shoestring gringa

If you’re building or renovating a house in Mexico and are at the stage of choosing the plumbing fixtures, here’s a word of advice:  always opt for the simplest item available.   Things like weird, exotic sinks will cause installation nightmares (unless you’re doing it yourself, and even then if you need any special parts).  And fancy mixing faucets may not work at all.  Keep in mind that deluxe fixtures are designed to work with deluxe infrastructure, i.e. levels of water pressure found in Canada and the U.S., not in Mexico.  Buy one of these babies and now you have to add a water pump.  Which won’t work when the electricity fails.  I’m all too familiar with the creative frenzy that can overcome a person when working on a house — but it really is best to keep a lid on it.   One’s true worth as a person does not hinge on cutting-edge bathroom faucets.

Mixer-type faucets may also be problematic when combined with on-demand water heaters which work off sensing water pressure.  This winter, our shower water kept getting colder and colder for no apparent reason, until finally the MexiGringo discovered that somehow the point that triggers the heater had moved in the faucet, so now we have to move the faucet toward the off position until it kicks in.  It was a miserable, shivery few weeks before he figured this out; at first we were thinking we had bought too small of a heater for the winter temperatures.  By the way, the on-demand water heater is a wondrous thing which has reduced our LP gas expenditures enormously, a truly worthwhile investment.

Please note I’m not advocating buying the cheapest thing (necessarily) — quality and durability are always worth paying for.  I’m saying get the simplest thing, the most functional item with the fewest moving/breakable parts, something which will be easy — or at least possible — to replace down the line.

And while we’re in the bathroom here,  if you’re shopping for sinks and toilets, consider the mineral content of the local water when contemplating the beautiful jewel-toned specimens available.  If there’s a lot of  lime in the water, you’ll become an eternal slave to that colorful toilet, on your knees scrubbing away with a pumice stone.  I actually learned this unhappy lesson back in Arizona, but it’s equally applicable here:  we never give those colored toilets a second glance.

There are plenty of trouble-free ways to beautify kitchens and bathrooms in Mexico — like tile for example.  But when it comes to the faucets and fixtures, keeping it simple is the way to go.

There are some cultural differences it’s important to keep in mind when hiring people to work for you in Mexico.  The main one is that Mexicans LOATHE talking about money.  If you don’t believe me, take a look at the classified section of any Mexican newspaper and count the number of for-sale ads that actually state a price.  Close to zero, that’s how many.  It’s very annoying to the gringo way of thinking — you have to make a call to find out if you’re even interested.  In Mexico, however, contact with one’s fellows is clearly valued way more than efficiency.

You’ll find this same attitude when hiring people to perform services for you, from building a house to catering a party.  What typically happens is something like this:  You describe the project in detail, then ask what the person would charge for it.  Instead of naming a price, they’ll tell you something like, “Oh, don’t worry about it, it won’t be much.”

If you allow yourself to be put off by this evasion out of a misguided sense of politeness, lack of assertiveness, fear of making a cultural misstep, or any other reason, I guarantee you will regret it.   If it’s a one-shot deal, like a car repair, you can write it off to experience, but failing to establish a price on larger projects can prove extremely costly both financially and emotionally.  ALWAYS AGREE ON A PRICE FIRST!

In hiring people for construction work, there are two approaches to payment: contract or wage.  Some workers prefer one or the other, others are flexible.  Under the contract plan, the maestro bids a price for the completed job.  Some amount of the total will be required up front to get the job going, and the rest at determined intervals.  An advantage to this is the work may be completed quickly, so the contractor can move on to the next job.  On the other hand, if the contractor is a flake, you may never see him again, or the job could take forever.   Another disadvantage is that the work might be hurried or slipshod, or materials may be skimped on if the bid was unrealistically low.  Also, you can’t make any significant changes without renegotiating the price.  Consider too that your helpful/supervising presence is less likely to be welcomed by a maestro racing to finish the project than one being paid a fixed wage.  If you want to be closely involved with the job and be able to make creative decisions as you go along, the wage basis is probably preferable.  A wage arrangement is likely to take longer than a contract, but you’re more likely to get exactly what you want.

