August 2004
FIRST NIGHT AS AN EX-PAT

OK, I’m sitting here tonight on a back street, low-rent apartment in Puerto Vallarta. It’s thundering and lightning outside and the rain comes down in a gentle torrent. There are about three different musical interpretations of this evening up and down the street. A truck drives slowly by announcing over a bullhorn the availability of pineapples, apples and tuna, cactus apples. Sounds like a theme. I’d go out and buy some but I’m very shy right now about my presence here and my Spanish is almost non-existent.

This is a first (last?) step in my master plan to move here. I’m not sure it’s a wise decision. I have a good business and a nice house up in California. Sarah, my wife, isn’t totally sold on the idea, yet, but she’s tolerant of my whims. I’m here without her on this trip.

So now what?

I’ve paid the rent for a year in advance and am hoping that I will find self-support within that time. The last few days have been hard. I flew down specifically to find a place to live here. Going back and forth in my mind about the wisdom of this action, I’ve spent 3 sleepless nights, living mostly on coffee and rum and coke. Barb, the real-estate person, tried to not so subtly hint that if the only vitamin C I was getting was from the limes in my rum, perhaps I should reconsider my diet. She’s right, of course, but these are traumatic times requiring extraordinary psycho-culinary support. No, I don’t go for that line, either, but it sounded good for a second or two coming out of these fingers…

Barb calls this apartment “funky Mexican chic.” You can tell by the description that I’m not up in the condos at the beach or in Gringo Gulch or Conchos Chinos. It’s about 7 blocks from Los Muertos Beach, up the river Cuale, right at the point where it splits to go around the upper island. The “other” side of the River from Gringo Gulch.

I suppose that by Mexican standards I paid too much for this place, about $500 a month, but by my standards, or almost any U.S. standards, it’s a deal. I NEVER trust real estate agents, but I like Barb. If she’s making a hustle out of this, it’s not a greedy one. She’s pretty easy to deal with. Certainly rough and tough around the edges, but when she lets her hair down, she’s a sweetheart. She acts as if she’s stuck here in PV, but I’m not going for that one. She told a story about having to drive in NYC in rush hour in the Holland tunnel as if that was some type of badge of valor. I’ll accept that.

The apartment is the second story of a house. The first floor is occupied by the owner, a man and his family. He’s a jeweler and works out of the house. My apartment has two bedrooms and each room is painted in a different gaudy color. The roof of the building is ours to use. If I buy a house here, I want a roof like this. The house is on Aquiles Serdan, a small street that seems like it was added to the city as an afterthought… and squeezed in.

So today I bought cleaning supplies at the closest supermarket, Rizo’s. I guess that’s what you’re supposed to do when you move into a new place. The first few days of a move, especially one this drastic, are a little confusing.

I was sitting in Cardenas Park this morning, kind of holding my head, and a local street person came up and asked me for 5 pesos, and then, after I gave it to him, offered me some advice: “Don’t worry so much about the future. You think too much.” This guy had me pegged even before the 5 pesos.

So, if you’ve read this far, you’re probably asking, “Why?”

The answer to this question is probably the same as for everyone else who’s left their country of birth for a totally different culture: I really don’t fit in where I was born. My values are different, my goals are different, and my methods of dealing with people are different.

Personally, I despise the government of the US and the culture that supports it. I hate malls. I hate Disneyland. I hate Bush and the Christian psycho-babble that he and his cohorts spout. The Bushes of the world are too greedy, too dishonest, and too moralistic (at least with other people’s lives and by my standards). The hypocrisy is up to the high-shit level and these people are murdering thousands of innocents in their war for oil and wealth. I can’t see supporting these activities with my taxes or my presence.

But these political reasons are secondary, at best. Mexico may or may not be better than where I’m from; I don’t know yet, but I do like the people and the climate here.

It’s easy to see some of the level of anger in me behind this move. I’m pretty transparent.

