthy relationship with them is to keep some distance. She doesn't live with them, as most unmarried daughters would.

As for men, that's another part of her life that is "pesado." She finally gave up on the New Jersey ex-student boyfriend who, despite promises, rarely communicated. Meanwhile her previous ex from DF has been begging her for days to get back together, saying his life is nothing without her, he cannot live without her, his life is empty without her. He loves her, he needs her.

"He's a writer," she said to me, with a skeptical look, meaning: he lives with his parents, so can afford to call himself a writer.

He sounded to me like a classic manipulator. I arrived at class one morning to find her looking dark and worn out. She hadn't slept much, she told me, because, after a phone conversation where once again she told him she wouldn't get back together, he took 14 sleeping pills mixed with alcohol and had to have his stomach pumped in the emergency room. His mother called her, weeping. Only her girlfriends got her through the night.

Sad though it is, she isn't tempted to go back to him. I was relieved. We agreed she couldn't save him.

Stress surely has no cultural bounds, I thought as I left our class that day. What's interesting to me is how different cultures respond to stress.

Male workers, Female home owners

2006-07-27T06:28:00.000-07:00

We live a fairly circumscribed life here. Monday through Saturday, the workers arrive at 8:00 a.m., when we normally close our door to our one-room sanctuary, for privacy and protection from dust and noise. They work here til 5:00 (except Saturdays until 1:00), at which time we re-open the door, and--like kids left at home when the parents are away--whee! We’re free again! We have to be out of the bathroom by 8:00, because the workers use the bathroom to change from their street clothes to their work clothes, which they leave here overnight. We can’t use the room that will be our future kitchen during the day, because they’re working on it.

The last couple of days they’ve been dismantling part of the roof, a messy business, chipping away at plaster and tiles with hammers and chisels. Barry and I were worried about their use of a ladder to get onto the roof. They climb onto the scaffolding outside the kitchen window to reach the neighbor’s roof, then up a steep ladder from her roof to ours. At different times, we each urged them to use the steps next to our room, which are also steep, but safer than the alternative. We assured them it was fine to go through our room to reach the steps. Each time they said, “OK. Sure,” but they never did. At least this time they ignored both of us, not just me.

A few days ago, the rubble that had collected downstairs was scheduled to be removed the next day. Coincidentally, piles of pavement stones line the street, because our callejon (alley), like many others in Guanajuato’s central historical district, is being replumbed and repaved with the help of a UNESCO grant. Destruction within and without! I suggested to the maestro that maybe the workers on the callejon would be willing to remove our rubble while removing the street rubble, at a lower cost than if we went the traditional route by hiring an independent contractor to transport the rubble. Geraldo nodded respectfully. “I will ask the street supervisor, Señora,” he said. I went away thinking, what a good idea, worth a try. Heard nothing else about it, until the next day—when the contracted worker arrived to carry the rubble away--and I realized the maestro had had no intention of asking the supervisor. But you never hear “no” in Mexico.

Realizing your suggestions are being ignored or dismissed, often because you are a woman, is, for me, a new and humbling experience. I’m not used to feeling so powerless. But it’s a reality here, and there’s not much I can do about it. A friend of ours who remodeled her home and acted as her own maestro (foreman), frequently, when giving her workers directions, would find them balking. As a woman, her opinions were irrelevant—even if she was the owner! (Just a detail.) Her solution was to tell the workers she would call her vet husband back in California (“el doctor”) and ask his opinion. Then she’d get on the phone and feign calling him and asking his opinion. After the “conversation,” she’d come back to them, nod emphatically, and say, “Yes, the doctor says this is what we must do.” And they’d get to work.

“Asi es Mexico.” Such is Mexico.

A Modern Mexican Woman

2006-07-25T05:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon V, our former teacher and friend, came to visit. V is about 33. Barry and I met her at the first Spanish school we attended in Guanajuato, on our first visit here in 1999. Since then we have followed her from school to school. (One of my axioms in Spanish learning is to be loyal to the teacher, not the school). But we've seen less of her over the last couple of years' visits, because she started teaching English in the city of Leon, about half an hour away, got married, and moved to a "fraccionamiento" (subdivision) in the suburbs. Married life in Mexico demands a lot of women and women's time. But we called anyway, hoping to see her, and she agreed.

