Real Life in Paradise

For a long time my business partner, Dave, and I have been talking about the need in Playa Del Carmen for a consignment store.  So many people come and go from Playa and all there are a lot of goods passed around.  I have purchased many of the items in my house from people who are leaving town and need to get rid of their stuff, so we figured it was time to capitalize on this phenomenon.

Starting a business in Playa Del Carmen takes a lot of little steps, but I think it will be worth it.  The first thing we had to do was add change our incorporation papers of our corporation to include owning a store and buying and selling merchandise.  This took a few days and a notary, but it got done last week.

Next, we had to rent a Bodega, I showed some pictures of it the other day, but I will take more later.  Now that we have rented the bodega we have to get it ready to be a store.  First of all, there is a special license in Solidaridad called “Licencia de Uso de Suelo”, which is a special land use permit that everyone has to get in order to do anything in PDC.  This land use permit is kind of funny, because the owner had to get an Uso de Suelo upon termination of the building in order to rent out the property, then anyone that rents the store-spaces from her has to get a separate uso de suelo to do their own business.  Uso de suelo isn’t the actual business license, it is just a step towards the business license, and every time a business opens this is required.

Before I get the Uso de Suelo, I have to get approval from Hacienda(the tax authority) to open a business.  They take my paperwork and look it over to see that everything is right, then they should give me the go ahead.  Since we already have a business set up, we will be adding a branch to our business.  The accountant says that I can do this over the internet and that it is fairly simple.

Here comes the catch, once we add the business-branch to the tax authority, we have just 30 days to get all the licenses in order.  Hacienda sends somebody out to check on the business after these 30 days, if they show up and we are not in order then we get a “Clausarado’d”.  They stick a big sticker over the front gate of the business saying that we are not legal to do business.

We are in the process of getting a bunch of signs made up, but we are a little leery about actually putting them up yet, because in Playa Del Carmen, there is a sign tax, and if you put the sign up without paying the tax, you can also get the signs “Clausarado’d”.  They put a big sticker over my sign, then I have to pay a fine to get it taken off.   We have heard that we also have 30 days for the sign tax as well, but I am going to check on that on monday when I am downtown to see if it is true.

I was just starting to feel worried about having all this work to do and not enough time to do everything, when I got a phone call this weekend from a guy who used to work for me doing construction.  I taught him everything I know about building and he is very motivated and a great problem solver.  He has been back in Chiapas for the last 6 months, building a family home, but he gets back to Playa Del Carmen today and is looking for some work to keep him busy for a while.  This takes a huge load off of me, because he can take care of all the building stuff that needs to be done and I can spend my time doing administrative stuff.

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Well, the tournament is over.  Team USA played their best.  We lost horribly to all who challenged us.  We are broken and beaten but it was sure fun!

We had been practicing all week, not so much so that so that we could win any games, more so we didn’t look like complete fools out there on the beach.  We knew that we would probably not be winning any games, but we wanted to be able to say we tried our best.  I think we accomplished that goal.

Our team was made up of four Mexican guys, three Americans, and a German(who is a partner in coffee café).  We showed up at Coffee Café for the pre-team meeting at 8am Saturday morning and I handed out jerseys and got all the liability-waver paperwork filled out.  We read through the rules that La Quinta had given me and we signed them, then we walked down to the beach to get things started.

We showed up at 9am, right on time for our first game.  We were kind of hoping for a dramatic entrance, you know, showing up at the last minute and looking tough.  It was a great plan except that the tournament was a little late in getting started, so when we got there the first game was just getting underway.  We wandered around and schmoozed with the Playa color for a while, talked about team strategy, and casually observed the wildlife at Mamitas beach.

At 10:30 we played our first game against Israel, it went really well and we thought we were getting on a roll.  Israel was made up of mostly Israelis, possibly all special forces.  They were all about my size(6 footish) and very sturdily built.  We got scored on a couple of times in the first period, but we were pretty sure that 2-0 wasn’t such a bad way to start the second period.  We rotated out and played good defense, but in the end we just couldn’t stand up to the force of the Israelis.  Somebody at some point made a comment about “they beat most of the middle east in seven days, how could we expect them not to beat us in a soccer game?”  We almost scored a point in the second period, which was a big moral booster for the guys, but for some reason it was called no good.

Our next game was rescheduled because the Dutch team wanted to play in our time slot so that they could watch their match against Russia in the Eurocup, so we finally played again at around 3pm.

