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| -rw-r--r-- | culture-shock.txt | 42 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | downsizing.txt | 31 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | navidad.txt | 36 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2018-11-26_food-table-tonight.txt | 4 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | scratch.txt | 15 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | se-renta.txt | 86 |
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diff --git a/culture-shock.txt b/culture-shock.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fe552b5 --- /dev/null +++ b/culture-shock.txt @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ + + + +When you step outside your own culture you experience what is often called "culture shock", though exactly what this means is difficult to put your finger on. You know it if you've had it. For most of us it's a nebulous and very vague feeling that often manifests as stress, anxiety, and sometimes outright panic. It's not really fun. It is culture "shock" after all, not culture "embrace" or whatever. + +I think what people mean when they say "culture shock" is the severe cognitive dissidence that comes from realizing that everything you think is true, and "just the way things are" turns out to only true for the world you learned those things in. Everything is relative, we say that a lot but by and large we don't live it. Go abroad and you will suddenly live it. + +To pick a very simple example, if you're American you "know" that you drive on the right. If you go to Britain, or a former British colony, that's no longer true. That's a tiny, not too difficult to overcome, example. + +Imagine that sort of undercutting of your knowledge happening for just about every single thing you want to do in the course of living day to day and you can imagine what it's like to go abroad for an extended period of time. + +The simplest things in life become grand adventures. You either thrive on this or you have a very rough time until you either figure out the world you're in or you go home. + +This is why, generally speaking, people spend their vacation in little islands of their own culture that have established themselves abroad. People from the United States go to Cancun because there's an entire industry set up to insulate them from having to deal with the vast difference between their culture and the local culture. + +Australians go to Bali for the same reason. The British love India. The Japanese have enclaves in Bangkok that put a little bit of Tokyo in Bangkok. You can rest assured that every place you think of as a tourist destination, every place that's on the cover of a glossy travel magazine, is a place your culture has established a kind of bulkhead. + +Self-styled "world travelers" and ex-pats tend to turn up their noses at these so-called tourist traps, but that's just one of the many reasons to avoid such people. Tourist traps, bulkheads, if you will, are important gateways between worlds. If there wasn't some way to smooth over cultural differences nearly everyone who ever left their own culture would be back the next day. I know this because I made the rookie mistake of avoiding tourist traps on my first trip abroad and believe me, if I could have flown home after a week, I would have. + +It's really hard to relearn every assumption you've ever made about the world. No one wants to spend their two to six weeks of vacation a year doing that. It's not most people's idea of fun. Good tourist bulkheads smooth some of this over, allow in just enough outside culture to whet your appetite for more, but not so much that you spend an entire day struggling to find toothpaste. + + + + + +The United States is not a good value for the money. + +I happen to really enjoy this sort of adventure, which doesn't mean it's any easier for me, but it does help if you enjoy it since it's at least somewhat enjoyable even as it's both physically, mentally and emotionally draining. + + +All binary reductions are wrong. That said, there are, broadly speaking, two basic approaches to life: + +Adapt the world to you. +Adapt to the world. + +Contrary to what some people will say embracing either of these approaches exclusively is a bad idea. + +Generally speaking is more difficult to adapt the world to you. It typically requires much more money, time and effort on your part. Still, if that's what makes you happy, then by all means. And good luck. + +At the same time, there are some things that you simply cannot adapt to. Lack of potable water for instance is not something you can adapt to + + diff --git a/downsizing.txt b/downsizing.