For Rent Furnished 3 Bedroom 2 Bath Condo in Seattle-6 month Minimum Starting in March 2016

Like many RPCVs, we still have the travel bug!  We are going to be renting out our condo as a furnished rental starting March 2016.  Per our condo rules, this must be a six month minimum rental, but we do have some flex regarding start date and end date.  The price includes all utilities, fast internet and cable TV.  Please feel free to pass this on to anyone you think might like to spend the early spring through early fall here in the beautiful NW!

Have them contact me at: jparrent@aol.com or via this blog
 
• Elevator Building, Unit is back right corner. Southwestern exposure, lots of sun and light
• Master bedroom with King size bed & walk-in closet
• Master bath with dual vanity & skylight
• Ensuite master bath with separate spa tub
• Bedroom 2 with Queen bed
• Bedroom 3 with Queen sofa bed
• In-unit laundry room
• Balcony off living room
• Kitchen with new dishwasher
• Living room with 52 inch flat screen

Our unit is spacious and quiet-top floor southwest corner, so lots of light and it is about 15 minutes north of downtown with easy bus access and right across the street from the summer Shoreline Framers Market and the gourmet market Central Market.  And as an extra bonus there is a brand new Trader Joe's only 15 blocks away!  Here are more details & photos from my craigslist listing:

Contact me at: jparrent@aol.com or via this blog

Spacious living room with attached balcony

Kitchen with new ultra quiet dishwasher

Balcony facing south

In unit laundry room

Third bedroom with pull out queen bed

Second bedroom with queen bed

Master bedroom king bed & walk in closet

Second guest bath

Spa tub in master ensuite bath

Separate shower area in master bath

Double vanities in master bath

Cervantino & My Secondary Project

Sorry for the long silence.  October was the month that the Cervantino Festival happens here in Guanajuato and we have had visitors in and out all month.  I must say that it was such a pleasure-both a change of pace and a chance to get to know some of the other Peace Corps volunteers who live in other cities.  To give you an idea of the festive atmosphere, I am posting some photos my friend Daisie took:

This last one is of the "callejon de besos"  or roughly translated as the little street of kisses. It is one of the big tourist attractions of our city-a street so narrow, that you can kiss across the windows of the buildings.  Supposedly however, since our city is a very conservative, Catholic town, they have actually banned the practice!

We basically spent the 3 weeks of the Festival hosting friends, hanging out in the streets watching many of the free events, and just enjoying the time.  We did attend two events, one a a contemporary dance event by a group called Delfos Dance, from Sinaloa which was the "showcased" Mexican state this year:

 

The other event was an outdoor event by a wonderful singer from Mali named Oumou Sangare:

So while an exhausting three weeks-a really fun one!

On other news, as some of you may know, in the Peace Corps we are encouraged to have what is called a "secondary project" outside of our primary work time.  Mine has turned out to be the adorable new baby boy Attila!  He is officially five months old yesterday and the son of the young woman who is the new CEO of CIMATIKA, the spin off our center is creating to commercialize technology from our center.  He is absolutely adorable and we take him with us everywhere-trips to business meetings, Costco, or just hanging out in the city having coffee together:

So that is about it for now!  Our birthdays were this past month as well, so October was non-stop festivities!  And since we aren't ready to slow down, we are going to San Miguel de Allende this weekend to join my sister Susie, who is already there. We are going to celebrate the day of the dead-one of the more important holidays here in Mexico.  After that, we have a week at home and then take our first "official" vacation when we go to Guadalajara to meet friends for a few days, then back to San Miguel and Guanajuato.  It will be hard to buckle down to work after all this playing. Luckily, at that point, Xmas break will be on the horizon!

New House Paint & Our Trip to DF

Our landlords (and owners of the house) left on the 4th of July for Spain where they typically spend 6months or so a year since like Antoine and I they are bi-cultural, but in their case, Spanish and Mexican.  But before they left, Miguel decided it was time to paint the wall of our house.  We are lucky to have our version of Diego Rivera!  I must say that I liked the wall before, which was painted white with kind of a dark red sponged on leaf pattern:

Now it is much more colorful.  It is sort of an abstract "EKG" pattern in violet, green and orange!  Sounds kind of crazy but it is growing on me.  The colors coordinate with the flowers painted on the house itself:

And I must say it makes it easy to describe to taxis when they pick us up or drop us off!  So, which one do you like better?

