Daily Life

First, best wishes to my Vancouver friends after the unfortunate bombing* that blew out half a block of stores near Broadway and Heather. I ate at the targeted taco restaurant when I first moved out west. I don't know what's happening to that once beautiful city.

This is a good time to take a break from the main story line to look at daily life in Mexico. Since today's blog contains a number of pictures, it is best viewed with Mozilla Firefox. Also keep in mind that blogspot's image server bp0 doesn't always work so if there are fewer than nine pictures in this entry then you'll need to reload the page.

There are a number of luxuries here in the mountains: clean air, flouride-free water, steady sunshine with longer daylight hours, the ability to see the stars, inexpensive local produce, and deep peace of mind. Weekly maid service is included in the rent for your apartment although you do need to pay an extra five dollars to have your laundry done. Dave says he considers it his patriotic duty to hire Mexicans for maid service and yard work.

Another wonderful luxury is fresh-squeezed juice. In Vancouver if you want to buy half a litre of fresh squeezed juice you add it to the mortgage loan on your tiny condo overlooking the houseboats on the Fraser River. In any case it took some time watching people walk around with large juice glasses, wishing I could justify the expense, before I had the classic "duh" moment: the people buying the juices were Mexicans, maybe the price is different here? So I went to the juice stand and was delighted to find that jugo only cost 10 pesos, or less than a dollar. With an abundance of flavors I quickly became addicted to daily juices, my favorite being mandarin. (See if you can guess the flavors from the picture.**)

Roast chickens from small farms are everywhere. You simply walk down the sidewalk and a merchant will hold a roast chicken in front of you. You grab it with your left hand and pass him fifty pesos with your right. Of course this does force you to pay close attention when you walk down the sidewalk so you know when to duck.

A few days ago I took a walk to the botanical garden, a magical cactus forest built alongside a canyon. The pictures below only begin to do it justice.

Dinner parties appear to be quite common and generous hospitality is embedded in the local culture. Dave and Jo have invited me to two more gatherings since I came here. Their friends appear to be in a different social strata than Jim and Therese but are equally interesting. One woman lives on a farm near town, has nine dogs, and is actively involved in educating poorer Mexican students. Another vivaciously loves the Mexican culture, especially its cuisine, and may start giving me cooking classes. During one of these nights there was an annual event around the corner that we went to afterwards. It was a hybrid art show with paintings, sculptures, and furniture displays that was called simply "The Aurora".

It's also been surprisingly easy to get used to living without TV. However one of the first things I did do after moving in and having more reliable internet was set up a US proxy server*** and catch up on this year's fantastic season of The Celebrity Apprentice. I do miss Corner Gas but Canada, with its culture of overregulation, doesn't have any working proxy servers. And Canada won't even let its own residents use a proxy server to watch US shows so if you're also a fan of Donald Trump's show you're out of luck.

On the topic of the web, has anyone noticed how when web pages take a long time to load it's usually the ad servers that are slowing them down? Just watch the status bar on your browser when a web page is loading slowly and you'll see it happening. I wonder how long it will be before hackers realize that to take down the internet they simply have to take out the ad servers. These probably aren't even that well protected, given the low priority that companies put on their functionality. That must be the first rule of hacking: engage the low priority systems to disable the high priority ones.

The main story line continues next time. Amidst steeply increasing dyslexia, what are the chances that I'll survive Spanish class?


* If the video doesn't work, click on "Global BC Stories" and scroll down to "W. Broadway Explosion". BTW, a great site for travellers to keep up on world news is here. It gives a map of global incidents so you can click on places where you or your friends live.

** Orange, mystery green, grapefruit, mandarin, tangerine, and carrot.

*** A proxy server lets you watch shows without getting the message, "This program is not available in your country". If you're using Firefox there's an excellent proxy add-on called "Foxy Proxy". Active proxy servers can be found here. If you find a Canadian proxy server that actually works please send me the stats!