Life Style Refugee - The Ajijic Blog

Is it? It must be, because I’m in an odd resort in the wild and wooly hills of West Virginia. I just left a different odd resort, also nestled in the hollows of moonshine country, famous for golf and artists. So, I needn’t say any more about that. My stepson, the oldest of the valu-pak of one husband and four children that I married 10 years ago, looked at me from barely focused bloodshot eyes yesterday morning and said, “Jesus. You must really love the mountains.”

I actually do. Greener, bluer and more beautifully Allegheny would be hard to imagine, and having traveled this far for our long vacation, I appreciate the contrast to my own beloved Lake Chapala.
The place where we are presently hanging our hats (and bathing suits) is more American than apple pie, with a bandstand in the middle of a green lawn, and white clapboard cottages that will soon be draped in red, white and blue bunting for the Fourth of July, yes, really.

Just thought I ‘d say hi.

June 29th, 2009 | Category: Blog Notes | Comments (1)

But I can’t for the life of me get organized to write a post. I’m ricocheting from family to family, all of them mine, all connected by giant, smooth, perfectly paved highways that are traveled by blindingly new cars. I’m completely boggled, as I always am when I return here from my little village.  We have more travelling to do, to West Virginia and here and there, so I don’t have very high hopes for getting my thoughts organized. I’ll be back though! For now, hasta luego.

June 22nd, 2009 | Category: Blog Notes | Comments (4)

The sea obeys and fetters break, and lifeless limbs thou dost restore. While treasures lost are found again, When young or old thine aid implore

Julian of Speyer,The Responsory of St. Anthony

I have to tell you, I’m surprised at the amount of voodoo that hides in the skirts of the Catholic Church. For instance, you know by now–I hope!– that I’m a realtor. Among other bullet points on my resume, along with the bar graphs, the certificates, pie charts, licenses, and marketing outlines, is my casual and unquestioning willingness to bury a plastic statue of St. Joseph, available in bulk to real estate agents, upside down in the back yard of a sluggish listing. This operation was first performed by Catholic sisters trying to raise money for their own real estate investing, and nobody ever seems to question how it got past the…well, it’s none of my business. I’m an Episcopalian. Burying a statue in the dirt just seems a little on the, um, Carribean side. I do it, though! Happy to help! There’s not much I wouldn’t try in this market, let’s face it.

St. Anthony is another one that inspires traditions that seem fairly superstitious, traditions that center around finding things that are lost. St. Anthony of Padua is the patron saint of the village I live in, San Antonio Tlayacapan. Tlayacapan existed long before the Franciscan Monks came strolling through in 1500-and-something. In addition to building churches left and right they claimed the villages that thrived on the shores of Lake Chapala with a minimum of fuss by tacking a Patron Saint on to the name that everybody already knew. The choice of Saint wasn’t completely random, but it didn’t have anything to do with the particular characteristics of the local villages, either, all of which were pretty much the same. They used a calendar to pick the saint, so that there wouldn’t be a scheduling conflict when each village wanted to have a nine day birthday party for their particular patron. Careful planning on the part of those early monks has resulted in one never ending carnival that ripples up and down the lake shore like a stadium wave all year long.

How any of these traditional fiesta celebrations get off the ground is a mystery, but they do. I’ve been planning my trip to Virginia, deluded as usual that I’m going to spend even a minute taking advantage of anything that the Fairfax County parks and recreation system has to offer, so I’ve been spending some time navigating their web page. I’m used to the confetti throwing and maniacal rubber stamping that passes for bureaucracy here. The serene order of Northern Virginia’s systems makes me feel like I’ve been rufied. All those pages of permits and licenses, everything in alphabetical order! Right up until sundown of the night our fiesta was supposed to start, the village square was sleepy and silent. “Isn’t it supposed to start tonight?” we asked each other. “Where are all the rides?” “It’ll start” said the Mexicans. And then, just like that, the fair came to town. Some women ambled in with plastic bags of booze which they unloaded into front yards of the houses that face the plaza. When the Corona tables and chairs showed up, the front yards became nightclubs. From somewhere, peddlers came, setting up tables full of improbable plastic junk and overwrought religious paintings. Believe me, Elvis on black velvet would look like a museum piece next to the martyrs crying tears of fiberoptic blood.  They’re so hideous that the place in your brain where taste resides goes numb. And then my favorite, the rides, which are brought in on a collection of pick up trucks while village folk rustle up enough extension cords to get juice to the Tilt- a-whirl. Then come the mariachis, in sixes and eights, and the jukeboxes that are plugged into the front yards where the booze was dropped off, and before you know it, you’ve got a fiesta. This is all on the first night. Every evening for the nine days that follow, more stuff shows up, more lights, more music, so that by the last night it’s a real carnival. Mass is said three times a day during this brouhaha, and through it all, aspiring bachelorettes bring shoes to the church with prayers for a husband tucked inside, and the old ladies and children pray to San Antonio to find something they lost during the year.