Overall, contract arrangements are probably riskier, especially for larger jobs.  Always try to find people with excellent personal recommendations from someone you trust.  In addition, do not hesitate to fire anyone whose work is not satisfactory; you can always find someone will do the job properly.

Obviously there are situations where quoting an exact price will not be possible (as in car repairs where the extent of the problem is not known), in which case you should ask for an estimate including the worst-case price.

If a person absolutely will not name a price for you, walk away.  Even if they’re the greatest cook/mechanic/architect/friend of yours in all of Mexico, even if it took you weeks of searching to find them.  There’s always somebody else, and you’ll avoid a world of heartache, misunderstandings, and financial losses by taking the time to find them.

When we were rebuilding this house last year (and freezing our butts off in a dismal, damp-walled rental), a big preoccupation was how to heat the place in the winter.   After some research, we decided to build a rocket stove in the living room and a corner fireplace in one of the bedrooms.  Now we’re living with these decisions, and the results are decidedly mixed.

The Rocket Stove

I found out about this concept looking around on the internet, and being a big fan of all things innovative and sustainable, promoted it enthusiastically to the Mexigringo, who I must say looked on it with a rather jaundiced eye from the first.  But I persisted.  It promised one-third the fuel consumption of a conventional wood-stove, clean and thorough wood consumption, a warm, comfy, and architecturally appealing adobe bench to read and snooze on, plus, cheap and easy assembly!  What more could you ask?

It really did seem like a great solution.  We wanted something efficient because of our large space and high ceilings.  Wood is available but not plentiful here, so the promise of low fuel consumption appealed.  The back of the how-to-do-it book asserted that it could be thrown together in a weekend by anyone with minimal building experience.  And, we already had a huge pile of adobe construction rubble on site which could be recycled into the bench.

So we built it and now it’s winter and we’re using it.  And have somewhat sadly concluded that doing this in Mexico was way more trouble than it was worth.

For starters, the materials, so easily obtainable and often free in the states, ranged from difficult to impossible to find here and involved literally weeks of searching hither and yon.  They were also expensive.  Nothing goes to waste in Mexico:  An old barrel is not a throwaway item but a valuable asset to be parted with only in exchange for cash.  The only freebies were the dirt and sand, which are plentiful locally.  There were no “cheapies.”

The stove took us WAY longer than a weekend to build, more like three weeks all told, and that’s not counting the bench, which we finished months later.  The book’s breezy assertion that any idiot could do this left us feeling like, well, lower than idiots.  In practice, the how-to instructions often proved vague, contradictory or open to various interpretations, leading to much lost time and interpersonal strain among the construction crew.   At some point we realized that no information was given on how to finish the surface of the bench — that was in another book.  One of our cats decided the unfinished bench was a giant kitty box, and we had to cover it over with tarps and weights.  It was not an easy journey, any of it.

Upon using the stove, it appears to be mostly suitable for colder climates than ours.  It’s meant to be fired up on a daily basis, which warms the adobe bench, which then radiates a steady warmth.  So far this year (which does seem unusually mild) we’ve yet to use it two days running, as we’ve been having chilly days alternating with warm days.  So we haven’t been able to benefit from heated bench effect.

Lastly, the stove is temperamental (as the book more than adequately warns).  It has lots of personality, and a bit of a personality disorder — if not given abundant attention, it tends to pout and smoke.   If YOU are temperamental too, then this is perhaps not the best stove for you.  On the other hand, if you’re what they call process-oriented — but really REALLY process-oriented — it may be just the thing.

To the stove’s credit, it does take off the chill in a hurry once we light it up.  This in a 12 x 30 ft. room with 14 ft.  ceilings and tons of windows.  Who knows what wonders it might perform in a smaller space?

To sum up, if we had it to do over again, we wouldn’t, not here anyway.  But if I ever found myself mysteriously transplanted to the back woods of Oregon, I’d totally try it again, hopefully with the help of lots of knowledgeable mountain-man types.  Ironically, these heating stoves are a spinoff of a successful cooking stove developed for use in Third World countries with wood depletion problems.   The heater version, however, appears more doable back in The Land of the Affluent.

