I'm back in Merida and this time it's for the foreseeable future. As of July 22nd, I'm officially a resident of Mexico!
Why move to Mexico? Well, in 1999 I came here on a cultural and language immersion program through Chico State and Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan (UADY). This program brought a group of students and our professor to Merida. We all had homestays and internships, mine turned out to be a substitute teaching position at a bilingual school for third grade. It was a great experience, although not without challenges, and I have been visiting on a fairly regular basis ever since.
My host family
Some kids from my class celebrating Hanal Pixan
Back to why I moved here...
As I said, I've been visiting Merida regularly since I graduated and it has become more and more difficult to leave each time. At first, I jokingly told everyone that I was moving to Mexico after retirement from the university, but then I thought, why not? The pandemic was the tipping point. I was working at home alone and no longer felt fulfilled in my work even though I still enjoyed my coworkers and the students. There was a lot of time alone to think about what might be next for me and so I began to research how to move abroad, specifically to Mexico. After working on campus again for a couple of months, I knew it was time and by the end of the school year, I had things in place to make it happen.
Merida has my heart. The people are friendly and kind, as they say, it's muy tranquilo, the climate is tropical (yay, summer year 'round), and there are so many things to do - free concerts, zoos, parks, art galleries, museums - and the food is delicious and fresh. It's really a foodie paradise. There's just so much to love and I plan to share a lot of that with you in this space.
I do not trust Facebook to preserve my content so I'll be posting links to each blog entry over there, but you might want to subscribe to my blog so you don't miss anything. It's not monetized so you won't see ads here. I can also write more here so I plan to tackle some topics that I think you might find interesting and will post some videos and photos here as well that you won't see on Facebook.
If ever there is anything that you'd like to know more about, just comment or send me a message.
Welcome to my new adventure!