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f09b598 --- /dev/null +++ b/downsizing.txt @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +Part of our decision to hit the road was to travel, which is fun in its way, but another part, the far more important part, was to change the way we live our lives -- the amount of stuff we have, the amount of space we have and so on. People in the U.S. often ask why? And here, as the saying goes, be dragons. + +No one in the U.S. wants to talk about it, or even to think about it, but ours is a society in decline. The nation-state we call the United States has been in its declining phases for, depending on who you ask, fifty to ninety years. In your head, when you finished that last sentence, you immediatedly formulated at least three examples to prove to someone, not me, because I can't hear what's happening in your head, but someone that that is absolutely untrue. Think about who you're trying to prove that too. + +I've never been much interested in the decline of the U.S. empire and broader society because I've never really felt like part of it anyway, but I am fascinated by the decline of Faustian culture more generally, which, if you haven't read Spengler, is an instructive term to refer to the culture that arose out of the ashes on the Roman empire along the banks of roughly the Thames, Seine and Volga rivers beginning roughly around 1000AD, which is to say, what we usually call western culture. Given that our planet is round, there really is no west in way that's useful for talking about cultures so Spengler came up with the term Faustian. + +Whatever the case Faustian culture is the long process of winding down. It will take at least another 300 years for it finish up, some years of what later cultures will refer to as dark ages, but which probably won't be all that dark to those living through them, and then some new culture will arise from those ashes, for reasons I won't go into here I think it's highly likely one of those future cultures will grow out of the great lakes area. + +What the holy living fuck does any of that have to do with moving your family into a vintage motorhome? + +An author I coined a lovely little turn of phrase to suggest one method of dealing with a society in decline which is: collapse now, avoid the rush. + +Which is to say moving into an RV is a way of learning to live in ways that most of us have forgotten, to struggle out way through situations most of us have forgotten and have a little bit of fun along the way. It is a way to downsize our lives without the pain that comes from downsizing because you lost your job, or because your house was underwater or whatever system of the stuttering march alng the downslope of decline happens to befall you. + +I already *know* solar energy is super useful to the individual, totally useless to society. I already know that there's almost always a way to fix mechanical things. I already know how to build a fire from nothing, I know how to emotionally handle a variety of situations with some degree of grace that I would never have learned to deal with if I had not chosen to collapse my standard of living long before it was necessary. + +And I was able to bring my family on this journey, see a million beautiful things we'll never forget and take charge of the raising of our kids in ways that we would never have been able to do if we had not abandoned the normalcy of our lives as defined by current standards of the United States. + +Here's the thing though. The bus was always a half way step. Societies don't, sorry hollywood distaster movie fans, collapse, they decline. Individuals collapse, societies, cultures, they just decline and fits and starts and they do it so subtly most people never even notices it. Long after what we call the end of the Roman Empire there are plenty of authors still singing the praises of Rome and talking about how all the contemporary problems will work themselves out, just you wait, they'll find a solution. Sound familiar? The only different between those authors and the ones saying the same thing now is that we can see the future they got, it's our past, but our future looks just like theirs. + +Now that we've learned to live in the bus, without all the convenience of a house it's time to let go of the bus. It's time to learn how to live without a vehicle to get us where we want to be, yes, that's the loss. And of course there's the emotional loss of our home, but one thing we learned from the last homes we gave up is there there's plenty to gain as well. We'll be nearly out of the iron triangle that has imprisoned most of us all our lives -- house, car, job. Each requires the other in an endless viscous cycle. + + + + +The only thing I don't like about that phrase is that some people take it to mean that some kind of hollywood style societal collapse is coming, which neither I, nor the author of that phrase, nor Oswald Spengler would want you to think is true. THERE IS NO COLLAPSE, just very subtle, long drawn out decline. + + + + +Now by modern U.S. standards our lives were never particularly extravagant. We were a family of five living in a 1200 square foot house. We considered it a bit extravagant though. diff --git a/navidad.txt b/navidad.txt index 442d0d7..f8dd25d 100644 --- a/navidad.txt +++ b/navidad.txt @@ -1,25 +1,35 @@ -I'm working on a backlog of posts right now, so even though this will be dated early December, it's actually Christmas eve. Bells are ringing from several churches, but otherwise it's a quite night, not much celebrating. It could be too early, or it could be that Mexico just isn't that big on celebrating Christmas. +On December 9th, 1531 Juan Diego was walking up the hill of Tepeyac, just north of Mexico City, when a woman appeared to him and, spoke to him in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec empire. She told him she was the Virgin Mary and asked him to have a church built on that site to honor "her native religion". +Diego then went to the archbishop of Mexico City several times with the message, but the archbishop did not believe him. Finally, three days later, after some other trials, a miraculous death bed recovery, and non-native roses blooming at 7500 feet in December, Diego delivered a shroud