Welcome to Puebla

Ahhh…the day we’ve been waiting for! Puebla, at long last! We arrived today (Saturday) around 3:30p to the greeting of three different welcome signs as we entered the city. I believe one of the signs indicates the population is slightly over 1 million, but judging from all of the cars and people we saw, it’s probably more like 2 million! Puebla is a very lovely city and very well developed like most cities in the U.S. I’ll write more on the city in a later post…

Tonight we spent the evening getting settled into our temporary apartment, which included a not-so-quick stop to Wal-Mart. Apparently Saturday, December 13th had been designated as “sales tax free day” at the nearest Wal-Mart (well, maybe not the closest Wal-Mart, but at least the first one we found!!). So there we were, waiting in line to checkout for an hour and a half! Fortunately, there was a little girl and her brother who were trying to speak to me in English (as prompted by their father). Of course, their side of the story to their friends and family is probably that they met a woman in line at Wal-Mart who was trying to speak Spanish to them…oh well, it helped to pass the time.

I guess the upside is that we actually have a Wal-Mart, unlike some of our friends in various places around the world. By the time we left it was 10:30pm and we were beat, but still had to find our way back to the apartment, in the dark, I might add. Todd left us that night with some crash-course directions in finding our way around the city and instructions for the best places to start looking for a house. The coming days should be very interesting……