Category: Places

One stark challenge facing an expat is “how does one make new friends?” It is easy to forget how dependant we all are on our extended series of relationships: our friends. Leaving your friends behind–the people from your hometown, where you worked, where your children grew up–can be daunting enough, but is easily surpassed by the next step: where to find a new group of friends?

I had a lot of experience making friends growing up. In the seventeen years between my birth and taking the oath on the Plain at West Point, my family lived in eight different houses. Which may not seem that dramatic, but it also included one, six-year stretch in a single house! I attended three different high schools. I pretty much dreaded most moves, since as a card-carrying introvert each move required the dreaded “hello, I am the new guy here, please be my friend” routine. I finally mastered the process at my last high school, and it served me well in a brief military career.

Then Judy and I settled into Washington, DC, for the next thirty years. We did move around, gradually pulled ever closer, inside the beltway, like some comet being sucked into a black hole. Overstatement? DC is the place famous for Harry S Truman’s apocryphal quote: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” He didn’t say it, but it lives on because so many Washingtonians recognize its fundamental truth.

The answer is the same as it always was: to get out there and find people with similar interests. The challenge as an expat is exacerbated by the twin aspects of foreign languages and cultures. As Sam Cooke crooned:

“If I can meet ’em, I can get ’em, . . .” Luckily, an expat lakeside has numerous opportunities to meet people. This probably is the ‘secret sauce’ explaining why Lake Chapala is such a draw for North American expats. An expat here has all the ability to engage that friendly Mexican culture I wrote about earlier, but also can rely on a huge number of English-friendly groups and activities.

Our weekly English-language newspaper, the Guadalajara Reporter, lists fifteen different religious services each week, as well as some spiritual-but-not religious activities. We have at least three dramatic theaters, two cinemas, and several galleries. There are numerous classes for dance, crafts, languages, card games, and groups galore, ranging from a motorcycle club to Democrats Abroad. El Ojo del Lago, our monthly periodical, has two solid pages (small print) of non-profit organizations full of active individuals performing good deeds.

Several expats acquaintances tell me that our area and San Miguel de Allende (SMA) are similar in that they both have well-supported expat infrastructure. Those who started in SMA but ended up lakeside say SMA is more stratified, more expensive, more cultured, and just busier. I’m sure the reverse set of expats (Lakeside>SMA) would call lakeside too blue-collar, too provincial, too small-towny. For beach-going expats, there is always PV, the Cabos, Cancun and Cozumel and Playa del Carmen. Merida is up and coming for a more authentic, but still tropical, experience. To each his own. Whatever your take on expat life, there are several locations in Mexico to try out, but not all have the same welcoming infrastructure!

Most expats at lakeside quickly adopt the refrain that life here is wonderful. Soon after, they start to lament all the newcomers and changes ruining paradise. I’m a little guilty, too, though I resist falling into the trap mightily.

I am less of a “close the door behind you, and please, everyone go away” expat and more of a “change is inevitable” one. One hopes for the best and prepares for the worst, as they say.

What’s new in the few years we’ve been expats? Plenty, just in a physical sense. Due to the growing demand of (relatively) wealthy expats with need of medical services, we now have:

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Restaurants come and go (as in either move or close) all the time. Old timers blamed the boom and bust cycle of the off-season, when part-time expats flock home. We full-timers enjoyed the quiet time and the ability to drop in for dinner without a reservation, but it was hard on the business owners. Seems like there is no off-season any more, just “way crowded” and “less crowded” periods. Which should have helped the restaurants, but now land owners have started hiking rents by as much as 50% a year! So a restaurant which was marginally profitable a year ago might be priced right out of its location.

Retail locations continue to grow along the carretera (main street). Sometimes we have a case of in-fill, where a small lot blossoms into a retail complex, but otherwise the development grows like a vine alongside the road between Ajijic and its nearest neighbor, San Juan Cosalá.

