My Mexican Adventure

In my last entry titled “liquor licence” I said in the end “I still need to go to Tepic on Monday to change the licence to my name and address but then it’s mine. (Fingers crossed / knock on wood)”

Well... I didn’t have to go to Tepic once more but several times and many other trips in between. 

Let me try and remember the whole show. 

21/05/21 - signed the sale of the liquor licence at the notary in La Peñita

24/05/21 - went to Tepic 

first went to the bank to pay the fee for the change of name 

Then went to the government office of Nayarit to receive a receipt for my payment and with that receipt received a document called “no adeudas” - stating that the licence does not have “debts” with the government

With that document I went to the office of “alcoholes” - a government body that is specifically dealing with liquor licence requests. There I initiated the change of the licence to my name 

18/06/21 - the process of changing the licence to my name is ready - so I had to go to Tepic once more, pay some more money and receive the licence in my name. 4h driving there - 5min of bureaucracy - 4h driving back 

After that I got in touch with a person that the person who helped me purchase the licence recommended. 

The next step would be to change the licence to my address. And for that a long list (11 items) of paperwork was needed. 

I got in touch with the person and he promised to help me. I prepared all the paperwork needed and he came and picked it all up and said he would do the rest. 

29/06/21 - the contact from the “ayuntamiento de Bahia de Banderas” dropped by my house and picked up all the paperwork

05/07/21 - he came back and explained to me that unfortunately my case is more complicated than expected. The reason being, that the licence I purchased was from another municipality - and changing the address to another municipality is more complex AND more costly. 

Well how much more is it, I asked. And he said 15.000 pesos. uff. Well I said, since I’m already half way through the process I kinda just have to keep going and pay the extra money. Ok, he said, he will get it done. 

12/07/21 - he informed me that the president had signed and that the “tramite” is ready for payment. I asked how I will pay and he said he could come and pick up the money. I said ok, but that I would like to get a receipt. He said I will get a receipt for the 10550 of the tramite but not for the 15.000 pesos. 

I hesitated. I said, surely if it is an official tramite I need to get a receipt and that I wouldn’t give him any money without a receipt. 

His reaction was that he said that he had explained to me that my case was more complex and that that’s why I needed to pay the extra money but that if I was not comfortable with it anymore he would return my paperwork to me. 

He said he would come in the evening and explain and give me my papers. 

I was confused. I suddenly felt like he was trying to rip me off. How could it be that I would need to pay so much money for “who knows what”… ? Where does the money go. To who would it go? 

I was determined to investigate myself. So I planned to go to the office of the “ayuntamiento de Bahia de banderas” and ask what’s up. 

13/07/21 - I made my way to the office to investigate. I arrived and after some time they invited me to the office of the boss. The lady in the office received me with a somewhat annoyed / defensive attitude. She asked what she could do for me and I started explaining the case. All in Spanish. She kept saying that the money (10500) is for the tramite and that the other money would depend on “what kind of deal I have with that person”… I said that I don’t have any deal, that he was just offering to help me but that I never agreed to pay anybody. It was a long back and forth and she first was rather hostile but then eventually I think she understood that I was just sincerely clueless of how things are done. After a while it started dawning on me that the 15.000 pesos were some sort of bribe - but I still didn’t understand to whom… 

I left their office and called my contact. I asked him directly “Is the money a “fee” that you are charging me to get this paperwork done?” - he said that no, he does not charge anything or get any money but that the money is for the “gestor”. I said well who is this Gestor and what does he do. He said it’s a guy in Sayulita and that he helps with getting the signature form the president. I asked if I could talk to this person and he said yes he would try and organise that. 

15/07/21 - After digesting everything (and calming down) I agreed to meet with my contact so he could explain to me once more what exactly was going on. We met in Sayulita at the gas station and he showed up with the “gestor”. 

He explained to me what a Gestor does. He said that what the ayuntamiento office essentially does is some sort of verification that the change of address is legit. Meaning that the new address is for example not within 100m of a church or a school. In the case that it is, and the ayuntamiento refuses to therefore authorise the change of address, the Gestor would go around and look for any bar that IS within 100m of a church or school and present the case to the ayuntamiento forcing them to accept the change based on the fact that there is already a bar in existence breaching that rule. So in short, the Gestor looks for loopholes in the system. 