Meanwhile, we just got back from Quertaro from our three month In-Service Training.  It was nice to see group member from PCM-12 (our group name) and catch up on what they are up to with their assignments, and it was pleasure to spend some more time in Queretaro.  That said, I was glad when training was over!  Now we don't have any more training until what is called mid-service training next April, and I think most of that is focused on dental and medical check ups.

After Queretaro, we we lucky because we had an additional week off as our center in Guanajuato was closed.  We had booked a suite hotel in the Zona Rosa for 5 nights.  We had a great time despite the fact that I caught a nasty cold during training from one of the other volunteers and it seemed to morph into a stomach flu.  So a lot of our plans for checking out ethnic restaurants seemed a lot less appealing than anticipated. By the end of the trip, unfortunately, Antoine caught the bug as well and is just now starting to feel a bit better!  So our first Mexico vacation wasn't necessarily a roaring success, but it was still nice to have the break.  We were feeling well enough to have dinner twice with some volunteers who were in town from Guadalajara.  They were great to get to meet since they are another couple around our age, and since they will be extending a year and moving to Queretaro, we may have  a chance to see other again hopefully!

The last day before returning to Guanajuato, I was feeling well enough to visit the Anthropology Museum which is always a treat-I especially love the Mayan section.  Here are some photos to enjoy from this splendid museum:

 

All Critters Great & Small

As much as we are pet lovers we are resisting the the temptation to adopt any cats or dogs while we are here in Mexico!  But I do want to share some photos of some of the more tame and wild critters we have run across so far.

As cat people, by far our favorite animal so far was our host mom Rosi's lovely little cat Matias:

And just down the road from Rosi's house, there is a corral with 10-15 cows and calves.  We never figured out how come, but sometimes you see a cow wandering down the road unattended, or patiently waiting outside the corral to be let in:

And up at our bus stop coming from CIMAT center there is this really sweet friendly girl dog.  She seems to belong to one of the people who lives up there.  I had a conversation with a woman one day who said that she was her dog, so hopefully that is true.  I think the dog has a sweet spot for me though because one day I saw her with a piece of twine tied tightly around her neck.  It was broken off as if someone had tried to tie her up and she had gotten loose.  I managed to cut the twine off of her neck which had really been bugging her, and now whenever she is around at the bus stop, she comes over to say hi:

Many times she is joined by goats and sheep who also wander by from close to the old mines:

Last but not least we have to show you a couple of the unwelcome and dangerous critters we have seen:

In our house we have now seen (and killed) 3 alacranes.  An alacrán is related to a scorpion. Supposedly the small black ones like you see trapped here are not too dangerous-like a bee sting.  If stung, you need to take an antihistamine and put ice on the sting and you should be fine unless you have  a very strong reaction.  But there are lighter colored ones with strong venom.  Supposedly all our friends say they only live in Leon, but I bet all the folks in Leon tell the volunteers there that those ones only live in Guanajuato!  In any case, we try to be very careful-we shake out our shoes and we check our stucco walls often in the house-so far that is where we have found all 3-clinging to walls.  But I guess that is better than stepping on them!

Finally, on our way to work from the bus stop after a rain we ran across a tarantula! Hard to tell from the photos, but this sucker was BIG!  So while we don't have lions to watch out for like the volunteers in Zambia, life in Peace Corps Mexico definitely has a thrills of the animal variety!

We Have a Place of Our Own

So it is official-we can finally have visitors!  We moved into our new house last weekend.  We ended up staying with our wonderful host mom Rosi for two weeks longer than expected because the house we ended up renting was quite ready for occupation, so she generously let us keep renting from her.  She was the person who helped us find the house.  It actually belongs to friends of hers here in Guanajuato.  It was not on the market.  It has a small apartment attached to the house and the people who own both units live in the apartment and the house has been sitting empty.  They spend half the year in Spain and after thinking about it, I think they decided that since we were a personal referral from Rosi, they would be willing to rent to us.  Like our PC trainers told us, relationships are really important in Mexico, and I am sure without help from our host mom, we wouldn't have found such a great place.

