North America

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A Not Particularly Restful Day Off

Oof, it’s been a really full day, but hopefully one that will have worn me out enough to get a solid night of sleep. I didn’t sleep a wink last night, the second time that’s happen in the last week, which tells me that I’m spending too much time in front of the computer, finishing too late, and not giving myself time to decompress before bed. At any rate, I wanted to run into Mérida today to do errands and I had someone coming by between eight (when I said I’d be up) and ten (when I said I wanted to leave) to come look at an issue I’m having with the water system.

I got up at eight as planned, made Puppy a nice breakfast (he loves scrambled eggs), and made myself a coffee, which I enjoyed outside in the courtyard for the first time. As I did so, I surveyed the absolute wreck that was said courtyard and the pool because of the winds and rain we’ve had all week. I’m never hungry when I’ve slept poorly, so once I was done with coffee, I got to work setting the pool and courtyard to rights. By the time all of that was done, it was nine and the helper was honking at the gate.

Thanks to the troubleshooting I’d done, he was able to quickly determine what was wrong with the water system (pump keeps cycling because the system isn’t staying pressurised) and he also had a look at the roof leaks. He told me to get some sealant at Home Depot today and he would have “his guys” apply it this week. He also told me to try to get another pressurizing tank for the water system, but if Home Depot didn’t have them, he had another source and would pick one up himself. Before anyone gasps, I was left funds to draw on for such situations! My hosts are lucky to have such a wonderful friend and I’m glad the ice is broken so that I have someone to call on for help if anything else crops up. I thought he was just “the solar guy” and didn’t realise the relationship was so close.

I was hungry by the time he left, so I had my leftovers from last night (mmm…), moved some money around so I could make a couple of withdrawals, put on a pretty outfit, and headed out around ten.

First stop was the Scotiabank at the Liverpool mall. Their ATM was out of order. I went to another one a few kilometres away, well out of my way for Home Depot and my other stops, and it, too, was out of order. Augh! I was therefore looking at nearly $20 in ATM fees at another bank since I would have to make several withdrawals.

Next stop was Gran Plaza, a mall, because I knew there were several banks there so I could do my withdrawals. I figured I could also do a couple of errands there and then come back after Home Depot for groceries since there’s a Comercial Mexicana there, which is the name Mega goes by in this part of Mexico, apparently. But it’s definitely the same store, has the pelican logo and everything.

Getting to Gran Plaza involved a lot of driving around in circles looking for the entrance to the parking lot. I know that I’m going to learn my way around here and things will get easier, but that was surprisingly frustrating today and more energy than I’d planned to spend so early in the day!

At any rate, I finally made it to the mall and did my withdrawals at the Santander. I decided that since I was there and had all my paperwork, I would try to open an account. There was a long line for the tellers, but I saw a stand at the back with a sign saying to sign up to see an executive. I looked at the sign up sheet and the first “reason for visit” listed was to open an account, so I figured that I was doing the right thing by adding my name to the list and then taking a seat instead of standing in line.

I waited for quite a while, probably close to 30 minutes, before my name was called. The man who helped me was kind enough, but told me that Santander doesn’t open accounts for folks on a residente temporal visa status. He said that every bank is different and he suggests I check with HSBC, Banamex, and BBVA Bancomer in that order. I don’t want to go with HSBC because of the dearth of ATMs and Bancomer will never see me again after they were so hard to get my money back from, so that makes Banamex my next choice (especially since there is one in Progreso). Unfortunately, the one by Gran Plaza was closed today. So opening an account is on the list for this week.

I really wanted to go with Santander because I like how their ATMs give small bills, but temporary residents can’t be choosers, apparently. I understand that Mexican banking has tightened up their regulations because of the war on drugs, but it’s a shame for folks who are trying to get settled in this country. They’ve very likely lost my business for life. Who am I going to be loyal to, the bank that said they don’t want my business until I’m a permanent resident or the bank eager to help me settle in on this first stage of my immigration journey? At any rate, I knew the bank account thing would be work and I’m not daunted.

