Sunday we’ll be heading back to the U.S. to spend the holidays with family. We’ll be leaving most of our stuff here with our friends in order to keep more room available for bringing down baby stuff when we drive back in January.

We went around town and took a bunch of photographs today. Hopefully we’ll have more time to edit them and put them up over the next few weeks.

It is going to be a long drive back. I’m planning on leaving around 4am in order to make it all the way to Austin before it gets too late. It will take us about 10 hours to get to Laredo and another 4 to get to Austin. If we are sick of traveling we can stay in Laredo overnight. I think I would prefer to drive about 7 hours and stay in Mexico and then head out early for the border the next day. But since we aren’t very familiar with the hotels here and we have a dog, it probably would be pretty difficult to do. We may want to leave a little earlier so we can try to hit the border by mid afternoon.

Living in Mexico is challenging. It is a different culture and so there are a lot of little things to get use to. We are very fortunate to have great friends that are helping us out so much. It is frustrating to be somewhere that you can’t even make a telephone call and set up and appointment. This is, of course, our fault for not knowing Spanish, but it can be so challenging to try to do little things like that.

We are growing, though, and that is the whole reason we came down here. I’m not just talking about understanding more Spanish, but growing in our cultural awareness. It is easy to look at another culture and think that they would be so much better off if they did things the way you are use to them being done. It is a lot more difficult to look at yourself and your own set of cultural expectations and re-evaluate which ones are really important.