After a busy day running all my domestic errands came home, and checked the news…. turns out there were narcoblockades today all over Guadalajara’s main roads, blocking traffic in and out of the city with burning vehicles, even some sort of incident on the carretera to Chapala not too far from where we live.  Supposedly the federales just arrested two guys who worked — fairly high up in the structure, one gathers — for Chapo and this madness today was the cartels’ revenge. They blockaded every artery going into or out of the city. The folks who analyze these things say “this is their way of waving a red flag in front of a bull, saying to the government, “See, we can shut down the second largest city in Mexico in a matter of hours, don’t mess with us…” Glad I wasn’t in town today! I feel sorry for the people who did go in for some reason or another. No expat hurt or assaulted or anything like that, but it’s so stressful having to deal with it when these things happen; the expat webboards are lit up with what’s going on and rumors are flying. We’re an hour away from Guadalajara and we don’t go often (Costco runs mostly), but when we do, we have to take one of the main highways in, and both the roads we customarily take had various incidents this afternoon. It IS getting worse here, but as Arnold says “okay, great, but what are we supposed to do?” Our lives are here now, at least for the moment, and mostly it’s beautiful, warm and tranquil. But not today.

We are supposed to go to a cocktail party tomorrow night, but at right now I’m thinking maybe I don’t want to be out on the main drag into the village after dark till things settle down.  Fortunately I did all my shopping today and we have enough in the house so I can enjoy the garden and the gorgeous weather, which has suddenly turned warm after a couple of cold spells. As part of my ongoing battle to manage my weight and attain some degree of physical fitness, I recently bought some weights and took out some dog-eared “weight training for senior women” books from the local English-language library. With our personal trainer gone on a three-week cruise with his partner, I’m bound and determined not to lose ground while he is away. So perhaps I will spend the weekend flailing around with an exercise book in one hand and a dumbbell in the other trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do. It’s so much easier when someone says “go to this machine and do so many sets and so many reps” — and you go into this mindless place where you just obey and get your hour workout over with. When you are trying to figure it out for yourself, you have to figure out which limbs you’ve moved and which you haven’t and all that. No wonder I never could get the exercise thing happening until I saw my mother go blind and become permanently bedridden from diabetes. That has made it crystal clear that I may flail around and maybe do some things not-quite-correctly, but flail, in some form or fashion, I must. Maybe this will occupy my attention till the news from the outside world is a little less disturbing, if it ever will be again in my lifetime.

It’s March, when it always starts to warm up around here. We have oranges on our tree, tons of bananas, limones, and we even have a mango tree too – usually the worms and the tlacuaches (opossums) get them before we do, but now I am wondering if I should go out to the garden and see if ours are ready….

Back home after a sunny, warm week in Puerto Vallarta – a five and a half hour bus ride for us, first through the scuzzy, graffiti’d outskirts of Guadalajara, then on through the agave fields of Jalisco (with a nod to Puccini and Fanciulla del West, Tequila per Tutti!) and then descending through the jungles of Nayarit to the coast. A lot of people say they get a bit of motion sickness on the bus and I can see why! The last (or first) part of it as you go through the mountains is pretty intense. But Aeromexico wanted eight hundred bucks for Arnold and me to fly (a lot of dough for a forty-minute flight!) and with our Mexican “senior discount” cards the bus price was about twenty bucks each way! We said we’d take the bus and save our money for playing once we got there. The tickets have a place on them where it says what class of passenger you are (adult, child, etc) and ours said “Senectud” since we’d purchased them with our “third age” cards – I thought the implication of senility about described it.

Anyway it was a lot of fun spending time with my sister Wendy, who met us there after a couple of grueling weeks’ work back in the States. We all were ready to decompress from various and sundry stressful things in our lives, most notably the ongoing and agonizingly slow decline of our mother, who is now blind, incontinent, and permanently bedridden. More on all that in another post I am sure, but the big news of the day in Puerto Vallarta was that 22 tourists on a bus tour  had been robbed at gunpoint and all of a sudden now even Puerto Vallarta is on the list of places it’s not safe for Americans to visit. So the poor Mexican economy will take it on the chin again, we are afraid. We feel perfectly safe there, as do lots of other people. Everyone says tourism is down but we sure saw a lot of people wandering along the malecon by the sea, shopping bags in hand. And at the resort where we stayed (we go every year), admittedly we didn’t see the numbers of folks that we have seen before all the cartel stuff started, but there were enough people in town so that one wanted reservations for dinner at the favorite places. Interestingly, this year we saw many more Mexicans vacationing there with their families than before. They say that’s who’s buying up real estate here around Lake Chapala, too….not retiring expats as everyone had expected a few years ago, but Mexicans. Some of them escaping the horrific stress of the northern cities, but some of them just wanting a nice “casa de campo” by the water in our pretty village.

