Jim and I sometimes just walk our dogs through the neighborhood, and then up some path or another into the country. Here are some photos taken in our neighborhood.
This is Jim and el perro y las perras walking down the street, Benito Juarez, from our house. There must be a million streets named Benito Juarez in Mexico. It is a custom to name streets after famous Mexicans, often revolutionary leaders.
There has never been a time when I have not seen piles of grava y arena on the street for mixing concrete. You can see some in this shot, on the left. Here people are always modifying and adding to their houses, which are almost all concrete. Or still building in them. Generally, people don't go into debt to get it all done at once, but rather build bit by bit as they get enough money for the next step. Below is a picture in which the bottom of the house is pretty much finished, down to being painted pink with a very pretty stencilling job around windows and doors which unfortunately is not clear in the photo. The grandmother and two grandkids were watching streetwork out the window. I asked if I could take their picture and they said sure, but they didn't want to be in it. You can see they weren't.
Major street work is going on now in our neighborhood. I think most of us would prefer the money be spent to bring our water system up to snuff: we could use water more than half a day every other day*, but the street's important, too. The whole street is being torn up a block at a time where there are cave-ins and broken drainage pipes and other water problems to repair. And we are getting nice sidewalks where there aren't any and below, you can see a hand-built retaining wall as well, on the right.
Here's a look at the construction from the other end of the block. There's been a lot of progress. Tons and tons of concrete were torn up, literally, and there were huge gaping places.
Below is the house of the head of the Colonia. I kept calling him el presidente, but that's not right and I've been told that the only presidente is the presidente of the Muncipio de Xico which our Colonia is part of. I will have to find out what his title is.
As you can see, his house is also a work in process. It's a very attractive house on the inside, roomy, with a lovely open dining and kitchen area lined with windows on one side, lots of bedrooms, etc. Outsides can be quite deceiving.
Due to the street construction, the front yard is nothing but rubble at the moment. You can see rebar sticking up from the house waiting for more work to be done.
From the not-the-president's house, we walk onto the main road, a U-shaped road, more or less. If we turn right, we walk about 3/4 of a mile to the crucero, the intersection with the road to Teocelo, to Xico and into San Marcos. If we go left, we can go two ways towards Coatepec. Down the road a bit we can turn right to go into the lower part of San Marcos and then left onto the main road to Coatepec. This way, we cross the new bridge which replaced the one that collapsed last year. (Or was it the year before?) If we stay on the road we're on, we go the way we detoured when the bridge was down and and miss all the traffic. It has a cobblestone place which slows us down some, but it's much pleasanter.
Here's a picture of a a boy and his dad bicycing. And Jim y dos perros también. (You can learn a little Spanish on this blog.) I have the other two. AND am taking the pictures.
On the right are the cattle and milking shed I featured on a short blog post a few days ago.
This is a no-longer-operating beneficio, or coffee processing place. It is now being used to transfer garbage from our colonia to trucks which take it Someplace Else. I don't know where. As in the US finding sanitary landfills is getting to be more and more of a problem. However, they keep this area immaculate. And it never smells (unlike some of the drainage in our area). A truck is in the process of dumping, as you can see. All the spillage will be picked up.
Below is a restaurant waiting to open. It's owned by a woman from Xalapa. She had a smaller, simpler completely unguarded restaurant, but it was only open sometimes. One day when it hadn't been open for awhile, thieves decided it was fair game and took everything that could be moved, including toilets and a couple of thousand (she said) trout from their trout pond. Now it is destined to be fancier and considerably more secure. I suspect she is waiting to get some more money saved up before she can welcome the public.
And here you see the gate into a mysterious place called La Providencia. It was once a beneficio, too. Next to it are various fancy looking constructions: a swimming pool, what looks like a club house, a very pretty house. People work on the beneficio part. They've unloaded a lot of dirt and leveled off an area, and are constantly doing structural stuff. It seems some of them live in a little house on the right of this picture with their wives and kids. We ask them what they are turning the place into, but no one seems to know for sure.
We cross the bridge right after this and head into the country. That will be another post.