MeXscape

Sometime last weekend I finished the book I was reading and set out to find another one. I checked all of our shelves of books and the places where where books get left even though they shouldn't. I had read them all. I continued to search and discovered a box of books that had not been unpacked – since we moved to Mexico.

I moved to Mazatlan with an open mind and an eagerness to experience everything about living in the tropics. There have been so many new things – 1001 ways to eat shrimp, street food, summers without air conditioning, parties that don't start until midnight, learning water flow management through rainy season, the eschewing of shoes more sophisticated than flip flops — and for the past two weeks I have been improving my experiential reference — by getting Dengue.

Geez it's been hot this summer. It got hot early in the season, and the temperatures have just kept on climbing. And I don't think we have had nearly as many rainy days to bring relief. It has just been hot and humid. I had to quit keeping track of the weather when the heat index hit 107°F on Thursday. I just don't want to know. It makes it feel worse.

Over the past couple of years, I have enumerated many reasons why it's a good idea to learn Spanish if you are going to live here. Not knowing Spanish can make life here pretty inconvenient. Chuck and I have a fairly good command of basic needs Spanish. We both picked it up pretty fast when we first moved here and have felt pretty good about our progress. We can now make polite small talk.

I have to keep swearing to Chuck that I'm not trying to tour all the hospitals for a multi part series on health care in Mazatlan. It's really not a goal of mine, and there are many things I would rather be doing that lying in hospital beds, like pouring alcohol on paper cuts or attending a live taping of the Jerry Springer show. It's just that fate keeps conspiring against me; well, that and my own stupidity.