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This is the courtyard of our rooms.Well, here we are in San Luis Potosi and Iraq seems a long time ago. We know everyone thought we were a bit loco moving down here and in the last couple of days we were quick to agree with them. The first week in a new place is always stressful and when you add the fact of an unfamiliar language and customs it makes it worse, but we are pulling through. By day three we have found and moved into more permanent accomodation and are slowing picking up the language. Our Spanish class starts in 2 days and our stress had reduced to a manageable level.
When we arrived Polly (our own personal saint) immediately took us hotel hunting in the historical center of the city. We looked through about 5 hotels before we settled on one. It is Hotel Progreso on Aldama street (Ignacio Aldama). It's a very old hotel but clean and has great cafe on the first floor. We paid 290 pesos (29 USD). Remember I said it's an OLD HOTEL so don't imagine anything like the Holiday Inn. We had wood floors, 12 foot ceilings and the bathroom
El bano de Mujeres
Here is the women's bathroom. The photo doesn't do it justice. Very nasty. wasn't anything I'm going to describe but it was the best value we could find. We could have had something more modern if we wanted to pay $60 USD per night. No thank you.
Polly is a tv/video editor and works on the travel website www.roadjunky.com. It's like an irreverent Lonely Planet, more entertaining and easier to navigate through. Mainly aimed at the backpacker crowd but once I logged on I was sucked in for a couple of hours reading all the stories, travel journals and recommendations.
We did some apartment hunting our first day and were very dissappointed. We were looking for a furnished apartment near or in the historic center of town where our Spanish lessons (at Centro de Idiomas) are. We had no luck at all and were feeling low with the negative energy surrounding us. We felt the need for a pep talk so we headed over to Polly's for some positive energy (she seems to be full of it). We spent part of the evening talking travel and politics with Polly and her friends from Road Junky, then headed over to stop in at a goth rock event Polly had been invited to
Home sweet home
Here is our room at the casa. Very old house with cracked walls and floors. (in case you don't know what goth is, it's young people who dress in black clothes, black makeup and love hard loud rock music) . We were up for anything so we went along (since it was on the way to our hotel anyway). We walked from plaza to plaza enjoying the cooler night air and quiet and all the visuals. The churches lit up from underneath, lovers sitting on the plaza benches making out, the old men passing the time on the same benches. We found a Mariachi band in one plaza who were hoping to get a last minute job. We gave them $1 and they sang a song for us. Now this is why we came to Mexico. As we neared the Goth rock session, we heard the music (or thumping really) over a block away so it was easy to find, plus it was next door to a funeral home (very appropriate for a goth jam). Turned out to be a Mexican goth band and an Aussie band (called Piss Christ, I know, very strange but that's goth for you). Polly knew the guy tending the bar (Carlos) She introduced us and mentioned we were looking
Men's bathroom
The dark floor hides the cucaraches for a place to live. Turns out he had some rooms to rent..... semi furnished. So we came back the next day to take a look.
So as the story goes we have rented a room in la casa next to the Funeral Casa La Paz. There is a front door on the street which is the entry into an open air courtyard with 7 rooms which open onto the courtyard. There are 2 bathrooms (1 for men and 1 for women). We went to the plastic store (Plastico Centro) and bought all our plastic needs for $5 (like a wastebasket, stool, fly swatter, bucket, etc). Our rent is $30 a week (what we were paying for one night at the hotel). It's extremely basic (did I say EXTEMELY? picture hostel and add in some privacy because we have our own room) but it fits our needs at the moment. They put in a fridge and we bought a fan. Our first 2 weeks rent went to buy a new mattress for the room (the old one was all foam and not comfortable, now we have a cheap one with springs). It is important for us to be located in this area so we had to make some adjustments. We could have had a modern apartment for $500 a month, but we would of had to commute to school everyday. We prefer to be able to walk to school and stroll through the shops and cafes of the historic area whenever we want. And since it's the "historic area" all the buildings are old, very old, and many of them have not been renovated.
Okay, Mike and I just took our first showers at our new digs. Ummmmmmmm, the cockroaches are big here.
Observations: 1. Once again no shower curtains! 2. Not very many smokers down here, we expected just about everyone to smoke. 3. At the Goth jam thing we did not smell any pot in the air. 4. As expected not much English is spoken here so we are being forced to speak Spanish. 5. This city is very safe. Lots of police presence (in cars, pickups, on bikes and and foot) and everyone seems friendly and helpful.
