Looking at the last thirty months of living in foreign countries, it’s no surprise that I was rarely at a loss for something to write about. Some of my favorite stories are: doing laundry with an almost-automatic-washing machine in Costa Rica; when we were illegal immigrants into Mexico; learning Chinese social graces through a meal with my husband’s English students; and being sick abroad.

The strangest entry had to be when a UFO stopped me from getting home from Shanghai to our Chinese city of Wenzhou—but, of course, no one told us this in the airport at 3:00 in the morning: we read about it on line the next day.

It’s a bit harder to reread those that deal with the risks and difficulties of our chosen lifestyle: leaving San Jose, Costa Rica after being robbed three weekends in a month; being propositioned by a Mexican truck driver on a deserted road; and the impossibility of crossing a street thanks to millions of new drivers in China.

Certainly the toughest one to relive was the story of watching a man beaten unconscious on the street and while people watched without coming to his aide. It wasn’t until I received readers’ comments about my safety that it occurred to me that going to help the victim being assaulted by four 250 pound men had, maybe, put me in danger.

But then there are funny postings like How Entertaining is Chinese Food? And let’s not forget the only guest post I’ve had—by Boris the Cat—about his week in human hell.

I’ve enjoyed sharing my stories with you and hope you had as much fun reading about my adventures. You can still keep up with me through my Friday blog Baby Boomers Traveling and can soon look for my new blogging venture dealing with the business of travel and tourism.

The Boomers’ Guide to Going Abroad to Travel|Live|Give|Learn is now available through BookLocker, Amazon.com, and BarnesandNoble.com. If you’d like to read a free excerpt, just click here BookLocker excerpt and you can read the introduction and the first chapter. BookLocker also has a pdf version available to download instantly on your computer for $9.99. An e-book version will be made available soon.

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For two months now I’ve been reading over the shoulder of this writer as she’s been yammering about her time caring for we five cats and a dog in Guanajuato, Mexico. Well, I can understand her complaining about Boa—who wouldn’t be bothered having to walk a dog? Why can’t they just walk themselves? I’m always asking.

I’m Boris. You heard about me. There was the Shrimp Incident. That’s the one when the writer was so busy watching the dog watching the cats watching the shrimp, that she tripped over her writing box and it came crashing down on the hard tile floor. Apparently it ruined the picture part of it but she just hooked it up to another picture part and kept writing. That woman just won’t stop.

Oh, you probably also heard that I like to sleep on her head. Well, not just her head. Any head really. Hey, when you humans decide to start looking normal and grow hair all over your bodies I won’t have to sleep on your heads. Sheesh.

My week in Human Hell

Now it’s my turn to tell you how hard I have it with that writer. Last week, she was busy—as usual—tapping that little board with all the letters which she calls writing. Well, the dog was chasing me and I ran up the side of the house like I often do but I must have been going too fast. I made it under the wooden beam but I didn’t duck far enough and scraped my back. No big deal. I’m tough. I can handle it.

Well, wouldn’t you know it? Miss So-Focused-On-Her-Writing-She-Wouldn’t-Notice-If-The-World-Came-To-An-End decided to notice this little scrape. In no time I’m packed off in that plastic jail they call a cat carrier and we’re on the way to the vet. I don’t even have time to ask how they plan to treat my little injury that he’s got me in a reverse Mohawk haircut. Did I tell you I’m a long haired, blond beauty? Well, I was. Now I look like I belong in a Pépé le Pew cartoon (we don’t just watch Speedy Gonzalez cartoons, you know).

The indignity didn’t stop there: twice a day she grabs me by the scruff of the neck and sprays this liquid all along my scrapes. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s for my own good and that it’s to help my injuries heal faster BUT does she have to do it in front of all the other cats?

And then there’s this pill she also has to give me every day. She squashes it into a powder, mixes it into a gooey vitamin gel and rubs that on my nose so that I’ll lick it clean.

So imagine this: a gorgeous, blond long-haired cat reduced to having a one-inch-wide strip of its fur shaved off with the hair on either side of the red skin perpetually flopped-over because of the wet spray. And for the finishing touch: a dollop of brown goop on my nose.

I’m the laughing stock of the household, I tell you. I can’t hold up my head, not even to Boa the dog.