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There is a constant need for more and different housing, both for the torrent of expats discovering lakeside and the Tapatios who want nice weekend retreats.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard prices have gone up so much that the rental market is beyond the reach of locals, and many long-time residents have given up resisting the prospective fortune they own by selling and moving out. It is the challenge of living where so many other people want to live, even if in doing so, they change the character of what they sought. It’s the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of living in paradise.

The development is for the good. In the past, our hospital (really more of a clinic) immediately sent emergency cases via ambulance to Guadalajara, but now they can be treated here. Eventually, the demand for housing will result in a demand for better services (like roads, trash collection, etc) although the lag will be considerable.

Even in the two and a half years we’ve been here, the physical scene has changed considerably, although I think the essential character of the place remains the same. The local pastor told me Ajijic is unique, in that there are three different villages: the locals whose families have always lived here, the Tapatios who vacation here on weekends and holidays, and the expats, both temporal and permanente. The mix remains about the same, and the three “thirds” still get along.

Paradise is a state of mind, after all. Oh, and the first rule of Paradise is (wait for it) like Fight Club: never talk about Paradise!

As Joe Walsh crooned in the same song, “I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do . . . “

Friends have admonished me for the negativity of my recent posts; I plead guilty. I was–after all–an intelligence analyst for almost forty years, and when I spoke publicly about it, I almost always used this joke: “An intelligence analyst is the type of person who—when he smells flowers–looks for a casket.”

But life IS good, even if “sometimes I still do (complain, that is).” What’s so good about it?

The weather has returned to its normal spectacular. The climate is so good here we get spoiled, and a few hot/sunny or cloudy/rainy days become a national tragedy. It’s cool (60s) in the morning, gets sunny and warm (80s) in the afternoon, then cools quickly in the early evening. Passing storms appear and disappear in the late afternoon-through evening-to early morning. Mostly they present spectacular lightning displays over the lake.

I seem to have won my war with leaf cutter ants. For those unfamiliar, leaf cutters are the plant world’s version of the creature from the Alien-series of movies: a relentless killing machine that turns beautiful tropical foliage into a bunch of naked sticks-n-stems overnight. They had so denuded my jasmine plant thrice before I caught on. Like Ripley, I nuked them from orbit (“it’s the only way to be sure“) using a product called Trompa which they take back home to the evil queen and die, already!

Like Aliens, they’ll be back, but for now I can smell the jasmin!

College football season begins this weekend, and all teams not named the Miami Hurricanes are still undefeated. Canes fans can take solace in the fact that they assaulted the band director of the Florida Gators: keep it classy, UM! Anyway, certain defeat lurks somewhere in the distance, but for a brief moment all fans can dream bigger dreams. I don’t know how many more college football seasons there will be (topic for a future post), so enjoy it while you can.

We’ve started to explore more of Guadalajara. Any town with five “a’s” in eleven letters deserves to be investigated. Many expats avoid it: too big (mas que cinco millones), too many cars, too Mexican (what?!?). We have been attending Mass up there, and then checking out new restaurants, shopping, etc., and it has been a very positive experience. We hit City Market last Sunday, which is sort of a Whole Foods on steroids. We sat at the lunch counter and ordered tapas and coffee. Since the coffee was served from the cafe, our waiter went over there to get it and bring it to us, along with some complementary chocolate croissants. Then we went grocery shopping on a full stomach–highly recommended over the alternative.

Judy & I are in great health: eating better and exercising more than ever before. We still eat out almost every day, and there are always new restaurants to try, even in our little town. We hit two more news ones (a creperie and a Tex-Mex one) recently. Judy got me to adopt walking laps in the pool. I always resisted this as something only ‘rehabbers’ and people “exercising without sweating” did. One more thing to be wrong about. It is very solid exercise and you leave feeling refreshed; who knew? We’ve even kept up “playing” tennis, which is to say we spend sixty-to-ninety minutes each Friday trying to volley the ball over the net. No score, no rules, just racket-and-ball-and-go! Good fun, better exercise (since we never know where the ball will go). Judy now has tennis outfits, so she looks marvelous, too! I got tennis shoes. I had tennis shoes my entire adolescence and never played tennis. Now these two parts of the my story have aligned.

