Room With a View

We arrived a week ago now after surviving our maniac van driver who met us at the Leon airport and drove us to San Miguel.  He consistently drove twenty miles over the speed limit on the dark curvy roads, tailgating so severely that anyone in front of him gladly let him pass.  It took several minutes when we arrived in the city for the driver to get us to our apartment because the streets are so narrow they have to be one way only.  We had to unlock three doors to get into our new home and climb a tiny spiral staircase of 32 steps.  The staircase is so narrow that we had to unpack our large suitcase and carry up it's contents.  I used to complain about Alexis' sixth-floor walk up in NYC, and now I have this staircase to complain about. 

The apartment is only a few blocks from the center of town, which the natives call the jardin.  The condo we stayed in three years ago was much like any US condo.  Now I feel like I am living in my favorite book and movie, Room With a View.  This place is rustic, with views of the city from every window and our own rooftop patio just off the kitchen.  We keep the doors and windows open as the temps are in the 70's and there are no flying insects to speak of. 

I liked the luxury of the other other place we stayed in three years ago, but prefer this location and the feeling that you are living more like a local and not as a tourista.  We have simplified everything we do here with regard to cooking because the kitchen has few amenities.  The warm tortillas from the little hole in the wall up the street, 30 cents per dozen, and the fresh fruits and vegetables at the open-air market just two blocks away, make preparing simple meals very enjoyable. Looking out of our windows onto the rooftops is a constant source of surprise and interest: fireworks at seven am. on Sunday morning, six cats being fed chicken bones, the bee keeper tending his bees, a man sorting bag upon bag of recycling, children running around playing the games that children play, dogs barking and bells ringing at all hours of the day and night.  You don't need television, you just stand at the windows for your entertainment. 

I like my Spanish school very, very much indeed!!!  I tested in at the intermediate level, where I attend three hours a day, which is enough for my brain to handle.  We worked on the past tense last week and began the futuro today.  The text uses the new pedagogy as to how people learn language, and I love the approach.  Our teacher, Jorge, speaks to us in Spanish about 90% of the time.  People attending the school are all ages and from all over the US, but mostly from the east and west coasts. The walk to school takes about ten minutes or so, and when I arrive I always feel like I have had an intense aerobic workout.  Walking these cobblestone streets, hiking up and down the hills, jumping over the high curbs, and climbing all the stairs would keep anyone pretty fit.  (Taking a Celebrex everyday for the bad knee.)

Last Friday the school secretary, Carmen, taught a cooking class at school on mole, and Harry and I attended.  The mole was served over chicken and rice with beans on the side. The list of ingredients was twenty-plus items, and total preparation time was over an hour.  What you start to realize is that a recipe for such traditional ethnic favorites is just a beginning: there are a hundred different ways to make a mole.  On Saturday we went on a school-sponsored trip to the city of Queretaro for the day.  It is a city of one million and an hour's drive from San Miguel, past a ranch which raises bulls for the bullring and through fields of nopales, for which we have no word other than cactus.  (For lunch we had a soup which included nopales, and Harry had the famous huitlacoche, or corn-blight fungus, which I did not share with him.)  This week's cooking class is on the classic Mexican soup, pozole.   

Cat Among the Pigeons

(Jeanne is having a hissy-fit because she already wrote a blog, but her computer fed it to the internet, which swallowed it in one bite; so I’ve been drafted.)

Beneath our window, between 5 and 6 o’clock, a rusty rooster groans a greeting to the dawn, repeated between six and ten times, which is actually more of a summons than a greeting; but the dawn ignores him.  It does wake up the bells, which summon in their turn the brain-dead to Really Early Mass, where they presumably engage in REM sleep during the rituals.  The rooster renews his efforts at half-hour intervals until the dawn obeys, and after an unnecessary alarm clock goes off, we respond too.  Jeanne putters around getting ready for school and watches CNN in Spanish, while I don my cozy Oaxaca hoodie and take my mug of coffee out to the roof.

(One evening, Jeanne came bolting out to find out what was disturbing the fowls: a predator perhaps?  City girl, she had never heard a hen announce the arrival of a new egg in the world:  tuc-tuc-tuc-tuc-tuc-tuc-tuc-ahoohoo!  Tuc-tuc-tuc-tuc-tuc-tuc-tuc-ahoohoo!  They’re doing it again now as I write.)

On our previous visit, we lived up on the hill and could walk upstairs to the roof and enjoy a magnificent view over the town.  Here, we walk out the door to the rooftop and enjoy an equally magnificent view with the difference that we are among all the other rooftops.  You need to be there in order to realize how much of Mexican family life, in houses which turn their arses to the street, is lived on the roof.  We are surrounded by flowers, shrubs, gardens, colorful lines of laundry, piles of rubbish, collections of junk, and, of course, animals.

