Sams Club in Mexico

 Sometimes you want a really good beef roast or an American-style sheet cake for your eminent 50th birthday (mine is coming next month).  And...the best place to get stuff like this is a gringo store, populated by other gringos and wealthy Mexicans (mostly the latter, Mexico is doing just fine, thank you).  

Sams Club in Mexico very much has 'not quite but close enough' American prices.  And I balk at how few products I got for $2400 ($120usd) pesos.  

• $172 ($9usd) for crunchy perfect 'just like you remember them back home' green grapes.  
• $40 ($2usd) for 7 organic platanos (aka bananas) 
• $180 ($9usd) for 12 botellas (remember to pronounce the ll as a y sound) of sparkling water
• $155 ($8usd) for 32 botellas of agua
• $40 ($2usd) for 6 grande botellas of agua (Easier for me to fill my kettle upstairs with than the liter bottles)
• $214 ($11usd) for .646 kilos (1.4 pounds) of Strip Steak
• $275 ($14usd) for 24 packages of toallitas aka butt wipes for my mom
• $142 ($7.30usd) for boxes of Kleenex...which aren't made by Kleenex, but all blow your nose tissues are just called Kleenex here.
• $281 ($14.50) for a big thing of toilet paper...Cottonelle.  It's slightly worse than USA Cottonelle, and has a bigger tube making the rolls go a lot faster.
• $408 ($21usd) for 2 boxes filled with catfood sachets.  Cat food in cans are rare.  You get little pouches here.  
• $604 ($30usd) for 8 boxes of trident gum.  They each have little packets with four pieces each, matching the chicklet style of gum that's so popular here.

All together $2,406 or $123.  Which is exorbitant for Mexico.  But we knew that walking in.  

We also bought a bag of oranges and a box of dates from a woman who set up shop in the parking lot.  I also gave someone $20 pesos who tried to sell me cold drinks of red or brown.  But I know the brown is sweet tamarind juice and the red is koolaid of some variety, both loaded with sugar, so I said no, but gave him a gringo tax.

Before we shopped we went to a seafood restaurant under a hut made of palm fronds.  Open to the outdoors.  They had posted such glorious seafood pictures and had enormous oysters...I mean, two bites to get them down.  The oysters were literally brought in while we were waiting to order from a vendor with a dripping net bag of them.  They were amazing.

The lunch was $900 pesos $46usd with our $100 peso tip.  I told the waitress no necesita cambio (keep the change) and she presented it to her boss at the counter who was talking to a local.  He said in Spanish:  'Why can't you be like the gringos and leave a tip?'  The man said: 'Tipping is gringo culture! We don't tip here!  They just never learn!'

Excuse me?  There was a big cocktail goblet by the register that had 'propios' (tips) written on it.  They definitely take tips there.  

We came home and my neighbor grabbed my mom to take her to the dentist with her.  She's there now and just sent me a WhatsApp (official communication means of Mexico) so see you later!

 

USA House SOLD!!!

 First off...I committed murder.  Imagine my shock and heartache when I opened my window and saw a poor little creature stuck to it.  😭 I had no idea he had crawled in.  I would have loved to see the little guy alive.  I love lizards!  

May God have mercy on my soul.  😣

In other news, I may have mentioned before:  WE SOLD OUR HOUSE!!!  I'm clearing close to six figures so I'm happy.  That's enough to buy the place we're living in or several other houses available.

We've decided we want to rent for a while.  Maybe for the next 4 years until we get permanent residency, when it will be easier to buy.

Renting is cheap.  The house is nice.  Moving is exhausting.  So...?  Also I'm not going to spend $250k for a fancy American house when I can get a liveable house in the local area for $100k or less.  Y'know?

My therapist said, "I remember last month (I usually only see him once a month) you were worried you made the wrong decision to move to Mexico.  I bet you know you did right now."

I never had a moment where I thought, 'Yep!  I did the right thing!'  I know this is a good life for us, and I don't regret moving here.  I just haven't paid as much attention to the catastrophe going on in the USA.  But for him, living there, having it in his face, he must see that I had the right idea.

All along I was stressed over still having a house to sell in the USA.  Our realtor contract was up in June and I didn't know what we would have to do once that was up.  I worried it could be years until we could sell it.  I worried I'd have to arrange to have it rented out and live through that nightmare a few years.

The amount of stress that lifted off me when we finally sold this place.  It's like a miracle.  I feel that yeah, NOW I know I made the right decision.  Now that I no longer have property in the USA and now have money.  NOW I can relax.  Now I know everything is going to be okay and there's nothing to stop me and my mom from living our best lives here.

And the money will grow.  At least for a year, but probably 4 years until we're permanent residents.  Maybe longer.  Rent is cheap and I can see myself renting until I have to move into assisted living in 25 years.  Who knows.