I said that I understood but that this does not apply to me. He said, no, it doesn’t but that my case is a change in municipality and that normally they don’t authorise that because it is essentially like handing out a new licence in the municipality and they don’t do that. So he needs to convince the president to authorise it anyways. 

Ok. I got it. But 15000 os a lot of money - can that not be negotiated? Obviously he said no, because he knew I was in a dead end and had no other way than to accept that he would do this for me for whatever fee he wants to charge. 

Alright. Alright. Alright. I said ok. I gave him the green light to proceed. 

The gestor and my contact assured me that they would only charge me once I have the paper I need in hand. That made me feel better. 

24/07/21 - the office of the ayuntamiento contacted me and asked for a few more papers. Some I had already sent them but they wanted another copy. I was lying in bed with fever cause I had gotten the COVID vaccine the day before but managed to gather everything they asked for and sent it to them. They said that my papers would be released within a few days.

26/07/21 - my contact sent me a proof of payment. He said he had paid for the tramite and that the paper I needed would soon be released. 

06/08/21 - the tramite had been approved and my contact came by to collect the money and hand me the paper I would need to finalise the whole deal. 

I contacted my original contact and asked when I could come to his office to Tepic to finalise the deal. He said that all government offices are closed until 20/08/21 due to COVID restrictions and that he would be in touch once they’re operating again. 

09/06/21

Happened again... wrote a whole text and then internet cut out and GONE. arrrghhhhh)”#(”&#” Alright, I’ll try again. 

Today I sat down and planned which kind of “celosías” to use for the kitchen and bathroom windows of the restaurant and how many of them I’ll need. 

Celosías are very typical Mexican bricks with wholes in them that form some sort of design. They’re often used to form terrace railings or are used instead of “windows”. There’s many many different ones and it wasn’t easy to choose a design but in the end I went with this one: 

I like it cause when put up right it looks like part of the logo that is being worked on: 

It took me quite a while to figure out how many of the bricks I will need to fill the space and what the best arrangement is. It was actually quite fun though to make the calculations and drawings.  

This is a good example of one of the millions of decisions I have to make during the process of this renovation and construction. There’s plenty of materials, products to choose on and it’s usually me who needs to make the final call on which one to use and figure out which provider has the best price etc.  It’s a lot of fun but there’s so much of these “behind the scenes” decisions which aren’t immediately apparent and keep me quite busy. 

Here are some examples of decisions I needed to make recently:

size of the water cistern (went for 10.000 litres - go big of go home) 

which material to use to pave the driveway (concrete, brick, “adoquines”, stone, etc) 

material and color to use to plaster the walls of the rental house (went for a color called “hielo” - ice)

material to use to waterproof the roof (just a sealer, tiles, in the end going for “carpeta asfaltica”)

design of the windows on the restaurant side

material to use to pave the restaurant terrace (probably going with something that is called “fachaleta” which is some sort of a longish brick)

where all the sockets in the new house go 

where all the lamps and light switches in the new house go 

21/05/21

There is a lot of paperwork to get done when you want to open a restaurant / bar and one of them is getting a liquor licence. 

There’s lots of rumours around it from foreigners not being able to acquire one at all, to that there can only be x licences per village etc.  What was obvious was that it’s going to be expensive... But particularly as a foreigner I decided that I’d rather spend the money and get all my papers in order (aka not bribing my way into existence) because it would give me more peace of mind. 

I had reached out to a few acquaintances who owned or used to own a bar and chatted with them about the topic. They had somewhat useful information but couldn’t really help me to get a licence. One day a friend told me that there is a guy who regularly inspects one of the restaurants in town and that he’s the one to talk to. So I met up with him one day and explained what I’m looking for. He explained all the requirements and it seemed that I had all the papers I would need to buy one. He also said that he knows someone who wants to sell their licence and that he will talk with him and inform me about the price. Great. 

