August 5th, 2007

Photo: Wild Impatients growing on the skirts of Macuiltepetl.

Sunday

It felt like we could almost rest better now, almost, because we still had to sign contracts and the house had to really be finished by the 15th or 16th. Still we decided another day off was very much deserved by all, so we took off to hike to the top of the “Macuiltepetl” Volcano.
Since our last visit to Xalapa, the boys had been fascinated by the existence of an extinct volcano right in the middle of the city, but we did not have time to visit it on that trip. This time, we were definitively going to go up to the top.
Getting there was, again, a feat in navigational skills. Although you can see the volcano from anywhere in the city, and you can tell you are approaching it, there seems to be just one way up to the entrance of the park. Of course, the streets hardly have names, signs are iffy and you can never tell what way traffic is going. I do not think there is one straight street in all of Xalapa! Eventually, and following a Taxi, we got to the entrance to the Reserve.
There are two entrances to the “Macuiltepetl” the one to the Ecological Reserve and Park, the other one for a short jogging road paved in red clay. We took the clay road, but it probably was not the right one to take. It was not very steep, but it took us only half way around the base of the volcano. It was still lovely to check out all the native plants growing freely on either side of the path. There were forests of pink Impatiens, a few Bromeliads here and there, and many fuzzy caterpillars. The path dead ended near some stairs that said they led to the other road, the paved one.
The cobbled road was a much better and it permitted you to choose between going up walking on the sloped road, or taking short cuts that consisted on incredibly steep stairs made out of volcanic rock. We tried the road most of the way up and took a good hour to reach the crater. It is an amazing jungle in there, but the city has used the flat surfaces to add a few ponds, some sitting areas and even a monument. At the top of the volcano there is a lookout tower. It is a precarious structure that has the most wonderful view of Xalapa. Only the bravest will go to the top level, which has no railing and a very sloped floor, but the view is great. Jevon went all the way up to the top, and although Diego wanted to join him, we decided to say no to that one.
Also on the highest point of the volcano, there is a little “museum” of native species. The National Wildlife service has dedicated this little building to saving hurt animals and keeping them as close to their natural environment as possible, it also serves as a way to educate the public about some of the native wildlife: falcons, eagles, reptiles, and insects. The boys found the raptor birds fascinating.
It took us a little bit less time to get down since we used more of the short-cuts (stairs), but it was really hard to keep oriented in the paths since signaling is, as usual, inexistent.

August 4th, 2007

Saturday
We were close to calling the guy about renting the big walled house on the street of Quintana Roo, when we stopped by the house at “La Gachupina” just to see how much progress there had been in the last week. The “contractor” (there is really not such thing in Mexico, but the term is close enough) was at the house and he showed us what had been done during the week. The house had a kitchen and at least two of the toilets installed. They were done with the exterior painting, but they were still behind on the carpentry area. The doors were still unmoved and the closets were not even started, the stairs had no railing either.
If it had been in the US, I would have guessed there was no way they could have it done in less than three weeks. In Mexico, things work a little bit differently; it all depends on which workers show up.
The architect came as we were looking around the house. She is very nice. She has tenure at one of the local Universities and got her graduate degree in Italy. She is a very educated woman, but incredibly down-to-earth and easy to approach. We talked about the house, about Coatepec (her family is a very old family from the area) and about all architecture and the World. It was a very nice experience to get to meet with Eva, the architect, and to learn from her what the timeline might very well be for the house. She did, at this point, let us know that, if the carpenter did not slack, it was going to be ready by the 15th.
After leaving “La Gachupina”, we were very sure that that was the house we were going to rent. The house at “Quintana Roo” was wonderful in many ways, but had more variables than the “Gachupina” house, starting with the amount of space to deal with and up-keep it might take.

August 3, 2007

Photo: Cliffs on the road to Mont Blanco

Friday

We finally had two options to choose from. Granted, both needed to be finished, but they were mostly livable. One was more practical, still with its charm, the other one was fascinating, with enormous size and potential.
We still went around a second time with Sofia, from Ecomania, to make sure we had not missed anything that might have been for rent. She showed us a couple of nice residential neighborhoods, but there were no houses for rent. She also showed us were a great water park was located right in Coatepec. As usual, going around with the people from Ecomania was a pleasure; they are so friendly and helpful!
In the afternoon, we headed out to a small town called “Monte Blanco” (White Hill). It is located just a few miles South of Coatepec, but the road is narrow and curvy since it goes up the mountains, so it takes some time to get there. Just the road is worth the trip, though. It climbs up unbelievable sheer cliffs over lush, almost jungle-like, canyons. You can find little waterfalls dripping on the sides of the road. “Romancing the Stone”, an 80’s movie with Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas was filmed in this area. The movie is supposed to be set in the Colombian Amazon jungle; I have never been to the Amazon, but it does look like a jungle down here.
“Monte Blanco” is famous for its handmade bamboo furniture: beautiful and cheap. It is also a tiny town of about 130 inhabitants, and it seems they all make bamboo furniture. You can hardly tell you have stumbled into the town until you see the row of scattered homes with bamboo furniture displayed in the front porches.
We decided that we would need a dining room, so we found a place that had interesting furniture, and ordered one. A 6 foot table with two 6’ benches and two chairs for less than 150dlls. Not bad, the down-side, it would take about two weeks to get it done and then delivered…

August 1st, 2007

Photo: Coatepec valley with the Acamalin in the background.

Wednesday

At this point our whole life revolved on finding a place to live. The clock was ticking toward the 17th, plus we were also getting fed up with living at Roy’s apartment. We did take the boys out for walks or to get special treats around the city.
We walked to the Jauregui Market and bought Chinese toys. We also took them to get a miniature horse ride at “Los Berros” and rented a bicycle car for the boys to ride at the park. I also walked with them to get “esquites” which quickly became a favorite. Esquites are corn kernels. The corn is cooked (boiled), the kernels are then cut from the cob and kept in hot water. When you buy them, they drain them and serve them in a cup covered with mayonnaise and cheese. You can also get them “natural” for those who prefer the low-cal version. They also sell the corn on the cob skewered with a stick. It is like a giant lollipop made of corn!
Part of the day was devoted to the never ending search for a home, preferably one that was already built. Although we did go by the house that was still being finished, the one in the subdivision called “La Gachupina” (The Spanish Woman). It was being worked on, but still it had no kitchen installed, no toilets installed and the inside doors were just laying on the floor. That did not give us much hope!
On leaving the Gachupina house, we saw a “for Rent” sign a few of streets away, on the street of “Quintana Roo”. It was on a massive stone wall with two big and menacing white metal doors, one for the garage, one for letting people in. Way back, inside the walled property, you could see the balconies of a white Spanish style house. We called the number.
The owner/agent was there to show us the house in 20 minutes, all the way from Xalapa. He told us he had bought it about a year ago from a research branch of one of the Universities, that it had been used as offices for the Ecology department.
The property was pretty big, with enough front yard to park about 20 cars, part of it was landscaped but overgrown, there were two cobbled “tracks” on the lawn so that the cars could drive in. The house was a two story home, all white with big French doors as windows and with tile roof. It was set back from the wall (that was right on the sidewalk) almost 60 feet.
The living spaces were huge, all the floors were tiled with red “Saltillo” tile and there were insets of “Talavera” (blue handmade tile) here and there. The first floor had an enormous living room with three French doors as windows, a formal dining room, a kitchen about 12X16 feet (but it had just a few cabinets and no stove) and a sun-room all surrounded by glass. Then there was the back patio that was just half the size of the front yard, and right by the house, the carport big enough for two cars.
The second floor had three full sized bedrooms, each with their own bathroom and walk-in closet, all of them had French doors that led to balconies. The master bedroom also had a “studio” and a Jacuzzi…. But the best part was the views! On one side you had a great view of the Cerro de las Culebras, on the other side you had a beautiful view of “Cofre de Perote” (one of the most beautiful mountains in Mexico). We were told that you could see the “Pico de Orizaba” (Mexico’s tallest peak, always covered with snow) from the roof top.
We were all very impressed by the house. It had tons of possibilities, not to mention great spaces for the boys to run and more than enough room to have a lot of visitors! There were a few downsides, though. The bathrooms and kitchen were not finished, so the owner would have to finish them. He said he would have them done in a week… There was no stove, so we would have to get one. There were no real windows, everything was doors that were not sealed at all… it gets cold in Coatepec in winter (ok, just in the low 50’s to high 40’s, but still). We would have to figure a way to keep cold and bugs out. And the biggest down-side: its size. There was no way we could even begin to make those rooms semi-filled. But it still was a fascinating house and it gave us an option to fall back on if the Gachupina house was not finished on time.

