Doing things on Mexican time!

Spent yesterday morning catching up on computer and internet stuff. What a luxury, having an unlimited supply of high speed internet for a change! I know that's a normal thing for most of you, but for those of us that don't normally have it, you really appreciate it when you get it.

That took up our morning, just lounging around. Then, around 1:00pm, we set out to get some food!

Juan was at work all day and we volunteered to make dinner, so we needed to get to a grocery store. There is a Soriana store about 4 kms (2.5 miles) south of here on the main highway. We figured we'd walk there, and take the bus back.

Looking south from the town of Santiago.

We had to cross the main highway on the pedestrian bridge. You can see from the pic above that the laterals that you can walk along are there, but when the lateral ends and it becomes highway, there is nowhere to walk! Not a pedestrian or bicycle friendly street.

We had already walked about a km, so we crossed back over and walked back on the other side. We came to a taco stand and decided that was a good place to have lunch.

Taco stand owner Germán, making our food!

Lunch is served. I had five tacos and Ruth had two gorditas.

Germán's young son Estefan was our waiter.

Love Mexican street food. Cost for lunch was 87 pesos ($7.13 CAD) including a small tip for the boy. 

Then, we went across the street to try and flag down a bus. had to wait quite a while, but eventually one came along and we told the driver we wnated to go to the Soriana store about 4 kms away. No problem... 12 pesos ($0.98 CAD) each. A little pricey for the short distance, but the Monterrey area is a little pricey in general compared to much of Mexico.

Arrived at the Soriana a few minutes later and bought a whole 3 lb chicken for 54 pesos ($4.43 CAD), and a few potatoes.

(By the way, I'm not going to include USD prices in my exchange calculations. If you want to know the price in USD, there are about 16 pesos to the US dollar. Mexico is very cheap right now for Americans.)

Then, we crossed back over the highway and waited at the parada (bus stop) for the next bus back. 

And we waited.

And waited.

Two school boys who were waiting with us eventually gave up and walked away. Then, another lady with groceries showed up, and we waited some more. One bus came and stopped but he said he was an express bus and that he wouldn't be stopping where we wanted to get off. So we waited some more.

Eventually, after close to an hour, our bus came along. Good thing we're not in a rush! That's okay, we don't mind doing things on Mexican time now.

Back home, we found a pleasant surprise as our friend Chris's work plans had changed and he was home! We kinda figured he would find a way to make it back here before we had to leave. So, that was really good!

Chris and Juan had just bought a new Weber Q1000 grille. This is by far the best RV'ing portable grille out there and we've been using ours for about 4 years. It has the most even cooking surface I've ever seen. So, to break in their new grille, we had to figure out how to cook a whole chicken. I had read about this before at George and Suzie's blog and he does a lot of cooking on his Weber. Here is the whole chicken recipe we followed...

http://geosuzie.blogspot.com/2012/05/chicken-on-weber-q-100.html

And it turned out perfectly! Thanks for the recipe George!

Mmm. Ready to eat!

Dinner is served. Nice to have Chris back in the picture too!

Today, we're headed into the big city of Monterrey!

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