San Miguel de Allende in winter

We spent just three days here over a year ago and had always wanted to come back to check out San Miguel de Allende as a place to visit for extended periods or possibly live, knowing that health care and insurance costs could force us out of the U.S. for good at any time (if U.S. politics and banal consumer culture don't do the job first).

So many who visit San Miguel stay within a few blocks of centro, which, while beautiful, is full of expensive gringo-oriented restaurants and shops. Walk six blocks in any direction though and the real Mexico is everywhere, with great street food, ladies selling seasonal fruit, nopales and pepitas, and 6 cent taco stands that sprout like mushrooms at nightfall.

San Miguel had had a glorious fall with highs in the high 70's and lows in the high 40's right up until our arrival, when we were greeted by heavy rain and daytime highs in the 50's - which sounds perfectly fine until you factor in high humidity and zero heating in the often dark, stone and tile built hotels and houses we've been staying in. We were quite cold the first few nights, but eventually fond a lovely guest house with small gas heaters in every room and have been quite content.

We spent the afternoon yesterday with our friends John and Sonia Garvin and their beautiful daughter Valeria. John is from Canada and Sonia is a Mexico City native, and as a bilingual and bi-cultural family they have a deep love of Mexico and an exceptional understanding of the positive and negative aspects of expats living in this particular part of Mexico.

We went to the regular Tuesday tianguis (market). Having been to the huge abastos market in Guadalajara as well as other smaller markets in many parts of Mexico we had some idea of what to expect, but the low prices, freshness and variety of the produce and bustling prepared food scene in this huge market blew us away.

Here's the gordita place where we ate lunch. Gorditas are thick tortillas made in this case from either yellow or blue corn masa, stuffed with any of a dozen or so guisados (stews). We had barbacoa de res con chile pasilla, long-simmered beef with mild chile sauce, plus chiles poblano con queso, a stew of poblano chiles with little pieces of fresh cheese. Two gorditas apiece plus a glass of the rice-based soft drink called horchata made us very happy; the total cost was 60 pesos ($4.50).

Aguas frescas are the healthy Mexican alternative to soda pop, made from fresh seasonal fruit, water and sugar.

Here's our Sonia about to buy a kilo (2.2 pounds) of fresa (strawberries) for 15 pesos ($1.25). A couple like ourselves who eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables could easily buy a week's worth at this market for about 100 pesos (less than $8) and the quality and freshness of the produce is far superior to even the best farmer's market stuff (let alone typical lifeless, shipped-1400-miles-plus produce from Whole Foods or mainstream supermarkets back home).

After two years at Lake Chapala and lots of time since in small towns in Colorado and New Mexico San MIguel feels like a Mexican Berkeley or Santa Fe, culturally speaking. This week alone there are a dozen lectures on books and political topics of interest, superb flamenco, classical music and jazz and a dozen or more meditation, yoga and dharma get-togethers to choose from. A block down the street from us is a world class French bakery, while a just across the street is an Italian place run by a couple from Rome, a coffee house serving French Press Chiapas organic coffee, a first-rate Lebanese restaurant and a tacos al pastor place that's a worthy rival to our favorite place in Puerto Vallarta.

San Miguel is a city of about 130,000. It's as hilly as San Francisco, but the architecture is reminiscent of our favorite places in Provence. Walk 30 minutes away from the center and you could be in New Mexico, with lots of cacti, juniper and other hardy small trees and vast vistas. Some say the place is too gringo-ized, but the 5-10,000 of us who inhabit the place are hardly noticeable for the most part, and the gringos we've met here seem to be genuinely excited about living in Mexico rather than cocooning in gated community ghettos and complaining about not getting enough U.S. cable TV channels as we've experienced at Lakeside and elsewhere. The weekly gringo-oriented paper, Atencion, is not only well-written but also completely bi-lingual, which speaks volumes about the foreign community here (check out their web site at http://www.atencionsanmiguel.org/).

We were particularly interested to check out the dharma scene here, having stayed at a meditation center last time we visited as well as corresponded with a well-traveled couple who live here and who've done more Buddhist practice and pilgrimage than just about anyone we know. We've attended a couple of sits and a dharma class at their meditation group and have been warmly welcomed by a diverse group of practitioners of extraordinary heart and intelligence.

World class medical care is readily available here at 10-20% of U.S. prices, and access to Mexican government health insurance is easy and free from the problems that folks at Lake Chapala have been facing thanks to a combination of the brokenness of the Jalisco IMSS system and an administrator in Chapala who's made excluding gringos from care her mission in life. A couple could live comfortably but simply here for a couple of thousand dollars a month all-in. The biggest cost difference I see between San Miguel and Ajijic or Chapala is there are so many more tempting cultural and culinary things to spend money on here, whereas at Lake Chapala (or small town America) the issue hardly arises.

San Miguel is also much further from a major airport than Lake Chapala: 1.5 hours to Leon, or more than double that to Mexico City. On the other hand, it's a 10 hour straight shot on the toll roads from here to Laredo by car, so you feel closer to the U.S. (although I personally join the Mexicans in thinking Texas in particular and the world in general would've been far better off had it remained part of Mexico).

San Miguel sees a surge in tourism on weekends, but it's mostly well-heeled and classy visitors from Mexico City (3.5 hours away) - a welcome contrast to the drunken partying of the "Guad. Squad" as the weekend invaders from Guadalajara to Lake Chapala are called. While Lake Chapala already is a de facto suburb of the city of six million a half hour away, San Miguel despite its growth in recent years, stands alone, with wonderful road trips and wilderness adventures in every direction. There's no sense of being trapped in a geographical or gringo bubble as there is at Lake Chapala, hemmed in as it is by mountains on one side, a vast and extremely polluted city just over those hills, and a body of water and the ultra-dangerous state of Michoacan on the other side.

Also worthy of mention - and of serious consideration by anyone considering Mexico as a retirement or snowbirding destination - is that San Miguel (unlike Lake Chapala) is far removed from the drug trafficking corridors and narco turf wars. Of course that could change at any time and no part of Mexico is removed from the disastrous drug war's effects on the national economy, but San Miguel does feel like an oasis in that regard, and while there is plenty of petty crime and property crime locals an tourists alike feel safe wandering the streets and going about their lives.

Erin and I really love the easy access to mediation teachers and retreats and to friends and family in the U.S., along with the sheer ease of being in the country and culture we grew up in, but there's certainly an underlying dis-ease in knowing that we need to bring in money regularly (from jobs that are hard to find in an economy that shows no signs of improvement) in order to live a far more basic and less culturally and culinarily rich life than we've had here in Mexico. It's great to know that if we do need a long-term Plan B San Miguel offers all that we need and more.