Well, it's been 10 months since I arrived, some days it seems longer, other days it seems only yesterday. I continue to be an observer as the cascade of colors and experiences I call my life rolls past in an unbroken stream.
 
One thing that I'm reasonably certain of, Mexican babies are born with a book of matches in one hand and a noise maker in the other. Those two traits are predominating in this culture; if something can be burned it will be, even in the rainy season and the penchant for noise is universal. Any time you walk into a WalMart or similar store you can be assured your ears will be assailed by 150 decibels of noise - I use the word advisedly as at the levels being pumped out the distortion of what was once probably good music is now little more than an ear splitting blat blat blat.
 
Yesterday afternoon I heard music and singing that seemed louder than normally experienced from the park so I took a look and sure enough it was serenade day at La Casa Nostra (the old folks home next door). Now this was somewhat better than the Mariachi music a few months ago (some of the old folks are still recovering from that one). However, this guy must have had theater size speakers and ten thousand watts of juice cranked up. I suppose when you consider many of the residents are hard of hearing it may have made sense, at least to him. The good news was that you knew it wasn't going to last very long as the old folks eat early and go to bed early vs. the party animals in the park that start early and go all night.
 
Lately I've been thinking about decorating; something that sends chills down my spine as me and color and I are foreign to each other, it's not that I'm color blind, just color stupid. However here in MX it's hard to go wrong, the brighter and more contrasting the colors the better - I think.
 
As I'm staying at least another year I got to looking at the walls one day and they're yellow, everywhere is yellow, even some ceilings, sometimes you begin to know what it would feel like to be immersed in a cube of butter - NOTHING BUT YELLOW. There is one big wall in the TV area that is sort of "brown mustard" for lack of a better description and I had asked the owner if I could paint it, and other areas need help as well.
 
First of all the owner has a thing for elephants and when I arrived a number of elephant motif decorations were in residence, they quickly were stored out of sight, while nice, elephants are not my thing. However several pieces of furniture are from their foreign travels and are nice including a wall tapestry of what I assume to be lama's which I suspect came from their stint in Ecuador. I decided to leave that and add to it, possibly some Mayan or Aztec or Inca art to compliment the hanging.
 
A trip to Tonala seemed appropriate. I remembered seeing a vendor offering appropriate artifacts and so upon arriving I sought him out immediately. Not knowing much about this sort of stuff I thought some stone wall hangings like the Mayan calendar etc would be great. Not being an expert I was at the mercy of this vendor, but he assured me they were all genuine pre-Columbian artifacts (no doubt secreted away from archaeological digs in the dead of night). I selected several pieces and paid what I considered a very good price, only $170p ($17) for 4 pieces. Who knew genuine artifacts could be so cheap? The amazing thing is that apparently the original artisans who created these wonderful calendars realized that some day they'd be hanging on someone's wall because they all have picture hangers on the back? - curious, but nice, they fit well, nothing like glaring guys with their tongues sticking out surrounded by snakes etc?
 
Next was some help for the wall that will be painted this next week. My daughter says do puce? - ok, I guess I'd call it more a rose color, but ok. One section is sizable and seemed to scream for a large picture, so with that in mind after hauling my Aztec treasures to the car I started looking at paintings. I understand the rule of 3 when it comes to decorating, Chris taught me that one and boy, have these people taken it to the extreme. Everything is in 3's, 3 pics, 3 pots, 3 wall hanging dodads, always 3? I needed some tall jarrons (vases) to serve as a headboard and wanted them to be the same height (around 4' tall) but no one will sell you 6 of the same height, they come in sets of tall, medium and shorter - oh well.
 
Back to the painting search, I went directly to the factory, not the factory outlet, THE factory (as it turned out). They had lots of neat abstract paintings (in 3's of course) some animal stuff etc. and the ubiquitous fruit (nothing like 3 adjoining pics of watermelon or fruta of some sort). Oh, and always the MX version of black velvet, Don Quixote in stick figure form - even better. But one set of 3 mounted on a dark frame caught my eye and so began the negotiation. During the haggle I saw another set of 3 without the base frame that I added to the negotiation and eventually settled on a fair price. As he was wrapping them (they wrap and over wrap everything for you here like you were hauling them to China) I looked in the adjoining work area and sure enough, the source of all paintings great and not so great was there, an artist painting like crazy and another guy stapling canvas on frames. I hauled my acquisitions to the Jeep and continued on.
 
Back to the great jarron search, actually a(nother) haggle as I had seen them early in the expedition. There they were, one large (nearly 4') and two smaller, I asked the price (handed her my calculator) and she punched in $210p to which I said dos - doble? indicating I wanted two sets, at that point she keyed $440p? - I punched in $400p but she didn't go for it. Actually I was feeling a bit guilty, haggling for pots big enough to smuggle illegals in for $7 each, but you have to try. We settled on $420p and I said I'd be back in 30 minutes, wrap them up. When I returned in the Jeep to collect them I had to park sort of up on the sidewalk as this street didn't have parking per se. While I was loading them a Traffico pulled up and looked like he was going to give me a ticket, she hollered something to him (which I assume translated to; "go away, he's just a dumb gringo") he moved on to more lucrative pursuits.
 
With the Jeep loaded I headed toward Home Depot for a few items, the trip was mostly uneventful, the usual death defying encounters with GDL drivers, trucks making lanes where they don't exist and one instance of an absolutely huge deep baches (quantum pot hole) which was hit by the minivan 2 cars ahead who immediately swerved to the right (might have blown a tire) leaving the guy ahead of me to attempt to swerve to the left still hitting it with such force it popped off a hub cap and it was a bit of a wild scene while everyone dodged and swerved as the hubcap careened on down the street.

Quickly assessing the situation I saw an opening had been created by this confusion and one thing you quickly learn in GDL is if there is an opening DON'T STOP TO THINK; HE WHO HESITATES GETS RUN OVER - TAKE IT and never look back. I hit the gas and shot into the hole knowing I could outrun the hubcap even though were going downhill and sure enough - I never looked back.
 
A further note from the Guadalajara Reporter indicates at least 3 deaths reported related to baches (pot holes) and the resulting chaos.
 
Yesterday I decided to document the decoration transformation beginning to happen and took a couple of wide angle shots of the mustard wall as the before shot and discovered something neat, my camera has a feature that allows you to sample a color and exchange it with another. So, I swapped in puce for mustard and it looks better, but I'm still a bit dubious. Next I tried swapping in pool table green - definitely NOT the color to go with, so I guess in lieu of any other suggestions the wall will be puce. There is a recessed alcove of sorts where some of the art hangs and seems it begs to be a different color, maybe the vivid deep thalo blue violet (?) I see here and there. As you can tell, the color stupid thing is starting to kick in. I'll post some pics later to document the transformation. The Great Adventure continues.

PS: the painting has begun and already it's on "oops" - turns out that I can not only pick the wrong shades of green, but puce? as well.