shoestring gringa

This last weekend found me once more with a mountain of dirty clothes, sans garden hose, and with rain predicted for Sunday. What’s a shoestring to do? I filled the machine using a couple of buckets, from the shower. It worked fine. I think I might even like it better than that stupid hose business.

I must point out that my current laundry woes are not at all typical, fortunately. There are usually a number of options available for getting your clothes washed wherever you might find yourself in Mexico, if you prefer to forgo the delights and hassles of owning a washing machine. Most of these places are lumped under the term Lavandería.

Cities, larger towns, and anyplace with lots of tourist traffic will usually have some variation on the self-service laundromat familiar to gringos. The main difference you’ll find is the interpretation of the concept of “self service”: there will often be a number of ladies buzzing about the place, selling you soap in little plastic cups, taking the money and directing you to the washers, mopping the floors, etc. The laundromat we used awhile in Mérida featured a couple of loud TVs, tables and chairs, and even magazines. They weighed your laundry to determine how many machines you would need (no standing on top of the load and jumping up and down to stuff it all into one machine here!).

Most places of this type offer the option of leaving your clothes there for the attendants to do, and picking them up when they are done. Many places which look like self-serve in fact aren’t and offer only this option. They charge by the kilo, and the prices have always seemed extremely reasonable to me (having had my fill of hanging out in laundromats a long, long time ago).

Next there is the lavandería which is a regular full-service laundry, with no washing machines in sight. You bring in the clothes, and they weigh them and tell you when you can pick them up. They will usually be beautifully folded and redolent of fabric softener. If you’re traveling on a tight schedule, it’s wise to clarify their business hours before leaving your clothes there. Many businesses close for two or more hours in the afternoon for lunch, reopening at 4 or 5 and then closing at 8 or so.

In really small villages where there are no official laundry services, have no fear, there is still a way. There will always be someone around who is willing to do your laundry for a modest fee. Nowadays it’s usually someone with a washing machine; in the old days it was a little old lady who did it by hand. Turnaround could be a bit slow, so don’t leave it to the last minute. In fact, never leave ANYTHING to the last minute; it’s bad practice anywhere but an invitation to disaster in Mexico.

Dry cleaners are called tintorerías and are found in cities and larger towns. I’ve yet to try one so can offer no personal experience except to say that one of my sisters-in-law has her work clothes dry cleaned and they always look great.

Well, it was yesterday actually. No time for much of anything else on laundry day. Actually it was extra laundry day. I’ve only been able to do laundry on the weekends lately, because the MG has been taking the garden hose to the other house to water cement with during the week. What does the garden hose have to do with the laundry? — you might well ask. Too much, at the moment. Here’s a few thoughts on getting the clothes washed in Mexico.

Depending on the age of your house, laundry arrangements in Mexico may be somewhat improvisational, so it was lucky for me that the MG knows all about things like appliances and drains and so forth, because the only thing that I ever knew about them was putting enough quarters in the slots, and operating the change machine, and how they get all bent out of shape if they see you using Rit dye in their machines.

Assuming you want to do the laundry at home, you’ll want to make sure that any prospective dwelling has a washer hookup, or at least the potential for one.

The newer houses I’ve seen have dedicated laundry areas, either in back of the house or in a kind of enclosed service area along the side where the kitchen door is. I’ve yet to meet anyone who uses a clothes dryer, although they can be found in stores. The price of electricity is probably the reason for this. Clotheslines are located in patios or on rooftops. Here in rural Sonora, lots of people just hang their wet clothes over a fence.

Oftentimes in Mexico, the washing machine will be situated outside the house somewhere, especially in the warmer areas. (Actually it’s pretty common in Tucson, too.) But unlike in Tucson (that I know of anyway), in Mexico you can buy waterproof covers that fit over the washer to protect it from the elements. I always assumed these were made by extra-industrious housewives when I saw them, but the MG maintains that they are ready-made.

In older or more humble housing, arrangements vary. Our casita in Yucatan had a hookup area in an alcove in the patio, i.e., incoming water, but it lacked a drain. The MG, aka Mr. Fabulous Fixit, solved this by buying a length of clear plastic tubing at the hardware store and running it around the patio wall where it could spew forth into the street. We confined ourselves to washing at night while living in that place. The clothesline was conveniently located right next to the washer.