The second game was against Argentina, last years champion.  They had a cheering section of probably fifty people, some of their cheerleaders were VERY distracting.  They had drums and half naked women, people painted in light-blue and white, the Latin Americans take this thing very seriously.  We had one of the player’s wife and and a friend of ours.  One of our other player’s wives seemed to be sitting with the Argentinians, maybe for sabotage purposes?

The Argentinian team was very physical, most of them somewhat large, they started pushing the guys around the field.  They got really rough with us during the first half and were able to score a few points on us.  The guys weren’t used to that kind of abuse, some even said it was getting dirty out there, so they were a little shaken up.  We decided to change our strategy a little for the second half.  We were going to play less carefully, hopefully it would even up the odds a little bit.

We put in all of the Americans to start the second half, with orders to make room for the one Mexican to make some points.  After just a few minutes of this the opposing team asked us if we could possibly all calm down a little bit on the fouling, and apologized for getting the game started off with that tone.  We agreed and pulled most of the Americans out, but the game started getting a little physical again toward the end.

One of the Argentinian cheer squad at one point in the game tried to jump on the field after one of the American players and then team USA ended the last 2 minutes of the period with only 3 players because one of the Mexican guys got thrown out for illegal use of hands(mostly on somebody else’s body).  It was a little out of control, all of the foul shots in the end of the game ended up giving Argentina 6 points.  This game really brought our team closer, we felt like we had gone through something together.

This game ended at 3:30pm, two hours after we were supposed to play our last game. One of the Americans had an business meeting at 4pm and one of our Mexican players had to meet his mother-in-law for the first time, so our team we down to just six players. We were a little worried about not having enough players for the next game, but we decided to get some lunch and regroup for the next game anyway.

At 4:15 we were informed that we were late for our next match, against Britain.  We rushed over to the second field to find nobody but a couple of referees sitting in the shade of one of the tents that was set up for the game.  I guess Britain didn’t know they had to play either.  The ref’s wanted to call the game, which was OK with us, because that would have been a win!  At the last minute 4 of the British team showed up and convinced us to play anyway, they told us that if they beat us that they would advance against to the finals and Argentina would not.  We were exhausted and short a couple of guys, but we figured we wouldn’t rob the Brits of the chance to go on just to be spiteful.

Three minutes into the first half the refs called time, I guess they were taking time off of the clock for time we kept them waiting.   At the beginning of the second half a couple more British players showed up, so we were now playing against a full team.  They started playing really well, but it seemed that some of their players were not as tired as the rest of us.

Five minutes before the end of the game some Argentinians and some of the tournament organizers showed up for a little high-spirited discussion on the sidelines.  There seemed to be some question as to whether or not we were letting them win!  Team USA was flattered by this sentiment, and I can assure you we were playing to the best of our abilities.  Then the Argentinian faction pointed out that some of the British players were not the players who originally signed up to play, which started even more controversy.  The game ended, Britain beat us fair and square.  Unfortunately, I seems that they were disqualified due to the new players.  So we may or may not have technically won that third game.  We didn’t really feel like sticking around for all the arguing to find out.

As we were leaving, we heard that Team Israel was disqualified as well, because they were switching jerseys between other people.  I guess when they were asked about it they claimed they had “Eight players plus a goaly”,  which wasn’t quite what was in the rules.  This game really controversial, I had no idea.

Well, Team USA had a great time.  I was glad to get the opportunity to play and hope that I can do it again next year.  Maybe we will train more so we can legitimately win one game.

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It’s official.  We are a soccer team, we have the jerseys, we were presented to the world by La Quinta Magazine last night.  It was kind of a scary experience, I got to recieve the jerseys from in the front of a press conference in Coffee Cafe.

We have been practicing hard and I hope we are getting better.  We were a little worried last week because we tried a couple of runs up and down the beach with the soccer ball and was more difficult than we expected it to be, but today was a good practice and we left feeling pretty comfortable about our soccer skills.

Team USA is made up of three Americans, one German, and four Mexicans.  The four non-Mexicans are who really needs practice in this equation, the Mexicans are all “bien chavito”, about 18 years old, and all in very good shape.  A couple of them play for Interplaya(the Playa semi-pro team), which might actually give us some chance of winning a few games, or at least not making complete fools out of ourselves.

It is really amazing to watch our guys play, the American faction of the team runs around and wastes a lot of energy trying to chase the ball, and the Mexican guys seem to always be standing exactly where the ball is going.  This seems to be some sort of Tai-Chi that I just don’t have yet.

Our strategy will be very simple, get the ball to the Mexican kids.  They all have repeatedly told us that we need to stop moving so much or we or not going to make it through the first game.  Actually, at first they just said we weren’t going to make it through the first game, no qualification.  Things have changed and they have a little bit more confidence now.