Our Spanish language lessons continue, and while some topics are very frustrating (how about the seven different verbs they use to convey the verb “to become”?), we can now hold a conversation with locals, as long as they verbally downshift to second gear. We had a young waiter in Guad last week who spoke supersonic español: I think he was trolling us! Yet it is nice to be capable of basic interaction, even with our limited vocabulary and gringo accents.

We got hit with something called DAC, which is the Spanish-language acronym for overuse of electricity, resulting in a triple rate charge. I guess it was the air conditioner use back in May/June; while it irritated me to no end (I have solar panels!), the triple charge resulted in a monthly bill of (wait for it) about $75 USD. I doubt I ever had an electric bill that low in the States. So even the bad news has a silver lining.

So, yes, I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do . . . just with a sly grin.

Take it easy, there, this is NOT a political post. I do smile every time I hear the phrase “climate change.” It’s such a self-evident truism: climate is a dynamic process, so it always is changing. Yet climate change as a slogan is so much better than global warming, which captured very little of what environmentalists were worried about. Anyway…

We are in the final month or so of our annual climate change. The dry season, which began around October, should end by June. The coming of the rains is attested to by the sounds of the rain-birds, which we hear clearly now throughout the day. The rain-birds are actually annual cicadas, and the buzz the males emit sounds distinctly like static on an analogue AM radio (only those of a certain age will even understand this reference). It is loudest in the early morning and early evening, or maybe that is just when other noises are absent so I notice it. Local legend is that the sound of the rain-birds indicates the rain will come in six weeks. We’ll see…probably about as accurate as forecasting winter on a rodent’s shadow.

We live in a high desert plateau, so one should not be surprised to find it dry. But because water is plentiful from the lake, we have abundant flora befitting our latitude (Hawaii) , if not our altitude (Denver). During the dry season, the mountains (which are of course not irrigated) turn brown.

It is hard to describe just how dry it gets here during the seven or eight months of the dry season. We had a few rain drops fall in December and January, probably because of El Niño (more on him later), but other than that, nada. Large dust piles build up alongside the roads, and work crews come out and shovel them up, otherwise they create mini dust storms as you drive by. Oh, and they would be a mud hazard once the rains do come.

It is so dry that the crop stubble from the last harvest does not decompose in the fields, so the farmers take to burning it. Of course, open field fires and a dry season beget uncontrolled burns in the mountains. One just crawled up the far side (nearer to Guadalajara) of the Sierra above Ajijic and is over-topping the peak as I write.

Not to worry, as there is a lot of terrain between the fire and most lakeside developments. Part of the tragedy of the extreme destruction during California’s wildfires is that the cost of land has pushed development ever further into the woods and canyons (also, buyers like to be among nature). Those same places used to burn with very little consequence; now they burn homes, livelihoods, lives. Something similar happens in Florida with sinkholes. The more development spreads atop a limestone peninsula, the greater likelihood a sinkhole will swallow a home. Here we have a few villas or small developments climbing the mountainside, but most development is concentrated nearer the lake, with adequate room to make fire-breaks, if necessary. Yet development continues apace, and views from up the mountainside are spectacular, so…

Meanwhile, the temperature has climbed to the low 90’s under an intense tropical sun. The snowbirds have migrated home NOB, and many full-time residents have taken trips, as this is the ideal time to avoid the “worst” weather we have. Planning a getaway so as to return for the cooler, more lush rainy season is an art form. Some don’t realize it may be even more difficult this year, because of El Niño.

This weather pattern (officially the El Niño/Southern Oscillation or ENSO) is caused by surface water temperature changes in the Pacific Ocean, and when it (or its obverse, La Niña) happens, it results in major weather pattern changes. Climatologists confirmed El Niño for 2019, which resulted in a cooler, wetter winter here: remember those odd rainy days in December, and the run on firewood in January?

You can see that the most severe El Niño weather changes do not affect central Mexico, but we are close to the colder/wetter conditions for winter, and warmer/drier conditions for summer. Luckily, 2019’s El Niño is a mild or “weak” one, so the effects should be lessened for all. But locally we might expect a delayed or reduced rainy season.