Our place is up in the hills very near to the center where we work.  After looking at a number of noisy, pretty awful overpriced places in town, we decided that living up here would be calmer and of course would make our commute to work in the morning a whole lot easier.

Here are some photos of the house and our view from the kitchen which is really beautiful.

Our place is right on the main highway going up from Guanajuato and it is white stucco painted with flowers. The blue area is the small apartment where our landlords live.  The husband is Mexican and an architect.  He designed the house and apartment.  Luckily he is a specialist in energy saving , so the house stays nice and cool.  An added bonus is that the bus stops right in front going down to town, and we just cross the street to go up the hill.

Since people seem to name their houses here, ours is now officially called Casa Flores because someone (I suspect our talented landlord) decorated the house with painted flowers.  And the red paint on the wall is all handpainted as well with beautiful a beautiful leaf shape:



















Here is a shot with better details of the flowers:

And here is a picture of our patio, which is lovely but generally a little hot, so we have yet to eat outside!

Because Guanajuato is hilly, our house is kind of a multi-level split level design-so lots of stairs and lots of hard surfaces.  This is looking down from the dining room, kitchen level to the living room.  We don't have much furniture-but we do have a fireplace!  Although in the very arid land I would be terrified to ever light a fire!

Here is the kitchen-which is really large and mostly empty although we now have a fairly large round table over near the windows.

And this is our view from our kitchen windows!

So as you can tell we have plenty of room for friends and family and we hope you will make plans to come see us!

Otherwise, we had a chance to go to Querétaro again last week since Peace Corps needed some more people to come be Spanish speaking guinea pigs for their language trainers in their certification training.  So since they were paying our bus fare for the day trip, we brought empty suitcases with us and filled them at Costco with last minute move-in stuff like some more pillows, etc.  Otherwise, we would have to pay to go to Leon and the bus and taxi fare wouldn't make it worth it.  So it was a treat to go back to a larger, flatter town for a day!  But it was hot, so we were actually kind of get back to our cooler part of Mexico!  We will be going back to Querétaro in mid-July for our early in-service training and then since our center will be closed we have booked a few nights in Mexico City.  We really enjoyed the overnight trip we took there during training so we thought we would go back when we will be able to really enjoy the restaurants and movies in the big city.

A Little Bit About Work

CIMAT has been a very welcoming center.  When we arrived, the first challenge was finding a place to put us!  Our counterpart Laura didn’t want Antoine and I to share an office since she knew that we would basically talk English all day together-which is definitely right!  Since space is at a premium, it was a challenge to find two spaces.  Luckily we both ended up with offices rather than a card table in the software development room!  Antoine is sharing an office with a post-grad student and I have my own space which is an office of one of the researchers who is currently on sabbatical in Spain. The center is currently finishing construction on a new building that will house a robotics lab as well as the software department and it is my understanding that eventually towards the end of summer we may move there.  But for now, I am not complaining.  The only challenge is that our center is built on a billion hills and there are something like 10 buildings built up the hill and so it is really difficult to get to know anyone and to gather round any facsimile of a water cooler!  So that is the bad news. Here is photo so you see what I mean-very challenging on the knees by the way, especially at almost 8000 feet up!

 

But I am hoping that once we start to teach some English classes we will get to know more people. Our first project here is to help with the transition to a new website for the center.  They are scheduled to go live with the new site at the end of June and while there is currently content on the old site, it really needs to be rethought and rewritten both in Spanish and in English.  Since the communications director has a very busy schedule, we decided that the best approach is for Antoine and I to rewrite the site in an English “Lite” version and then once we all agree on content, they will translate the new copy into Spanish.  So far, the process is working and it is a great way to get know every aspect of the center since we spend hours studying the content that is on the old site, studying work documents, and trying to understand how to communicate all the aspects of the work done here at the center.

The highlight of the first week was an invitation by the Director of the center to join him for lunch along with our counterpart at one of the nicest restaurants in town.  They both insisted that we try one of Mexico’s specialties called Escamoles, which for the culinarily challenged among you, translate as ant larvae!  In this case they were served as a starter in the form of a sope-a  little masa pancake and they were very good-kind of nutty and buttery as they are described-but better not to think about what you are eating!  Here is a photo:

Aside from the amazing lunch, we welcomed an opportunity to spend some time with our Director who is a brilliant and busy man.  He has won the national prize for mathematics here in Mexico and it was interesting to listen to the kinds of projects he is interested in working on for the center.  We will see how they all develop and how we might be able to contribute.

