The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Water problems

No water in Mexico City, anywhere

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Everyone’s been buzzing about the latest water news: Mexico City officials said they’re shutting off the taps to the entire city starting today, and lasting through Monday. No one will have water, the newspapers said. Not just our neighborhood in Cuauhtemoc. We still haven’t “officially” had water for a few weeks now.

Our building manager ordered another pipa, which arrived this morning at 5 a.m. Of course the driver rang our buzzer. (The joys of being apartment No. 1.) Crayton read in Reforma this morning that one family who’d lacked water since Monday bathed themselves in a man-made beach in Coyoacan. (Wish I could link it, but Reforma is subscription-only.) Strangely, El Universal is reporting that some places in Cuauhtemoc and Alvaro Obregon still have water. Where is the logic in this?

I’m off to Seattle to celebrate my mom’s 60th birthday, but I’m thinking about organizing a rain dance on my back patio when I get return. Let me know if you’re in.

The Zen state of mind (or: I will no longer shed tears over Telmex and water)

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The beach in Progreso, Yucatan

I’m back from the Yucatan and I feel calmer already. The beach and the poolside views at our hacienda hotel helped. And so did (I’m semi-embarrassed to admit) certain chapters of Eat Pray Love, which I swore I would never read (over 7 million copies are now in print!), but now I’m so glad I did, because if a formerly divorced and depressed woman can find inner peace, then dammit, so can I.

Telmex says we’re not going to have a phone line for at least 15 more days. That’s fine, if that’s what the universe wants….

We still don’t have water, but pipa truck guys arrived this morning at 6 a.m. and rang our buzzer. (We had no idea they were coming and no one else did either.) The water is supposed to come back soon. The fact that we can even afford a pipa is a blessing.

And I am living in Mexico City, which is a blessing, too. Oh, and I met a really cool cab driver yesterday afternoon who said he’s known in Tepito as “Bruce Lee’s Cousin,” because he puts the smackdown on any dudes who try to mess with him. (Tepito is known as the toughest neighborhood in the city.) I got his number and he’s taking me to the airport next week.

Your faithful Zen Princess,
Lesley

I finally thought it: “I want to go home.”

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This morning, my arms full of dirty clothes, I opened the door to our tiny washer/dryer combo and discovered the sheets I’d placed there last night were still wet. I’d already tried to dry these sheets twice. Did this mean our dryer was broken, too? I screamed in my head, and I think it reached Mars.

The past few days have tested my patience. First we didn’t have water. Then we didn’t have hot water. Then I got a haircut from an aggressive Mexican stylist who gave me spiky bangs. Then the telephone installation guy broke Crayton’s nightstand. Then he said, Oh señorita, actually you can’t get a phone line in your building, the “network is saturated.” Then I woke up to find the wet sheets. Meanwhile three other loads waited, staring at me with their dirty eyes.

At that moment, the United States suddenly seemed like paradise. Hot water gushes from the faucets without anyone worrying where it comes from. A person can call up AT&T — or a carrier of their choice — and receive a phone line without much fuss. Few people worry about whether they’ll have water or gas tomorrow. And they don’t get scratch paper shoved in their faces during business transactions. GOD. What is it with Mexicans and scratch paper? Is it leftovers from the dearth of fliers people give out on the street? I got a Dianetics one today (headlines: “Depresion? Estres?”) and was seriously considering purchasing it.

So yeah. I thought it.

I wanna go home.

Eventually, after banishing myself to my room and playing with my new iPhone, I calmed down. I took some clothes to the cleaners and passed a quiet street that reminded me of what I like about this country. An old, osteoporotic woman walking ahead of me called “Buenos dias!” into a cafe. The man behind the counter yelled back, “Buenos dias!” His voice sounded raspy, like he’d smoked too much.

When I got home, the maintenance man in our building showed me how to light our water heater’s pilot light, and I read the instruction manual to learn how to keep the thing going. (The whole while feeling like a dumb American for not knowing a shred about water heaters.) About an hour later, our hot water had been restored.

The sheets went into the dryer a third time. At the end of their three-hour cycle, they were dry too. (I have now purchased a clothesline.)

One beer and a few Hershey kisses later, life is really not so bad. And I’m coming around to seeing the other side all this, which is that as an American, I’ve been spoiled to believe that natural resources like gas and water are in endless supply. Obviously they’re not. Readjusting my world view is part of the reason we moved down here in the first place. Just wish it was more “lazy conversations with Mexicans over coffee” rather than “wake up, surprise!, there’s no water.”