It turned out she knew our house, or at least the first floor, because when she was a young girl, her family moved to Guanajuato from Mexico City. They lived at the top of the street, and she had a schoolfriend who lived here.

We sat and talked where we always do, at the large kitchen window (no glass yet) among all the construction materials, with the view of San Francisco Church that motivated me to buy the house. Barry asked if she was enjoying married life. "About 85% of the time," she said, which we thought was a pretty good percentage for the second year. (Our answer to the question "what is the secret to a happy, long-term marriage?" is: "skip the first year!")

"But," she went on, "I miss my parents, and--" she giggled guiltily--"my single life." Then she said, "I have a confession: a few weeks ago I was very depressed. I cried and cried and told my husband I wanted to die." She had been sick with various infirmities, which meant she couldn't get pregnant, and she was lonely. She works, but her husband works all the time because he is in the start-up phase of setting up an independent accounting business. They come home for the traditional Mexican extended lunch between about 3:00 and 5:00 p.m., the main meal of the day, but then he goes back to work til late, and she's alone a lot.

But last Friday, she told us, she and two neighbor moms got together one evening and drank vodka and brandy and opened up to each other. "We are like a club now," she laughed."We were very open with each other. They told me they thought before that I was stuck up and always in a hurry, rushing in and out of the house." Now, she said, she feels less lonely.

I told her about the recent studies showing that women's friendships and support systems are one reason why women tend to be healthier and live longer.

I reminded her of a time I saw her in the Jardin (the town plaza) all dressed up, looking very sexy, talking to some guy, probably her future husband. She remembered, too. "I was wearing the suit I wore to the civil ceremony," she said. In Mexico, a marriage has two parts: the civil ceremony, which takes place first, and the church ceremony. Sometimes these two events are divided by a long stretch of time. In another teacher's case, it was six months. And the marriage isn't official until both ceremonies are completed.

"So can a couple have sex after they've had the civil ceremony, or do they have to wait til the church ceremony?" Barry asked.

"They have to wait," V said.

"I bet they don't," I said.

V went into peals of girlish laughter. "No, of course they don't!"

"I bet they don't wait for the civil ceremony, either," I said. More laughter.

She really is a lot of fun. Because she's on vacation from her English teaching job, she has extra time, and she agreed to give us private classes three times a week at the house. We asked her what her price was.

"Whatever you say."

This is typical Mexican. From my American point of view, they need assertiveness training. I said, "If you want to open a Spanish language school (which she does), you'll have to set rates. You can't have student after student coming in and asking what the price is, and you saying, 'Whatever you say.'"

"I know," she said, hesitating. "OK. I was thinking 80 pesos, if that works for you."

Funny, that was the number I had in my mind. This is slightly less than $8/hour. Teachers in the schools around here get an abysmal $3 to $4/hour.

Barry and I are proud of her for setting a price. Classes start Wednesday. I'm looking forward to more conversations with my modern Mexican woman friend.

So who's doing the work?

2006-07-23T09:17:00.000-07:00

Although remodeling a house in Mexico feels like a full-time job, Barry and I are not doing much of the physical labor. So who is? Here are the players.

David (Da-veed) -- our architect. He´s 37, speaks understandable English, and is a joy to work with. Has his own ideas, is very creative, but also open to ours. He dresses in jeans, shirt tail out, very casual--the opposite of stuffy.

Geraldo Flores – the “maestro” (foreman). David addresses him as “Maestro”; he calls David “Arquitecto.”

Then there are three albaniles (workers): Juan, Hector, and Juan Angel, a.university student for whom this is a summer job. In three weeks, they’ve enlarged the kitchen window, built concrete countertops, built the concrete bathroom walls, dug into the walls to create the space for the future bathroom sink and cistern, enlarged the living room window, added an interior window, stucco-ed two exterior walls, and done a lot of finish work.

