November 30, 2007

Archive

Random Observations

There are tons of things I love about Mazatlan. Some of them are probably unique to Mazatlan and some are similar throughout Mexico. Here are a few: Bike Cops – Mazatlan has a ton of them. They wear t-shirts and shorts with a gun clipped to their belt. They ride all over, not just on the malecon, and they are friendly to everyone. I don’t know why, but they just make the city feel more approachable and friendly. Mosquitoes –...

What’s for Dinner?

I promise to write a post soon that isn’t an update on a construction project. But we are pretty excited about the transformation of our kitchen that just was completed yesterday… Above is a picture of our kitchen from the marketing website before we bought the place. As you can see there are appliances and granite countertops, all of which is a part of the concrete structure. The concrete part is typical of Mexican kitchen construction, although most Mexican kitchens...

Salitre 101

I thought that you might want to see pictures of the salitre repair project in one of our bedrooms. We’ve learned a lot about salitre over the last couple of months. Salitre is a kind of cancer on the cement skin of the house. It’s caused by water leaching out the salt in the cement mix. It could be happening because of a water pipe leak, a drain problem, or ground water coming up from under the house. So usually...

We all had a great time

  Here’s a picture of Adam and Martha on our sail on the Patricia Belle. We had such a good time! In addition to the sailboat cruise, we went to the beach and boogie-boarded, ate out a lot, stayed up late and in general hung out a lot. One thing that was really helpful was asking the two of them a ton of questions about Spanish. They really were generous and patient with us, and we appreciate it a lot....

Our first guests!

We are very excited to have our first guests coming tomorrow! Son Adam and daughter-in-law Martha are visiting from Mexico City for the holiday weekend. Our house is in quite a jumble with all the construction but we have managed to make the guest room pretty nice, I think. Considering it still needs paint! There is a lot going on in town and we should have a lot of fun going-and-doing as well as sitting-and-talking. We always have fun with...

The courtyard, continued….

  I thought I’d keep going with the courtyard remodel pictures. They should be finishing all three roofs this week, and next week the painters will paint the top part of the wall so they can use the scaffolding while it is still here. Once the wood was removed from the slab the maestro kind of splashed on and smoothed out a very thin layer of mortar to make the slab really pretty. Then he started installing the roof tiles....

Two week progress report

We are in the midst of our courtyard remodel. Above are a couple of “before” pictures: As you can see there are chipped tiles, a big empty space, an irregular step, overgrown plants, etc. The windows on the floor above take the southern sun directly so we are having shed roofs made with tile above the three upstairs windows. A shed roof with three posts will support a cover over the walkway area and also shield the doors below from...

Mazatlan is Unique

One of the reasons that we chose Mazatlan as our home is because it has a historic colonial Centro – and is on the beach. Usually these two don’t go together. But there’s another thing that makes Mazatlan interesting – it’s varied people. Germans settled in Mazatlán in the 1820’s. Their presence is noticed in the music, food, and beverages. There is strudel in most bakeries and Pacifico beer is the most popular in town. Oompah music is heard everywhere....

This life is good!

Of course, we knew it would be, but we never thought it would be this good! Although, Friday when Paul and I went out for Day of the Dead festivities, Henry (the dog) got into the room with the sand the salitre repair guys are using and tracked it all over the house! So a fair bit of time Saturday was spent vacuuming and mopping. But the house gleamed afterwards, which is amazing given the amount of dust that gets...