Things I’m thankful for today, when we don’t have water, again

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1. The Artesanos del Dulce cafe only a few blocks from my house, and their wireless internet, cafe Americano and dark-chocolate cookies

2. The hot showers at my new gym. And, for that matter, my new gym. It’s at the Sheraton Hotel a few blocks from my house. It’s super nice and EMPTY. No guys in mesh tank tops doing tricep curls and kissing their guns. (Talking to YOU, Gold’s Gym Polanco.)

4. The fact that my husband and I are happy and healthy, and so are our parents and loved ones.

5. The “display case” outside this dentist’s office, which I always pass on my way to Artesanos del Dulce.

Teeth, anyone?

6. My new iPhone. It took two visits to the Telcel store and a personal reference, but I got it. Now I know why Americans don’t get Mexican cell phone plans.

What happens when you have no water in Mexico

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Turns out that when the city cuts off your water service — which is what happened to us a few days ago — you can just pick up the phone and buy some more.

There’s a whole industry of private “pipas” here, which are basically big water trucks that pull up to your house and fill up your cistern. They’re in the yellow pages, so you can even shop around for a price. Ours charged us 150 pesos per apartment for 10,000 liters of water.

You ask: But where do they get their water? And if they have water, how come the city can’t use it, instead of shutting off water to residents in the name of conservation? This is the official reason why we don’t have service, by the way — because there isn’t enough water to go around. I asked my landlady this question, and she just shrugged.

Because a person will go insane if they ponder these kinds of things too long, instead I’m going to focus on the positive, which is that we do have water now, thanks to the pipa guys. Our toilets don’t work — we have to fill up the tanks every time we want to flush — but we do have TV and cable and light.

The real water will hopefully come sooner or later. In the meantime, maybe I’ll call a laundry service for all the clothes piling up in the hamper.

The honeymoon’s over, and we have no water

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In the past few days, when people have said to me, “Oh, you’re new! How do you like it here so far?” My response has been — thoughtful pause — “I like it…”

Everything is starting to grate on me, suddenly. The noise. The endless horn-honking. So much freaking horn-honking, I start composing symphonies of horn-honks in my head. Could one have a Hallelujah Chorus of honking? What about that gloomy Transylvania theme song, always blaring in haunted houses? That thing was made to be honked.

Then today, we woke up to find we had no water. It’s a problem throughout our neighborhood. Undeterred in my quest to become the cleanest woman in Mexico, I ended up taking a medieval-type shower, heating up water on the stove and then carrying it into the shower in my largest mixing bowls. It actually worked pretty well, to be honest. Something tells me tomorrow it won’t be as fun.

Other things I don’t understand about this country: Why paying a bill at the bank takes at least an hour. Why getting Internet at home, if you don’t have a phone line, takes two to three weeks. And why men make that weird lip-smacking sound at women walking down the street. It sounds like they need a toothpick.

I’m looking forward to getting out of here, at least for a little while. My friend Joy and I are going to the Yucatan at the end of the month, which will be nice.

So I’ve officially descended from my new-resident high. Still like it here, but it just feels more real. Not as magical.

A water crisis in Mexico City, if you don’t have money

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Last weekend, the city’s water crisis was all over the news. From what I gathered — and I’m still figuring out how to read newspapers in Spanish — the government planned to shut off water to certain neighborhoods during the last three days of the month, in order to conserve and fix problems with the water system.

I couldn’t ever figure out which neighborhoods would be affected, so I assumed we’d wake up Saturday morning without water. Which, for us, isn’t that huge of a deal — we have purified water to drink and cook with. (And showers, eh, they can wait on the weekend.)

So on Saturday, I turned on the faucets. They worked normally. Then I looked at the paper online. Some of DF’s outlying neighborhoods — where people can’t afford to buy water — didn’t have any.

The fact that these people had no water and we did made no sense to me. If you’re going to shut off water for conservation purposes, why not do it city-wide? I told this to a friend of mine, and she said the city would never shut off water in our neighborhood. Too many embassy employees live here.

Suddenly I felt bad for being so blase about the lack of water in the first place. Of course we can buy our own. We just walk down the street to the supermarket, or tell our doorman we’re out, and boom. It’s there. It’s so easy to forget that there are thousands of people who can’t do this.

Of course, this raises the eternal question about Mexico, which is why so many people here still live in poverty, while the rich — or even solidly middle-class — lead normal first-world lives. It’s part of what makes the city so chaotic and fascinating, with entrepreneurs crowding the subways and the neighborhood knife-sharpener whistling down the street. But the concept of having so much more than so many other people is a hard thing to get used to. I don’t know that I ever will, to be honest.

I was chatting with Lola, our housekeeper, the other day and she mentioned she had a 12-year-old daughter. “But only one,” she said. “I didn’t want another because it’s too tough in this world.”