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03/14/05 - Ajijic, MX (Photos - Same as other Ajijic photos) Our run-ins with the "true" natives |
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While we've gotten along well with most of the locals, we have met a few that we don't care to see too much of. In a 24 hour period, we got to see our first Mexican scorpion, rat, and cockroaches! While Caroline was sitting on the couch last night, a three or four inch scorpion skittered out from under her and plunked himself (herself?) down in the middle of our living room. We quickly decided that we don't like scorpions, and considered him an unwelcome guest. Caroline kept an eye on him while I went to put my shoes on and grab my weapon of choice (a magazine, folded in half - Delta's in-flight magazine, for the extremely curious). I had never seen a scorpion before, and wasn't sure what it took to kill one. Are their little armored bodies tough, like crabs? Are they fast, and will they see me swinging my pages, deftly able to evade my attack? Turns out, none of the above. I raised my mighty magazine above my head, bringing down my hateful fury on what turned out to be quite a fragile little creature. The blow I delivered not only sliced the enemy in two, but also smooshed him into a greenish gravy of gook. But, lest the scorpion's pieces come to and retaliate, I dropped the magazine on the victim and stamped him out for good with my shoe-clad foot. We cleaned the mess, and watched where we stepped the rest of the night. Oh, and checked our sheets, shoes, and clothes, apparently all places that scorpions like to hide out.
Our next encounter occurred in Jocotepec, just 17 kilometers down the lake from our place. An uneventful encounter, well, not really even an "encounter" so much as a sighting. As we walked down the sidewalk, busy with activity in the middle of the day, we looked down to where the street meets the curb to see that the oncoming traffic was a rat. Nothing too big, just your run of the mill lab rat-sized fellow, wandering the other way just like everybody else running errands this afternoon. The rest of our time in Jocotepec was quite nice, we enjoyed the town and realized we missed the ambiance of the busy Mexican activity going on around us. We had lunch (tried a tripe taco - I'm sure to most people the thought of eating a pig intestine taco is grosser than spotting a rat on the street, but it was actually rather tasty) and walked around awhile, and snacked on some fruit from a street vendor before heading back to Ajijic. Caroline's fruit was relatively straight-forward - a mango, sliced fresh for her into spears, served in a plastic cup. I went with the traditional Mexican fruit salad - grated papaya and mango mixed into a coleslaw looking combination, doused with chili sauce and the juice of a fresh squeezed lime. I thought it was quite good, although Caroline tried it and claims she couldn't even tell it was fruit.
Later in the day, back in Ajijic, the weather turned on us and the rain started. We speedwalked (hard to run on the cobblestones) with laptop and bookbag to a convenient restaurant where the highway meets the town, which turned out to be the same Italian restaurant we ate in on Friday evening. We ran into a couple of women that we had talked to on the previous couple of days who own a wonderful little gallery here in town called The Gathering Place. They live and work in the building that they've transformed into their gallery and home over the past six months, which we loved so much we went back a second time to take photos. If we can find a similar property somewhere that we want to settle down for a while, we'll snatch it up. They're a very inspiring pair to talk to, and seem to have a very nice lifestyle going for themselves here. They live at their beautiful gallery/home, and have their business meetings in a nice Italian restaurant where their waiter brings them wine and food while they work. If our work environment had been like that, we might not have been so anxious to quit work and hit the road!
Finally, our third encounter occurred after an evening of chatting with our neighbors, Betty and Brendan, who live on the floor above (and have the beautiful view of the lake from up there). After listening to some of their crazy and funny traveling antics, and exchanging scorpion/spider stories, they asked if we'd had any run-ins with the cockroaches yet. "Nope, haven't seen any", we reply, and make our way downstairs for the night. As you've probably guessed, we got to see several between the time we said we hadn't seen any and the time we actually made it back to our place. So far, most have been outside, so no big deal - we'd just rather not step on them barefoot, or find our pantry teeming with them. Who'd have thunk it? Cockroaches in Mexico! Huh... |
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