We looked at a nice very large house today that was renting for $300 USD per month. The surrounding houses were not quite as nice though and it was a long ways from our friends and the church. There is a very beautiful place for sale downtown for $400,000 USD. It has 9 rooms and a pool and from what we could see looked very nice.

I get the impression that house prices are fairly random and that there isn’t any type of standard way to evaluate the pricing of houses. In the US house prices are public information so it is pretty easy to see how much houses in a given neighborhood are selling for. This tends to keep the pricing from fluctuating too dramatically. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.

In Durango there are people at the stop lights that try to wash your windows for you. Since we look like gringos they tend to single us our to wash our car windows. Telling then “no” doesn’t seem to work. Usually they try to squirt soapy water from about 20 feet away. That by the time you realize what is going on you don’t want to tell them to stop because your window is all soapy. Generally you give them about a peso, so it isn’t very expensive, but there are only so many times you can have your window washed each day.

We went and looked at two houses that were for sale downtown. They were nice but a bit pricey for what we would want to pay. They were both in the 700,000 peso range. They were both in a gated area with a little guard shack, that didn’t look like it had been used for quite a while. We might be able to rent one of them if we wanted, but I’m not sure if we would want to buy all the furniture necessary to furnish it because both were pretty big.

This morning we woke up and discovered four inches of water in the floor board of our car. The local dealership said we could bring it in but they didn’t know if they would be able to take a look at it or not. We dried it out the best we could using the leaf blower and headed out toward Laredo. I called a mechanic on the way and he said we should get it checked out because the water could damage the computer under the seat. We finally located a dealer who said he could fit it in to look at the car in San Antonio.