Next, I went to a store called Compu8 to get a cable for an external hard drive and some ink for my printer. Dang was the woman there cranky! She was one of those rare store clerks I’ve met who prefers to pretend she can’t understand me than to serve me. Thankfully, after what happened at the City Deli on Isla as well as the Velcro Incident, I know I’m not the problem and don’t let myself be intimidated. I got the cable I wanted (pricier than I would have liked, but necessary) and they also had the ink (cheaper than expected).

Then, I thought I might as well check out the food court since I was getting peckish again. Chinese sounded good and the stand that got my business was the one handing out free samples. 🙂 I couldn’t believe how generous the portion was and I actually ended up not being able to come close to finishing. But dang was it all yummy. I got chicken balls cooked in orange juice with big chunks of pineapple, chow mein, and broccoli.

Next up was Home Depot (almost right next door), where help and my plumbing vocabulary were lacking, but with some perseverance, I was able to confirm they didn’t have the right kind of tank. Thankfully, the sealant was easy to find and someone helped me with it because it came in a very heavy bucket! A cart guy at the exit asked if I needed help getting the bucket into my truck and my answer was oh… yeah. 🙂 He asked if I had a roof leak and I told him how I’m minding a house and the owners are in Canada and nobody’s ever been here during the summer and, well, I practically took a shower in my bedroom last night, the recitation of which left him in stitches. He asked me what I had to seal (glass against cement) and he said that I had the right product (Thermotec) and that it is excellent. Well, it’s what my hosts wanted, but it’s good to hear another positive review of it.

I then went back to Comercial Mexicana and managed to find parking fairly near the store. My list for there was all the imported sauces and condiments I can’t get at an average Mexican grocery store. I got most of the stuff on my list, just missing tahini, but I have another source for that that I’m holding out for. Their bakery had the black bread I loved in Maz, but not the raisin bread. I treated myself to a pair of goggles for the pool ($25, $30 off!) since I like to swim underwater and my eyes have been getting irritated. I’d been tempted to buy a pair before, but the ones I’d seen were over $100. So I knew I was getting a great deal. I didn’t buy anything I could get at an average store since the prices are so much higher. But I got sushi vinegar, sesame oil, sweet chile sauce, udon noodles, etc. The only thing I struck out on was the Earl Grey tea, but I have a few more places to look for it before I give up.

My final stop was Costco where I dropped a whopping $2,300, but it was absolutely a planned and smart shop that should save me from having to go back into Mérida for groceries for a while. It was the shop I wanted to do when I landed, but didn’t have the money for.

I’ve been looking for a drying rack for my clothes, really necessary now that the rain has started, and Contessa suggested I look at Costco. That was good advice because they had a really heavy duty stainless steel one for $550. That’s something I’m going to need in my own home when I move, so it made total sense to drop the pesos for one that pricey, never mind that I haven’t seen any drying racks at other stores!

I also stocked up on meat and a bunch of things that made sense to buy in bulk, like these bags of limes and lemons for just 4.50CAD and 6CAD respectively (WOW). I can just throw the fruit in the freezer and pull out singles as needed. Once nuked for 15-30 seconds, they’ll produce more juice than when fresh.

Philadelphia cream cheese lasts forever and I was able to get four bricks for just $90 or 6.75CAD, when one brick is normally about 4CAD in Canada. Cream cheese is a total luxury back there, but here it really is a staple (and goes so well with black bread!). I also got a giant bag (900G) of grated Parmesan for just $193 or 14.50CAD. I buy a small wedge for that price in Assiniboia

I think the only thing I felt stupid paying for was $250 for four big containers of Clorox cleaning wipes, but they really do help me stay on top of my housecleaning and were a great deal. Well, I was delighted when I checked my receipt to discover that I got a $64 discount on them, so they only cost me $186! So, really, even though I was shocked that I dropped over $2,000 in one trip, there was nothing I didn’t need that didn’t make sense to get a bulk purchase discount for.

One other thing I like about Costco is that you get a discount if you pay with cash rather than plastic. I saved $150 on top of my other discounts for using cash!

