Travels of the Bay family and the Yoda Van

Our faithful readers will have noticed that we haven’t been updating our blog very much lately.  We’ve been in Ajijic for nearly 6 weeks and have only posted a few blog entries.  The first week we were here we enrolled William and Julian in a pre-school here and we’ve had every morning (Monday – Friday from 8 AM – 1PM) without William and Julian.  It really hasn’t been for lack of time that we haven’t been writing blog entries – simply laziness.  It had been a long time since we have had so much “free” time and we’ve really enjoyed it.  The main thing we accomplished was to become totally addicted to the TV show House, MD.  We downloaded and watched all 3 seasons in less than 4 weeks.  That is a total of 70 episodes.  If you realize that we have been watching that much TV it is no wonder we have not had any time to write blog entries.  And even if we had gotten around to writing, what would we have written about other than Dr. House?  We haven’t been doing anything else except watching that show?

Traveling for 9 months is hard.  I know no one really has any sympathy for us, but we had heard it from other travelers early on in our trip – most travelers are tired of traveling around 7 or 8 months.  We needed these 6 weeks to decompress and muster up enough Wanderlust to get us through the last stretch (~3000 miles) back to Seattle.  Matthias said he’s not ready yet to hit the road.  I’m almost there, and I think my desire to again be in a familiar, comfortable place is what makes me ready to leave.  We are leaving for sure on Tuesday since we are meeting my parents in Disneyland in 3 weeks.  I think we’ve left ourselves enough time to take a nice leisurely trip up the Baja Peninsula and back into southern California.  The next time we travel like this (which we are definitely planning on doing again) we are thinking we will need to stay longer in fewer places and move around less.

William and Julian have been doing pretty well at their school.  They have definitely picked up a lot more Spanish in those 5 weeks.  They wear uniforms to school and have homework and I think they genuinely enjoy going to school there.  Last week William turned 5 and he celebrated his birthday at school with piñatas and cake. 

In Seattle full-time daycare costs around $1000/month per child.  Here we paid $170/month for both children.  (It was only half day, but still it is WAY cheaper than in the US.)  We also have a babysitter here who charges $2.00/hour.  By Mexican standards it is very expensive, but it is such a steal for us.  In one of the bars here we heard that a worker earns about ten dollars for a full shift (plus tips of course).  And apparently at this bar they are being paid twice the minimum wage.  When you hear these numbers about salaries here it is no wonder why there are a number of kids that don’t go to school.  Families either can’t afford to send their kids to school (due to the costs of supplies, uniforms and tuition) or they can’t afford to live if their kids don’t work.  Often during those hours when our kids are in school we have been visited by other kids selling stuff – bread, avocados, dried fish, flowers, etc.  Child labor is been commonplace in much of Central America as well.

Overall it has been a really great stay here.  The rainy season has also eventually started and we got to witness some amazing lightning storms and the thunder echoing and rumbling between the mountains around us.  In just a few weeks we’ll be back in the United States and Matthias and I are both very nervous about returning.  I’m starting to formulate some impressions and opinions about the things we’ve seen and experienced over the last 10 months and I have a feeling they will be magnified once we finally return to the US.  I promise that eventually we’ll write about it, but for now we’re still mulling it all over. 

After we leave Mexico we’ll have some time in California.  If you have any good advice about what to do or see in California please e-mail us some suggestions.  Neither of us has seen much of California and so far we are flying without a guide book. 

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Mexico-Guatemala. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.