The three of us enjoyed the beautiful weather and the warm pool and being waited on hand and fist and then came back here to discover that spring is springing here, too. No horrid crimes in any of the newspapers (except even our local weekly reported on the robbery in Puerto Vallarta, of course) so a bit of reprieve from the ongoing tension there. The jacaranda trees along the carretera are coming out in brilliant purple and this evening Arnold invited me to sit out with him on our terrace for awhile – the first time it’s been warm enough in the evenings to do that since – well, last fall. The white roses in our garden look stunning, almost illuminated from within, in the twilight, and the hummingbirds are definitely coming back already. The kitties and Reina the Purebred Mexican Street Dog were happy to have us home and there was much purring, licking and tail-wagging and such.

Now, back to reality, alas!  We can remind ourselves of how terrible PV was by watching the attached video of the view from our balcony. Can’t wait till we get to go back!

…the hot-off-the-press news about the body by the donut shop is that apparently the poor guy wasn’t killed by narcos, a jealous romantic rival, or anything like that. It was, they say, DOGS! A pack of street dogs apparently attacked the guy around 2:30 in the morning, chewed him up, cut a major artery and he bled to death. How did he get to be naked? Or WAS he completely nude after all? Everyone around here is saying “WHA’????” Some people did report hearing dogs barking but there are so many dogs around here running around loose in the street that no one would pay any attention if they heard dogs in the middle of the night. It turned out that the victim wasn’t a young guy, but in his fifties, and he lived right around there, he was a laborer. These dogs hang around all the time, so did he goad them somehow? No one can figure out how dogs attacked this guy and killed him without there having been much more of a ruckus as it was right in town — but there you have it. Was he very. very drunk, drugged, just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Pues, pobrecito, it is “destino” if god calls you and it’s your time. Will anyone do anything to deal with the stray dogs? Not a chance.

If it’s true, at least we are saved the inevitable cascade of questions from our friends up in El Norte, saying “omigod how can you stay there when they are killing people right on the street corners??!” Of course it’s also Mexico, who knows if if this is really what took place or not. But — well, for the moment, they say it was a pack of dogs. I am sure that more will come out about this, as far as the police are concerned, I suspect it is case closed, and on to the next weird death for them to investigate. The family is apparently asking for a further investigation but it remains to be seen whether anything will come of it.

Meanwhile the “frente frio” (cold front) we suffered last week — meaning we had to put on socks and sweaters and complain to everyone we see about it — has passed, the gray skies are gone, and it’s warming up here – since we have no heat in our houses that is a welcome development!

Rosa came over, her usual day to clean, and halfway through the day she stopped for a bit and asked if I’d heard about the poor señor whose mutilated body they had found the other day up by the donut shop. I said yes, indeed I’d read about it online and that people had been talking about it. How horrible, how horrible; she said her sister, who lives right there, walked out her  front door early that morning and practically tripped over this bloody body which also had been castrated and left there nude, in the rain. Her sister thought he’d been dumped there maybe around 7:30, just as she normally goes to the panadería to get bread and start her morning errands. She said now her sister can’t sleep because every time she closes her eyes, she sees the same awful sight again and again.

“And the worst”, Rosa added, “is that at 7:30 all the little kids have to walk up that hill to get to school and a bunch of them saw it before the police got there, and those kids are now completely frightened and upset by what they saw, and their parents are at a loss as to what to tell them about what it all means.” She said by the time her sister got back from her errands that morning, the police, ambulances, all that, were there and that they were taking the body to the Forensic Institute in Ocotlan.

Thus far, no one has identified this poor guy, no one has claimed responsibility, and as he wasn’t from our town, no one is certain whether it was cartel-related or he just got sideways with someone over a woman or some other score being settled, who knows. She said the worst is that the fallout from something like this is that everyone who sees it right there in the street is in some small way traumatized and damaged for life. Not unlike my adventure with the carjacking, come to think of it. Of course she’s right and she asked me “why would someone do that to another human being, kill them that way?” I didn’t really have an answer for her but we talked about it for awhile longer, till she noticed it was starting to rain, and she gathered her things and ran out the door to get to the bus stop before the weather got any worse.

Guanajuato

Guadalupe shrine around the corner from our house....