Meanwhile, we have the website to keep us occupied.  We also will be starting some English classes in the next few weeks.  Antoine will be leading a conversation group for interested staff members and I will be focusing on a business English class for the people in sales and the people who work with industry.  So it is will be interesting to see who signs up and how those courses proceed.  For now however, May 1^st is a holiday here in Mexico, so we have been enjoyed both Monday and Tuesday as a holiday!  Not a bad way to start off our new jobs!

Swearing In & Host Family Life in Guanajuato

As of last April 19^th, we are no longer PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) but are now PCVs! (Peace Corp Volunteers).  Our service will end officially on April 18^th, 2014.  The swearing in ceremony took place in the garden area of the Peace Corps Offices in Querétaro and we were officially sworn in by Laura Dogu, who is the number two person in charge at the US Embassy in Mexico.  The ambassador was supposed to do the honors but had a last minute change of schedule in conjunction with the G20 conference.  

We chose Salvador, our fellow volunteer who is originally from Spain, to do our five minutes volunteer speech in Spanish.  He did a great job and even though we took the easy way out as a group choosing our Spanish speaker to give the speech, in terms of presentation skills and personality, he was a very good choice to do the honors. The ceremony was more emotional than I had expected.  I am not sure if this was due to the ceremony itself or only our vast relief at finally finishing our 10 weeks of grueling training!  Even though we consider ourselves lucky in terms of being assigned to Mexico, the training experience seems to be difficult no matter where in the world you do your service.  Between classes running six days a week and the anxiety about your future service, it seems to universally be the part of the Peace Corps experience that everyone is glad to see come to an end!  Speaking of classes, as far as we know, we all made it successfully to the “intermediate low” level of Spanish that is required for our program.  So that at least means that we aren’t on language “probation”.  That said, once we get just a bit more settled, Antoine and I want to start to see what we can do with online resources to continue trying to improve our language.  We also plan to get a television, which we don’t currently have, in order to get more practice listening to Spanish. 

After the ceremony itself, we visited with our center directors, host families and PC staff for a while.  At that point, our center director and counterpart colleague were invited along with the other important guests to one of the CONACyT research centers for lunch with the Embassy representative.  Meanwhile, we went back to our host family’s house, packed our things and went back to the center to await our ride to Guanajuato-our new home base for the next two years!  Before I change the subject and talk more about our first days here in Guanajuato, here is a photo taken after the ceremony.  The Embassy person is the tall woman in front of Antoine in the light blue jacket.  Behind me is Sam, our youngest volunteer from our group, headed out to work in the rural area of Puebla near where they are constructing a giant telescope. He is hoping to work with some of the surrounding villages on eco-technical projects.  The other people in the right side of the photo are the other 3 new PCVs from our group.  Two of them are staying in Querétaro working at Universities and Salvador, standing next to our Assistant Director Kitty Kaping, will be living in Leon.  Finally, the last two people in the photo are Beatriz Charles, our program manager, and in the back row middle, our country director, Dan Evans.


 

 

So, after the ceremony we were able to ride up to Guanajuato with our counterpart Laura and her driver.  We are currently living with our new host family in an area up above the city center called “Los Filtros”.  It is a little residential enclave about a two minutes’ walk from the main highway that runs between the city center and our CONACyT center called CIMAT where we are working.  We love our new host mom, Rosi.  She is a single mom with three sons.  Since two of them study in Querétaro, it is quiet most of the week and we live downstairs in a little separate studio apartment, which is a huge improvement over the single small room we had at our first host family's house.  The bathroom is built into a passageway and have a very low ceiling so poor Antoine has hit his head at least once that I know of and has to duck to shower, but neither of us are complaining since we are so happy to have a much more comfortable space.

The walk is surprisingly bucolic-we walk by a corral with cows, horses and mother hens being followed around by the cutest little baby chicks!  Every so often, for some unknown reason we will walk by and see one of the cows alone standing outside the corral or wandering up our little dirt road.  That is the moment that we realize we are actually having a Peace Corps moment despite working at a mathematics research center with all the comforts of home.