About forty yards away, a coven of cats, at least six of them that we have counted, share a half-dozen concrete and corrugated iron roofs with a flock of pigeons.  In summer they are presumably cats on a hot tin roof.  The birds and the cats literally rub shoulders in easy companionship – in fact, the pigeons are meaner to the pigeons than the cats are.  The cats migrate from one level to another, clambering over the pigeons’ crib as they do so.  Closer to us, about twenty feet away, a six-to-eight-year-old boy behaves in similar fashion, scrambling from one level to another and perilously and unnecessarily circumventing the big black water tank on the edge.  He has an evening ritual which we have not yet deciphered, so we do not know whether it is a functional part of the household routine or his own play, in which he cleans out a large kitchen pot then packs it again with something sloppy and scuzzy, then molds the stuff into a smaller container and carries it off with him.  On our own porch the bougainvillea are retreating for now but the geraniums are still vigorous.  There is a little bush by the door which Jeanne found covered in little birds, but she is no ornithologist so we don’t know what they were.  Not pigeons.

Another feature of life up here is the afternoon parade of thunderstorms which we can see approaching for miles, but so far there has been very little rain since we arrived.  Around us is a real neighborhood where no-one pays attention to the apparent gathering storm.  A Chow barks demanding admission to his house: we saw him in the afternoon bur recognized his 10.00pm voice.  A man comes around several times a day with a distinctive cry ending in a whoop, selling things from a little cart.  He may be yelling “cacahuet” (peanuts) but not pronounced the way we would expect it; we haven’t deciphered it and haven’t been down below to look when he comes.

Life is simple.  The kitchen is adequate but will not support our elaborate cooking style.  We shop every day in the old style at the covered market, bring home a roasted chicken or some chorizo.  When Jeanne comes home from school she will stop at the little tortileria on the next block and bring home the basis for lunch.  Have you ever had fresh tortillas?  Really fresh?  Really really fresh?  Still warm and wriggling?

I’ve bought a hat in the hope that Jeanne won’t give it away again.  If I wore it here I’d look like the Compleat Tourist, but it’s really for the next adventure, in New Mexico.  All I’ll need will be the horse.

San Miguel de Allende.....once again!

My blog break is officially over.  My goal was to move this blog to WordPress with a sophisticated new look and format when I resumed blogging.  That has not happened because Harry and I realized we need to find a young person to help us get set up properly.  So until we find such a person, Blogspot will remain my blog address.   


I began blogging on blogspot.com three years ago this month while Harry and I were in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.  It seems only fitting to start up blogging again from the place that inspired me in the first place.  I  have posted 202 blogs since that time and have had some 9,302 page views.  The most popular was the blog on English tea and tea cozies and the #2 was the blog about Fifty Shades of Grey....go figure!  I want to thank those of you who take time to read these blogs in what I have learned is my effort to fight dementia.


My blog break included time working on my Spanish (thank you, Rosetta Stone), making a quilt for my grand-daughter, Eva, attending Lexi's graduation in NYC, and a trip to Bayfield, Wisconsin with Alexis and Curtis.  I also found that, though I love to blog, blogging consistently, as I have been, is a lot of work, and I was tired.  I now find my blogging energy on the rise after the break, or I have sensed the resurgence of dementia, so I have no choice but to get back to blogging as soon as possible.   


Harry and I fell in love with San Miguel, with its cobblestone streets, colorful doors and its church bells pealing at all hours of day and night.  Lonely Planet describes San Miguel as an Italian hill town, which is good as I may never actually get to Italy.  We bought matching shoes this week for cobblestone walking, as last time I took a bad tumble on San Miguel streets wearing the wrong footwear.  Now I will not need to buy shoes if I do get to Italy someday.  


My heart has been longing to be submerged again in a different culture.  I love Mexico in all its beauty and complexity and contradictions.  On this trip to San Miguel I will be attending Spanish classes every morning and an afternoon conversation class perhaps a couple of times a week.  Harry has a new camera and will be the official photographer for the trip as well as blog editor and blog contributor should the spirit move him.  I am also hoping he will join me in the conversation group so he can continue to correct my bad Spanish grammar.        


My bank recently upgraded their on-line banking system and I had to choose new security questions to get into my bank account.  One of the security questions I chose was what would be your favorite job?  I of course answered blogging tourist.  So I hope you will come along with us on this journey back to Mexico.  


click on: The New Old Mexico in blue below

GREATHOMES AND DESTINATIONS   | November 21, 2008 The New Old Mexico  By JIM ATKINSON In San Miguel de Allende, a place beloved for its preserved Spanish colonial architecture and aura of timeless charm, new developments for expatriates may threaten the lifestyle that drew them there.