Progreso/Chelem/Chuburna

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Chiapas Earthquake

Last night, I was woken around 11:45 by what could be nothing else but an earthquake, my first in two years. I knew this was a big one, at least a 7 if not 8-pointer, having experienced one before. But there are no fault lines in Yucatán and there’s never been an earthquake here, at least as per the quick Googling I did. I also checked in with Protección Civil and they didn’t have anything up. So I figured that with Hurricane Irma lighting up seismographs, I must be feeling that.

So I was devastated to wake up to news that Mexico’s worst earthquake in 100 years has decimated the states of Chiapas and nearby Oaxaca.

Chiapas is one of the poorest states in this country and doesn’t have great infrastructure. There have been many deaths and so much damage from this earthquake and the counts can only rise. 🙁 I was talking with a lady the other day who had just come back from San Cristóbal, a city with a small expat population (that is way too BRR for me to consider), who talked to me at great length about the disparities between Chiapas and Yucatán.

Here in Mérida, at least one hotel was evacuated as a precautionary measure.

As far as I can tell, there is no damage to the house here. Last time I experienced an 8-pointer, I was practically on top of the epicentre and my house was damaged. Here, I got the weird rippling sensation all through my body as I laid in bed, but nothing seemed to move in the house. Puppy apparently slept right through it!

While I’m blogging, I might as well answer the question on everyone’s mind — no, Katia is not going to hit us. It’s going just north of us and probably going to slam in Veracruz. 🙁

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About to Sign My First Mexican (Yucatecan) Lease

Like she promised, my real estate agent sent me a copy of my lease to peruse before the official signing tomorrow. As expected, it was six legal size pages of bla bla bla that could mostly be summarised in a few sentences.

As a former rental agent and tenant in Canada, I was first struck by what was not in the lease — the monthly rental amount and terms for renewal — and what was considered pertinent, like the owner’s proxy’s person details (age, address) and the exact specifications and location of the house (things I’d expect to see in a legal land description), rather than just an address.

Otherwise, the lease was exactly as I expected, with the standard clauses about having to pay my utilities, returning the house in the condition in which it was received, not subletting, and not turning the house into a meth lab (that clause was more PC than that, but that’s what they mean). I have zero qualms signing that document, although I do have a few questions, like what are the terms, if any, for renewal. The lease says that I have to vacate in two years, but it’d be good to know today if there is zero hope for a renewal or if the owners are also hoping this works out well enough for a renewal.

The other thing we need to clarify is the address, which is super confusing. The address is given as actually being in Colonia Felipe Carrillo Puerto. If I put my address into Google Maps or my GPS using that colonia, I end up right across the city. You can see my colonia at the top left there, but in red at the bottom right is the area that Google and the GPS think is my colonia.

What I’m worried about are silly guests ignoring my instructions and insisting on using just an address, as well as deliveries, but since with the latter, you have to give the nearest intersections and, ideally, a landmark, as well as your postal code I should be fine.

Now, here’s to hoping I actually get access to keys tomorrow so I can go take pictures! I don’t have any other listing ones really worth sharing as a teaser, but here’s part of the master closet. It has its own window so it could actually double as a secondary bedroom as I’m sure there’s enough room in there for a full size mattress and it also has a ceiling fan!

I’ve started to window shop for what I need to move in so I can firm up my budget. A mattress will be new, of course, but since I have a good mattress topper, I can get something on the lower end of the scale. I’m going used for appliances, though. A super cheap placeholder fridge fell through, but it made me realise that I should get a super cheap placeholder fridge for now and upgrade later. I’m also waiting to hear about about a reasonably priced Bosch range. It was immediately evident from the photos that it’s better than even a higher end Mabe because it had cast iron grills, rather than cheap enamelled ones that will wear down and rust. I am not opposed to a Mabe fridge and washer, though.

I really don’t want to buy anything until I actually have access to the house to avoid having to move things twice or worry about storing them in the meantime since the storage room here is pretty small. It’s going to be wonderful to start moving in and see my new home take shape!

Now, I leave you with this curious fact from my lease that surprised me, considering how big the house is. The house lot is about 4,600 square feet, with the house being about 2,600 square feet. My “small” lot at Haven is 5,000 square feet!

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Summer’s End

It is incredible to be days from September and to not be thinking about packing so I can get on the road or pulling out my cold weather clothes or anticipating any change in my routine. I can focus on other things and expend energy on more productive endeavours.  I love that I’m going to move into my house at the start of November and I can still think about planting a garden. I really think that I’m going to do very well living in a world of perpetual summer.

Plus, there is so much to explore just in the Yucatán peninsula that I’ll be able to keep satisfying my wanderlust. Just as I know that Haven is the perfect-but-for-the-internet-situation place for  me, so too I know that Mérida is the perfect-but-for-the-humidity place for me. I have very few reservations about setting up housekeeping here and committing to Mérida for at least four years. And I am so grateful to have had the years of RVing and snowbirding and the months in Europe behind me as they bolster that confidence that I’m doing the right thing at this stage in my life.

