mexican safari

Ok, maybe safari isn’t the right term. Perhaps urban wildlife encounters is more appropriate. We recently saw our first large cockroach in the casita – Nani of course was the one to stomp on it. But the kids enjoyed checking it out afterwards. I also got some shots of picaflores (hummingbirds) across the alley from the kids’ Spanish school. I haven’t noticed any other feeders in town, and while we occasionally have one whiz through our yard at the casita, this feeder routinely has 7-12 hummingbirds in a frenzy around it, jockeying for spots, chasing each other off, etc. I could spend all day here just watching them. At some point, I need to ask if we can go to the upper floors of the school when there isn’t class in those rooms because they are directly opposite the feeder. Though I brought binoculars, I opted not to heft my N. American bird guide down here because I’m probably not going on any excursions and there’s probably only 10-15 birds in town – I figured it wasn’t worth the space and weight. So I figured out online that the ones with the really demarcated white belly are violet-crowned hummingbirds. The others I can’t sort out from among the apparent options. Would love any of you birders to chime in! Not sure if there are two more species, or sex/age differences within the same species.

The craziness at the feeder!

The violet-crowned hummingbird, I think.

ID, anyone?

ID anyone?

I just like this one because of the wing!

As we were walking to town yesterday, Lucas ran around the corner of our dirt road, which is a pretty sharp turn so we briefly lost sight of him. About 5 seconds later he came running back with an odd look on his face and he said, “there’s something creepy there! It’s black and orange!” For some reason, I imagined a tiger, and was subconsciously expecting a large animal when we turned the corner. There was nothing there. Then he started looking all over the ground, saying it was right here. He had found one of the most amazing beetles I’ve ever seen in the wild. It is incredible – it looks hand painted, as the photo below shows. I thought because it seemed so amazing (to me) that it would be really easy to ID online, but it took me about an hour, and required downloading a dichotomous beetle key to get us into the right family of beetles. It is a giant mesquite bug. Phew! Apparently it’s not the adult stage – they get boring-looking once they mature. Bummer. Given all the colorful fanfare you’d think it was the “you’d-better-think-I’m sexy-and-mate-with-me-right-now-because-I-don’t-even-have-functional-mouth-parts-anymore-it’s-just-these-colors-and-some-gonads” adult male stage!

giant mesquite bug

Last evening we noticed the couple from the big house hunting around in the garden, seemingly picking things up. The kids went out there and it turns out they were snail hunting. So the kids joined right in. Because it had rained recently, there were hundreds of them everywhere. It took them mere minutes to fill up handfuls, and then they’d take them over to the patio and stomp all over them. I know it’s not a very good lesson in kindness to life in general, but according to the neighbors they are introduced and serious pests. I’m just going to go with that.

free range escargot, anyone?
(yes, i stole that from the sign by the phinney farmer's market)

olympic snail stomping...all the puddles are crushed snails

Ok, no Mexican urban wildlife experience would be complete without the neurotic chihuahua, whom I haven’t introduced because it’s taken all of us a while to warm up to her. She bit (not hard, but definitely bit) both the kids the very first day we were here, despite the fact that she desperately wants attention, love and to play. Her name is Chocolate (sounds better in Spanish, so think it that way in your head if you can, or better yet, confuse the person sitting next to you and say it out loud). For a couple of days Zeiva wouldn’t even go outside without Nani or me, and I was thinking that was going to be a serious problem. But then Zeiva couldn’t resist – she would sit on our side of the glass doors and “pet” the dog by touching her side of the glass as Chocolate wiggled around outside wanting to come in. She and the kids have finally figured out how to be around each other without her getting freaked out and nipping, but it took a while. Now the kids LOVE her, they call her the minute we walk in the door to the garden, I hear Zeiva following her around outside saying, “I love you, Chocolate, I love you, Chocolate, I love you Chocolate” and then when Chocolate gets too close and frenzied and starts jumping on her she yells, “VAYA!” (go away!) and, fortunately, Chocolate does. And the cycle starts again. I must admit she’s fearless with the soccer ball, so she’s a great playmate for Lucas, especially since she doesn’t speak English!

