Mi Casa es Tu Casa

The sky is falling, church bells aringin’ and boiling poop

In Puebla if you ask someone where they live they’ll give you the general directions to the whereabouts of their house- explain the neighborhood, what bus you have to take to get there, and how many minutes it would take to get there from where you are currently. They end this explanation with there, you will find your home. I love that. There is something so welcoming and inviting about the softness in which it is said. Knowing that you can just pop in on anyone and you’ll find a long conversation, an endless supply of sugary Coca-cola and sometimes an offer of food. At first when performing house visits with my work I couldn’t understand for the life of me how we could just show up at a worker’s house and then spend upwards of 2 hours with them talking. Isn’t this rude? I thought. But in a place where the fluidity of plans and time doesn’t fit into planners, where the uncertainty of life can be both exciting and terrifying, and frankly, communication is severely lacking in precision and exactness, this dropping-in bit serves not only as hospitality, but also as a safety net. Mi casa es su casa.

Mi casa. I live in perhaps the quintessential living situation in Mexico second to the palapa on the beach: the old city center. Puebla is known throughout Mexico for many things- excellent food, mean and unfriendly people, and the most Spanish of architecture. One enters my building from the street entrance into an uncovered patio or courtyard. From there you follow a large staircase up to a wraparound balcony with several doors that lead to apartments. There, you will find your home. I have three rooms. The living room/kitchen, my windowless bedroom, and my massive bathroom. I adore my house. I love cooking for hours on weekends in my tiny kichenette. I sit on my large antique window seat and stare at the plants, or read a book. I am constantly fascinated with the noises, commotion and stirring life, right outside of my house. Buses honking angrily, venders whistling and shouting what goods they have for sale, children screaming as they select what candy they want from the candy shop right below my apartment. These are the sounds of my life.

Chicken Little. My ceiling sheds, so to speak. Often I wake up to a little piece of my ceiling cuddling up in bed next to me. I have a large table in my bedroom that receives daily deposits of dust from the old wooden beams above. The corner of the ceiling next to my stove is constantly forming a pile of ceiling debris. Sometimes I sweep whole chunks of timber into my dustpan. Additionally, the rain inevitably seeps through the ceiling in one particular part and I’ve slipped on an unknown puddle once or twice. The building is old and the neighborhood can be rough at night. The beams that hold up the roof have luckily been reinforced in my area of the building. I have peaked into other apartments that have yet to be renovated and I fear the next earthquake. The building has been in my landlady’s family for several generations. According to her it was first built in the early 1700s, when the busy thoroughfare two blocks away, Boulevard Cinco de Mayo, was a river instead of a 10-lane city street. It was first a stable and servants’ quarters for the large pension across the street that now serves as a prominent newspaper’s headquarters. Later it turned into a convent for nuns of the adjoining church and once served as a well-known bakery. Now it is an old, decrepit, colonial building that holds a paper supply store, a shop that sells bags, a barber and, of course, a taco place. Some neighbors. And me.

The church bells. Morning, noon and night, I can hear the sound of church bells. I have tried to find the rhythm and the estimated time, but I still cannot figure out the schedule. Where my bedroom is, literally on the other side of the wall sits the church offices. Just beyond that, one of the 70 historic Catholic churches in Puebla. I pass it everyday with both awe and contempt. I peak inside and see priests blessing and praying, preaching and forgiving. The bells are part of my landscape. I barely hear them anymore until someone visits and says, “Damn, don’t those church bells ever drive you nuts.”

My bathroom. My bathroom is a monster of a room. It receives the best light in my house, has two sinks (one of which serves as my kitchen sink, since my “kitchen” is sinkless) and the best feature of all an actual bathTUB. In all of Mexico, I have only seen one other tub and that was in a Guadalajara hotel. Showering has never been so good. In Mexico City I relished the 6 minutes of tepid-to-hot water I would get in the morning. Here, I sometimes stand in the shower for un-environmentally-sound amounts of time. But my building is old. And no amount of superficial rehabbing can disguise the fact that we sometimes don’t have water in the city center, there is often an extraordinarily foul smell emanating from some undetermined pipe and the toilet doesn’t always like to flush.

