Refugio

We’ve been in this neighborhood for 8 months now.

No complaints. Really. The house is perfect with a well defined separation between our business and our living quarters. The front of the house has a garden and a garage which, not having a car, we have turned into a hang out, registration area. We have lots of plants and two fish ponds, multiple sitting, a registration table and two hammocks.

The sun enters diagonally from about 8am, then full on until about 3pm and then diagonally again until about 4:30. The patch of garden is small and we don’t get all the direct sunlight we used to get in the other house, so some of the flowering plants won’t flower, others died with the move.

The neighborhood sits in low ground, it may have been a swamp before because there are lots of mosquitos. We have a park in front with big trees, grass in between. Really lovely. On the other side of the corner there is another park with a soccer field and two basketball courts and a green area with exercise toys for adults. The second park is very active before and after work hours. Classes happen at 7am and 7pm Monday through Friday. There’s no law against playing music in the parks so the teacher bring his giant speakers and blast the music for the whole neighborhood to hear. Fortunately the living quarters are receded in the back and the sound is faint inside but basically we teach yoga with some kind of music coming from the park. But no trucks with massive pollution which sounded like we were living beside the airport runway in the other house. Here the birds begin to chirp at 3am which is weird and may have to do with the gigantic lights over the parks. It does wake me up but at least earplugs are not an absolutely necessity. Anyway, I have trouble sleeping. The little kitty, Uma, likes to cuddle and takes up all the bed, makes me too hot so I reject he blankets and when I get cold, she is on top of them and I don’t have the heart to wake her up so I end up not sleeping. No trouble. I catch up with Savasana, jaja

Right away we started to have classes for one or two people. Not enough to cover our expenses even yet but definitely better than there even though this last month we had entire weeks when no one came. The people of this neighborhood are more working class. Most don’t know about yoga and some are predisposed against it for religious reasons. They believe it will damage their faith…whatever.

So, it is not without challenges. But we are content. We hope for more students, clearly. Still just barely scrapping by but it looks like next year we might take off and the days of waiting will be over.

For now we are gearing up to withstand Christmas. Loud parties, lots of fireworks, sometimes not our choice of music but we get into our cave and bake more cookies. Gluten free, egg less. Impossible to get in the markets here, so we have to make them ourselves.