Beware the pistachio and Yalta in the shed

When last we left our intrepid contra-caravaners, I believe they were encountering some bumps along the road to late-life artsy kismet. Friday Day16 dawns clear and cool with the usual smokiness that accompanies the dry season in this 7,000ft desert plateau town. And we are recovering from the week's earlier one-two punch of food and real estate poisoning.

Yes, it's true that Day14 saw me foolishly succumb to the temptations of a street helado vendor at the corner of  Insugentes and Hidlago as we were trekking back to the Rincon to try to make sense of the baffling delays and unexpected invoices that stopped us in our proverbial tracks as week three emerged. What better way to shed the light of optimism on the dark corners of second thoughts than with home-made ice cream! Jackie got a generous cono de chocolate while I opted for a taza de pistache. The cart was a cloth-roofed rectangle sitting on the busy sun-filled corner of the quaintest of colonias,  filled with about a dozen dented aluminum pots with their flavors sharpied on masking tape on tight covers. The woman at the tiller of this land boat explained that one side was water-based helado and the other cream based. The pots sat in cracked ice to which another woman continuously adds rock salt. I later remark to Jackie that the helado-ista had to reach far into the pistachio tub for my choice and that her efforts resulted in a much smaller scoop than Jackie's. In other words, that sugar cream and nut mixture had probably been sitting on that corner of the cart on that sunny corner of that town for at least two days and I got the last bit. Lucky me! It was on our trek back, when Jackie brought-up dinner that I realized I wouldn't be eating dinner that night or probably much of anything for oh, probably the next 24 hours. Beware Montezuma's Pistachio!

So Day15 was one of, let's say leisure for me as we awaited an explanation and hopeful recanting of the surprise pergola invoice, and other more positive progress from the banking and immigration sectors. We'd given up on the missing stuff from Magical Marcos who, presumably, was already far north of the border helping out some other unsuspecting reverse emigre. This down-time also led us to realize that our little pipe-dream of turning the lime of our move-in delay into limonada of a couple o' weeks on the Mexican Riviera was just that. The questionable prices at peak season aside, not many of those resorts were cat-friendly, so, instead we spent the day chasing down a place to live starting next next week. Took some doing, but we managed by dint of AirB&B to find a cat-tolerant-if-you-cut-their-nails affordable house in the Obraje colonia just above our place in progress at El Rincon. It comes with a garage of sorts so Jackie went to work finding us a car rental at the Queretaro airport for a month starting the day before we have to leave Casa Gayle on the 31st. This way we could start moving our once moved stuff in two locales one more time to a third one before we moved it all for good to a fourth and final one, whenever that might be.

But, my God, has it all been work, work, work since crossing the border? What about relaxation, I hear you ask. Well, we had been spending our cool evenings before the ceramic gas fire watching the completely outrageous Netflix Latam telenovela La Casa De Las Flores on my laptop. No better way to start to learn the language and the culture than by watching really trashy TV, if I do say so myself. But having finished the series the night before (and guiltily hoping for a season 2), and to soothe our co-fevered brows during what was shaping up to be our semana horribilis, I bought the third season of Victoria from ITunes, so we settled in to watch the first two equally soapy episodes when halfway through episode two, we finally got a response from one of our twin real estate brokers who had met with the contractor that afternoon and consulted with the architect and gave us the verdict: We damn well owed money on the rooftop build and more! Huzzah! Forget about the threat of the Chartists' Revolt, this meant war!

Suffice it to say, we didn't take this lying down, even though that had been my actual position most of the day and it was late. Still, we took out the contracts and the signed architect plans and I dashed-off my best LA Law-esque point-by-pint rebuttal via e-mail to all parties and The Shade's awesome powers of corrective invective were unleashed via voicemail. The result was the convening of a mini-Yalta of all parties to gather inside the construction shed at the Rincon the following day at 12:30pm. Jackie and I prepared our case, drafted an agenda for the meeting. We also crafted a face-saving fiscal solution for all. I must say, with all modesty, we were good. There was no rebuttal to our arguments. Only the absent and suddenly uncommunicative architect came in for most of the much deserved blame. We discovered that he had drawn plans for a much more elaborate rooftop shangri-la than we had expected or budgeted for. And he never sent them to us! Clear violation of para 5! But then this is not LA or NY, it's Mexico, Mr Gittes. So we presented our perfectly reasonable financial proposal to untangle the gordian knot with which he had bound us, for we need to get our project back on track before we have to find a third rental or go home unmoved-in. We now await his response....*

Throughout all of the construction sturm und drang, of course, Jackie's pursuit of design superiority has gone unabated. On the way back from our summit, we stopped back in Centro at CIBanco which had had a change of heart and were now assuring us that our deplorable gringo penmanship could be overcome by their lawyers if we just stopped by for a few more signatures. Yay! Outside the bank was a street vendor with many of the usual crafts for sale including some woven baskets. Jackie had been on the prowl for just such baskets for a good part of a fortnight now. Leaning on my terribly creaky Spanish, we learned that Leonardo lived a few blocks away and could execute the canastas Jackie desired in a little more than a week. We exchanged email and I gave him a deposit. Bam! Baskets ticked off the list. That night, feeling somewhat more adventurous about sustenance, we walked to the very end of our rental street, 20 de Enero, to a spare store-front called Denver's Los Olivios, a local who had worked for Olive Garden in the states returned and opened his own Italian kitchen right here in colonia San Antonio. There, over chicken parm, we seriously engaged our first expats, Michele and Deiter, from LA and Frankfurt with whom we exchanged WhatsApp numbers. Not a bad ending to a tough few days. 

*You're probably wondering how and why does this Mexico DF architect seemingly have so much power over our lives as we are still awaiting his response to our proposal to get on with it! That for a future post. Stay tuned...