The Home Place

Dec 6 - Sooo, we finally moved into our new place on Monday, December 1st.  It went surprisingly well.  Our driver picked us up from the hotel at 10, and the movers arrived with our air shipment around 11:30.  My cell phone here is a pay-as-you-go, so when it stopped working the night before the move, it finally dawned on me that I needed to add minutes to it.  I kept telling the driver I needed to add minutes to my cell phone, but he wasn't getting it.  Then I remembered that they say you add "money," not "minutes," and eureka!  So we stopped at the 7-11 store (they are everywhere, and serve as your place to pay your utilities and "top up" your phone, as well as getting snack food and such).  The clerk behind the counter took my phone, pulled off the back, looked under the battery, punched in some codes, and I was back in business.  I wondered how I would know if he actually put the amount he said on the phone, but I got a text message from the provider confirming it right away.

So we had just gotten our suitcases in and settled, and the truck with the air shipment arrived.  Twenty-eight boxes of stuff to fit into our little condo.  The movers were remarkably efficient and enthusiastic - the crew boss was fawning over the view for a long time, and we started to wonder when the actual moving was going to begin.  They had all the boxes in, and some of the stuff even unpacked, in under two hours.  Many of the boxes will be going to Tim's office as soon as he has a permanent one (it is being built!).  It was so nice to get some different clothes to wear, and to "have my things about me" (as Mary Kate Danaher would say).

View from the balcony -
the Sanctuary of Truth

The new place is great - it's a long, winding road off the main thoroughfare that passes a big public school, a school for the blind, some shops, some hotels, and a couple big construction sites.  We are tucked away at the very end - a nice, secluded corner with a spectacular view of the gulf.  It is a building with 30 condos, but only 12 units have people living in them full-time.  I have only run into one other person in the week we've been here.  She was a woman from Switzerland who was leaving the next day to go home for four months.  Funny that they would go north for the winter, eh?  But maybe they want to escape the tourist season here.

View of the dock from our balcony

Without the luxury of hotel food, I headed out to the store to see what I might find in the way of sustenance.  Food shopping is quite challenging, as nothing is really recognizable from the packaging like one is accustomed to at home.  Therefore, it takes probably five times as long to do what would've been a quick run in the past.  I managed to find some wrapped chicken, not sitting out in the open.  I figured rice would be safe, but the rice is in a huge aisle with bags stacked like you would see rock salt at home - huge bags in a variety of which I never knew existed.  Compounding the confusion, none of the bags seemed to have much in the way of English to explain what the different kinds were.  I decided to go with the smallest bag I could find ( a bag bigger than any you'd find on the shelf at Kroger!) - that seemed safe.  And not a pound of coffee to be found - lots of instant coffee in jars and little single packs, but nothing to put in the nice new coffee maker the owner left for us.

We needed a copier/scanner pretty quickly, so after food shopping, Tim and I were driven to a place many people had told us about.  It is a seven-story store/mall? housing every imaginable type of technology and accessories.  The origin of some of the items is somewhat dubious (not in the original shrink wrap or package in some cases), but the prices are really good.  Every floor was a different specialty, and each floor had several different vendors hawking a seemingly infinite variety of the same thing.  One floor was all cell phones, one floor was DVDs, etc.  And the cell phone cases!  Everywhere you go, rows and rows of displays full of cell phone cases! We finally found an HP all-in-one on the printer floor (6th floor) for much less than we would pay in the US, I think.

The experience was dizzying, so we treated ourselves to dinner at Mike's again - dee-licious!  We then made a quick, emergency stop at a Starbucks to buy some coffee for the pot (still no filters), and, for the first time, headed "home."

• What I'm reading:  In the hotel, I finished McCarthy's Bar by Peter McCarthy, a funny account of an Englishman's search for his roots in Ireland (thanks, Sharon!)  Then, the latest Jan Karon (my literary comfort food), Somewhere Safe with Someone Good.