I so often wish that some of the Bush supporters I’ve met here could say something that would convince me of some type of integrity on the part of their Party, but all they ever do is flip out and get outraged and condemn me for being unpatriotic, as if I considered patriotism to be a virtue. I can’t see blind obedience to any country, much less to any religion or ideology as a virtue. It’s more like a handicap for those too dumb or lazy to think for themselves. This is rather blunt, I realize. The longer I stay in Mexico, the less ideology means to me.

I was so thrilled as a child to read the Bill of Rights of the US, and then I was so equally disappointed when I discovered that it didn’t apply to all segments of that society, especially mine. Now there’s not even any pretense of the US government supporting the Bill of Rights. It doesn’t exist any longer except in the Library and if you go to the official US Government web page on the Bill of Rights, you’ll see it is listed as an “Historical Document.”

Perhaps that drunk in the park this morning was wrong. Maybe I don’t worry about the future too much. Maybe I mourn a past too much. You can’t really put too much stock in the words of a drunk.

September, 2005
The Expat… Buying a House, part 2

It’s been almost a month since I wrote the last trip report on house buying here in Puerto Vallarta. I wrote it shortly before I had to leave to go back to California for a few weeks. In the couple of days before I left, we finally obtained the building permit (cost 2500 pesos instead of 500—no explanation). That was fine, tho. It’s still cheap by comparison to California.

On the day I was to leave, a ton of rebar was delivered and a dump truck pulled up and dumped a load of sand and gravel on the street in front of the house. I was a little worried about this because a few nights earlier the street was a river with enough water to wake board on.

This is where I left for 3 weeks. I left everything in Guy’s hands. “Trust is a way of knowing,” as the old saying goes. I had little choice. With Guy, I ran with my instincts, instincts that said he was extremely intelligent and capable and one of the good guys. So far, the instincts are right. When I came back down to PV last night, a lot of changes had taken place at the ol’ homestead. Guy was at the house when I arrived, and so was Gregorio, the maestro, lead man for the sometimes 2, 3 or 4 man work crew. I could tell from their faces, even before I looked at the work, that things were going well. The smiles were real.

All of the sand and gravel on the street was gone, carried up 2 and 3 floors to the work areas. A mass of bricks for the roof wall are also up top. The rebar was all used up and the whole framing structure for the third floor roof was poured and in place. Damn, it was starting to look like the house I had dreamed of when I described to the architect what I wanted to do. The first stairway is in place and usable but not finished yet because of the heavy traffic that needed to go up it for the roof work.

Today, my second day back in PV, more rebar and the wooden framing for pouring the top floor/roof are being delivered. Heavy material delivery in PV is fast and efficient. We chose (actually, Guy and Georgio chose…) a materials place out past Pitillal for its price and fast delivery. We’ll be using a cement delivery truck with a tall extension for pumping the cement up and over the electric lines to the forms on the top floor. High-tech combined with manual labor on this project. I usually just use manual labor in my work, so this combination is amazing to me.

I’ve contracted only for the rough work in this project. I’ll still need to find masonry finishers and tile setters to complete things. I’ll also need to hook up with some metal workers for windows, doors and railings. I’m starting to wonder if the house will ever be ‘finished.’ With every project stage completion, I think of new things to do.

In PV residential areas, you can build up only 3 floors, but you can make the roof of the third floor a terrace, which I am doing. Some of the neighbors are a little worried about a building this tall (most buildings in the area are two stories). But they seem to be not more upset than anyone is when something new happens in their living space.

In this part of Mexico, house walls are shared and you are sometimes more than neighbors with those living next door. In this case, all of the people living on the south and east sides of this house are closely related. It’s one big family. The west side of the house is the street and the river and the north side is the house of the woman who runs the hot dog stand across the street at night.

The house originally had windows on the north side but they are plugged up because you need permission from the neighbor adjacent to put in windows if they overlook their living space. Apparently Sergio, the original owner of this house, didn’t get that type of permission and had to plug the windows at some point. This seems like a good law since I would want my privacy protected if someone started building a high building overlooking my place.

On my last day here in PV on the last trip, I found out that I had some type of legal concession right to the land on the river bank across the street from my house. All of the other neighbors have little food stands there. I was thinking of a bagel stand since I can’t find any good bagels in town… My sister-in-law makes bagels commercially and I’m going to visit her next month to try and steal some trade secrets.

