Packing Up

Yep, it's that time of year again... packing to make a major move for the 3rd time this year.

It's not fun.

I told my friend Zach yesterday that I thought it'd be easier - more fun and adventurous - if we had less stuff, if we could carry it all on our backs like some of the European tourists wandering around Guadalajara. But that is so much easier said than done...

Anyway, part of the problem is that we really don't know what to expect in the next place. We visited San Juan de Los Lagos at the beginning of February, but because it was in the midst of a massive religious festival it wasn't exactly easy to find an apartment and get everything set up for our arrival on March 1st.

We did try stopping in the tourist office when we were there to ask about apartments. The guy working there kind of looked at us like we were weird, then hemmed and hawed about whether there were really apartments for rent in San Juan, then said, "Look, I live in a pretty big house. You could stay there." We thought this was kind of weird, but without other options at that point we decided to go with him to look at his place. It's true, it was kind of big and modern, and he did have a very small bedroom where we could live. But we'd have to share a bathroom with him and the three yipping chihuahas he kept out back...

So, that's one option, I guess. But we've been frantically emailing other people - friends of friends of random contacts, other tourism officials, even priests at the basilica in the hopes of finding a more private place for ourselves. At this point we'll stay in a hotel probably for all of the first week and hope we'll find a more permanent place ASAP.

In between checking our email every five minutes for news of where we might live, we've also spent time soaking up everything we can of city life here in Guadalajara. We even went to the mall the last two nights, which we hardly ever do, but we figured this might be the last time for awhile that we could find a good old-fashioned American hamburger at Chili's. (Yep, Chili's - and yep, it is EXACTLY the same as the Chili's back home, right down to the southwestern tiles on the tabletops. Globalization is real, my friends...)

We also went to the movies, to see Slumdog Millionaire, here called Quisiera Ser Un Millonario, which just arrived in Mexican movie theatres last Friday. I'm hoping to blog a bit next week about watching Slumdog Millionaire in a fancy Mexican mall, an experience that raises a couple of extra questions about class and poverty in cities with 20 million people, but at the moment these open suitcases are staring me in the face...

So in short, the last week has kind of felt like running headlong toward a cliff - which, come to think of it, is kind of what it felt like when we were getting ready to leave for Mexico back in July. It's always another adventure...