July 31, 2007

Tuesday
With the uncertainty of were we could find a place to live, I started calling every single “for rent” classified that said it was located in Coatepec. Again we started driving around to check out the places that had given us information. One was too little and too empty: it was in a new subdivision in the periphery of Coatepec, but there was no one living around, just empty houses… Another one was just ugly; it was a brand new duplex painted in the brightest Aqua color with absolutely no character otherwise, and it was not that easy to get to either. The third one, we just could not find… again, no street names and very iffy map…
In our going around in circles we stopped at the local supermarket: Chedraui Coatepec. It was very well stocked, small but very efficient. It was good to know that we would not have to drive all the way to Xalapa (the whole 15 minutes of a drive) to go to a grocery store.
We also happened to find where the Ashram was located. The “Ashram” is a place of spiritual peace and good vibrations. It sounds very “Woodstock”, and it might very well be, but it has the reputation of having beautiful grounds and a very nice campground right at the foot of the “Cerro de las Culebras”. We were already thinking about camping out at the Ashram if we did not find a place to live by the 17th!

July 30th, 2007

Monday

The decision was made and we would try to rent the house at the top of the street in Xalapa. We would stay in the neighborhood we already knew, with all it's quirkiness. We would keep the mini-park for Kiwi at the end of the street, the really good homemade yogurt a few houses down, and the convenience store where you couldn't even walk in of how full with products it was, and the myriad of street vendors hollering at strange times of the day "yogurt" or "elotes"(corn) or whatever they happened to be selling that day. We would also keep the strange little fruit and vegetables corner store that had the pictures of the Pope (John Paul II) and the Virgin of Guadalupe surrounded by twinkling, colored, Christmas lights and played loud music every morning since 6:00 a.m. We would definitively keep our little "laundry" place where you can drop off your dirty laundry and pick it up later in the day clean and folded for .40 cents (dll) a pound! We would even get to keep the garbage collection "service"...
Garbage does deserve a few lines in itself. Garbage collection in Xalapa happens daily at variable times. In this neighborhood, it is about 5 p.m. that the garbage truck comes by. Every evening, between 4 and 6 p.m., you can hear a cowbell making a very loud, moving sound. That is the sound that brings everyone in the street out of their homes carrying little bags filled with garbage. Since the garbage service is variable, and this is in all Mexico, a guy (that is part of the garbage truck crew) runs up and down each street sounding a cowbell as hard as he can, he is about 10 minutes ahead of the garbage truck. People have about 10 minutes to grab their garbage bag and take it to a certain corner which has already been designated as the collection corner. The garbage truck will come by, pick the garbage up, and make its appearance the next day preceded by the much anticipated cowbell ringer... That guy really has to be in good shape, as much as he runs and with the hills in Xalapa!
Jevon left for the SiiX (Real Estate) office early in the morning, ready to sign a contract. The boys and I stayed behind so that he could do some negotiating on his own.
I was getting exited, finally a place of our own! I was still not thrilled about the commute we would have every morning to school in Coatepec, and I was still not convinced about looking for a school in Xalapa. And then the bad news came with a knock on the door.
Jevon had come back from the Real Estate office with good and bad news. He had gone into the office to find out that the house at the top of the street had already been rented out to someone else! I was no less than bummedY...The good news was that Margarita was waiting downstairs ready to show us a house they were building in Coatepec. It would be finished in a couple of weeks and it was going to be put up for rent by the owner/architect.
I told Jevon to go ahead and check it out, I was not in the mood to drive to Coatepec.
When he came back he had very mixed feelings about this house. It was in a nice place, close to the school and it seemed a very comfortable size, but it looked like it needed a lot more than two weeks! He had met the architect and was very impressed by her. She had said that the house could be ready if all the workers kept their schedule, butY this is Mexico, so she really didn’t want to commit.
In the afternoon we took a drive to Coatepec to get papers to the boys' school, to check out the house and have an ice cream at the plaza.
As usual, it was a pleasure to chat with Aurora at school. The boys (and Kiwi) played for a while in the school yard with Lucia and another girl. Still not much verbal communication was happening, but they had fun. Aurora and Ricardo told us a little bit more about living in Coatepec and recommended the higher altitudes. They pointed out that the low grounds of "La Pitaya" had little wind blowing and really high humidity levels. Ricardo said that if you hiked one day and left your shoes in your closet, in two days you would have to "shave" the mold off the shoes because of how humid it is down there. They live in the higher area of Coatepec, and really enjoy the winds that make the humidity almost disappear.
We ate lunch on a bench at the plaza. I had made sandwiches and they were very welcomed by all. Afterwards we had a very special treat: ice cream from the cart vendors in the plaza. We figured that we had been enough time in Mexico and had taken enough "probiotic lactobacillus" for our stomach to survive this ice cream. (We started taking lactobacillus in pill form as soon as we got to Mexico to build up our defenses in our stomach). The boys got really good vanilla ice-cream. I opted to get a fried plantain covered with condensed milk... I was a little depressed by the loss of the house in Xalapa.
The house in Coatepec was almost finished, but it looked like a little more than two weeks to me. It was set on one side of the "Cerro de las Culebras" (the mountain of the snakes) that is a little mountain that pops out in the middle of Coatepec. The top of the mountain is a Natural Reserve, so it is mostly dense semi-tropical forest. Since the house is built up high, it gets really nice winds blowing through. In many ways, the house was nice and very practical, but I had doubts, big doubts, that it would be done in time. We had to be out of Roy's apartment the 17th of August.

July 29th, 2007

Photo: Tecajetes Playground

Sunday

We were already so tired of looking in all the wrong places! We had found really bad homes, or really nice ones that just did not suit us in one way or another... that is until the wonderful orange house up-the-street that Margarita had shown us Saturday morning!
We were both in love with that house and started studying how life would be driving every morning to Coatepec. Although it is only a 15 minute drive, it still is a commute that made us uneasy since we had never seen the amount of traffic that might be driving at that time during school days. We were going to put up with it, though, because the house was the best fit we had seen so far. Yes, it was right in downtown Xalapa, but that made it close to many things which we were already very familiar with!
In adjusting to our life in México, we also had to scout grocery stores, markets, etc. This morning we were going to visit "Comercial Mexicana", a store I used to go to when I lived in both Monterrey and Mexico City. It was rather far (in Xalapa scale), so we decided to break-up the trip and treat the boys to something different: we took them to one of Xalapa's famous urban parks: Tecajetes.
Tecajetes is no less than amazing. It is set near the perimeter of downtown Xalapa, on one of the hills. Set in the middle of the city and surrounded by high to medium density neighborhoods, the park rises in its entire splendor as more than an Oasis. It has been carefully landscaped with what seems to be nothing but native plants and trees. Cobbled trails twine through lush gardens, fountains, ponds with wildlife, playgrounds, skateboarding rinks, soccer courts and even an outdoor theater. The park is magnificent, and being in it is quite an experience. The forest is so lush that you forget that you are in the middle of the city. The jungle gyms really are in the middle of the jungle and the slopes densely forested easily buffer any automotive sound that might want to filter into the serenity of Tecajetes.
We probably spent close to two hours walking around, watching the boys try every single play structure and checking out the many ponds filled with fish and turtles the size of basketballs. Then we slowly made our way back to the entrance gate on the cobbled paths enjoying the many fountains and the one or two friendly soccer games in the courts.
And, of course, we couldn't leave without buying a drink from one of the many street vendors that congregate at the entrance of the park, patiently waiting for the Sunday clientele to leave hungry or thirsty. I treated the boys to a classic: a Boing triangle. "Boing" is a brand of fruit drinks (more sugar than juice, of course) that has been in México forever. Their drinks are flavored with juices of fruits like mango, tamarind, guava, etc. and they come in cardboard containers (like juice boxes) but shaped as a pyramid. The boys have a new favorite: mango Boing!
Going to the supermarket in Mexico has always been quite the experience, it's almost like a mix of a US supermarket with a little bit of farmers market charm. Again, the cleanliness isY optional. In the US I really miss some of the more Mexican foods, veggies and fruits. Now I know I will not miss American stuff here! Have stores changed in the past few years. The amount of imported stuff is staggering; there are almost more imported groceries on the shelves than Mexican brands! And the prices are very much imported, too! I will usually head for the brands I grew up with, and they usually will be the better value brands, but not always. I find it really frustrating that prices are getting very close to US prices in many items! Meats are still much cheaper than the US: chicken is less than 2dlls a pound for skinless, boneless. Peaches, though, are imported from Alabama (yeah, US) and they are over 1dll a pound. OK, it is still cheaper to buy food in Mexico, but inflation is making it really hard for people in Mexico to catch up with the prices!
So after finding food for the week, and very high prices in some of the furniture pieces we would need to get to semi-furnish whatever home we would end up in... we headed home, to rest!