Why are these weather patterns named El Niño and La Niña, literally the boy and the girl in Spanish? The warmer surface water temperature in the Pacific was first noticed by South American fishermen, who also noted it always began in December. While el niño means the boy, the capitalized version refers only to one specific boy, appearing also in December: the Christ Child. La Niña became the title for the opposite condition.

More than you probably wanted to know, but if it rains on your Polynesian vacation trip this summer, remember, I warned you the climate was changing!

An entry on the continuing sage of everyday life as an expat in Mexico.

Last week, as I walked our dog Tucker around the entry to our development, he stopped, as is his custom, to smell this and that, eat some grass, and do other quintessentially dog things. And then at one point, he leaned over and snarfed something. I called him over, and whatever he had, it was firmly in his snout as he desperately tried to swallow it before I could extract it. I stuck my fingers in between his jaws and pulled them apart, but my hand slipped, he bit down on my fingers (ouch!), I let go, and he swallowed it, whatever it was.

Dog poisonings are a thing here, but I wasn’t too concerned because we were inside our development property. Still, there are all kinds of things in our tropical paradise that a dog shouldn’t eat.

A day or so later, he vomited a little. Then the next day, he did it again. He stopped drinking water. On Friday he vomited one more time, and on Saturday, he refused to eat breakfast for the first time in nine years. And we were off to the vet on Saturday. The day before Easter. The week when everything in Mexico is closed for the Semana Santa holiday.

Although the vet had been closed Thursday and Friday, we were in luck: they were open Saturday until 1:00 pm. We took him in and waited about twenty minutes. They examined Tucker and took an x-ray: I am sure I got a few roentgens myself, as I helped secure him on the table. I wasn’t even aware they had started the machine as I leaned over and pinned the dog on his side in a “stretch” position. Oh, well, just radiation, right?

Sure enough, something had severely irritated his stomach and it was swollen. He was also dehydrated. They put an intravenous port in his right front paw and gave him a bag of fluid. He also got the first of three daily shots of a combination of anti-inflammatory, antibiotic, and vitamins.

The doctor told us to come back Easter morning for the second shot. We asked “aren’t you closed?” and he said “yes, but we’ll meet you here.” We arranged to meet at 8:00 am. The nurse checked the dog and said he didn’t need another bag of fluids, so she gave him a shot and we were on our way in ten minutes.

On Monday morning we returned for the final shot. They examined Tucker again and we reported he was not vomiting, he was eating and drinking normally and had recovered his energy. They removed his IV port and told us to return on Wednesday for an ultrasound just to make sure, so we made the appointment.

After the ultrasound, the vet told us Tucker’s gallbladder was still a little inflamed, and he had aspirated some vomit into his bronchial tubes. We got some meds to address both issues and agreed to a final follow up visit in a month.

So we had four vet visits (one an emergency visit on a holiday), an x-ray, an ultrasound, three shots, one bag of IV fluid, and two prescription meds: one month-long oral fluid and one ten-day set of pills. Care to guess the total cost?

Before I reveal the damage, I must point out that while most things are much less expensive in Mexico, there are some mitigating factors. Veterinary services are not in high demand here. Many people leave dogs exposed on roofs or behind fences (alone) all the time just as noisy guards. Dogs are mostly working animals; if they don’t work, they are abandoned. We have many vets, dog parks, and shelters lakeside due to the expats’ importation of the concept of “pets.”

So I wasn’t expecting a truly, ridiculously-low price. The total was $5,700 pesos, or about $300 US dollars. I rarely left a vet’s office in the States for one routine visit for less. So a happy ending, except I doubt Tucker learned anything from all this except he likes to go for rides in the car.

As I have noted before, we have a full-scale Passion Play here in Ajijic, as in many small Mexican pueblos. There is always a Palm Sunday procession with Jesus and the disciples welcomed, then non-stop action Maundy Thursday (Last Supper, Arrest at Gethsemane) Good Friday (Trial before Pilate, Herod’s palace, Via Dolorosa, Crucifixion, and laying Jesus in the Tomb. Saturday builds up to the midnight vigil of Easter, with Jesus rising and the fiesta beginning.

