Back

The waiting Monday | Day 345 of my 2023 Journal

Cecilie Conrad·Dec 11, 2023· 3 minutes

It is nice to sometimes just have a practical day. We needed papers to travel with the dogs, so Silke and I walked to the local vet; smiling, professional, and friendly, she helped us with the paperwork, and we had the pleasure of meeting a real wolf in the waiting room. We were also very happy with my Spanish skills; this situation would have been complicated without the language.

Walking to find broccoli+ with Storm. Nice.

Red flowers for sale everywhere as a symbol of Christmas, small local market, talking with my son, walking back, making lunch.

In the streets, we observed the garbage system. Mexico City is surprisingly clean. You would not think so in a city of 22 million people, many living under the poverty level, many living in the streets, and thousands living off pop-up shops in the streets. I wonder, by the way, about the system of this. There must be a mafia or a law to allocate these spaces to the vendors. I wonder which it is? As I see Mexico City, it could easily be an official thing, the government helping the street vendors not to fight over spaces and share the time. In the morning, there is instant coffee and bread for sale; during the day, it is the tortillas with all the fried meat; in the evening, it is snacks and stuff (food, but other food or less food). In the night, it is mostly gone.

Back to the garbage, I am surprised there are hardly any bins in the street, yet they are impeccable in most places. And the garbage guys (bless them) hand-separate the trash into categories and load it on the huge trucks working like snails cleaning the streets. It is overwhelming.

It was also a day of waiting, as Liv and Erik would arrive in the early evening. So, after lunch, Silke and I went out to buy her an extra pair of jeans, as it will be a while before we travel to warmer climates again. We enjoyed the walk, found a pair of jeans, and sat down to have a cacao and a chai as we were watching closely the arrival of the rest of the family.

We returned to cook a welcome meal and paused before the Uber delivered our oldest daughter and her Erik, safe and sound from Costa Rica.

And so, the evening was spent in reunion, stories and smiles and laughter shared until we were extremely tired and went to bed to sleep a lot. 

With love

Cecilie-Underskrift-300x133

Cecilie Conrad

Thank you for reading
I would love to hear from you. Listen to your thoughts and reflections - or praise :) It is often emotional to share our lives like this, and we get very happy when we get your feedback. So feel free to share a comment below 😋 

See more images on Facebook

I just wanted to include more images from the same day. The streets with their shiny buildings contrasting the little cargo-bike-food stalls, the arc…Read more
I titled this “Beating Hearts” because the Aztecs’ human sacrifice took out the still beating heart of 52 humans EVERY DAY (according to our guide)! …Read more
The first step in Mexico City was to take it in the city. A good way to do it while not wasting time is to visit an art museum. Mexican art is like n…Read more
I am not afraid. I am insecure about how to find my way in this context, how to find solid information in most here-and-now contexts, and how to bala…Read more
The story goes (the one I know) that the Huichol people, who make this sort of art, took the peyote juice to enter a state of transcendence in order …Read more
Everything can be an adventure, even this. For us Europeans, a REAL gated community with a guard, actually several guards, is seriously exotic. We ha…Read more
It is truly overwhelming how fast San Miguel de Allende is unfolding for us. One of the game-changing things is that there is not much ego energy. It…Read more
It was a lovely morning after the game-changing party, convincing us we had finally found the place with the right vibe and the right people to stay …Read more
This was the final drop: We are now convinced San Miguel de Allende is the right place for us to have our winter breaks and find our new community an…Read more