with an imprint of the Virgin Mary to the archbishop who finally believed him and thus was born the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Marian vision that is the cornerstone of Mexican Catholicism. +This, far more than Christmas, is what Mexicans celebrate in December. In San Miguel the neighborhood of San Antonio is home a blessing of the horses, which involves basically every horse in the nearby countryside coming into San Antonio to be blessed. I think. The truth is, we lacked the necessary Mexican sense of patience to see this one through. We saw the horses lined up, but even our horse obsessed daughter was ready to go long before any of them were actually blessed. -I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about -- hard work and family -- but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example. +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-12_142407_blessing-horses.jpg" id="image-1807" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-12_141244_blessing-horses.jpg" id="image-1806" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-12_142511_blessing-horses.jpg" id="image-1808" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-12_144759_blessing-horses.jpg" id="image-1809" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-12_144836_blessing-horses.jpg" id="image-1810" class="picwide" /> -My favorite example of this is bus drivers. In the United States if you drive a bus, you wear a uniform and, aside from your face and body shape, you are largely indistinguishable from whomever is driving the next bus. Chances are, when you get off you park the bus and go home. It's not in any meaningful way, your bus or even your work, you are by design an meaningless cog in a profit wheel where most of the profits go to someone other than you. I could make a good case that this is an awful way to live, severely limits your humanity, leads to depression and dissatisfaction with your work and life, and is one of the more profound and overwhelming problems in American culture, but we won't get into that here. +I never did figure out what Guadalupe has to do with horses, other than she has to do with everything in some way, but I did do a good bit of research on her, in part because I think 300 years from now she will be the focal point of this religion. -Instead consider the Mexican bus driver. His bus is his bus. Her bus is her bus. The dashboard is given over to shrines of La Virgen de Guadalupe, or whomever their patron saint might be, along with photos of family, friends, wives, children, what have you. Usually there's a crucifix and some pithy quotes about god, country and most importantly, family. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida, was one I saw. I don't know where the buses get parked at night, but I do know that the next day the same person is driving the same bus. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida. +The story above is the purely Catholic version of events. Alas, any other version of these events, including that of Juan Diego in his own words, is lost to time. I mention this not because I do not believe the story as it is, it is, to my mind, as likely as any other. For historical completeness it might be worth noting though that even most Catholic historians doubt the authenticity of story of Diego. Still I'm happy to accept the story in full, it's the name of the goddess that I think is worth quibbling about. -For me this helps to make sense of +One of the reasons Catholicism was so successful is that no other sect of Christianity is so good at taking what's already in place and tweaking it slightly to fit with Catholic doctrine. And prior to the arrival of the Spanish, the very same hill where Mary appeared to Diego was rather well know for as the home of the goddess Tonantzin, who regularly appeared to travelers. While there is no English translation, I have seen several second hand sources quote Juan de Torquemada -- whose epic tome *Monarquía India* is apparently one of the more complete histories of early Mexico -- as saying that the goddess Tonantzin regularly appeared to the natives on that hill "in the form of a young girl in a white robe." -> I wanted to test myself. And that long ride nearly beat me. It was so hard. Many times I almost quit but my friends who came with me kept me going. And I kept them going. Many strangers gave us food and a place to sleep. We experienced a big change in our hearts. We learned that our families are our greatest treasure. I want to keep working hard for my family and for Mexico -- Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe! <cite><a href="https://changesinourlives.wordpress.com/2018/12/12/even-blurry-photos-are-worth-a-thousand-words/">a pilgrim quoted on changes in our lives</a>.