We had now been at the hotel for a month and it was time to start searching for a more permanent home base. We had been living out of suitcases for two months and while I fancied myself a nomadic traveler, transient and carefree, I was actually itching to unpack and get settled. V now worked full-time at his parent’s art gallery and this made it an easy choice to live right in Puerto Vallarta’s old town where we would be walking distance to almost everything.
We decided that the best way to find an apartment was to wander up and down the streets and holler at anyone that had a sign posted on the side of their building. V’s mom, Pati, recommended that V go on the search alone, as any building manager that got a look at me – a white tourist that had, ‘I have dollars and am a sucker’ stamped on my forehead - would bump the asking price up at least a third without a moments hesitation. This would have been a great strategy had I been someone that was a bit more laidback about living arrangements, but as it so happens I’m not. Before leaving Vancouver I had visited an astrologer who told me that because of some sort of planetary alignment at my birth I was a person that needed to love my home in order to feel happy and grounded. She had also told me in my last life I had been a samurai that had killed myself in the ritualistic suicide ceremony of seppuku, which had made me abruptly stop listening to her chart reading as if it were the undisputed truth and instead take the information, as one always should when receiving an astrology reading, with a grain of salt. Never the less the bit about the importance of home was true and V and I knew that it would be impossible to not have me included in the entire process. So off we went, gringo suckers walking hand in hand, eager to find our new home.
We spent the next few days traversing the city’s cobblestone streets stopping every so often to see an apartment. They began to all blur into one poorly furnished suite with questionable views and a monthly price tag the equivalent of $900 Canadian dollars. While I had sufficient money saved for the year I was not prepared to pay the same rent in Mexico as I had been in Canada and so we trudged on, sweating under the fiercely hot midday sun, becoming more and more disheartened with each new viewing.
Before we had made the decision to move down to Mexico I had been asked by a very lovely friend to be a part of her wedding. The celebration was scheduled for the end of June and to justify the cost of the ticket home I was heading back to Vancouver for almost a month. I would be leaving in two days and the pressure was on. After a fruitless search on foot we had decided to try another tactic and were now employing the aid of the ‘Mano a Mano’, literally ‘Hand to Hand’, which is Puerto Vallarta’s version of the classifieds. The apartment ads were small with no images, every one of them using the exact same language to list their suites. Pointing blindly, and for me illiterately, we called whatever our fingers landed on, assured only by the fact that the landlord could not see my ‘whiteness’ through the telephone line. We booked a few appointments and hoped for the best.
The day before I was to leave we had a morning appointment at a building just up the street from our hotel. Puerto Vallarta is wedged between the ocean and the mountains with the last few blocks of any east to west street climbing quickly up to the jungle covered hills above. The apartment building was at the very top of the street – the last 3 blocks of which seemed to be on a near vertical incline. This held promise of ocean views but left my heart pounding loudly in my throat and my thighs burning in protest.
We were greeted by a nice Mexican woman who took us up to look at a large two-bedroom apartment on the third floor. We entered through sliding glass doors and stepped onto a floor of large white tile. As I looked around hopefully I quickly realized that almost every surface in the room had dutifully been covered in the same white tile as the floor. To me the place screamed ‘bathroom stall’ and I zoned out of the tour leaving V to feign interest for the both of us.
Having spent the last few days with me while I passed disdainful judgment on every apartment we visited V had quickly become accustomed to my ‘NO’ face, and so it was a surprise when he lead me out the sliding doors and up the stairs telling me there was another suite for us to see. We climbed all the way to the roof, and there, sitting on the top of the building was a little house. It had a pitched roof of typical Mexican red tile and every one of its walls was made of sliding windows. Because the building was on the last residential street before the mountains turned into jungle the back half of the house looked on to lush tropical rainforest, beautiful and private, while the front had a gorgeous view of the city and ocean below. We peered in through one of the many windows and saw that while the space was small it had been laid out well with a half wall separating the sleeping area from the rest of the home and ample room allotted to the kitchen. The kitchen counters were tiled with the rest of the surfaces left white, it’s rounded rough walls reminiscent of classic Mexican adobe architecture. The little house only took up a quarter of the roof and the remaining space had the potential to become a large private patio if we didn’t mind sharing it with two in-residence iguanas. Sure there were some down-sides – a third of the roof was allocated to the buildings water and gas tanks which were less than attractive, there was no internet and the year before someone had built a large condo that now blocked half of the ocean view – but it was a glass house. More importantly, it was a glass house perched on the top of a building. The rent was more than affordable and we knew that nowhere but in Mexico would something like this exist. And so we took it.
We walked back to the hotel talking animatedly about our ‘Casita Cielo’, our little sky house, and the next day I got on a plane for Vancouver feeling excited about returning both to V and our new home one month later.