The tournament has four groups of four teams, all of which will play three games.  The games will be two fifteen minute quarters with a five minute intermission in between.  There will be an hour and a half break in between games.  By game three I have a feeling we will be exhausted, but our coach Luis(also a player) seems to think that all of the teams will be exhausted by that time so it won’t be such a big deal.  He is very optimistic.

The practices this week have been kind of fun.  Yesterday was pretty tough, we practiced really hard and all of us ended up very sandy and very sore.  Today was much better, though some of the players couldn’t show up because of other commitments, we just played two-on-two in the hot morning sun and then did some passing and ball-handling drills.  The practices all end with a swim in the ocean, which makes me remember why I love living here.

Tomorrow we will be practicing at one of the municipal soccer fields, Luis wants us to take a day off of running on the beach to give our ankles a rest.  I was quite pleased to hear that he thought that would be a good idea because I have been feeling a little hobbled the last couple of days.  We will have another beach practice on Thursday and then take Friday off to rest before the big day.

I have never been really into soccer but this experience is really making me think that it might not be so bad.  Some of the guys have talked about maybe continuing to play after the tournament is finished and there have been some inquiries on one of the Playa Del Carmen forums I post to about a continuing team.  Not what I was expecting at all.

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So, a couple of weeks ago(could be a month even) somebody came to me and asked me to be part of Team USA in the annual Mundialito soccer tournament that is held here in Playa.  At first I said absolutely no, because I don’t know how to play soccer.  I played in a league when I was about 6 but I remember lots of grass stains and that is about it. 

I became convinced to play, a friend of mine is sponsoring the team and he can’t play and it sounded like a good chance to get together some other young people and have a little fun.  Then I became informed that I was the team captain because nobody else was on the team, it was my responsibility to get a team together.

I called some friends and got a lot of no’s but eventually my friend Hans got together some people he knows and we got a team together.  I still seem to be the captain.  There is almost no soccer skill between all of the Americans I got to play on the team, I was a little worried.  Luckily, we were informed that we could have four non-Americans on the team to even it out a little bit.  Good thing, because we were having a hard time finding Americans anyway.

Now, since I am not good enough friends with anyone from the Mexican National team, I figured I would have to look for talent elsewhere.  We got the next best thing, some guys from Coffee Cafe volunteered to play as our ringers.  They play all the time and I hear they are pretty good.  Since Coffee Cafe is our team sponsor, they were easily convinced to play, though I think they are a little amused by our lack of skill.

We had a team meeting on Thursday, which went well.  We got together, had a coffee, bs’d a little bit and got the details down.  It will be a fun experiment because all of us are sort of “managers” in our daily life and the team organization seemed to wreak of too many bosses.  It will all work out.

I went to La Quinta today to register the team, they showed me the jersey design, very cool.  They also informed me that there is a little pre-party tonight at Santanera and asked that I get all of the team members there.  We shall see, it will be our grand unveiling to the world I guess.  I am on my way there now, so I better cut this short.  I will try to take pictures and I blog about what happens next.

Stay tuned, Monday morning is our first “formal” practice.  This should be interesting.

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After a lot of talking about it and thinking about it we have decided to open a new business in Playa Del Carmen.  I know this is going to be a big adventure and somewhat of a challenge, but I am really looking forward to it.  This is going to be an ongoing blog topic for me for a while, but for now I will talk about what we have done so far.

My partner in the business and I already have a corporation set up in Mexico, so that is a big step already taken care of.  In Mexico as a foreign owned company(possibly any company has to do the same), we have to define the functions of the company upon incorporation.  We think the is taken care of, we had some extra bits added to cover almost anything we could think of at the time we set everything up, but we have to meet with the notary on Monday to find out if that is done and if not we will have to add it.  This shouldn’t be too much of a hassle, but we will see.  We are also going to have to find out about business aliases, because we don’t want to call our new business by the name we set up originally.  This should be pretty easy to fix as well.  I guess in The States this process would be similar, but it seems so much more daunting here.  We shall see, whatever it is it really cannot be as hard as everyone makes it seem.

We have been looking around for a spot and I think we finally found one today.  It is about perfect and the price range is right.  It is a little out of the way, but I think with proper marketing we will be ok.   We have to get the negotiations on this all worked out, we will probably start that as soon as we get the go ahead from the notary.  The idea we have requires some space and that is hard to find without paying a ridiculous price.  I cannot believe what some people are asking(and getting) for their locals.

Next step of course was to register an internet domain for the business…very important in this day and age.  It is funny, in today’s business world we choose our business name based on what we can get as a domain.  Anyway, I registered a domain and the site hosting will be active in a few days, I will let everyone know the details later.  I am not much of a web developer, but I guess I will get better with every attempt.