July 28th, 2007

Saturday
Kiwi adores his three to four times a day walks down the street to his park. He loves saying Hi to all the neighbors who might be around. He very much enjoys stepping into the Tailor Parlor a few houses down and wagging his happy tail at the old tailor that opens shop as early as 6:30 a.m. Then he leisurely sniffs every single smell on the sidewalk until he gets to the "callejón" (alley). He might leave a little puddle on the weeds and grass that grow between the cobblestones on the alley, or he might just pull the leash across the street to the little grassy park, and then do his stuff. Then he will cross to the other sidewalk and walk back, checking for Romeo (the old Fox Terrier) at the Silver Jewelry store. Then it is off to have "La Beba" (the over-protective toy black French Poodle) at the house next to Romeo's bark at him. He loves to make her bark, and then they smell each other through the mesh on her window. Finally, he heads home and runs up the stairs in 3 seconds flat... Not today.
He had been having diarrhea for a couple of days now. He is a small dog, so I was getting worried about dehydration. He got out of bed, walked slowly down the stairs, made it to the park (bypassing the alley), did his stuff in an almost painful way, and then fell from the sidewalk. I initially thought he had missed the step, but when we got home he could not make his back legs go over the steps.
He looked sad and in pain. He still ate, but his back was arched and his little tail would not wag, at all! I was terrified, even Jevon was terrified. Kiwi had never been sick, and he did not look good.
We had our appointment to see the house at the top of the street at 10 a.m. The Veterinary down the street, that Roy recommended, did not open until 10. Kiwi was curled up shivering, having spasms of pain.
We left the boys to watch Kiwi while we went to our appointment with Margarita, the lady from SiiX that was going to show us the house. Needless to say, looking at the house was not high in my priority list, but it had to be done, the Vet was not open, anyway.
Margarita was already there when we got to the top of the street. She is a very nice and sweet woman with not one bone of Real- Estate broker in her. She is just plain nice. She had her daughter with her, and I wished I had brought Armando along so he could meet another kids his age.
Margarita opened a section of the garage door that was scaled for people and showed us in the single car garage. She explained that there was a very curious thing in the garage, that the owners had built a full size bathroom right there. Yes, that was weird. Then we went upstairs, being that the one car garage and the bathroom are the only things in that first level. The house occupies the whole second floor of what probably was a huge house. The master bedroom has a balcony to the street and the living room has one big arch window also to the street, the rest of the windows are open to light wells with skylights illuminating all the way down to the first floor house (right under us). The floors were immaculate, with wonderful red tiles inlayed with hand painted blue tiles. There were carved wood columns here and there and a nicely sized kitchen. The best thing was the huge rooftop! A huge flat area that could easily be converted into a roof garden (oh, and fully fenced so that little boys or little dogs didn't do base jumping from the roof).
We were still not sure about living in Xalapa, so Margarita promised to show us a house she had for rent in Coatepec in the afternoon.
I ran back home, called the Vet, and was told that she could not see Kiwi until Tuesday!
I had walked into another veterinary clinic on one of our walks, it was on one of the lower streets, so I went to it to see if the Vet was available to check on Kiwi. The Vet was in; right away she recalled Kiwi and told me to bring him in right away.
Dr. Liliana is very young, but she really loves and cares about animals. Between her and her business partner, Dr. Mireya, they run a very clean, small and friendly animal clinic.
She right away checked Kiwi, while her 15 month old daughter roamed around the clinic on her little walker. Talk about growing up in the family business!
To make a long story short, she found that Kiwi had intestinal parasites. It was amazing to see her doing even the lab work, and showing me, under the microscope, the results of Kiwi's labs! Yes, he had worms. She skillfully shoved a de-worming medicine in his mouth and then we wrestled him to get a few other medicines injected (pain medicine). For such a little guy, he is a fighter. It took two vets to be able to get two shots in Kiwi! But, three shots, one pill, three prescriptions medicines, full labs, $20dlls and two hours later, Kiwi was again wagging his tail.
Later we drove to Coatepec, looked for the address Margarita had given us and studied the neighborhood while we waited for her to show. The neighborhood was a couple of blocks off downtown Coatepec, with some charming streets filled with colonial architecture. The house was small, not very charming, but practical. The really big down side: location. The street it is located at is the main entrance to the Town from a freeway. The amount of buses going uphill made Xalapa rush-hour traffic look minimum! And the fumes! The Diesel was already making us sick in the few minutes we spent inside...

July 27, Friday
Early morning, we decided to take the kids to the Museum of Transport, finally! It was very early and it was pretty empty. There isn't much information at the entrance, just a sign that reads: entrance $5 (pesos). We paid and walked in the gate. There was a big group of kids doing some kind of stretching guided by what seemed to be either a teacher or a camp counselor.
Our boys were very unimpressed by the antique locomotive or the WWII fighter plane; they headed right for the inflatable playground. The old trucks, tanks, etc. might be impressive, but not for our children. And, although it cost us $10 (pesos) for each kid to jump on the inflatable
"Titanic", it was well worth the amount of energy they got to burn there! We also braved the "Little Teacups"! Safety, again, is optional in Mexico. The Teacup's restraints stay only if you hold them tight and you stay in your seat purely because of the centrifugal force! And boy, do they turn fast! The boys had the time of their life, me... I was glad it was over.
We checked Coatepec one more time, just in case... Then we went back to Xalapa to visit another Real Estate office.
We had seen a few offerings from a company called Leru, so we drove to their office. They were nice and seemed to know Aurora, the principal of the school. They right away showed us four properties that they thought would fill our needs, one in Coatepec, the others in a residential area near the old freeway (windy little road) to Coatepec. We made an appointment to see them for the next day, but decided to check them out from the outside first.
Glad we did, two of them we couldn't even find because of how complicated it was to get to them. One was way too expensive for what it was (a brand new side by side in Coatepec). The fourth one was in a very run down neighborhood and was pretty homely. So we just called Leru and said thank you but no thank you.
Running out of options, we finally noticed a "for rent" sign on Roy's street. It had been there, on a second floor balcony on a wonderfully orange colonial house at the top of the street. We had not paid much attention to it because, at first glance, it looks like a huge home with three wood garage doors. Then I looked closer and saw that each garage door had a different street number.
We gave SiiX, the real-estate company offering it, a call. The woman that answered was very helpful and gladly offered to show the house to us the next day.

July 26th, 2007

Photo: Steps of Xallitic, near Dr. Lucio.

