January 29, 2013 – Guadalajara One
Well, the last week has been extremely eventful and not without its stresses.
Last Monday night, I was off with my buddy Bob playing Texas Holdem with nine other like-minded snowbirds. Bob won, again, but that’s another story. Whilst I was there, my left hearing aid started acting up, with the sound cutting in and out. By Tuesday morning, it was completely verklempt. This is bad, as I have a tough enough time with TWO hearing aids, so getting it fixed became the immediate priority. No problem, I thought; I’ll just get someone in Manzanillo to fix it. Not! OK, how about Puerto Vallarta, which is a mere 4 hours away by bus. After a day or so of searching, it turns out that there are two places there, and they both send their stuff out of town to be fixed. OK, how about Colima, which is 2.5 hours out past Manzanillo? I found a guy, but he sends his stuff out of town, too. So, where do these folks all send their stuff to? A little shop called Salamanca, in Guadalajara, about five hours away by bus. And I found someone there who can speak English! She asked me to put everything into an email explaining the problem, and the technician would get back to me if it could be fixed in-house or not. Naturally, the email system went down for 3 days. Faced with the choice of waiting for my head to explode or just going to Guadalajara, I bought two bus tickets for my trusty sidekick and me, and here we are!
To get to Guadalajara, we could take a Primera Plus (1st-class) bus from downtown Melaque, where we live, or an ETN (executive-class) bus from downtown Barra de Navidad. The ETN bus is very cushy, a bit more expensive, and it only goes once a day, quite early in the morning. The PP is still very nice (aircon, wifi, in-flight movies, free lunch) and there are way more trips, and it leaves right from town, so PP it was. I think the five-hour trip was $20 each. It’s a good trip, but it takes one of the secondary highways through the mountains rather than the autopista that ETN uses. It’s very pretty and scenic, but don’t do it if you’re prone to motion sickness! It’s pretty wind-y in places.
The bus station in Guadalajara is VERY cool, like an international airport. As buses are the major form of travel for the middle-class here, I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise. There are probably 100+ bays for buses like ours, plus another station 200 metres away for all the second- and third-class buses, plus a big station just outside for all the city buses, plus an enormous cab-stand if you’re completely lost like we were.
The cab ride into downtown was very straightforward, no one tried to rip us off, the hotel is just fine, and the weather is great here. I’ll give you more of the straight poop on all of that over the next few days. The bottom line is we still had time to walk the fourteen blocks from the hotel to the repair shop (completely voluntary, we were just sniffing out the ambiance). The nice lady immediately recognized us (I guess we still don’t quite look like locals) and she dragged the technician out of the back, who immediately advised us that this brand of hearing aid must go to Mexico City for repair, and it would take 2-3 weeks. It’s not these guys’ fault; 90+% of North American hearing aids are made in Switzerland, and they won’t ship replacement parts to anyone in Mexico except their shop in CDMX. Of course, if the email had been working, we could have saved ourselves a trip and just couriered it out. And yes, the email is working now. Sigh. So I bit the bullet, and the little fella is in a box on his way to Mexico City. The good news is we get to explore Guadalajara for at least the next 2 days, as I booked us in for 3 nights. We’re already liking it, as we found a bar-restaurant called Hamsterville. Doesn’t get much better than that!
Gotta go, as we’re sharing a computer and Deb is champing at the bit. That’s because my shiny new Nexus 7 tablet just blew up this morning, and it looks like a catastrophic fail (beyond even duct tape). Sigh. On the other hand, what a perfect excuse to check out that new Asus Transformer!