Barry and I are staying in the room adjacent to the street, our future patio. We recently learned this room was a patio/terrace when the house was built, and we like the idea that we are returning the house in some ways to its roots. For now, the room is our combined office, bedroom, dining room, kitchen, and hang-out room. We have a phone, desk, 2 laptops, a modem, two plastic tables, several chairs, a set of temporary shelves resting on bricks, a fridge, a range top, and a plywood door to keep out the dust. The door is an important addition! Dust seeps in from the rooms where the workers are working and from the new kitchen and bathroom windows, so far glass-free and open to the air.

In the room next door, the workers mix cement. It's sticky and messy and we have to carefully step around the pool of cement to get to our room. Downstairs are huge mounds of sand to be mixed for stucco.

At the end of each day the workers clean and organize everything. What's noticeable is what there isn't: no power tools, no trash, no loud music (no music at all), no beer bottles-- all things we've been warned about by other gringos. I attribute this to David's leadership style. He is understated, soft-spoken and modest, unfailingly courteous and respectful and never orders people aound--but he clearly lets Geraldo the maestro know how he wants things done. The workers respect him because he’s a working architect—his dad was a mason, and he was a mason in the family trade before he became an architect. So he knows his stuff.

Every Friday we buy bottles of cerveza and at the end of the day sit around with the guys getting to know each other and talking. We find out things like the fact that Giraldo worked on this and the neighboring houses 40 years ago! Hanging out helps to break down the “us” and “them” barriers.

Shopping, Guanajuato-style

2006-07-18T14:24:00.000-07:00

I went to Guanajuato's only chain supermarket this week, Comercial Mexicana. It's not that far a walk, so I was trying to understand why I felt so tired once I got home. There's the heat, of course. Even at almost 7000', it can get quite warm. But other factors are also part of shopping stress.

1. The noise. In the supermarket, a loud male voice shouted items for sale. You hear selling spiels at supermarkets in the States, of course, but this guy's voice sounded louder, faster, and more breathless. Plus there was music, of course. Loud music almost everywhere--one of the realities of Mexican life.

2. Groups. There are more people walking in Guanajuato (a town with few cars, and a large pedestrian area), but in addition, you usually see larger groups made up of 2, 3, 4 and more people. Frequently I see a mom, I'm guessing her sister, and their combined kids. In the U.S., I rarely see more than one or maybe two people shopping. Mexicans are a group culture, not an individual one. They are defined by groups.

3. Order. In the U.S., people seem to have more of a sense of direction and order. They know where they're going, and they go there; then they get in their cars, and they drive home. Here, it doesn't look like people are so goal-oriented. They may be, but they seem less linear. Especially the kids, who zigzag and wander this way and that, screaming up and down the aisles, picking up products, playing, parents nowhere in sight, though I know they're around. Kids seem to have more physical freedom here (not sure about emotional/mental).

4. Different flow/orientation. As I walk down the sidewalk, frequently I almost bump into someone walking out of a shop or stepping off the sidewalk. I expect the person leaving the store to look left or right and pause, because, from my perspective, the pedestrians on the sidewalk are the "main current" and have the right of way. I'm assuming that people entering the "river" from outside it will yield before entering, like cars on an on-ramp. Wish on! People don't look either way; they just walk right in, and someone like me, who isn't used to it, has to quickly come to a stop or I'll bump right into them. I wondered if it was just me who had this sense? I checked with Barry, and he agrees; people don't seem to look where they’re going. I shared my observation with one of my Spanish teachers, and he laughed and said. "Well, I never thought about it, but it's true."

On the other hand, they must intuitively understand the flow, because they're not the ones bumping into each other, like I am.

5. Crowdedness and body space. Buses and taxis exist, but even so, the streets and narrow sidewalks are thick with people from mid-morning til late at night. People rub shoulders with each other.

6. Waiting. In many shops there will be only one cashier operating, while other cashiers are talking with each other or attending to other tasks, not focused on customers. Mexicans wait patiently. This doesn't seem to annoy customers as it would in the U.S.

