Well, here we are again. It's been a couple of weeks since I added my thoughts and believe me my thoughts have been piling up so rapidly that I haven't had time to Blog!
However, the sleepless nights returned with a vengeance a few nights ago and I laid awake for quite a long time trying to fathom out what the heck it is that is causing this and then it hit me! Actually my only real concern is my lack of knowledge of Spanish! I think it stems from when I learned that in the particular area in which the school is located, very little English is apparently spoken and that worried me! But the rest of the adventure is so exciting and there is everything to look forward to, and I realise that I have to press on with my learning apace.
What was becoming clear was that my old Spanish course is proving not so easy as I thought it would be for revision as it’s one designed for use in a classroom environment, with a tutor filling in many of the blanks and providing handouts of additional materials. This doesn’t really work at home when I’m self-learning so I researched and sourced another course ‘Living Language’. Then it was back to good old Amazon and I'm starting from basics again which is already proving much more helpful because it is so much more interactive. Having loaded the discs onto my laptop it’s going to be altogether easier (hopefully).
In the meantime we’ve been sent some brief details of a couple of properties close to the school, which demonstrate that we should be able to find something suitable. One is an apartment, a bit above our budget, but the other is a nice looking house in a small condominium, and well within budget. It’s good to have a local member of staff on the lookout for us! Apparently it isn’t wise to rely on a bicycle on the local roads because car drivers are a bit erratic and it’s either Shanks’s Pony or a taxi, so it does make proximity to the school much more desirable.
There was one house in the village to rent, which was quite expensive at 14,000 pesos per month but from these two photos seems to be nicely located, and another was priced at 11,000 pesos per month and we await further details. Mark's colleague is hoping to have a look at it for us and report back. It would be quite nice to find a house with a small garden although we'll be very happy with an apartment. The consensus at the school is they will continue to look around and hopefully something will come up.
We’d heard that the village “is just working class and nothing special” but this has since been corrected by someone who went out for a walk thinking she would look to see if there were any houses to rent and who came back to say that she had forgotten that there are a few beautiful streets in the village and sent some pictures.
Meanwhile I’ve added Mexico City to my iPhone as a weather centre and when I looked the other day I found this...
Temperatures hovering around 30° during the day but which drop quite significantly during the night. Whilst we have enjoyed a few days of excellent sunshine here in Reading, the thought of this sort of climate is very appealing. I must remember to take plenty of Factor 30 (now on the list!!).
During the past few days at home therefore, I’ve been able to cultivate the vegetable patch ready for laying the turf. That was quite sad after all the hard work put into vegetable production and
what was this….
Right out of the blue I received a telephone call two mornings ago offering me a job as Team Leader in charge of a group of Interviewers employed by the Company appointed by the Government to follow up the Annual Census which was taken on 27th March (one is taken every ten years) and check on those households which had not returned or completed the Return online. This will involve organising the already appointed team of interviewers in making random checks at specifically targeted postcode areas, and although I applied some while ago and thought I had been unsuccessful, there was apparently a last-minute replacement vacancy to fill, and so I've accepted. This is going to keep me quite busy for the next few weeks.