[View with PicLens]

The Boomers’ Guide to Going Abroad to Travel * Live * Give * Learn is now available through BookLocker, Amazon.com, and BarnesandNoble.com. If you’d like to read a free excerpt, just click here BookLocker excerpt and you can read the introduction and the first chapter. BookLocker also has a pdf version available to download instantly on your computer for $9.99. An e-book version will be made available soon.

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If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the envelope next to the word ‘subscribe’ at the top of the left-hand menu. You will receive notification by e-mail every time this blog is updated. I solemnly swear to never sell, trade or give away your information to anyone!!

Living abroad has made rising early to work a necessity as the noise level in the Mexican, Costa Rican and Chinese cities I lived in made it impossible to write after midmorning. The first couple of hours are pretty quiet with just the roosters crowing in the background and the occasional dog barking. Doves coo, birds chirp and the only constant sound is the melodic tapping on my keyboard.

After a while, I hear the neighbors start stirring; kids in bed moaning they don’t want to get up. I smell the coffee brewing and sweet pastries baking. The early workers stomp down the stairs of our calejon (a small, narrow street) letting gravity carry them to the street without resistance. Below, the commuting noise begins with drivers tooting their horns in stopped traffic while further away diesel buses and trucks grind their gears climbing the hill.

By eight, the water man walks the streets advertising his product at the top of his voice, while the gas man does the same. In China, men and women pulling wooden wagons call for residents to bring down their cardboard, glass, plastic—any used products they can take away and sell. Costa Rica is known for its vendors of eggs, fruits and vegetables at the back of pick-up trucks or station wagons with a similar sing song—just different products.

Many a time I’ve thought of the line from Monty Python and The Holy Grail: “Bring out your dead.”

All of this morning noise becomes part of the routine and is most pleasant.

How Loud Can It Get?

Later in the day, and especially on weekends, the noise level becomes excruciatingly loud. In China, neighbors were all working so there was no problem with radios and televisions. There, the issue was street traffic below us and the noisy card players at outdoor tables across the street.

In Costa Rica, it was the adjoining neighbors’ kids playing extremely loud music (the Thriller CD for a week when Michael Jackson died). And in Mexico it’s another kid playing the exact, same CD three or four times each afternoon, very loudly.

This weekend was the winner, though. Not only did I have all of the daytime noise, but the evenings were filled with a festival at the nearby St. Sebastian church. We had half a dozen carnival rides with loud music and sirens every time one started running, loads of people screaming in fear, traffic backed up half a mile, and drivers tooting their horns: oh what fun we had!

And this until 10:30 at night. In a residential neighborhood. On a street, not a park, for four nights. I could have strangled the idiot who gave the carnival rides a permit for this. And what, pray tell, do carnival rides have to do with Saint Sebastian? Huh?

And all day Sunday the church shot loud cannons—well, that’s what it sounds like to this gringa—as they usually do on Mexican saints days. It was annoying to me but frightening for the dog and five cats I’m caring for. They spent much of the day under the desk where I was working wondering what were those stupid humans up to now?

This is when I really miss houses that are well insulated, with double-paned glass windows: haven’t been in too many of those in the five years I’ve been traveling. Instead, I make do with getting up early in the morning, writing as much as I can while it’s quiet, and using ear plugs when it the noise becomes too much. Like everything else when living the expat life, you learn to adapt to the circumstances you have to live with.

Look for The Boomers’ Guide to Going Abroad to Travel * Live * Give * Learn is now available at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and BookLocker.com .

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Having spent a winter in Guanajuato several years earlier, I knew to bring my flannel pajamas and wooly socks. Thankfully, housemate Katie had also put flannel sheets, a down comforter, and several thick blankets on my bed before my arrival.

Central heating is very rare here as is house insulation or windows that seal properly. That means a lot of cold air comes into the house from outside and there’s no way to heat the inside air. All you can do is add more clothing on your body and more blankets on your bed.

I remember breaking down and buying a small electric heater for our apartment when we lived here last time. The unit was cheap enough but we’d been warned that it would suck a lot of power and that our electricity bill would increase greatly because of this one addition. As a matter of fact, it increased so much that our landlady—not knowing about our purchase—had the power company come out to check on the meters to make sure they weren’t malfunctioning.

