Category: Mexico life Page 1 of 2

Grandma Conchita brought me a brilliant new Caterpillar coffee/travel mug tonight as a surprise. I was really night expecting it. She is the best mother-in-law in the world. I will use it DAILY! After she got here, Tío Lynn grilled us up some milanesa (thinly sliced steak) to make sandwiches. Loren had previously purchased bolillos from the drive-by bread truck that were perfect for that application. Now we are waiting for the elote cart to drive by so we can by some fresh corn-on-the-cob for desert. It does not get much better than this.

Lynn contracted with our neighbors, Richie and Chuy to install the doors on the cabinets below the kitchen counters in our apartment. They did a great job. Richie introduced himself to me as “Richie” and now everyone in the neighborhood calls him “Richie the gringo” and laughs. Before that, they called him Ricardo and think that Richie sounds extremely pretentious. Actually, it is kind of not Richie’s fault because he spends a lot of time building houses up in the States and that is what they call him there. I LOVE this neighborhood.

One of the nicest things about living here in San Pedro is the opportunity we have had to just hang out with Lorena’s family. The one’s we see the most are Grandma Conchita and Tío Lynn with Tío Lauro a close third. We now have a couple of really nice places to hang out–the living room of our apartment and, when the weather is nice, the main terrace where Lynn usually grills us something. It is amazing that we are now in November and the weather is still just amazing. It is currently 83° and is expected to drop to 73° at about dinner time.

The entire apartment building is really taking shape. We really could be at the point where we need to move out from the apartments and up the hill to our house remodel so that Lynn can rent out what where we are living now. We have been accumulating all the little things needed to just live daily life like an electric tea kettle, art (mostly from Tío Lauro), house plants, a small oven (no of the apartments have one) which also serves as an air fryer, etc., etc.. We have never had an air fryer before and we are honestly amazed by the thing. We are getting to like the neighbors so much here that is hard to think of moving. We are not sure if the culture of the neighborhood will be as friendly, but this is Mexico so it probably will be.

This image was captured the night of the Festival of St. Jude when the street was blocked off for a Mexican brass band, dancing Matachines, and a quinceñera. The group of kids playing soccer grew and shrank over the five hours of the festivities, but it never stopped. This same group of kids plays street soccer every evening their parents let them until 9:00 PM. It is just amazing. There are a couple of really privileged kids among them that have portero guantes which seem very, very cool to me and I wish I had some, too.

Photo credit: Tío Lauro

My brother-in-law, Lauro, took this photo last night of an event that was organized just by the people on our block. It was actually kind of a double event consisting of Matachines dancing to the music of a Mexican brass band with an excellent singer and a quinceñera after party. This was certainly not an official city event, but the people blocked off the street, there were lots of onlookers in lawn chairs on the sidewalk with food and drink everywhere. The setting was incredible with the colorful house, colorful dances, mountain backdrop and lots of happy people. I went out to see what was going on and a bunch of people, known and unknown, made sure I knew I was welcome and would I like to have a beer. It surely seems like we are living in the right place.

I am missing my Barcalounger, but I have finally found a pretty reasonable work-around until we can get into our house up the hill–God willing, I will be able to buy one. I am amazed at how much we are enjoying our apartment. Lorena has been adding plants and other touches and doing her OCD cleaning thing, so it just keeps getting better and better. We think we will have to move out to the other house because Lynn will have one floor done up there and wants to rent the apartment as he prepares to put it on the market and sell it. In the meantime, I am enjoying my new reading station quite a lot.

Every night at about 10 pm, a guy walks through our neighborhood pushing a cart and screaming, “Elotes!” He is in the corn-on-the=cob business and from all we can tell, it is booming. We have taken to buying one or two ourselves one or two times per week. It is not nearly as good as fresh corn-on-the-cob in season in the Oregon, but it is pretty good. The only rub is that he only sells it with chile sauce and mayonnaise. Lorena likes it that way, but I have to add my own butter and salt. This is just another good reason to lover our neighborhood.