Thursday
We had looked at some very promising ads in the newspaper on Sunday, so we drove to an area of downtown were there was a nice penthouse available. It was opposite the Main Plaza of where Roy's place is.
The area was very crowded, about three blocks from the big Jauregui Market (one of the big produce and product markets). The building is about one block from where the crowds end, but it is still close. It is a new building with offices and retail on the front, and three amazing apartments on the back. Remote control gate for the parking lot, metal and concrete details, and simple but nice landscaping make it very inviting, not to mention the really great modern lines that the buildings has.
Luckily the caretaker was there and he let us in to check out the apartment for rent- the penthouse had already been rented out-. The apartment was small, but it was outstanding. The design was so well done that every room was delightful. It had a beautiful wood inlayed floor, a little balcony, two nicely sized bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms. Yes, it was small, but the really good architecture made it worth it! It also had amazing views to a small colonial church that neighbored to the back of the building.
We all but fell in love with the apartment, the four of us- five if we count Kiwi-. Even the caretaker was exited about having us live there, since he had just arrived from working in Chicago. He said he never had had the time to learn English, but that he wanted to learn for when he went back North to work.
We walked to the real-estate offices that offered the Dr. Lucio (the street it is located at) apartment for rent... and then we got the bad news.
In Mexico, or maybe just in Xalapa, you can only rent if someone who owns real-estate in the city cosigns the rental agreement. Yolanda, from Ecomanía, had mentioned something, but since she is very accustomed to dealing with International costumers, she makes different types of rental agreements. Sepromex, the company that was renting out the Dr. Lucio apartment, could care less if we were the Queen and King of Spain: we needed a co-signer who owned real-estate in Xalapa... Good luck!
After being so rudely awakened to our ever slimmer possibilities of renting a place in Xalapa, we set out to find another Real-Estate company that we hoped was a little less... square. We also started doing more leg-work.
That day, both Jevon and I, walked the area around Roy's (mainly downtown) and the Parque Los Berros (the park we love to walk to) area. Jevon found a quirky "tin" penthouse (furnished) on the end of a narrow, little street. The down side: no garage. Every one parked their cars on the street which was just one lane, so it became a parking lot with no exit (since it was a dead-end street)... so good luck driving out when you needed to. The upsides: furnished, and the owner had a grandson about Diego's age (7) living in another one of the apartments.
I went another route and found a very cool house made out of brick (in Mexico they are really made out of brick, not just covered to look like brick). Kiwi and I had been walking and found some stairs, so we went down hill. There are so many hills in Xalapa, that some streets just suddenly end and there are stairs for people to go to another lower area. The stairs are usually adorned as little parks and little chapels, so it is always a pleasure to explore these steps.
I thought the house was a double, but later on we found out it was one house and it had been rented to one of the Universities to house some offices. It probably was not ready to be used as a home. We also realized that the dead-end street also housed two major schools (a technical and a junior-high) which made the traffic little more than impossible...
Kiwi and I also saw a very charming town home not very far from the brick office house. It looked very colonial, small with a one car garage enclosed with rod iron gates. It looked very pretty, decorated with hand painted white and blue tiles. Down-side: half a block from the two big schools, and... I had not noticed the urban bus traffic: lovely diesel fumes all day long on an uphill road! Up-side: it is located on a historic road called "El Callejón de la Calavera" (The Skeleton Alley) and it has very colorful stories behind the name: one, that a woman killed her husband and buried him there, they later just found a skeleton when they were digging to build a home. The other one says that it was a favorite place for a famous Mexican Revolutionary General to execute prisoners with a firing squad...

July 25th, 2007

Wednesday
And so started our seemingly endless search for the perfect house. We knew that the Blue House was too big, but it still was extremely charming and in the middle of great forests. Still we didn't know enough of the area, and we had not seen enough of whatever the rental stock had to offer.
We didn't call Yolanda right away; instead we decided to look a little bit more in the all areas to have a better sense of what was available. On some level, the remote area that the Blue House was at (Zoncuanlta), although charming, made me nervous. It rains a lot, there is no pavement, there are not too many lights and some roads are almost vertical...
Coatepec had little to offer. Our first find was one newly finished house, small but nice, with the yard the size of a closet and a 4 meter tall wall separating it from a chicken farm with about 10,000 heads of poultry clucking all day long... Oh, and the street, again, was not paved, or leveled. Of course, the nice gentleman that was offering the house to us promised the chickens were going to disappear in the next three months... yeah, right!
Another unfortunate find was a wonderfully charming duplex. Very colonial and with a nice façade... Then "El Orejón" (The Big Eared One) showed up. He did not stop barking for more than 1 minute with that hound bark that borders on a howl that Basset Hounds have! Hey, we love dogs, we just don't love dogs that roam free barking around and their owner is oblivious! As for the inside of the Duplex, it definitively could use some love. It was very simple and on the small side, but it was not very clean and needed much up-keep. Somehow light bulbs dangling out of the ceiling and Winnie the Pooh semi ripped borders don't add much to the charm of a place.
We decided to give Coatepec a rest and look around in Xalapa. The drive is 15 minutes, at the most!

July 24th, 2007

Photo: Helioconda Guacamaya in it's natural habitat!

Tuesday
The meeting with Yolanda from Ecomania couldn't come quick enough! We were very anxious to see the blue house she had to show us in the La Pitaya area.
Yolanda is another amazing woman. She is very friendly, knows a lot of people and places. She decided to start Ecomania when she grew tired of following her son and husband to their extreme sports outings, but had fallen in love with the nature wonders of the Coatepec area.
She surprised us with the news that there was another house for rent in the same area, and she would show both houses to us. She took us to the new road (old freeway) we had driven on the day before. She showed us the entrance to a very nice bilingual school, you could barely see the school from the road, but it looked like a summer camp with cabins more than a school.
Then she turned on a cobble stone road (one wide lane for a two way road) that would take us to Zoncuantla, the neighborhood the houses were located in. The road soon became a dirt road, a not very even dirt road. Yolanda explained that most of the neighbors preferred to keep it like that because it slowed down trafficY no kidding! We stopped a couple of times on the side of the road to let cars, coming the other way, pass. After a few bumpy minutes, we turned on Second Street. Second Street is unpaved, but it does have a name sign! Oh, and second street is one block with four homes on it, one of them the blue house we were going to look at.
I have to say that the deep forest green of the abundant vegetation really sets off the bright blue the house is painted with. The house was beautiful, with amazing wood details throughout and a small but cute yard. There was even a room that had been the studio of the ceramic artist that used to live there that was ready for a gas kiln and had plenty of shelves for drying ceramic. The boys loved the house, Jevon and I liked, but it seemed really big! Even so, we liked it enough to consider it as a very solid possibility. The boys did not like the outside, though; it was too buggy! My boys did not enjoy the amount of insect life that was resting their wings on the bright blue stucco walls.
The next house was on the corner of Second Street. Yolanda called it a rustic house and she explained that it had been built by a laudero (artisan that makes string musical instruments). The wood doors and some shutters had details that looked like violins. There were wood details that looked very hand made. It was a big cabin with a big traditional, antique kitchen (the stove looked 100 years old), and a huge garden. The yard had a natural well with stone walls and covered by a piece of plywood. At the far end grew huge trees, one of them a Macadamia tree. I had no idea that they even grew in Mexico, but I guess we could easily have the bys collect enough Macadamia nuts to send to our friends in the US. I think this house was a little too rustic and quite musky to be anyone's favorite.
Yolanda drove us back to Coatepec and we promised to give her a call later on with any decision we might make.
We drove around Coatepec for a little while more, and then drove back to the blue house, to see if we could actually get back there on our own. The area is unmapped; it doesn't exist in any map! We did find our way back to the Blue House, and even drove around some more, staring in awe at the huge homes built by artists (both Mexican and International) in the heavily wooded neighborhood. Zoncuantla is more a spread of forest with a mix of very poor homes made out of brick and enormous country homes built by the rich. Very interesting mix, in very uneven, rocky roads!

July 23rd, 2007

Photo: Moth on our apt exterior wall.