We already have some marketing ideas ready, I am sort of skeptical about mass flier distribution, but I think we are going to try it out.  It really seems to work well for other businesses that have opened here in Playa.  I guess there is nothing to lose by trying.

This is going to be a different work environment than I am used to, for the time I have lived in Playa Del Carmen I have always had sort of a mobile office situation, often I work at internet hotspots or at home, then the rest of my work I do at the various buildings.  The big change here is that I will be tied to a fixed location, which I guess will have its perks.

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Last week, up until Monday afternoon even, we were feeling the effects of Tropical Storm Arthur here in Playa Del Carmen.  I wasn’t even aware of the “tropical storm” part of it all until different friends and family from the US started to call me to ask if I was weathering the storm OK.  It is funny, I just thought it was typical June weather on the Yucatan Peninsula.  Anyway, I figured I would write a little bit about hurricane season and my experience with hurricane preparedness.

I got to Playa Del Carmen about a month after Hurricane Wilma ripped through here so I (thankfully) didn’t get that experience, but I got to hear lots of horror stories about Wilma and got to see the damage that was done that hadn’t been cleaned up yet.  I did on the other hand get to be here for Hurricane Dean, which was not much of a hurricane.

When Dean rolled up most people around here expected her to miss us, so a lot of people waited until the last minute to make the hurricane preparations.  The weekend before the hurricane was supposed to hit everyone went into frenzy mode of finding plywood and getting it up on.  The stores were packed, the prices of plywood doubled, and the “fletes” or rentable pickup trucks were backed up for hours or days.  It was a mess, when I finally got the go ahead from all of the owners of the condos I administer the line for plywood was a couple of hours.  When I got the plywood and arranged a delivery, through a furniture moving service, the next step was getting guys to help me put it up.  At the time, luckily, I was managing a construction in the Ejido and I pulled all of the workers off of there to put up plywood in various different locations.  It seems like a small task putting up a few sheets of plywood, but it ended up being a lot of work.  We slapped up 50+ boards over the three day period, sometimes having to really get creative because of tight working conditions and some irregular constructions.  In some places we couldn’t fit the plywood through the doors or windows so we hauled it to the second and third floors with rope and ladders, some doorways were too big even for 2 sheets of plywood so we had to get creative with a third piece, even some places we only had marble door frames so nails or screws were out of the question.

After two days of getting the plywood put up in various locations we were mostly done, I took a couple of guys with me to my home to get my plywood ready and sent the rest of the crew back to the construction site, where they also lived, so they could make the proper arrangements there as well.  My apartment was the most challenging for them because it had a 4meter X 3meter glass wall in a balcony so there was no place to nail to and technique we had used earlier to prop the wood up with 2×4’s wasn’t going to work either.  One of the lead guys came up with the idea of building a freestanding wood frame that wedged tightly against the side walls and then covering the wood frame with plywood.  It looked like a framed in wall like they use in the US to build houses.  After this problem was taken care of the next step was to figure out how to cover the only entrance to my apartment, which was a sliding door.  Nailing up plywood wouldn’t work there because then I would not be able to get in and out easily.  They came up with another ingenious invention, a sliding door made out of plywood and 2×4’s, using the 2×4’s as tracks for the plywood to slide on, then when it was time to shut the door I could slide it shut and then secure it to the tracks using wire ties like they use on concrete forms.

We then made a run the the grocery store, stocking up on water, tuna, candles, playing cards, etc.  I had heard that before Wilma the grocery stores started running out of food, but I didn’t notice that much at walmart.  When I went to drop off the guys at their home they had moved all of the portable water containers inside and were filling them with water, this included a big 2500liter tinaco(big black water containers you see on roofs in Mexico) that we had.  They had tied the tinaco on the roof down with various cords and ropes so that it would not blow away in the storm.  They suggested that I do the same to the tinaco where I lived.  Before the storm hit I made sure that the tinacos on the roofs were full and that the cistern was filled as full as I could get it.

At the time my gas tank, as well as the gas tanks from a few other apartments in the building were loose, attached via hose through a hole in the kitchen wall.  I disconnected the tanks and stored them so that they would not blow away in case of a storm.  I attached a 10-kilo gas tank inside my kitchen so that I could still cook during the storm, though I don’t really suggest this because it can really be unsafe in case of a fire.

I filled up some 5-gallon buckets with water and put them in the shower, so that I would have water to flush and wash with if the tinaco ran out of water.  I stored all of my important documents in large ziplock bags and made sure that anything that I didn’t want damaged by water was off the ground.