‘Tony, Tony turn around. Something’s lost and must be found!”

Last night, I asked Bruno to turn down the volume on the golf match he was watching as I went to bed. “Oh, really?” he asked, one eyebrow shooting up. ” You’re worried about the golf match keeping you awake?” Of course, at that moment the happily liquored up young thugs at the square lit a match and set fire to the castillo, which is a terrifying fireworks display that features a contraption that looks like a summer camp project involving Elmers glue and wooden matches. It does involve those, but it involves as well cherry bombs and m-80’s and lighter fluid. As this masterpiece of homemade pyrotechnics exploded, it did indeed seem silly to be concerned about being kept awake by the polite murmur of golf announcers.

I fell asleep, as I have every night this week, to the sound of fireworks, live music, drunken neighbors lurching home, dogs barking, school bands parading, children screaming, lovers fighting, church bells pealing and the mechanical soundtrack of the carnival rides.

It’s going to seem awfully quiet at Mom’s house.

June 14th, 2009 | Tags: Ajijic Blog, ajijic realtor, chapala fiestas, san antonio tlayacapan | Category: Blog Notes | Leave a comment

There’s a well known book in Ajijic titled “Behind the Walls,” by Alison Pickering. It has pages of fantastic photographs of houses hiding behind the often shabby looking painted walls that line the sidewalk. A lot of these houses are spectacular. The moment when a visitor discovers a half acre of manicured lawn with a swimming pool and guest house behind a rusty gate that looks like it leads into a cellar is a favorite, ranking up there with coming over the hill from the airport. That’s the moment when the lake is first revealed, and it’s a showstopper.

Many of these houses have terraces expansive enough to double as second living rooms or dining areas. We value our indoor/outdoor living here, and with our climate there’s very seldom a good reason to stay inside. These terraces have become the location of choice for our …er, “Zumba” classes, ( words can’t describe the depth of that trademark violation) which have turned out to be shockingly popular, with many of the girls in possession of a perfect attendance record. Much of the fun is that we see each other every Monday and Wednesday for Happy Hour and dancing. Not Friday. Friday, we lunch.

Last Friday we went to one of our favorite restaurants, Ajijic Tango.   I am not an army brat, but I was raised like one, and nothing causes me to melt down like the the annual summer dispersal of my friends.  Even now that I’m a woman of a certain age, I feel a pang when my close friends start peeling off for the States in this early June ritual, and Friday was the last day for our group until August.  Bruno and I are no exception, and preparations for our trip, a week away, are starting to distract me.

While we were at the table arguing about how many flourless chocolate cakes and mousses we should order, a complicated algorithm which varies depending on who’s sharing, who’s dieting, who has just stopped dieting (that’s a two-fer) I caught myself humming the chorus of a song that once represented all those summer leavetakings. “I’ll be alone each and every night. While you’re away, don’t forget to write” To my delight, as  I love nothing more than a real life  MGM musical moment, the refrain was immediately picked up by the girls at our table.  Our waitress is Carlotta, and she serenely picked up glasses and dropped off desserts as we babbled“Bye bye, so long, farewell,” in damp, hysterical unison. To this day I can hear a jukebox somewhere in Greece  clicking through it’s inventory of Beach Boys and The Everly Brothers to locate “See You in September”, a  1966 song that could reduce me to tears until I was 30 years old.