I do know that it's hard to sell a house in Mexico.  These are not the good investments you find in the USA.  The houses here don't appreciate at the rate of the USA.  It takes a long time to sell.  So...if I bought a house and had to sell it, it would again be a big pain.  And we like our rental.

I told my therapist that we like it here because we're friends with the neighbors and there's so many little shops, restaurants, beauty salons, pharmacies, convenience stores, butcher shops, grocery stores, etc. that are just a short walk away.  We only have to take the car out of the locked gate once or twice a month.  I'm spending a lot less on gas.  

Delivery is dirt cheap here too, just not from Walmart anymore.  It's fine to just order a few things from Didi food.  Yesterday we got bananas, mangos, oranges, potatoes, and soda.  400 pesos or $20 including everything, and the drivers are super fast.  Gotta hustle out here.  

I noticed this sign outside the Oxxo by my house.  Here's what I found out:

Punto de Reunion is a pre-designated, easily accessible location where people should go in the event of an emergency, such as a fire, earthquake, or any situation requiring evacuation. Its main purpose is to facilitate coordination, counting, and ensuring the safety of people during an emergency, avoiding chaos and confusion.

Good to know!

Couple of Things

 Okay, first of all, my neighbors daughter is a budding artist and she's doing the kind of art I'm hiring for.  She's 16, so too young to work for me, but I bought her a manga anatomy book to get her started on more complicated images so she can be ready to go for me once she turns 18.

She was thrilled and was engrossed in the book at once, marking pages of poses she wanted to try.  Literally the book was dog-eared before she left our house.  But the best thing?  It was her birthday!  I had no idea.  Just lucky.

We went out grocery shopping and the bananas at Aurera Bodega looked sad, so I went the the other nearby grocery store, Casa Ley.  While there I realized I was in our old colony (the neighborhoods have 'colony' names that are parts of the addresses here).  So I picked up candy for the little girls who lived next door to our Air BnB to drop them off while I was there.

Okay, we go to our old Air BnB, and the girl comes out of the house in full make-up and a crown (a 10yo).  IT WAS HER BIRTHDAY.  Are you kidding me?  She took the candy and hugged me.

So weird.  Or maybe a lot of kids are born at this time in Mexico?  

At the end of our street is a busy shopping area with lots of stores and restaurants.  There was a beauty parlor there too, but it's always closed.  I went walking around and found another place that was open.  And it did manicures and pedicures!  My mom hadn't had her toenails cut since we left the USA.  I'm forbidden from doing it because I feel a little skin in the clipper is okay.

So, right then and there, my mom got a pedicure.  In the USA there are nail salons with lots of comfy chairs above tubs with faucets and drains.  In Mexico, my mom was put in a chair on a platform.  A large square tub was filled with water.  Then she boiled some water and added it to make it warm.  And when she was done, she dumped the water out.  My mom got a great pedicure with a foot massage and felt great.  It wasn't as fancy as in the USA, but the price is 50% of what we'd pay there, and the service was great!

That's the thing about Mexico.  The prices are circa USA 2005-2015.  Sometimes my mind got stuck in that era in the USA and I was shocked at how expensive things became.  Here, everything seems to be the correct cheap price.  So reasonable, and you're not really giving up anything.  Who cares if she has to fill and dump the water manually?

Anyway, we sold our house in the USA and should be closing in 4 days.  ;0; Hallelujah!!  My realtor said homes are still selling just fine.  That's a bit surprising, but good.  Great.  Whatever.  

Fitting In

Now that we're in Mexico there are a lot of people coming by the house, such as neighbors, vendors, landlords, repair people, delivery people.  Normally I just had delivery people who were gone before the end of the doorbell ring.  So I slummed it most days, confident that no one would ever see my patchy gray hair and dirty shorts.

In Mexico, yeah.  Lots of people get a chance to see and judge me, and I really don't like putting on a wig unless I'm going out.  So, for the first time in a year, I dyed my hair and tried to make a no-wig effort.

I bought dark brown hair dye and let it sit for a long time because I had A LOT of white and gray to cover.  It came out black.

Oh well.  No big deal right?  WRONG.

Now people are talking to me expecting me to speak Spanish.  In the past, they just talked to my mom.  They looked at me and thought, "I bet that gringa doesn't speak a word of Spanish."

With black hair I am now a Mexi-American.  "When did your daughter live in the USA?  She speaks English."

My mom told me that the guys who cleaned our car assumed I'm just a Mexican who lived in the states for a while.  And that's only because they listened to my pathetic attempt at Spanish.  

Today we have repairmen in the house fixing a drippy AC unit.  Again.  He talked to me.  @_@  I said okay.  Something about going to and small.  That's all I got.  Voy a blah blah pequena blah blah.  

