When you woke up this morning you had somehow lost an hour of your life. When we woke up this morning, we had not. Time is relative. I think it was Einstein who proved this, although I might be confused. Last year, the Mexican legislature decided to do away with Daylight Savings Time. It is kinda stupid this far south. The good news for us is that Steven will start working at 8 a.m. since that is now 9 a.m. Central Time. Does that seem like a good thing? It is! Do you know why? Because that means we can’t go to the gym at 7, which means we won’t be getting up at 6:15 a.m. Yay! There’s no way we’re going to the gym at 6 a.m., so we’re just going to suck it up and go at different times during the day that work for us since I still want to do morning yoga, but at the civilized hour of 9 a.m. instead of 7.

You may know that I am no longer taking Spanish classes except with our tutor. Finally, this week, I met with the mom of my yoga instructor. Silvia wants to practice her English and I want to speak to Mexican people in Spanish. We had a great conversation and are planning to do it again Tuesday. The only way to learn a language is to speak the language. I definitely think my Spanish is improving, but only poco a poco as the waiter said to me last night.

Where were we last night that a waiter was talking to me? I’m glad you asked! We had an eventful Saturday that ended with a night at Jazzatlan, a club close to our apartment. We thought we were going to hear a jazz singer, but apparently during the pandemic, they got a yen for the blues, so we heard a bunch of blues standards from singer Louise Phelan and Octavio Herrera on guitar. If you want your students to learn real U.S. history instead of the version being legislated around our fair nation, maybe send them to a jazz club in Mexico. The singer and lead guitarist explained Jim Crow laws to give one of the songs context.

Before jazz, I had decided I wanted Italian food because I had smelled garlic walking by a different restaurant. We looked up a place close to the jazz club and then learned that it’s best to eat Italian food where Italian people live. The pasta was passable, but I wouldn’t go back. We have had some good pizza, so maybe we just went to a not-so-great place with good reviews? At any rate, we had an OK dinner, it was beautiful out and then we headed over to jazz.

We were also witness to a crazy occurrence yesterday: A thunderstorm. It lasted about a minute and I saw two lightning bolts. Wow! Today, it’s so windy, a tree fell onto a power line and Zap!, we have no power. According to the landlord, this happens fairly frequently and will probably be fixed in about three hours. We decided to go for a walk and got rained on. What is going on here? The good news is that the landlord was pretty much exactly right. Power back in three hours.

So, back to Saturday: I want to make it clear that this week’s death march was not my fault. We had gone to the gym and then wanted to do something mellow since we knew we’d be out past our bedtime. I had seen that one of the world’s most beautiful libraries (No. 13), Biblioteca Vasconcelos, is here and I thought about going there, but it was about an hour long walk. I said: “Oh, that’s too far for today – we’ll do it another time.” But Steven said, “I’m game.” So off we went thinking that we would take an Uber back.

I started to worry that it wasn’t going to be worth the walk, especially when we approached the building, and it was surrounded by the bus station and a craptastic street market. I was wasting my angst. The library was beautiful and had an exhibit on the Divine Comedy with paintings of different scenes from the book and many examples of different printings (from back when a book was a physical object made from dead trees) dating back hundreds of years.

The building itself is hollow in the middle and the shelves are cantilevered up seven stories. You can see the Dewey decimal system numbers all the way up from the first floor. The lobby is divided into two with a staircase in the center. On one side a whale skeleton hangs from the ceiling. Between that reminding me of Sue at the Field Museum and the blues night, I was feeling a bit Chicago nostalgic – at least until I realized it was still snowing there.

Steven’s back has been a bit creaky, so I was figuring we would take an Uber back for sure, but he said, “Let’s just starting walking and see how it goes.” It was a bit cloudy, so that helped. You won’t be surprised to know that we walked all the way back. Just another self inflicted 10 mile death march.