In our next place, there was space in the bathroom to put the washer, which was good since we could use the shower drain by stuffing a short length of plastic hose down it. It usually would stay put; when it didn’t we got an unscheduled floor-washing. The downside of that location was there was no threaded faucet for the incoming water; but fortunately the patio faucet was in reach of a garden hose. We hung the clothes out to dry on the roof.

Our present rental also has space in the bathroom for the washer, which even has a drainpipe of its very own. It’s hooked up to the hot water line (which we rarely use due to expense), but again, has no cold water, so we have to attach the trusty garden hose to the kitchen sink (which has a patio-type faucet) some 40 feet distant. The clothesline is in a patio behind the building which is not accessible from the house, you have to go up an alley to get back there, and through a padlocked door.

In our real house, which we’re presently fixing up, we’re going to have cold water, hot water (just in case), a dedicated drain, and no more stinking garden hoses! Mr. Fixit is even threatening to get a dryer, which I think is too expensive. Sure would be nice on some days, though….

I’d have to say the difficulty of getting information is right up there with shopping withdrawal as a major source of culture shock to gringos in Mexico, or at least to this one. We’re always hearing about how we live in an “information society,” but it never really meant much to me until I moved to Mexico, which is decidedly not a member of the club, surface appearances to the contrary. It’s true that communications technology here has improved vastly. Cell phones and internet cafes are everywhere, and you can get phone and even high-speed internet service in most places now. So, if I need to find the zip code of a bank in NY, or find out the hours of a museum in Paris, it’s business as usual. However, if I need the zip code of a bank in Mexico City, or the hours of a museum in Oaxaca, say, I’m likely to be out of luck.

The tech revolution in Mexico has mainly accomplished two things that I can see: (1) Enabling the population to do what it loves best, which is to chat with one another, more often, and (2) enriching the providers. In terms of making information available, it hasn’t done a whole lot. Getting information is not the easy walk through the Yellow Pages we gringos are accustomed to, and I’ve personally found this more frustrating than shopping problems.

I used to get really irritated with the Mexigringo, in the early days of our relationship, when we needed to shop for some specific item. He’d jump in the car and drive to the nearest likely store, get out of the car, wander all over the store, finally find a clerk only to learn that they didn’t have such an item, then get back in the car and drive on to the next store. We lived in L.A., by the way, where there are lots of stores. I found his approach to shopping the biggest waste of time I’d ever seen, and thought it was some kind of character defect on his part. With time, I convinced him of the superiority of looking in the Yellow Pages and calling around first. Well, twenty years later, I now know why he did it that way. It’s the only way you can ever find anything in Mexico.

It’s not that Yellow Pages don’t exist in Mexico, they do; you’ll usually be given a copy when you get a new phone, and you can also obtain them just by asking in any TelMex office. And they look just like the ones in the states, from the outside. It’s once you try to use them that you realize you’re not in Kansas anymore.

One big problem is that only a miniscule portion of businesses advertises in them. It’s way beyond the means of most small businesses here. So you’re less likely to find a good price even if you manage to find the item or service in question.

If you do find a place in there, don’t expect their business hours to be noted, that’s rare indeed. Sometimes even the address will be lacking, you’ll need to call and ask for it. Good luck if you don’t speak Spanish!

The rationale behind the categories used in the Mexican Yellow Pages is obscure, nay mysterious, in the extreme. One of my favorites is the long series beginning with the designation “Artículos” (things). You have things for beauty, things for photography, things for the home, things for engineering and architecture, things for publicity and promotion, religious and church things, things for industrial cleaning and maintenance, and things for regular cleaning. Some, but not nearly enough, of these are cross-indexed to the more useful word (i.e. the non-thing word). Another great category is “Materiales,” which encompasses teaching materials, electric materials, first aid materials, materials for laboratories, schools, and industries (huh?), materials for hospitals and clinics, iron materials, construction materials, decorating materials, packing materials, raw materials, raw materials for the food industry, and raw materials for the rubber industry. Oh and, not wishing to belabor the subject, but I can’t neglect to mention the eminently helpful “Tiendas” (stores) category.

The White Pages are not much better. An amazing number of really large concerns are nowhere to be found in them. (I remember spending half a day once trying to locate the number of the beauty salon at Liverpool, a huge upscale department store in Merida. The MG finally found it by calling directory assistance). And just FORGET trying to find the number of a government office or anything like that.

