A Broad Abroad

HOW TO Live in Mexico

I am still learning How To live in Mexico. If you ever choose to pack up the kids and head out to a foreign land, I’ve picked up a few tips to help make your transition easier.

HOW TO:

-Take advantage of the heat. This is the kinda hot that makes Africa look downright balmy. When we first arrived in late July, we would walk from the bank to the car looking as if we had gone through the car wash. The humid air attacked us and covered us in sweat. We spent entire afternoons in the air-conditioned McDonalds, downing as many soft serve ice cream cones as possible as the twins entertained themselves on the behemoth Playland.

The upside of the punishing heat, however, is that recently purchased eggs can be cooked by the time you cross the parking lot. Saves time.

-Never buy another alarm clock: Nature’s own alarm clock makes its home on our bedroom wall, right above our bed: The Gecko. For her size, ours, who we will call Consuela, has an astonishingly loud voice. She makes a beeping sound, much like an alarm clock, at 2, 3:45 and 4:17 a.m. When she dies, her pal, Armando, replaces her on the underside of the ceiling fan. One gecko sat in the same position on the bathroom ceiling for a week before we realized it was dead. I am happy to report that the geckos do eat some of the mosquitoes in our house, but, unfortunately, poop them out in tiny pellets everywhere. Marina recently approached me with a small handful of the dark dots. In slow motion, I yelled, “Marina, Nooooooo,” as she popped the pellets into her mouth. She smiled and held out the bag of Cocoa Puffs. “Want some, Mom?”

Marina crept out of her bedroom one evening in a tense whisper. “Mom, there’s something in the bedroom.” “What is it,” I asked, reacting to her worried voice. “I’m not sure. I think it’s a leopard.” Fully alert now, I raced towards the bedroom. “Oh, I mean a lizard,” she said smiling.

Of course the gecko in the bedroom was nothing compared to the scorpion in the kitchen. But that’s another story.


Drive like a madman: It took me three weeks to get up the nerve to get behind the wheel and drive to the supermarket four blocks away. The roads have no lines, arrows are painted on the asphalt facing the wrong directions and police officers regularly wave rows of SUVs and jalopies through red lights. Street signs actually say the names of a street you will see in a mile or so if you keep heading in the same general direction. If you want to know what street you’re on, guess. Occasionally, you might be lucky enough to find a faded street sign, bent over and facing the wrong direction. It’s like driving in the Wild, Wild West, but not nearly as safe.

Nobody in Cancun refers to North, South, East or West. Every place is referenced by the mega-store landmarks. “I live between the Walmart and the central McDonalds.” “Oh, really! You’re right near me. I’m between the stadium and Costco.” Once, when trying to find a birthday party, I made the mistake of asking someone for the cross streets. The stranger looked at me as if I was speaking a foreign language (which I was) but the look was more exaggerated than usual.

Impress your new boss: Our first weeks in Cancun were a mélange of fevers for the kids, late nights, concerns about visas and worries about finding a place to live. Benji’s reoccurring fever of 104 added serious stress. Those weeks in July were so hot, that we sought the air-conditioning of our principal’s home as refuge for our sick boy. We had only met her a few days before when we asked to sleep at her house while he was sick. Very kindly, she obliged, and offered him a nice, cool glass of grape juice. Now, all of you who have small children know where this is going. That’s right. Benji gulped it down, and it shot right back out…like a purple version of “The Excorcist”. Twice. On the carpet. Needless to say, we now know how to make a good first impression.

Get cheap furniture: Surprisingly, everything in Cancun is expensive…except for limes and tomatoes. Most expensive, however, is furniture. So we bought cheap stuff, and the rest was provided by the school. “I can’t believe my nightstand is an overturned garbage basket,” I whined. Steve’s reply: “Mine’s a cardboard box.” He was right. Mine was much nicer.

Have a good hair day: The humidity does a number on my hair. I got it cut short before heading to Mexico. But, once in Cancun, my cute, Meg Ryan Do suddenly looked more like Ronald Mcdonald meets Don King. Fortunately, I can get a haircut at the local Walmart. Until then, I’ll just keep using my Mexican shampoo, which has the unfortunate name, “Placenta”. I couldn’t possibly be making that up.