2 weeks went by when I suddenly received a phone call and a few text messages from said person. He wanted me to make a money transfer for the licence in question because as it was the last day of April it would be the last day to get things sorted blablabla... it didn’t really matter what his explanation was, I wasn’t having it. He also stated all kinds of cost that he hadn’t mentioned before and the whole thing just seemed way more expensive than I expected it to be. I explained to him in a friendly way that I thought it was too expensive and that I out of principal never do things in a rush when so much money is at stake and that I am sorry but the deal was off. 

The next day I decided to do a bit more due diligence and drove to Valle de Banderas where the “ayuntamiento” (city hall?) of the region was. I wanted to talk to them about getting a licence and what the requirements were. I don’t know why but somehow I expected a big government office where I would pick a number and then wait fo 3 hours. But no... it was a tiny little office, I just walked in and the young woman behind the protection glass counter was super friendly. She told me to be careful, that many people try to rob you selling false licences etc. I told her the fees the other guy had stated and she said that it seems too much. She also explained that if I am looking for a licence for “restaurant / bar”, then the “cambio de giro” (for which the guy wanted to charge me 30.000 pesos) wasn’t necessary so that was cost I could totally save by just finding the right licence to begin with. (there are different tiers of licences - some for supermarkets, small kiosks, night clubs etc). She also gave me a small piece of paper that listed all the requirements to open a restaurant and told me to get started with the process rather sooner than later cause it would take a while. Super friendly and helpful. 

19/05/21

15/04/2021

12/04/2021

8am - went to the site for the Monday morning meeting with Eric and Gilberto to discuss the tasks for the week 

9am - had a session with my acupuncturist who told me that I am being way too hard on myself and that I took on a job that would be really tough anywhere in the world but as a woman in Macho Mexico even more so. He told me what I already knew - I need to calm down and give myself some slack. 

10am - as per acupuncturist’s order I rested for 15min 

10.30am - made breakfast 

11am - went to the Ferreteria to buy more “junteador” (filler) 

11.30am - arrived at the house but realized that Eric is working in the bathroom and that there isn’t enough space for both of us to work in there so I just did some small things here and there and explained the kitchen design to him (they’re supposed to start building the kitchen counters today) 

12.00 - decided to drive to Home Depot 

13.15 - arrived at Home Depot - roamed around for nearly 2 hours searching for things and thinking what else I might need

15.30 - left Home Depot 

16.30 - arrived in Sayulita to buy a used foam surf board 

17.00 - arrived back in Lo De Marcos and went to the house 

17.15 - unloaded the car, chatted with Eric 

17.45 - explained the kitchen design to Gilberto 

18.00 - wanted to do the shower floor but Eric was still working in the bathroom so I decided to start painting the parts of the walls that had gotten dirty again 

19.00 - Eric left so I started working on the floor 

19.45 - finished pouring the rest of the filler, started cleaning up 

20.00 - left the house and got some food at La Sea Food

11/03/2021

Saturday night, after the floor was finally done, I made another list of all the things that still needed to get done before I could move in. Most items were for Eric but a few were for me such as: putting the filler in the shower pebble floor and go to Home Depot to buy some important things. 

Sunday morning I still felt exhausted and wondered what I should do that day. For a while I considered going to Home Depot but I’m too tired to drive and decided I’m “only” gonna do the shower floor and then take the afternoon off. 

I had never poured a filler (concrete mixture) on a pebble floor and wasn’t quite sure how to do it but I thought I’d figure it out. I went to house and started making the mix. I knew it had to be somewhat liquid so it would flow into the cracks between the pebbles. I was mixing for a while and kept thinking that it’s too liquid and poured more of the dusty stuff in there to make the mix less runny. After some time I thought I had a good mix. 

I went to the bathroom and started pouring the mix between the pebbles. It wasn’t very runny and pretty soon I felt like I probably made it too thick and it also seemed like it wouldn’t be enough for the whole floor. All of the pebbles started disappearing under the mix and I started wondering if I had made a big mistake and it would all be ruined. But I had no real options, I started so I had to keep going so I kept going. 