Lorena and I pick up habits easily. Sometimes they are good ones. For the last three Sunday’s we have visited Aló Café in the center of San Pedro Garza García for brunch and then walked to Casa Casco for a coffee and a cookie. We plan to keep it up while we are here and cannot imagine that we will get tired of it.

We now have a roof over parts of both the upper and lower terrace of the apartments. It is really nice, but that is not what this post is about. The post is about the working class area where we live and how it seemed like the whole neighborhood was involved in the installation of the roof. First, Milton (is that a Mexican name) the welder Lynn hired came over with his son and put up the framework with the help of one of Lynn’s regular employees, Rodolfo. He could not reach some of the higher stuff, so he went across the street to ask his friend, Jesus if he could borrow some scaffolding. Of course, Jesus brought that over and stuck around to help. Lynn was about two hours late with the actually roofing materia, so rather than go home and wait until he got here and then come back, they went over to the convenience store on the corner, bought some caguamas (Mexican slang–look it up), and brought the owner of the convenience store came along to join the fun. We all proceeded to talk about politics, religion, neighborhood drama and to berate Lynn while enjoying the caguamas while Lorena brought out a tub of refried beans, salsa, and a stack of tostadas for us to munch on. They all stuck around to finish the job when Lynn finally arrived. In the middle of all this, an older, retired neighbor who lives in the house with the green trees came over to the apartments to water OUR trees. There truly is community here–it is not all goodness and sunshine, but people do know and look out for each other in this neighborhood. I love Mexico.

We are starting to figure out how to live here in Mexico. It is a lot different now than when Lorena lived her almost 32 years ago. Some of the infrastructure is a lot better than what we have in the states, but some of it is a lot worse. It has been a bigger change to move back into an apartment from a house than from the United States to Mexico–at least this part of Mexico. We are working with Lynn now to make a plan to get the house up on the hill in good enough shape for us to move up there so we can rent out the two (of six) apartments where we currently live. Our goal is to get there a week or two before Thanksgiving so we can be ready for the kids to come here with us. One of the parts that is almost no different is the availability of American chain restaurants–yesterday we ate at Shake Shake for lunch and then took Conchita and Lauro to supper at IHOP last night.

Lorena has been wanting to take more pottery classes since the time she took them almost twenty years ago at Linn-Benton Community College’s Corvallis campus. She found a place in a very fancy place in San Pedro with lots of other little shops around it and signed up for eight classes. She will be going there for three hours every Thursday she is in town. Today was her first day. There are three pottery wheels in a small workshop along with space for people to do other things. Today, there was a small group of woman doing sculptures at the sculpture table and two college girls working on the other two pottery wheels. Lorena says she loved it and cannot wait to go back.

Lorena and I ran down to the Galería Mall in Monterrey to eat lunch at the SHAKE SHACK!!! It is just as good (the SAME) as in the U.S.A. There are actually three of them in the Monterrey metropolitan area. We are truly blessed.

Conchita, Lauro, Lorena, and I went into El Centrito de San Pedro Garza García today, had arrachera for lunch followed by coffee and a grocery shopping trip to Soriana. I decided to go home after that, but everyone else stayed to go to an evening street fair. They are still there having a great time, but I am glad I came home. What I though was a three hour even turns out was about a ten hour event (and that is ok!)!

We knew we needed to figure out how to get our prescription medications when we moved to Mexico and were pretty sure that was true for a lot of other things, too. The first thing we learned was that my prescription medications are just medications in Mexico, no prescription required. Then, we found out that the 5000 UI capsules of vitamin D3 and the vitamin K2 we could not seem to find anywhere online or in stores, was readily available just by asking the pharmacist where we got our medications to order them. The reality is that we have not find anything, so far, that we cannot get easily here in Monterrey.