Learn to speak Spanish:
-While filling out a Spanish marital status form, I tried to write “married”, and wrote cansado instead of casado. Which means “Tired”, not “Married”. But I suppose it really is the same thing.

-Renting an apartment was no easy feat. What Steve thought he understood was, “How long will it take you to look at the rental.” Steve replied “About 30 minutes.” After the landlord’s laughter died down, Steve realized that the owner had asked, “For how long will you want to rent?”

-I have learned to be very specific when describing things. Ensalada, the word for salad, means mixed vegetables. I came home to find the cook had stewed the cucumbers. Another time, believing I knew a word, I told her to pierce the potatoes before putting them in the microwave. She laughed, when I told her to “hole punch” them.

-I’m getting really good at charades. I didn’t know the word for “empty” or “box”. My interaction with the grocery clerk went something like this: “I am in need of a thing (pantomiming a square box).” He nods in understanding. “But I am in need of a thing (mime again) that is the opposite of full” Yes, I know how ridiculous this looked. But I got the empty box!

-I announced at the teacher’s meeting, “I want to learn the language, so please speak to me in simple Spanish.” The word for simple is sencio. I accidentally said sucio, which means, “Please speak to me in dirty Spanish.”

-On parent/teacher day, all the teachers sat on the stage in the auditorium, waiting our turns to introduce ourselves to the parents. As we waited, one of my Mexican colleagues asked me in Spanish how I was enjoying Cancun. Loudly, I replied, “I like it, but I’m very hot.” A plume of laughter erupted from my new peers. Apparently, I had said, “I like it, but I’m very horny.”

Hope you all heed my lessons.

A BROAD ABROAD
Get Ready….

By the time you read this, I will be relaxing on a white sand beach, margarita in hand, watching the twins splash in and out of Cancun’s turquoise seas.

Okay, that is optimistic. First, we have to find a house, activate our cell phones, buy a car, and nurse Benji through his 105.1 degree fever.

In a weak moment, I agreed to pack up the house and the kids and move to another country. The thought of embarking on this huge adventure was both exciting and daunting. Preparing to leave was an adventure in itself:

To Do List:
Get Jobs:
So here are our criteria. We needed a foreign school where I could teach high school English and drama and Steve could teach math and science. Additionally, we hoped to find jobs in a Spanish speaking country, where our kids could be in a bilingual program at our school. Oh, and a great beach would be nice, too.

So, I started calling schools, mostly in Mexico, using my very bad Spanish. I had learned to say, “Hello, I am an American teacher. I would like to teach at your school. What is the principal’s email?” I learned these phrases by typing then into Google Translate. So what I may have been saying, judging by the stunned silences on the other end of the line, was, “Hello. I am an American taxidermist. I would like anchovies at your House of Repute. Is your chief an email?”
After about ten of these calls with little success, I phoned the International American School of Cancun, where my conversation went as follows:

“Hello. I am an American teach---.” Immediately, the voice on the other end cut in, “One moment, I’ll connect you to the principal.”

In a split second, the phone connected to an American woman’s voice announcing her name. I was so flabbergasted at actually having the chance to speak to a human that I stopped breathing altogether and became instantly mute. By this time, I had forgotten her name, which she had announced a moment earlier. Regaining a modicum of composure, I stammered, “Hi. Um, I’m a teacher, and um, I wanted to talk to you about….what did you say your name was, again?” She repeated her name, which I promptly forgot again, and I continued my blathering until she, bless her heart, suggested that I send her an email with my information.

We were astonished and thrilled to hear that we got the job, even after my obvious inability to speak the English language. Instead of English, however, I will be teaching Shop.

2. Pack up the House:
In preparing our house for the renters, I made a startling discovery. I am a pack rat. I have saved many an important item from my childhood: a glass hippo paperweight, a Swedish flag/pen-in-one, a pink golf ball and a green-haired troll, to name a few. I am certain there will come a day when I will be asked to join Tiger on the 18th, but only if I can produce that pink ball, pronto. I am prepared for that day.

I have also been hoarding items for my twins, which I will foist upon them without the slightest provocation the day they turn 18. Their This Side Up T-shirts from the hospital, the first party-favor horn Benji was able to blow, and Marina’s personalized china tea set that was given to her as a baby gift. I’d like to let her use it, but she might break it.

