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.
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.
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