Holiday Celebrations - old and new

It was great to celebrate the holidays here in Tepoz.  We schlepped our “Christmas” boxes from Mexico City and did up the new place as best we could.

This is a chili wreath that Lasha and Jerry gave us several years ago.  It looked great on the terrace along with multiple strings of twinkle lights among the beams.

Sergio and I both enjoyed cooking for the celebrations.  He was busy with cheesecakes, cookies and bread.  I'm just about to carve the turkey.

Here we are in front of our Christmas Tree – please note Christmas stockings on window.

As there was only Pinky, Sergio and I, we decided to have a Christmas Eve pajama party.

But not before Pinky had her nails done in town to celebrate both Christmas and the New Year.

For New Years Eve Sergio set-up a table on the upper terrace so we could watch the lights and fireworks from the village. A holiday tradition is to use the linen table cloth my Aunt Farilie gave me when closing up the family home.

Since then we’ve been doing “stuff” every day while enjoying the pool and the wonderful sunshine.  I’m all tan!

Quincena Guests

Roberto, our head worker, invited us to attend his daughter’s 15^th birthday party.  Turning 15 in Mexico is a huge thing for young girls.  Families mortgage the house so a daughter can have the event of her "Cuincena" dreams.

The girls typical choose a really flashy dress.  Always in bright colours.  Here’s Sergio standing beside Guadalupe.  It’s hard to belive that she is only 15 years-old. Check-out the gloves!

The young women also selects several of her male friends (and sometimes relatives) to be her escorts.  They are call “Chambelanes” and they get all gussied up in tuxedos.  Lupita had six guys all  in these black suits with green vests.  She also had six girlfriends in matching cocktail type dresses.

A big part of the event is a danced staged with the gal and her escorts.  This is almost always choreographed and requires hours of rehearsal.  Lupita actually did four numbers with her troupe – the poor guys doing their best despite almost no rhythmique ability.

Then the show-stopper is a waltz with Dad.  Here’s Roberto doing his best.  Honestly it was so sweet it brought tears, literally, to my eyes.

While this is a humble family, the event was over the top.  They had two stages.  First there was a typical Mexican band with a singer you can just make out in a green jacket and cowboy hat.  Then there was a salsa band and the whole thing finished off with Mariachis.  They even had cock fighting although I’m not sure what that has to do with a girl’s birthday party.  We passed on that spectacle (all perfectly legal here).

It seemed that the entire village (Amatlan – around the corner from us) was invited and they ordered food for 1500 people – yes fifteen hundred people.  As you can see, the tequila and beer flowed freely.

The cake was four levels high.  Unfortunately we had to leave before it was cut.  We had a blast.  Roberto thanked us a million times for coming.  Too sweet.

Jenny's Gifts to Tepoz

Way back when we first bought the lot a book club friend offered us some appliances.  She and her husband were moving back to the States and she said taking them off their hands would be doing them a favour.  We had them picked up and the appliances sat in Arlene’s garage for an embarrassingly long time, while Linda stored other things in her maid’s room.

Here I am in our laundry room (under the indoor stairs) with the family-size washer and dryer, both in perfectly good order. I'm sweaty from cleaning the room after major exterior work.

We were also given a dishwasher (now hidden behind a kitchen cupboard door).

Jenny also gave us a single bed which we’ve set-up as a day bed in your bedroom.  It works perfectly.

On top of that she gave us this elliptical machine.  Naturally all it has done is gather dust despite our continuing claims that, “Next visit I’m going to get on the elliptical”.

Thanks Jenny. Everything is fantastic.

Some "real" furniture

Bit by bit we’re getting some furniture so we can retire the cardboard moving boxes pressed into temporary duty as end tables, coffee tables, bed tables, etc.  We’ve even managed to fold up one of the two plastic tables!

In Tepoz there is an antique dealer with lots of interesting stuff.  We stopped by his store one day to see what he had.  Along with a couple of beautiful old benches and lots of nick-knack type things we saw this table base.  It’s made of old railway spikes!