My name is Rick, but that doesn’t translate well into Spanish so I end being called Ricardo or Rikii (sp?): “Ricardo’s Bagels” or “Bagels Ricardo” If you see a small bagel stand alongside the Cuale River with one of these names on it, that’s me. I’ll have to be in disguise, tho, since I can’t legally work a bagel stand here. I can own it, but half the fun of it would be working it.

This reminds me of another place I was looking at to buy here in PV: a beautiful 8 room mansion in a really lousy location out by the town cemetery. The only use I could possibly see for this place was as a brothel. I always had dreamed of being a pimp, but major parts of my head and/or heart always disagreed with the concept. Other parts of me (not my head) liked it… One night at the CyC bar down on the beach, after a bit of talking, etc, I think I remember a friend here, Juliana, offering to be the Madame if I bought the place.

August 2005
The Expat a Year Later… Buying a House

A lot has happened since I wrote the last two ex-pat trip reports. It’s a year later now and I’ve made the jump and bought a house in PV.

Some of the trip reports that I had filed in this last year were lost when the VallartaScene board where I was publishing these reports was hacked in the spring, and so many things have changed for me, mentally and physically, that playing catch-up is almost an impossible task.

I had rented an apartment for a year to see how I would adapt to life in Mexico and to see if this was the place I really wanted to be. It is.

I’ve flown back and forth from San Francisco to PV at least once a month during this last year because I still had to work up in California. I felt a lot like some of the kids I’ve met here who cross the Northern border for a few months to a year to make enough money to get by down here for an equal amount of time. I admire their persistence and ingenuity and bravery for heading off to a foreign country to earn extra money for their families.

I get lonely when I’m down here alone, away from my family for even a couple of weeks, so I can imagine how they must feel being away in a strange land for months.

A little background: I’m 60 years old. I’ve rarely had a ‘normal’ job, mostly being self-employed as a treasure hunter, smuggler, graphic artist or ethnobotanist for at least 40 of those 60 years.

I probably won’t get US Social Security because I’ve never really been in the system. I’ve lived most of my years in the US but did not really participate in it. In some ways, this makes it easier to move to a different culture: If you don’t feel like you’re part of your birth culture, it’s a lot easier to fit into others, or at least to know how to navigate them.

I like Mexico. The people here are a lot like the people I was raised with in San Jose, California. I lived in the East Side of San Jose, which was back then the Mexican ghetto of the area. All of my neighbors and school friends were Mexican. I never learned how to speak Spanish, tho, because all of my friends from back then didn’t want to speak their parent’s language. They were ashamed of their culture. God, I see so many parallels between them then and me now.

It’s been about 3 years since I knew I was leaving the US. I became so totally disillusioned and disappointed in the Iraq war and with the corruption of the US government and the cowardly behavior of the citizens who went along with every insane proclamation of their President, that I couldn’t stand being called an “American” any longer. I know this is an extreme reaction and not all that common, and everyone has their own reasons for emigrating, and this is one of mine. Emigration is not a simple matter if it’s voluntary. I have many reasons for leaving. I have many reasons for arriving.

I also like the weather, the food, the land and sea and the people. There’s a spirit here that resonates with mine. Part of this is because I have always been on the outskirts of the law and part of it is because I share a lot of the same basic values and world-view. The major value I don’t share with a large number of people here is religion, but I do share some of the spirituality behind that religion. On a shallow level, I love the churches with the candles, sculptures and stained glass windows. On a political level, the only religious leaders I’ve ever seen that had any balls (or guts) were certain Catholic priests and nuns who stood up to the injustices they saw. Many gave their lives. Most preachers of other religions just promote the status quo.

So, that was the background.

For a year (off and on) I lived in a rented apartment on Aquiles Serdan in Old Town Vallarta. Friends came down from the States to visit. I made friends here. I began thinking of selling my house up in California and my business and setting up a permanent home here. With each trip it became harder and harder to get on that plane heading back to the States. I was getting very depressed when I was there. It was obvious to my family and friends that my life was over up north. All I thought about was what I was doing down here.