For those of us that live in the village of San Antonio Tlayacapan, the soundtrack of June includes fireworks, as our annual Patronales, the fiesta held in each village to honor the saints that Spain assingned  to the Indios back in the day, kick off on June 4th. This ushers in 9 days of complete mayhem, including daily parades and and live music in the plaza and, in addition to the thrice daily barrage of firworks to remind the partiers to go to Mass,  astonishing fantasies of small rockets wired together to look like castles and airplanes that are lit up at midnight..  Bruno isn’t talking to me, because once again, I managed to schedule our visit back to Virginia so that we either haven’t left yet or have already returned. Somehow, we are always here for the whole fiesta with it’s lights and noise and drunk cowboys and the dogs having nervous breakdowns.

Tradition holds that the rains will start on the last day of the festival, and that will bring back our cool evenings.  Even the little bit we’ve had already has been enought to make the flowers go crazy, so by the time we get back from The World, the mountains will be green and all the flowers that climb down the walls will be blooming. I haven’t even left yet, and I’m sort of homesick. My maid, however, she who does the laundry around here, feels like our visit is long overdue. She has made it quite clear that we are not to return without new sheets and underwear.

So, the song says, “Will I see you in September, or lose you to a summer love?” Oh, c’mon, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll see you way before September.  I’m just not sure about how the rest of June and July is going to go, because of travel. But I’ll be checking in, so you do the same. Hasta Luego!

June 7th, 2009 | Category: Blog Notes | Leave a comment

I’m not a big fan of conversations about the adorable antics of dogs and cats. In fact, it may be my least favorite topic, second only to Obama’s birth certificate. Unless, of course, the antics are those of my dogs and cats. This week, through some misplaced application of the law of attraction, I have even more dogs than usual shedding and slobbering and performing cute pet tricks for me while I try to sleep.

I have two dogs, Milly and Lupi. We got Lupita in the early days, when her name seemed unique and exotic to me. As a result, when we call for her in the street, the hairdresser, laundry woman and grocery shop owner all stick their heads out to answer. At least one out of three women in Mexico is named Lupita. In addition to my two, this week we have a four legged houseguest,Violet’s English Bulldog, Digsby. This third dog changes the dynamic between man and beast. Lovable as individuals, cute as a pair, in a trio they cross an invisible but dangerous border and become a pack.

I agreed to watch Digsby for a week, but we are now entering the 17th day. If  I understand the situation correctly, Violet is being showered with dinner buffets and free nights at luxury hotels  in exchange for volunteering her attendance at time share presentations all over the coastal resort city that she’s visiting.  I guess the salespeople are happy to have live bodies to talk to, as so far Violet has parlayed her tolerance for these lengthy sales presentations into an extended visit with no threat of a cutoff in sight. And I’m stuck with the crushing responsibility of caring for her bulldog. Both Violet and Digsby are well known fixtures of the local scene. She is one of those eccentric characters who are notorious for the obsessive quality of their devotion to their pet. I have no doubt her fortune will be left to Digsby,  and such is Violet’s reputation around here that when folks find out that I have undertaken to keep Digsby safe in her absence, they blanch and make the sign of the cross. But he’s just like one of the family…ish.

It took him a while to settle into the routine here at canine sleep away camp. The first morning after Violet had left,  Digsby succumbed to a spasm of separation anxiety and bolted when the maid slipped in through the street door, taking off at a rate of speed that was hard to reconcile with his stubby little bulldog legs.

I was at the office when this jailbreak occurred. Although Bruno called me right away to let me know that we had a situation, his tone of voice didn’t, in my opinion, convey a clear understanding of how appalling the situation was.  Digsby escaping our care, Digsby being lost or harmed in any way on our watch, was critical, desperate, a code red.

It turned out that  Bruno is as scared of Violet as everyone else, however. By the time I got home,there were several posses of children, shopkeepers and domestic help competing to corner the bulldog, who had turned out to be pretty goddamned wily in addition to being absurdly quick.  For cavalry, Bruno had enlisted a couple of cowboys who were chasing Digsby up and down the cobblestones on their horses, trying to land a loop of lasso around him. My impression was that the cowboys were enthusiastic about the opportunity to do a little bulldog roping, but I didn’t hold out much hope for their success. Neither horse nor rope seemed to be of the correct scale for a quarry the size of Digsby. As it turns out, I know nothing about bulldog roping. One of them did lasso the dumb little dog and bring him back to us.  Which is how we got first hand experience with the infamous Mexican kidnapping.

