Travels of the Bay family and the Yoda Van

The first really amusing outing was our first dinner back in the USA.  Where else would we go than McDonalds?  It wasn’t that we had been missing it for the last 11 months – McDonalds are everywhere in the world.  We cruised the streets of San Bernardino looking for a McDonalds.  I was waiting for our food when a pudgy black guy with a see-through fish-net shirt, thick glasses, dread locks and a key chain with “Jesus Saves Lives” came in and started talking to me.  He bore a resemblance to a young Stevie Wonder and his belly rolls were clearly visible through his shirt.  He was very upset because they made us write our names on our receipt so they could call out our name when the food was ready.  “What if you are from a 3^rd world country and can’t write?  And this McDonalds is really going downhill.  They are slow and the food is bad.”

I guess what I thought was so funny about this encounter wasn’t really his outfit (although it did make me smile), but rather the eclectic mix of weirdoes this country has to offer.  People in Latin America seemed to be a little more homogenous in their outward appearance.  The fact that he also just started an animated conversation with a complete stranger was unusual for us.  Maybe it was just our bad Spanish, but we didn’t have so many impromptu conversations like this on the street.
While I was ordering at the McDonalds I was standing behind a rather shifty looking group of 3 adults and a couple of kids.  One of the guys was very jumpy and looking around nervously.  They seemed pretty ghetto.  They had darker skin and could have been Hispanic, but they were speaking English.  They ordered, got their food and went outside to the play area where Matthias was waiting with William and Julian.  While I was talking to Stevie Wonder Matthias came in with a big smile on his face.  William had gone up to the kids outside and started speaking Spanish to them.  Off he went playing with those kids and the entire time was rattling off in Spanish.  Eventually the mother said to Matthias “Does your kid speak Spanish?  Because my kids don’t.”  For the last 11 months William and Julian have been the only white boys and all other kids spoke Spanish.  It was so logical for him to use his Spanish with the other kids around him; especially since they looked similar to the kids he’d been around during the last year.

That is another thing that struck me in our first evening back in the USA – how diverse this country is.  You see people with all different skin colors.  Many people look like they are from somewhere else but really they are Americans – born and raised here.  The United States truly is a melting pot.

One of the most unfavorable impressions here is that much of this country looks the same.  If you drive up I-5 from San Diego you see one beige strip mall after another.  The stores you see are McDonalds, Burger King, Home Depot, Staples, etc.  In every city and every state you see the exact same strip malls and the exact same stores.  It is really uninteresting and it takes a lot of the character out of day-to-day living, in my opinion.  The only stores that appear to consistently remain independent are the nail salons in strip mall.  What culture this country has!

Overall people are very friendly – especially the supermarket checker.  Our first time back in a grocery store the checker was from Washington and gave us a hearty welcome home.  But if you listen to talk radio you also notice that a lot of people here are embarrassingly close-minded and just plain stupid.  Living in a city like Seattle it is easy to forget that a lot of the US is very rural.  Rural here means that a person can live hours away from a big city, whereas rural in Germany means you are about 30 minutes away from a bigger city and there is still a lot of urban sprawl between you and that big city.  Many people in the US haven’t ever left the US, or in more extreme cases, their own state or county.  That doesn’t make for great open-minded world citizens.  When people like that become adamant about not wanting to live anywhere where they force you to separate your garbage or recycle I feel more ashamed to be an American.

The unbridled patriotism here is also just freaky.  I would be the first to admit that overall people have more opportunities here in the US than in a lot of other countries.  But are we really more free here or is the US really the best country in the world?  What does that mean to be freer?  We are not a very family-oriented society.  I found that in the countries we have visited they received more support from their extended families in raising kids.  Am I really freer because I have to spend $1000/month for full-time daycare for my child while I am off working?  I felt like I have missed a lot being in the workplace instead of with my kids.  I certainly don’t feel very free when you look at the cost of health care and medicine in this country.  We were able to find modern, acceptable healthcare in the countries we visited for very little money.  It is not uncommon for people in the US to go bankrupt when they have medical issues because it is so expensive.  The US is also not the country with the lowest infant mortality rate.  We are definitely not “the best” in that respect.

There are lots of places in the United States that are nice places to live.  But I find statements like “The Land of the Free” and “The best county in the world” extremely arrogant and also ridiculous.  “The Land of the Free” sounds like we are the only group of people who have found a slice of freedom on this earth.  I bet if I asked the “average” American on the street “Why is the US better than Norway or El Salvador” first they would struggle to find either country on a map, and then they couldn’t give me many compelling reasons why the US is better.  First, most people don’t know all that much about many other countries, and second, how can you come up with a couple of criteria that make one country better than the other since it is such a subjective thing.  Even if we could agree on a few criteria that would constitute one country being better than another, isn’t it ridiculous to think that the US is better than every other country on this earth?