Well, that was enough money spent for one day and I was beat, so I headed straight home, really enjoying the drive now that my truck is running well again. 🙂

At home, Puppy was on his best behaviour. He let me tie him up so I could open the gate and bring the truck into the yard to unload and laid quietly until I was done unloading and unpacking. We then played for a bit before I jumped into the pool!

Well, I thought I was going to get a full day off, but I just looked over my task list for tomorrow and realised that I’ll have to get a very early start to get through it. So I’m going to try to get a start on it right now, but I firmly plan to quit before eight!

The cleaner is coming on Tuesday and I’ll try to get away again to do a fun trip to Mérida. We’ll see how well that plan works out. 😀

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A Lovely Evening Out for Dinner

I’d more than earned a nice dinner out, so I made a reservation for one at 6PM at the nearby Italian Bistro “Maasai Maya.” I’d been there with V and F and it had been really good, with great portions and prices and a wonderful ambiance, so that made more sense than trying to hunt down something in Chelem or even as far afield as Progreso. Talk about convenient for living in the middle of nowhere! 🙂

I headed out a little earlier than needed so I could test Moya. Just getting out to the main road, I saw a difference and when I made her do a bunch of turns in Chuburna, she was once again purring. Ah… peace of mind is a lovely thing. 🙂

The entrance to the bistro is right off of Calle 21, the principal highway, then you wind and wend through deep brush a very short distance to get to the restaurant. This is the inviting entrance and that’s their poor pizza oven wrapped in a tarp because of the weather we’ve been having.

It’s an open-air restaurant decorated in bright colours. The owners are expats (American, I believe) and the name of the bistro is in honour of a family member who was Maasai.

They don’t have a liquor license and make a wonderful bottomless limonada for just $25 so that’a a nice treat instead of just having water. Their menu is really lovely and reasonably priced. It includes salads, pizzas, pastas, panini, and more, but the best bang for your buck are their calzones, which are basically like a folded over pizza. I had their meat one last time and so ordered their Alfredo today, which has bacon, chicken, and broccoli in a cream sauce

It comes with a garden salad. You have a choice of a few dressings. I had ranch last time, so I went with vinaigrette this time.

Here’s my limonada, which had the perfect balance of sweet and tart:

You really feel like you’re in the middle of the jungle at Maasai Maya!

I love this M*A*S*H or Watson Lake inspired sign post. One of the slats has the info for Richmond, VA, practically where my best friend lives.

Here is half of my calzone, complete with marina dipping sauce. I asked to have the other half boxed up straight away to ensure that I’d have room for dessert. This was to be a very special meal, after all. 🙂

Here are the yummy contents. There’s pretty much all my favourite food groups. 🙂 I can’t believe I have another half to enjoy tomorrow or Sunday!

Dessert is double chocolate cake with your choice of ice cream. I went for cappuccino. 🙂 This was way too much for me, but I soldiered through. 🙂

My bill came to $180 — $90 for the calzone, $25 for the limonada, and $65 for the dessert. So $200 with the tip and I have leftovers for a substantial lunch another day. What amazing value! I think everything on the menu is reasonably priced, but the calzone is definitely a real deal if you take half home

Service at Maasai Maya is warm, like being invited into someone’s home. I’m glad they are so close by for when I need to get out of the house and try someone else’s cooking! They do takeaway and I have a menu, so I may order a pizza to go next time!

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So Grateful

The mechanic was supposed to text me regarding the truck this morning so I was a bit distressed that he phoned because I’m still really not good on the phone (although I’m forcing myself to use it more!). Anyway, I was really confused when he said that not only was my truck ready, but he was parked outside of my (gated) house. I went out and, sure enough, he was there! Wow! I thought I’d have to lose an hour to go pick up the truck. Talk about service! I’m glad I included the directions to the house on the paper with my phone number!

I never did catch the name of the problem, but these are the parts that he replaced:

Oh, someone on Facebook just told me they are a brake spring and adjuster cable. If I was one kilometre away from disaster, please don’t tell me. 🙂

Cost? 300 pesos. About 15USD or 25CAD.

