Oh Mexico...

Well, the days and weeks drag on with no noticeable change to our situation.  We're still unemployed, which is creating a bit of anxiety for both of us.  Luke was supposed to have an interview on Tuesday with a local non-profit - exactly the kind of work he wanted to be doing.  They cancelled the interview at the last minute, though, because of scheduling issues.  Supposedly they will reschedule at some point.  It's a bit frustrating, because we were both hoping that would turn into at least a part-time position.  Now, who knows when he'll be able to meet with them.

I continue my search for piano students.  Yesterday was a slightly more fruitful day than most.  I posted some ads around the park that's close to our house - Parque Espana.  I also went back to a bookstore I had found over the weekend, because I had noticed that they have a piano in their cafe.  I asked about coming in to play sometime and they said "Sure!  Whenever you want!".  So.  That means I just have to find some piano music and a piano to practice on.  I will hopefully have at least one of those things by the end of the week.

We're both having moments of wishing we were back home, which we try not to dwell on.  We want to do everything we can to make this work, since we put so much time and effort into getting here in the first place.  It's hard sometimes, though.

So, to counter our frustrations and feelings of discouragement, I've come up with a list of comforting and wonderful things from the past week (and one for the coming week).

1. We got to see our good friends, Claudia & Humberto, while they were in town for a wedding.

2. We spent a wonderful Saturday with Humberto's parents, who took us to "El Bazaar del Sabado" - a huge market featuring local arts and crafts.

3. A 3-day weekend!  Monday was a holiday, commemorating Benito Juarez (Mexico's 26th president and the first full-blooded indigenous Mexican president).  Mexico City on a normal day (weekday or weekend) is busy and very noisy.  Mexico City on a holiday weekend (when everyone apparently goes to Acapulco) is heavenly.  The roads are empty, you can take a quiet walk along virtually any street - I'm a big fan.  Anyone know when the next national holiday is?

4. I signed up on meetup.com, for an expat group that's meeting next week.  I'm looking forward to meeting some more English-speakers and, hopefully, making at least one new friend!

5. Luke came back from his Spanish lesson the other night with 2 white roses for me :-)  That spells happiness, no matter which part of the world you're in.

So, off I go for another day of searching and exploring...

(P.S. I promise we'll have some pictures to post soon.)

An apartment, some tortillas, and a maid

I've been putting off writing this new post for awhile.  Not sure why, exactly... I guess it just seems like a lot of work, in addition to the seemingly thousands of other things that need to be done when you're building a new life in a new country.  Then I realized, the longer I put it off, the more work it will be!  So, here it goes...

Last I wrote, we were still looking for an apartment.  We checked out some ads we found online, and went to see a one-bedroom furnished apartment in La Condesa (a nice, "hip" neighborhood with lots of good restaurants and a sizeable expat community).  We liked the apartment and, as we weren't coming across anything else furnished and in our price range, we decided to take it!  We tried our hand at some good, old-fashioned Mexican negotiating and managed to get the price down to a much more manageable number.  One week ago today, we were moved in!  It's a small apartment - probably about half the size of our apartment in Silver Spring (for those of you who saw it).  It's fully furnished, including a few kitchen supplies, towels and bedsheets.  It's really pretty nice - exactly the right size for us.

One of our first tasks in the new place was to fill the fridge.  There are 2 supermarkets about equidistant from the apartment - about a 10 minute walk.  We also - just a few days ago - found a "tortilleria", a tortilla stand selling freshly-made tortillas.  We were very excited (Luke, especially) to have our first batch of fresh, still-warm corn tortillas - and at only 10 pesos/kilo (that's less than a dollar)!  We've discovered there are all sorts of things you can do with a couple of tortillas... melt cheese inside, put refried beans and veggies (and cheese!) inside, and - my personal favorite, just discovered this morning - put a spoonful of vanilla yogurt and some fresh fruit inside.  Best. Breakfast. Ever.