</cite> +If you wanted to tweak that existing story to fit Catholic doctrine all you need to do is swap some names and you're away. Next thing you know you're feeling quite justified in tearing down the temple of Tonantzin to build a church for Our Lady of Guadalupe, as she is now known. +Monotheistic religions that want sole claim to the capital T truth have a hard time accepting this, but religions are always changing, always in flux. Gods and goddesses come and go throughout time. Whatever essential mystery is behind them remains. -k -Temple to Tonantzin on the hill of Tepeyac -Before the Spanish conquest, there was a temple of adoration to the goddess Tonantzin, which was attended by settlers from all over the Anahuac country, as the federation of tribes was called. Stories collected by the Spanish friars give an account of this: the Mexicas and other Nahua people believed that on the top of the hill of Tepeyac the mother of the gods appeared: +I point this out not to mock anyone's faith, but because I find the Mexican version of Catholicism fascinating and a bit confusing because, well it isn't what most Americans or Europeans would recognize as Catholicism. Here Catholicism seems to be the thinnest of veneers over a much, much older set of gods, goddesses and religious practices. -“The goddess, was very venerated by the natives. According to them, she appeared to one of them at a time in the form of a young girl in a white robe, and revealed secret things to the person “. Fray Juan de Torquemada in “Monarquía India” – 1615. +But Mexicans are adept at adapting and incorporating, so it all blends and molds together into a cohesive whole that makes sense when you see it, even if you probably couldn't put it in words. Still, everything is changing and I think if you come back in 300 hundred years you'll find worship of Jesus has been replaced with worship of Maria -- and only those of us on the outside would think this odd. Arguably it's already that way. -Cerro del Tepeyac +That's not to say Mexico does not celebrate Navidad. It does, complete with lit up trees and all the rest of the trimmings. We were on hand to see the tree light up in Plaza Civica and lights come on in Centro. -Fray Bernardino de Sahagún said in his texts that in the mountain called Tepeaca or Tepeyac, they had a temple dedicated to the mother of all the gods, they called Tonantzin, to whom they made many sacrifices; Men and women from all the regions came saying “Let’s go to Tonantzin’s festivity”. -The Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman warns in some of his notes that by the year of 1530 the Franciscan friars built a hermitage dedicated to the Spanish virgin trying to replace a pagan rite with a Catholic one. +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-06_195028_tree-lighting.jpg" id="image-1801" class="picwide caption" /> +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-06_195531_tree-lighting.jpg" id="image-1802" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-06_195537_tree-lighting.jpg" id="image-1803" class="picwide caption" /> +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-06_195852_tree-lighting.jpg" id="image-1804" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-06_200440_tree-lighting.jpg" id="image-1805" class="picwide" /> + +We tried the night after to see another tree light up in San Antonio, but we got there a bit late. We were in time to see another round of fireworks though, and somehow I think lights in the night sky will always trump those on the ground. diff --git a/published/2018-11-26_food-table-tonight.txt b/published/2018-11-26_food-table-tonight.txt index 4416b46..a750c5c 100644 --- a/published/2018-11-26_food-table-tonight.txt +++ b/published/2018-11-26_food-table-tonight.txt @@ -40,9 +40,9 @@ Luckily my family is usually game to go with me and try new foods. The other day <img src="images/2018/2018-12-26_135339_mercado.jpg" id="image-1789" class="picwide" /> <img src="images/2018/2018-12-26_135311_mercado.jpg" id="image-1788" class="picwide caption" /> -A lot of people seem to obsess over food in other ways. Like health. I seems like nearly everyday there's some new food discovery that either kill you or cures you of everything. Then there's the whole fear of foreign food. You see this when chefs [talk](https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/craving-the-other-0) about "elevating" street food (so they can overcharge you for it). You also see it in people's fear of getting sick from food they're not totally comfortable with. I've overheard tourists around here telling each other not to the street food, but yet they go to the restaurant up the hill and sit down to a dinner made from the same ingredients, from the same markets, coming from a kitchen they *can't* see. That's far more likely to get you sick than the stalls in the market where you can see for yourself every step of the process. +A lot of people seem to obsess over food in other ways. Like health. I seems like nearly everyday there's some new food discovery that either kills you or cures you of everything. Then there's the whole fear of foreign food. You see this when chefs [talk](https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/craving-the-other-0) about "elevating" street food (so they can overcharge you for it). You also see it in people's fear of getting sick from food they're not totally comfortable with. I've overheard tourists around here telling each other not to the street food, but yet they go to the restaurant up the hill and sit down to a dinner made from the same ingredients, from the same markets, coming from a kitchen they *can't* see. That's far more likely to get you sick than the stalls in the market where you can see for yourself every step of the process. -<img src="images/2018/2018-12-26_134116_mercado.jpg" id="image-1787" class="picwide caption" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-12-26_134116_mercado_01.jpg" id="image-1797" class="picwide caption" /> Sometimes it blows my mind how little people understand food and, more importantly, food preparation. I do have an advantage I suppose, having worked in the restaurant