The cowboys, who had cheerfully taken off after the dog at Bruno’s request, refused to return him to us unless we coughed up a two hundred pesos ransom. We did.

That was the first day though, and he hasn’t tried to escape again. Maybe he has  Stockholm Syndrome. Or perhaps he has begun to enjoy being the big pimp daddy of a stable of street girls like Milly and Lupi. Regardless, Vi better get home soon.

June 1st, 2009 | Category: Blog Notes | Leave a comment

Dear Mexican: What’s the deal with men in masks in Mexico? From Subcomandante Marcos to El Santo, masked men seem to be a real fetish in Mexico. Am I supposed to be turned on?

Dear Pregnant Wab*: You should be turned on by all Mexican men, chula, masked or not. I’m sure you’re looking for a answer that involves mysticism and the ancients while revealing an innate proclivity amongst Mexicans to hide themselves, weaving in references to machismo, the Conquest, and telenovelas for good measure. But you ain’t getting it from this Mexican. If you want that kind of respuesta, turn to a smarter wab: Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, who devotes a chapter in his famous 1950 book The Labyrinth of Solitude to the Mexican amor affair with masks. “The Mexican, whether young or old, criollo or mestizo, general or laborer or lawyer,” Paz wrote in “Mexican Masks,” “seems to me to be a person who shuts himself away to protect himself: his face is a mask and so is his smile.” Paz goes on to argue that Mexicans try to hide everything — their feelings, plans, illegal relatives — because “opening oneself up is a weakness” in their culture; masks, according to his train of thought, are a physical manifestation of the psychological.

Gustavo Arellano, Ask a Mexican

I like college towns. My uncle (shout-out, Uncle Mr!) lives in Norwich, Vermont, which is a quintessentially New England college town. My genius stepkid went to school in Charlottesville, Virginia. I myself spent one or two highly formative years in Williamsburg. The Williamsburg of my memory is like the Star Wars cantina, full of inhabitants from a variety of planets. There were baby faced sailors and English professors from William and Mary, and an old fashioned cracker class that died out after 1964 everywhere else in the world, but flourishes to this day in Southern Virginia, along with its African American counterpart. Women of both groups can be identified by their pink curlers. Black or white, they would look naked without curlers in their hair. There were frat boys and rugby players and furtive junior spies from the nearby training base, and mixed in with all of it were the colonial bit players who went about their day as if it was still the seventeenth century, and who were so much a part of the scene that nobody even thought about how weird that is.  It was, and I’m sure still is, quite the potpourri. And I like potpourris.

Lakeside is a potpourri, and it’s also a bit like a college town. A college with really, really old students, but still, if you imagine that all of the white headed guys wearing aloha shirts and a single earring are here to attend school and are living off campus, it gives you an idea of how our two communities function together. I am always on the lookout for ways to describe how the Mexican and Gringo community functions, because people seem utterly mystified about how we manage to coexist. Honestly, it isn’t hard.  My feeling is that the people who were born here spend very little time thinking about us. I don’t think they really notice us at all, unless it’s in the way that the residents of a college town notice those darn kids. That is to say, when it affects them. But we wouldn’t be human if we went around realizing that we have very little effect on our surroundings at all.

Like college students, there are folks around here who spend a lot of time doing a local version of online social networking. Not facebook, although I’ve noticed that more people are logging on to that site. Certainly not Twitter, for Pete’s sake. I shudder to think of what local tweets would look like. (I’m at the light. Now I’m home. Now I’m inside the house. I can’t find the remote.) No, there’s a webboard here that’s even more like the Star Wars cantina than Williamsburg. It’s haunted by a handful of local gringos day and night, and I have to admit, it’s strangely and awfully addictive, no doubt because the opportunity to voice opinions from behind the anonymity of a cyber handle brings out the absolute worst in people. Brother, talk about masks!