Surely enough at some point I ran out of the mix. I quickly went to mix some more but this time I accidentally made it way to liquid and since I had no powder left I couldn’t fix it. Fuck. It’s Sunday… the Ferreteria isn’t open so I couldn’t go and buy some more. I panicked and thought I’ll just mix some of the other concrete powder in with it (which is generally used for something else). I kept mixing and was wondering if mixing two different concrete powders is a good idea. What if the chemicals react weirdly... thanks heavens at some point I realised that even if the mix would work aka do its job, surely the color wouldn’t be exactly the same and so I decided to ditch it. I would just have to buy some new mix on Monday and hope that the fact that 1/4 of the floor is poured a day later wouldn’t make such a big difference. 

I walked back into the shower and looked at the floor. It was all covered in a thick concrete mix and I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly get the pebbles to re-appear. I started scraping on the stones with a sponge, like Eric told me to do and it was obvious that there was way too much of the mix on there. So I started taking off all the excess material. The sponge wasn’t very helpful though as it just moved it all around a bit and so I started scraping off the excess material in between the stones with my fingers...until my fingers literally started bleeding. This wasn’t gonna work. I went outside to look for something else I could scrape around with and found a little wooden stick. I felt so nervous and panicky that it would all be ruined. I scraped some more of the material off with the stick but since I had made the mix too thick the surface started getting quite uneven again. Fuck. How could I save this. Finally I had the idea to bring in the Mexican super weapon… the broom. I went to get the broom and scraped over the whole area with the broom. It worked. Quite a bit of the excess material started coming off and the surface evened out a bit. 

I waited a bit more for it to dry so I could clean the pebbles a bit more and luckily enough they started to re-surface.  

It was 2pm by now and I hadn’t eaten nor drunk anything. I felt shaky and clearly needed to take a break. So I decided to leave, make some food and come back later. Hoping that the material would be still somewhat workable.

I felt it was really important for me to write this entry today because I have a lot to learn from today. It is obvious that I can’t keep going like this... I’ve done it before and I know the result.  Once again I am putting unnecessary pressure on myself. Why the rush… yes, why? Obviously moving into my own house will save me rent but is that really so important? I guess it’s also because I initially thought I could move end of March and quit my rental agreement. Luckily though I have incredible landlords - shout out to Guillaume and Marie-France - who let me stay longer than planned. But they do have guests coming to the house next weekend. So there is indeed a real deadline now. 

Back to today… why did I have to put the filler in today? Why couldn’t I just take the whole day off and do it some other day. Did it have to be today? No. It didn’t. I rushed it thinking that it’s oh so important. And by rushing it I made mistakes. This time it was only the floor of my shower and something that could be fixed but next time it could be something worse. Being so exhausted all the time could even put me in danger of having an accident of sorts. 

I need to stop putting so much pressure on myself. Yes of course I love working on my house. I didn’t dread going there today and do the work but I should know better by now that taking a break is equally important to working hard.  Why do I feel like I need to prove something. Prove what and to whom? 

Anyhow, I am glad I made this realisation and now I can work on myself again and keep myself in check. I finished at the house, went to Tomatina to get some nice food and write this blog entry and ran into some lovely peers which made me feel better. Later on I even went stand-up paddling for an hour and I am so glad I did.  

10/03/2021

The house I bought has a very old tile floor. I was told though that they’re not in fact tiles but “concrete mosaic”… Ok. Now, the floor hasn’t been taken care of for ages and is therefore in rather poor condition. It’s got cracks and scratches and since I originally didn’t intend to keep it, it wasn’t handled with much care during the construction and got further scratches and paint stains and whatnot. 

Obviously I have no idea how to restore such a floor. I googled a bit but people around me seemed to have ideas and so I went with it. “Pulir piso” sounded like something the floor needed… “polishing”. There was a guy nearby that dealt with marble and he has one of those round floor polishing machines. Great. He can do the job. Eric inquired about the price for me and also contacted one more person with such a machine a bit further away. The one further away would charge 60 pesos per m2 and said he could do the job on Sunday (this conversation happened on Monday), the one nearby charges 70 pesos per m2 but said he could do it “ahorita”… since I was hoping to move in by the weekend although it would cost more, I opted for the guy who said he could do it right away. 