If you’re interested in learning more about rocket stoves, see the book Rocket Mass Heaters by Ianto Evans and Leslie Jackson, or their website here.

And stay tuned for part 2 of this tale, which has a happier ending…

Before I get off the subject for good (when?? please!! you’re probably saying), I’ll just share one last laundry experience in the hopes it might save someone else from a similar pointless exercise.

A few weeks ago we were having a lot of rainy weather here, and what with our limited selection of clothes, I worried a lot about getting it to dry by the time we would need it again.

And then I remembered what my mother so un-fondly recalls doing when we lived in England in the early 1950s, which was to retrieve the frozen-stiff garments from the clothesline and iron them dry.

Brilliant, I thought, I’ll just do that! The old style! How simple, how elegant! (How labor-intensive, but oh well.)

How mistaken.

Oh, it still works with some things, pure cotton jeans are fine. But in most clothes nowadays, even the clothes of a natural-fiber freak like me, there lurks some small percentage of synthetic content which does NOT take well to being steamed dry with a hot iron. No, these fabrics will melt, rather than dry, under a hot-iron assault.

If you think about it, it wasn’t so long ago, maybe 100 years, that people boiled their dirty linens. That was before my time, but I can remember the days when Clorox was routinely used; everything white (read cotton) got bleached. And then they had bluing to counteract the yellowing effects of the bleach. I suppose all socks must have been wool back then. (A pair of wool socks costs at least $12 now, and you have to buy them at a backpacking store — when did that happen?) But I digress. In sum, take heed: old-style laundering practices can be hazardous to present-day fabrics.

So, it was back to the drawing board, or more accurately, to the clothesline, this time one strung up indoors for those rainy-day Saturdays.

So what’s the best way to learn Spanish? Some words of advice from one who learned it the worst way.

I learned, or rather studied Spanish, in college. I was so interested in this at the time that I majored in Latin American Studies so I could take as many Spanish courses as possible and fit in some cultural studies as well.

The Spanish department at my school was at that time hopelessly antiquated and taught basically grammar, supplemented with a little audio work in the language lab. Although the graduate student teaching assistants were mostly native speakers, English was the primary means of communication in the classroom. I quickly sensed I was getting nowhere fast with speaking and understanding, even though I was making all A’s.

Fortunately, I was really determined. I accepted an offer of free tutoring from a similarly obsessed Spanish major, and we would meet weekly to converse, dictionaries in hand and a strict “no-English” rule in force. Together we attended every Spanish film or cultural event that passed through the Bay Area. We ate in Mexican and Spanish restaurants. We perused exhibits of Hispanic art. We listened to South American charango music and saw flamenco performances. We made flash cards and drilled verbs. We spent hours in the language lab listening to historical recorded speeches by Fidel Castro, Lazaro Cardenas, and others. And we did eventually manage to speak and understand Spanish. But it was unnecessarily torturous (apart from the cultural stuff, which we loved) and I am convinced that the initial grammatical approach handicapped me to this day, particularly with regard to comprehension. I can speak Spanish quite well, but I still miss a lot of what others are saying, especially under suboptimal conditions, such as the presence of lots of background noise (a given in Mexico), or having more than one person talking at a time (like at parties).

Towards the end of my undergraduate career, I decided to audit a French class. Same school, even the same building probably. But the French department was light years ahead of the Spanish department, even though their basic text was equally crappy and overpriced. Their secret? They allowed only French spoken in the classroom. Madame, the teacher, spoke exclusively French, and she spoke plenty of it, keeping up a constant patter throughout the class hour. If you, the student, wished to ask leave to go to the toilet, or inquire when the next quiz was going to be, you had to do it in French. It was amazingly effective, miraculous, really. I learned more French in those 10 weeks than I’d done in two years of Spanish, and this despite the fact that I almost never had time to do the homework. Although I never pursued it that much and therefore lack vocabulary, I can follow a French movie almost as well as a Spanish one, and once after spending three weeks in Paris I found I was understanding maybe 75% of what I heard. I remain deeply impressed by the difference in these two learning experiences.