The point being…I’ve got an awful lot of junk I just can’t part with. In clearing out the house, we made four piles: take to Mexico, store in our back room, throw away, or donate. Our “storage” room, about the size of a large closet, was to hold all of our non-furniture items that we wanted to keep for our return. Obviously, we needed to be discerning about what we kept. As I packed up, my husband, Steve, stood by with a whip and a steely gaze, disintegrating with a steely glance any unworthy items I might try to sneak into the “keep” pile. (The items in the above paragraph were secreted away into a box at 2 a.m., which I marked on the outside in black Sharpie “Silverware and Kitchen Utensils”. Herr Director need be none the wiser.

Steve’s “Reduce. Reduce. Reduce,” mantra permeated our meals in our final weeks. The challenge: to eat all of the food from our kitchen freezer and the chest freezer before our departure. Now, I had never really kept track of the “Best if defrosted by” recommendations, so some of the stuff in there looked like Frosty the Snowman with Bubonic Plague. Add to that the fact that during the Great Seattle Power Outage, we had removed our frozen meats to a friend’s freezer, but had left the veggies. Some bags broke open and refroze as mush. Steve was unmoved by my desperate pleas to buy fresh vegetables or order take-out. He is, after all, the kind of guy who loves a challenge, and thinks the sign at the “All You Can Eat” restaurant presents a worthy goal. So his frozen food quotas became his mission.

Further complicating our efforts, Steve threw out his back, and used the remaining vegetable medleys as ice-packs. You would think the repeated freezing and defrosting would let us off the “edible-quotient” hook. Absolutely not. Steve kept repeating, “Rubbery, but not bad with salt.”

3. Learn Spanish:
I never studied formally, but I had learned to speak passable “Gringo Spanish”, which consists of phrases such as , “Cerveza, por favor,” and the standards, “Where is the bathroom,” and “How much is this,” – to be said pointing at a ridiculously overpriced miniature turtle that bobs its head when wiggled.

But I wanted more. I hoped that with the help of a few language CDs, within a week or so, I should be speaking like a native. So I got a set of discs creatively titled, Learn in Your Car, and began doing just that. Within a few weeks, I did sound like a native….English speaker. I had begun repeating the English phrases rather than the Spanish ones, just to have a bit of success.
As I practiced, I would listen to the same section over and over, until I felt competent. By Disc Two, I had progressed to the past tense, and was zipping along. It was at this point that I lost Disc One and was unable to review the present tense, which I had already forgotten. Disheartened, I quit the discs only able to communicate in the past tense. I could say, “Where did I go to the bathroom?” and “When did the bus leave?” I hoped to clarify my Spanish by adding words indicating the present tense at the ends of my phrases. “Excuse me, I thought I was lost, immediately.”

And we’re off…

“Well, my bags are packed and I’m ready to go….” Darn, I can’t get that song out of my head. Our hard work paid off, and we headed out feeling prepared for our adventure. From my casa in Cancun, I can appreciate all that we did to get here. As prepared as we were, however, we could only imagine what lay ahead. Stay tuned for updates!

Ladybug, Ladybug

Dark dots on shiny lacquer.
Eye-popping planets
Backed by a blanket of red.

As a child, I held ladybugs in my palm with tender fascination. I gasped at my good luck when one landed on my shoulder. I remember designing my favorite 6th grade art project, a ladybug kite, which was featured on the cover of our school’s magazine. As a middle-schooler, I would redden with righteous indignation when callous friends would chant, “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your children will burn.” Did my love-bug deserve such a heartless fate? We were part of a secret sisterhood, the ladybugs and me.

Twenty five years later, Steve and I bought a house. We were thrilled with the cathedral ceilings and tall windows. The rooms provided airy views of the greenery outside. We could hardly wait to move in.

When the awaited date arrived, we raced into our new home, up the stairs to the master bedroom, and directly into a scene from a Hitchcock film. The Ladybugs clung to the windows like a mat. They shaded the room, trickled onto the windowsills and collected in the corners by the ceiling. Dead ones lay like tiny soup bowls on the carpet. There were hundreds of them, creeping, clinging and clustering everywhere. We looked at each other in terror and simultaneously blurted, “Oh my G-d!”

What to do? We ran from the house and called the previous owner. “Oh, yeah. Those?” he offered nonchalantly. “Those are some kind of Asian ladybug. They live in the mountains during the summer, and they winter here, in the lowlands of Bellevue.”