Lots of big places, like banks, have websites now. Beautifully designed, great graphics, a button to click for all the bank’s branch locations which you’re looking for – and no locations listed behind the link. Lots of style. No links.

You can try finding stuff through the newspaper classifieds too, but these have their own special annoyance: They almost never specify a price in the ad. People are very coy about stating prices in Mexico. So, you have to call in order to find out if you’re even interested in the item.

The real information network in Mexico is the person-to-person one, as it has always been. This involves asking anyone you can corner where to find the desired item or service, following up on their suggestion, and repeating the process (also known as the wild goose chase) until you either find what you need or decide you really didn’t need it after all.

Feeding the little buggers south of the border has proven to be quite a hassle, which is presently in abeyance only due to our proximity to el otro lado. It’s not that you can’t get cat food here, it’s that you can’t get DECENT cat food. Well, here’s the story.

We have three cats, two about age 6 and one who’s over 10. So, they were already old – and set in their little ways – when we moved to Mexico. I had started buying so-called premium brands of cat food some years ago after reading scary things about the cheaper stuff, and during the last years of the late, great, much-mourned Lolita, who had a delicate digestion. So these current cats had long been dining off one of those pricey brands from Petco, something with “nature” in the name if I remember (and YES!! One of the very brands that poisoned all those cats about a year ago, thank GOD we moved when we did), along with a brand of dry food called Azmira which I got at the Holistic Animal place in Tucson. They all seemed to do fine on this.

Fast forward to Yucatan. We’d brought a couple months’ supply (one of the more brilliant ideas I ever had) because even in my boundless ignorance at the time, I had a wee suspicion that I wouldn’t want to be hunting for CAT FOOD in a strange land while rehabilitating a house and trying to figure out how to feed us.

The cans ran out first, and that was simple, we just went back to Friskies. You can get it in Walmart and its clones, and large supermarkets like Soriana and Comercial Mexicana. Whiskas is equally available, but our cats won’t eat a lot of their flavors, so I gave up on that. So, we had Friskies. It’s about 60 cents US a can as of this writing.

Then we ran out of the dry food, and that turned into a BEEG problem. We got some Whiskas dry (known as croquetas in Spanish), which is available everywhere I’ve been in Mexico. You can get it in bags or boxes in grocery stores, and many little tienditas have a giant bag on hand and will sell you the stuff by weight.

Well, the cats liked that fine too, but I noticed that after about three weeks they were getting really jumpy, and their coats turned dull, and I could see that this just wasn’t going to work. Cheap-food carbo OD. So the search was on for some better quality dry cat food. Which we finally located, after numerous trials and tribulations which I haven’t the strength to relate here, in a – get this – pet store in the Gran Plaza shopping mall in Mérida. Eukanuba. At 400 pesos or $40 US smackers for a teensy 8-pound bag. Yep. We love our kitties, yes we do!!

The good news is that it worked, their shiny coats returned and their nervousness abated. The only real downside was that sinking feeling I got every time I had to shell out 40 bucks for another bag.

Eukanuba also makes dog food, by the way.

Then we moved to central Mexico, taking a couple of bags of Eukanuba along, of course. By the time those ran out, we managed to locate a source, not exactly local, in a veterinary clinic about 30 minutes away. Crisis averted once again.

Along about that time, feeling royally sick and tired of the whole cat food business, I started researching on the net how I might feed them real food, so that I’d actually know what I was giving them. Well, THAT turned out to be quite a Pandora’s box, and with disappointing results to boot. I did learn a lot. Cats, it seems, are what they call “obligate carnivores” which means they need meat, pretty much exclusively. Unlike dogs, who can thrive on a more varied diet. It’s something to do with the length of their digestive tracts. Cats also need a substance called taurine, which is added to commercial cat foods. Not all meats contain taurine for some reason. Although liver supposedly has some, and heart has the most of all (yum, yum!). Maybe some of the taurine comes from crunching on little bones in the wild; according to one source you can roast egg shells and grind them up and put them in your homemade cat food to provide taurine.

Then, as if all this weren’t enough, there’s the hotly debated issue of cooked vs. raw meat. And what kinds of meat. And on, and on, and on.

