Humberto, Firefly, and Obraje limbo

What a difference a car makes! 

As promised, with the shifting calendar, we knew Day23 was going to be a big one so, anticipating it and the jam-packed ones to follow, the Source-er made the mad-brilliant plan for us to bite the proverbial projectile and rent a car for the next month. The only caveat was that we would have to somehow trek all the way back to Querétaro airport to get an affordable deal from, wait for it, Alamo. No, the dumb symbolism of that particular car rental brand did not escape us. And, of course, it proved as prophetic as it was obvious. After and hour and 15 minutes there via Uber (yes, It's everywhere) and and another hour and half with the beleaguered desk agent, we were roundly defeated at Alamo as they could neither honor the guaranteed Expedia deal nor, as it turned out, provide any of the class of car we had reserved. During this typically elongated two-languaged skirmish, I spied three bueys at Firefly Car Rental across the way bemusedly watching our surrender at the Alamo counter, so we eventually made a deal with them!

Yes, it was at almost a third more than the Expedia deal, but we got an almost new VW Vento with 3/4 of a tank of gas, which was no throw-away given the long lines at the Pemex pumps these last weeks here. But we had wheels, access to the open road, freedom! I eased the VW onto the Mexican highway filled with a new sense of optimism then proceeded to miss a turn for the toll road back to SMA and took the big 405-like carretera through the heart of busy, booming, Santiago de Querétaro. Wending our way back we stopped to check on our stuff in exile outside of SMA then on through the impossibly narrow, cobbled and topes-ridden streets of the place itself for our last night in the San Antonio. We got a spot for the Vento right across from our puerta, then re-packed, readied the felines and hit the sack, waiting for the bells to start hump day.

Thursday morning at 9:00am saw us waiting outside the Instituto Nacional de Migración on Calzada de la Estación along with a motley crew of mostly other viejo gringos looking to build a life on this side of the wall, for the arrival of Humberto, a paralegal from our immigration lawyers' office. He was to navigate us through the all important step of having our pictures (mugshot-style: front and side) and fingerprints (all ten fingees!) taken for our desperately important residency cards. Without getting too granular, you need a permanent or temporary residency card  to buy cars, get bank accounts and, oh yeah, get out of the country. We realized right away that paying the not unreasonable tarrif to San Miguel Legal for their services to complete this task begun at the Mexican Consulate in New York several months ago was a bargain when Humberto's number (15) was called first. Now, as you no doubt have started to clue-into by now, the usual pessimist's mind-game of asking "how bad could it be" when facing certain possibly daunting tasks, in order to be relieved and thankful when "the bad" is never approached, doesn't work here. Imagining what could go wrong to point of testing one's patience is just being realistic in Mexico. Simply put, we're living the pessimist dream! 

We're happy to report, however, that our immigration experience with Humberto at the start of Hump-Day23 was the exception that proved the above rule. Except for the fact that my picture for the Permanent Residency of Mexico Card has my nose lead-white like a sorry David Hasselhoff pining for the beach, it went smoothly enough that we now just have to wait for the actual cards to arrive at our lawyers' office any week now. That's assuming the immigration service doesn't run out of blank plastic cards as it did last year causing delays as long as three months; but we wont go there for the above stated reason. Not yet anyway. It went so smoothly we actually had time to get a late breakfast at El Cafe Tal before wrangling the cats and the three stuffed maletas, the keepable contents of our fridge, and a number of boxes, cases and bits of acquired furnishings into the now groaning Vento for transfer to our new reduced circumstances home for the next two weeks, a three story sliver of cinderblock construction next to a rubble-filled lot, up two very steep rutted roads above the dry Obraje but not far from our will-it-ever be-finished abode in the Rincon. Squeezing-in more meetings with the contractor, by mid-afternoon we had made the interim crib transition from the sublime to the barely adequate. 

Tomorrow, Monday, Constitution Day (the holiday calendar here easily rivals that of  New Orlean) is another watershed of sorts as we have hired a moving crew to once and for all rescue our stuff-from-home-in-exile at Magic Marcos bodega in the country. Assuming we can get past Marcos' perimeter fence and the chained pit-bulls guarding the compound, it will be deposited, presumably, in the mostly finished and we hope secure studio of the new house. If we actually pull it off, we will take a tremendous synchronized sigh of relief. Yes, we're still missing three newly purchased pieces that MM evidently sold off on one side of the border or the other, and we still can't precisely pinpoint the precise locale of the supposed-be-delivered-already refrigerator, washer-dryer, and TV from the local Liverpool dept store, nor who's responsible for the water-purification installation (I can go on...) but our Nuro stuff will finally be back under our control. Come-on! Yes! New definition of achievement!

So Now we sit in our second rented living room here on Superbowl Sunday afternoon after having spent a good part of the day at La Comer, the local version of a huge Stop n'Shop cumTarget, optimistically stocking up on food and new house essentials, listening to Spotify, eating Ritz Sabores con Mantequilla y Ajo and drinking Bohemia cerveza as our
 neighbors loudly visit each other's stoops over barking dogs, revving engines and crowing roosters.  
Middle of this month is now our new move-in date here in the pessimists' paradise.
​Stay-tuned.


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