industry for about six years, but most of what helps me comes from learning the basics of microbiology. All the restaurant experience did was provide practical examples of microbiology in action. If you food is bad, you'll smell it. Trust me. diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt index 64a515b..2cd3b61 100644 --- a/scratch.txt +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -1,3 +1,18 @@ + +I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about -- hard work and family -- but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example. + +My favorite example of this is bus drivers. In the United States if you drive a bus, you wear a uniform and, aside from your face and body shape, you are largely indistinguishable from whomever is driving the next bus. Chances are, when you get off you park the bus and go home. It's not in any meaningful way, your bus or even your work, you are by design an meaningless cog in a profit wheel where most of the profits go to someone other than you. I could make a good case that this is an awful way to live, severely limits your humanity, leads to depression and dissatisfaction with your work and life, and is one of the more profound and overwhelming problems in American culture, but we won't get into that here. + +Instead consider the Mexican bus driver. His bus is his bus. Her bus is her bus. The dashboard is given over to shrines of La Virgen de Guadalupe, or whomever their patron saint might be, along with photos of family, friends, wives, children, what have you. Usually there's a crucifix and some pithy quotes about god, country and most importantly, family. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida, was one I saw. I don't know where the buses get parked at night, but I do know that the next day the same person is driving the same bus. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida. + +For me this helps to make sense of + + + + + + + I'm not going to pretend to know what Wallace Stevens was referring to by the Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is, but it has always reminded me of the fact that there are myriad complex worlds around us to which we are wholly ignorant. Not because we don't pay attention, though that may be part of it, but because we can't pay attention. There are vast existences too small to see with the naked eye. Ponds full of pond scum that have their own version of stressful jobs, political and social situations, and whatnot just as we do. They're just having it all on a very different scale, from us and happen to use chemicals instead of words to communicate. For all you know that puddle you didn't even notice on your way into work this morning is home to a population of microbes undergoing an extremely stressful existence which they would desperately like to escape just as much as you would desperately like to escape your cubicle. diff --git a/se-renta.txt b/se-renta.txt index 6c98a84..b9c23f9 100644 --- a/se-renta.txt +++ b/se-renta.txt @@ -1,44 +1,100 @@ -When we left Dallas a few months ago our plan was to be gone six months. We were going to spend the winter down here, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus. We had plans to travel the southwest, see some areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah that we hadn't seen yet, and then head up to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana when it got to hot to stay in the desert. Then we'd swing south again when it cool off and do the west coast of Mexico for the winter. It was a pretty good plan I thought. It still is a pretty good plan. +I like airports -- liminal zones between worlds fascinate me even when those zones are only between national borders -- but I really dislike flying. I dislike the process of it the way that everyone dislikes it, but I also dislike parachuting into a place, so to speak, without any context of how you got there. Airplane travel also is far worse for the environment[^1], and, to me at least, feels gratuitous in a way that buses, trains, autos and RVs do not. As I've written before, I like the planning process, I like driving in, I even like traffic sometimes because it teaches you something about the place. -As the man said, it's important that you make them, but in truth, plans rarely work out. And that one is not going to work out. At least not on the timeline we'd envisioned. +We spent most of December at our friends' house while they were back in the states for the holidays. Aside from saving our asses from homelessness, it was a really nice house and had a lot of books. One of the books I read while we were staying at their house was called Gringo, by Chesa Boudin. I was not a huge fan of the book overall, but Boudin captures my dislike of plane travel in one rather tidy little sentence: "Airplane travel predisposes us to superficial, compartmentalized knowledge of a country, while land travel forces us, often uncomfortably, into contact with more everyday realities". -There are a variety of reasons it's not going to happen, one of them is money. It's not the only reason, but, while it's a tad boring for most people, talking about money is super helpful for anyone who's thinking of doing what we do. I know this because I searched high and low for anyone willing to talk about how much it cost to travel the U.S. by RV and came up with very few hard and fast numbers. +Arguably, you can go further. Bike in and you'll understand it that much better. Walk and