Sinaloa

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Iguana!

I saw my first two wild iguanas the other day, but today was the first time I saw one one my garden wall! The neighbours must think I’m a crazy gringa because I stood there filming and shooting pics for ages. The iguana very nicely posed for me and then continued climbing to the roof!

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Tortillas!

It took a couple of weeks, but I finally figured out how to get fresh corn tortillas! I’ve been buying tortillas at the grocery store and they haven’t been good, rather stale and tough, not like the lovely soft ones I get with my chicken.

Well, the last time I got chicken, a boy on an ATV pulled up, took packages of tortillas out of a cooler, and passed them to the chicken lady. She opened up one of those packages and put several of the tortillas on my plate of chicken. Interesting. Now, where did that boy get his tortillas from?

This morning, I saw the Lala dairy truck go by, so I took that as a sign that the supermarket probably had been restocked. I just about ran to the Super Deli and was able to stock up on cheese and yoghurt (got the bigger peach one this time! *g*).

On the way home, I spotted the tortilla boy and noticed that, wait a minute, he’s making door to door deliveries of tortillas to people’s homes. Perhaps he’s just delivering a set order or maybe I can buy directly from him?!

I caught up with him by the basketball court and asked how much for the tortillas, expecting to be told he couldn’t sell me any. Nope! He replied ‘Ocho’ (about .65CAD) and I scrounged around for change. He handed me a package of STILL WARM tortillas.

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Hopefully, this boy won’t be as elusive as the vegetable trucks, which I haven’t seen since that day so long ago that I caught one! I’m used to paying about 10 times as much for half as many tortillas. The plan is enjoy the tortillas until they get a little stale, throw the rest in the freezer to eventually make my own chips which (finding them superior to premaid chips), and get a new batch of fresh ones.

It’s been a good food scrounging day since I also found an edible-looking avocado at the supermarket!

Lunch was two very satisfying panela cheese, turkey ham, mustard, and tomato roll ups in my lovely warm tortillas. Tonight, I’m having chips and guacamole and beer. 🙂

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Pensive

I had a really brutal work day yesterday (Monday) and am running on way too little sleep for way too many days in a row. So today is ending up to be pretty much a write-off. I have tons of work for the rest of the week, due late Friday, but the amount will still be manageable if I skip today. I’m looking at my hammock and wondering if I might actually be able to fall asleep if I crawl into it…

When I started to seriously think about Mexico for this winter, I was still very much in the working extremely hard for little money stage of my life. I envisioned my Mexico winter to be pretty much what November has been and what last winter was like, being housebound, typing madly, and occasionally emerging for the odd meal out and a bit of sunshine. I was okay with that and I am okay with how my first few weeks in Mexico have been. I mean, I am in Mexico.

One of my good friends is at a resort at an exotic location right now. When the pictures starting showing up in my feed, I felt a momentary pang of jealousy that I can’t afford to take vacations like that. And then, I remember where the heck I am! I can’t afford to take vacations like that, but I can afford to port my life to amazing destinations!

I didn’t get to eat much yesterday, what with the schedule being as crazy as it was, and December money is going to be coming in very quickly. So I decided this morning that I had earned a splurge and went to Carmelita’s for lunch. I didn’t bring a book or device, choosing to instead sit outside and watch the ocean and the beach crowds and let my thoughts go any way they wanted.

My life is so simple and yet it affords me the luxury of being at a beach resort location on a gloriously warm and sunny day when it is grey and absolutely freezing back home. I might not be able to afford to vacation here, but I can live here and have an authentic experience of what it means to live in a country that is quite different from my own. I have no regrets.

I ordered a mineral water limonada (it was sweet this time, but not so much so as to be undrinkable), and one of the most expensive things on the menu, the shrimp quesadillas. They turned out be more like my idea of a shrimp taco, but in flour tortillas, with the shrimp so sweet and chewy and non-fishy that I was momentarily overwhelmed by their succulent flavour. I actually wondered if I had ever in my life tasted something so incredibly delicious. Seriously. I must be really bored with my cooking!

I took my time savouring each delightful bite, worked my way through most of the bowl of pico de gallo as well as sides of rice and beans, and sipped my drink slowly enough that the ice had time to melt.

The server has seen me a few times and we talked a little today about where I’m staying here and where I’m from. He tries to serve me in English, but I’m adamant about responding in Spanish.

My meal came to a hefty 160 pesos and left a 25 peso tip. I could feed myself for a week on that, so I won’t be eating out again at a Gringo place for a while, but, really, it was just $15.25 and I pay exactly that for lunch at 121 in Assiniboia without batting an eyelash because it’s such good value.