So I started looking for a place to buy.

Everything is for sale here in PV so finding places wasn’t hard. Finding a place that I could afford and liked was.

Lots of people are buying places, fixing them up, and selling them to gringos for grossly exaggerated prices. Any place that has stucco on the whole of the outside of the building and a cutesy “Casa —“ plague on the doorway probably fits into this category. Gringos like smooth stucco, one contractor told me, “It fits their fantasy of what Mexico should look like.”

The only requirements I had for a house was that it either be near the beach or the river. And I wanted a multiple story house because I had fallen in love with the roof-top terrace on the place I had rented. The multiple story requirement is easy in Mexico because most city houses are built that way or at least have rebar columns sticking up above the roof in anticipation of skyward movement.

The requirement of being near water is more difficult (expensive). The place I chose was on the River Cuale, but upstream in Colonia Buenos Aires. I had been told to avoid that area because of the crack heads, etc, but I usually take those types of warnings with a grain of salt. I’ve been called derogatory terms like that many times, myself, and I know what it means: People who are not friendly to or similar to the ‘normal’ people of the area. As it turned out, I haven’t seen any more dopers here than in other parts of town. Somebody must have been hallucinating.

I bought a fixer-upper for $50k (US) from a guy who was getting divorced and kept putting the house on and off the market. There seems to be a tendency here in PV for the owners of houses to not be sure that what they are offered is enough. They’ve been ripped off by gringos and landlords for too long to trust any offer and they are afraid of being ripped off again.

Finally Sergio signed the papers. I don’t know if I ripped him off or not. I just didn’t have more to spend and his was the only house in my price range with enough of the features that I wanted.

The things wrong with the house are that it’s on a main street (traffic sounds) and it had a leaking roof and a second story that wasn’t completed. Sergio was in the midst of remodeling the house so there were a lot of unfinished “concepts” but I had my own concepts that would overshadow his.

The bottom floor is livable, but I wanted height. I had to buy furniture and appliances and spent a couple of weeks running around comparing prices and finally settled on the place that seems to advertise the most, Mueblas Blanquita (a note from the future: this store does not honor guarantees without a great deal of force being applied), on the street behind Leys Grocery Store. They have a good selection of appliances and their cash price is lower than even WalMart, plus they deliver immediately for free.

Did I forget to mention that I don’t speak Spanish? This is a handicap, for sure. I’m learning, but things are difficult at this stage.

I decided to start immediately on adding a third floor to the house and I hired Guy the Orchid Guy to be my contractor and translator. So far, it’s working out great. He’s gotten the architect to draw up plans and we’re supposed to pick the building permit up on Monday. We were supposed to pick it up last Friday, but that didn’t work out… Hope Monday works.

The architect that Guy hired also happens to work in the building permit office, so that was a plus. The architect charged 4000 pesos for the plans and the permit, itself, was 500 pesos. I’m putting prices in here just to show approximate costs. This project isn’t finished yet, so maybe if things work out well, people may be able to get some help from it and if they don’t work out well, maybe they’ll get even more help.

The cost that I hadn’t expected in buying a house was almost $7000 (US) for the notary and bank charges. This still seems excessive to me and if I buy something else here, I’d look for a different notary and bank. I still don’t have the paperwork from the bank for the place, but most people say that this just takes time. Seems like a long time, tho. It’s been 4 months since I paid for the place. Maybe this is where I get screwed. Or maybe it’s just where I slip into gringo impatience.

Guy has also arranged for the workers for the construction and they’ll start as soon as the permit is in our hands. He also priced materials and will arrange for delivery as needed. I feel a tad like a babe in the woods here, but with my alien inclinations, I have no choice but to trust someone local. Guy has also helped in getting the phone installed and in getting the electricity and water changed over to my name. There were technicalities like the wrong address on the electric company’s bill that had to be fixed. Patience has worked well with problems so far.

I hope I’m not jumping the gun here.

I intend to continue these reports on a regular basis as things progress.