Given temperatures in the 90’s and a hot tropical sun, we decided to attend parts of the play each year, and this year, we made it to the crucifixion. Actually, we planned to attend the crucifixion last year, but somehow we missed it. We arrived around 3:00 pm, the time associated with Jesus’ death and everybody was gone! Seems that the crucifixion ends at 2:15 pm in Mexico…who knew?

This year, we headed up the hill to “Golgotha” around 1:15. There was a small crowd milling under the intense sun. Sure enough, around 1:40 I could see a larger group coming up the hill.

The many re-enactors played their roles as the three crosses were put in place.

A narrator set the scene in both Spanish and English, then the crosses went up and the thieves, soldiers, members of the Sanhedrin, and of course Jesus did their parts.

The crowd was silent throughout. The actors, all locals, take great pride in their roles, and you can see they spend a lot of time and effort on the pageantry.

We’ve seen the arrest, the trial before Pilate, Herod’s Palace, and now the crucifixion. Maybe next year we’ll stay up late for the resurrection (and the after-party)!

Change is haunting our little corner of paradise. As long as there have been gringos moving to lakeside to get away from it all, each new wave has had two things in common: first, the old-timers predict the end of all that is good and wholesome here, and second, the newbies want to shut the door behind them and let no one else in.

As The Eagles once sang, “you call some place Paradise, kiss it goodbye.”

When you have a great, inexpensive place to live, with a wonderful climate and friendly people, near a major metropolitan area and an international airport, people will find you (Cue Hans Gruber). With the improving economies NOB, all those baby-boomers (10,000 a day) looking to retire, and Guadalajara continuing to grow in all directions, another growth wave is washing over lakeside.

I don’t get overly excited about it. Yes, there is a shadowy group of international investors looking to build some high rises up against the mountains. And a major consortium of Mexican companies wants to build a US-style retirement community on the underdeveloped east side of Chapala. New properties are up for sale and in development all over the area, and even my own condominio has started clearing lots in the second, larger portion of our development.

The infrastructure, especially the road network, is insufficient for even the existing population. And the local government–regardless of who is in charge–seems more interested in making some money from approving new development than in improving the infrastructure necessary to support it.

I still feel most of the opposition to development is a little reflexive. Most of these proposed projects don’t get built. Developers in Mexico have a tendency to promote first, in the hopes of generating enough interest to rezone/build/sell. So one often hears about a project, sees advertising and maybe even a ground-breaking, yet nothing comes of it.

On the flip side, we have two new hospitals and a cardiac clinic underway, which is a vest improvement on the simple clinic and Cruz Roja ambulance upon which we previously relied. I agree that no one wants to turn our sleepy little town into another Puerto Vallarta, yet that is unlikely. While our weather is near perfect, the lake does not provide the same tourist draw as the ocean. There is a sizable mountain between us and Guadalajara, so we won’t be overrun by commuters until (1) the main road is greatly improved and (2) there is nowhere else closer to the city to develop. That gives us about 20 years of peace on that front.

Which is not to say there is no threat from development. We have a high-rise sneaking up on the lake shore in an otherwise quiet residential neighborhood, despite the zoning laws and the opposition of the residents. Scars appear on the mountainside from time-to-time. but the good comes with the bad.

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As more people arrive, especially more Mexicans and even more specifically Tapatios from Guadalajara, demand for infrastructure will grow, too. Its one thing to ignore a pueblo of 10,000 locals, or even a few thousand gringo retirees and snowbirds. But when folks with political connections start to retire to lakeside, things will change. As they always do.

Change is the only constant, as they say. Fifty years ago, Ajijic was a little Mexican pueblo connected by a dirt road to the wider world. Thirty years ago, expats lined up at the only phone in the public square to make long-distance calls home. Today, it’s still a quaint village, albeit with a WalMart and more traffic and good restaurants than it would have otherwise. It probably won’t be that forever, but nowhere is.