Chocolate the chihuahua

Ok, enough about critters, here’s a few other updates:

I’m getting more used to and am really enjoying the fruit/veggie shop and the butcher down the street. The produce has been delicious (laden with pesticides, I’m sure) and the prices are unbelievable. Yesterday I bought tomatoes, corn, an onion, garlic, 2 pounds of tomatillos, 4 peaches, 4 plums, and about 10 of these itty-bitty incredibly yummy bananas for $2.60! Then I went next door to the butcher and told him I didn’t have a clue what the names of the cuts of meat are (which is true in English as well, by the way, but I didn’t tell him that) and asked if he could give me the right pork to throw in with the tomatillos for chili verde. He said sure, and did I want him to cube it for me so it was ready to go? Well, why not?! It was awesome! :) And my mom made chili verde and it was scrumptious.

Also found a “regular” small grocery store right down by the Spanish school, finally! Hurray! So now when we’re down there I have a place to buy milk, eggs, yogurt, cereal, rice, etc. I am feeling MUCH better about settling in. We even decided to try a bus instead of taking a taxi home, and we survived! We got on the right one despite it being really hard to tell which way we should be going (because of the whole thing about surface streets going one way and the tunnels going the other, if that makes any sense), we figured out how much to pay and made it home in a reasonable amount of time.

The last major news flash is that we signed the kids up for a summer “course” on Thursday night at the posh club I mentioned earlier. The distance (not walking) and the exclusivity of the club is not ideal from my personal perspective, but I am sooooooooo relieved to have them officially enrolled and starting on Monday that I am a completely different person. And if you read earlier about me not counting on it until it was actually happening, the story of signing up is kind of funny. Emboldened by our first mishap-free bus ride, we decided to take the bus with the kids out to the club in Marfil (an area that’s a cross between a suburb and a separate small town). The maid/nanny for the big house lives there, so we asked her how to get there. We had to take two separate buses, but she gave us all the details, including that the first bus comes every 20 minutes and that each leg takes 8 minutes, so that a total trip time of 30 minutes was very generous. This all sounded awfully specific and easy for a Latin American bus system, so we gave ourselves 50 minutes to be safe. After walking to the first bus stop we waited 35 minutes before deciding to give up (maybe it was too late in the day? maybe we misunderstood the stop??) and head back to another road where we’d seen taxis more often. Literally as we were crossing the main road to leave the bus route, we saw the bus coming! Lucas and I barely flagged it down, the driver fortunately kindly waited for my mom and Zeiva to cross back, and we made it to the club exactly 20 minutes later (the first leg indeed took exactly 8 minutes, we waited less than a minute between buses and the second leg took 10 minutes). Wow. Unfortunately, we were still a 5-minute walk away and the woman who coordinates the camp said they’d be registering families from 6-8 pm and it was 6:10. Most of you know that being late really stresses me out, so I was hurrying the kids (I wasn’t going to DO that here!!), imagining there’d be no spots left, etc. We get to the gate of the club and ask about coming in for the summer course registration and…..once again, we get a completely blank look and “I don’t know of any summer course registrations happening here. Do you know who is doing it? What time are they supposed to be here?” etc. Other than the guard, the club seems to be completely empty. Huge pit forms in my stomach. We dragged the kids all the way out here and no one is here? They don’t even know what I’m talking about??! Fortunately, this time, I’m armed with phone numbers and I make the guy call them. He gets no answer calling the woman I’d spoken to on the phone, Marisol. He calls the other number and the other coordinator, Javier, answers and says he’ll be at the club in 5 minutes. Phew! Marisol shows up about 2 minutes later, apologizing for getting stuck in traffic. Super phew! The short end to the long story is that I went through some impressively formal paperwork with her and was also impressed by everything she told me about the course. They are supposed to be doing soccer, tennis, swimming, art, music, story-telling/writing, crafts like mask-making, etc. She’s been a Montessori teacher in Guanajuato for 7 years and has also run the summer course at the club for the last 7 years. This makes it even more insane that no one at the front gate knew about the course when we stopped by several days ago, nor did they have a clue when we showed up for registration. So bizarre. The one potential hitch is that parents aren’t allowed to stay at the club while the kids are there (unless they are members, which many aren’t). But I told Marisol that I would feel much more comfortable if I could just hide somewhere with a book for at least the first week in case it wasn’t working out, especially since I don’t have a cell phone. She said she was pretty sure she could work something out with the club, that they just couldn’t have dozens of families lounging at the club all day because their kid is in the summer program. So we’ll see how that goes. While I was talking with her and filling out paperwork, Nani went wandering with the kids and Lucas apparently took about 5 minutes to start playing soccer with some other kids already kicking the ball around. He’s also done this a couple of times right outside the Spanish school, so I’m hopeful that sports will give him the in that he needs, and Zeiva will follow suit. One last funny thing on this topic – remember Javier, who was coming in 5 minutes? He had the receipt book, so we waited for him until 7:40…that’s right, an hour and a half after he said he be there in five minutes. Who knows if he ever showed, but we gave up and caught a taxi home (which, incidentally, is only about 60 cents more than taking the two buses, so I’m stilling pondering what our regular mode of transportation is going to be), just as the weather turned.

