Sparkle City

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico – Map
by Scott Gilbertson

Children know no moderation. At least ours don’t. The minute they discover something new they love, they must have it ALL THE TIME.

Pretty much nothing in Mexico happens without fireworks. Luckily actual fireworks are hard to come by, at least here. Sparklers though, they’re everywhere. I picked some up for Christmas Eve, which kicked off an episode of this is the greatest thing ever, which of course means we must have sparklers ALL THE TIME.

And for a while we did, pretty much every night through the new year. If you look closely you’ll notice that these are not your average American sparklers, some of them are about three feet long. Mexico is serious about its fireworks.

Mexico is more serious about fireworks than it is about Christmas. It seems to be a much less significant a day than Three Kings day, which comes later, in January and is when most families exchange presents. Most expats go home for the holidays it seems, but fortunately some of our friends stayed and we got together for a little cookie baking party.

Christmas stockings are unheard of down here. What’s Christmas without stockings? Maybe this is why Three Kings day is a bigger deal. Corrinne came up with a substitute to get us through — some nice ceramic pots. When in Rome, adapt.

2 Comments

DREW ELDRIDGE January 23, 2019 at 10:00 a.m.

Im a sucker for long exposure- the picture of Corrinne is a framer- and the one with the fire hands like the old mortal kombat game is my other fave.

LQuesiton. At what point are you an ExPat? I assume Linda and John are considered X-Pats. But are you? When is it just a nice long vacation and when do you cross that grey line into?

Like, do you walk around town and see other English speakers and Identify as Expats vs. tourists?

Scott January 23, 2019 at 10:21 a.m.

Drew-

I don’t know exactly what the dividing line between expat and tourist is, once upon a time I’d have probably said hotel vs house, but Airbnb ruined that. Now, I don’t know.

I guess I would say expats are people with no fixed plans to return to wherever their home used to be? But I don’t know, technically we don’t have any fixed plans and yet I wouldn’t probably call us expats. Not because I’m avoiding the term, but because we do intend to leave eventually. More on that in the next (long) post.

Thoughts?

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