3 things

Last week, some of my small dreams were answered: 1) to get a fresh new water cooler-size jug full of water to last me through the week, 2) to rescue my laundry from the lavanderia, and 3) to get more pesos on my cell phone.

Early (for me) Monday morning, I was getting ready to face my week by doing yoga. Okay, I was in child’s pose, which means I was really just sitting on the mat with my head between my knees. Unfortunately, I was also in my underwear. So when I heard the sound I had so consciously attuned my ears to (agUUUUAAAAA – uttered by a bicycling water jug vendor), I was only able to stare helplessly into my mat and utter a very uncentered “f%$k” – which didn’t seem like a great way to start the morning. BUT – then I heard my neighbor Glen at the front gate talking to the water man! Ah, that gave me just enough time to pull on a pair of pants and run out my door to ask Glen to get me a water jug, too. Then my week was off to a great start.

I felt like a million bucks having already knocked one item off my to-do list for the week. What if I could get all of it done in one day?! Wouldn’t that make me awesome? So I quick took a walk over to the lavanderia to get my laundry – which they’d told me would be ready Monday morning. No such luck. My laundry was still dirty or missing. As it turned out, the 8 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. hours seemed to be a bit more wishful thinking than concrete fact. Two more nights went by and the underwear supply was definitely dwindling. Finally, on Wednesday morning, I was able to liberate my clothes from their harrowing four days of captivity. As I hugged them in our joyful reunion, I have to say they were much better smelling than they’d perhaps ever been.

As for the phone card, it’s really a non-story. My friend, Chelsea, saved me a trip to the Telcel store by pointing out that I could buy a card to add pesos to my phone in pretty much any miscelania shop in town (and there are a lot). The better news is that I finally found out how to receive calls from the U.S. to my cell phone here. And I also finally figured out that when I go to my local caseta telefonica to make a phone call, the price for the E.U. is not for the European Union, but for the Estados Unidos. (I was wondering how many Europeans they really get making phone calls in those places, and why they didn’t have any U.S. rates posted…)

Enough on my errands for last week. Check out Flickr for a few of the photos I took on a recent trip to Teotitlan – a village known for it’s rugs and textiles.

And a couple of you have asked for more quizzes, so here you go: If you can check out the photos, look at the one with the older woman pulverizing something that turns into red dye for the yarn. What’s she crushing to make the red color? (animal, vegetable, or mineral? extra points if you can come up with the name...)