We got home, got ready for bed and were treated to a really incredible thunder and lightning storm. We turned out all the lights, laid on the big king bed and watched out the big double glass doors and windows. It poured, we saw lightning strikes along the ridge behind the house and then lighting up everything around us, and had thunder loud enough to feel. The kids loved it!

Friday was the last of Spanish class for the kids at least for now, since the summer course starts on Monday (and goes until 5 August – I’m going to give myself a few days rest before I start stressing about Aug 6-30). Someone was supposed to come fix the water heater around 9 am, so we figured if he wasn’t done by 10:30, I’d take the kids to class while my mom relaxed at the casita. The guy hadn’t shown up by 10:30, so I went ahead and took the kids down. There was more thunder on our way out, so we made it up the hill in record time trying to beat the rain – 21 minutes! And guess what? The guy STILL hadn’t come for the water heater. He finally showed up around 4 pm. He worked on it until about 7 pm, in a small, dark closet with no direct light (and the guy was replacing a thermostat, installing plumbing, even soldering in there!) despite our repeated offers of our headlamp. Yikes. Anyway, we’ll see if it’s fixed over the next few days.

Today was Nani’s last full day – she leaves tomorrow, Sunday, at mid-day. Waaahhh! We will miss her tons, me as much or more than the kids! We took the bus down to this park where we’d heard kids rent bikes and ride them all around. I doubt more than a few people own bikes here because it’s nearly impossible to ride around with all the steps. The fact that there were adult-sized bikes already outfitted with training wheels certainly is suggestive. So we thought we’d check it out. Lucas said that he did NOT want to ride bikes, and given that, Zeiva wasn’t so sure. But then we got there and Lucas saw the huge line of bikes set out along the edge of the park and he just ran and picked one out. They both rode around for an hour and had a blast. It was also really nice to be in such a green, lush space. There are only a few them in Guanajuato and it felt really nice to relax there while the kids entertained themselves. And no one crashed, even, so it was a tear-free couple of hours (rare so far).

Just pretend they are wearing helmets, ok?

The first time I've allowed her on a pink bike... ;)

Just a small selection of bikes available. 

Adios, Nani! We love you and will miss you!

Once we were home, the kids were playing outside while Nani and I were washing produce in the casita and she noticed that it had been awfully quiet. We went outside and couldn’t find the kids anywhere on our side of the yard or along the connecting yard of the main house. Fortunately, you need a key to unlock the gate to the street, even from the inside, so I was pretty sure they were on the grounds of the main house. Though the 8-year-old over there had told us that there were stairs to their roof and I’m sure there are numerous other ways to get into trouble, so I was definitely fighting a tinge of panic. I made it along the front of the main house and was rounding the far corner when I spied them underneath a pomegranate tree, sitting and picking seeds out of pomegranates that had split open, presumably from the recent rain. They saw me and with huge smiles on juice-stained faces shouted, “pomegranates!!”

We ended the day with Nani taking us out to dinner in el centro. We went to a very swanky restaurant right off one of the main plazas. I had a Mexican-French “fusion” fajita dish (their description). It was delicious – super tender steak layered in between little round crisp tortillas with goat cheese and guacamole, covered in a chipotle wine sauce. On the side was a little round tower of au-gratin potatoes with some sort of strong cheese sauce. It was very ostentatiously presented, but it was really good! I went halfsies of course with my mom, who ordered the local specialty enchiladas, which were also delicious. The kids wolfed down an entire Margherita pizza between them. It was really fun to be out, have a glass of wine, and enjoy watching the nightlife scene start to emerge. We walked through the plazas and the kids were dancing around to the mariachi band music and the club techno and watching some of the street performers. It actually felt a bit like we were on vacation! p.s. dinner, with wine, beer, the two entrees + an entire pizza, a huge pitcher of lemonade for the kids, flan for dessert plus tip = $60! Sorry I keep brining up prices, but they amaze me.

In theory, we start a real routine on Monday, so hopefully for my sake as well as yours there will be less to write about! :)