A Visit from Canadian Friends

We are enjoying a visit from two fantastic friends.  What a blessing it is to share meals together,  laugh together, talk at length, and just be in eachother's presence! 

Guanacaste Tree

This is a guanacaste tree, a local source of lumber.  It produces a beautiful dark redish brown wood which is resistant to water and termites.  Our closet doors are made of this wood, and at El Faro most of the desks, bookshelves, and tables are made from it.

This is the remains of a felled tree at a brother's ranch.  His carpenter cuts off chunks as needed.

This is the carpenter's workshop.

Here are slabs of wood waiting to be turned into beautiful furniture.

This is the highchair that he is making for our favourite local cafe.

Japanese Bound Books are Done!

One by one the older girls at El Faro have made their own Japanese bound books.  The books turned out wonderful and you can see by their smiles that they are proud of their work.

And I am proud of their work too!

A Very Canadian Moment

The other evening I acted like a true Canadian in Arriaga.  

First, a primer in Mexican advertising:  there are no classifieds, no Penny Savers, and no fliers delivered to your door.  Instead, you pay someone who has a speaker on their car to drive around town announcing your amazing iguana meat for sale, or your wonderful Tlyudas from Oaxaca, or the date and time of your spouse's funeral.  If you live in a really small town, they don't bother driving around, they just put a speaker up on a pole and make announcements all day long(often 4 times, once in each direction).  The announcers don't read in boring monotone voices, but dramatize, like sport's announcers.

Until recently I've thought of this as an unusual and loud but a reasonable solution for advertising in this society.  That was until I experienced a stationary announcement . . .  a single announcement . . .  repeatedly . .  loudly . . . with speakers directed at my house . . . at 9 pm . . .  when my children were suppose to go to sleep . . . for more than 20 minutes.  My Canadian ways of thinking began to surface.  "This is crazy!"  "How can they be allowed to do this?"  "In Canada we would call the police for disturbing the peace!"  After fuming to myself, I decided I would take action and tell them to turn it down, as we had already heard their announcement to remember it till we die and maybe even later.

The problem with my plan was that I don't know how to politely (or rudely) tell someone to turn it down in Spanish.  So I asked my friend who works in the cafe next door about my problem.  I asked her if it was permitted to leave the announcements pouring on a few unfortunate houses.  Her sympathetic reply with a smile was, "In Mexico, yes."  But, being a good friend, she went and asked them to turn it down.  The dial was turned down a millimeter and I returned home to marvel at the differences between life in Mexico and Canada.  Eventually they turned it off or left to bother someone else. 

Progress on the Bunkhouse

The bunkhouse is a building on the ranch which is intended to host work teams.  There will be ample room for a team to stay while working on the ranch.  Currently work teams stay in a hotel in town and travel to and from the ranch each day.  When we first visited the ranch a year ago, it looked like this:

It had been looking like this for a few years, and aside from some walls build a year or two ago, not much has changed until last month. 

Now, it is beginning to have walls and soon it will have a roof too!

The above grassy area will be a covered tiled porch where hammocks will be hung.  Ahhhh, lovely siestas after a morning of good work!

Buildings are constructed very differently here than in Canada.  First a wall is built with bricks.  Gaps are left between the sections of the wall.  These spaces are closed in on both sides with wooden panels and cement is poured into the gaps.  After the panels are removed you have your "framing".  Sam hopes to add some blog entrys soon about Mexican construction, for those interested.

For any really keen construction minded persons, the bunk-house is a combination of international building styles. It was started by a team from the US, the leader's experience was in building high rises!  It will be finished by Mexican bricklayers, welders and roofers, and plumbed and wired by Canadians, Americans and . . .?



Turtle from Tlyuda Lady

These are tlyudas, a Oaxacan food.  Since we live just a few minutes from the Chiapas/Oaxaca state boarder, we a blessed to have tlyudas available in Arriaga.  They are so yummy!  They are dinner-plate-sized corn tortillas filled with refried beans, Oaxacain cheese, cabbage, and meat, grilled over a charcoal fire.  Of course there are many variations of tlyudas, but this what is inside "tlyuda lady's" tlyudas.  She is from Oaxaca and comes to Arriaga each weekend to sell tlyudas.  She opens up the gates to her driveway and sets up shop in her courtyard, working from the tiny kitchen.  (Many people will set up small food stands this way to earn extra money.) Once she has made enough money for the weekend, she closes up shop and goes back to Oaxaca.  Too bad for you if you don't come the first night, and she is already gone.

Since we like her's best of all the tlyudas we have tried, her's are "authentic" in our minds.  Each weekend we make it our "duty" to have one meal of tlyudas.  Tlyuda lady keeps track of us.  She knows how many we like to eat and she notices when we don't show up. We know this because she comments to other Gringos about our habits.

Well, a week ago she gave us a turtle along with our tlyudas.  Sort of a treat-of-the-week to go along with our meal, I guess.

I don't know much about turtles, much less Mexican turtles. I had to Google how to take care of him.  Funny thing is he doesn't like to eat what I am suppose to feed him.  He only seems to like the meat found inside tlyudas.  The neat thing about our turtle is the bottom plate of its shell has two hinges.  It can pull up the back and front thirds, completely closing itself inside. 

The kids named the turtle Papaya and a friend has agreed to take over our pet when we leave.  She has a lovely backyard full of plants and I'm sure Papaya won't miss us - that is unless our friend doesn't feed him "authentic" tlyudas.

Mexican Colours