We believe that our life in Manzanillo, Mexico defines "the American dream". We have a beautiful 4000 sq. ft. house with a garage, pool and gardens ON the beach. A house like this, at this time, can be built or purchased for just under 1 million dollars. Imagine that in Seattle or Los Angeles.
We have a wonderful lady who does our cleaning and ironing, and a young man who takes care of the pool, garden, and other things we need done. We pay about 200.00 dollars a week for both of them.
There is no "honey do" list to fight over. It is taken care of for us. The first week we were here, one of our neighbors said, "we in Mexico do not do much for ourselves". She is of course from the upper end of the economic scale, but, I have often thought about how true those words are.
So how do we spend our days? What do we do? I remember asking a lady on a plane who was on her way down to Mexico for the 6 months of winter." What do you do all day? " The obvious answer is, whatever we want.
It is the opportunity to figure out what you really want out of life, and do it. We have people who take up art at 50 or older and become accomplished artists. We have groups of women and men golfers several days a week as a social occasion as well as exercise. We have tennis groups and bridge groups. There are plenty of opportunities to volunteer with the children, the old folks, the dogs, or individual families. With each year we have more opportunities, such as the availability of the latest books with e-readers, on-line classes to improve your mind, body and or life, newspapers, of course, are on line. And the best part of our small town is that most of us have time for one another. We are very social (those who want to be) because we have time and not a lot of distractions.
We do have a "Gold's Gym" as well as several others. And an ocean that is warm all year. One of the best parts for me is the weather. I am from Seattle where it is often cold and dark (sorry). Here, it is possible to go outside almost every day. The first summer we were here I was learning to play golf and praying for rain. We only missed six days of golf due to rain. It rains mainly at night, like in Hawaii.
12 years ago we started two groups to help foreigners get to know each other, as we live all over, not congregated in one place. The first was a lunch group for English speaking ladies. We meet once a month and have speakers to keep the rumor mill on track and keep us educated on what is happening in our town. This group is called mujeres amigas, "women friends".
The second group is for couples and meets every week for early dinner and drinks at different restaurants. They are the manzamigos.
Between these two, it should be possible to get to know many of the other ex-pats in a short time.
We have great restaurants with reasonable prices, a big movie theater with 8 or more movies playing. Usually about half of them are in English with Spanish sub-titles. We have a Walmart and Soriana, and Commercial Mexicana for big grocery and department stores. We even have Starbucks and Burger King.
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