I decided to experiment, and at least supplement their diet with some “real food.” Up to then it hadn’t occurred to me that the cats themselves might not be in favor of any more dietary changes. At least a variety of meats was available where we were living. We even had a friend who owned a butcher shop! I tried quite a few things. The two younger cats LOVED raw liver, couldn’t get enough of it, but every time we gave it to them one of them would barf it, in the middle of the night, all over our down comforter. Which we would then have to wash. Which was not good for it. All of them were lukewarm on ground beef, raw or cooked. The tabby adored raw chicken; and they all deigned to eat cooked chicken. The older cat would eat only cooked chicken, and would have nothing to do with any of the other stuff. They unanimously hated the heart, raw or cooked, taurine-packed though it supposedly was. I got stuck with a kilo of the stuff. WE certainly weren’t going to eat it.

As you can see, there’s no happy ending to this story. A few months after the Failed Real Food Experiments, we took a bunch of paintings up to Arizona, and bought a couple 25-lb bags of Azmira in Tucson. 25 pounds!!! For only 25 dollars!! We couldn’t believe how incredibly, miraculously cheap that seemed. And soon thereafter, we moved to Sonora, which is only a few hours away from Tucson. If we ever move back to central Mexico, I’m not sure what we’ll do. I guess if we could afford to do that, we’d also be able to afford Eukanuba. Or Azmira via FedEx.

Meanwhile, if we should foolishly acquire any new cats, we’d be well advised to raise them from the start on real food (with egg shells, I guess, or I think you can buy taurine supplements, which would certainly be cheaper to FedEx than 25-lb bags of Azmira).

Well, I don’t know how secret this actually is, but it sure got by me until a recent evening when I was perusing the details of our latest, appallingly expensive, phone bill from TelMex. At first I assumed the cause was simply a large number of long-distance calls still coming in from when we were buying our house. But no, there was more. On the bill I noticed a section which shows the local numbers called, along with the number of calls made to each one. And one of these numbers, which had an oddly familiar look to it, showed 136 calls! It turned out to be the number the computer called for our dial-up internet access (recently changed to a low-speed modem connection when TelMex apparently got rid of all dial-up).

Feeling quite the Sherlock Holmes, I calculated that we had 136 local calls to dial up the computer in that month, plus 58 calls in all other categories (local, Mexican long distance, international long distance, to cell phones, and to 800 numbers), for a total of 194 calls.

Now, here’s the point I hadn’t quite understood before (and I bet plenty of other people don’t either). You supposedly get 100 calls included in your monthly service fee. But these are not “free local calls” like in the states (where the number of local calls is generally unlimited and actually IS included in the basic service fee). No, no, no. These TelMex “calls included in the monthly rent,” are not free, or indeed actually “included,” at all – in fact EVERY FREAKING CALL is billed separately according to the number of minutes talked and whether it was made at peak or non-peak times. (Non-peak is like between 3:45 and 4 a.m. or something – okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little. Forgive me.) What is actually happening, people, is that there is a SURCHARGE for any calls exceeding the 100-call limit. And that surcharge is 1.48, one peso and 48 centavos each, which is say 14-15 cents US. Which added up, on this particular bill, to $139.12 pesos, or ~$13 US.

I’m just wondering now how it’s going to work with this new modem we have which is connected all the time. How are they going to make up these revenues they’re losing by getting rid of dial-up? I’m sure they’ve got something in mind.

Can you get kitty litter in Mexico? This is a question I worried about a lot before we moved here.

The good news is that kitty litter is fairly easily to find in Mexico, at least in towns of any decent size. The best place to get it is at Sams Club or Costco, where it comes in plastic bins of 15.9 kg (30-some pounds). Cost is ~$11. You can also get smaller quantities in some of the larger grocery stores, although not at such favorable prices, and it may not be the scoopable variety (rendered as agglutinante in Spanish).

Our litter box developed a leak after we got here, and that item was not so easy to find. However, as any plastic box will do, it was no real biggie. But if you hanker for one of those models with the rim on, or a little dome on top, you’ll probably just have to get over it, unless you can find a fancy pet store in a mall somewhere (The Gran Plaza in Merida, Yucatan had one).

Before I knew for sure that we could buy the stuff in Mexico, I did a bit of research on substitutes. My findings were not extensive, but I’ll share them for what it’s worth. All of these solutions, of course, would depend upon whether the cats in question are willing to use them.

