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    How It Goes in Mexico: Essays from an expatriate
    How It Goes in Mexico: Essays from an expatriate
    How It Goes in Mexico: Essays from an expatriate
    Ebook67 pages1 hour

    How It Goes in Mexico: Essays from an expatriate

    By Carol Merchasin

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    About this ebook

    Carol Merchasin first visited San Miguel de Allende in 1996, fell in love with its language, people, and culture, and moved there full-time with her husband in 2005. A lawyer by training, Merchasin is curious about how everything around her in Mexico works—the health care system, religious rituals, loaning money, small change at the market, narcotrafficantes, telenovelas, and the subtleties between the verbs ser and estar. An intrepid researcher, she informally consults her neighbors, history books, and experts until she’s satisfied. In How It Goes in Mexico, her essays are by turns funny and poignant, and her portrayal of Mexico is neither romantic nor wary but respectful and compassionate. Carol Merchasin is a cheerful guide to take you behind the stone walls of San Miguel de Allende, inside not only the courtyards and gardens but the culture, history, and people. Carol Merchasin is a lawyer, trainer, and speaker who moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 2005, when she understood about 20 percent of everything going on around her. After years of inquiry, that percentage is increasing but varies from day to day. This is her first book. She and her husband live with a dog and two birds and split their time between San Miguel de Allende and a beach town they refuse to name. You can find out more about her and Mexico at her website, howitgoesinmexico.com. This is a short e-book published by Shebooks--high quality fiction, memoir, and journalism for women, by women. For more information, visit http://shebooks.net.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherShebooks
    Release dateJan 8, 2014
    ISBN9781940838090
    How It Goes in Mexico: Essays from an expatriate
    Author

    Carol Merchasin

    Carol Merchasin is a lawyer, trainer, and speaker who moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 2005, when she understood about 20 percent of everything going on around her. After years of inquiry, that percentage is increasing but varies from day to day. This is her first book. She and her husband live with a dog and two birds and split their time between San Miguel de Allende and a beach town they refuse to name. You can find out more about her and Mexico at her website, howitgoesinmexico.com.

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      Book preview

      How It Goes in Mexico - Carol Merchasin

      Author

      Where We Wake Up to the Revolution and Meet the Circus Mas Grande y Muy Famoso

      The boom of heavy artillery woke us at 5:45 a.m. on a Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving 2005. As it reverberated through our room at the Casa Luna, a charming bed-and-breakfast in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, I shot up out of my covers, my blood running cold, the metallic taste of fear in my mouth. Robert sat up heavy with sleep and a questioning look.

      What was that?

      I don’t know—it sounded like heavy gunfire.

      Silence. The night shadows were lifting, outlining rooftops in a gray woolly light, but it was still too dark to see.

      Boom. Boom, boom. The repeats echoed and bounced around, like a giant playing a pinball machine.

      I should have focused more on the political situation in Mexico before I exchanged my frequent-flier miles for round-trip tickets on Mexicana. My mind scrambled into Emergency Evacuation Mode. Moving here would now be out of the question.

      The decision to move to a foreign country is not one to be made over drinks and a bowl of guacamole in a Mexican restaurant in Philadelphia, but that was how my husband Robert and I did it. In between enchiladas with salsa verde, mariachis playing violins and entreating trumpets, and tufted piñatas swinging from the ceiling, we resolved to create a new life in Mexico. We took out a piece of paper and made two columns, labeled pros and cons, and when the bill came, we were living in Mexico.

      After 20 years of hard time known as law school and the firm, I had decided to metaphorically leap out of the 24th floor of my high-rise office, accompanied only by the hope I could figure out how to build another life before I hit the ground. Since I am a person who doesn’t like to work without a net, I hoped one would appear before I landed. I wanted to spend the last part of my life, whatever is left, building a life rather than buying it, living out ordinary days in which the challenges were less manufactured and more real. I wanted to take off my long, wool Philadelphia coat and trade it for a tank top.

      Had I been unhappy? No, I had been constructive, dedicated, disciplined, and well paid, all of which were satisfying. But in that moment, when I released myself from the harness of work life, I experienced the overwhelming relief that came from identifying a huge, unexplored territory between not being unhappy—and being happy.

      The heat of the day rose up and embraced us as we stepped out of the plane onto the tarmac at the Leon airport. The terminal was shinier and more modern than I had expected. Our Mexican driver met us, a short, rugged man who spoke no English. He drove us to San Miguel, our home base for the next 10 days. From there, we would decide what to see, where to go, and whether we could clear a path from the United States to a life in Mexico.

      Robert rode in the front seat because his Spanish was more adventurous than mine. I absorbed the bright heat and the high desert landscape from the back. The glare of the afternoon sun shimmered on dry fields, short flat-topped trees, and unfinished houses, their empty windows gaping like missing teeth. We passed the billboards and traffic of Leon, then the occasional donkey, as we made our way up and over a mountain pass.

      Is that San Miguel? I gestured into the distance, where church spires pointed skyward and buildings nestled in the bottom of a bowl formed by high desert mountains. Bright Mexican colors glowed like a distant cubist painting.

      It was.

      In the months following our decision to move to Mexico, Robert and I had talked endlessly about our plan. Just short of 60, I felt too young to give up work, and besides, we never aspired to retire. We hoped to shift into a fifth gear where our lives would run more smoothly and reflectively, and the cogs in other people’s wheels did not drive us. We would not subtract effort but instead add delight. We would develop reverse alchemy—taking the gold of our years of work and turning it into a simpler life. We would leave behind what didn’t matter anymore to find what did.

      Retiring would mean financial and psychological adjustments, but Mexico fulfilled a long-time longing for foreign living. Mostly, we hoped to be where we could wake up to life; where we wouldn’t just walk down the street. We would do it with light and air and color that is not available in Philadelphia, with people who look different, with donkeys loaded with kindling and bags of cement—and we would do it in

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