So this is why after an hour or two of shopping, the Mexican way, I come home and want a siesta!

Neighbor Courtesy

2006-07-18T08:41:00.000-07:00

I finally ran into D on the street. She said she'd like to drive to San Miguel, she has her own reasons for wanting to go. And yes, she does have a cellphone, but doesn't use it, so there is no way to reach her except through R, unless I wave at her while she walks on her terrace. D exercises by walking back and forth on R's upper-story balcony, listening to music.

De agrees with me: she learned from her Spanish teacher that it would be rude to drop in on R and ask for D without visiting with R first.

I asked my Spanish teacher if I had to visit with R when who I really wanted to see was D. She frowned. "Mexicans are very passionate and emotional and jealous," she said.

"Men and women both?"

"Women more. I have two aunts. If I call one, then I have to be sure to call the other, because the first one will tell the other I called, and the other will be offended."

Barry and I discussed R's request for the albaniles. "I watch them during their lunch break, and they're really resting. They need the time off," he said. "If she uses them, it will end up costing us." We agreed that I will call David, our architect/contractor, and tell him that we are going to tell R, if she asks again, that David has said he wants the albaniles to focus just on the house, it's such a big project.

Normally at home I would resist relying on a third party to assume responsibility, but I think here it would be better for R and me, and more credible if it comes from David.

Meanwhile, Barry and I invited R and her son over for drinks on Saturday to see the progress on our house. Hopefully, that will smooth things over, if they need to be smoothed. I hope any minor cultural infractions I make will be forgiven. But for one who who can fuss endlessly over possible mutations in relationships, and stay awake at night interpreting the subtlest of signals, Mexico is a wild card!

How to Say No in Mexico?

2006-07-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I finally made it over to my neighbor R's house to visit. She arrived at the door on the phone, very distracted. She got off the phone, and, barely greeting me, said she needed someone to carry a stove to her cousin's house, it was urgent. Could she borrow our workers?

Her abruptness worried me. It would be so simple at home. I'd just say, "Is everything OK?" I'm a little uneasy being so straightforward here. And it bugged me that she wanted to use our workers, for the second time.

R offered to sell me her elderly stove back in January. I took a brief look at it, though it was hard to inspect because it was covered with a pile of towels and linens, and said tentatively yes (that is, I saw my response as tentative, it turned out she interpreted it as a definite yes). A month later she dropped off the stove at the house while we were in California. I wasn't very happy to hear this when T, our friend and "project manager" while we were away, wrote me that a stove had arrived unannounced on our doorstep. I was afraid I might be stuck with it.

Happily, when I arrived this time, R told me that her niece was buying a house in Guanajuato, and if I didn't want the stove, she would take it back. When I looked closer at the stove I saw that the burners were missing and would have to be replaced. I'd rather get a new stove down the road; we don't need one right away because we bought a rangetop and don't use an oven very often.

When I politely refused the stove, R asked if our albaniles (workers) could carry it up the street to her house, and she'd pay them. I hesitated. The workers don't work for us; they work for David, our architect, and I think it's important to respect the system of working. This wasn't like Barry asking them for something related to the house (like moving the gas cylinder). So I called David and he said it was OK, that they could carry it during their lunch break, he would inform the maestro (foreman).

It's OK, once, I guess. I assume she paid them, I never asked.

But now I stood on R's doorstep, and she kept murmuring, "This is urgent, this is urgent," and she asked me again if she could use the albaniles to carry this damn stove to her cousin's house.

"Well, maybe during their lunch break," I demurred. This was my way of saying no. It is very difficult to say no in Mexico. She kept looking up and down the street for a couple of husky guys, murmuring how urgent it was. It was about 10:00 a.m., and lunch break was four hours away. I was pretty sure she was hoping I would change my mind, but I said nothing. I was struck more by her lack of greeting me. Was she just distracted, or was she being less polite because I had failed to greet her on the phone when I asked for D, my Canadian friend who rents a room from her?

