Infonavit Las Vegas

We are living with a family in a sector at the southern end of town called "Infonavit Las Vegas." Having driven all over Tapachula by cab and combi at this point, I think this is still my favorite section. The houses are smallish, colorful, and squished up against one another.


The streets are crooked and bumpy and often under-paved, some of them even dirt, so cars drive nice and slowly through them. (Any stretches of paved road of any length in this town are peppered with thin but deadly speed bumps that require you to almost come to a stop to avoid blowing out your tires, which also really cuts down on the speed of traffic.)


We have numerous kids living around us. David, on our right, often throws a ball around with the boys before dinner. But last night marked the first major immersion into our neighborhood nightlife. The boys had been out all afternoon with Greg on a mission to find a piano to practice on, and arrived back at the house a little before 6. Tula and I had been hanging on the street corner, a couple of gringas looking for fun, and had encountered some young Tapachultecas who were enjoying Tula's antics. One of them, a 12 year old girl named Gabi, bought us all ice creams from the small tienda that one of the neighbors runs at odd hours out of her home, and we all enjoyed the tastes as well as the sounds of words like "cacahuate," or peanut.



The boys and Greg soon became involved in a game of pick-up that started out as basketball but morphed, over the course of the next couple of hours, into soccer and then, finally, as everything always does, no matter where you are apparently, into screen time (another neighbor, this one with a mini-arcade outside their door, hosted that group experience). The boys apparently have another date for tonight, "a las seis y media."

So I am up early today--6 o'clock, which even beats Mahlon. The morning was clear and almost crisp, which is all the more enjoyable given that within 2 hours os so the sweltering heat will descend upon us and leave us wondering why we brought so many long sleeves (oh yes....something about mosquitoes...?). Today we are going to drive to the nearby volcano, which this morning is particularly clear from our window.







From this view, you can see the car that the doctor from the shelter lent me last night after I treated him and his wife with acupuncture. I think it must have left them both in a state of major disorientation, because the trip is not short and consists of, I have beeen told, a very winding and treacherous road up a steep incline with some crazy passing and lane-changing rituals, but there's acupuncture for you. Perhaps in addition to my usual caveats for the next 24 hours ("no beer, no ice cream, no sex, no bamboo shoots," etc.) I should have listed, "no rash lending practices." In any event, we are delighted by their generosity and plan to take full advantage of having our own wheels and not being wedded to schedules of buses without seatbelts.