Monday
Monday traffic is quite different to weekend traffic. I am still not totally sure of the benefit of having traffic police on every intersection, but there they are, blowing their whistle and doing their best to keep the flow of traffic. Between the buses, cars, and pedestrians, it gets pretty wild in downtown Xalapa. That does not make navigating any easier either!
We did find our way to Coatepec easier the second time around, though, but decided to take the new/old road so that we could see were the "country" homes were. We had heard about this area called La Pitaya were very nice homes were being built on the road to Coatepec. There are a couple of very good schools nestled along that road, too. We, again, lacked a map, so we just started driving. The drive was actually stunning, passing by the famed Clavijero Botanical Gardens and then through very thick subtropical forest.
There actually was a sign that said La Pitaya, so we turned at the sign... and then the road became a dirt trail that was more vertical than horizontal. There was no need for speed bumps since the rocky and uneven road made sure you drove very, very slow all the time! Suddenly I was very glad to have an SUV and not a low-clearance minivan. We did see huge homes nestled in the forest, we just could not figure out how to get to them, there were no real roads marked and the trails seemed almost too vertical for a car to be able to make the descent... So we gave up on trying to figure La Pitaya and headed back to the main road. We would either get a map, or leave the touring to the professionals (real estate agents in this case).
We were pretty lucky on finding information this time. We dropped by Ecomania, a real estate office on the main street heading to the Plaza in Coatepec. They are a small real estate office that caters to the Coatepec area and to other areas with Ecotourism. We had been studying their on-line offerings for a while so we felt somewhat familiar with what they would have to offer. We had planned to find something out in the forest for the boys to experience something totally unique, so we were pretty sure Ecomania would have something for us.
The Ecomania office is located in a wonderful patio of an old home that has been converted into retail space. Sofia, the real estate agent on call, was very nice. She immediately looked up what they had for rent, and it wasn=t much. There was just one property listed and, luckily, it was in the area we wanted to check out. So we made an appointment for Yolanda, the owner of Ecomania, to show us this house the next day, and headed to the Main Plaza.
It was dry and the tourism office was open, we got a map and I asked if they knew were the Colegio Calli was. This is the school the boys will attend. To our surprise (since no one had heard about the school so far) they told us exactly how to get there!
We drove to the school armed with our newly acquired map, which again was more a loose guide than a real map, but the directions we had gotten were good enough that we actually made it. The school is housed in an old home. It has a very curious façade since it is covered, from top to bottom and from side to side, with brownish tile. It is hard to miss, not just for the tile, but for the Previa minivan with Texas plates parked in front of the building.
We rang the doorbell and were received warmly by the owner/principal and her family. Aurora is a wonderful young woman full of energy and a love for learning. Her husband and she decided to start a school when they got married and added up the kids they had between both: 7, it was cheaper to start a school than to pay private education for all of them! But also they believed in a different approach to education, so they chose the Waldorf model.
The boys slowly warmed up to the place, Aurora and her daughter Lucia, and played for a little while. We filled some registration papers and took a tour of the growing school. They were adding a second story to the building so that they could have more classrooms, including a woodshop to make jaranas (a small regional guitar) and other musical instruments. It was wonderful to hear how this second story was designed by Ricardo, Aurora's husband, who is a laudero (an artisan that makes guitars, violins and other string instruments). It seems it will be a wonderful second story out of wood and bamboo and other regional materials. It also had to be "portable" since they foresee moving to a bigger building in the future.
We left Coatepec with a very nice feeling that the boys were going to be very happy in this school, with a small teacher to student ratio, an at home feel and a very artsy curriculum!

JULY 2nd...

Sunday add on...

To dampen the mood a little... We had the not so fun chance to see ATM fraud first hand. We usually get cash out at the bank's ATM, right down-town. Yes, we are always very careful and try to get cash only in weekdays (since the bank is open and security is high)... well, alas we were low on cash on a Sunday, so while I took the kids to eat across the street to the "Vip's", Jevon went to the ATM.
On coming back to the restaurant, he told me he had experienced something really odd. He said there were two really well dressed guys in the ATM room (there are 5 ATM's outside the bank in a little glass enclosure). They were "helping" people because it seemed the ATM's were broken, at least three of them. So the "helpful" guys were directing people to one that was "working". Jevon got a little suspicious, he did try his card on the "working" machine, but before he got cash out he decided to switch to another ATM.
After our meal, we went back to the ATMs. The helpful guys were gone, the "no funciona (broken)" hand written tags were gone. Jevon got closer to the ATM that they were leading people to and noticed a whole part of the machine was gone...
Well, he didn't pull money from there, but he was not sure how far the cloning had gone on his card... We are holding our breath.

July 22nd, 2007

Photo: Xallitic

Sunday

Our first morning in Xalapa was beautiful. Sunny and mild! We had breakfast early and walked down to the park to give Kiwi a good walk. The park, called "Los Berros", is a huge, landscaped city block with fountains, huge trees, benches and a kiosk. From very early in the morning, vendors start lining the park avenues with their wares, mostly fried pastries, corn on the cob and "chicharrones" (crisp savory non-pork rinds- like a dinosaur sized chip). Some entrepreneurs bring their battery ride-ons for kids to rent by the minute, others bring their miniature horses and offer rides on them for a small fee. The boys like the rusty old playground with the many see-saws and the kamikaze slide! (It is play at your own risk here, no safety standards whatsoever...)
After lunch at another favorite of the boys: "Vip's" (a nice, simple restaurant with very kid friendly menu) we headed off to Coatepec.
Coatepec is where the school the kids will attend is located. It is a few miles (5ish) away from Xalapa heading south. There are three roads that go from Xalapa to Coatepec: The Old Road, The Old Highway, and the New Highway... or something like that, maybe it is the old road, the new road and the new highway... It can be a little complicated when communicating with the locals on what road is which, but the main difference is that the only one worth driving is the New Highway, the one that is four lanes with a median. The other two are two lanes with no shoulder, one is longer and goes through more villages or settlements, and that means more "topes" (speed bumps). By the way, Speed Bumps in Mexico are not very well marked and they are HUGE! So, you better drive slowly is you want your muffler to stay put!
Xalapa is not a very easy city to navigate through. The streets are mostly old and narrow, they lack name signs and many of them are just one way... and usually not the way you need them to go. Getting out of Xalapa could have been easier if we had actually been able to match the street map we own to the actual streets, but maps in Mexico are a loose guide, not necessarily a navigation tool. So, yes, we got lost on one of the hills of downtown Xalapa before we actually found our way to the modern four lane "calzada" or boulevard that leads to the exit to the Highway (new) to Coatepec!
The exit to Coatepec goes by the Transportation Museum which boasts a nice array of old airplanes, tanks, trains, antique trucks, etc. set out on a large, nicely kept lawn. The boys had seen this place a couple of times on our last trip, but we had never had a chance to stop, so they made sure we promised to take them there this time around. They were especially interested since the "museum" had added a few inflatable games, a zip line, carnival games and a bungee cord area to the old vehicles.
Getting from the Transportation Museum to Coatepec is a breeze, about a 6 minute drive, then the freeway becomes a street that takes you to downtown Coatepec. The traffic is pretty bad on weekends since Coatepec is such a weekend destination and the Main Street is a one way and mostly one lane street (there are always parked cars on the street). The Main Plaza is a very busy and festive place. There are food vendors, balloon vendors, ice cream vendors and live music. Parking is hard to find around the plaza and the streets close by, so you have to circle on the surrounding streets to find a place to stop.
We walked a few blocks to the plaza to find the Tourism office so that we could get a map of the town, since we had no luck finding one elsewhere, but it was closed. We then headed to the Kiosk to grab an ice cream.
Last year, our friend, Doris, took us to Coatepec to get an Ice Cream. It seems the town is famous for its ice cream and its coffee, so she told us that many people drive all the way from Xalapa just to go get a good ice cream. And the ice cream was (is) delicious! The Kiosk is one of the safest options, since there is no FDA around to make sure things are produced in sanitary conditions. It is a bit pricey (as ice cream in Mexico goes) but it is extremely good!
A funny thing in Xalapa and Coatepec: usually it rains every afternoon. So, as we were starting our ice cream, it started to rain. Not a soft rain, but a torrential downpour with thunder and lightning. Luckily, we were in the kiosk, but we still were getting cold and a little bit wet because of the wind. Kiwi was shivering in his bag, the boys were nervous about the thunder and I was freezing... we decided to brave the water with our umbrellas and get to the car as soon as the rain slowed down a little.
The downside of parking a few blocks away from the plaza is walking back in the rain! Our legs were soaked by the time we got to where we had parked and most of us were freezing. Rain does not necessarily fall vertical around here either... We did find out something about the traditional architecture of the place. The single story buildings have eaves that cover the sidewalk; the two story buildings have balconies that span most of the width of the building also covering the sidewalk. Bear in mind that sidewalks are very narrow, though, and the wind blows the rain, but it is a nice practical and very pedestrian friendly detail in a rainy region like this!
Another thing we learned in the next few days was that, almost as clockwork, the downpour started between 2 and 3. It usually lasted 1 to 2 hours and then it cleared up beautifully! A funny thing that Mexican lunch time is from 2 to 4. Those two hours much of everything is closed, only restaurants are open. People close shop, office or whatever and go home to have the main meal of the day, then come back to work at 4. They close shop at 7 or 8 p.m. to get home for supper, which is a light meal.