So on Monday he said he could do it right away and come Friday the job was still not done. It was the first time that the stereotypical “mañana mañana” made a grand appearance. Everyday the same story. Either Eric or I would call him, he would say he’s coming “later today” and by the end of the day he still hadn’t shown up. Now I should to add that I already had the same experience with this same guy the week before where he was supposed to pick up some wood trunks to cut them and also took a whole week to finally get it done. So yes, I could have known better and searched for someone else instead but because there weren’t many options I decided to rather keep hoping that he’d be more reliable this time. Well....  Friday evening at 7.45pm, 15min after Eric and I had left the site, I get a voice message from the guy saying that he’s at the house but nobody’s there. I sent him a voice message back, being as friendly as I possibly could, telling him that of course there’s nobody there because after having waited all day we decided to leave because it’s about to get dark and that I don’t think he could do the job well within 45min before it gets dark. I explained that we have other things to do Saturday morning and that I need to move in which is why this is urgent and asked him to come on Saturday at 3pm. I had little hope he’d show up. 

Saturday 3.30pm he did indeed show up and started with the floor polishing. I watched for a while and then asked what he’s doing and if he could explain the process to me. Eric only stood by my side watching. 

Arturo said that he’s waxing the floor. I asked if they won’t clean it properly before they do that? I pointed out that the floor still had quite a few stains especially around the corners of the floor and that I want those removed before they start polishing. 

He seemed a bit but-hurt and told his assistant to pack the machine back up on the van cause apparently I didn’t want them to do the job. He said that this floor can’t be “polished” because it’s concrete and it would get damaged even more. I got his point but surely you could at least clean it a bit more. I went to get some fine sand paper and started scraping off some of the paint stains here and there. It was obvious that he just wanted to do a “quick job” and I wasn’t gonna have it. After he had put me off all week. 

He asked me if I wanted him to do the job or not and I said “yes, if you do it well”. He said he had a small hand sanding machine that he would get and come back and he left. 

I had my doubts if he would indeed come back but sure enough after some 30min he did. His assistant started working on the corners with the small machine and he started with the big machine. After some time two more guys came with another machine and they started sanding the whole floor before putting the wax on. It took them some good 2 hours and after that I was quite happy with the result. 

During all this we had some small conversations here and where he for example pointed out that the bathrooms not finished so surely I can’t be moving yet anyways and he asked me why the rush. It pushed some serious buttons and I wanted to really go off on him about how that was none of his business and  that it’s about principles of not telling someone you’d do the job for a week and just never show and not even inform when not coming. But I tried to stay calm and just explained that I needed to leave my current house because they already have new tenants lined up. It seemed to make him a bit more understanding of my situation and I felt better. 

But it was true. The bathroom wasn’t near ready. Eric had only managed to put up the small shower wall but the toilet wasn’t installed, the countertop for the sink wasn’t done and the shower wasn’t installed either. Which wasn’t Eric’s fault, he was working as hard and fast as he could. It was just too many things that still needed to get done... Which made me realize that it would easily gonna take a few more days if not a week before I could move in. 

23/03/2021 - Day 187

I got a street address sign now and it makes it look so much more “official”... Since I already have some packages delivered to the new house and DHL and co. had trouble finding the address I painted an address sign =) Doesn’t look too shabby. 

22/03/2021

Finished painting the walls and painted the steel beams once more since they had gotten some white stains from the white ceiling paint. Pretty happy with the outcome. Now only missing painting the bricks. 

18/03/2021 - Day xxx

Today they poured the foundation for the new house. 

13/03/21 - Day 177

Started painting the wall that’s gonna be behind the bed. When I opened the bucket of paint I was first a bit like ‘Is this the cloud I chose?!’ - I somehow remembered the color I picked was more towards grey... this is green. Just green.

I started painting the first few strokes and was even more like 🤔😬

But after a while I started quite liking it...

Let’s see what it looks like after a few more coats.