This didn't happen to me in my light brown wigs or undyed hair.  So...I guess I fit in more?

And I'm desperate to get my Spanish up to par.  Yes, I'm able to say most of the things I want, though many STILL don't understand me, but also I'm having a hard time understanding when people speak.  :sigh:  I'll get there. 

Today's Adventure

Today was payday for me and everyone in Mexico apparently.  I was warned not to go out on the 1st or 15th because that's when everyone gets paid.  The ATM at Chedraui ran out of cash.  But I don't use the same one all the locals do, so I still got my cash.  Of which...$60 is left for the rest of the month's food.  😓 Kind of went crazy today.  But I will stay on budget.  YOU MARK ME!

While we were in the store men came and cleaned our car for $100pesos or $5.  It was filthy.  Everything gets caked with dust in La Paz, and our car was a disgrace.  So I gave them $200 since they did a good job, and also because I didn't have a 100 peso bill.

We couldn't go shopping while they were cleaning, because the check out lines were wrapping around the store.  Seriously.  A half hour wait to pay at least.  And people here seem to put up with it fine.  Not me.  I'm still in gringo mode, so I am not standing in a line that long for nothing.  It wasn't just a lot of people, but full grocery carts with everyone.  This was their monthly 'big shop.'

Instead I walked to the nearest Oxxo to get me and my mom drinks.  As I was walking I noticed the air tasted like salt.  Beach town, y'know?

Then we went out for lunch at a restaurant we like called Don Quijote's.  Except we liked their lunch/dinner menu.  Not the breakfast menu.  At 11am it was still breakfast.  At 12pm...still breakfast.  So we came today at 1pm.  Still breakfast?!

In the USA lunch starts promptly at 11am.  Not so in Mexico.  I don't know when this place's menu flips.  x_x  But I got a waffle with sliced apples on it, all the same.  Waffle in Spanish is the same word as English except pronounced waff-ley.  

We then went to a private hospital to find out what insurance we should get.  They gave a list of phone numbers to contact to decide which one we want.  On the other side of the list was PRICES.  Yeah.  Imagine being an American and walking into a hospital with a LIST OF PRICES.  What a dream!

Unfortunately, what I wanted was to get my uterus ripped out, and that wasn't on the list.  They said to wait and they'd call all doctor to talk to me.  @_@  en serio?  But in the end there was no one, because today is Mexico's labor day holiday.  He was golfing.  But the hospital looks nice, and the prices reasonable.  So I know where to take mom next time she's sick.

After that we went to the gringo mall.  I call it the gringo mall because there's American stores.  A Dairy Queen (yes we totally got some ice cream) a KFC, Petco, assorted American clothes stores, and a Carls Jr.  Right in my own little city.  We went through the KFC drive-thru yet again, and it was slightly less of a disaster than usual.

In the Dairy Queen the person told me the price and I blanked and tried to pretend I heard, but then just gave up and asked again.  And she had already written it down and held it up for me.  Yeah.  Gringos.  Our brains don't hear numbers.  Looking at the check out screens is the only way I get by.  Or by throwing too many bills and getting the overage handed back to me.

We got our finicky kitty's $60USD fucking cat food, and while there I grabbed a cat bed.  In the Waldo's we also visited, we got a large cushy blanket. 

I went outside, swept under the built in concrete table, and put down trashbags.  On that I put the cushy blanket, and then a pillow because my mom stole the cat bed for Scrappy once she realized what I was doing.  Oh well, I grabbed Scrappy's pillow instead.

What was I doing?  Making a cat alcove because there are two pregnant gray tabbies desperately trying to run into our house every time we open the door.  These are strays we feed.  One loves to be petted, the other flinches, but doesn't run.  She doesn't like it, but she likes us, and won't run from us.  Both have swollen kitten bellies.  Both are looking for a safe nesting place.

I'm sorry, I can't let these trojan horses into my house.  Our resident cat Scrappy is called Scrappy because she's violent to any other animal that's foolish enough to come into the house.  Except now she's 22 years old and while she'll still try to kill the other cats, she'll get killed herself probably in the process.  We can't give her this stress in her final years.  She's already singing the cat chorus of death whenever she sees them through the window.

Except for one cat.  A white cat showed up today meowing to her through the window.  Scappy just watched him calmly.  I think he's okay with her because he reminds her of her deceased big brother Sultan.  Anyway, this tom cat is here for one reason only.  His nuts are walnuts.  She's female.  The guy is meowing to her all fricking day.

My mom wants to let this paroumar (I don't know how to spell it) in and adopt him after promptly nuetering the perv since Scrappy seems to like him.  I don't know.  He is a little dirty and scarred, but he's so friendly someone must have owned him at one point?  He's not skinny either.

So we'll see.  For now the preggos have to stay out for their own salvation, and it's not ideal for them, but the best we can do.