Here’s a great clip from Bill Maher on this topic.  He’s so much more eloquent and funny than I am on this matter.

In my opinion the US is just another country on this earth.  Collectively a lot of good comes out of this country and also a lot of bad.  In many ways the US is different than other countries and in some respects it definitely sticks out as a great place to live.  I’m relatively happy living here, but I know there are a lot of other places in the world that I want to see and would be sad if I never left the US again to experience them.

When you drive into Ajijic there is a sign that says “Riviera Alta.”  You might think it means the OLD Riviera since aside from the dozen Mexicans that live in this town all you see here are ex-pat retirees from the US and Canada.  High-water socks, bad Hawaiian shirts draping over big bellies, thick wide black old people glasses, canes, grey hair, etc. are all encountered every time we step out of the apartment.  Really “Riviera Alta” means the high Riviera since the elevation here is over 5000 feet, but I chuckle every time I see that sign since “alt” in German does actually mean “old”. 

Our first morning here we decided to go out to breakfast and we even found a Mexican version of Denny’s.  They serve mediocre breakfasts well into the afternoon, weak coffee in thick porcelain coffee mugs and the place is packed with retirees.

Ajijic is actually a very pleasant small town.  We are about 5 blocks from Lake Chapala (the largest lake in Mexico), there is a nice old church, cobblestone streets and the weather has been nice and hot.  Our friends Dave and Terri found us a nice 2 bedroom apartment with a swimming pool and it has been great.  They have given us tips on where the good restaurants are, a good fruit and vegetable stand, they hooked us up with a babysitter that charges $2.00/hour for both of our children and we are no longer strangers in the good gringo bars in town.  The other day I was walking by one of those gringo bars and saw a big white Cadillac parked next to a horse that was tied up to the front of the bar – such an accurate juxtaposition of all things Ajijic.

During the first week in our apartment complex I noticed that we were by far the youngest in our building – by about 30 years.  We watched an older woman come and go – cane, big dark glasses, oversized polo shirts, white retiree/nursing pants.  My first impression honestly was “oh, just another retiree.”  When we actually got to know her we found out she is really an amazing woman.  She has lived in Ajijic for the last 16 years, and referred to her time here as “interim”.  And when we met her she started to tell us about where she was moving to next – Cyprus.  She is flying to Madrid with some family members, will book a cruise around the Mediterranean, they’ll visit some friends she has in Greece and they are eventually planning on finding a new home in Cyprus and settling down.  Now get this – she’s 82 years old!  When I got closer I realized her big dark glasses are a much hipper design and even had Swarovski crystals embedded around the sides.  And later I watched her whip around town with her cane and was impressed with her speed and finesse.  To be so fit and adventurous at 82 is truly amazing and also inspirational.  What I wouldn’t give to be able to take advantage of life like that so long into my life.  We said goodbye to her today and I think she is sitting in a plane right now as I write this. 

Through our friends Dave and Terri we also met a man who now has two sons in college but when they were young, his wife and him took their sons and traveled around Asia for 6 months.  He understands how great traveling like this can be – especially with your children when they are young.  He told us how important it was to be able to spend that time with his kids when they were young.  It seemed to him that just being together at that age was the right thing to do, even if all you were doing at the time was walking down the street holding hands.  There aren’t too many people traveling with children like we are, and it is so neat to meet other people who have done it and reinforce the fact that we will wont regret what we are doing.

One of the things we are looking forward to here is the change from the dry season to the rainy season.  Some people in this part of the world call it the change from the dusty season to the muddy season.  Typically during the rainy season you get rain every day for a couple of hours, often around the same time every day.  I think that change might have happened last night.  About 9:30 PM the thunder and lightning storm started and it started to rain.  The lake is surrounded by mountains so the thunder just rumbled and echoed for hours around us.  The rains weren’t super strong, but it was a good solid rain – much more of a rain than you would usually see in Seattle.  Most of the land around us has been crispy and brown since we started heading back north from Costa Rica, and doesn’t look so great.  But once the rainy season really starts, everything should turn lush and green within about a week or two. 

This weekend we are going on a little road-trip.  Guanajuato is a small town a couple of hours from here.  It is supposed to be one of the most colorful towns in all of Mexico and there is a famous mummy museum.  We’ll post some pictures on the blog when we get back.