July 21st, 2007

Photo: Pino Suarez and our first home -second floor, brick.

Saturday
Breakfast was another great surprise: it was a very nice spread of sweet bread, juices, yogurt (real, no gelatin added for thickening!), granola, eggs in salsa, pancakes, and more corn masa delicacies. The coffee was also very good. Already in this area, you are getting close enough to the coffee lands to be able to get good coffee!
The rest of the drive was fascinating in many ways. The road is narrow, but not too bad. The two lanes lack a shoulder most of the time, but it is not a high speed freeway since there are plenty of towns on the road and, at least the first part of it, is still "resort" (I am stretching the term here) area.
From the many little shops filled with all sorts of beach wear and inflatable beach toys, to the little "mariscos" (sea food) restaurants, it is hard not to want to stop and check some of the local goods out. I know from when I used to live in Mexico, that the some of the best food you can eat is in these little freeway eateries. It is, though, well known, that with the delicious flavors, comes the risk of contracting a huge amount of intestinal maladies... otherwise known as "Montezuma's Revenge"... so, even though Jevon really craved cold coconut water cut right out of the coconut, we decided to let our stomachs get a little more acclimated to Mexico before doing anything adventurous.
A few miles down the road we found amazing beaches amidst huge livestock ranches. It seems like a very dry region and, although it had been raining plenty in the last week all over the Gulf area, this part of the coast looked like it had had no rain in quite a while. The cattle seemed very content, though, and the beaches looked like paradise.
Another more miles down the road we came by a small lagoon that was very green and Jevon told me it was the infamous "Laguna Verde". I was stunned! When I was growing up, my dad used to talk a lot about "Laguna Verde", since he used to go there because of work. I never really knew what he was referring to, but in my mind it was a City in the State of Veracruz. Many years later I learnt that "Laguna Verde" was a nuclear plant, but I still had these images of a populated area. Well, I finally saw the tiny green lagoon with the huge nuclear plant near a cliff on a semi deserted area, many miles off the road. It is supposed to be in bad physical shape, although it has a nice road going to it and an information booth at its entrance. Security looks very high, though, with plenty of soldiers guarding the entrance. Every few kilometers you see a Afallout evacuation route@ sign, and the signs that mark the name of the settlements (towns) say something like "ecological radiation control area"...
Glad to get far away from the "fallout" area, we drove past another stretch of beaches that are quite famous because of their huge sand dunes. One of this beaches is called "Chachalacas", we have it in our plans to go back to check this beach out some time or another.
Finally we got to the "Super", in other words, the four lane highway that would take us from the coast to the mountains and our final destination for the day: Xalapa. The road we knew since we had driven it last year, it is a great road but very boring, not much to see. It takes no time to get to Xalapa, though.
We entered the city on a very quiet day for traffic, Saturday, so it was easy to drive around. We decided to head toward Roy's place and see if he had room for us to stay.
Roy is an ex-pat that came to Mexico over 20 years ago, got married to a Mexican woman and decided to stay. He now has kids and grandkids, a photo studio (he is a photographer), a couple of small furnished apartments that he rents out and a little "tour" business. He offers guided tours to Americans interested in retiring in the area, as well as offering his services as interpreter, house hunter, etc. We rented an apartment from him for a couple of days last year, so we hoped he had the apartment available while we found a more permanent place to live.
The apartment was available and the boys were thrilled to be back in a familiar setting. Although it is set two blocks off the Main Plaza of downtown Xalapa, the street it is on is very calm. I very much enjoy the fact that there is a small green area less than half a block away so that Kiwi can do his doggie stuff! The boys love that a mayor park is two blocks down and the Main Plaza is two blocks up! They also love the fact that there are "papelerías" (office supply mini-store) less than a block away, two convenience stores less than half a block away and a mini health-bakery across the street, two houses down (they love the amaranth-oat- fruit loops we get there and the home made yogurt).
The apartment per-se is not great. It is old and most of its furniture seriously needs to be changed, but Roy has been slowly working to make it better at least since last time we visited. It is also small for spending a whole year there, so we started the search for a place to stay right away. After Dinner...
Up the street from Roy's, right across the street from the "School for International Students" of the University of
Veracruz (Spanish Language School), is a very nice little restaurant that serves a small but very good buffet. Roy sent us there a year ago, and we headed there as soon as we got a little bit settled. The Restaurant, "La Plazoleta", is set in an old home with a huge covered patio. The patio is covered with a plexiglass cover which lets the light in, but not the rain (which is a very good thing in Xalapa). The tables are set around huge Ficus trees that grow freely in the patio and the buffet is set around this area. The food is very good, home made, and fast. There is a woman making hand made tortillas and "gorditas" (fat tortillas) with salsa and cheese right at the entrance. You choose your table, the waiter asks you if you would like a menu or buffet (we always go for the buffet) and then brings a pitcher of fresh squeezed Limeade, Alfalfa-lime juice or Jamaica (Hibiscus) water to your table. While you go and grab your veggies or salad, he goes and gets some "gorditas" with cheese (and salsa for the adults) and brings them to your table. When you go and get your main dish, he gets you fresh made tortillas for your meal. The kids don't like dessert there, though; it usually is a thick corn pudding with cinnamon or chocolate.
Since the part of the idea of renting Roy's apartment was to save some money on meals, we headed to a downtown supermarket to get some staples for breakfast. It was packed! There were thousands of people walking on Xalapa streets and most of them seemed to be going to the store we were going to. So we got some milk, juice, bread and cereals and headed back home as soon as possible.

July 20th, 2007

photo: Costa Esmeralda

Friday

Breakfast was... surreal. We stopped at a McDonald's! The menu was quite different than the US version, since it included regional favorites like "molletes" (hard crust bread toasted with beans and melted cheese) and "huevos rancheros" (eggs in red salsa)! It also took a little bit longer to get the food to the table, somehow fast food in Mexico isn't quite Fast and it does not taste that "Fast" either. The kids were very grateful, though, to get McD's even if it was so different, so they were ready for the long road ahead... again.
Leaving Tampico, we headed South to an area Jevon had researched for some time: "La Costa Esmeralda." To get there, we had to drive past the City of Poza Rica.
Poza Rica is a coastal Gulf city that has never been known for its beauty. It is an Oil city. I believe (but don't quote me on this) that it started as the home for the oil workers of the area Petroleum Fields (and Platforms). Maybe it was named for the richness of Petroleum wells (Poza means well and Rica means rich)... Well, it is still not very pretty, but seems to be rising in importance more and more in Mexico. New highways are being built to connect this coastal city to Mexico City. Unfortunately, the highways are still being built, so we got some pretty uneven roads. Some parts are very good, some parts are under construction, and others are just old and are being patched!
It still was an interesting drive, with sugar cane and banana plantations here and there, and even some coconut palms. The landscape kept changing from tropical to dry and back. As we approached the Costa Esmeralda area, the landscape became drier, still it was green, but the pastures were more common. The kids enjoyed counting donkeys placidly pasturing at the side of the freeway. They did not enjoy going through every bump and "tope" (speed bump) on the road, and there are a lot, since there are many towns on that stretch of freeway.
Costa Esmeralda is a long stretch of beaches on the Gulf of Mexico. As opposed to South Padre Island in Texas which has very brownish water, Costa Esmeralda has wonderful Blue/Turquoise waters! The sand is pretty soft, although there are a lot of plants growing close to the beach, so the strip of sand is not terribly wide. The hotels on the beach go from nice 4 star to camp grounds. It is not a very developed area and the tourism that it sees is mostly National tourism, mainly from Mexico City and some from the same State of Veracruz.
We found a nice hotel in a very comfortable price range to stay in. It had wonderful rooms almost on the beach with a very nice pool for the boys! No sooner had we gotten in the room, the boys were out the door heading for the beach. Even Kiwi was tremendously exited to check out that strange place with the moving water.
The water was a nice temperature, and the surf was soft enough that the boys had no problem at all jumping into the waves. Kiwi, on the other hand, was not as sure once he was in front of the water and felt it on his paws. I still took him for a little walk on the beach and pretty soon he was a very wet dog! The boys dug a tide pool for the dog and spent a long time just lounging around on the beach. When they headed for the pool, Kiwi and I headed for the room... and to de-sand the dog! I am just very glad he is not a Golden Retriever!
The food in the hotel restaurant was surprisingly good, too! The boys had there first taste of "Chocomilk" (Chocolate milk), quite a staple in Mexico. We just enjoyed the fresh corn masa tlacoyos (like a fat long tortilla- a very regional delicacy) with salsa and some rice with fried Plantain (another staple in coastal Mexico).