Looking for Cheaper Options

When the temperatures dipped a week after I arrived, I mentioned to Katie that I’d be borrowing a small gas-powered heater from a friend. My housemate told me that a similar unit was available but she wasn’t interested in using it as she was uncomfortable with gas. I dragged the heater out of the closet, took it out of the box, read the Spanish-language instructions, set it up in my room and wondered how the heck I would be hooking it up to the gas tanks outside the house.

The weather warmed up so I didn’t bother figuring out the problem of getting gas to the heater.  Katie went off on her Christmas holidays and I settled in my routine of caring for the house, the dog and five cats. The temperatures took another dip and this time I decided I’d better figure out how to hook up the gas so that I Katie wouldn’t find my frozen corpse in bed when she returned.

I wrote the homeowners an e-mail not knowing they were away camping and it would be five days before I heard back. By then the weather had warmed up again and I no longer needed the heater. But it was good to know that the appliance needed to be hooked up to a small tank to be found in the garden shed not the big gas tanks used to provide fuel to the stove.

The next time I felt a chill in the air, I decided I was going to dig out that gas tank and bring it into my bedroom before it got too cold. That’s when I discovered it was empty. I knew that having let five weeks pass, I wasn’t likely to have the tank filled for the remaining three weeks of my stay—especially since I knew I couldn’t carry a filled tank. I repacked the heater and stored it away in the closet.

That night, I put on an extra layer of clothing before going to bed. And, as on many a cold night before, at least four of the five cats joined me in bed—the warmest place in the house. One cat, a large long-haired peach-colored one named Boris, has the strange habit of sleeping on people’s heads. It appears to be the cheapest option for keeping my bodily heat from escaping and so I let him lay there while other cats lay by my sides.

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Jacob and I first came to Guanajuato, Mexico four years ago for an intensive two months of Spanish classes. Through another student at the don Quixote school, we learned of a women’s rights project that might need some help. We jumped in and wrote an English-language website for them in the remaining six weeks—just in time for a U.S. speaking tour the director was about to undertake.

The program director, Vero, had been named one of three worldwide Defenders of Human Rights by Human Rights Watch and was advised by the organization to have a website created to send potential donors to. Of course, she had no resources to make this happen and she was amazed that Jacob and I happened to come to Guanajuato with the right skills just as she needed us. We then went on with our world trip intending to return to this wonderful city where we’d made many good friends.

You Don’t Always Get What You Want

I spent the next couple of years learning all that I could about fair trade businesses, products and shops and visited many in the 42 countries we travel to. The idea of bringing such a project to Guanajuato excited me—I just didn’t know that someone else would beat me to it!

When we returned two years later, we asked Vero what kind of help she needed. Jacob—newly qualified as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language—would end up teaching a group of women at the center and building archive shelves for years of paperwork to be filed away. I undertook to organize their first library and to sort out an economic development project—a fair trade program—that was having a hard time staying alive. Mine would have to wait as there was no sense starting a new one if the existing one wasn’t doing well.

It’s only now, my fourth time in Guanajuato, four years after my first visit that I’m finally able to get it started. Hermelinda, the woman with whom Jacob and I lived while we studied Spanish four years ago, will be sewing sleep masks and pouches that will be sold as part of sleep kits. These will be made available on the Baby Boomers Traveling website and at conferences and travel shows. Later, if we have enough interest, we can start distributing them to stores.

We’re starting small to minimize our risks with only Hermelinda sewing but when we grow bigger she’ll become the trainer and manager of other Mexican women sewing the products. The plan is that, eventually, the entire project will be turned over to them where they’ll own and manage every aspect of the project.

The need for this kind of work never goes away. Even though I’m sure Hermelinda could have used the money earlier, I know I wouldn’t have succeeded with my project if my time had been split between trying to help the other program survive (it didn’t) as well as launching a new one. I’m glad that I held off and waited for the right time and thankfully now that I’m ready, everyone else seems to be willing to jump in as well.

Look for The Boomers’ Guide to Going Abroad to Travel * Live * Give * Learn on sale here in hard copy and in electronic format soon.

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If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the envelope next to the word ‘subscribe’ at the top of the left-hand menu. You will receive notification by e-mail every time this blog is updated. I solemnly swear to never sell, trade or give away your information to anyone!!