you'll know it rather well indeed. Since walking more than a few miles with a three year old isn't a lot of fun, we effectively parachuted in, as you do. And despite having been here three months I still I feel like I do have a superficial, compartmentalized understanding of the area. That feeling is compounded by the difference in language and culture. It's relatively easy for us as Americans to go from Georgia up the UP, spend the summer there and come away with reasonable understanding of the area. It's impossible to do the same when spanning cultures and throwing in different language for good measure. -We track our spending to the penny. I can give some pretty accurate figures, but they're averages and that doesn't actually reflect what you're really going to spend because the real answer is that it really depends where you are, and how you travel. +When we left Dallas a few months ago our plan was to be gone six months. We were going to spend the winter down here, stay warm, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus. Then we were going to spend the Spring traveling the southwest, see some areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah that we hadn't seen yet, and then head up to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana when it got hot, to spend the summer at higher, cooler elevations. Then we'd swing south again when it cooled off and come back down to Mexico and work our way down the west coast of Mexico for the winter of 2019/2020. -But here's a rough number for a family of five, barring unforeseen expenses, which is euphemism for if the bus doesn't break down, we spend about $4500 a month on average traveling the U.S. Of that roughly 30-40% tends to be food, depending on where we are in the country (the west is much more expensive in nearly every regard, relative to the midwest and south, but especially food). Lodging is extremely variable +It was a pretty good plan I thought. It still is a pretty good plan. But as the man said, it's important that you make them, but it's rarely to actually follow a plan for too long. And that one, much as we still like it, is not going to work out for us. At least not on the timeline we'd envisioned. +There are a variety of reasons it's not going to happen, one of them is money. To get where we want to go in the bus, we need to rebuild the engine. We need more power on hills and the only way I've come up with to do that is to either drop in something bigger, a 440 or the like, or rebuild the 318 to get better compression, which means boring out the engine, new pistons, new manifolds on both ends, probably a new transmission and quite a few other things that are not cheap. It's all doable, but it takes money and we lost about 50 percent of our income earlier this year. +I don't want to sound like I'm complaining or asking for money, I'm not doing either, we're very fortunate to be able to do this and there isn't a day that goes by that I'm not grateful for everything we've been able to do. If we had to sell the bus and go home tomorrow I would have no regrets. Even Marco Polo went home eventually. We're not ready to do that yet, we're not even sure that means anymore, but sometimes you do have to adjust things if you want to keep going. +It's a tad boring for those of you just following along, but I'm going to get into the subject of travel and money because talking about money is super helpful for anyone who's thinking of doing what we do. I searched high and low for anyone willing to talk about how much it cost to travel the U.S. by RV before we left and came up with very few hard and fast numbers. Consider this digression my contribution to anyone searching for information on how much it cost to travel the United States in a 1969 RV. +We track our spending to the penny, so I can give some pretty accurate figures at the monthly level. However, that's really not going to tell you what you need to know. The real answer is that how much is costs to travel the U.S. by RV really depends on where you are, how many of you there are, and how you travel. +That said, here's a rough number for a family of five, barring unforeseen expenses -- which is a euphemism for months where the bus doesn't break down -- we spend about $3000-$4000 a month on average traveling the U.S. -We spend just over half that in Mexico, sans bus. +Yes, that's a big spread. The reason is that roughly 30-40% tends to be food, which varies tremendously depending on where we are in the country. The west is much more expensive in nearly every regard, relative to the midwest and south, but especially in food. Generally speaking the $4000 a month areas would be California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, etc. The midwest and south are cheaper for us because food is cheaper there things rounded out to just over $3000/month. -Part of it is that some things are cheaper here. Though really, not that much cheaper. I'd say food, which makes up the largest part of our budget, is about 30% less here. That's nothing to sneeze at, it helps for sure, but it's not the real reason it's cheaper to live in Mexico. +On the flip side of that equation boondocking tends to be easier out west -- there's lots more BLM land, which means you can find a free place to stay much easier -- so you spend less on camping (except in California, Calfornia is just expense). If you're on the Gulf Coast it's going to cost you upwards of $30 a night in most of Florida (unless you know