Life in La Paz

April 11, 2009 Happy Birthday Amy

Life is smooth and soft here in La Paz. The Mexican people never seem to be stressed or in a hurry, except when they are driving. Then watch out!! We need to get used to waiting. Mother used to say, “Some body has to do the waiting”. That is especially true here. We spend a lot of time on our boat sitting in the cockpit or listening to the radio or working on the internet. I have learned to cut the dog’s hair which is a noticeable savings for me. It was also a necessity since I couldn’t find the groomer here and her hair was getting really knotted and shaggy. However, I still need to find a groomer because they do a better job than I did.
La Paz is built in a rather hilly place and instead of smoothing the ground out, they just built on hills. As you walk down the side walk you will go up stairs and down stairs and you have to be careful of drop offs and holes in the sidewalk. The houses look like southern California but most of them are older than what I am used to seeing there. They all have fences. Some are rot iron and some are stucco. Some are a combination of both. The stores have bars on the windows too. There is a lovely old cathedral in the center of town. It makes me glad that the temples in SLC have fences and peaceful yards around them.
The stores open around 9 in the morning like they do in SLC. But they have a siesta around 2 which lasts a couple hours. Then they open again and stay open till around 8 or 9 pm. People here are hard workers. They sweep the sidewalks in town a lot. But they still need sweeping all the time, probably because of all the sand. But there seems to be trash too. I would think that with all that sweeping, people would be careful what they drop but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
In Mexico you can’t fire your employees, if they have worked for you for 6 months or longer. If you should go out of business, you will have to pay each employee a lump sum which can amount to several thousand dollars each. Each case is different but it is enough so that people don’t mind getting laid off and people usually don’t get fired. I am not sure how it works. I know that many people work for tips and they will wash your car if you stop at a stop light. (With a very dirty rag) They will try to find ways to be helpful because they expect a tip for everything they do. Someone said this is the Mexican retirement plan.
Another difference here is that they have many products in the store that mimic the products we have in the USA but are not the same. Cheetos are one of them and V8 juice is another. They create a product that looks like what I am used to buying but when I get it home, it isn’t nearly as good. But they do have V8 juice once in a while. The butter isn’t salted. I guess that is the case in Europe too.
April 15th Tax day
Luckily, I got the income tax done, thanks to Wendy’s running all over town for me, many times. I wonder what it will be like next year, now that we are on Social Security. I hear that they are having Tea Parties all over the USA. I wonder how those will go. If any of you are interested in the conspiracy theory in the government, as I am, there is a web site you may want to check out. On the La Paz cruisers net this morning, someone suggested that we should look it up and see what it says. I did. I was surprised to see what this person claims, is going on. You may be interested too. To find it you type “JFK Bush Hoover Memo” into your web browser. Check the sites that come up until you find the interesting one. Then you read the large entry at the bottom and draw your own conclusions.
There are a group of cruisers that get together and talk on the VHF radio every morning at 7:15. We use their program like an alarm clock. Most of them are pretty liberal and they think Obama is doing a wonderful job. But there is at least one who thinks they don’t have all the facts. He is the one that mentioned the web page above. They discuss the news and the weather and whatever else they decide to talk about.
Then at 8:00 every morning, we tune to a different channel on the VHF radio and they have a net. They give you the weather report and welcome any new comers. They have announcements from their club and exchange ideas. They also try to solve any problems you may have like, “Where can I find this or that?” After that they have a swap and trade session. We can’t sell anything in Mexico so we trade for “coconuts”. We aren’t allowed to work while we are here either. The Mexican government is much stricter about this than we are in the USA.
Jim has gone over to see if he can help Chris with his electrical problems. He has tried not to get too involved but now Chris is ready to sell his boat and get a condo because of all the problems he has had. That would be a shame because it is really a beautiful boat. I hope Jim will be able to help. He has worked on it a little but hasn’t gotten into it deep enough to really solve anything. I think he could fix it if he had enough time. Both Chris and Jim started out with big problems on their boats. We think our main problem is fixed. It would be nice if Chris’ could be fixed too.
I stayed here to make bread, work on my journal and work on the “screen door” for the companion way hatch, which I haven’t started yet, and it is now 5:00. Maybe I should start on it before it gets dark.
April 19, 2009
I would tell you about our weather but I don’t want to make anyone jealous, so I will skip that for today. I hear the weather is pretty bad in UT this week.
Jim showed Chris where the problems were with the wiring. They managed to find several things that had been done wrong. Chris was very grateful since several people have tried to solve the problems and failed. He took us out to breakfast the next day.