Last Saturday, we had the luxury of spending the afternoon with a Mexican-American couple who live in the northern suburbs of Mexico City.  They're the parents of a former WOLA intern who Luke worked with.  They invited us to their place for lunch (absolutely delicious) and conversation (in English!!), and then gave us a ride home.  On the way back, we stopped at (of all places) Costco.  Who would have thought, the first time either Luke or I would ever see the inside of a Costco - the picture of gigantic American quantities and consumerism - would be in Mexico City?  Not I.  But, there we were.  And, as we had Costco members with us, we bought stuff!  The most important supplies we realized we needed were cleaning supplies.  You see, I had written those things off my list of things to buy, because we get a maid with our apartment.

Okay, this requires a whole new paragraph.  We knew we were getting a maid with our apartment.  It's really pretty uncommon to not have a maid around here.  So I figured she comes with her bucket of supplies once a week, cleans up our mess, and that's that!  Well, I was only partly right.  She definitely does come clean up our mess once a week - something that I really really appreciate, but also feel a little self-conscious about.  However, she doesn't bring her bucket of supplies.  She counts on using our bucket of supplies.  And as our Costco-member friends informed us, "she'll use whatever she finds".  So, if all we have is dish soap and a sponge, she may very well use that to clean the whole apartment (and our clothes)!  So, we stocked up, and on Monday evening when we returned home from a day of gallivanting, the apartment was spotless and 2 weeks worth of dirty laundry was freshly washed.  Pretty amazing for 2 Americans (well, one Canadian) who's mothers taught them how to do their own laundry and clean up after themselves.  And, believe me when I tell you, my clothes have never been so clean.  Ever.

For this week, our biggest task has been job searching.  Luke had an interview at a new high school in Santa Fe (pretty far west from where we live), for an English-teaching job.  They basically offered him the job on the spot, but he wouldn't start until August.  Big disadvantage, as we're definitely going to need some income before then.  But, it's a possibility.  He's got another interview at a non-profit this coming Monday.  I have been working on creating an ad that I can post around town and hand out at schools in the area.  I also posted it on Craigslist and, just this morning, received a response from someone!

So, little by little, we're figuring stuff out.  The Spanish is coming - Luke has started a Spanish/English exchange with someone, and today has his first real Spanish "class".  I'm starting to think I might like to join a Spanish conversation group, to help me fill in the gaps in my speaking ability.  We're making this work - so far, without any major bumps in the road...

The first week...

This first week has gone by quickly in some ways, slowly in other ways.  We've done a fair amount of exploring various neighborhoods, trying a couple of restaurants, and just familiarizing ourselves with everything (and practicing our Spanish, of course!).  Today we moved to a super-cheap hotel, to give our hosts some space again and, admittedly, to give ourselves some space of our own where we don't feel dependent on anyone.  We'll stay here until we find an apartment, which will hopefully be sometime this week.  We looked at a couple of apartments this weekend, with a realtor who was recommended to us.  They were both quite nice, but were bigger than we need and at the top of our price range.  So, the realtor is going to contact us tomorrow with some more options.  We've also done some looking on our own - on Craigslist (who knew they had that here?) and another website called metroscubicos.  Hopefully we'll also be able to take a look at a couple of those places this week.

All in all, it seems like the vacation is over.  Now it's time for us to work seriously towards building a foundation here.  Luke is planning to look for somewhere he can take some Spanish classes, and I've got a meeting with a pianist/piano teacher who will hopefully be able to direct me to possible employers.  I've passed a couple of small music schools in our exploring over the last couple of days, so I may also stop by those places to see if I can make some connections.

