All change
Limited it to places I’ve lived for 6 months or more, which rules out France frinstance
View Places I’ve lived in a larger map
Greetings from our little house in Salt Lake City, Utah. Bet no one else has a blog with an entire category for ‘Moving’…
Moved
I have to admit I’d been scared of the NY idea for quite a while. It seemed a bit too much like London- an enormous place full of people sucking money out of your pockets while you dithered about with a map trying to get from one tourist trap to another without getting mugged. After two days here I reckon that while there are definitely parts of the island just like that, we’ve lucked out and are in a great location where everything’s walkable, people seem friendly and there are proper, normal, shops and restaurants. Hellz, there’s even a Trader Joe’s about 10 blocks away. Just a question of training Atticus to understand the command ‘Charles Shaw’ to get him to retrieve the occasional bottle of 2-buck Chuck.
The apartment seems bigger than when we viewed it a month ago and with all our familiar charity shop/ikea furniture and knicknacks in place I’m really looking forward to living/ working here… This was the 1st time we had professional movers do it (because it’s a prohibitively expensive process). Basically on Monday two Ecuadorian blokes turned up with a huge lorry and more cardboard boxes, sellotape and packing materials than I’ve seen during our last 10 moves combined. They methodically swept through the house wrapping, stuffing and carting all our stuff into the van til about 6 hours later nothing was left except for us two, our suitcase and 10 months worth of schipperke fur. We did a final clean of the place, then headed round a friend’s house who made one of the best paella’s I’ve ever had for a farewell meal… next morning, we drove to Portland, left the car in storage, taxi’d it to the airport, flew to La Guardia, then ‘supershuttled’ it to our new quarters where the Ecuador dream team were already unloading our boxes.
It’s the 18th floor (the 17th floor in real money). Out of 30 or so. But the lift is very fast. The view is impressive… There’s a Picasso sculpture out side the entrance… we’re between Greenwich Village and Soho. Everyone seems to have a dog, and they all seem a bit better trained than ‘Cus for urban living. That’ll be a project.
Brunswick had more unsecured wi-fi networks than this area mind. I thought that at least one of the 40 odd available networks in this here skyscraper would connect us to the tubes. Mais non. So I’m typing this in a text editor and shall copy and paste it onto the webs when I get to Think Coffee, the nearest caffeine and wifi emporium. No point in getting internet installed before we bugger off to Guadalajara for a month and half tomorrow is there. That said, with no internet, no dog and no telly, productivity is through the roof.
Highlights this week:
Farewell to Maine and Maine-based peeps
NY Restaurants: Dojo, Tartine, and that Indian one.
The Lomography shop
Rediscovering NPR
Pain-free move
Adieu, adieu, to you and you and you
Translating this Oaxacan knicknack would require too much explanation of the ins and outs of Mexican wrestling, but I loves it. “Work hard, play hard” would be near it but doesn’t capture even a fraction of the colour…
Anyroad, just a note to say that any minute now the internets are getting cut off to this here house and we’re moving to NYC, then on Friday, Guadalajara for 6 weeks or so, then L.A. for a week, then back to NY, NY… shall be something of an adventure. My new zip code resolution (to coin a phrase, nay, a tradition) is to update this blog a bit more often. So let’s see how that goes. If you don’t already subscribe by RSS, and would like to be emailed whenever new ramblings find their way to this site, please sign up for email updates here:
Subscribe to Gwyn’s Blog by Email
Maine’s been grand. I’m going to miss the folks and the ample, accessible, countryside and coast. We’ll be back… A bientot, folks.
Wondering how we’ll afford to live in NYC?
Takes me back to the last time I used one of these machines 5 years ago… Wish they were transparent so you could see what’s going on inside.
Continental drifting
Hola amigos, I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya but things have been moving pretty fast here in Portland, Oregon, Gringolandia…
DrSita’s been applying for positions all over the country for a while since her fellowship here was slated to finish this month. They finally got around to offering her another two years but by then she’d been interviewed and accepted a great job at a premier teaching institution in Maine… This means that our summer plans (which had been up in the air because of this whole where-are-we-living-in August? uncertainty) have been cleared up and in the last couple of weeks we’ve had to plan a trip to the UK for me, a jaunt to Brazil and Chile for DrSita and a 3,189 mile move from Portland to Portland all while resolving the “what to do with young ‘Cus during all this excitement” issue. We’re pretty happy about the move. DrSita’s job sounds really good, I’m excited to find out what Maine is all about and have a new area to photograph. I’ll also get to make a much bigger igloo this winter if I’m right about the climate. We’ll be closer to our East Coast posse of friends, and it’s been a while… And the time difference with england is only 5 hours which makes phone calls and that easier, and we’ll be time-synced with Guadalajara. Portland’s been good to us, and I’d still heartily recommend it to anyone considering a place to live. That’s if it doesn’t fill up with New Yorkers in the coming months.