I was supposed to sign the lease tomorrow, but there were scheduling conflicts. After a flurry of hilarious texts, my agent is pretty sure that 10AM Saturday will work with everyone’s schedules and we’re going with that. 6PM tomorrow would have worked as well, but mean driving home in the dark and I really do avoid that whenever possible because my night vision is so terrible. At any rate, it’s not like a few more days will make a huge difference and it eased the work pressure a bit.

Speaking of work, here is a wall of my new office. I thought this rather strange cabinet could be a writing desk, but only just noticed that it’s up on a dais, with no space for a chair. I cannot for the life of me figure out what it’s actually meant to be then…

This room is really big and I’m actually starting to think that it should be the guest room so that I can actually make a guest studio, especially since it has its own exterior door to the parking area. It would be rather a shame for guests to lose their huge closet, but the extra space might make it worthwhile as I could even set up a small kitchenette. At any rate, if I ever get the Airbnb thing going, I’m going to consider it…

 

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Looking Ahead

This weekend wound up being a good time to catch up on my bookkeeping, set up a budget for the next quarter, and start to work on my projected budget for the start of 2018. There is no doubt that I’ll be able to afford a comfortable life here, but I’m trying to pay down some debt and step up my retirement savings so I wanted to see if there was some fat I could start trimming right now. Absolutely. I have a few calls to make for that tomorrow.

It will be good for me to have a stable (ish) budget for a couple of years to catch up on some things. I’m doing absolutely fine for someone pushing 40 who just spent a decade gallivanting over about a quarter the planet’s land mass and I want to make sure I’m in at least as good a position 10 years from now.

I really didn’t go into this without a lot of thought. Setting up a home again is going to be a big expense and I had to be sure that it’s something I’m ready for again and that this is the right location for it. I definitely am certain on both counts. So that’s one of the reasons I chose to go with more house than I really need — I wanted a place to grow into.

I didn’t want to find myself wanting to move again in a few years, especially since I know I’m going to be in Mérida for at least four years. I really wanted a proper home base where I can receive people, pursue hobbies, and continue to grow my business. If I had continued to snowbird, I would have definitely gone with a much smaller place as I would have had to maintain two homes, but this will be a year-round home for me, something I had started to doubt I would ever have.

While there are a few things I’m not thrilled about with the house, especially the location of my office, there is so much more that I’m looking forward to and I’ve spent probably too much time in the last couple of weeks dreaming of how I’m going to set it up and doing some online window shopping.

The room I’m probably most excited about is the kitchen, which is huge and has great light from two windows. I am going to be able to really get back into cooking here, something that I’ve missed since I’ve stopped living in Miranda full-time and had access to a pantry.

I also know that I’m going to spend a lot of time in the rear courtyard off the dining room. I saw so many homes with uncovered exterior spaces that would have been difficult to make comfortable in the middle of the day.

The laundry room that I discovered on the second visit is such a bonus. I’ll be able to do laundry without there being noise in the house and there is so much space to hang everything outside.

My bedroom is going to be so airy and I’m ridiculously excited to have a closet almost as big as Miranda after squeezing into her tiny wardrobe all these years.

I’m thinking of turning the upstairs landing into my art studio, but I suspect a comfy chair might end up there to turn it into a reading nook. Regardless, it’s so bright and well ventilated that I’m sure it won’t be wasted space.

I really hope that I get keys with my lease on Wednesday so I can take you on a tour of my new digs. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak! This photo is taken from the centre of the living room (which you enter directly into from the front door). Looking ahead is the staircase to the master suite. To the right, you can see the dining room and the door to the courtyard. Both spaces that you can see here come with really nice furniture!

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Checking the Status of a Temporary Vehicle Import Permit Extension

On the calendar for today was to check the status of my request to extend my Temporary Import Permit (TIP) for my truck. I did all the paperwork for that in May, but was told it could take three to four months to process.

I went to this site to check the status:

http://www.sat.gob.mx/aduanas/vehiculos/importacion_temporal/

(The address was in the footer of the letter they gave me confirming they had received my request for an extension.)

On this page, scroll down to the Verifica el estado de tu permiso section and click on aplicación:

On the next page, you need two numbers, which you will have in the letter you were given confirming that you made the application for the extension. You don’t need that letter to get that information since you can find it elsewhere, but it’s convenient to have it right there, plus you might not remember what was used for the second number.

The first number is your permit number OR the VIN of the vehicle whose permit is being extended.

The second number is the number of the ID document used. In my case, they used my passport for ID and so my passport number is what I put in that field.

Fill in the CAPTCHA and click Buscar (search).

As long as the information is filled in correctly, you will get a search result at the bottom of this same screen:

If it says PRORROGA (extension), your request was duly processed and your vehicle is still legally in Mexico. However, this does not tell you if your deposit with Banjercito is safe and I was not given a way to check that.

What next? If, like in my case, you are planning to renew your residente temporal status after the first year, you will renew your TIP a second time, just like you did the first. However, if you are at the point of getting permanente status, you need to start thinking about an exit plan for your vehicle. That will be the subject of another post when I get closer to that moment.