December will be quite different from November if work keeps up the way it has. I’ll be able to get back into a more normal routine with evenings and days off. I’m planning to take the village panga to Maz on Saturday to find the Ley grocery store and I’d like to get into the habit of going to Maz at least once, if not twice, a week. It’s an inexpensive trip (just 16 pesos for residents on the village panga), so there’s no reason not to expand the boundaries of my Mexican home.

Six months sounds like such a long time, but I’m already about to start the first of only four complete months here on Isla. Time is going to go really, really fast. I know how easy it is to settle into a groove somewhere, thinking that there is plenty of time to see everything, and then it’s suddenly time to leave.

Speaking of Saturday, I will be going to the airport in the afternoon to pick up my new neighbour in the little suite. She is flying in from… Saskatchewan! I’ve had a good laugh about that! She has negotiated the use of the palapa and the washer, so my not-so-quiet existence here is about to come to an end and I may end up having to change my office setup since I look right out onto the palapa. But my new neighbour sounds great (we’ve been emailing) and she was here in my suite last year, so it’ll be nice to have someone who knows the ropes and her way around my landlady. 🙂

I feel so grateful to be here, to be bone tired while looking at coconut palms and iguanas running across the top of the garden wall instead of staring at my neighbour’s garage. I doubt I will ever stop being amused at having to dodge lizards in the hallway while en route to another part of the house, unlike having to chase mice hell bent on killing me (hantvirus!). I miss the quiet of my home back north, but otherwise am quite content here and not really missing anything.

My RVing years taught me to be at home everywhere. They have reduced a lot of the awe at being in a new exotic location because being somewhere new has become my new normal. I worry sometimes that I’m becoming a little jaded, but then I find myself spotting my first wild iguana or nearly getting clocked by a coconut falling out of a palm tree and I am so giddy and happy about the event that I know that I have not lost the ability to look at the world with a child’s eye.

I love my life.

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Early Morning On Isla

One of the things I need to get used to about life on Isla is that I cannot go to sleep past 10 p.m. because the absolute latest I can be guaranteed to sleep uninterrupted is 5 a.m. Seven and six do sometimes happen, but it’s rare. I didn’t get to sleep till about 10:45 last night and I’m feeling it this morning. 🙁

I woke up around five and gave up on going back to sleep around six. I decided to go for a beach walk before getting to work.

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High Speed Internet Is Relative

This post will be redundant for those of you who follow me on Facebook, but it does contain additional detail.

Last night, as dinner (a lovely Moroccan-spiced lentil stew!) was just about done, I ran out of gas. Wonderful. So much for not having to deal with propane this winter!

I called my landlady and, to my immense surprise, immediately got hold of her. She said that she had ordered gas for me the day after I arrived and why did I not tell her they hadn’t come yet. Um, maybe because I didn’t know they were supposed to?

She said she would put in another order and then I asked if she could call TelMex again to find out what the hold up is. She said she would make both calls first thing this morning.

Around noon, she came by to give me bad news in person. First of all, the gas company said that I have been scheduled for delivery since the 11th and that it should happen between the 7th and 11th of December. OMG. She is calling around to other companies and her husband is going to try to jury rig something for me before then, but it’ll take a few days. The tank is welded to the roof, so I can’t take advantage of door-to-door delivery of little tanks.

She also had a brand new internet contract for me, showing that she had gone to TelMex in person. She said that for whatever reason, my original order was canceled and that the clock had reset for installation! I couldn’t even be angry at that point, just frustrated.

I thanked her for her help and decided that since I wasn’t going to get internet till Monday at the absolute earliest and was no longer tethered to my casita, I would go for a mid-day beach walk! I did that, wading into the surf to my thighs, enjoying the hot sun and the warm water. Being a weekday, there were almost no vendors and I didn’t get hassled to buy trinkets.

Instead of going straight home, I took a slight detour to see if the peanut vendor was out today (he’s next to the police station). Yup, so I picked up another big bag of plain roasted peanuts in the shell for 10 pesos.

I came home and continued to work on an easy but excruciatingly boring medical lecture. Around three, I heard a knock at my door to find a man wearing a TelMex shirt…

I swear that my heart stopped, my shock was so great! It took me a moment to recover. He looked at me quizzically and said “I’m here for your internet installation?”, just like that, as a question because I looked so puzzled and he must have thought he had the wrong house!

