Entry #9

Sunday, October 30th, 2005
As I was doing research for my visit to San Miguel, I found references to La Biblioteca Publica’s House & Garden Tour on Sundays. Each week three homes are visited, and the three I saw today could all be chosen to appear in the pages of Architectural Digest.

House #1: <--- belonging to Carmen & Antonio Rangel-Barrera
House #2: owned by Jean & Rick Jacobson
House #3:home of Peggy & George Bell

They shared a marriage of landscape and design; these are Mexican-style casas .

Each of the three I visited had the typically Mexican high exterior wall that prevented curious eyes from knowing whether there was a palace or a hovel on the other side. Most streets in Centro San Miguel are mixed; Mexicans and Gringos live beside each other but often standards of comfort are different.

Empty lots are rare since property values have skyrocketed in recent years, some say up by 25% in just the last year. On the street where I have been living, there are broken walls, with the occasional guard dog atop.
The other three most common

security measures are bars on all windows and a row or two of broken bottles, sharp edges pointing upwards, on the top of the walls, or a wall of cacti.

Sometimes competing with the chiming every 15 minutes of the many churches bells is the wail of a car or house alarm.

The farther away from Centro you are, the better is your sleep.