24 June 07 We have figured out how to solve the shower cockroach problem; take our showers before the sun goes down because the cucuraches come out after dark. We have met one of our neighbors today. His name is Jose Luis and he actually speaks some English! A very nice older gentleman who is a Charro. A Charro is (I think) a cross between an acrobatic Mexican cowboy with great costumes and a Mariachi singer. He lost his thumb doing some roping. He has helped us out alot by explainining the routine of the casa and showed us how to use the washing machine. Everyone has their own day they can wash clothes. I'm not sure what our day is, when the landlady was explaining it to me I had no clue what she was saying so I missed the whole conversation. We also have our own wake up service. First the church bells ring to call everyone to mass at 7:30 then it's a cannon on our roof which they set off at around 8:00AM, I guess to scare away the pigeons. It sure scared the first morning. They do this in the morning and at night.
Today was Sunday and as busy and crowded as yesterday was it was the exact opposite today. Just about everything was closed and the streets were deserted except for people coming and going to church. This afternoon we took our siesta (a very good customs) then took our daytime showers and went out in search of an open internet cafe (failed mission on that one) but we got in a good walk. We wandered in circles around our casa and stopped in for an icecream, Mike had rum raison and I had blackberry. We sat for a while in our plaza and watched the people stroll thru the area. The weather cools down nicely and it's really comfortable to take evening strolls.
26 June 07 Our Spanish teacher is Raquel and she speaks no English. We could not believe we were going to be taught Spanish without any English to help us along and right now the class consists of her jabbering away in Spanish and us looking stupid "huh?". She immediately started in with grammar. We expected something like, dog, cat, see Jane run, basic vocabulary, but no. We immediately get thrown into ser and estar. Which I guess is what Americanos make the most language mistakes on. Not us man, we've got this part down. We are sincerely hoping one day in the near future the jabbering will stop and we'll start understanding what she is saying. Some of my high school Spanish is coming back to me and helping out alot. We are in class monday thru friday from 10 until 1pm. So far our routine has settled into wake up with the cannons, walk over to our favorite breakfast place at our old Hotel and have fruit and yogurt with granola, walk to school. After school we walk towards home, take a siesta, out again for supper and any errands around 3 or 4, then in the evenng we try to get to an internet cafe on our evening stroll.
Today was my first day doing laundry here. I'm not sure if it is my day to do laundry but no one said anything. The washer won't fill up by itself so you have to use the bucket and put the water in manually. Makes you appreciate your clean clothes even more.
4 July 07 and a change of location... Guess it's Independence Day. The closest thing we're getting to America today is the hotdogs I fixed myself for lunch. Much has changed since my last update on 26 Jun. First of all we discovered the pigeon cannons aren't really cannons. They are small fireworks that shoot up about 10 feet in the air and explode, the pigeons take flight for about 15 seconds and come right back. The biggest change is our location. We are now in San Miguel de Allende, about 2 hours from San Luis de Potosi. We finally admitted to ourselves that we weren't really happy in San Luis and it was just a bit too much real Mexico for us gringos to handle. We had been down with "La Turista" for 4 days so we hadn't paid for our school yet and we had a minimal investment in our luxury accomodations; so we decided it was a good time to move on. That's the benefit of slow travel with no schedule, we could move and we did. We packed up and and got on a bus the next day for Querotero where we changed buses and headed to San Miguel. We had avoided even considering San Miguel because of it's reputation of having a large North American community and a more sanitzed version of Mexico. We crumbled and admitted to ourselves we needed that "version" at this point. There are lots of Spanish schools here and the place is very welcoming to travelers in that it is easy to get around and there are quite a few hotels and furnished accomodations available. San Luis Potosi is not set up for tourism or visitors and everything we tried to do or find was a struggle. I think one of our turning points (after we returned from one of our many bathroom runs, and I do mean run) was late on Friday night when an old guy was let into our courtyard (thank you un-named chica casa mate who opened the door to his incessant leaning on the buzzer and then walked back to her room). He was falldown drunk and tried to get into our room. As the room was vacant and open last weekend we think our room (and our mattress.....) was probably where he slept it off last weekend. That's something I really didn't want to know. We had to walk him out of casa and put him back on the street. So much for our feeling of security in the casa.
We had just been trying too hard to make everything work and it wasn't working. Why should we stay somewhere we weren't comfortable? As my brother-in-law, John, emailed to us... GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE! Thank you John for the words of wisdom.
So, here we sit in beautiful San Miguel, in our nice apartment and with a much better outlook. The details on that in the next journal...
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Um... really?
THanks for the detailed description of what "goth" is.... I had no clue! HAHAHAHA j/k Sounds like you guys are getting around okay. I think you've inspired me to go learn some Spanish.