Category: Mexico

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We Have Booked Our Mexico City Lodging!

We have booked a wonderful penthouse apartment just a couple of blocks from Chapultepec Park in Mexico City for our 2 1/2 month stay this winter and early spring.

We have done a bit of research into Mexico City, talking to friends who have lived here or visited, and reading books and perusing online resources, to determine which were the safest and most fun neighborhoods to live in — Polanco, Juarez, Roma Norte and Condesa among them. We knew we wanted to live near a park for running, near public transit, and within walking distance of restaurants and other amenities.

The kitchen and dining room

This apartment in Juarez was on sale for half-price because it was a new listing on Airbnb, so we are getting a big place in a great location for pauper’s prices. It’s also a new apartment, and newly furnished, and the landlord says most of the other apartments in the building are not yet occupied. It has two bedrooms with large closets, a little room with a bar, a full kitchen/dining/living area, a patio, and even a roof garden, where the landlord, Eduardo encourages us to practice our instruments. He doesn’t normally allow cats but is making an exception after I begged. (I think he thought it was worth it for the income.) This is the unit: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/40229764

  • A little patio for the cats

  • Huge closet in the master bedroom, which has a king-sized bed

This location is perfect for us because it’s just a couple of blocks from Chapultepec Park, one of the largest city parks in Latin America. This park is more than twice as big as New York’s Central Park, with a zoo, seven museums, live music, and of course great running (which we missed in Tlaquepaque). There’s even a lake where I can kayak!  

Chapultepec Forest Lake (Source: Pixabay)

The apartment is also a couple of blocks from Paseo de la Reforma, a wide, tree-lined avenue that runs across the heart of Mexico City. We’ll be able to run down it to the city’s historic district. It’s also about three blocks from Calle Chapultepec, another popular avenue with lots of restaurants and nightlife that starts at the park by the same name.

Paseo de Reforma (Source: Wikimedia Commons, Fortepan — ID 73834: Adományozó/Donor: Romák Éva)

There are several close subway stations, which is good, because we will park our truck in a secure parking spot when we arrive and not use it again until we leave.

We are confident this is an apartment where we – and the cats – will be able to spend a safe, happy two and a half months in Mexico City.

Enjoy our YouTube video about our successful search for a place to stay in Mexico City!

By Lisa
Hamm-Greenawalt
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Back in the Saddle Again

It’s hard to believe it has been seven months since we left Mexico. A brief summer interlude in Vermont getting one of our vacation homes ready to sell and settling our youngest child, Gavin, into Champlain College in Burlington turned into a much longer stretch in the USA when Bob’s mother, Jane, called us in August to say she had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Enjoying a boat ride in Montreal during a weekend off working on the Vermont houses

So after spending the summer painting a house, tiling a kitchen, planting two gardens, refinishing a floor, staining two decks, replacing windows, and doing more tasks than I care to remember on both houses – punctuated, thank God, by a couple of long weekends in Montreal and Burlington and many visits to local craft breweries – we moved into Jane’s house in Mechanicsburg, PA, in October to care for her in her last months.

While living here, we kept busy. Lisa signed up for National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) in November and wrote a long-postponed book. Bob threw himself into the editing of his many videos from our time in Mexico for the Messy Suitcase YouTube channel. We both spent countless hours studying Spanish and practicing our instruments (Bob saxophone, Lisa guitar). We spent 9 days in Cancun in November, during a period when Jane was doing better and we needed a break.

The official winner’s certificate for Nanowrimo. Lisa wrote a YA fantasy novel called Elephant Rock.

We also spent time with some of Lisa’s family members around the winter holidays, and got to know Jane’s neighbors in her over-55 community. As her health deteriorated, we became quite attached to her regular visitors from Homeland Hospice, who became our family’s lifeline: her CNA (certified nursing assistant) Sherry, who came every day to bathe and dress her; her hospice nurse Hannah, who visited weekly; and our social worker Pam, who supported us all in too many ways to count.

Jane was able to lift a glass of champagne on New Year’s Eve. She passed away a week later.

Meanwhile, we cared for Jane and tried to keep her comfortable. We watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy with her. The kids came home for Christmas break and got to spend time with their grandmother. Bob’s sister Beth came to visit regularly.

