Paying Our First Bill In Mexico

Paying Our First Bill In Mexico

We enjoyed our Sunday breakfast and meeting our email amigos in San Carlos, we have made plans to get together at the Friday night tianguis in Guaymas Norte. They own a boat and spend much of the winter sailing. It was a nice meeting. She is also just getting a blog up and running, the URL is here http://blissbloggin.blogspot.com/ and I will add it to my blogroll soon.

We are still waiting for glass in our door upstairs; but plumbers arrived in the late afternoon to do some work. It was not the original plumber, he has disappeared into the sunset. Ciro mentioned to his brother, who is a plumber that he was having trouble getting the work done, so of course, brother came over to help out and did the work. He had not asked him before as he is very busy at work. Along with him was his son, who is on vacation from university, he is taking an engineering course also (as is Ciros son Carlos); but he is going into computer stuff. Ciro told him about our 2nd computer not working on the net as the cable guy said it would. We had just decided to wait until we moved upstairs before calling the cable company to find out what is wrong. He looked at the setup and told us that we needed the install disc from the company for the 2nd computer to work, which of course the company did not give us. We will have to go there and get one from them.

Back to the plumbing. They installed the lines for the gas and the hot water and the rest of the hook ups will have to wait for the hot water heater and the stove to arrive. We had some interesting conversation while they were working and a nice evening sitting outside upstairs in the light breeze. Ciro likes the look of the storage box that Luis made for us out of bricks and then plastered over on the outside with cement as they also do the houses. He is thinking now that maybe he should have Luis make a similiar one (no lid of course) at the front of our patio to use as a planter box. We wholeheartedly endorsed this idea; but Irene was not in on this discussion, so who knows what will happen. It seems that her ideas for the stair railing may have changed when discussed with Ciro, so we will see.

We had asked Ciro how we go about paying our cable/internet bill, as here your bills do not come in the mail. He told us that you just go to the office anytime in the first 10 days of the month and pay. We decided that yesterday was the day to try this. Last winter we had to pay no bills as everything was included in our rent. I took the hook up papers with me to the office as no one there speaks any english. I stood in line for maybe 10 minutes and when it was my turn I told the girl I wanted to pay the bill, I also asked her if I could pay for 2 months (we will be away for almost a month in September and don't want our service cut off), she told me that I could pay up to September 30, which is perfect for us. I gave her the money, she printed up a receipt on her computer and that was it. I get a bit nervous about things like this as I don't like to hold up the line while I try to make myself understood; but maybe my spanish is getting better, as she had no problem understanding what I wanted and did it quickly. Painless!! Now to return there and try to speak enough understandable spanish to get the install disc. Another day, another blog.

I am finding that one of the biggest problems is that everyone is so polite that they will not correct my pronunciation, so I never am sure that I am saying words correctly; even when I point blank ask Ciro, I sometimes have to ask 2 or 3 times before he will tell me how to say a word properly. Sometimes though when he sees me having trouble getting my tongue around something he will feel sorry for me and say it over with me a couple of times.

We also stopped at a home yesterday, where we had seen them making bed frames last winter. At first there was only an old gentleman there, who appeared to have very little sight, and who was muy occupado (very busy) spitting chewing tabacco. He was very pleasant; but was having a hard time understanding me when I asked about whether they would be able to deliver it. After a while a younger lady came out of the house and I finally wrote the word down for delivery and with some chatting she said, yes, they would be able to deliver it and would not charge extra. We told her that we would come back in a week or so when we needed it. An interesting day.