After leaving the hot and muggy Pacific coast of Mexico we drove inland to Mexico’s 2nd biggest metro area of Guadalajara.  This is another place we’re considering to spend the winter, and by the end of our stay it’s a definite maybe.  We like the weather and the number of things you can do that come with being in a big city.  However, we’re not really big city people, at least with kids, and traffic here is kind of intense.  Traffic is intense all over Mexico in it’s own way if you’re not used to it, but here things like 4+ lane roundabouts, constant traffic slow downs and busy, frequently merging multi-lane what you might call highways take it to a whole new level for us.  I’m sure this has nothing on Mexico City from what I’ve heard, but it was stressful enough for us.

We decided to stay a little ways outside the center of the city at the Crowne Plaza hotel near the Plaza del Sol, partly because it was hard to find dog friendly places and this one was, partly because it had a pool which has been a savior of a feature for us to wear the kids out for bed, and partly because it looked like it was closer to some neighborhoods that I’d read might be quieter and better for long term living.  This put us farther away from city center than I expected, but that didn’t seem to matter a lot since it seems to take at least 15-20 minutes to get from any point in the city to any other.  Even when things looked fairly close together on the map, it would end up taking us 20 minutes to get from point to point when you take into account traffic and parking.

The plazas in Guadalajara are phenomenal places to hang out.  The first night we hung out in Parque Expiatorio which is the plaza near the University, and we had a blast.  Geneveve found a couple groups of kids to play with even though they didn’t speak the same language as her, we found some good vegetarian street food, and there was some live music.  Later we saw many other plazas on the Tapatío Tour bus, and there were mariachi performers, acrobats, demonstrations, and just chill places to hangout and people watch.  I highly recommend the Tapatío Tour bus for seeing the city so that you don’t have to do the driving yourself, which is a frantic process that means you really won’t see much of anything except the traffic around you.  Probably the easiest place to pick up the bus is in the plaza just north of the main cathedral, but we finally figured out where the Plaza del Sol stop was and caught the bus there so we didn’t have to drive down to the centro just to find the bus.  Their website has a list of the stops you can get on at, but it’s very unclear exactly where those stops are and how often they come.  While waiting for one of the buses to come we took a carriage ride, something Kim has always wanted to do but was more expensive than we ever though we could justify in places like New York City, while here it was less than $15 USD.

We did a little bit of research on the preschools and home rentals in the city to see if we might want to live here.  We found there’s a ton of Montessori schools all over the city and they all would have been easy to get Geneveve enrolled.  We didn’t tour any though.  We also saw quite a few possible house rentals online, but didn’t tour any of those either.  The market for rentals is extremely fragmented with at least a half dozen different websites that have a couple things posted here and there, often with very minimal descriptions and terrible photos if they even have photos.  It really makes me miss how easy and central Craigslist is in the US.  That combined with the long drive times between everything made us hesitant to really begin finding a place to live in earnest.  We figure if we go to San Miguel de Allende after this and like Guadalajara more, we’ll come back and get serious then.  We couldn’t find a strong, online expat community in Guadalajara either, I’m guessing partly because many expats here are older and less internet savvy, but it’s possible I just didn’t look hard enough.  There was a website called Internations, but it’s signup process and website were such a pain to use that I didn’t even bother to try to use it once my request to join finally got approved.  We stopped by the American Society one day and the lady there was very helpful with info about how we might go about finding a place to rent, the best sounding option being to pay someone to find us a place within our parameters and she gave us a number for a person to do that.  We can speak Spanish well enough to call people on the phone, but with the kids around that’s an exhausting process.

We’re leaving on Mexican Independence day to head to San Miguel de Allende, our final place to consider before choosing somewhere to settle down.  We didn’t notice much going on today, in fact things seem kind of subdued as we drive out of town, but we’re guessing the real partying happened last night well after we put the kids down.