Real Neighbors

We got a package delivery today, which was odd, because we weren't expecting anything.  The delivery man said it's for our neighbor and when he called them they said to leave it with us.

1. Yes, delivery men, like FedEx, will call you if you're not home.

2.  No number 2.  Just wanted to make a list here.

We were happy to accept the package.  We thought it was for our right side neighbor who is our close friend now.  That's the one we went to Sams Club with in the last post.  She brought us her pozole and brings strawberries and oranges for us a lot.  In turn, I gave her 20 bottles of sugary soda I accidentally bought because I thought it was seltzer.  @-@

But no.  It's the neighbor on our other side, which is the last house on the street, so we're their closest neighbor.

They don't know us except for us saying hi/bye.  But that's enough.  And we gave them their package later that night.  

I mean...that's how things are here.  And I think it's great.  I think it's great that the delivery men call and really care about getting your stuff to you.  I think it's great that the default is just to trust your neighbor.  

People talk about 'the good old days' in the USA.  I'm living those 'good old days' here in Mexico.  You know, 'the good old days' where people put their hearts into their jobs, and neighbors trusted each other.

Anyway, I went to Sams Club because I needed protein powder and didn't want to wait to order some.  I figured Sams Club was a gringo enough store to have it in stock.  It did.  And it was 2x the price in the USA.  Fricking $75 for a tub of Musclemilk.  Like seriously?  It's like $45 in the USA.  I guess it was all the cost to import it.

Protein powder is definitely an American thing.  The friends with me didn't know what it was.  They asked my mom why I needed it.  My mother told them I'm missing half my guts and poop myself and need to drinks special powder.  Or I assume that's what she said.  My Spanish isn't that good yet.

The truth is I was dieting and doing really good.  So I added wrist weights.  The only weights I could get were 2.5 kilos per wrist.  This is compared to the 2.5 pound weights I used to have.  I figured it's fine because it only takes a few weeks for the weights to feel to light anyway.  So I started with these and my body said:  You apparently want muscles!  Give me protein!

I found myself scarfing 2 porkchops before bed and my diet was ruined.  I gained back several kilos.  I can't do this.  I figured If I drank protein powder before my workout I'd have it covered.

After eating 2 hamburger patties tonight I can say it didn't work.  So, no weights for a while.  It's too soon for them anyway.  

In other Mexico news, I don't think there's mail here.  I really don't.  I don't think the Mexico government sponsors a national mail service.  We have a mailbox, but there's never been anything put in it.  And we've never seen mail carriers, vehicles, or postal workers.  

Documents get delivered, but by private courier services.  There's lots of them.  

I've always said my little brother could never adapt to live in Mexico because there are some hassles I don't think he'd deal well with.

1. You can't flush toilet paper. He'd die.
2. You have to go to a gas station to pay your cell bill. And you never know when it's due because the app is not only in Spanish, but it's screwy.  
3. You can't get a monthly phone plan.  All the phones are pay as you go.
4. You have to buy the screen protector at a different store than you bought the cell phone.
5. Most stores don't have iPhones, but they do have nice Huawei phones?
6. You have to go to a gas station to pay your internet bill.  Actually I managed to do this online.  I don't know why I can't just pay my phone online.  It's the same fricking company.
7. If they say a package will be coming tomorrow it may be tomorrow, or it may be in 4 days.  So you better not absolutely positively need to get something that day.
8. Nothing is universal.  
1. Toilet sizes are different here, they have their own standards. 
2. Addresses are written differently. They have postal codes here but you put it before the name of the city, and the street number is put AFTER the name of the street, and you have to specify which 'Colony' you live in. The state abbreviations are 3 letters.
3. You need the equivalent of two social security numbers as a citizen here.  An RFC for taxes, and a CURP for banking and invoicing?  I don't know what this whole invoicing thing is about here but they're constantly asking me for my CURP to give me an invoice.  And I say I don't need one, which they think is weird.  But what do I need the invoice for?  Maybe Mexican taxes.
4. What was I listing again?  Oh well, nevermind.

When we're driving around La Paz we notice a lot of cars that don't have license plates.  I thought it odd.  They definitely have license plates here.  I see them on most cars.  But many are without them.  I saw my neighbor didn't have one and she said the car wasn't registered.  ??  'I know someone who works for the police so it's fine.'  Okay then.

I Have Friends

 Even with bad Spanish I have friends in Mexico.  Friends who don't speak English, but we make it work.  I just went to Sams Club with my neighbor and her daughters.  It was fun.  

My mom asked when the last time was we had friends where we lived?  In the mobile home park we lived in in Las Vegas.  And that's because everyone was a transplant like us.  We knew everyone who lived around us and even went to a two funerals.

