Saturday

Lately it seems like Monterrey has grown smaller. Sort of in the way that familiarity always makes home more intimate, Monterrey has just naturally become more intimate the longer we have been here. Not that there isn't a whole lot of it I haven't seen, but what I have seen, I feel like I know very well. I can give directions competently in English, and I can point my way to places, if necessary, in Spanish. We have witnessed several restaurants open and close, and grown used to things we saw them building when we first arrived. Witnessing the landscape change in this way makes us feel like old hands: I remember when the Wal-Mart was the Carrefour grocery store, we sit in our rockers and think. A lot of this comes from running into the Carapan man in La Casa de Maiz the other day and realizing we are very much part of the downtown community now. On the way to the restaurant, we had walked down the wrong side of the street to avoid being noticed by the staff at Estia, the Greek restaurant we like, who tend to wave at us from the windows when we pass because we have become regulars. We did not want to feel like we were cheating on one favorite restaurant for another. Today, they unveiled the yearly children's fund-raising fair at the church near our house. Last year this was blocking our road, but now it is all contained in the gravel parking lot across the street (it was still filled with equipment last year while the church was under construction). Last year,* the fair made us feel too big with all its teens and child-sized rides. This year, all packed into a lot, it even feels smaller somehow. [Cavin]