On Wednesday I let my employers know that I’ll be moving on in mid-June and they’ll have to get by without my services. They’ve been really cool about it. If I’d known how many nice emails I’d get I’d’ve quit months ago… maybe not… anyroad, right now we’re transitioning to a new behemoth of a content management system for the site and I don’t think I’ve worked so hard since teaching Spanish in Scotts Valley. There are going to be all kinds of issues arising before, during and after it goes live so it’s a weird time for all concerned, and I’ll be working hard till the last moments I reckon.
Last weekend we had some friends up from Alameda (remember Alameda?) and so got to go out and enjoy PDX in the sunshine for a few days, eating out, drinking out, walking out, driving out, and all that. And now DrSita’s classes have finished we’ve been able to get out a lot more, spend time with mates who are also jumping the PDX ship and lately it’s been gorgeous and I have a new camera…
I’m also happy the summer blockbusters have started hitting the cinemas. Star Trek was great fun and maybe tonight’ll be Terminator. We’ll see, cos today I’m at a conference and for some reason listening intently and avoiding networking makes me tired. I’m 34 you know. (btw, it’s Dr.S.’s b-day in a week’s time, folks. She’s on Facebook… ) Yesterday I saw Mark Frauenfelder there off of boingboing do a fun presentation on Making stuff and a couple of other sessions.
I’m stoked I’ve bought my tix to Bristol and back. I was tracking them and they hit the $1000+ mark because I was originally going to fly around the 4th of July weekend which is uber-high season but thanks to the new date possibilities I managed to get something of a bargain for that time of year. My folks are helping with the cost anyway, bless ’em, but still, a bargain’s a bargain. Email me for the dates. I’ll have shaken off the worst of the jetlag for Stu’n’Anne’s wedding and be back in time for packing the moving van before our lease is up.
Sita’s folks are coming up next weekend which is always fun. And there’ll be roses in the rose garden, parades and all kinds of good stuff especially if this weather holds. We’re very glad they said yes, because it’ll be a while till I see them otherwise.
Other landmark events… La Flaca got past the 100,000 views mark on YouTube. Am I famous now? And do I owe anyone royalties?
And that’s all for now. Thanks for bearing with the streamofconsciousness that was this post and for your continued readership. I’m off to “Creating Dynamic Sites with AJAX and Dreamweaver“… subject to change
Pylon logo
Flash was asking for a simple logo for her (international) Pylon Appreciation Society in her blog yesterday and I happened to have p’shop open… behold!
Today we went to Santa Cruz for a couple of errands and managed to fit in a walk round Wilder Ranch, still as gorgeous as last time we were there a few years ago, only they’ve fenced off the rosemary fields, still I got a fair few pictures in. I thought I’d cleaned my camera sensor, but evidently not as there’s still a telltale blob in most of the pix (except where I cropped it out), I don’t love any of them enough to go clone-tooling…
[flickr]photo:2694443158(medium)[/flickr]
Right now I’m waiting for some craigslist people to show up for the sofa, they’re late… and that’d better be because they’re waiting for their own burly team of 3-tonne-settee movers.
Sneak preview of our Portland residence…
YouTube lets you annotate your videos now, but apparently the notes only show when you’re on their site. Click here for the annotated video.
Like a shark…
…have to keep moving.
Thanks everyone for congrats for Dr. Sita, much appreciated. It’s been a busy little weekend and fun all the way, but today sees us back to work and trying to plan the Portland move, which involves working out whether to drive/fly in each direction, what to do with the dog, furniture, car… it’s like one of those puzzles where you have to ferry everyone from one side of the river to the other without the fox eating the chickens…
Anyroad, we need to find renters for 1010 1/2. I repurposed the site I had for selling our Mexican furniture and here it is for our house. Pending approval from the landlord, it’ll be on craigslist as of tomorrow.
While on google maps I noticed they’ve done the street view thing in Alameda. If you’d like to check out the ‘hood we’ll be leaving behind, there’s worse things to do.