A webboard is irresistible to people who have fallen in love with our beautiful location and want to be in Chapala instead of their cube, but its a poor place to gather information. Very few of the goons who patrol the webboard are interested in anything except for ongoing games of gotcha-last. I’ve been watching with interest one poor dolt who is planning his move, and diligently wading through post after post of contradictory information.  I predict he’ll give up soon, and either come or not come. If he comes, he’ll be surprised to never find anyone that he took advice from online, as they are not out in the world, but home. At their computers. Behind their mask.

Anyway, I’m not sure where I’m going with all this. If you say the word “mask” in Mexico, the discussion can go anywhere. Including Swine-effing-flu. David Lida did a whole piece on that a couple of weeks ago, which may have been what got the idea of masks into my head, although I think its more that Octavio Paz, who the piece was about, wrote so much about our two cultures, and the gap between them is more visible to me on that dumb webboard than anywhere else.

By the way, to try to tie the discussion of Mexican masks and gringo online networking together, Subcomandante Marcos has a facebook page.

*And so does “The Mexican” that is quoted at the top of this post,  Gustav Arellano. Wab is Californian for Wetback. I couldn’t get away with it, but Arellano definitely has the street cred.

May 24th, 2009 | Category: Blog Notes | Leave a comment

In which your blogger indulges in romantic daydreams about cute latino boys, namely Luis Miguel and Beto Perez.

I was that kid who knew all the lyrics to” Sentimental Journey” and had to fake it when the conversation veered to the Allman Brothers, or other bands of the ’70s. It was a big relief when Disco came in, as I approved of it’s glamorous vibe and was more at home with Gloria Gaynor covering “How High the Moon” than with Pink Floyd singing about its Dark Side. This affection for the music of a different era included Latin favorites, and I’ve always been a sucker for a romantic bolero. When I worked in the ballroom dance studio,  I would waste time trying to get the teachers who worked for me to choreograph routines to Eydie Gormet instead of The Talking Heads. That project had a very low success rate.

Recently, I, along with every other woman south of Ft. Smith Arkansas, have fallen under the spell of Luis Miguel. Luis Miguel is a dreamboat who once bought a yacht for Mariah Carey.  How do I know? Because here in Mexico,  if you go out into the street and say his name, any woman in earshot will drop what she’s doing and come over and trade intimate tidbits of information about Luisito like baseball cards. I’ve known about this ladykiller for a long time, of course. The office manager at work is a Mexican 30-something who swoons, literally, at the mention of his name. She can rattle off his favorite foods, colors, likes and dislikes along with his idea of a dream date, and she is not alone, not by any stretch.

It wasn’t until I started teaching Zumba, though, that I myself fell under the Luis Miguel spell. Well, Zumba. That’s the name we use.  If the founder of Zumba, Alberto ” Beto” Perez, got wind of my interpretation of the exercise system he invented, he would charter a jet to fly down here and smack me, so far from his original inspired latin flavored aerobics is it. But we like it. Using my background in ballroom dancing, I lead a group of my girlfriends through a series of easy dance moves to my favorite songs from back in the day.

If you’re in the States while you’re reading this, go take a Zumba class.  While you’re there, look around you and see what the demographic is. Then imagine me leading a dozen women of a certain age through some of the moves in someone’s house in Mexico. It’s a pretty unique event. We wear our idea of Zumba outfits, and I make my own playlists which feature a lot of Perez Prado and Rosemary Clooney. The house belongs to Linda Fossi, my new real estate partner, and we move priceless antiques out of the way in order to have the class under a giant crystal chandelier and face out over her pool. But certainly the most unique facet of my class is  the happy hour before hand. The participants gather an hour ahead of time to gulp down buckets of wine and nibble on hors doeuvres that they bring with them. When the time comes to warm up ( to Luis!) for our particular brand of aerobic dancing, the girls are rubber legged and relaxed.

The other morning Bruno and I both woke up with a big smile on our faces. “What are you smiling about?” he asked me, bringing me a cup of coffee. “I was dreaming that Luis Miguel was singing live at Zumba class,” I told him. “How come you look so happy?”

