Just like all of you, we started the week celebrating the 4
th
of July. Our celebration was a little different, though, because it’s not a
holiday here. So we thought about all of you having the day off while we were
in the office. I wore a red sweater with white and blue jewelry, and a couple of
the Mexican people wished us a “Happy 4
th of July,” which I thought
was nice of them. That evening we had the Teca Once missionaries over to our place
for a 4
th of July dinner of hot dogs. Our apartment and the Davis’s
are the only ones on the 5
th floor and our doors open across from
each other, so we set up the serving table in their apartment and the eating
tables in ours. It worked great. After dinner we played a patriotic music
trivia game I made up. That was our celebration—no fireworks, no parade, not boating,
but we were all still very grateful for our country. We love Mexico, but we’re
thankful to be citizens of the U.S.A.
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| My attempt at decorating in red, white, and blue |
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| The serving tables at the Davis's |
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| Ron "grilling" the hot dogs |
We went to a couple of malls this week. One time it was
actually for an assignment. They were both beautiful malls with great food courts
and a lot of the same stores you’d find in a mall in the US. The first one we
went to had a beautiful garden on the grounds, with lots of flowers, paths, benches,
and fountains. Naturally we had to spend some time walking around in it before
we went inside to take care of the business we were there for. We went to the
second mall on Friday night with the Barnetts and the Wrights to watch the
movie
Top Gun—Maverick. I know it’s crazy that we’re on a mission and
can still do stuff like that. It was a VIP theater, which meant it was one of
those where the chairs are recliners and you can order food right from your
seat. Fortunately for me, the movie was in English with Spanish subtitles. I doubt
Ron would have enjoyed having to translate the whole movie for me. It was a fun
evening. I don’t think we’ve been to an actual movie theater since before COVID
hit.
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| Inside the Satelite Mall |
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| Just some of the fast food places in the food court at Satelite |
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| The entrance to the Miyana Mall |
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| Dinner at the food court before the movie |
Claudia, the cute young woman who went to Pachuca with us
last week, used to teach Spanish at the MTC in Mexico City. She offered to help
me learn Spanish. We’ve had a group of missionaries who meet once a week in a
Zoom meeting for Spanish class. We had a man from BYU working with us for a
while, but he had to quit. Since then we’ve been floundering a bit, so when
Claudia offered to help me, I asked if she would be willing to teach our group.
She said she would love to. We had our first class with her on Thursday, and she
was great! She told us, “If you are at a beginning level, I’ll get you to an
intermediate level before you go home. If you’re intermediate, I’ll get your to
advanced, and if you’re advanced, I’ll get you to Latina.” She has motivated me,
so this week I’ve put myself out there more and have had a couple of short but
successful conversations.
Saturday morning we went to the tianguis to get produce for
the week. As we walked around, an embroidered blouse caught my eye. The booth it
was in was being manned by three children. I’m not sure if people there
sometimes run more than one booth or if they sometimes jump in to help each
other. We’ve often had someone come over from another booth when we’ve
stopped to look at things in a booth which didn’t have anyone in it. In this
case, the mother was back in the booth a while later, so I’m not sure what the
deal was. Anyway, the three kids seemed very excited to have a potential sale.
They took the blouse down from the display before I asked them to and handed it
to me. I tried it on over my T-shirt to make sure it would fit, which it did.
Then I looked at those three expectant faces, and how could I do anything but
buy it. Fortunately, I liked it. Of course, Ron was talking to the kids and
teasing them the entire time. A little later, he bought some strawberries to take
over to them. He told them he was giving them the berries because they were
such good salesmen.
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| Ron giving strawberries to two of our cute salemen |
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| Mauricio, who is our favorite fruit vendor at the tianguis. Saturday was his birthday! |
Later that day we went to Chapultepec Park again. I know, we’ve
been there multiple times, but it is almost 1,700 acres, so there is a lot of
it to explore. It has bike trails in it, and we thought we saw a place to rent
bikes on one of our previous visits. Sadly, the bikes were gone from the spot
we’d seen, and we couldn’t find another place to rent them. Still, it
was fun to explore the park some more. We stopped for lunch at a hamburger
stand in the park and then sat at a picnic table while we waited for our order.
A cute little girl, who looked to be about seven and who was the daughter of
the woman running the booth, brought us our food. We told her what a good
waitress she was, and Ron bought her a soft drink as a tip. I think he’s
missing our grandkids—he seems to feel the need to buy a treat for every child
we encounter. (We have a stash of snack sized packages of Skittles in our cupboard
because one of the maids sometimes has her granddaughter with her.)
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| Our cute little waitress |
After lunch we used Google maps to help us find our way to
the Cárcamo de Dolores Museum. This isn’t a traditional museum. It’s all part
of an art/engineering project from the 1940s and 50s to improve the water
system for Mexico City. In front of a small but elegant building is
Fuente
de Tláloc, which is a mosaic tile covered sculpture of the Aztec rain god
Tl
áloc
created by Diego Rivera. Tl
álco is lying down in a pool which is
about 100 feet wide. When the system was functioning, water from the Lerma
River rushed over this sculpture. Inside the building is a deep concrete
cistern, the walls of which are covered with a mural painted by Rivera called
El
agua, Origen de la Vida (Water, the Source of Life.) When the system was
functioning, this mural was underwater. When Mexico City’s water system was
upgraded, these elements were bypassed, partly because they discovered that the
water was degrading the mural. Now they are pieces of art celebrating water. Also
inside the building are organ pipes. They are connected to a machine which somehow
takes the vibrations from the earth, the water running underneath, the air
movements, and the sun and interprets them into music. It was more of a low
humming which varied in intensity and tone. It was intended to be contemplative
and relaxing, and it was.
Last week I talked about the pastes we ate in Pachuca. I found
a recipe online and decided to try my hand at making them. They turned out
pretty good, though the crust wasn’t quite right and they were a little
overdone. I took them out of the oven about 5 minutes before the recipe said I
should, but they were still on the darker side of golden brown than I would have
liked. I’ve had enough experience making pastry dough that I think my next
attempt will be better.
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| The final product along with some guacamole and tomatillo salsa I made. |
I sometimes worry that anyone reading my blog will get the
impression we are here playing and having a vacation, because those are the
types of things I mostly write about. It’s just that saying “we sat in a
planning meeting” or “I helped translate a document” isn’t very interesting.
Plus, many of the projects we work on are ones that I can’t say anything about
until they are publicly announced. However, just to prove that we really are
working here, if you go to https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/
and change your region to Mexico, four of the articles that are currently posted
there with the byline “De la sala de prensa de Mexico” (from the Mexico
newsroom) were written by me. Plus, I wrote the first draft of one of the other
ones, and Alfredo finished it. We are enjoying all the fun things we get to do
here in our off time, but it is the work we do in the office and as part of the
communications team that makes our time here feel worthwhile.
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