More about life here

In my last post I forgot to mention the best find ever!  Some neighbors took us to church with them, an awesome Calvary Chapel Capilla Calvario Horizonte Ensenada.

We worship in both languages! Songs are a few verses in each language and words are projected on the screens. Since we know most of the songs this is helping to learn Spanish while we worship and encouraging us to learn more. The sermons always delivered in English and translated, prayers and announcements can be either but still translated.   We love the mixed cultures and efforts.

Doug had a mild cold, then we had a massive n cold rain storm that kept us from church (remember we walk everywhere here and would have been cold, drown rats!)  Then I got a tooth ache.  First medical need and post will follow.  Any ways we missed a few weeks so it was awesome to return to worship this past weekend.

Doug and I are doing well with many interesting points to balance.  Wifi is free at the marina and works well in the office which becomes social and worthless on the boat.  Doug is most willing to go the the 'cruisers lounge' and seems to be able to work in what I consider noise.  I can't work with the noise and he is good with paying for the phone program that we can access internet from.  We are learning how to trim usage in a practical way.  For instance downloading vids take tons of bandwidth so we avoid them or go to the office if necessary.  We will begin trading our email newsletters to text not html  and go from there.

We have the phones figured out, at least mostly...  We found a service that forwards our American phone number to our Mexican number for $1 per month and .05 per minute.  This is supposed to be free to all who call us.   We can call out on our Mexican numbers for .20 per minute, which is free to all we call.  Texts are supposed to be free both directions...  Have not found that they work yet.  Voicemail is recorded and sent to email as an attachment.  Worked for first time yesterday...

It has been very interesting to shop translating dollar/pesos and lbs/kilograms all at the same time.  Eating like the locals is easy and cheap.  Fresh tortillas are ohhhh so good and they put everything in them.  We can get organics but it is harder to find.  Real/whole food is gmo free and most processed is of course not!  We wash everything in vinegar and have had no problem.  I enjoyed a massage here at ½ the price of back home and thoroughly enjoyed it.

We have not been doing much sight seeing per se but just walking around town is such an eyeopener. Of course lots of extreme poverty with pockets of basic living. The walk on the beach is totally bizarre. While the beach itself is actually cleaner than most of Oregon's, dilapidated shacks and mansions inter-leaf the beachfront.  Even more interesting is that in Mexico only the natives are legal to own beachfront land/homes.  

Only things we wish for are a international airport and a nearby place to go anchor out. They will have to wait until we are ready to go further south. We have some boat work to be done that will require being hauled out and put on glorified stilts on land. Thankfully we waited for Mexico to do this as US liability would never let us life aboard 'on the hard.' Cats won't be impressed but I think will be much better than a hotel room.  

Trying to juggle all the new knowledge (especially that Pacific Mexico has 6 distinctive weather patterns, each with 4 distinctive seasons) that has to be interpreted and applied before we go much further... Not sure how long we will be here but visitors must fly into Tijuana and bus to us....  Our hope is we can figure out our travel agenda and rent a furnished  place somewhere with an airport so that anyone who wants to visit can and will be nearby with comfortable and free housing.  Not sure how this will work but we are trying!!!

love to all