Mornin’ ya’ll,

Sitting here thinking about what to write. Gonna try to answer some of the questions we’ve been emailed. Since I’m eating breakfast while I write this, I’ll start with food.

Breakfast today is bacon and eggs. Newbies from the U.S. sometimes kinda freak out about eggs (and milk and OJ) here, because the eggs here are not refrigerated. You go to the mercado and the trays of eggs are just stacked up out in the middle of anywhere. What? Are you kidding? Have these people never heard of salmonella? Well, after a couple of weeks I got curious and started researching whether or not eggs really need refrigeration. The answer, it turns out, is, it depends. Interestingly (or not), is that it goes back to governments. If you’ve read some of our other posts, we’ve mentioned that the government in Mexico is a lot less intrusive into people’s personal lives here. Not a lot of “it’s for your own good” going on. Laws here seem to be made to protect you from others, not yourself. So, eggs, right, getting there. In the U.S., the people in charge of your health (no not you, the FDA, DA, EIEIO, whatever) insist that as soon as eggs are collected from the chickens, that they be washed in hot water and detergent. Seems like a good idea, right? Well it turns out that ol Mutha Nature has been a step ahead of DC since forever. When an egg is laid, it comes out with a coating on the shell that keeps all that nastiness from penetrating the shell and getting into the yucky part of the egg. Once you wash the egg, you remove this protection, and now you have to refrigerate it to keep out all the nasties that are trying to penetrate it like sperm cells on crack. Some of it probably has to do with distribution. Eggs in Manhattan probably don’t come from a chicken ranch (A chicken ranch, not THE Chicken Ranch. Get your mind back on the blog.) on Fifth Avenue. They come a long way in a truck and God knows how old they are by the time they get to the supermarket. The eggs we buy here were most likely still in the chicken the day before yesterday. A tray of 30 eggs costs 39 pesos (about $1.90 US) at the mercado. I don’t remember what they cost in the old country. Anyway, we’ve been eating them here for about 5 months, no diseases yet.

Oh yeah, the milk and OJ. There are two kinds of each here. You get the kind like we had in the States sold in plastic in the refrigerated section. Then there’s the kind sold in paper cartons and stocked on shelves without refrigeration. The difference here is in the pasteurization process. The stuff in cartons is pasteurized at a higher temperature and will keep on the shelf for about six months as long as the container stays sealed. Same stuff, different process.

Putting the milk and OJ in there kinda ruined my planned segue from eggs to chicken. Sorry. But, hey, since we’re on the subject of chicken (smooth huh?), the first time we bought it here I thought there was something wrong with it. It smelled funny. Not bad, just funny. Different. Turns out the “funny”, was “fresh”. Much like the aforementioned eggs, the chicken we’ll have for dinner tonight was probably happily clucking away yesterday at breakfast time. Heads up – fresh tastes really good. Same with bacon. When you buy bacon here, you go see the meat guy at the mercado. You tell him you want a half kilo (about a pound) of bacon. He gets a giant slab of whatever part of the pig bacon comes from and shaves you off a pound. Like the chicken, ol’ Porky there was probably happily wallowing in the mud very recently.

OK, enough with the food, next email. Technology. We get a lot of questions about cell service. Do they have it there? Yes. We even have indoor plumbing and electricity. Cell service here is as good as anywhere else. It’s a lot cheaper than the old country. We have two smart phones, an Android and iPhone with AT&T Mexico. We pay for service a year at a time. Service for both phones with unlimited talk and text to and from Mexico, the U.S., and Canada, free Facebook and some other social media timesucks, and 3 gigs of data cost $240 a year, or about 10 bucks a month per phone. I know people who pay that much up north for one phone for just a month.

Next. A lot of our readers seem to be concerned with homesickness and missing their old lives. We’re often asked what do we miss. Well, the people of course. We have kids and grandkids that we don’t see as often as we’d like. We skype for video chats, and look forward to their visits. We miss our friends, but again, welcome them for visits anytime. Lots of them have expressed an interest in coming to Mexico since the 9^th of November for some reason. C’mon down. I (g), being a habitual consumer, miss my Amazon Prime. I liked the fact that I could find pretty much anything I wanted online, click a couple times, and in a day or two it would show up at my door. I can still order from Amazon, but it takes ten days to two weeks to get here. There is now an Amazon Mexico, which we’re looking at, but the upside to this is we (OK, especially me) are learning that we don’t really need all that we thought we did. We get asked about Costco, Walmart, and Sam’s Club and the like. We have a Walmart, Sams Club, and Home Depot about 15 kilometers away. The same but different. Walmart sells scooters and motorcycles. Yup, right there in the store between liquor (yes liquor) and housewares is the motorcycle department.

I miss the tropical climate. After travels in the Caribbean and living in the Keys, well, to me, that feels like home. This is my first time living in a desert environment and I’m not sure it’s for me. For one, it’s cold. The temp here this morning was 15C/59F. OK, those of you in the great frozen north probably think that’s positively balmy, but coming from the Keys, it’s freakin’ winter. This may lead to us leaving San Carlos and heading to the Riviera Maya on the other side of the country, which curiously, was our original plan. The upside of that for you, Constant Reader, is you will get a lot more information on different parts of Mexico if we go. I guess the important answer to this question is that there is a lot more that we don’t miss than stuff that we do miss.

Well friends, gonna stop for now. Lots to do today. Or not. If there’s a question you have, drop us a note. We try to answer every email individually and then summarize the answers in posts like this. If you don’t want to miss any of this brilliant writing, go to the upper right hand corner and subscribe. No trash, promise.

g.