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Maria O’Connor – Part I Single • Chicago, Illinois • Attorney, Tropicasa Real Estate
“Don’t leave your brain at the border and come down here and think things are done that differently. They’re not, especially when you’re buying property.”
At forty-four, Maria O’Connor represents the tail end of the baby boomer generation. She was born and raised in Chicago, as were her mom and dad. Her family moved to the northern suburb of Evanston when she was about three, and then farther north to Glencoe when she turned seven. Maria has two younger brothers, an investment banker father, and a concert violinist and schoolteacher mom, who influenced her to attend the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana, where she majored in history and minored in political science. Following graduation she moved back to Chicago and got a job with a law firm as a law clerk and paralegal and also attended law school at night. After graduating from law school in 1990, she took some time off to find out what she wanted to do with her life. “I really hated Chicago weather, and, as trite as that sounds, it was the impetus for my relocation to PV,” Maria explains.
Maria saw Puerto Vallarta for the first time as an undergraduate in 1985. She had been to Cancun and was planning a new trip there when a terrible hurricane made her change her plans. Her travel agent helpfully recommended Puerto Vallarta. The only thing she knew about Vallarta, though, was what she remembered from the old television series The Love Boat. She liked Cancun a lot because of its beaches, but when she arrived here she was absolutely floored. “When I saw the mountains and the jungle for the first time, it was amazing. I stayed at the Playa de Oro, which was close to where the cruise ships came in. I was so intrigued that there were no televisions or telephones in any of the hotel rooms. I liked that very much. I would get my cup of coffee in the morning and walk over to the cruise ship area to hear the mariachis playing at seven in the morning as the ships would dock, and then finish my coffee and go lie on the beach all day. What a great introduction to PV.”
After returning to Chicago, she told all of her friends about Vallarta because she had fallen hopelessly in love with its beauty, and it was just a hop, skip, and a jump from Chicago. “You could get on a Mexicana flight at nine in the morning and be here by noon,” Maria remembers. “We would fly down on Friday and go home on Monday. It was a perfect long weekend. I came to Vallarta eleven times between 1985 and 1990 before I finally moved here. I mostly came for long weekends because I was working at the law firm and going to school at night.” The longest time Maria spent in PV before she moved here full-time was three weeks. She was supposed to go with a friend, but her friend had to cancel, so she came by herself. She was surprised to find so many people traveling by themselves, which she found she liked. “I loved traveling alone. I didn’t have to worry about anything. I could go where I wanted, when I wanted. I still love traveling by myself,” she says.
With each trip to PV, she would inch closer to town until finally she started staying at the Playa Los Arcos on the south side of the Cuale River. “At that time many of the roads past the Tropicana hotel were made of dirt, which caused problems when it rained, but I didn’t care a bit,” she laughs. “It just added to the laid-back atmosphere of the town.” Maria has been a world traveler for many years and has seen many beautiful places, but she puffs up with pride when she speaks of her adopted city. “I tell people that there are beautiful places all over the world, but none more beautiful than Puerto Vallarta. I’ve traveled throughout Europe and even lived for a few months in Italy. In fact, two years after I moved to Vallarta I went to Rome for three months thinking it might be an even better place to live. It wasn’t. I came back to Vallarta for one important reason: the people. The people who live in this city are the nicest people I’ve ever met. They are so proud of their country and their city. I’ve found that when people say they’ve had a bad experience here it usually involves people who do not live in Vallarta. I also liked the fact that Vallarta is a city with a rich history, not a created tourist town like Cancun or Ixtapa. With its red tile roofs, whitewashed buildings, and its true colonial look, Puerto Vallarta is a lovely, but authentic, Mexican town.”
She finally decided to move to PV in 1990. “I’ve always been an organized, Type-A personality who never caused my parents or family any problems growing up,” Maria confides. “I never did anything weird, have never been arrested, and so forth, but when I announced that I was going to move to Vallarta, my parents thought I was nuts. The night before I left, I went out on the town with my brothers, and it was minus twenty degrees. I almost overslept the morning I was to leave, which I almost never do. I didn’t have time to dry my hair, and it froze on the way to the airport. I knew then I had made the right decision. I also remember how I used to cry when I would leave Vallarta and have to return to the weather in Chicago.”
After making the move, she recalls a life very different from the Vallarta of today. “In the early 1990s, it would take three or four days for newspapers to get to Puerto Vallarta, satellite television was found mainly in the bars, and telephones weren’t plentiful. In fact, when I wanted to go out, I would walk over to a friend’s house to ask them if they wanted to go out because telephones were not that available. But that’s how you got close to people. And, when I wanted to call my parents, I would have to go to a public calling place and wait in line to use the phone. Thankfully, communication services here have improved greatly in the last eighteen years. The Internet has really made a difference.”
When Maria first moved to PV, she had no plans whatsoever to practice law. She just wanted to live here and then would figure out what she could do and what she wanted to do. She traveled throughout Mexico her first year to see if she liked other areas within the country better than PV. She had always been a city girl and thought she might move to Mexico City or Guadalajara, but that was not to be. Her first instincts were correct, and she decided to put down roots in Puerto Vallarta. Most of the expats at the time Maria arrived in PV supported themselves by either selling time-shares or teaching English. This was before the real estate business really gained traction and began to employ a lot of Americans and Canadians. Her first job was teaching English at the hotels. She would go from hotel to hotel, timing her visits for either the start or end of work so classes were convenient for the workers. The human resources departments of the hotels would employ her to teach varying levels of English. She enjoyed teaching, but through her work with the hotels found a better opportunity as the assistant to the operations manager of the Los Tules hotel’s condominium business.
“That’s really when my Spanish improved significantly,” Maria recalls. “I had taken two semesters of Spanish at the University of Illinois and had always been good at languages. I took seven years of French, studied German in both high school and college, and took Russian for a while because I had wanted to do a semester in Leningrad during my junior year at Illinois.” Even with some Spanish, though, Maria found that the best way to learn the language was to tell people not to speak to her in English. She found that immersion is always the best way. “I would buy a newspaper and use my Spanish/English dictionary to read it. It often would take me a week to read the newspaper. I would also go to the nightclubs and just listen to people speak so my ear could get accustomed to the language. Watching television news and soap operas in Spanish also helped. I really knew I ‘got it’ when someone told a joke in Spanish at a nightclub and I laughed.”Email to a friend.
Will continue next month…
• Please click here to read Chapter 2 – Part II
• Please click here to read Chapter 2 – Part III
• Please click here to read Chapter 4 – Part I
• Please click here to read Chapter 4 – Part II
• Please click here to read Chapter 4 – Part III
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After making the move, she recalls a life very different from the Vallarta of today. “In the early 1990s, it would take three or four days for newspapers to get to 