The Departure and Arrival

In order to arrive at our new home at reasonable time (before Dylan's bedtime) we chose to catch an early flight out of Minneapolis...so we were up at 4am (Ugh!). Still the departure went well - no problems checking the ridiculous amount of luggage we had and no delays due to snow (ha! do they actually have that in Minneapolis now that we have left).

In explanation of the ridiculous amount of luggage - we have indeed had much of our things packed by a moving company but we will not see that stuff until Matt's work visa is processed and the various customs stuff dealt with. The visa process will not be started until we are in Mexico and this process apparently takes a month. Given the time for the visa processing and information from other expats about how long it took before they got their home goods we don't expect to get our stuff for 2-3 months. Oh, in case you were wondering what we were sleeping on, sitting on, and cooking with, we have rental furniture until we get ours.

We arrived in Mexico City and were fortunate to have a quick trip through customs and passport control. We found our ride and loaded the bags. The trip from the airport seemed to take forever but really only about an hour, which is pretty quick in the scheme of things (on a good day it might be half an hour to the airport, on bad day 2 hours).

At the apartment the first thing we noticed was the banging of fireworks. Not even dark and it appeared that the celebrations were on. We arrived on the day of the Fiesta of the Lady of Guadalupe. I had been warned that this was a big deal (especially in Mexico City) and no doubt it is but there did not appear to be a lot of partying going on in our complex.

Our trip was not totally without any hitches - when we arrived in Atlanta for our connecting flights Matt had a message from our security company to say that the alarm was going off and we needed to have someone go and check it out. In the short time we had while waiting for our flight calls were made to the security company, the property management company and our cleaners....eventually this was all resolved.

While Matt was out getting some dinner I met our neighbor (our floor only has two apartments). I missed his name due to my non-existent Spanish and being tired from the early start. Anyway they have two little boys who were racing around a table set up for painting in the foyer area.

We enjoyed our dinner of rotisserie chicken with fresh tortillas before heading to bed early.