The Cute News

Warning: if you don't like cute, get out now. Go read about health care or something. (Am I a bad person because I'm sick and tired of the health care debate? Just wondering.)

Today we went to the Mercado to buy a piñata for Indigo's birthday next week. After looking at all of them, she decided on this traditional Mexican design:



Well, ok, maybe not so traditional. It is, however, as Indigo pointed out, enormous (her latest word), at least in comparison with the birthday girl. We also bought a 5 kilo bag of candy to go with it, which is a rather scary item. We're talking 11 pounds of candy here, and I think I'm developing diabetes just having it my house.

In other Cute News, Indigo came home from school yesterday with a Mexican flag she made. The colors of the Mexican flag, according to Indigo, are green, red and egg. (Guess what the white part of her flag is made out of.)

Too tired to post. Here's some stuff I wrote on our first full day here, a few weeks ago:


We've arrived in San Miguel de Allende, which so far has lived up to its reputation. It is a beautiful, picturesque city, with cobblestone streets, lots of hills, beautiful houses with that typically Mexican combination of bright colors, flowers, fancy ironwork, and carved doors -- even sometimes on very modest houses. It is fairly cold here, and pouring rain, but there are gas fires in every room of the house we're staying in and lots of blankets. The rain is unusual for this time of year, and is supposed to stop tomorrow. I hope it's not the typical Mexican tomorrow they're talking about, since that could be awhile.

We're staying in a house owned by some member of the local Unitarian Universalist church for about 10 days. In return, Amy will preach at the church on Valentine's Day. It's a small, English language church for the expat community (10% of the population of this city is expats, mostly American and Canadian). Typical of UUs, in my opinion, that they don't even try to reach out to Mexicans with a Spanish language service, but UUs are so afraid of being accused of cultural imperialism that they shun anything that looks like it could possibly be proselytizing, even though the numbers of UUs continue to dwindle. But I digress.

We have to start looking for a more permanent place to live, and a school for Indigo, but we've decided to spend a couple of days just hanging out first. It takes a few days to acclimate to the altitude -- we've all been huffing and puffing and napping quite a bit.

I need to post some pictures, because it's hard for me to find words to describe Mexico. I think it's the mix of the old and the new that I like so much here. While that's true everywhere, I think of that mixture in the U.S. as always being at war. In Mexico they coexist much more peaceably, and the new doesn't try so hard to eradicate the old. So while we were eating lunch yesterday in a tiny little restaurant, six burros packed with firewood walked by on the narrow sidewalk, inches away from the street packed with cars and taxis and buses. We went to the Tuesday market, which is an enormous empty space which fills full of vendors selling everything in the world (but only on Tuesdays), each vendor's stand about 10 feet long with a plastic tarp over each one to provide some protection against the rain, each one selling something different and totally random. So we bought Indigo a toy at one stand, some bread at another, a kilo of mangos for about $1, a pair of Crocs for me. We spent a long time at the pet vendor's stand, looking at lots of brightly colored fish, a few unhappy-looking lizards, some tiny turtles, but most excitingly (especially to the little munchkin), a box of baby black rabbits. I am so happy to be here.

Sickly

We all have colds, so the little one is cranky and Amy and I are exhausted. I have no energy to do anything even slightly strenous, like getting out of bed. Fortunately, it's not like there's much I need to do. I made a big pot of chicken soup yesterday and I'm waiting for it to cure me. I realize that this is not very exciting, so I'll throw in a photo. This is Indigo standing in front of a fountain by a very large church.

Playtime

We took Indigo to Parque Juarez today so she could play in the playground and we could buy some more plants. The playground is filled with mostly old and falling apart equipment -- wooden bridges with slats missing, slides with holes in them, dangerous climbing structures -- stuff that would make a U.S. lawyer salivate in litigious anticipation. Needless to say, it's a lot more fun than any playground in the U.S. The plant sale, which according to the newspaper ended weeks ago, is still there, although smaller than it was when it was official. I noticed that some of the plant sellers seem to be living in the park, in tents. I hope they have a lot of blankets, since it gets pretty cold here at night this time of year. We ate lunch in a restaurant in the middle of the park which consisted of a tent with a few tables, the usual rat's nest of wires illegally connecting a refrigerator with a streetlight, and a stove fueled by a couple of propane tanks. The food was cheap and delicious -- about 8 bucks for 2 Cokes (I don't usually drink that stuff, but Mexican Coke is made with sugar, rather than corn syrup, and it's much better), scrambled eggs with cheese for the little one, rice and beans and tortillas and pork with spicy sauce for the grownups. Their salsa was smoky and full of cilantro and other more mysterious flavors.

Adriana, who lives in the apartment next door, gave Indigo a lotteria set. It's a sort of Mexican bingo/picture matching game, and Indigo and I played it tonight, putting pieces of popcorn on our cards every time we matched a picture.

Adriana is also the gardener responsible for the beautiful patio in the building where we live. Here's a picture:



Aside from having lots of beautiful plants, the patio has all sort of interesting things, like birdcages full of plants:



and cool stuff on the walls:

Introduction

Welcome to my Mexico blog. This blog will likely be a random collection of thoughts, images and stories about my six month sabbatical in the city of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. I'm here with my partner Amy and our daughter Indigo. We've been here for a few weeks and in that time we've gotten to know the city a bit, found a nice apartment to live in, found a bilingual school for Indigo, and acclimated to the high altitude and hilly terrain. My Spanish has improved a bit, or at least it feels like it's started to come back to me and I can communicate with people pretty well.

The photo on the right is of the mosaic table I made in a workshop I took last week. I might take some more art classes at some point, but during the month of March I will be taking a Spanish class for 3 or 4 hours a day.