Return is near

Home to the roost

 

Well, we will soon be departing our southern residence for our northern domicile.  We did not mind missing the record snowfall or the cold rains that followed.  But we must return the first week of April to complete the move to our new house and attend to related matters.

 

Important note:  Our telecommunications is likely not to have been completely installed.  We will be online irregularly and telephone communications will also probably be problematic (Our new house is in a nearly dead zone for cell phones.).  Please allow a few days for us to respond to emails and voice mails.  But do continue to send your messages; we will make every effort to respond.

 

 

Easter here is quite an affair.  The town has been crowded.  People have come and gone, mostly to be replaced by another group.  Many have two weeks vacation at this time.  It has been an experience about which we may write in the future.

 

Here is perhaps the last story from Mrs. T about this year's southern sojourn. 

 

 

Chickens

 

When you live in Bucerias there are three important sources of protein.  Beans are undoubtedly the primary local source of protein, and the most boring.  You can spice it up all you want to but after a while beans is beans if you know what I mean.  (I can eat beans and rice everyday. – dt)  The second source is seafood, but Dan does not care for seafood except for shrimp and I don't particularly enjoy digging out those little black parts.  Which brings us to chickens.

 

There are chickens everywhere here.  They definitely are free range.  If you thought much about what these chickens eat, the value you place in your KFC stock would decline significantly.  (AR, you must really come down for a visit.)  These chickens eat rocks, dirt, ants, bugs - just about anything small enough to fit in their beaks.  I have not discovered where they have their nests but I have seen them sleeping in the lower branches of trees.  Every so often you see a hen with a bunch of chicks following her around.  I can't think the survival rate for these chicks is very high considering all the dogs and cats that also free range around here.  But I have never seen the chicks attacked.

 

Perhaps the Roosters protect them.  There are many different kinds of Roosters here and they are quite colorful.  There is a Rooster right down our street who is obviously modern in that he operates on Daylight Saving Time.  He takes his duties quite seriously and begins crowing every morning about 4:45.  This Rooster has a very healthy pair of lungs whatever the size of his brain may be.  (Mexico adjusts time on 6 April; currently Jalisco is 2 hours behind Columbus.  dt)

 

Roosters play a significant part in the art scene here.  In fact Dan won a prize in a Dublin art show with one of his photos of a Bucerias rooster.  I actually sold a little painting in a Bucerias art show I made of a fighting cock.  It happened this way.  I took a picture of this rooster and using the photo as a model painted a small sketch of him in oils.  I did not particularly notice that this rooster had no comb.  At the local art show a cock fighting aficionado was quite excited and bought the sketch.  He told me you did not often see pictures of fighting cocks.  It seems the combs are cut off the fighting cocks so that their opponents can not attack them there because it causes a lot of bleeding (We wouldn't want that, now would we!).  (I think that cock fighting is actually illegal here but it goes on quite openly.)  Luis offered to take me to a cockfight but I graciously declined.  I guess my interest in the local culture does have its limits.  But then I don't go to boxing matches in the US either.

 

I have no reservations about eating the locally cooked chickens.  Almost every block has a little chicken place where they grill them over carbone fired in ½ of an oil barrel sliced lengthwise (or other creative contraptions – dt).  We have had a chicken 'family meal' every Sunday after church.  It is invariably delicious.  The family meal includes one whole chicken chopped into pieces, 2 servings of rice, 2 servings of cole slaw, 2 grilled onions, I bag of hot sauce, 4 tortillas, and 1 grilled green chili, all for 60 pesos (about $6).  The chicken is grilled with an orange sauce which I think contains paprika among other things.  One chicken is about 2 meals for Dan and me because the chickens are smaller and lack the breast augmentation we are used to in US birds.  You can buy larger birds from the chicken man but he explained to me they are really capons.  We do not know where the chickens come from.  There must be a chicken farm – probably several - somewhere because the birds we see wandering around are not nearly enough to supply the local consumption.  (We think over 1000 chickens are grilled in Bucerias everyday!  And there are several regular chicken chains that mostly do rotisserie style.  – dt) (Actually a lot of beef, pork, and turkey is also consumed here.  – dt)

 

Americans and Canadians have come a long way from their roots when most farm families had their own chickens as a cheap source of meat and eggs.  Many gringo children follow the chickens around not to mention the adults who paint and photograph them as if they were exotic.  At Easter time here they were selling little chicks that had been dyed different colors.  I can remember this from my childhood and I never quite understood it.  Dan reported he saw one of these dyed chicks with a little baseball cap glued to its head.  How odd! 

 

Today because of Easter we had Hot Cross Buns; they were yummy!! 

 

Happy Easter Everyone!

 

 

 

Dan and Rebecca

 

http://casa-de-terrible.blogspot.com/

 

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9151458@N07/

and

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9151458@N07/sets/72157603660415941/

 

 

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THE ADVENTURESS

Further adventures

 

Mrs. T has become somewhat adventuresome this year.   And she has become surprisingly involved in local activities.  She is doing a splendid job with her Spanish.  She presents some stories below.

 

We are observing the primaries from a distance.  Much of the US election system is a mystery to our Canadian friends, but some of them have a basic understanding of our favorite sport.

 

This year we will be here for Easter for the first time.  We understand that it is quite a holiday.  Many businesses are sprucing up with fresh paint and other decorations.  The city also seems to be doing some repairs, cleaning, etc.