I still haven’t started on the “screen door”. But it has been a pleasant and busy week. Our plans for our trip to Utah are shaping up. We are going to purchase a car to drive home. It looks like it belongs to a Mexican or a red neck, depending on where you are. But it seems to be mechanically sound. I hope Jim can get the air conditioner to work. Iif not then it is sweatsville all the way through all that desert. It would not be legal in the USA because of the broken windshield. We will need to get Mexican drivers licenses and insurance, etc.
We have made arrangements to put the boat in dry dock for a few months. They will pull the boat out of the water for us and place it on the hard. Then we will climb into the old black blazer we are purchasing and head for UT. We will be able to see the inner part of the Baja Peninsula while we travel. We expect to take a few days to get home. We will probably get a hotel here and there.
We are planning on spending a couple months in Utah and renewing friendships. Then we will come back down here and live in the boat while it is “on the hard”. That will be tricky, but not impossible. The dry dock we found is a safe hurricane haven so we will leave the boat there till hurricane season is over this fall. Then we can put it back into the water and we can continue with our long vacation, or whatever.
Today there was a swap meet here at the marina. Jim got a water generator. This is a propeller that you drag behind the boat to generate electricity. He also got a little dingy. We are a two dingy family now! This one is small and easy to maneuver. Jim also sent the larger outboard motor to the repair man to be reconditioned. Then we will have two dingys and two motors. What more could anyone want?
I got a wind scoop for the hatch and a couple cook books. Now I can tell you how to kill a chicken and take the feathers off, in case you want to know. If you want to learn about that, just ask me and I will let you borrow the book. But I still don’t know how to cook a fish and make it turn out so you want to eat it.
April 23rd
Karen (Jim’s sister) is going in for surgery today. Our prayers are with her. She will be fine we expect.
We have had a busy week this week. We have been trying to finalize the deal on the car. Monday we went with the couple we are buying it from and their interpreter (agent) to the DMV to get the title changed. We found out that we needed to have Mexican driver’s licenses to drive a car with Mexican plates, and since we were at the DMV we began working on that too. Then we learned that we needed to get an FM3 visa for Mexico before we could get drivers licenses. We have spent the rest of the week walking from one place to another and back again trying to get that accomplished. Willie has gone with us and helped us for two days. So did Greg and Laura who are selling the car. We learned that the title will not be clear until they send the papers to Mexico City and someone there looks through a bunch of boxes of papers to try to find the original. Then they can certify that the car really belongs to Laura and Greg. This is because when they bought the car, it was OK to give them a copy of the original with a blue stamp on it to prove that it was original. Now it is not OK. So the copy they got when they bought the car will no longer work to sell the car. The law was changed 2 months ago.
While we are waiting for the certification to come back, we will be trying to get our FM3 so that we can get driver’s licenses to drive the car. We also need insurance and I have called the company twice and given them the information. Both times they promised to call me back, but they haven’t yet.
We have had our blood taken and filled out forms. One had to be typed so we went with Willey to find a typist who works out of a little wooden booth in a plaza just off the street. This little old man has a copy machine and an old typewriter and he sits in the wooden booth and has a line of customers waiting for him all day. He must earn good money. He had me pull back my hair so he could see the shape of my forehead. He wrote down the shape of my nose and the size of my mouth and the shape of my chin, etc. This all had to be on the form. We spent 2 days getting our pictures taken and going from one office to another trying to meet all the requirements for the FM3. Yesterday we turned in the paperwork and we will have to wait a week for them to check it. Then we went to find the place we get our physicals for the driver’s licenses. We didn’t find it yesterday but today we tried again. We walked to the place we thought it was and it wasn’t there. We kept looking and finally ask a policeman. He directed us to a different place and we didn’t know if we should go in or try again to find the place Willey had told us to go. We finally decided to try again to find the right place.
When we found it, we went in and give the lady the note Willey had given us saying what we needed. She said something in Spanish. When I told her I didn’t speak Spanish, she said she didn’t speak English and turned around and walked away. If she would have stayed, I think I could have made her understand or perhaps I would have understood what she wanted me to do, but she didn’t even try. We had walked about an hour to get there and I was upset. Jim was too because he turned and walked out of there. I decided there was nothing I could do but follow, so I did but then I was upset at him and the lady in the window.
We had left the dog at the groomers and couldn’t pick her up for 3 more hours so we just looked around the town for a while. Mostly when you are walking around town you just look at sidewalks because if you look up, you may trip over some edge or stumble into a hole. I am getting to recognize the sidewalks but not the stores or the store windows.
