Feliz Navidad!

It's 7pm here in El Mirador and there's a very noisy card game going on. Christmas started yesterday evening with a Mexican meal of Bacalao, Romeritos with potatoes, nopales and Oaxacan Mole Negro, and Bunuelos. I'll leave it up to you to Google what all of these dishes consist of :) We sat up on the roof at sunset with glasses of wine and watched the sky turning the most amazing shades of blue, black, grey and blood red.

Today started early with the arrival of Santa and then we spent an hour or so opening presents. There are nine adults, two children and two dogs in the house so you can imagine the bedlam. I was in charge of the Irish Christmas dinner and, despite the vagaries of the new gas oven, we sat down to turkey, ham and all the trimmings about 3pm. We all of course ate too much but took the dogs out for a walk to the local park, had a sit down and a chat while they were playing ball with the kids and felt much better when we got back.

The weather here is just wonderful. When I was last here in August 2012 I knew it was somewhere I could spend a lot of time. It's a very clean, safe city with loads of fabulous restaurants and shops, plenty of culture and at least five big parks and plazas. The climate is dry and sunny with very little rainfall. It's not in an earthquake zone and, best of all for me, there are very few mosquitoes.

In one of the Plazas, Jardin Zenea, each of the four little gardens has a biblical scene set up: the Nativity; the animals from Noah's Ark; and, this could only happen in Mexico, a scene from Hell with a myriad of red Devils in various ghastly poses. Every Plaza has plenty of shade, lovely Victorian wrought iron benches, fountains - lovely places to sit and people watch - and, of course, vendors selling balloons, bubble machines, sweets as well as shoe shiners, Lustradores, in their little booths. Well, that's the Blog set up. More later in the week x