 

 

 

La Nina

 

The weather has been quite changeable for the last month but it is warming up.  The water temperatures have been very cold for diving.  This is due to an ocean current called La Nina.  (I think it is like El Nino but going the other way.  (Just lower rather than higher temp, I believe.  dt)).  Water temperatures have been in the 60's.  The other day I saw a humpback whale swimming by wearing long red underwear.  The octopi are busy knitting leggings out of seaweed.  Just kidding about the red underwear (it was dark grey).  As you dive deeper or move near undersea reefs and rock, you often come to a place where the water temperature changes (a thermocline). The change is quite abrupt, like a wall.   And often it looks like a shimmering wall right in the middle of the ocean.  Many fish like the cooler water and if you are careful you can swim in the warm water and look across into the cold water where all the fish are gathered.  Last week we saw a sea turtle, a lot of fish and eels of different kinds, lobsters, crabs and shrimp.  Perhaps the most interesting thing to me, because I had never seen it here before, was a garden of sea anemones.

 

Anemones are attached to the rocks and come in all different shapes and colors.  Some look like feathery ferns of all different colors.  Some are shaped like graceful trees.  There are anemones with petals shaped like daisies.  Some have long tentacles that wave slowly in the current.  Anemones can sting but they are quite lovely and the garden we saw was a combination of many different shapes and colors.  At shallower depths the visibility was bad last week because it had been windy and the wind pushes the water over the ocean floor where it picks up sand.  The sand here shimmers with a golden color – perhaps from mica -  and when the visibility is low it is as if you are swimming through sunbeams.  When you dive deeper, at perhaps about 50 or 60 feet, the waters clear.  There were familiar fish and fish I had never seen.  When I got back home I looked through my big fish book trying to identify the new fish I had seen, while I remembered my dives,

 

Diving is not the only joy that comes to me from the sea.  I continue boogie boarding and I am improving, although the Wide World of Sports has yet to call.  This week there was a new and wonderful thing on our beach which I believe is called kite skiing  (Kitesurfing or kiteboarding – dt).  These guys have huge oval shaped kites which they fasten to a harness they wear and it pulls them across the waves on large slalom boards. (See:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitesurfing  dt)  Yesterday it was quite windy and there were at least a dozen of them darting back and forth.  It looked like fun to me.  The kites were of bright colorful patterns and it reminded me of a time I saw a whole field of balloons taking off.  But the kites moved much more quickly.  Perhaps it was more like a butterfly dance with humongous butterflies.  The magnificent frigate birds were observing at a discrete distance probably wondering what new creature was invading their airspace.

 

 

 

Espanol

 

My Spanish is continuing to improve slowly.  At a couple of parties I had some fairly involved conversations with the architect, Jorge, who lives in one of the condos in our place.  He is working on the construction of a large new shopping center just down the road.  Also I had several conversations with some giggly young ladies who were in another condo for about a week.  Their father said, "I spend a lot of money to send you to that English school so talk to this nice lady!"  We ended up playing Scrabble in English and eating popcorn.  The grandmother and aunts came over and we all had fun.  I am taking the second section of intermediate Spanish at the bilingual school.  Our teacher this session is a marine biologist who is doing a population survey on sharks!  I found this interesting but did not offer to help.  When I first learned he was a marine biologist I asked him if he dove.  He replied that he did not want to dive with his subjects.  I can see that!  When he showed us the three books we were going to use in our class the main one was an ESL book.  I was just ready to open my big mouth and say no that is the wrong book, thinking English as a Second Language when light dawned.  This book is Espanol de Segundo Lengua.  Still my memory is all filled up with various things and it takes a bit longer to shove a few of them out of the way to make room for new Spanish words.  Alas, my class with the waiters was canceled when no students showed up.  Que Lastima!!

 

 

Supporting the Mexican Economy

 

While living here we feel a moral obligation to support the local economy.  To that end (as well as for aesthetic reasons) I bought a large tin angel.  I wanted to bring her home to put in my garden in Ohio but Dan demurred.  It is true she is about three feet tall and including her wings has a significant girth so perhaps Dan is right.  At any rate she sits on our patio here showering us with blessings and protecting us from evil influences.  I also finally found a green peacock (pajaro real verde) water jar that goes with our kitchen colors of green and yellow.  When I was wandering through the mercado one day I saw a little silver Kokopelli pendant that I really liked.  It seemed a little high and I did not buy it.  The vendor cleverly told Dan that I really liked it and guess what I got for Valentine's Day.  Kokopelli is the Indian flute player that you see dancing through a lot of motifs here and in the American Southwest.  Some historians believe that he might have been a trader who carried goods from the Aztec empire north since the symbol is seen in both cultures.  I always liked Kokopelli because he seems to be enjoying himself so much.  (He should be as he is a fertility deity often pictured with a large organ.  dt)  In case you might be thinking it is unpatriotic for us to support the Mexican economy when the American economy is not exactly thriving, remember we are probably doing wonders for the balance of trade.  Hasta Luego.

 

 

 

Here are some new pictures, including some of the items Mrs. T. mentioned.

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9151458@N07/

 

Note on photos:  If you click on Collections or Sets you can view pictures from our past adventures.

 

 

 

Rebecca and Dan

 

http://casa-de-terrible.blogspot.com/

 

 

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