One of my best friends, Melissa visited in June. For days we visited old ruins, shopped in markets, ate insane amounts of food and participated in other such merriment. It was wonderful. However, on the third day the city center didn’t have water. We bussed to a friend’s house in order to bathe, we used purified water to brush our teeth and wash our faces, but finally one night during a particularly strong storm we decided we couldn’t go another day traveling an hour for a shower. Instead we ran up on the roof in our bathing suits to bathe in the rainstorm. Squealing as the cold drops sprinkled us over, we shampooed, conditioned and washed our bodies, hysterically laughing the whole time. The neighbors laughed at us as we ran back into the house to dry up as the thunder stormed roared on.

On one very recent occasion, after days of bathroom “issues” that were exactly opposite of Moctezuma’s revenge, I finally had the pleasure of spending some quality time in my restroom. I finished, flushed, etc. However, upon returning I realized that an extra flush was in order. And so I did. I watched in horror as the backed up pipes made the water rise. And rise. It finally stopped just two centimeters from the top. “Thank God,” I thought. Deep breath. I waited for its descent. And after nearly an hour it was back to normal level. But still had not flushed away the, ahem, waste. So, like I have done in the past, I gave it another flush. Same process- rose, slowly sank to normal level, still dirty. I stared, frustrated. And so, I played this up and down flushing game for about two hours.

I then decided to march downstairs to the store and ask if they had a plunger I could borrow. Lupita searched for one for a good 10 minutes and lent it to me- I marched back upstairs, certain this would do the trick.

It broke. Right there in the high-level-brown-water toilet. The plastic just ripped right there in my murky water.

“What the…?” I exclaimed.

It was then, in that moment of desperation, that I got the brilliant idea to boil some water. When you’re literally counting every peso, you tend to figure a plunger is a lousy investment. One must be creative with their household maintenance procedures. I use boiling water for a host of uses here- cleaning dish sponges, pouring down smelly drains, disinfecting mildewed towels, cleaning my socks. So, wouldn’t a little boiling water help me out in this situation? I filled up my largest caldron, brought it to a boil and brought it over to my disgusting, seriously backed-up, non-flushing toilet. I tossed in the gurgling water and it rose to the top. And to my horror, didn’t go down.

“Shit,” I yelled, sans irony. “Now I have boiling, freggin’ shit!” I sat there in despair. I recounted all the times I didn’t give a damn and just threw my toilet paper in the toilet bowl instead of in the trashcan. I would arrogantly announce to visitors that my toilet is different. Go ahead. Throw your used toilet paper in the toilet. My place is just like America! No need to throw that nasty ass-rag in the little trash can like everywhere else you go here in Mexico. Here you can actually enjoy the first world luxury of, gasp, flushing it down the toilet!

I tried to strike a deal with the toilet gods that I would stop tossing paper in the toilet for “light visits” if only they would help me with this situation. To no avail. My boiling water experiment had clearly failed. For a half hour longer my toilet was spewing forth gaseous steam. When things cooled down, I threw on some jeans, swept my hair back in a ponytail and went and bought my very own plunger for a whopping 15 pesos. It solved the problem in 23 seconds.

My house. So, I don’t own it. It isn’t even my furniture. It could very well not even be here in 15 years for my kids to see. It is old and dusty, and sometimes I get really scared at night. The pipes are ancient and the ceiling is falling. There isn’t a sink in the kitchen and my mattress sags. But it is where I rest my head and escape the chaos of the outside world. It is here that I watch hours of Sex and the City and read every English language literary device I can get my hands on- from 1990’s Gourmet magazines and outdated issues of The Economist, to the books my friends send me. In my non-kitchen kitchen I cook my best meals for my few friends and on the fridge hang the pictures of my family and friends from back home. In the late afternoons I sit in the window and daydream about a future garden I’ll have someday. It isn’t perfect and it isn’t fancy, but it’s the place I feel the most at home in Mexico.

Mi casa es tu casa.