But that was 15 years ago.  I knew one neighbor in Arizona and she died.  The other who gave me her grapefruit from her tree moved.  And the new owner put a Trump sign in their yard.  (But there was a lot of Kamala signs).

I did try to make friends in Tucson.  I went to bingo.  I went to poker.  I couldn't connect to anyone.

The USA is lonely.  In Mexico the people are so kind.  They just seem to proceed with the idea, 'Oh, you live here now?  Let's be friends.'  

It's a beautiful thing.

Mexico Musings

I was thinking the other day that my mom and I should go out for lunch.  And in my head was all the places we used to eat at in the USA.  Then I snapped out of it, and remembered I'm in Mexico now.

No more Red Lobster.  Er...actually, we already said we'd never eat there again after the menu turned to shit and got stupidly expensive.  

No more Texas Roadhouse.  Um...there was always a line to get in there.  They were always crowded.  And yeah the steaks were good, but $150 for two people?

I tried to think of a place we actually liked to eat at in Tucson and came up empty.  The Chinese food there was terrible.  My mom can't eat much of the American version of Mexican food because she can't handle anything spicey.  (In actual Mexico, it's really not like this that often.)

Oh wait, there was one go-to mainstay:

No more Churches Chicken.  Okay, well, I like fried chicken of this sort and they don't really have that here.  It more the El Pollo Loco style baked chicken everywhere.  If I want to get American style fried chicken there is one single solitary KFC in the gringo area of La Paz.  We've eaten there twice.  

When I say eaten there, I mean went through the drivethru.  

Ahhh...ordering through drive-thru's.  Such an American convenience.  I pulled right into that drive thru the first time with all the confidence of a stupid American and ordered.

"Doce piezas familia bucket por favor." 😀

There!  I did it!  Amazing.

*Rapid Spanish questions that sound like gibberish to me.* 

😨AHHHH!  What did he say?!  Mom what did he say?!😨  

Mom:  I don't know.  I couldn't hear him.  Ask him to repeat.

HOW THE FUCK DO I DO THAT?

Me:  Um...extra crispy?

NO!  *Rapid Spanish Gibberish Sounding Words*

Mom:  I have no idea what he's saying.

Me meekly:  No intiendo.

A manager gets on:  😡Pull up to de weendow.

I pay and am handed a bag of food.

FUCK!  WE GOT COLESLAW!  He was asking what sides you want you idiot!

Yeah.  So.  Drivethrus are a no until my Spanish gets 10x better.

But I don't need Drive thrus!  I got Didi Food!  

Didi Food is the UberEats of my area (and maybe all of Mexico?)  It's also the Uber of my area.  It has another app called Didi Drive.

Any time we're out and about there are motorcycles with boxes attached zipping through traffic at mach speed with the Didi Food logo on the back.  I got in on that shit quick let me tell you.

And let me tell you something else:  Ordering food delivery in Mexico is FUCKING AWESOME!

USA:  We only had UberEats in my area.  I have *NEVER* had an order of literally *ANYTHING* be less than $100.  Korean food?  $150.  $70 for the food.  $80 for the fees and tip.  And it was a race against time for them to deliver before the gate to my building closed for the night.  So I always did the $3 'straight to me' fee too.

Mexico:  Literally no way for any food order to cost more than $50.  That's with EVERYTHING.  Fees.  Tip. Letting the delivery person keep the change.  Everything.

And I say there's literally no way for it to cost more than $50usd because you can only order up to $1000 pesos worth of food ($50) and pay cash for it.  Otherwise you have to pay with a credit card.  

And guess what?  They don't accept any of my credit cards.  I try.  They fail.  I'm routed to a page to get a ClaroPay account.  Which I would love, but I don't have a tax ID number for Mexico (the local Mexico one).  They didn't give me one because I'm not allowed to work here, and that's how they make sure of it.  If I can't pay taxes, I can't work.

Hence, I have to make sure every order is under $50 enough for there to be room for the fees and tip.  You'd think that's a problem, right?

I just ordered lunch for my mom and I for $250 pesos.  $13.  And that was, again, EVERYTHING.  A pizza.  A tip. The App fees.  It was actually only like $220, but the delivery people always give change in a massive pile of coins so I told him to keep it.

BUT WAIT!  It gets even better.  La Paz is a reasonably big city.  250,000 people here.  It's a decent size.  Big enough for us to have everything we need.  However, the whole city is on a very small footprint.  There is no such thing as a 'long drive' here.  Everything is within 6 kilometers of us.  

In Tucson we had to give ourselves an hour to drive anywhere.  It's a 30 minute drive to get anywhere because there was so much sprawl.  But add to that constant annoying construction and bad traffic in winter when all the snowbirds were there.

But here? THE FOOD COMES FAST.  Especially since there's a million places within 3 kilometers to order from.  