And on Jan. 7, 2020, at the age of 89, Jane Greenawalt left us.

Now the funeral is over, the spawn are back at college, and we are officially empty nesters. Although Jane’s stuff still needs to be sorted and dispersed, and her condo needs to be fixed up to sell, we are deferring that till the summer.

It’s time for us to get back to our lives, at least for a while. So we are planning to return to Mexico later this month and spend the rest of winter and half of spring there. We’ll come back in late April, before Gavin’s school lets out for the summer, and spend some time in Vermont before returning to PA for the next round of heavy lifting.

This time we are headed for Mexico City! We are excited at the prospect of living in a big city, after spending the summer in rural Vermont and the fall in this Harrisburg suburb.  We are currently deciding between several condos in a safe neighborhood – Condesa, Roma Norte or Polanco – near a huge park (a requirement for us as runners). We are also looking at language schools, because we plan to study Spanish every day, at least for the first month, the way we did in Tlaquepaque last year. It will only be for two hours a day this time, because Lisa is editing her book and we want time to enjoy the city.

We’ll keep you posted as things develop! Right now the plan is to leave Jan. 28 and drive our trusty Toyota Tacoma (with two cats on board; the third now lives with Gavin at school) slowly south, stopping in Cincinnati, Memphis and Austin on the way so we can see some friends and take some breaks from the road. We should arrive in CDMX (Ciudad de Mexico, Spanish for Mexico City) on Super Bowl Sunday.

Wish us luck! Hasta luego!

Mexico City, here we come!
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Messy Suitcase Video: Why Guadalajara?

Beto (Bob) is developing his video editing skills, and working on putting the many videos he has made over the past year of traveling in Europe and then Mexico up onto the Messy Suitcase YouTube Channel! 

After toting his GoPro all over Mexico, and now Vermont, plus the drives back and forth, he’s just learning how to edit the footage, so please be patient, and feel to comment with words of encouragement.  Each video will get better, and they will be packed with fascinating info and our illuminating comments and observations.

We’ll hope you’ll follow our the Messy Suitcase YouTube Channel,  and ring the bell to be notified as we put more videos up. We are also open to new ideas!

Enjoy the video Why Guadalajara? 

Why Guadalajara? video

 

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Missing the US, Missing Mexico, Part 1

Now that we’re back in the United States for the summer, we’re experiencing a bit of a culture shock! We’re realizing there were a lot of things we missed about the US when we were living south of the border, and we’re delighted to get to experience them again.

But even more surprising – or perhaps not – is how many
things we miss about Mexico.
 
Enjoy our lists!
 
Things We Missed About
the United States
 
These are some of the things we missed about the U.S.
when we were living in Mexico:
 
·       English-language book stores (especially Barnes
& Noble)
·       Noodles & Company
·       Really good hamburgers
·       Brick oven pizza
·       Having white wine on restaurant menus
·       Lilacs
·       Yards and green grass
·       Being able to put toilet paper in the toilet
·       Being able to drink water from the faucet
·       Being able to brush our teeth with water from the faucet
·       Did we mention being able to drink water from the faucet?
·       Cheezit crackers
·       Toilet seats on public toilets
·       Toilet paper always available in public toilets
·       Being able to ride our road bikes
 
Things We Miss about Mexico
 
Here are a few things we miss about Mexico, now that
we’re back in the States:
 
·       Low prices for everything
·       Tlaquepaque, and the fact that there was always something free going on in Plaza Hidalgo
 
Ballot Foclorico in Plaza Hidalgo, Tlaquepaque
·       The incredible views of Guanajuato below and the eye-popping, jagged mountains beyond from every window at Casa Estrella
 
Guanajuato views
·       The fervent Roman Catholicism, including:
o   Gorgeous churches, basilicas and cathedrals, even in the humblest villages
o   Bloody Jesus statues and other curiosities inside churches
o   Parades to accompany statues of Nuestra Senora (our mother Mary) from church to church
o   Easter pageants, especially the bloody Jesuses carrying their crosses, accompanied by costumed throngs
 
