Other insights into Mexico

Hola nuestros amigos. ¿Cómo están? Hacemos muy bien. La vida es mejor cada día. Nuestra casa está más a más como queremos. El trabajo será completo en una semana menos los gabinetes. El concreto está completo, el escritorio de Nancy está completo y media del cuartos son completo con pintura. Hablamos con los trabajadores sólo en español. Nuestro español está mejor poco a poco cada día.

Ok, back to English. This posting is a continuation of some our first hand impressions of Mexico.

One of the things we knew we would need is a "village car". Our Ford F-150 pickup is a real challenge to negotiate down extremely narrow cobblestone streets. Several times we have had to back up to get out of a tricky situation. So we've transfered the money, and it is in transit (yet another slow process) and checked out the local (and only) used car dealer. We would have gone earlier, but they were closed for a week's vacation. (Can you imagine a used car dealer shutting down to go on vacation? However, that is typical this time of year because it is the low season , so what better time than now?) He'll help us find the right little car, with good air conditioning and good suspension. Those are the priorities.

Since we can't be weaned from our US television shows, we have Dishnet. To get the standard network channels, we had to go through a somewhat "underground" fellow that has us registered with a New York address, so we are watching news from the Big Apple. We have a whole lot of channels, and we can watch Law and Order or CSI anytime of the day or night. We get a lot of movie channels that we didn't want, and don't pay for (because we didnt want them) However, one down side: every time a rain storm moves into the area we lose our signal . Luckily we brought our personal video store with us. And the rainy season will be over next month.

As most of you know, we are getting our house painted. The painter speaks excellent English because he lived in Santa Cruz for ten years. He learned painting in the Bay Area. Some of his clients included Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott. We are honored to have Joe's and Ronnie's painter painting our house. We are having many of the rooms painted with a special "faux finish" and his crew are real artists at this. (No, it is not like Trading Spaces) It is a wonderful thing to paint the house to make the art look good, especially since a lot of our art was done by the kids. So the walls now highlight the paintings and photographs we have hung there, as well as some cool architectural features. The process of adding wiring and preparing the walls for painting is very interesting, not to mention messy. The outside walls are about 14 inches thick, brick and concrete, and the inside walls are almost a foot thick, also of brick and concrete. So to run a wire for new lights you simply carve a trench in the concrete, place in the new wire and then cover with concrete to match the original. Some of the pictures show this process for lights we are adding in our bathroom.

I mentioned that we have had a number of severe lightening, thunder and rain storms but mostly at night. Well, yesterday when returning from our Spanish class at 5:00 pm, a hailstorm hit for about twenty minutes. We have never seen anything like it. Since our roofs are flat, the water runs out of spouts that dump water over the yard and the lawns. Yesterday this included hailstones dumping out on the lawn, so Walt made a "snowman". There is a picture of the snowman in the attached photo album.

As part of our Spanish class we have to ask local Mexicans questions so that we learn to listen and to speak to native speakers. One of the questions dealt with discipline and whether they spank their children in Mexico. Walt asked our maid the question since she is a mom and ought to know. She replied of course they do. I said that in the US you aren't allowed to any more. Her immediate response was, "Well, you will only end up with bad children". No, really????
We love it here.....