We Have a Place of Our Own

So it is official-we can finally have visitors!  We moved into our new house last weekend.  We ended up staying with our wonderful host mom Rosi for two weeks longer than expected because the house we ended up renting was quite ready for occupation, so she generously let us keep renting from her.  She was the person who helped us find the house.  It actually belongs to friends of hers here in Guanajuato.  It was not on the market.  It has a small apartment attached to the house and the people who own both units live in the apartment and the house has been sitting empty.  They spend half the year in Spain and after thinking about it, I think they decided that since we were a personal referral from Rosi, they would be willing to rent to us.  Like our PC trainers told us, relationships are really important in Mexico, and I am sure without help from our host mom, we wouldn't have found such a great place.

Our place is up in the hills very near to the center where we work.  After looking at a number of noisy, pretty awful overpriced places in town, we decided that living up here would be calmer and of course would make our commute to work in the morning a whole lot easier.

Here are some photos of the house and our view from the kitchen which is really beautiful.

Our place is right on the main highway going up from Guanajuato and it is white stucco painted with flowers. The blue area is the small apartment where our landlords live.  The husband is Mexican and an architect.  He designed the house and apartment.  Luckily he is a specialist in energy saving , so the house stays nice and cool.  An added bonus is that the bus stops right in front going down to town, and we just cross the street to go up the hill.

Since people seem to name their houses here, ours is now officially called Casa Flores because someone (I suspect our talented landlord) decorated the house with painted flowers.  And the red paint on the wall is all handpainted as well with beautiful a beautiful leaf shape:



















Here is a shot with better details of the flowers:

And here is a picture of our patio, which is lovely but generally a little hot, so we have yet to eat outside!

Because Guanajuato is hilly, our house is kind of a multi-level split level design-so lots of stairs and lots of hard surfaces.  This is looking down from the dining room, kitchen level to the living room.  We don't have much furniture-but we do have a fireplace!  Although in the very arid land I would be terrified to ever light a fire!

Here is the kitchen-which is really large and mostly empty although we now have a fairly large round table over near the windows.

And this is our view from our kitchen windows!

So as you can tell we have plenty of room for friends and family and we hope you will make plans to come see us!

Otherwise, we had a chance to go to Querétaro again last week since Peace Corps needed some more people to come be Spanish speaking guinea pigs for their language trainers in their certification training.  So since they were paying our bus fare for the day trip, we brought empty suitcases with us and filled them at Costco with last minute move-in stuff like some more pillows, etc.  Otherwise, we would have to pay to go to Leon and the bus and taxi fare wouldn't make it worth it.  So it was a treat to go back to a larger, flatter town for a day!  But it was hot, so we were actually kind of get back to our cooler part of Mexico!  We will be going back to Querétaro in mid-July for our early in-service training and then since our center will be closed we have booked a few nights in Mexico City.  We really enjoyed the overnight trip we took there during training so we thought we would go back when we will be able to really enjoy the restaurants and movies in the big city.