Moving Day...Again

Today we moved into our new place. Again.

It is nice. Really nice, actually. The house is almost exactly the same as the one we just moved from (at the Lutheran Center, there are 4 houses for guest accommodations that are all the same, one right next to the other), but this house is much more furnished than the one we were living in during the month of August.

While we are, of course, happy just to have a bed and a shower, this particular room also has a larger dresser, two bedside tables with lamps (lamps!), a shower head with better water pressure…etc. The common area here has couches, a computer that is sometimes hooked up to the Internet, and a giant bookshelf with our course books on it – one copy of each book for all of us to share.


The kitchen is also better, with lots of helpful cooking utensils. Last night I cooked a lentil-rice salad from one of the two Mexican cookbooks we lugged down here. (Brief sidetrack: You would be surprised how hard it is to find jalepenos in the grocery store here! Jalepenos! Nowhere to be found!) Anyway, about halfway through making the recipe I realized a needed a blender to finish it. How do you say blender en espanol? Fortunately, we, um, borrowed one from another house. So now that we’re in the furnished house: No more blender stealing!

I also brought my maps – my map of Mexico, with each state in a different color, and my gi-normous and hugely detailed map of Mexico City – over here, too, and taped them to the wall in the common room. Kim was very excited about them, so I thought I would share. The downside is that the maps are no longer in our bedroom… but the upside is that our bedroom has a mirror, which we have decorated appropriately.


Actually, I have to admit that decorating that mirror was the first time I actually started to feel like this could be home. A Cubs hat, a Tigers hat, two Obama campaign buttons, and our Lonely Planet calendar off to one side… yeah, that could be home. ☺

Later in the day there was a knock on the door: it was time for a house blessing. Kim pulled out his trusty Occasional Services book, Spanish language edition, and we processed our way through the house, blessing each room in turn with a verse of Scripture and a prayer. Then we all sat down to our first community meal together, with Kim and Randy, our faculty advisor from Luther.

Tomorrow the semester program starts officially, with orientation activities scheduled from 8am to at least 8pm. It’s time to dive in. Deep breath, here we go…