where to look). -When I take a hard look at the spreadsheet, and then rotate it sideways to get a new perspective, what really jumps out is the "miscellaneous" category. I don't get real fine grained with categories so miscellaneous holds everything that is not gas, food, lodging or vehicle repair. Basically it hold the non-essentials. +Another thing worth noting is that throughout the course of our trip we've spent less and less per month (except for last winter in California, which puts an irritating bump in the nice downward sloping graph I generated). There are two reason for this I think, first, we're getting smarter about boondocking and finding cheap camping, and two, we went back cross the country to the south and midwest where food is cheaper. -Why is the category larger for us in the US? After spending some time meditating on this I have a very simple answer: in Mexico you are not bombarded with advertising. Mexico has pretty much everything the United States has, but it's no in your face 24/7. Shops do not have windows, most do not even have a way to browse through stuff. Instead you walk in, tell the person what you need, the person asks small medium or large and then goes rummaging around to find what you want. +Final point -- we do it for less. We could probably cut our food bill by 30 percent if we dropped the organic meat and eggs for conventional and changed our eating habits a bit (in fact we have by necessity here). We don't, or we didn't in the U.S., because we didn't need to. As I noted in the post on food, food is one of life's most important elements to me. Not that good food has to be expensive, but good quality ingredients in the U.S. are going to cost you even if you do what we do and mostly shop at Asian and Hispanic grocery stores. + +So what's the point of all this money talk? The U.S. is considerably more expensive than Mexico. We spend just over half our U.S. monthly spending here in Mexico, sans bus. You probably could have guessed that, what you probably would not guess is why. + +Part of it is that some things are cheaper here. Though really, not that much cheaper. I'd say food, which makes up the largest part of our budget, is about 30% less here. That's nothing to sneeze at, it helps for sure, but it's not the real reason it's cheaper for us to live in Mexico. + +When I take a hard look at the spreadsheet, and then rotate it sideways to get a new perspective, what really jumps out is the "miscellaneous" category. I don't get real fine grained with spending categories so miscellaneous holds everything that is not gas, food, lodging or vehicle repair. Basically it hold the non-essentials. That category doesn't exist in Mexico. After spending some time meditating on this I've a very simple answer: in Mexico you are not constantly bombarded with advertising. + +Mexico has pretty much everything the United States has, especially here in San Miguel, my wife brought home duck fat yesterday for crying out loud, we're not in the boonies, we're not just eating beans and tortillas. The difference is that it's not all in your face 24/7. Shops here do not have windows, most do not even have a way to browse through stuff. Half of them you can't even get to the stuff yourself. Instead you walk in, tell the person what you need, the person asks small medium or large and then goes rummaging around to find what you want. Everything you buy here comes from your own mind first and is found second. In the United States everything is presented and then your mind decides what to buy. -One of these models will leave more money in your pocket than the other. +One of these models will leave more money in your pocket than the other, full stop. + +And I know, I know. I like to think I am immune to advertising too, that I am smarter than the advertisers, that I resist the never-ending onslaught "buy this stuff". + +Unfortunately my spreadsheet says otherwise. I am not immune. + +And I don't even own a TV, how much more would I be buying if I watched television and were subjected to that much more advertising? And it's not that I'm comparing many years of life in the U.S to just three months in Mexico. Comparing the U.S. to Mexico is not what led me to this conclusion. It got me thinking about it, but it wasn't until I went back and made another comparison that I believed it. It was when I comparing the time we spent in the bus without a car, to the time we had a car that made it painfully obvious to me. It's very simple: given a car and easy access to everything, we spent more. + +Take away the access and we spent less. Mexico also takes away the access, so we spend less here too, but it's not the situations or places really, it's us. + +I am not immune. You are not immune. We all fall for advertising. + +Advertising is a debased form of magic, which is another way of saying it's powerful and you probably are not aware of its power in any conscious way. + +I know I am not. However, now that I'm outside its sphere of influence a bit, I've noticed something -- I don't want anything. Maybe that's not quite true, I want much less. So much less that I became aware of it, I noticed how much less stuff I wanted. At first I thought I was maybe a little crazy, but we've talked to couple of Americans who've been down here a few months and they've noticed it too. + +I think part of it is access. I can't use Amazon down here. Or I can, but it's a huge pain, enough of a pain that we just don't. And effectively that