Our mega-modest and interesting daily life; or, "Casa, Sweet Casa"

We don't pay a lot for our apartment, and that's good, considering we don't have a lot of money. It's also good, considering the fact that our home is not always the easiest place in which to live. I've always enjoyed the challenge of penny-pinching and living simply. Sometimes, though, we long for those "luxuries" back home (or those "luxuries" of the nicer apartments here); including, but not limited to: consistently running water, a heater/heating system, natural gas through a utility company, potable tap water, etc). But most of the time, we like the added adventure that comes with living in D.F. Day-to-day life is so easy in a developed country (like the U.S.); you don't realize how easy it is until you live in a developing country (ahem, Mexico).

Allow me to give you a few examples, por favor:

This is our gas tank, Old Blue. It is stored on our roof. It is our source of heat for the water heater, and gas for our stove. Every morning, a man walks through the neighborhood, and in a beautiful tenor voice yells, "Gaaaaaaaaassssssssssss!" When we're out of gas (or getting low; we've started realizing a faint odor of gas is emitted from our water heater when it's nearly empty), Matt runs out to the street and flags down the gas man. The man selling gas then lugs up the heavy tank two flights of ricketly stairs to our roof, and then we give him $140MXP, plus tip. He ends up paying us a visit almost every two weeks. Here's a truck of gas. Lots of it.

Remember when (last paragraph, not too long ago) I said that the water heater gives off its lovely rotten egg smell to let us know that we're low? Well, that smell is very evident because our water heater is in our eensy-weensy tiny kitchen. With regards to the water heater, if we want to take a hot shower, we cannot decide that we want one, and instantaneously hop into our pink-tiled beauty. Oh no, we turn the dial on the heater to "caliente" and wait for ten minutes, for water to heat up.

Which brings us to the next consideration; do we even have running water for a shower? We run the kitchen tap to see. If water pressure's low, we go down to the entry way and use our big, loud water-pump for ten minutes to flush water out of the pipes. We run out of water every four days or so. Here's our water pump, also known as our life saver (because there's nothing like running out of water when your hair's full of shampoo lather--ouch!).

As mentioned in other entries, Mexico is running out of water. Thus, we try to conserve. For me, in one small way, that translates in taking a shower every other day, instead of every day. "Ew! Gross!, no? Don't you walk a lot? Don't you get all sweaty and smogified?" Nah, it's not too bad; I'm more concerned about doing my part to not waste than worrying about some arbitrary norm of a daily shower.

When I visited Laura Ingalls Wilder's ("Little House on the Prarie") childhood home a couple decades ago, I remember learning that their family took a bath once a week, and the mom's bath was last. Thus she got "clean" with very used bath water. You know, the stuff her stinky, hirsute husband (not Michael Landon, the real one) used. And she didn't sit on her butt playing "Bejeweled Blitz" all day and watching cable tv all night; she was ACTIVE. For some reason, that little prairie tidbit has stuck with me. Here's our water reserve, it's located on our roof.

While we're on the subject of agua, here's a photo of our drinking/cooking/brushing teeth water.

WE. DON'T. EVER. DRINK. OUT. OF. THE. TAP. Nobody does, unless you live in a fancy apartment or house that treats its water, or if you're really craving some intestinal issues would you ever drink the water. Instead, we use this big guy. When we've finished it, Matt brings the empty to the grocery store and lugs home a new one. I love the recycling factor of this system; especially considering Mexico's total lack of recycling.

Last bit on water. We have a washer on our roof for our use! Granted, it's a very strange one, but it does the trick. The whole system uses a lot of water, so Matt works very hard to catch the refuse water and cycle it back into the system. Did you notice its two compartments? One is for the washing part, the other is for the spin cycle. Manually, you move the sopping wet clothes to spin when the wash cycle is finished. Of course, we don't have a dryer, but that's no problem. Matt and I have never been dryer users. Our clothes last longer when they're air-dried, for one. Plus, Folks, dryers consume the most electricity of any household appliance. I have sources for that, if you need them. People from the U.S. love their dryers but most other countries don't. Not even the U.K.

What about trash? Well, the hard working garbage collectors come around six days a week. That's good, because like most other countries in the world (excluding the U.S. again), you can't flush your paper down the toilet. HOWEVER, you don't just leave your trash waiting on the street (well, some jerky slobs do). Instead, every day, you wait for the sound of the trash bell. That's right, one dude's job is to walk down the road, ringing a bell to let you know that it's time to get your butt out on the street or be sorry. Often, you see people scurrying and hear doors slamming when they hear the bell. Here's a picture of Matt, rushing trash out of the gate.

So, there you have it. Our daily life is fraught with different types of chores than those we dealt with back home. In the beginning, there were fits of rage because, all of a sudden, our half-cooked brown rice was sitting pointlessy and unboilingly atop a stovetop that lacked that beautiful blue flame of sustanance. In the beginning, there were lots of calls to our landlord like, "Um, Jorge, we don't have gas/water/electricity/etc. ?! What do we do?!"

Then, after a while, came the lightbulb moments, "So that's why that strange guy is yelling that chant outside EVERY SINGLE MORNING! He's not doing it for fun; he's selling something we need!" For some strange reason, it's satisfying when you've got down all the quirks of daily life here.