“Oh, it just occurred to me, ” my darling said,

“I’ve always wanted to be able to say that I was married to an aerobics teacher.”

May 17th, 2009 | Category: Blog Notes | Comments (1)

Many newcomers to this country go through a phase…it must seem like a mental illness to the locals… of Mexican wannabe-ism. Sadly, the template in use for this transformation is almost always cobbled together from an assortment of Speedy Gonzales cartoons and Carmen Miranda  movies, with an occasional dash of Anita from West Side Story thrown in for good measure. I myself took a while to develop immunity to the disease, and among other symptoms, introduced myself for several months as Elote, which I had seen on a sign and mistakenly thought was the Hispanic version of Elliott. Actually it means corn, and the sign that said Tamales del Elote referred to the ingredients from which the tamales were made, not the cook who made them. I was saved from humiliating myself into the indefinite future by Violet, who grabbed me by the elbow at a cocktail party in those early days and hissed into my  ear “Listen, you silly cow, I don’t know who you are, but I know you are not called Elote!”  Standing next to her in her vintage  pallazo pants while she scolded me,  I felt like a tourist in my embroidered blouse, and vowed on the spot to follow her in all things Mexican. That included giving up the lightweight and brightly colored cottons that she said made me look like I was a spinnaker taking a turn around the plaza.

This embracing of made up Mexican culture seldom extends as far as Mexican cooking, perhaps  because doing it well is such a huge pain in the ass. If your idea of Mexican food involves Nachos Supreme or anything with  El  Paso on it, then the way that some of the traditional dishes are actually prepared is an eye opener. I found this out at Christmas.

Tamales are a holiday food here, as specific to Christmas in Mexico as cranberries in New England. Some historians claim that the recipe is thousands of years old, which I believe, as their making certainly predates convenience food. To give you an idea, two critical steps involve charring peppers over an open flame until they blister, and soaking corn in  some weird lime solution until the  the outer shell falls off of kernels that are then ground between stones, for the love of God. Can you fake it? Well, yes, but that’s not the Mayan way. I wanted to be a real Mexican.

I was determined to make tamales from scratch last Christmas, a decision that I definitely should have checked out with Violet. Two days ahead of time, I started with the charring and  the soaking and the shopping for the corn husks that tamales are wrapped in before they are steamed. Because the most basic element in a recipe for tamales requires about 100 ingredients, and because most of those had to go through several steps, I found myself exhausted and pissed off before I had even started preparing the meat, a slab of  pork that the guy at the counter had assured me was appropriate for my task. (“You’re making tamales? Hey, boys, look  at the gringa, she’s going to make tamales!” Although this was said in rapid Spanish made unintelligible by riotous laughter, I was able to understand it.) I don’t have a cook’s kitchen, and I had to keep washing utensils and using items that weren’t meant to be utensils and trying to translate in and out of metric and in and out of Spanish. It was hideous. But I persevered, and when I tasted the tamale sauce I’d made myself from scratch, it seemed worth it.

That didn’t solve the problem of waking up Christmas Eve morning with total tamale burn-out, however, or change the fact that the most critical steps of assembling the final dish still remained. When Carmen came over at breakfast time, because I had at least had the good sense to ask her for advice on handling the dried corn husks, she found me slumped on the kitchen stool, despondently surveying the wreckage. I put on a brave face and assured her  I was enjoying myself, no problema, wait until she tasted my Christmas tamales. After she left, I went to accomplish the last of my Christmas errands while the corn husks soaked (these errands included the purchase of a pair of live turkeys as a Christmas present, but I’m certainly not going to go into that here) and when I returned to my home tamale factory, I realized that I was defeated. My Christmas tamale project was a failure, because, after chopping, charring, soaking, dicing, mincing, boiling, shredding, dividing and combining for two full days, I couldn’t finish. I could not muster the strength to go into the kitchen with my dumb tamale making book and figure out the last step, which was also the easiest, but I just couldn’t face it.