The moral: I would humbly recommend that you seek out what is called the “natural approach” in your language studies, and avoid old-fashioned grammar like the plague. If going to live classes, insist upon ones where only Spanish is spoken. If using audio or video material, look for similar qualities. You’ll gain a far better grasp of the language, a whole lot faster, and it’ll be more fun, too.

I was remembering a cookbook writer, Huntley Dent, the other morning as I combed the town for enough food for a couple days’ worth of dinners. Huntley Dent’s book is entitled Feast of Santa Fe: Cooking of the American Southwest, and a wonderful book it is (tragically lost to me now, with so many of its brethren, in the Great Pre-Move Book Unloading). A particularly memorable part is where he discusses some dishes traditionally eaten in the days preceding Christmas in tones of truly inspired poetry and longing for their simple goodness, their rustic wholesomeness, their utter foreignness to anything we eat today, in Santa Fe or out of it. “I WANT THAT FOOD,” I remember him writing, and he made me want it too. Of course I already wanted it, which is why I’d bought the book — but you know what I mean. (Actually I once lived in New Mexico, but that’s another story.)

My point here is that the sudden memory of this book caused me to snort out loud at my simple-life fantasies of yore, realizing that the Sonoran village where we now live is probably very similar to Santa Fe of 100 years ago. The chief difference being Sonora has beef and Santa Fe had pork.

A discerning reader glancing over these 10 feasts of Christmas as I think they were called, would quickly note that they all consisted of the same three or four ingredients, done up in slightly differing ways. There was pork, beans, flour tortillas, red chile, and I think green chile, although frankly he may have been stretching it there because there wouldn’t be any green chile by December, unless people canned it back then. Which I suppose is possible. It makes for romantic reading, all right — but don’t try it at home. Unless you’re forced to. Simplicity is all very well and something I aspire to, but I start getting health problems if I can’t eat some vegetables on a regular basis.

Our current location is actually paradise compared to the neighboring town where we spent the summer. There, you could buy beef one day a week, IF you arrived early enough. Sleep till 8 and you’d miss out. There was no pork, fish, chicken, lamb, or goat available at any time, ever. Vegetable selection was exceedingly limited and miserable in quality. Nobody in town sold butter. Here at least, we can get butter, a few more vegetables including broccoli, and beef/pork/chicken/fish most days of the week, but it still drives me crazy.

Do let me clarify that this situation is NOT typical of Mexico as a whole, far from it. The entire southern half of Mexico is blessed with colorful, overflowing central markets in most towns and a wealth of regional cuisines. The ranch country to the north, however, has far more austere traditions in food. If you’re attached to your eating habits, be sure to check out the local food shopping before settling on an area.

As my predilection is for a more or less Mediterranean-type diet, the lack of vegetables presents a real problem. I can stock up on olive oil, decent parmesan, and vino in the city (along with Friskies and kitty litter), and I can make my own bread. But the only real solution I can see for the vegetables is to learn to grow them myself. Stay tuned.

Tropical or temperate climate? This was a biggie for me. I had a lingering suspicion I might not thrive in Yucatan, having once spent a summer in Ft. Lauderdale, which has a similar climate, and boy, was I right.

Some people just love the tropics — (mad dogs and Englishmen, and quite a few Canadians) but if you have never spent the hot season in these precincts, check it out before making any big commitments. I was utterly miserable, having always lived in pleasant Mediterranean climes like California, or the dry desert Southwest. I found the humidity smothering and oppressive. I couldn’t figure out what the hell to wear, because having anything at all next to my flesh was torture. The local women went blithely about bareheaded, in miniskirts and skimpy tops, a style which I declined to emulate because (a) that kind of exposure isn’t too flattering on me, and (b) my skin would have cooked to a crisp. Wearing a bra was unthinkable. I finally devised an acceptable outfit for the street, consisting of a linen-y blouse with pockets which hid the bralessness, a short denim skirt, and a large-brimmed straw crownless hat whose open top allowed the steam to exit off the top of my head while providing shade for my face. So much for fitting in with the locals. I was able to walk to the market and back in this getup, but once home would have to rip it from my body in desperation and run to stand under a cold shower for ten minutes. Around the house I wore loose rayon tank tops and mini-pareos, and hoped nobody would come to the door.

