We seem to have been remiss in our blogging but really there is just less to blog about now we are away from the tourist Mecca that is Mexico City with all the museums and such.
Our temporary home on the hill in SMA is really wonderful, nicely landscaped, great light, and tonight we will be trying out the hot tub! So much for roughing it in hostels!!!!
Our view of the Courtyard and Pool from the Porch
We, of course, need to find a place to stay more permanently for the duration of our stay in SMA and we need to get going on this search. There are lots of furnished places which are very reasonable, at least up front. Some places come with utilities included, some don’t. Some have daily maid service (don’t need that),some weekly and some for as an extra and so on. At the end of the day we would like somewhere peaceful, reasonably equipped for cooking, with a comfy bed and a desk. Grand is truly wonderful but certainly not necessary. Anyway, we would like to sort this out by the end of the week – have to actually.
We have finally been able to cook our own meals which has massively reduced the hemorrhaging of money spent at various restaurants. Note that while we have eaten at several holes-in-the-wall I always wind up having a couple or three beers and so the low cost of the food is overridden by the cost of my habit.
Yesterday and today we went to the local market at the bottom-ish of the hill, so far spending $35 on enough groceries for most of the rest of this week. We have two different chorizos, one apparently made by the butcher called longaniza (one giant long sausage that gets sliced up to the length you want) and the other chorizo made at some factory somewhere or so the butcher seemed to be saying. We also bought a hunk of some sort of pressed/spiced porky product (I’ll try to take a photo next time) that sort of looked like bacon and sort of looked like the elephant hoof that is al pastor (my favorite taco basis). In addition we bought a chicken yesterday, using part of it for pollo con mole and the rest today to make a soup that my friend Juan taught me to make all those years ago when I was in college. We have enough soup left over for at least one lunch and a dinner.
We dropped in to a cafe in town and bought coffee, and learned that the reasonably correct request is “cafe Chiapas molida americano, por favor” or something very like that (translates to coffee from Chiapas ground for a drip system, please). I also had an espresso (a double called a doble (emphasis on the e)) and Darcie had a mocha made with Mexican chocolate which was really yummy.
We also dropped into one of the local bookstores today. I bought a book of Mexican short stories written both in English and Spanish. Darcie bought a copy of Crepusculo (Twilight in Spanish) to see what all the buzz is about and to practice reading Spanish in a context that is hopefully easier than other books. We’ll see how it goes soon enough.
Darcie also tried once again to use her ATM card in the machine to no avail. Arrrggh!
Our first language class was yesterday and, except for one teenager, we are by far the youngest in the group of about 12. The average age being something on the order of 60 if you count us and the teenager out. The class was fun and we have been doing a lot of swotting today in order to be ready for class tomorrow and thus get the most out of it.
Most of the restauranteurs/vendors in town, at least those we have come across so far, seem to speak some English (and in some cases are bilingual) and we have been having fun asking for things in our pigeon Spanish, getting corrections, re-asking and then forging on. Hopefully the corrections stick. My ear has been getting attuned to listening to Spanish and I am able to pick out what I am being told/asked a surprisingly frequent portion of the time. I have trouble answering coherently but thankfully patience is thick on the ground.
We have our second class tomorrow morning at 9am.
Just like with Mexico City (really anyplace one goes) it takes a few days to get ones bearings, figure out where you want to go (and how), what places you want to patronize and so on. We are getting there fairly quickly here in SMA as it is a smaller town, we have a tiny but useful grounding in how Mexican cities work and we have a place to cook in. We still need to find some holes-in-the-wall to get quick bites at; SMA does not have the endless line of street vendors that the DF does.
I am really loving the ceilings in Mexican shops and residences. The shops frequently have relatively heavy, exposed beams supporting red clay floor tiles, presumably as a first layer. Homes have these lovely domed, exposed brick ceilings (which probably would have frequently been stuccoed and painted). It is nigh on impossible to take a reasonable photo with a point-and-shoot camera since you really need a fish-eye lens to get a good sense of the roof and I don’t have one. Here’s what we managed to get with our camera.
I am also really loving all the amazing Dia de los Muertos art that is everywhere (at least so far). Fun, colorful, imaginative and unfortunately fragile (too fragile to ship without serious risk). The pictures will just have to do.
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