Category: Mexico life

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.

Unbelievably, last night we went to a working man’s outdoor taco place for the first time since we moved down to Mexico. As usual, it was just incredible and we cannot figure out why we did not do this until two weeks after we arrived.

Lorena and I are genuinely excited to be living in Mexico. Of course the food is spectacular, but there is so much more. We just happened to pick a time to come down here during one of the mildest summers in memory. The temperatures in August have been between five and ten degrees cooler than where we are building our house Southwest of Fort Worth. We are living in a working class neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else, the music is a little too loud, the streets are not exactly the cleanest in the world, but the people are truly the friendliest people anywhere. The added bonus is the closeness of family. We could not be more grateful.

We are amazed at what it is like to live in our new neighborhood. Beside the beautiful vignettes of daily life we see out the front window (we loved seeing this cat relaxing on a shelf above the garage of the neighbor across the street), it seems like everyone here knows, or at least knows of, everyone else in the neighborhood. Last night, Lynn walked up to a deposito (a non-chain, neighborhood convenience store–they call them depositos because everyone buys their beer and returns their empty bottles to stores like this) to return some bottles from other renters in our apartment. The guy working behind the counter asked to whom he should credit the bottles. Lynn told him, “the girls from Veracruz” and he knew exactly who Lynn was talking about even though they had been here only a month.