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.