Daily Life in Oaxaca

I realized yesterday that we've been living in Oaxaca for two months now and I've been completely remiss in not sharing a glimpse into our daily/weekly routines.

On a typical weekday Duke wakes Trevor up around 5:30am, ready for breakfast. After feeding the kitties, Trevor does a live stream on his Twitch channel for a few hours. He does some daily games like Wordle and Connections, plays Grand Theft Auto, and tests out new games. To be perfectly honest, I'm usually sleeping during his streams, so I can't go into much more detail than that on his morning routine.

When I wake up, I enjoy doing yoga in the house before getting ready for the workday. We both work remotely during the day and we have separate workspaces in this house, so it's easy and comfortable to do. The internet is usually pretty good, but sometimes it does cut in and out. So far luckily it has not been too disruptive to our jobs.

Around 12:30pm, the sun hits our patio and Sitah is ready to go out and sunbathe. The nights have been getting cooler here in November/December, and since the house is built to stay cool, it takes a long time for it to warm up in the mornings. So someone needs to be on the lookout for the first rays of sunshine on the patio :)

We make our own lunches at home, usually a quesadilla with eggs and fresh avocado for me.

After work, we go out for a walk, usually to do one of the following activities:

A. Spanish lessons

When we first arrived, we found a Spanish language tutor and signed up for lessons together, meeting three times a week. So that was a big part of our schedule for the first 6 weeks here. Eventually the homework started getting harder and we started dreading our lesson days (eek!). So we've decided to take a break from tutoring for now. We both use the DuoLingo language learning app every day and I also just ordered a new Spanish workbook from Amazon Mexico so we will continue with self-study for now.

B. Grocery shopping

There are many small tiendas/shops in our neighborhood, but we prefer to shop at the larger grocery stores which have more variety. There are three major grocery stores within a 15-20 minute walk of our house. Two of them are average size and quality, and the third is very fancy...It has a cart escalator, a lot of international foods, and a wide selection of clothes and home goods- we describe this store as the fanciest Fred Meyer you've ever seen. This is Trevor's favorite store, despite being the furthest away. We take two duffle bags with us and carry everything home on foot. Because we can only carry so much at one time, and we prepare most of our meals at home we usually go to a store at least three times a week.

C. Laundromat

We don't have a washing machine in our rental home, so we need to take our laundry out to get done. There are several drop and go full-service laundry shops nearby, which seem to be more common than self-service laundromats where you sit and wait for your laundry to be completed. We have found through experience that it costs about the same to drop off our laundry as it is to do it ourselves. So we bring our laundry in bags to the Lavanderia and they weigh it. They charge by the kilogram and we pay upfront. We come back 48 hours later and it's been washed, dried and neatly folded for us. I will say that laundry is quite expensive here...This week we dropped off two full duffle bags including bedding a few towels and cloths for the past week, and it cost 350 pesos, or about 17.25 USD. On the other hand, all of our utilities are included in the cost of our rent, so we can simply think of this as our water/electricity bill and then maybe it's not so bad when you compare it to the cost of utilities in the US.

In the evening, Trevor cooks dinner (I taught him well!) and we like to relax with the kitties. After a DuoLingo session, I like to watch a movie or show using our projector (since we have no TV), and Trevor likes to game or do more work.

Weekends

Our Saturday and Sunday routine still includes some of the activities above, like grocery shopping of laundry, but we also like to go for a longer walk to explore a new neighborhood or part of the city. I like to walk on Sundays because it's very quiet around town, with very little traffic noise and chaos to navigate. However, you may see it as a pro or a con, but most shops and cafes are also closed on Sundays, so that limits our window shopping or cafe-going options.

Occasionally we might sign up for an organized hike, or if we have visitor in town we will go out to eat, and spend time downtown in "Centro" for sightseeing or to browse the shops that cater to tourists and are more likely to be open on weekends. I also have a mental list of places I'd like to go before we leave Oaxaca- different churches and markets, etc. Hopefully you'll see some of these featured in future blog posts!

Here's a picture of our rental house. We live in the blue and white one. The tall building next door is an upscale gym and salon, and they just opened a new cafe on the ground floor last week. But it has a lot of competition from the ~5 other cafes on our block!