It comes faster than the Apps estimate.  The app said 30 minutes.  Yeah right, it was 17 minutes.  Basically when you get the notification that the courier is picking up your food you better start walking downstairs, Yamila, because if you think you have another 5 minutes you're crazy.  

There are some things I miss from the USA, but if I was to go back I would miss SOOOO many things about Mexico.  

Life in Mexico is good.

Just Mexico

• You hear a vehicle blasting something on a speaker. 
  
  
• You run outside, pesos in hand, thinking they're selling ice cream or strawberries
  
  
• They stop and think you're donating to their political cause--because the car was driving around blasting a political message.

And Now Back to Normal

The last few months have been utter chaos in my life. 

• January:  Deciding to move to Mexico after the Election
• February: Getting our residency visas so we could move to Mexico
• March:  Literally getting rid of anything that couldn't fit in our car and DRIVING to Mexico
• April So Far:  Trying to furnish this home, get my bidet toilet seat, get settled.

And now we're settled.  We have all we need.  The washing machine isn't dancing anymore.  We over-furnished the tiny living room because 'Merica.  

I'm sitting at my computer catching up on work and I realize it happened.  I said before I left that 90% of my life is sitting at the computer working.  And I can do that anywhere.  And that's what I'm doing.

Today our new housekeeper gets started.  We met her at a tamale shop.  Not really a tamale shop...I guess you'd call it an Elote shop.  The 'tamale' was just masa covered in some white corn bread loose stuff covered in sauces.  My mom got something that was slicing open a bag of the Tostitos here (more like doritos, but they don't have doritos because the word dorito means a different kind of chip in Mexican Spanish).  There was kernal corn and other things added to the tostitos to make it some wild street food snack.  

The store was just a wooden open shed thing on a corner of bare earth among the winding streets of the area where our Air BnB had been.  We only moved two barrios over.  The same area.  The 'local' area.  We're the only gringos.  But still, we liked the area.  The Air BnB area was a bit more dirty and poor, but it was nice.  We made friends there.  We felt safe.  

This area has the same tiny footprint as the houses in the Air BnB, and the houses are connected together, so you share a wall with the house next to you.  However, it's a nicer area because the houses are two floors.  Two floors make that postage stamp sized floor plan livable.  

The streets are clean here.  The sidewalks are more stable, but you still have to watch where you're going.  My mom can walk with her walker to the Oxxo by us.

That's what I wanted to post about.  The new housekeeper is starting today.  She said, 'I need money.  I have kids.'  She was sweet and we hired her on the spot.  First job:  Clean the Air BnB for us.  Do we have to clean Air BnBs before we leave them?  I don't know.  That's the first time I ever stayed in one and we had a 'cleaning fee' added.  But I think we did, and for $30 American, I was happy to pass that job off to her.

She did a good job.  Sent us photos.  But she showed up with nothing to clean with.  We asked her how she was going to clean.  She said she'd just use our stuff.  But we'd moved out of there.  We had no stuff.  This is different from a USA housekeeper.  They bring a whole kit with them.  Here?  They just show up.

We managed to scrape together some cleaning supplies, find a broom, find a mop, find some cleaning stuff in the bathroom and kitchen that the owner had supplied.  She got it done.

For our new house we knew we had to be ready for her.  We bought cleaning supplies, but the house had random stuff here already.  

In the USA we use a Swiffer.  Hey, guess what?  Mexico doesn't do shit like Swiffers.  The floors are tile on concrete and they are made for big sloppy old-timey mops.  My mom said, 'We need to buy her a mop.'  

There were already two of these mops in various places outside.  One was threadbare.  The other looked pretty good.  My mom refused to allow the outdoor mops inside because roaches.  I'm like...put it in a bucket of fucking water.  That will get rid of them.  But we don't have a bucket.

So...I walked out my door, down a few houses, to a 'cleaning supplies store'.  Like literally right around the corner to me.  The had mops and buckets on display outside.  Like seriously.  

No getting the car out of the gate to drive to a big box store.  Just walk down a few houses, and boom.  Everything you fricking need.  Mexico.  They don't do zoning here.

I bought a mop, a bucket, and a rake because my mom said to get one for the leaves in the garden.  How much?  258 pesos.  $13.  And I went by myself.  I did this without my translator.  ;_; I did it!  (I should have taken a fricking picture.  I will next time I go out.)

So we have a bunch of cleaning supplies ready to go for her.  Everything she'll need.  She said $30 to clean our 4 bedroom (but really 5 because of a bonus room upstairs) house.  I'm going to pay her $50 because this is a shitload of work for her, and we want our windows done.  How much did I pay the USA housekeeper?  $125 per clean.  So my $250 a month housekeeper is now $100 here.

And we sold our house.  ;_;  For $15k less than asking, but with the chaos in the USA, I would have taken even less.  

There's no going back now.  We're here forever.  

Oh my God.