Our Sunday adventure: a visit to the Bosque de Chapultepec (Chapultepec Forest, actually just a big park).  We walked (much longer than it looked on the map) to the Metro, found the right train, and got off at the Bosque.  Our guide book told us that Sunday is a busy day there - lots of families go to spend the day, picnic, and enjoy themselves.  There are LOTS of vendors set up inside and outside the park, clowns, people dressed up as Barney or Winnie the Pooh or Elmo.  Kind of ridiculous in some ways, but it's clearly a popular place for Mexicans.  Kids can get their faces painted and you can buy all sorts of candy and toys.  We wandered around the park a little and ended up at the Zoo, which is part of the park.  Admission was free, so we went in to check it out.  I was interested to see what it would be like - my only other zoo experience outside of the U.S. was in Havana, Cuba, where the zoo (and the animals within it) was in pretty bad shape.  The zoo we saw today was definitely in better shape than that one, although I'm fairly sure that if we were in the U.S., animal rights activists would be pretty unsatisfied with the conditions of the enclosures.  (Although, do animal rights activists even like zoos at all?  I don't know.)  Anyway, after the zoo, we made our way back out through throngs of people and vendors, and set out to find something to eat.  The neighborhood directly north of the Bosque is called Polanco - one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Mexico City.  Once we were inside Polanco, we definitely felt that we were in a different place.  The streets are nicer and cleaner, there are fewer street-side establishments and more nice restaurants and stores.  As we were looking for a place to eat, we got caught in a downpour and took shelter outside the entrance to the Hard Rock Cafe.  So there you are.  Definitely not the Mexico City we had seen over the past week.  We found a relatively affordable restaurant which offered supposedly "authentic" Mexican food, so I ordered a quesadilla... I wanted to see how they make them here.  Turns out, they're exactly the same as they are in the U.S.  Lesson learned.

And now, here we are, back at the hotel.  Hopefully there will be lots to report (good things, of course) in the coming week...

Estamos aqui!

Well, here we are!  We arrived safely, albeit exhausted, in Mexico City on Monday night.  But, as we never like to let an entire trip go without at least one adventure, we left one of Luke's suitcases in the taxi.  (Luckily, we were able to retrieve it at the airport on Tuesday.)  We just wanted to make sure we had at least one good story to tell right away :-)

For these first few days, we're staying with relatives of some friends of ours from D.C. - Jessica and Memo, their little 2-year-old son Diego, and Jessica's mother, Jay.  They have been wonderful - welcoming, helpful, and very patient.  We've been fed very well with delicious food - fresh fruits, lots of bread, cheese, and (of course) tortillas, among other things.  They've set up a mini "suite" for us, so we can have our own space while we stay here - a nice place for us to relax at the end of the day.  They've also taken us on a short driving tour of a couple of neighborhoods we're interested in living in, and have already set up some appointments for us to look at a few apartments this weekend.

Yesterday, Jay took us to see the Palacio Nacional (the Mexican equivalent of the White House).  We had our first adventure on the Metro (which is very busy, but very efficient and clean!), as we made our way to the center of the city.  El Palacio, along with La Catedral and a number of other governmental office buildings, surround an open plaza filled with people, pigeons and a few street vendors.  It was the most beautiful sight I've ever seen.  The buildings (especially La Catedral) are very old and very ornate - as soon as I saw them I could see all the history in them.  It's hard, and probably futile, to try to describe it all.  We didn't have our cameras with us yesterday, but I'm sure we'll return so that we can post some pictures.

There is much to tell, although we have only been here for a couple of days.  The sights and sounds of a brand new place are exciting and fascinating.  I won't write them all down today, but here's one sight for you to imagine:

Right outside the front of the house where we're staying, an older Mexican woman sets up her own little "restaurant" every day.  A table with a frying pan for making fresh tortillas, and lots of toppings.  A big green tarp, strung from surrounding trees, keeps the woman and the food in the shade.  Throughout the day (especially around 1 or 2 o'clock in the afternoon, when most Mexicans eat their main meal of the day), people stop to sit and have a freshly-prepared tortilla.  Although we've been advised to avoid eating food from street vendors like this, it's fascinating for me to see - something I'm not used to seeing in the U.S., but that is so much a part of this city.