To be fair, many big old houses in Yucatan stay fresh and cool in summer, but our casita, with its asbestos roof, was not among them, despite the high ceilings and sea breezes. Some people resort to air conditioning, at least in one room, to cope with the hot season. Unfortunately I am physically and philosophically allergic to air conditioning. And electricity in Mexico is shockingly expensive.

Winter was marginally better, but to tell the truth I found that pretty unpleasant as well. The humidity was such that one felt chilled at 65F. A malign wet wind blew, ushering in respiratory complaints and flus far nastier than any I’d experienced in drier climates. When it was cool, and the sun was out, it was creepily possible to feel both hot and cold at the same time, a sensation I found singularly disagreeable. No, I did not adapt well to the tropics. We ended up moving.

If, like me, you prefer a temperate clime, you have lots of choice, as the whole north of Mexico qualifies, as well as the vast high central plateau. The climate in many of these places is rightly described as “eternal springtime.” The main thing to be aware of in these areas is that, even if it’s eternally spring outside, the masonry houses can be cold at some times of year, so don’t give all your warm clothes to Goodwill before leaving. And bring that down blankie, and the flannel sheets, and all the rest of it. You can always get rid of it later. But you can’t dash out to Target and buy a new one if you need it.

Method 1, the best way to decide where to go: Already be in love with a place you’ve vacationed in a hundred times, have a bunch of friends there and know your way around, line up a long term rental while on vacation, and go live there and check it out for at least six months. If you’re happy with it, you can start scouting for something to buy.

Method 2, the next best way: If you haven’t any specific place in mind, think generally what your requirements and desires would be. City or country? Beach or inland? Altitude or sea level? Tropical or temperate climate? Sophisticated or rustic? Easy or difficult of access? Many or few fellow gringos? (More will follow on these topics in separate posts.) Get some travel guides, visit the library, go to the bookstore, go online, and narrow it down to several likely possibilities. Then take a leave of absence, close up the house, and go visit them all, staying at least a month in each place, always of course remaining open to unexpected discoveries — it’s Mexico, after all.

Method 3a or 3b, the least desirable ways: Go because you’ve got some relatives there, and they can help you get started, without regard to any of the considerations named in paragraph 2. Or, go somewhere because it’s easy to get back from there to your business interests or your aging parents in the states, without regard to any of the considerations in paragraph 2.

We’ve lived in four different places in Mexico, having used the cretinous and ill-advised methods 3 twice and method 2 but once, and I cannot praise numbers 1 and 2 highly enough in the light of our experiences. No matter how expensive or impossible it seems to get away and do this much-needed research beforehand, trust me, it is going to be 1000 times more expensive, not to mention insanely stressful, to do it on the spot, with all of your worldly goods, dogs, cats, children, photo collection, or whatever, in tow. Do your homework! You’ve been warned.

Keep in mind:

Rental properties vary from slightly difficult to impossible to find in Mexico, depending on where you are. Even HOTELS can be difficult to find, more so if you have a few cats with you, say, or if you’re towing a trailer with all your crapola in it and need a safe place to park it while you sleep.

Mistakes tend to be costlier than in the states. Mexicans just don’t move around much and things are set up for the long term. We paid two $60 penalties for moving our internet service before they got rid of the obligatory contract business recently. You might have to wait weeks for phone or internet service to be installed, while your whole life goes on hold. And setting up house in a new place can take two people a good month to accomplish, full-time, without doing anything else.

Of course, if you have oodles of money (and an overdeveloped sense of adventure) then preparation doesn’t matter so much, but if you are moving “on a shoestring,” my words of wisdom for the day are: plan, plan, and plan some more. Know (something — anything — as much as you possibly can!) before you go!