Neighbor Worries

2006-07-17T18:35:00.000-07:00

I've been worrying about my neighbor up the street, that I may have offended her. Neighbor relations in Guanajuato can get very tricky. She is not my next-door neighbor, fortunately; she's across the callejon (alley) and up the hill about four houses.

R provides room and board to Spanish-language students. Barry and I, and I alone, have stayed with her for 2 or 3 months, all told, in various visits over six years. The last time I stayed with her, in December, was when I was searching for the house we bought. While with her, I met D, a Canadian woman who is renting a room in R's home long-term while divorcing her husband and re-examining her life. D and I hit it off immediately.

I do like R, too. After my early-morning run most mornings in December, I'd sit in her kitchen drinking coffee and chatting with her while she cut up fruit for breakfast. R is Barry's age (early 60s), divorced, and lives with her single 40-something son. Mexican children live with their parents until they get married, all their lives if they don't marry.

D has a car down here. She told us if we wanted to go to Leon, the nearby city where people often shop because prices are lower, or other places, feel free to ask. So this week when I found out I had to go back to San Miguel (1 1/4 hours away) to pick up my residential visa, I wanted to ask her for a ride. But this week here has been so overwhelming with house details that I avoided going over or calling because I had the sense that I would, to be courteous, need to visit with R first rather than just ask for D. I just didn't have the time or energy to visit with R. I'm pretty sure D has a cell phone, so I can hopefully in the future reach her directly, but I don't know it.

One day, getting more and more anxious about my impending deadline to pick up the visa (a deadline, I later learned, that was not as rigid as I had made it!), I picked up the phone and called R's, and without saying who I was or greeting her, asked for D.

"Is this Louisa?" R asked. "Yes," I said.

"D is in Leon today."

"I'm sorry I haven't been over to see you, I've been overwhelmed with the house," I said.

"I'm here when you have the time," she said.

I still feel uneasy.

My Spanish teacher

2006-07-17T06:42:00.000-07:00

My 23-year-old Spanish teacher was telling me about her love life. One boyfriend, an ex-student (she hung her head briefly, admitting the unprofessional nature of it, though Barry and I notice that teacher-student liaisons happen all the time at Spanish-language schools) is back in New Jersey. He's very cold, she complained. He doesn't write much; he's busy. Work, work, work. "The American way," I agreed. She also has an ex-boyfriend in "De Effe" (i.e., Mexico City; they refer to it as DF (District Federal), the way Americans refer to Washington as DC), who also was very cold, which is why he's an ex. But he has been writing her soulful emails, eager to get back together.

"I don't know which to choose," she sighed.

We discussed the pros and cons of each guy for a couple of minutes. Then I said, "I have a bigger question. Why must you have a novio [boyfriend] at all?"

She looked thoughtful. "I am a passionate person! I love to be involved with someone!" She doesn't like "frees" (Mexican slang for a fling). She prefers long, intense relationships. Later she added, "In Mexico we are very community-oriented. We are not loners. We are social. This is why I like a boyfriend.""

"The opposite of Americans," I said. "We are probably one of the most exaggeratedly individualistic cultures on the planet, right next door to a very community-minded people."

I told Barry about our conversation on our weekly Saturday hike. "It sounds like her euphemism for sex," he said.

Mexican girls and boys seem intensely sexual at a very young age. We see these barely pubescent teens--12, 13-- on plazas benches and in alley corners, entwined. A couple of days ago I saw a young girl, sitting upright on a bench, looking out ahead while a young boy swarmed all over her. I felt sorry for her; she looked so uncomfortable. From the outside, sexuality looks much more pressured than in the States, but maybe it's partly because Mexican teenagers have nowhere to demonstrate their affections except in public places. They can't neck in cars. They don't have large houses to host parties in. Family members, from grandparents to younger siblings to babies, are everywhere. Privacy as we know it doesn't exist here.

I decided at my next meeting to ask her more about sex in Mexico. This is one of the wonderful advantages of one-on-one Spanish learning. Time and again Barry and I find that the teacher becomes a source for all kinds of cultural information. Also, she was going to talk with her various boyfriends this weekend. "I'll wait to hear the news," I told her in our last class.