Fast Forward

The house is ready! It is the blue one:

Sometimes it seems like too much happens at once, and life goes by faster than I can write about it. This distresses me, because it means I'm losing the details. But things will settle soon, because we are about to move to our house!

It's finally finished. And buying it was honestly not that difficult, in terms of bureaucracy. I thought we'd taken on a bit too much by working with a realtor who only speaks Spanish, but I quickly learned the key vocabulary words for things like "down payment" and "house title". Our realtor, Luz, marched us into Scotia bank and opened an account for us, a feat I'd heard was near impossible for expatriates on tourist visas.

We are now learning about buying furniture and trying to get water service and waiting for deliveries that arrive when they arrive. But the house! Here is the inner courtyard:

Here is the hallway, someday to be filled with art, when we learn how to hang things on concrete: Here is the yellow living room, empty save for a piece of furniture we bought off the street. Our Oaxaqueno friends warned us not to buy the furniture that's carted around on dollies in neighborhoods all over the city. The wood is young and not dry, and thus shrinks and changes. But the furniture itself is lovely and quirky and the kind of piece that would cost so much in the United States. And we bought it a block from the house, in the middle of the street!

Someday, the rooftop garden-to-be:

I think I can even handle haggling the moving price with the guys that drive the "Transportes de Carga Ligera" trucks all over town.