Then I waited.

That night the wind started to pick up and sometime early that morning the light went out.  I remember getting up to go to the bathroom and thinking how absolutely inky dark the house was all boarded up.  The wind howled pretty good and the plywood occasionally banged in the wind but overall it held up pretty well.  When the wind died down I opened up the sliding plywood door to survey the damage.  Playa was pretty much untouched, there were some things scattered around the streets but overall no big deal.

My cell phone wasn’t working so I couldn’t immediately check on the damage in the other buildings, but I had a little bit of work to do in the building I was in.  One of the tinacos had drained, one of the toilets was running or something, so the water drained out pretty quick.  We dipped water out of the cistern until the power came back on, no big deal really.

Two of my buildings only had hydro-pneumatic water systems, i.e. no tinacos or water storage on top, so without power there was no water in the building.  Lomas Mariposas has a pool so the tenants there just dipped pool water out to flush their toilets and wash with.  The other building was stuck without water, which in a false alarm hurricane like this is no problem, but after a real disaster a the building would not have water for a while.

The next day I started to take the plywood down, that ended up being the hardest part of the whole ordeal.  The excitement of the upcoming hurricane kind of made putting up the plywood tolerable, but the taking it down just seemed to drag on and on.  Then we had to patch the wholes left in the cement and repaint everything.  Repair from the protection took much longer than putting it up. 

Now, what do you do with 50+ pieces of plywood spread out between 3 buildings?  In the building where I live we put the plywood on the roof and nailed the pieces together, making a large heavy block of wood that would be available in case of another hurricane.  In Mariposas we stacked the pieces and screwed them together, this time in the parking area of the building in an unused parking space.  In Las Olas we had a space under the building that we converted into a bodega so we could put everyone’s plywood in there.  I guess we are prepared for next time.

This year I recommended to all of the condo owners that they install hurricane shutters.  Some of the property managers we work with are telling their clients that if they don’t install hurricane shutters they will be unprotected during the next hurricane.  I don’t know how strictly they will adhere to this rule, but for my clients I will still install plywood if it is absolutely necessary.  I also suggested to the clients in the buildings that have hydro-pneumatic water systems(no tinacos) that they install a backup type system where possible, a couple of tinacos on the roof will supply a building for a day or so if the tenants are careful with there water consumption.

I live in a different apartment now, it will be less hassle this time to install my own protection.  I plan to prefit the plywood to the door and have it predrilled and install anchors in the concrete so there is no drilling or nailing involved, just a few screws and nothing more.  We used nails during Dean to hold up the plywood, but when we took the wood down it left gaping holes in the cement.  We tried anchorless screws but found out that they were very hard to get to work properly and they also tended to break off when removed, therefore leaving a piece of metal that has to be chipped off later.

Everything else I think will be about the same for the next hurricane, lots of water and lots of food.  I really didn’t feel like I lacked for anything during Dean, but I am sure there is something I am missing.  I don’t look forward to a hurricane, but I heard so many stories about the comradarie that happened in Playa Del Carmen after Hurricane Wilma, so I am sure that whatever happens everything will be all right.  People tell stories about after-hurricane parties where everyone brings something that they stocked up on, sharing what they have with others.  Not so bad I guess. 

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So I mentioned the other day that I was going to a meditation conference on Tuesday night.  I went, it was pretty good.  I have been trying to add daily meditation in my life, so I was interested in what the Lama had to say.

The talk was held at Ytsasil(sp?) school on 26th and 25th, I went with some friends and we showed up at about 6:45pm and the conference was not scheduled to start until 7:30 so we decided to walk down to a coffee shop on La Quinta for a cup before the event started.  We returned at 7:15 and there was a line to get in out the door, we finally got our seats at around 7:45 but the conference did not start until about 8:30.  The room filled up, by the time it all started it was standing room only with people stacked up in the doorway and out in the hall listening to the speaker.  I had no idea so many people in Playa Del Carmen would be interested in this sort of thing.

The speaker was Lama Ole Nydahl, one of the few Buddhist Lamas from the western world.  He had a lot of good things to say, often joking and wandering off into interesting stories.  The translation into spanish was phenomenal, the girl who translated didn’t miss a beat and really got the message correct.  I actually had a hard time hearing the Lama’s microphone so I payed more attention to the translator.

The Lama talked for about an hour and then opened the room for questions.  Many people had very well thought out questions, the questions section went on for at least another hour.

Before the questions ended we had to leave because we were late for another engagement, but we got information on group meditation sessions in Playa Del Carmen on a regular basis.

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