Snowbird Activities

I just completed a week-long Spanish intensive class with two other students. Our teacher, Estela, is from Ensenada, but is living here temporarily with her husband who is a supervisor in the nearby mine. My fellow students were Leba, an Alaskan women who lives on a small "ranchita" outside of town and Robin, a nurse midwife from Berkeley, California. They are both winter residents of Alamos, as is the majority of other "gringos" here. Our Spanish class was relaxed but I found it very helpful and am much more confident of my verb tenses. I realize that I do know a lot of Spanish but need to find more opportunities to use it.  I'll take a couple more classes next week.

Because of all the "snowbirds" there are myriad activities available in Alamos at this time of year. On Sunday night we had pizza and beer at a local hotel followed by a free showing of the film, "Charlie Wilson's War." Dean had a Latin jazz jam session with a bass player and a percussionist last week. On Tuesday afternoon, I attended a one hour "Shut up and Dance" session. A dozen of us danced free-form for an hour to a variety of music. Great exercise and lots of fun.

Wednesday evening, we attended a weekly gourmet dinner at the local B and B. Three courses, including Alaskan crabcakes in tomatilla sauce with hearts of palm, corn and fava bean soup with a dollop of dove mousse (it is dove hunting season now), and pomegranate marinated pork tenderloin on a bed of swiss chard were followed by a yummy chocolate dessert. All this for under $25 per person. We are meeting more people all the time and it is great to just run into them in the square or cafe or drop by their houses for a chat.

Last night, we were invited to the house some friends just finished building for popcorn and a Mexican movie (with subtitles). On Saturday, there will be a jazz singer visiting from LA performing at a local bar and on Sunday one of the hotels is showing the Golden Globe awards live in its movie theater. Also on Sunday will be the annual membership meeting of Amigos de Educacion, the group with which we worked this fall raising money for the Alamos flood victims. In a moment of weakness I agreed to serve on their board of directors for the coming year.

In between all of this we are taking walks every day and reading: me- Omnivore's Dilemma, D- God's Middle Finger. The latter is about the drug trade that apparently is all around us here in the Sierra Madres. I say apparently because we see little sign of it and do not feel at all in danger, even though the US State Department is sending out traveler's advisories for Mexico. Most of the violence is between the drug cartels and the government and they all leave the gringos alone because after drugs, tourism is the second most important part of the economy here.