• Shredded newspapers. This would be expensive in Mexico, with the daily paper selling at ~70 cents and Sunday editions ~$1.

• Beach sand. This was my choice back when we were moving to a beach town. The drawback being that beach sand is likely to contain sand fleas, which you wouldn’t want in the house or on the cats. Then I found some info on the internet from some folks who lived on a sailboat with their cat, who said that if you get WET sand and then dry it in the sun, it will be flea-free. They added that you could bake sand in the oven to kill the fleas, but that option seemed a little unappetizing to me. I’d want a special, dedicated oven just for the sand, which would be too expensive.

• In a pinch, I guess there’s plain old dirt, or non-beach sand, whatever’s available. It might not be the Ritz, but it’s better than having them use your shoes.

One house we rented had an interior patio which was wonderful because the cats could be outdoors and still protected at the same time. There was a large planter filled with dirt out there, where a previous occupant had been growing some green beans, and which one of our cats (the piggy one) appropriated as her own personal kitty box. So something like that might be another option.

That’s it! All the other suggestions I saw (cedar chips, etc.) would be WAY harder to find than kitty litter in Mexico. If you’re taking cats to Mexico, adult cats who are already set in their ways, it’s best not to get too far from civilization where supplies for them can be found.

Mexico abounds with opportunities for the newly-arrived gringo to experience culture shock, but in all my reading I never found much mention of the thing that got to me the most when we first arrived — Total Shopping Withdrawal.

Yes folks, I was mightily shocked (dismayed too!) to realize what a TOTAL CONSUMER CULTURE CREATURE I really was. I’d always thought of myself and the MG as decidedly unmaterialistic, what with driving old cars, eschewing furniture, wearing clothes until they fell off our backs, etc. I guess you could call us cheap, be it from sour grapes, making a virtue of a necessity, or whatever. In any case, we’ve definitely never been what you’d call big spenders.

So imagine my surprise at suffering — yes suffering! Total Shopping Withdrawal soon after arriving in Mexico. Me! Who always said I “hated shopping.” Who believed that sincerely.

Mexico can be a mirror. Sometimes it lets you see yourself. Some mirrors (like those department store ones when you’re trying on bathing suits) are not very flattering.

See, when you live north of the Rio Grande, shopping is akin to breathing – you don’t even notice you’re doing it, it’s an autonomic function. It isn’t a part of your reality, it IS reality. The sheer variety of goods available for purchase everywhere you look induces a kind of permanent and self-perpetuating trance state in the citizenry, who do their bit to hold up the whole system up by duly working, working, working, and buying, buying, buying. Nobody seems to question this state of affairs. It just is. And I’m here to tell you, it’s surprisingly painful when it suddenly isn’t.

I simply never realized how much entertainment value I used to derive from my most complained-about domestic chore, the food shopping. Even though I could do it in my sleep, indeed often did it semi-comatose after 12-hour night shifts, there was always the diversion of choosing (oooh, should I buy slices or dices, oil- or water-packed, red ones or green ones, this brand or that?). All the while seduced into a familiar daze by the lights and the colors of aisles of endless packages all clamoring for my attention, never mind that most of that stuff I don’t even consider food.

In addition to this weekly entertainment (which I of course didn’t appreciate at the time) there was the soothing background awareness that almost any annoyance, inconvenience, or whim that might arise could be instantly resolved by dashing to a store — at any hour of the day or night — and purchasing something, and I was moreover in the habit of doing so.

Overnight, these familiar comforts vanished. Not only that, but countless items I’d heretofore believed indispensable to my existence, were suddenly unavailable at any price. They had simply dropped off the screen, out of the picture — poof! No more prosciutto, no more volumizing shampoo for fine hair, no more homeopathic-compatible toothpaste, no more rayon batik fabrics, no more nada.

The whole experience has forced me to conclude that the so-called consumer lifestyle, to which we are all so well trained from birth, is a form of addiction, and like any addiction, leaving it behind (even willingly) is painful.

So how does one cope? Two things spring to mind, one active, one passive.