The Virgin of Guadeloupe. She’s everywhere.
·       The food! Especially:
o   Nieve de garafa (fresh, hand-stirred ice cream made inside metal barrels, with
unconventional flavors such as tequila, elote and blackberry cheesecake)
o   Michoacan ice cream
o   Cuarto de Kilo (awesome Guadalajara hamburger chain with crispy, lemon-pepper-dusted French fries)
o   Pollo Pepe (great chicken place, also a chain)
o   Gus’s, our favorite the taco place in the basement of the mercado (market) in
Tlaquepaque
o   Mercado fruits, veggies, breads, and fresh chicken and fish
o   Valentina’s, our favorite pizza place in Tlaquepaque, with its rooftop garden
o   Cat-shaped bolillos (small loaves of bread) from Pasteleria Don Pedro
o   Amazing donuts everywhere in Guadalajara (who knew Mexico was such a big donut destination?)
o   Mexican street food, especially elote (corn) and chayote (a unique Mexican squash) with queso y crema (cheese and a uniquely Mexican thick cream), then doused with salsa. The lonches (meat sandwiches), tacos and fresh-made potato chips were also excellent.
 
Elote in Tlaquepaque
o   Pasteles (cake) and pan de elote (corn bread) from La Petit Plaisir, the French bakery across the street from the Guadalajara Language Center
o   Chocomilk in any restaurant, which is a refreshingly frothy, blended confection
o   Cremax cookies 
o   Raspadas (shave ice with fresh fruit and syrup)
 
Raspada Frambuesa (raspberry)

·       The drinks! Especially:

o   Horchatas and horchata fresas (a rice and cinnamon drink, sometimes accompanied by strawberries)
o   Aguas frescas (fresh water with the essence of fruit, including mandarin oranges and jamaica, a therapeutic flower)
o   Tequila and mescal
o   Mexican craft beer
o   Limonada (lemonade)
 
Horchata fresa and tacos in the Tonala mercado
·       The sounds! Especially:
o   Mariachi music
o   Church bells
o   Crowing roosters (who expected to miss this sound?)
o   The song played by the Zeta Gas truck (“Zeta, Zeta, Zeta Gas!”)
o   “Agu-AA!” yelled by the Pura water garafon (jug) delivery man
o   The daily jangling bell of the trashmen
·       Atlas FC Futbol (soccer)
·       Lucha Libre (wrestiling)
·       Adorable roof dogs
·       Waiters never rushing us and always waiting for us to ask for the check
·       The weather (warm days and cool nights, with the occasional dramatic downpour but not a speck of snow)
·       Speaking Spanish all the time
 
Got this shot into the goal at an Atlas futbol game
Next up … Part 2: Things We Won’t Miss About Mexico
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Casa Estrella: Our Hillside Home in Guanajuato

It’s a shame we ever stayed at Casa Estrella: We will never be happy anywhere else again.

Thanks, Donna

My friend Donna Bryson recommended we spend time in the World Heritage city of Guanajuato, where she and her family enjoyed a vacation a couple years ago. Since Donna was my favorite partner in exploration when were young, single and living in NYC, I trusted her advice and we decided to visit for five weeks or so on our way north from Tlaquepaque.
 
Lodging proved to be a little bit of a challenge, though.
Guanajuato is a colorful, astonishingly well-preserved city of 150,000 with narrow cobblestone alleys and winding underground tunnels carved out of rock, neither of which was very welcoming to our wide black Tacoma Toyota truck. Hotels and apartments in El Centro (the historic center) don’t have convenient parking, if any at all, and guests have to navigate narrow, steep  pedestrian walkways to get to their entrances – hardly practical when you have as many possessions as us, in addition to
three cats and two bikes.
 
So we widened the search beyond Guanajuato City, and ended up at Casa Estrella Vacation Rental Homes in Valenciana, a village about two kilometers up the mountain from Guanajuato. And although it would have been nice to be able to step out of our lodging right onto one of Guanajuato’s nine plazas and walk a block or two to a restaurant, Casa Estrella offered unique benefits that made it the perfect choice for us.
 

Car- Friendly

 Casa Estrella was one of the only places to stay in Guanajuato that offered secure parking for the truck, though because of the hillside location, getting the vehicle out the couple of times we used it was a spine-tingling tight, logistical challenge. So once we parked the Tacoma, we left it to collect dust, and used buses, cabs or Uber to get around. Buses only cost 7 pesos (37 cents) a ride, and Uber or a cab cost 60-70 pesos ($3.65-$4.20) per ride. 
 