Over the years, ladybug problem did not subside. When flicked, picked up, or threatened, they emitted a sour, celery-like smell, like a mini-skunk. I was mortified later to find out that this was the smell of their pee. On winter days, ladybugs could be found in our sheets, dining at our table, littered in the vents and between couch cushions. Countless times, much to Steve’s dismay, I jumped, squealing, from our bed at 2 a.m. and swatted a ladybug from my eyelid.

Our neighbor, who was apparently plagued with the same problem, told a story of a nearby church, where ladybugs had clustered by the thousands inside the steeple, and dropped like a chandelier in “Phantom of the Opera” on a group of horrified parishioners. Whether or not the story is apocryphal I do not know.

I called Molbanks garden store. “Wanna buy some ladybugs?” I asked, hopeful that I had struck bug-gold. The per-ladybug payola was considerably less than the effort it would have taken to corral them. The best, non-pesticide solution, I was told, would be to seal off any crevice or cranny they might be coming in from. And as for the ladybugs that did squeeze in…. “just vacuum them up.”

We duct taped the door leading off the master bedroom to the deck. So much for our luxurious Sunday morning respites, but it seemed easier than replacing the door. After seeing an article in Better Homes and Gardens that quipped, “Ladybugs are recognized as the international symbol for good luck,” I realized that my next course of action could engender some seriously messed-up karma. However, our need was dire.

So, we bought a rechargeable Dustbuster. We battled daily with the intruders, sucking them into the abyss, and dumping the remains off of the upstairs deck. As I’d knock the carcasses out of the container, a few dizzied bugs would careen recklessly away, oblivious to their near-death experience. I did not dispose of those tiny-winged souls lightly. But it was them or me.

My daughter, Marina, witnessed the ritual one day. “Why are you throwing them away?”

"Oh, they’re okay,” I replied guiltily. “They just want to go outside.”

“Are they dead?”

“What? No!” I exclaimed a bit too hastily. How many moms, when faced with that same, “Did you kill that spider?” question have come clean?

One day, I noticed Benji and his sister playing in the empty bathtub. They appeared to be talking to the tile and grout. “Don’t worry little guys. We’ll save you,” they whispered to their invisible friends.

On closer inspection, I noticed they had collected a crew of ladybugs onto the bathroom windowsill, some alive, some dead. They had established a sort of petting zoo. The sour-celery smell hit me, and I reeled, “Alright, that’s it. Wash hands.”

I found that Marina had been creating a ladybug refugee camp of her own, storing them in the ceramic cups and pot of her tea set. She would show me the bug in the evenings, feeling it was safe as the hand-vacuum was out of juice, and I would warn, “Honey, I don’t think he likes it in there.” The next morning, as proof that “he liked it,” the captive creature would still be there, unable to have scaled the walls of its tea-prison. Of course, it wasn’t moving at all.

I’ve come to terms with sharing my house with the critters. The key, I guess, is to get rid of them as quickly as possible each winter when the sun comes out, before they breed like….well, bugs. But still, one of Marina’s favorite stuffed animals is a little ladybug. Sometimes, she rubs the heart sewn on its tummy and kisses it, and I smile at her in a conspiratorial, ladybug-lovin’, nostalgic kind of way. Until I come to my senses. Then, I have to fight off the urge to get out the Dustbuster.

Travel Films

Laughter slips under the door
Coaxing me from my covers.
I slink from my bed
And creep to the edge of the dark hallway,
To press my cheek against the wall
Behind the bold line
Of spilled light.

I hear the tick, tick of the 16 millimeter film,
Looping through the projector,
The raucous polka music from the record that
My father had swaddled in his carry-on
And the soft, murmuring narration
As his voice lilts with remembered excitement.

I am a narrow adventurer.
My whole world lay just beyond that line of light
In the peaks and valleys of his voice.

Tiptoe

The twins sleep recklessly.
Limbs flung akimbo against crib rails,
Like leaves blown up against a fence.
Playing cards scattered by the wind,
All sprawl and innocent abandon.

Sneaking in on tiptoe, we peek at them,
Feeling that familiar parental guilt:
How peaceful they are.
How shameful that it seems
Easiest to love them most
Like this.