Wish lists can be helpful. Just write it all down for the next time you go to the big city or to the states. You can make categories, prioritize, organize according to types of stores for more efficient shopping — there’s no end to the fun you can have playing with your lists of consumer cravings. You’ll find out how much you really need it when finally in the store and faced with the prospect of parting with actual cash for it. Some items will disappear without a trace. Others you’ll realize you really don’t want to live without. Priorities while wishing can differ noticeably from priorities while paying.

And then there’s good old Time, the passive approach. You eventually adapt and change. You find many of those “needs” diminishing, and look back in wonder on what you thought so necessary a few short months ago. “Stuff” becomes less important. The itch to buy something — anything — as a knee-jerk reaction to the slightest fleeting emotion, recedes. On the other hand, you learn what is really important to you and figure out the least expensive and burdensome way to get it. I’ve come to see, on the far side of fifty, that my fond fantasy of a life of Zen simplicity ain’t gonna happen: I’ve been too well-trained. But my buying habits have become more conscious, and more limited. Getting stuff in Mexico is usually such a hassle that consumption for its own sake finally loses its appeal. Life becomes simpler, willy-nilly.

We were recently away for two days, shopping in the Big City for yet MORE construction materials for the house, and of course groceries. We got someone to feed the cats so we could spend the night, because we’ve never been able to get it all done in one day (what with the three-hour drive each way and the exigencies of shopping here).

Shopping in Mexico is never a breeze. Shopping in a city you don’t know well only adds to the fun. Finding things here calls to mind phrases like “needle in a haystack,” and “pulling teeth.”

The three main impediments to shopping bliss in Mexico are:

• There just isn’t as much stuff to buy. If you remember the 1950s in the states, it’s pretty similar to what shopping is like in Mexico today. It brings to life those statistics you’re always reading about the US, with only 5% of the world population, consuming some humongous percentage of the goods.

• Finding out who’s got what to sell can take on Kafkaesque overtones. Logic is lacking. The Yellow Pages, looking so innocently helpful like the ones back where you came from, are next to useless (more on this another time).

• Finally, finding the stores themselves in an unfamiliar city is a job in itself. Maps can help, but not that much where street signs and numbers are frequently absent.

We were in search of, among other things, eight-inch stovepipe for this rocket heater we’re planning to build. Only six-inch is common here, we learned. We finally located a place that fabricates the stuff, but it was closed for some obscure reason (it was Monday). They did open the following day, but we found the prices too steep. We reluctantly resigned ourselves to using six-inch pipe, reluctantly because it will require us to modify the design in the book, a complication we could well live without. That finally settled, we had to find the six-inch pipe, which all the hardware stores claimed to stock normally but seemed to be out of at the moment. We finally found it at Ace, of all places. Of course, they didn’t have the elbows — that would have been asking too much — but we were able to find those in a little hardware store enroute back home.

Things we found: Joint compound, electrical stuff, plumbing stuff, metal for the windows and doors, a cool old lamp for somewhere, the stove pipe, cat food, wine in a box, Kleenex, two wilted red-leaf lettuces (boo), soap, tomatoes in a box, mushrooms in a box, car parts, a can of air.

Things we couldn’t find: A propane heater (too late in the season, they’re already selling fans, and anyway we probably wouldn’t have indulged due to shock at the cost of all the other stuff), double deadbolt door locks, two medicines I needed, but fortunately not for another month and a half (never leave anything important to the last minute), farfalle.

Things we found but didn’t buy: A 2008 calendar, they had some at Sanborn’s but the ~$17 price tag dampened my desire to know what day it is; kitty litter (we still have some although I like to stock up on this); jamon serrano (too extravagant).

Things we blew off altogether : A visit to a tienda naturista for some herbal remedies.

Semi-impulse purchase: A gallon of raw honey for only ~$18 in a hamlet on the way home.

We discovered a terrific hotel, basic but super-clean and with courtyard parking (which we needed due to all the stuff in/on the truck by that time), for ~$20. It had hottish water but no towels. Someone had painted a charming abstract design on the wall over the bed, and there was some nice tile trim outside. There was a TV for the MG, and lighting bright enough to read by for me. Door lock was of the wobbly push-button variety. TIP: Bring your own towel and one of those safety lock gizmos if you frequent cheap hotels. Toilet paper too, although this place had an industrial-sized roll. There were two taco stands within a block, an Oxxo for beer, and a hotel with breakfast buffet two blocks away. What more could a gringa on a string ask?