I let him in and showed him the modem box and contract. He asked me where I wanted my modem installed, immediately going to some outlet covers by the entertainment unit in the living room.

Here’s the thing about those outlet covers, which I thought were hiding phone outlets: they’re empty!

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When I saw this the other night, after curiosity got the better of me, I was certain I’d been had regarding internet because surely they weren’t going to bring in new wiring for me, were they?

I told him that my computer is in the rear bedroom and there there was a similar outlet back there (conveniently enough). I didn’t know how to say outlet so I just said ‘caja’ (box) and he understood. He said that he would take the ‘alámbrica’ (which I eventually understood from context to be wiring) from outside and could bring it to any such outlet. So if there was one in the bedroom, he could definitely set up the modem there.

I led him to the back room and pointed out the plate cover. He immediately moved furniture out of the way to give himself room to work and examined the box, showing me that it is the outlet for conduit that goes up the wall to the roof. Of course. These walls are all made of cement or some such material, so the only way to pass cabling in them is during the planning phase or by having the foresight to lay conduit.

He went outside and onto the roof, then came down and told me to please wait, he would be back.

Time passed… Five o’clock came and went and the sky became tinged with pink. I resigned myself to using Banda Ancha over the weekend and then I heard noise. I looked out the window to see this:

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The job didn’t take long after that! I heard some drilling and saw dust come out of the conduit, then he came down to see if his cable had passed. No. Back on the roof he went, then back down and he was finally able to catch the wire.

Each time he came into the house, he asked for permission to do so even though I left the door open. Such a lovely and polite man!

After he pulled the wiring into the house he asked if he could wash his hands. Certainly! I’m glad I didn’t leave any embarrassing female stuff lying around the bathroom. 🙂

After that, he addressed the long delay that I experienced. As it turns out, TelMex had a glitch with their ordering system last week and a bunch of orders didn’t get put in the queue. After three days, non-processed orders get immediately cancelled and need to be redone. It was unfortunate that I bought into the old mentality that these things take time and was so patient because if a call had been made last week, I would have had service very quickly.

Because, yes, TelMex was known for being very slow at getting things done, but they have really shaped up and changed their business model and now anything more than three days is considered unacceptable to them. So when my landlady came in after 11 days I was moved to the very top of the queue for today, bumping several people out of line!

After explaining all of this, he wired in a phone outlet and tried to plug my modem into a power outlet. My office stuff uses a lot of sockets, so I had a power bar, but we couldn’t get the modem plug to fit in it.

Thankfully, I remembered where I had put another power bar. I shifted some things around to make sure that what needed to be on the surge protector bar were and the rest, including the washing machine extension cord, went on the non-surge protector bar. It’s a good thing I know a thing or two about electricity or I’d be worried about overloaded circuits!

All that done, he did some tests and then told me to sign on to my network. The modem has the network name and password printed right on it. Not very secure, but convenient! It took a moment for my computer to find the signal, but it locked on quickly once it did and loaded a page in moments. The tech was impressed with the speed. At some point, I exclaimed ¡Esta un milagro! (It’s a miracle!) and he laughed.

I told him my sob story about having slow poke cellular service in Canada as my only option and he said that he gets a lot of complaints about how slow the service is here but that I should be happy with it.

He showed me that the modem does come with an Ethernet cable, but I have a Macbook Air, so I can only connect with WiFi.

He then put all the furniture back. I thanked him profusely and sent him on his way so that I could get back to work.

Of course, I tested the connection first, though! Download speed was just shy of of 5Mbps and upload around 0.65Mbps. I’ve been informed that that is pretty slow. Well, I downloaded an 800MB file in about 20 minutes that would have taken me at least 24 hours to download at Haven. High speed internet is relative. This is truly fast for me and I doubt I will have any complaints!

So yay, I’m online and the little white casita on Calle Cholita is home. Or it will be, soon as I can cook again. 🙂

By the way, the tech was the first person to not address my Spanish skills. I think he went to the landlady’s house first and someone told him that I get by in the language or there was a note on the file because he didn’t do the usual language assessment folks have been doing with me. He dove right in in Spanish, speaking slowly, and we never had a moment’s trouble communicating.

I still find personal conversations so trying (especially with my landlady who thinks I’m more fluent than I am and constantly needs to be reminded to slow down), but the more business situations like these I get under my belt, the more confident I become.

It’s been a very long good day and I have heaps of work to do over the weekend and it’s already 9:45, so off to bed I go. I can’t wait to have a moment to actually enjoy my connection and try Netflix with it!