July 19th, 2007

Photo: Traveling in confort Mexican style.

Thursday

Now, time to cross the Border.
As you cross the International crossing Bridge, you pass through Mexican Customs. Your car goes over a bump and it activates a traffic light which tells you if you are going to be checked or if you pass without check. I often wonder if it depends on the weight of your car, so I was sure we were going to stop and be checked in customs. We had left a bunch of our stuff (including clothes) at my parents', but we were still carrying a lot of weight, mostly on clothes and inflatable beds. To our surprise, the light was green, and we were free to pass without being checked.
And then there was Reynosa! Talk about an ugly border town... city. Reynosa, in the Mexican State of Tamaulipas, is probably one of the ugliest Border Cities in Mexico, and there is absolutely no logic to it either, so getting through it to catch the freeway to Tampico, Tamaulipas... well, it was a feat! Oh, and traffic! Traffic in Mexico is chaotic no matter where or when. The lanes are not marked and the street names are nowhere to be found, and no one respects speed limitsY and stop signs are optional... At least traffic lights work the same as everywhere else in the World... that is if you find one.
The freeway was not bad at all for the first hundred miles or so. We even found a nice place on the road to have some lunch! It was a drive-through convenience store/ taco restaurant... The boys were amazed at this establishment! You just drive off the road on the dirt drive, and you can either go through in your car and the attendant will give you the stuff you want, or you can park and sit on the road-side rickety chairs and have tacos. We decided on the chairs, being it that we had no idea what we would ask for if we were to drive through! The "waiter/cook" took our taco orders, heated the tortillas on a huge "comal" (griddle) over a wood fire and then served the fillings out of big pots that rested by the "stove". Very yummy, very fast and kind of fun!
Then we decided to get fancy on our detours (to save time) and we went on a road that we had heard was very good, sometimes. Big mistake! We drove about 35 minutes in a semi-constructed road that sometimes became one lane (for both traffic directions)Y and at speeds of no more than 40 mph... We just had enough and turned around for another 35 minutes of misery to head back to the main road! So that delayed us about an hour in our progress through the Northern part of Mexico, and we were very grateful to arrive to Tampico in the early evening!
I had never been to Tampico, but I have a few friends that were born and raised there. We didn't see much of it, but it seemed interesting, with its renovated areas and a lagoon inhabited by crocodiles that is surrounded by the most populated areas (downtown) of the City.
We stayed at a very strange hotel. We have been cutting costs, and downtown hotels are not very inexpensive, but we found a very reasonable option. The Hotel Bonitto Inn downtown Tampico is not beautiful from the outside. It looks like a very old and run down commercial, one story building with no outside windows. As you walk into the lobby, you discover that the rooms have been fitted around the perimeter of the building with their windows facing the inside courtyard where the front desk is. The courtyard is very plain, but it has plenty of light from a skylight and the rooms are clean and pretty spacious.
That first evening in Mexico, we treated our kids with a Classic: "El Pollo Loco". This restaurant is a must in Northern Mexico. It is just grilled chicken, tortillas, salsas, rice and beans. The chicken is marinated in fruit juices and then grilled over wood. The result is amazing. Very juicy inside, very crispy outside! I have been told that the "Pollo Loco" in the US (since they exported the Franchise) tastes very different and is very dry... I am sure the FDA did not approve of the secret ingredients in the marinade!

July 4th -18th , 2007

Photo: Kiwi and CK playing in McAllen.


We stayed in McAllen, Texas, for about two weeks. Jevon had planned for a stay of about a week, but there were many, many things we needed to get ready before heading south. There was the matter of getting a visa for Jevon, and then a visa for our car (actually a temporary import permit).
It is amazing of how difficult it is to get everything ready for a move like this, even if it is temporary! Hey, but after two weeks, most of everything was in order and we decided to hit the road.
The boys enjoy their Grandparents (Abuelos) tremendously, but they miss being with kids their age. And, although they swim most of the day at the pool, well, you can only do that so long too... We also got to go to their favorite restaurants (too much eating!) and we got to hang out with their cousins. It was such a nice thing to have both our niece and our nephew around for such a long time. They are growing so fast and turning into teenagers! They are fun, though, they enjoy playing with the boys and the boys love the attention! We also got to meet my niece's horses: Beau and Guapo. We didn't get to ride them, though. Maybe next time!
When it was time for us to hit the road again, Mother Nature came back with her showers. It is the first time I have seen that part of Texas so green, but the drainage of the Border Cities is not designed to drain that amount of water. Actually, the soil is not designed to take so much water either! There were a few days there, that the Valley of Texas (the area where McAllen is located) had flash floods everyday! Many cars (and even trucks) got stuck in flooded streets- over 8 inches of water.
Luckily, the day that Jevon decided to leave town, there was a nice reprieve and the rains stopped for our departure! And just in time, because I was not going to have us drive a Mexican highway with rain!

July 3rd, 2007

Tuesday
For our last morning in Austin, we revisited Dominican Joe. It is hard to say goodbye to such a great brew!
It was a nice visit in all to the old 'hood! In a way, I wouldn't mind going back to live there, but it definitively is still not a very child friendly place- although they are working hard to get there- hey, but it is a very Dog friendly place!
The last stretch of road was a very familiar one to me, since I used to drive it at least 6 times a year. It is as boring as I remember! First, there are little strip-mall and outlet towns between Austin and San Antonio, then it is time to try to figure our way out of San Antonio. I didn't mention that Texas highways are... well, Texas highways... they are definitively traced differently that elsewhere. The on-ramps are suicidal (short and abrupt), the speed limit is a courtesy, and the trucks... everybody in Texas drives a truck! So it took us a couple of turns to get on the right Interstate, and we were on our way to South Texas.
South Texas is like driving in another country. It is a very desolate area and a very poor one too. There are no big gas stations every 20 miles, it is... different. You have to believe that it is a way of softening the blow when you finally cross over to the Mexican Highways! Oh, yeah, and Mother Nature decided it was going to be rain season in South Texas this year. It never rains in South Texas, never... That is until we decided to drive through it! There were stretches of highway in which I had to drive no faster than 30 mph since I could see very little through the rain, even with the wiper at full speed! So it took longer...