I wanted to cry, I really did. It was Christmas Eve, and  I stood in my kitchen, surrounded by hundreds of dollars worth of tamale fillings and sauces that I was ready to throw out rather than have to look at anymore, when I heard, as if from far away, the whistling theme of  Colonel Bogey’s march from “The Bridge on The River Kwai.”*

Minutes later, the front gate banged open, and a queue of Mexican women marched in behind my maid’s mother, maybe six of them, with a couple of little girls hovering around as well. One of them carried a giant pot, which I recognized because I had one, too. It was a tamale steamer. As I looked more closely, I saw that the women were the local village ladies that I passed in the morning emptying their buckets of water onto the street, or shopping in the corner bodegas and that my maid, Carmen herself, was bringing up the rear. This assortment came into my kitchen, took stock of the mess… and started making tamales. When I asked Carmen what I could do to help,  she turned me by the shoulders and pushed me out of the kitchen, telling me to go watch some television. Which I did, falling limply onto the couch and turning on a Christmas movie. Bruno came home from golf, took one look at the kitchen and went out to buy wine, which he served to the gossiping tamale makers by the tumblerful. After a few rounds of that, another trip to the liquor store, several hours of holiday movies and some Spanglish caroling, the gate closed behind the last of the women, two huge vats of tamales steaming on the stove the only sign that they’d ever been there.

Proving to me once for all that Christmas miracles do happen, and that I am not, and never will be, a Mexican.

*Um, that didn’t really happen. I mean the women really did come over, but they didn’t  whistle The Theme from the River Kwai.

May 10th, 2009 | Category: Blog Notes | Comments (3)

Looking back over recent posts, there’s a distinctly Myra Minkoff flavor to them, as if I wrote them while wearing black tights and sitting crosslegged in a coffee house, agitating for rebellion and strumming folk songs on my guitar. That’s not really me. I’ve been writing this blog for several years now, and a cursory review shows that I always get a little cranky in May. Well, listen, it’s hot as hell, yo.

I originally started writing LR as a way of making our real estate page (Vidalago.com), more attractive to the mechanical search spiders that Yahoo and Google send out. It was strictly marketing, and it actually has worked, as the blog and the webpage are tied together. Thus, every time I publish a blog post, the spiders think that the content on my webpage has been updated. This is pleasing to the spiders.

Perhaps you can tell that I’ve long since forgotten about my original mission, which was providing information about Lake Chapala Real Estate. I have grown to love the sound of my own voice, as it were, and enjoy presenting to others how Mexico looks to me. But! I am still in the real estate game, and, for once, I actually have an announcement about that.

I’m changing offices, from Ajijic Realty in Ajijic, to Absolut Fenix in the neighboring village of San Antonio Tlayacapan, conveniently located by Superlakes and Tony’s restaurant. The main reason is so that I can join forces with Linda Fossi, a local superstar who has energy and expertise to burn, so it’s a great opportunity for me. While trying to rustle up my old bio, I came across this chestnut;

Having slept around indiscriminately for the better part of 3 decades, Elliott  embarked on a concentration camp style diet and exercise program and finally bagged a rich  husband  she met at an AA meeting in 1998.  Typically, he declared bankruptcy and got viciously drunk within days of returning early from their honeymoon, claiming “Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.”  Forced  back into the workplace, Elliott turned to real estate in desperation and with the certainty that she could be hired with or without a High School Diploma. Disappointed to find  that not only were the standards stressfully high in North American real estate,  but they required a good deal of arithmetic, she and her husband moved to Mexico and she is trying her luck there.
Elliott is working on a new marketing campaign, featuring the slogan “If you don’t sign this, I’ll start crying”

Linda has a slightly more impressive background, as you can see from this blurb;

Linda brings lots of real estate experience with her - several years as a top agent with ReMax Advantage in Northern California, a fine arts professor, repertory theatre owner and artistic director in Southern California, natural and gourmet restaurant and store owner in Washington, and small business owner in Sedona, Arizona. Additionally, Linda has completed her studies in design and architecture using AutoCAD. She offers all of these special skills to her sellers and buyers.

Clearly, this is an upward move for me. Wish me well, and better yet, come and visit. Better yet still, come and visit and buy a house. You’ll like it here, I promise.

May 4th, 2009 | Category: Blog Notes | Comments (1)