I knew that by Canadian standards, I wasn’t look at a big repair bill. That was a given. But even a few hundred dollars (like the brake job cost) would be a burden right now. I am just so bloody relieved and grateful that it was such a minor thing and am kicking myself for having put it off this long. It was a good reminder that when it comes to truck troubles in Mexico, I should just have them looked over and be done with it.

Now, this issue hasn’t been the reason I haven’t been going out much — I really haven’t had time. But now that I know I can go into Mérida this weekend if I want, or preferably Monday (stores will be less busy) and I won’t get stranded, I’m more motivated to make time. Heck, I haven’t eaten out in recent memory (!) and I might go up the road a bit to get dinner tonight to celebrate! 🙂

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A Measure of Linguistic Confidence

My time and Spain and my interactions with a Spanish teacher in England apparently helped me pass another mental barrier when it comes to my confidence level in my Spanish. I know I did very well at the border and with immigration and customs, but it wasn’t until the last couple of days that I’ve come to realise that I’ve finally settled into a wonderful place where Spanish generally isn’t scary or an effort anymore and things that were mentally taxing just a year ago aren’t anymore.

Take last night for example. I was absolutely brain dead and couldn’t bear the thought of any more mental gymnastics. I wanted to put on a movie and let myself be swept away. Well, the movie I picked, which I can’t recommend highly enough, Lion, was only available with Spanish subtitles over the Hindi and Bengal dialogue. I decided to give it a few minutes and, sure enough, the Spanish subtitles were as comfortable as French or English ones. I think I paused the movie all of four or five times to check a word or verb tense I wasn’t sure about.

Then, there was today, which was the day to finally take Moya to see a mechanic. Money is trickling in and not feeling comfortable taking her far is really beginning to cramp my style. The directions I got to a mechanic who was recommended to me by not only an expat but also a Mexican neighbour were easy to follow. No one was there, so I called out and an elderly woman came out. I asked for the mechanic, she called for him, and then she started chatting. Now, it’s harder to understand older uneducated people and kids using a lot of slang, but I still followed what she was saying. Then, the mechanic came out and I explained what was going on. Now, here’s the thing. I’d only come in with one three new words, the verb dejar that I’ve been practicing and which was useful for saying I just wanted to leave the truck for him to look at whenever he could, the verb girar (to turn), and the noun cojinetes (bearings, as in I think that’s what’s wrong). That’s all I needed.

It’s hard to describe how I felt as I went into the garage, but there just wasn’t that knot in my stomach I’d get at the start of my Mexican adventures when I’d pace back and forth outside of a business going over all the possible ways the conversations could go so I could be ready for them. I don’t do that anymore. I’m at the point where I’ve finally accepted that I’m fluent.

Do I ever fall flat on my face and have failures in communication? All the time. Are they the end of the world? No. I go back over the exchange and look up words I didn’t understand or was missing. Because I’m not needing to pick up a lot at a time, I’m not overwhelmed and often the new words stick, especially if I make an effort to use them. I was dismayed today that I almost forgot about dejar, but when I finally blurted it out, the verb was mine and officially part of my vocabulary, as is girar. I’m not sure I’ll need cojinetes often enough for it to roll off the tongue, though. 🙂

Whether I’m scanning ingredients on a can of something at the grocery store, skimming a trashy magazine at the grocery store, chasing down the guy in a truck with a loudspeaker blasting that he has watermelon, stopping a tortilla deliverer to see if he could come deliver to my house periodically (sadly, no), or taking a funny quiz on Buzzfeed, everyday Spanish has become comfortable. Now, that I’m this point, I need to stop thinking of watching Spanish movies and TV shows or reading Spanish book as “homework” and just start doing it regularly without making a fuss about it. And then, when I finally move to the city in the fall, I really need to start socialising with Mexicans. I’m already doing research on courses I could take, everything from painting to Mayan history, that could get me out of the house and meeting people beyond my immediate neighbours.

