Trip to Mexico

At the end of last week, we went to Mex­i­co. Our friends rent­ed a house on the coast for a week and invit­ed us for the week­end. It’s the same house in the same place in Puer­to Peñas­co where we were the year before last.

We set off on Fri­day right after school. School hol­i­days here vary at dif­fer­ent schools. The dri­ve from our house, tak­ing into account stops and cross­ing the bor­der, takes 4 – 5 hours. In light of recent news about the wall being built against refugees, we were a bit con­cerned about the sit­u­a­tion at the border.

But we didn’t notice any­thing unusu­al. Every­thing was as it was dur­ing our last trip: qui­et and calm. Vehi­cles enter­ing Mex­i­co with car­go were direct­ed for weigh­ing, inspec­tion, and paper­work, while oth­ers passed through with­out hin­drance. On the return jour­ney, enter­ing the USA was also won­der­ful. Approach­ing the bor­der check­point, we need­ed to show all the doc­u­ments from inside the car to the cam­era with­out get­ting out. Then, pass­ing by the cus­toms offi­cer, we opened the win­dow, he looked into the car and wished us a pleas­ant jour­ney. When Mark was lit­tle, they used to ask him, if I was his dad and mom, but now they didn’t ask any­thing at all. There were still two more check­points in the USA a few miles apart, but they were there before.

The weath­er in Mex­i­co was the same as in Ari­zona, 25 – 27 degrees. I didn’t swim in the sea, but we kayaked a lot, sun­bathed, social­ized, relaxed, and changed our scenery. In the evenings, the men grilled shish kebabs and baked fish (the fish was from the Mex­i­can mar­ket, very fresh, straight from the sea).

My veg­etable gar­den is doing well. My seedlings didn’t quite work out this year, but the pre­vi­ous year’s egg­plant bush­es sur­vived the win­ter, con­tin­ue to bear fruit, and are still bloom­ing. Recent­ly, I gath­ered a whole bowl of egg­plants again and fried them. Peri­od­i­cal­ly, I go out to pull weeds that are break­ing through the stones. The mimosa trees con­tin­ue to bloom on the streets, and the desert is in full bloom. When we were dri­ving to Mex­i­co, we also not­ed that the desert was bloom­ing with yel­low, blue, and orange flow­ers. Because of the bloom­ing, trash is hard­ly vis­i­ble at all. It’s beautiful.

Now I have a new hob­by — I bake cook­ies from almond flour, which they call cook­ies here. I found a lot of almond flour at Valentina’s. And she has a won­der­ful mix­er, in which I whip egg whites into foam, add almond flour, and in 15 min­utes, the cook­ies are ready. We’ve become addict­ed to them 🙂