We walked around for about an hour, then we decided to go back to the clinic. The lady was gone and the man that was there pointed to the doctor’s offices in the hall. We tried the door of the first office and found the doctor was busy with a patient. We waited. After a while, a lady came out of the second office and Jim opened the door and motioned for me to follow, so I did. This doctor spoke a little English and he told us we were at the wrong clinic. He told us we needed to go back to the one the police man had told us to go to. It was about a mile away from this one.
When we got there, there was a line at the door. People kept coming out but no one went in. We waited in that line about an hour. Then Jim realized that they were probably at siesta. That is why no one was going in. Around 3 they started going in. The line was about 30 feet long by this time. We waited a little longer and realized people were paying in advance to get their appointments. We were worried that if we had to pay in advance, we may have to leave before we were seen because we had to pick up the dog by 4. We left and walked the 8 blocks back to get the dog. Then we took a taxi home. That is pretty much how every day has gone this week, but we are making progress. We called Willie and he promised to meet us in the morning and go with us to the clinic. That will make it easier.
The next morning we went with Willie to the Clinic to get our physicals. He took us to the back door of the Clinic and he talked to a doctor there. He said that he told her that we had waited all day the previous day and not been able to get our physicals. She sent us to the cashier and then to the optometrist. While we waited for the optometrist, a nurse took our vitals. The doctor waived our physical and a few minutes later we were walking out the door with our certificate. We went right past the long lines waiting for help.
Willie talked to the people at the DMV and they said they would give us our driver’s licenses as soon as we get far enough with getting our FM3 so that it has been approved and paid for. Immigration told us we will need to wait till Wednesday to do that.
April 29, 09
This is Wednesday and we walked up to the Immigration office to finish our FM3. The girl there told us that we needed to pay for our visa again if we didn’t have a receipt for the last visa we got which we obtained last November. So we walked back to the dingy dock and went back to the boat. We were in a hurry because we needed to go up to central city to the bank to pay the fee and then get back to the Immigration office before one pm. They will not work on FM3s in the afternoons.
We did get the receipts and went to the bank. When we got there, there was a long line of people and rows of chairs in the lobby. The bank was like the DMV in Salt Lake. We took a number and took a seat. After we had sat there for a few minutes, the lady in front of us turned around and offered us her number. She said someone had left and given her their number so she had a spare. We were grateful because we were in a hurry and the new number was 40 places in front of the one we had.
After we finished there, we hurried back to immigration. We made it before one o clock and were seen. The attendant there took the papers they wanted and told us to come back in 10 days. That is a Saturday and we were hoping to be able to leave here before that. Oh Well!! We will need to wait till the following Monday. We will not be able to leave until the license on the car is cleared anyway, and we have no idea when that will happen.
We called Willie and ask him when we could go get our driver’s licenses and he told us that he needs to work today and Thursday. Friday is a holiday so we may have to wait till Monday. If we had our driver’s licenses, we could drive here. We cannot leave until we have our FM3s and our car license plates so now we don’t know when we can leave for the USA.
While I am waiting, maybe I will work on making that screen for the companionway hatch. But not today because it is too hot now.
Meanwhile, the swine flu scare is threatening to close the borders. Oh no, that was yesterday. I heard this morning that they have decided that it is too late to do that, so I guess we will be able to get home. The incubation for the flu is only 2 days so by the time we got home, we should be clean. But that isn’t much of a worry since they have no confirmed flu here in the Baja peninsula YET. A lot of people are walking around with masks on and the schools are shut down.
It is getting hot here during the day time. It was 93 yesterday and gets down to the 60’s at night. The water in the bay is 80 degrees now. It is too hot to do very much in the afternoons. I am reading a book. Jim usually plays solitare.
The people here have more freedom in their personal lives than the people in the USA. But their opportunities are stymied by their countrymen. They don’t need to have safety inspections to drive their cars. They do have a seat belt law but it is only for the driver. They can smoke in cafes if they choose to and the owners don’t object. They can park in their yards if they want to, but most people don’t do it. They may have less freedom of speech but if that is so, it isn’t noticeable. Their taxes are very very low and their utility bills are very very low compared to those in the USA. Most people are quite considerate and helpful. And the sunsets here are beautiful!!

When we get through the lack of technology and we get our license plates and our FM3s and our drivers licenses, we will be headed home. We plan to visit a few of the old missions on our way home and taking some desert pictures. So we will see you all soon.
Love,
Jim and Donna