So at any rate, the mechanic said he’d look at Moya first thing tomorrow and message me what’s wrong and the cost. Hopefully, it’ll be no worse and ideally better than the brake job I had done (which was over $4,000, or about 300CAD at the time) and I’ll find myself with a trustworthy vehicle again. After I left her, I went into a shop around the corner to get a bottle of cold water for the nearly 3KM walk home, and set off. Well, just as I passed the limits of the town proper, a van screeched to a stop ahead of me. It contained three expat ladies who are basically immediate neighbours! What timing!

That worked out well because it started to storm shortly after I got in. We lost power for a bit and I discovered that the skylights in my suite leak. I spent some time on Skype with the hosts talking about that and some plumbing problems I’m having that I troubleshooted on and off well into the evening.

Somehow with all of that, I got through a mountain of work today and still managed to finish early enough to watch another movie. It’s no wonder I’m sleeping so well considering how worn out I am by bedtime! 🙂

I’m trying to take it easy this weekend and possibly go to Mérida for a day on public transportation, but that’s proving more difficult than expected. There are buses that stop very near my house, but they tend to be full and I could wait for hours to get a seat on one, with the same thing in reverse. I might make more sense to wait until I’ve got Moya running again. Thankfully, there’s enough going on here that I don’t feel too claustrophobic yet. 🙂

And with that, ¡Buenas noches, queridos lectores!

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Working Too Hard

Ouf, it’s rare that I think that I’m working too hard, but when I’m transcribing 100+ minutes of audio daily while still maintaining a spotless home and garden, there’s no other way to put it. The days are really running together, but, thankfully, I’m managing to get some quality sleep so I can start fresh every morning. I’m really looking forward to a day when I can drive into Mérida, park, and just amble for an afternoon, but I don’t see that day coming anytime soon.

This continues to be a novelty for me since the famine days of sitting around looking for work really aren’t that far behind me. One of my clients asked me to let him know when my queue is empty so he can send me more work and I was able to honestly tell him that that is not likely to happen in the near future. My queue has been sort of like a merry-go-round where clients have to catch an empty spot when it goes by them because it’ll disappear quickly!

I’m not exaggerating when I said that I landed here broke the likes of which I haven’t been in almost two years and so I would be a moron to turn down work just because I’m tired. Once the May income starts trickling in at the start of June, I’ll have earned myself some breathing room, but, really, I need to keep up this pace straight into July.

Yesterday afternoon, I had to go get groceries. It was one of those do or die moments since I was out of just about everything but rice and peanut butter. We had an impressive storm in the late afternoon as I was finishing up work on a new movie project. The amount of rain made me worry that the roads in my neighbourhood would be impassable, but when I went out about 30 minutes after the rain stopped, everything was fine.

I decided to just go to Bodega Aurrerá in Progreso and come straight back since I had more work to do in the evening. There, I was able to get some of the things on my list, including the so important beer, and a few treats, like dulce de guayaba letting myself be tempted at the till by a display of cacahuetes japoneses, or cracker nuts. I’ve been making some decent tacos at home for my lunches, so I also bought some commercial salsa verde and guacamole to put on them.

I’ve somehow found an hour every night before bed to work at my Spanish, so I also treated myself to a new notebook for that and a package of 10 different coloured pens, a very inexpensive gift (about $50 total) that made my “schoolwork” more fun that night. I’m working on a new verb tense, the imperfect (one of the past tenses) and treating it like a vocabulary lesson. Instead of using the standard verbs, like hablar and comer, to learn the new tense, I’m using new verbs that I’m struggling with, like dejar and romper.

I am once more grateful that I can go from French to Spanish because that makes learning Spanish so much easier. Dejar, for example, translates as “stop” or “leave” in English, but not in the senses that immediately come to my mind. Stop is more like quit (eg. smoking) rather than doing so in a car and leave is more in the sense of something being dropped off than exiting a room. There is no ambiguity as to the meaning if I go from French and so I’m once more understanding what an enormous challenge learning Spanish would be to a native English speaker with no other points of comparison. I mean, the imperfect of, say, comer (to eat) is  comía, comías, comía, comíamos, comíais, comían. In English? It’s ate, ate, ate, ate, ate, ate!

So it’s really just routine here in paradise, but dang, the living is easy. 🙂 Now, I have to really get to work!!!