12/03/21 - Day 176

11/03/21 - Day 175

Today the excavator came rolling in to demolish the structure in the back and excavate the foundation for the new house.

10/03/21

Invited bunch of friends to help me start paint my apartment. We managed to paint one whole room (almost, missing one wall that’ll be painted in dark grey/green).

Day 164 - 28/02/2021 

Sunday evening after a super relaxing day at the beach I made Lasagne. We were sitting on the terrace when I received a whatsapp from Erick.  “Sorry to bother you, but they’re informing that someone was found inside your house. You haven’t been at the house today, have you?” I read the message and was confused. Who was they? What was going on?  I replied: “No, we didn’t go. Who informed you about this?” Erick: “They published it on Facebook. That it happened next to Armando Renteria, which is your neighbour.”

My confusion was even bigger. Who published what on Facebook? I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying so I called him. He said something about “Vecinos Vigilantes” and that they posted something on Facebook about having caught someone climbing over a fence into my property. 

Obviously this was serious. There’s tons of valuable stuff at the site. Stuff that’s not so easy to steal like my new fridge and stove and washing machine but also stuff that’s very easy to steal like smaller tools and new rolls of cable etc. 

I explained to F and we decided that it’d be best to go to the house and have a look and see if everything’s ok. 

It was already 10pm and dark so we armed ourselves with a flash light and a machete and drove to the house.  We opened the gate and walked in. Two eyes stared at us from a distance. Luckily very obviously just a cat but either way my pulse was sky high. We slowly made our way through the property with F banging the machete on the floor to make noise in an attempt to scare anyone off that might be lurking around in the property. If anything he for sure managed to scare the shit out of me but luckily nobody else seemed to be in the property. 

I had a look around and from what I could tell nothing was missing. I grabbed Erick’s tools and hid a few other things a bit more and we went back home. 

It was obvious that I would have to do something about security in the place. F had already mentioned several times to me that the wall at the front of the house is super easy to jump and that I need to put a fence up, all the neighbours have fences up for a reason. I knew he was right but I hated the idea of an ugly fence so I was reluctant.   I started to think what other options there could be and suggested a motion detector which would be quite easy to install and maybe not that expensive but obviously also not as effective.

The next day we went to the house and discussed options to tighten security around the house. I took some measures and was already about to head off to go buy some fencing wire when F suggested we could use some of the corrugated metal sheets that were lying around at the property. Brilliant. Ugly as hell but obviously just a “for the time being” solution and wouldn’t cost me any extra. With the help of Erick we managed to get it installed by end of day and I felt much better about having the place secured. 

Days 163 - 27/02/2021 

On Saturday, 27th of February I got up in the morning and made some phone calls to my family. While sitting on the terrace a man walked by the house shouting that he is selling paint. Paint... that’s something I need since I have hundreds of m2 of walls to paint soon. So I walked to the gate and asked him what kind of paint he’s selling. He explained that he has a job here in town where someone ordered 19 buckets of paint from him and in the end only ended up buying 15 so he has 4 extra buckets to sell. It sounded like a believable story but I wanted to be careful. So I texted my worker Erick and explained the situation to him. He told me to be careful cause sometimes people go around selling paint what in the end is just a bucket with colored water. He said I should demand to see the paint and check if it is sealed. Ok. I’ll be careful... 

I walked back to the guy and said that I would like to see the paint. He said he’ll go get his truck. After a few minutes he pulled up in front of the house and started demonstrating the buckets. 

It all looked rather legit. The buckets seemed sealed and he took the lid off of one bucket of white paint and from what I could tell it looked like paint. 

I hesitated for a bit but he gave me a flyer and expanded his story saying that the paint is of “medium” quality but good paint and that if I use it for outdoors it would last up to 6 years. He would sell me one bucket for 450 pesos. Normally, a bucket that size is 1800 pesos. So I decided to buy the 4 buckets of white and one bucket of blue (thanks to the influence of my friend Claudia who recently had made fun of me for painting my whole house in boring white...). 

I paid the guy 2000 pesos for 5 buckets of paint and felt quite accomplished.