The picture in the orange frame was in the city.  We bought it from the same kooky lady that sold us most of the art in the Polanco apartment.  She claims it is an original by some famous Cuban artist know for painting roosters.  Who knows?  Looks nice there for sure.

The antique dealer also had this coffee table.  It’s actually an old door!  We really liked it.

He wanted 1000 pesos each for the two pieces.  Well business can’t be that good as we offered him 1000 pesos for both, he said he’d have to think about it, and called us back two hours later accepting our offer.  He also foolishly agreed to supply the glass top for the dining room table without actually finding out how much it would cost – a lot!

We also went to see a carpenter in town to have the small unit made to hold the stereo and DVD player – plus hide some of the “stuff” that was collecting around our “entertainment center”.  It is made entirely of re-cycled wood then with a distressed “antique” finish.  It too was a bargain so we’re happy with that.

Piece by piece we're getting the house into shape so we can generate some rental income.  Meanwhile the two of us are enjoying it immensely.

Post Party Planting

After a brief respite after Sergio's celebration we went to work planting.

The first thing we had to do was "paint" the pool shed.  We wanted it to look like the adobe stone.  I assumed this meant going to the paint store and buying said colour.  Roberto said that we could make our own.  Jerry Kolidij and I spent several hours breaking up a couple of adobe bricks into the finest possible powder.   This was then mixed with water and sealant to create a very thin paint.  Jerry was a great help as we attacked the structure first with rollers then with brushes to get the mixture into all the plaster crevices.  It took all day but the result was so much more pleasing than the white block you saw in previous posts.

Jerry continued to be a great help planting a mix of yellow and orange flowering vines along the face of the building and the start of the far stone wall.  It was slow going, especially in the heat.

Sergio had selected a large palm tree to plant off the side of the house.  We wanted to be able to see it inside the length of the house and it works really well.  It now has more plants around the base.  By this stage we'd run out of sod and opted just to put a layer of tezontle in the meantime.

Gabriel has been busy building stone steps to get from one terrace level to the next.  This is slow work as each piece has to be chiseled flat and the progress is pain-staking.  You can also see that the plants along the stone wall now go all the way up to the corner.

Pat and Marco arrived and they helped out as well with more planting.

We've finally been able to enjoy the pool.  Marco was in it constantly and the adults used it to cool off.

There's still lots to do but we're back in the city for a few days and will return on Saturday to pay the guys and enjoy a quiet weekend just the two of us.

Garden Race

We were franticly trying to get the yard ready for Sergio’s party frustrated by all sorts so things - including the fact that the week prior was the big Mexican celebration of Day of the Dead – and nobody wanted to deliver, work, or do anything.  We basically bribed our three workers to come.

Earlier that week we spent two hours at a gigantic – and I mean huge – nursery.  We walked for miles with a very knowledgeable women checking off things from the list prepared by the guy who did the landscaping proposal.

This is what $1,000 dollars worth of plants looks like before they are planted. My only consolation is that in anyplace else, this load of, literally, 128 trees, plants, bushes, would have costs five times as much.

This is me with our first limes – basically everything that fell off the trees as we moved them.

All week long the workmen, including the two of us, have been leveling the lower levels of the lot and placing a layer of tezontle on top of it.  Tezontle is a red volcanic stone that absorbs a ton of water and is especially useful here during the dry season.

Then two trucks arrived with 24 square meters of top soil. It took six of us two hours to move it off the truck and get about half of it dumped in piles around the lot.

Then the sod arrive – 350 sq. meters – this was over 1000 pieces of rolled sod.  There were three of us in the truck and another three up top piling the rolls.

We treated the worked to a taco lunch and multiple beers before they left to join their families for Day of the Dead celebrations.

Here’s out three guys, Roberto, Gabriel and Samuel laying the first sod around the pool.

Unfortunately we were so beat we passed on going into town to enjoy the festivities.