July 2nd, 2007

Photo: Poster for an ongoing cause @ Dominican Joe

Monday
Day 2, we decided to try something new, we found a new coffee house called Dominican Joe and, as the name suggests, it serves excellent coffee brought from the Dominican Republic. The brew is excellent, and the place is amazing. The design is clean, minimalist and they use light and a few choice materials (like bamboo and steel) to give it a very cool ambiance. We remember the coffee we drank when we were visiting Dominican Republic was always excellent, and we were happy to be able to find that coffee somewhere in the US!
The rest of the day we just visited some of the Hills around the city, checked out our old neighborhoods, and the boys relaxed for a long time at the hotel pool. We were all pretty burned out! I just managed to drive to another favorite from way back when: Taco Cabana. Not a fancy Tex-Mex, but very decent fare. I got some rice, beans, quesadillas and other goodies to-go, so when the swimmer boys came out of the water, dinner was served!

July 1st, 2007

Photo: Armando and I at Ruta Maya.

Sunday

Day 1 in Austin was a little bit better for all. After resting the night and a pretty bad breakfast at the hotel, we headed to one of our favorite coffee joints in the city: Ruta Maya (pic). It used to be in a warehouse downtown, but they moved it South to a very cool office/store mall done nicely in regional architecture (lots of sandstone, metal and the Hill Country Vernacular forms) by local architects. It is still a very down-to-earth, cool, whimsical, almost hippie joint: they give free yoga classes and serve vegan delicacies alongside high octane coffee and punk rock clienteleY oh, and they even offer a bowl of water for your dog while you sip your java (or smoothie for the boys) in their patio.
Austin is an extremely dog and jog friendly place. Everywhere you look (even in the heat of midday) you can see joggers around the lakes or downtown or heading to the green belt. There are quite a few dog parks, and the city passed an ordinance for all Restaurant patios to allow dogs on leashesY
So off we headed to check out our old home, where Armando spent his first 5 months of life. It still was as charming as back then, although the park down the street had seen quite a few improvements in the last nine years! The boys spent probably two hours playing in the new playground while Kiwi and I explored every square inch of park. Jevon checked out some of the home restorations that have happened around the park area. The restorations are impressive because of the quality of detailing, respect for scale and neighborhood, and the eco-conscious native plant landscaping that can be seen throughout.
I later on dropped off the boys at the Children=s Museum downtown (where I hear they had a blast playing with humongous dominos) while Kiwi and I explored the City a little more. I had to go back to Campus to see what had changedY that had remained mostly the same. So I headed to pick-up lunch(dinner) to-go to another one of our favorite joints: Kim Phung. This hole-in-the-wall has won prizes for best Vietnamese in Austin for the last 15 years, and it is still a hole-in-the-wall. It is very cheap, and it really has the best Vietnamese noodles and Pho (Vietnamese beef broth) I have ever had. Glad to report that it was a hit with the boys! We headed to Deep Eddy to find a picnic spot to eat our noodles. Deep Eddy is a great natural pool very close to the downtown are we used to live in. Unfortunately, we didn=t choose our picnic spot very well at all, and had to run from the insect life before really enjoying our meal! (Yeah, the Texas Hill Country is really buggy) At least the boys got to see Deep Eddy and want to go back and enjoy the water there.
We were supposed to go check out the bats under the bridge at dusk, but dusk comes really late in Summer, so we opted to pass on that.

June 30, 2007

Photo: Diego conquering the Hill Country.

Saturday
By the morning of the third day, we were all very tired of being on the road. We were also very anxious to get to Austin! I do not think we broke the speed limit too much, but we did try our best to get to the Texas Hill Country as soon as possibleY that is as soon as we finished driving through Dallas!
Talk about sprawl! I think we started greater Dallas around 11a.m. and finally got through about 2 p.m. and without stops! The sad part is that there is not much to say about the landscape, mostly strip malls and bad suburb semi architecture, hey, but at least Texans are proud of their DallasY no taste, but proud of it!
The rest of the road was somewhat familiar to us. We had driven from Austin to Dallas a few times when we were in school, the only new thing was a new outletY Oh, there is this town called Gruene in the middle
nowhere and it really caught our attention the huge sign that proudly proclaimed: "Gently resisting change since 1878 . Must be either a really charming little town with very well preserved historical buildings, or a run down town that is slowly dying, would definitively like to take a look on our way back North.
And finally we got to Austin, and got lost! Well, it had been nine years since we left, and Austin has definitively not been resisting change at all (and we are very grateful for this). The unfortunate downside if that Austin has not escaped the Texas epidemic: Sprawl. It has grown enormously into the neighboring Counties with bad strip malls and cookie cutter suburban homes. The really nice thing about the growth, though, is that it has taken downtown by storm. It was amazing to see the warehouses turned into state of the Art Convention Centers, Retail and lofts, as well as a new plethora of Museums for all ages and interests. Even the old Coliseum has been renovated with regionalist detailing that speaks a lot about the quality of minds that the Architecture School at the University of Texas has been producing. Even as we were leaving 9 years ago, there was already a strong contingent of obstinate Austinites who a) loved their city, b) knew change was good, c) had a very high education level, d) were ecologically consciousY anyway, they really changed Austin from a fun College Town, to a rather surprising Cosmopolitan City.
From names that started there and have grown nationally like Whole Foods, to the quirky little home-grown businesses like Book People or Amy's Ice Creams, it is a delight to visit and feel the energy. It is funny that each of the Austin home-grown businesses have their own t-shirts with their logo and, on the back of the shirt, all of them sport the same motto: KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD!
After being lost for a little bit, we finally found the hotel we would call home for 3 nights. Nothing too exiting, but it felt good to get off the road for at least a little bit over a night! The boys were already beyond grumpy, tired, hungry, just lovely. We took them to one of our favorite Ajoints@ from when we were in school: Texadelphia (Where the Philly Cheese Sandwich meets Tex-Mex cuisine) but it was not a big hit with themY it still was extremely satisfying for us. To me, it tasted like a little bit of heaven!

June 29th, 2007

Photo: The lookout at Hot Springs: The Ozarks.

Friday

The next 500 miles were a new experience to all. After a night of much Kiwi-hoping and some pillow wetting (couldn't stop mourning my home), we hit the road for the second day in a row out of Kentucky and down through Tennessee and Arkansas.
I had never been in the area and it was fascinating to see the changes, not only in landscape (wow agriculture land!) but in culture. From the capital of Country Music to the Mega Super Warehouse Christian Churches, it was amazing. You know you are not in Cleveland anymore when the signs on the road read "Jesus is the answer" or when every gas station has a Popeyes Fried Chicken attached to itY or when you see a glass Pyramid adorning downtown or a sign that invites you to see where the King slept (and they are not talking about LeBron!). It was fun, rather informational and a bit educational to see a little bit more of America.
For the second night, we decided to get off the beaten path and head for the mountains, the Ozarks. Although Texarkana sounded like a fascinating place to spend an eveningY we opted for a detour to Hot Springs, Arkansas.
What a fabulous little town carved right into the National Park! The main street actually cuts the Park in two and is lined with charming little shops and Historic Bath Houses. They are being renovated but, even with construction going on, they still preserve their almost Majestic vigilance over Main Street. We never really touched the hot springs water, but it was almost funny to see some stores selling empty gallon jugs to take water with you, I suppose for its medicinal properties.
The Ozarks themselves are beautiful. I hear they are a very different mountain range than any of the others in America, the vegetation is wonderful and dense, and the lakes and valleys are definitively something I would like to visit again.

June 28th, 2007

Photo: Kiwi at the backsteps. CleveHts.

Thursday

It was very hard to leave. The morning of the 28th of June was terrible for everyone but the dog. It was hard to say goodbye to our house, the Big Yellow House, to our neighbors and friends, to those that lined the driveway to see us off and to those who held us in their thoughts. Yet, it had to be done, and we were all ready to get on with the next phase of our journey.
The road ended being almost therapeutic, long and at times very boring, but simply getting out of the empty house was a welcomed change. The first 500 miles where uneventful since they were mostly familiar roads to Columbus and down to Kentucky. The boys entertained themselves for hours coloring. For them it was just the beginning of a very extended vacation like those we usually take, just longer.
The first night at a motel was the first interesting experience, being that Kiwi (our pup)had never been in a place where people walk by the door all the time during the night! He never barked, but I think he leapt from the bed no less than 20 times when he heard people outside the door. I don=t think he has still warmed up too much to hotel rooms, but he is getting better all the time.