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.