How can we stand it here? Aren’t we scared? Even this evening, I talked to one of my friends back in the States – an old Mexico hand – who said the hysteria being whipped up by the U.S. press about the violence in Mexico is beyond absurd. She’s visited us here a couple of times and during her stay (many of  her friends told her not to come), we laughed about how the only thing we saw rolling around in the plaza — not severed heads — were a couple of little girls on their branny-new pink bikes because it was a couple of days after Christmas.

Still, you can’t blame our Stateside friends for being increasingly concerned. And it is true that while we have been in a little island of delusion here in the gringolandia of Ajijic and Chapala, the narcos are bearing down on us too as they battle for control of the Guadalajara routes and markets. They found a body just above the donut shop today. This is the donut shop where people go for coffee and morning gossip and which, in the days when I was still eating donuts, I was sure made arguably the best donuts I’ve ever had. No one seems to know who it is yet (a young Mexican male) but of course we’ll all know soon, after the police, such as they are, have done their investigations, and the news will be all over town.  We’ve had some police vs. narco “entre ellos”(between “them”) gunfights and the occasional grenade tossed around town but this is the first dumped body right in our village, right on the street we used to take to get up to my mother’s house.

You’d be crazy not to acknowledge that the noose (or whatever it is) is almost surely tightening around us, or so it would appear. But in spite of the near-certainty of the violence worsening here, even if we talk about leaving or doing something else, where would we go? Our lives are here, our home is here, we continue to love so many aspects of the life and culture; the friends we’ve made. If anyone should have fled soon after moving here, it would have been me, who was carjacked at gunpoint a few months after we got here (the subject of another tale, one of these days….) but somehow I bashed through my episodes of PTSD and flashbacks (the guy with the gun pointed at my head and all that…) and convinced myself that “this too shall pass” — which it did, sort of. Sort of is the operative description: I survived, obviously, but became a maniac about locking doors, locking our gates, looking over my shoulder all the time. I drive my husband crazy wanting to add more and more security; he says he doesn’t want to live in an armed camp. And neither do I, really, but I don’t want to be assaulted ever again, either. As if you could prevent it anyway.

I guess the thing that strikes you most (other than whatever injury you may suffer) about an adventure like that is the randomness and suddenness of it all, where someone springs out of the bushes or comes up behind you or however it happens; and that’s what is so scary about the narco stuff. I mean, they don’t put up posters like they do for the community dances that say “x time, x day, there will be a balacera (gun battle) so y’all come”. Some poor devil is on their list and he gets it in the middle of a restaurant where you’ve gone for a nice comida with friends; or on the sidewalk, and if you just happening to be walking by with your nylon market bag full of groceries, it’s curtains for you too, I guess. Hard to adjust to that reality, and to the idea that it’s probably going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

But we have sunk pretty deep roots here in the years we’ve been here, and at least for the moment, and it’s our home. Once I get behind our locked gates and hear the splash of our fountain, though, I do breathe a bit of a sigh of relief. For the moment.

Since my husband Arnold and I moved to Mexico (from Santa Fe, New Mexico) in 2007, any number of our friends have asked me “why don’t you start a blog?” Truthfully I never really considered it because I kept thinking “oh, honestly, all those ‘We restored a wrecked house in (insert name of exotic foreign country)’ books have been written, and they were pretty much all far better than what I could have written. But when we’d see friends back in the States, or they came to visit us here, and I would tell stories about this or that thing that happened to me (they really loved the tale of the carjacking-at-gunpoint I endured a few years ago, it was much juicier than the dishwasher blowing up). Anyway, folks have persisted and at least for the moment, overridden my “who cares about my little life?” protests, so here I am.

My family lived in Mexico City in the ‘fifties and I certainly must admit that I came to our present expat adventure with certain advantages: I knew and loved Mexico, even though it was the Mexico I remembered from childhood and quite different from Mexico in the 21st century. I spoke the language, loved the weather and the aesthetic, and I learned the first time around that I could survive and thrive here. In fact, now that we have indeed been here for awhile, I actually feel that I may have developed a better instinct for interpreting what I see around me. My Spanish is much better now, even Arnold, my husband, is much more comfortable here. It is an interesting time to be living in Mexico and it is also an interesting time to be viewing the events back in the U.S., our Ancestral Homeland, from another perspective. Now, here we are, in this no-longer-third-world-but–not-first-yet-either country, with a front row seat.

So, welcome to my new blog; let’s see how long and if I keep it up!

Sunset over Lake Chapala – the view from my office window.