means the rest of the internet too, ordering stuff off the internet isn't practical so we don't do it. Since we know we can't do it we don't bother looking things up to see if we can get them. Interestingly I don't feel like I did this much before, but my spreadsheet says otherwise (my uncle and my wife's sister's family could also say otherwise, given how much stuff we shipped to their addresses). + +A good example of this for me would be camera lenses. I use old, manual focus lenses. In the course of the trip I've bought and sold about a dozen, and there were many more I wanted to buy, but since I can't get them shipped down here I started paying less attention. I used to follow a few used lens websites and would lust after various expensive hard to find lenses. + +Once I started thinking about the idea that what I wanted, what I thought I needed might just be the result of constant advertising I didn't even notice, I started thinking more broadly about where my attention was and how that was affecting me. So I decided to stop reading all the lens sites, to stop reading the forums and instead starting paying more attention to the photographers whose images I admired. I started directing my focus to craft rather than gear. I spent more time thinking about things like composition, texture, tone and all the other bits of craft that actually make good photos rather than any particular lens. Not only have I not bought a lens since, I've become much more satisfied with the ones I own. + +This dovetails with a lesson we learned early on in the bus -- once you realize you can live without something, get rid of it. Once I realized I could live without reading about cool new camera lenses I sat down and scrutinized every website I read on a regular basis and got rid of anything that was likely to make me want stuff. + + + +If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals -- think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff. -I like to think I am immune to advertising, that I am smarter than the advertisers, that I resist the never-ending onslaught of stuff, but my spreadsheet says otherwise. And I don't even own a TV, how much more would I be buying if I watched television?i +What does this have to do with traveling? Well we sat back and took stock of things, what we all wanted to do, and we decided that we wanted to stay here in San Miguel for longer than six months. Not too long after that we found a house that was just about perfect for us so we signed a year lease and we're staying here. We're staying here to slow down for a while, to work on some projects that require the kind of deeper focus that's difficult to manage on the road, to get better at Spanish, to try to move beyond a superficial, compartmentalized understanding of the place we're in, and to save money, both because we can live a little cheaper and because we spend less here. -And it's not that I'm comparing many years of life in the U.S to just three months in Mexico. Comparing the U.S. to Mexico is not what made me notice this, it was comparing the time we spent in the bus without a car, vs the time we had a car that made it painfully obvious. It's very simple: given a car and easy access to everything, we spent more. Take away the access and we spent less. Mexico also takes away the access, so we spend less here to. But it's not the situations or places, it's us. +There are other reasons, the kids wanted to do somethings that are hard to do on the road, like take gymnastics and swimming lessons, and I wanted a break from crawling under the bus every other day to see what the mysterious fluid was leaking now. -I am not immune. You are not immune. We all fall victim to advertising. -Advertising is a debased form of magic, which is another way of saying it's powerful, but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. -If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals. If you have the ability to travel to somewhere you don't speak the language and is outside the general sphere of western advertising then do it. Spend a month tracking your spending to the penny. Then move away for a month and track your spending again. Observe the difference. Now that you see mediate on why it exists. + + + + + + + + +but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. + If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting. + + +[^1]: This is endlessly debated on the internet by people looking to justify which variety of travel they support. Based on what I've read at the [Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies][1], as well as Michael Sivak's work for the University of Michigan Transportation Research on the energy intensity of both driving and flying, a family of 5 driving, even in the bus, puts less carbon in the air than flying. Would it be better to do neither? Yes. As for the whole climate change debate, I managed to pick up enough of an understand of energy flow and the laws of thermodynamics back in high school to realize that billions of tons of infrared-trapping gases into Earth’s atmosphere is going to fuck things up as it were. The fact that Earth’s climate has changed drastically without human interference in the past should really just demonstrate how idiotic it is to tinker with a system clearly vulnerable to destabilization. + +[1]: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-climate-math-of-flying-vs-driving/ + + + + + The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home. |