Cheers for now, I’ll leave you with Sita’s flowers from Fionnula:
Back from Downey
All seems well enough down in Southern California, round Downey way that is… One of these photos is Atticus exercising his remarkable rehabilitation skills on Martin who’s looking very well indeed despite his recent surgery. The other is the house that M & S will be moving in to in a month or two.
Flickr’s got the hiccups today, so the photos might not display right just yet…
In other news, I got my laptop back from the repair place with a hefty bill for a new fan. Windows was nagging me to activate it again despite it being genuine paid for software and giving me grief from all angles. T’was the final straw. Am presently installing Ubuntu, Heptatic Hedgehog or somesuch. Seems to be going smoothly enough.
Gave the Lente Tapatio peeps the heads up today on upcoming visits. One of these days I shall plan some kind of itinerary for next week’s guadalajaraing. Can’t wait…
Moving to Mexico
I just got asked to write a bit about our time in Mexico for a blog on “Learning to Live in Mexico“. Here’s what I wrote:
What prompted you to move to Mexico?
My wife’s a sociology grad student and is writing her PhD dissertation on “How Tequila became Mexico’s national drink”. Her research naturally led us to Jalisco, Mexico, home of Tequila and also the place we met 10 years ago when I was studying as part of my undergraduate degree in Spanish. We thought we’d only be there for a year but managed to extend the stay after she won various grants and scholarships.
What was the biggest thing you had to adjust to in Mexico?
To be honest, I feel just as comfortable in Mexico as where I grew up in the UK or have lived in the US, if not more so. It’s actually quite hard to think of anything that really needed adjusting to.
Witnessing levels of poverty absent or hidden in other countries, like kids of 7 selling chewing gum on the streets or flowers in bars late at night is something you never fully get used to and there are constant reminders of the huge divides and contrasts of a modern Mexican city like Guadalajara. That would be the major thing, and everyone has their own way of assuaging their first-world guilt.
On a more prosaic level though, some people take a while to get used to the food, I never had any problems and ate food from street vendors almost every day (the trick is to look for places with queues of locals). Drinking bottled water was new to me and having the water guy deliver gallon bottles every few days was odd at first but it’s not exactly life-changing. Driving can be tricky at major intersections, but despite Guadalajara’s ever rising levels of traffic, it’s still nowhere near as dangerous/ frustrating as it is getting from A to B in the SF Bay Area. Paying tolls to use decent motorways does take some adjusting though. If you’re planning a long journey you’ll need a lot of cash handy to pay the tolls for the extremely modern, well-equipped roads. However you can plan ahead with a handy new web tool from the Transport Department’s website that tells you how much the charges will be.
If you had to leave Mexico and go back to your old lifestyle what would you miss most?
The people. A more welcoming, genuine, friendly and fun bunch of people you’d be hard pressed to find. I was welcomed into many homes, shown so many local events, foods, drinks, sights. Everyone has ideas of what to see, where to go and also show an interest in where you’re from and your own culture. I already had a few good Tapatian (from Guadalajara) friends when I arrived, but met many new people who still keep in touch 5 months after we left, offering us places to stay on our next visit (hopefully soon).
I also miss pay-as-you-go cell phones… you buy your fichas (credits), use them, recharge them. The way things should be… None of this dollar a day use it or not malarkey…
What advice would you give to someone considering moving to Mexico?
Make an effort to meet people & learn Spanish. There are all kinds of classes, events, forums and suchlike where you can make your stay infinitely more fun. I met a ton of people via the photo sharing site flickr.com and went on phototours with them to places off the beaten track with local guides and had a great time in cantinas and bars afterwards talking about Mexico and photography. There are also ex-pat sites such as chapala.com where you can meet folks, learn about local events and ask questions. Blogging and commenting on other people’s blogs is also a great way to make your friends at home jealous and a good way to meet folks in the area. I also signed up for seminars and classes on computing (PHP) and photography which were great for meeting people and learning useful things.
Also, buy a cell/mobile phone on day one. It’ll set you back about 40 bucks then you just recharge it with credits. It’ll be handy for not getting lost, enquiring about housing/accommodation, keeping in the loop with friends about what’s happening, meeting people, being ready for any transport breakdowns and all the usual… You name it…
Above all though, move on from considering moving to Mexico and just DO IT!
Need more persuading? Here’s a post on my Top 7 things to do in Guadalajara.