Once we got down into Guanajuato, we used our feet for transportation.

Pet-Friendly

The staff at Casa Estrella happily welcomed our three cats and considered them part of our family. And the cats loved our two-bedroom apartment, Casa Estrellita, from the moment we opened their traveling cages and released them from their travel confinement. Ellie swiftly took over a round blue chair in the living room, though all three cats alternated through at one time or another. Kaylee liked to hang out high up on the second-floor landing, regally surveying her domain. Noxy ambled from bed to bed, and eventually befriended a corner chair in the dining room. He managed to escape one day when the cleaning crew came, and relished the opportunity to amble around the little courtyard below our apartment before coming back to our door and waiting for someone to notice he had been gone.
 
Kaylee
Equinox and the Monk statue
Smoitie in the kitchen

One day, Casa Estrella’s resident cat Toby, who was the spitting image of our old cat Jiji  who died in 2012) except for a scarred right eye, came to the door and meowed loudly, as though asking our cats to come out and play. Lex and I did just that, hanging out on the stairs petting Toby for a long time. Toby belonged to Inge, a Dutch retiree who  dispensed wellness advice, astrology readings, and essential oils from her little apartment across from the fountain below us. The cats never met him.

People- Friendly

 We knew Casa Estrella was going to be people-friendly from the moment we parked our car. First, the manager, Javier Salazar, greeted us warmly. Then three male staffers swooped upon the truck and rapidly carried all of our heavy suitcases, duffle bags, musical instruments, and other assorted paraphernalia up the stairs to our apartment before we even had a moment to breathe. What service! By the time we could blink our eyes, our stuff was in our rooms and we were ready to settle in. 

Casa Estrellita

Our two-bedroom apartment, Casa Estrellita, was absolutely stunning. With a warm pallet of many-shaded oranges and royal blue, with bright pink accents, its warm glow enveloped us. The dining room had a bar with a wine rack in one corner, and a domed brick ceiling with a chandelier hanging over the handmade round wooden table. A newly-constructed breakfast patio overlooked the city of Guanajuato below and awe-inspiring mountains beyond (and Javier brought a lounge chair when he saw how much I enjoyed spending time there reading).  
 
My favorite breakfast spot

The kitchen was large and well stocked. The dinnerware consisted of individually crafted, hand-painted ceramic plates, bowls and mugs from the local Gorky Gonzalez Pottery Studio. The rest of the house was also filled with decorative pottery – on shelves, walls, the bar, along the steps and even on the fireplace mantle—from Gorky Gonzalez, Mayolica Pottery of Santa Rosa, and other local artists.

 
Both bedrooms, on the second floor, were generous, with sliding doors and balconies showcasing the incredible view of Guanajuato and the mountains. Beds had heavy, hand-carved headboards.  The master bedroom even had a fireplace and a changing room, and the master bath had a sunken jetted tub, which Aryk enjoyed, and a hand-painted sink, which Noxy occasionally napped in. 
 
Master bedroom with fireplace
The volume and quantity of the artwork throughout the apartment made my jaw drop daily. A brightly-painted, skeletal, smiling Catrina statue stood inside the front door, next to a small painting of a Lucha Libre warrior. A handcrafted wooden monk statue looked down from a lighted alcove at the bottom of the wide stairway. There were painted ceramic serving platters, a full-length copper lamp, a basket crucifix over the bed in the master bedroom, a Diego Rivera print in the main hallway, hand-woven rugs, and tapestries.

Catrina
 
Mayolica

Mayolica
 

Diego Rivera print

The Grounds

 And beyond our apartment, there was so much more to explore and enjoy! Casa Estrella’s public space was beautiful and comfortable, with leather couches, a huge solid wood dining table with a tile-covered wall over the banquet, a large covered deck, even a big double-kitchen for use by guests staying in rooms without kitchen facilities. (Casa Estrella also provided a delicious, healthy daily breakfast for an additional fee, consisting of yogurt, granola, fresh fruit, tamales, and coffee.)
 
Yoga with Blanca
Beyond the main building, there was a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi. Down the steps, the Fiesta Fitness Room offered an elliptical, complete weight set, free weights, Bosu, exercise ball, barre and more, as well as a large patio for weekly outdoor yoga classes (by Blanca of Casa Quatro in Guanajuato) offering the mountain view as the perfect “dristy.” There was also a spa room for massages, a botanical garden, a tennis court, an RV park with a beautiful bathroom and shower, an organic garden, and other public spaces.
 

Wellness

 I mention all these things because Casa Estrella’s focus is on wellness, and I left feeling so relaxed and serene. Javier, the manager and concierge, gave us exceptional service to made us feel truly pampered. If you ever decide to visit Guanajuato, you can learn more about Casa Estrella here. Tell Javier that Lisa sent you!
 
Saying goodbye to Javier., the manager and concierge at Casa Estrella.
Hasta luego!
By Lisa Hamm-Greenawalt
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Torture and Death in Mexico

We visited three morbid museums that reflect a certain
obsession with death and torture in Guanajuato, Mexico.

El Museo de las Momias de Guanajuato 
(The Mummy Museum)

 
The one that attracts the most tourists is El Museo de lasMomias de Guanajuato, or the Mummy Museum of Guanajuato. This underground museum tucked into a corner
of the old city displays scores of naturally mummified bodies found to be in surprisingly good shape when they were disinterred to make room for new bodies in the cemetery above.
 
The mummies were discovered in the late 1800’s after the government instituted a perpetual burial tax on the cemetery. If the families of the buried did not pay, the bodies of their loved ones were exhumed. It was during this process of evicting the dead for back taxes that the mummies were discovered, beautifully preserved.
 
 
 
 
After exhumation, the mummies were stored in an ossuary beneath the cemetery, where they are displayed today. Each mummy has a tag with a little information about them and theories on how they died. Many of them are still wearing the clothes they were buried in.
 
The most interesting to me was the mummy pair of a mother and her unborn child, advertised by the museum as the smallest mummy in the world.
 
Mama
Baby
In addition to the mummies, the place is full of existential quotes such as the following:
 

“Man must open himself to death if he wants to open himself to life.
The cult to life is also cult to death.
A civilization that denies death ends up denying life. “

–Octavio Paz
 
(Source: https://museodelasmomiasdeguanajuato.negocio.site/)

La Casa de Los Lamentos
(The House of Wailing)

 
La Casa de Los Lamentos is a cheesy House of Horrors located in a historic 18th-century mansion where serial murders occurred in the 1890s and early 1900s. The story goes that the owner, Tadeo Fulgencio Mejia, was obsessed with trying to contact his dead wife, Constanza, and committed an unknown number of murders as human sacrifices to perform rituals in an attempt to reach her. Human bones were supposedly found in the mansion’s basement.
 

 

 

 
The museum uses red and flickering lighting, slammed doors and other sound effects, a Hitchcock-style video in a picture frame, and ghostly holograms to scare the BeJesus out of the unfortunate who walk in and pay the 45 pesos admission. We stumbled upon it while exploring the Valenciana neighborhood and it was a hoot!
 
But we were the ones wailing at the end, because we came out of the museum to a colossal downpour. We had walked half a mile down the hill from Casa Estrella and had to wait out the tormenta before we could walk back. But what a diverting hour or two!

El Museo Casa del Purgatorio
(The Purgatory House Museum)

We stumbled upon El Museo Casa del Purgatorio, tucked innocuously into an alley near the Templo de San Cayetano (Saint Cayetano Church), while walking around the little village of Valenciana, down the road from our lodging. Aryk and Lexie were with us for this exploration of a museum that turned out to be about methods of torture and killing during the 18th century Spanish Inquisition in Mexico, when people were persecuted and killed for being Catholic.
 
Methods of torture we experienced through our guide included a spinning wheel into excrement (sort of an extreme sort of water boarding), the stretching table, the guillotine, and of course the gallows. The museum even featured a small cemetery with a replica of the tomb of El Pipila, the hero of the Mexican Independence movement – despite the fact that this iconic miner hero wasn’t even caught and tortured, but apparently lived to the ripe old age of 83 before dying in his hometown of San Miguel de Allende.

 

 

 

 
This museum was so gruesome that Lex had to leave and waited outside. The rest of us enjoyed it in a perverse way.
 
By Lisa Hamm-Greenawalt

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