When I think back on the last 5 years it is hard to believe all the things we have seen and done, most of which we enjoyed. It has been 5 years of major life changes.
We sold everything in Canada that didn't fit into the car and said goodbye to consumerism, status symbols and stress. Major change! We have continued our life SOB happy with ourselves and each other and find no need to try and purchase happiness. We live a very simple life here compared to NOB and love it. We haven't lived here for 5 years yet, that anniversary will be the 10 th of October this year.
We have traveled some of the USA and spent some weeks at different times in New Mexico and also Arizona. We have spent 7 weeks on the Baja. We have traveled a little bit on the Mexican mainland, not a lot. We have explored most of our sprawled out city on foot in most of the neighborhoods, good and not so good. We have never felt threatened. We have explored our surrounding area by car and seen some very interesting things. This area has a lot of history being a port city.
We have driven, flown, bussed and taken ferries.
I must have taken about a million pictures and apparently a lot of people have enjoyed looking at them as my webshots photos usually have anywhere from 1500 to 3500 views a week. Unbelievable to me!!! I have found websites online using my photos, (without permission), which kind of irks me in some ways. I don't mind people downloading the pictures to their computers for their own use; but when commercial sites use them without asking permission it does bother me a bit. I have started putting the blog name on the photos that I upload (which is a pain in the butt), so if they use them now they have to go to the trouble of editing the photos first.
We have learnt to go with the flow and to relax more. We have learned some Spanish and hopefully will continue to learn more. It is nice to be able to converse with people in the stores, etc. now. We have attended more parties in the last five years than I probably attended in 15 yrs. in Canada. This is a big thing for us as we are both a bit antisocial and like being on our own. We have met many people including our landlords and their families who have all been amazingly open to us and have basically adopted us into the family. We have great neighbors who don't often have loud parties lol. We now meet people downtown in our city of around 130,00 or more, that we know.
We have navigated the immigration FM3 process on our own along with the IMSS application process. We go to doctors, dentists, optometrists appointments, basically all the necessities in life and manage in Spanish.
We returned to Canada for a couple of weeks in February this year and managed to renew our passports in English, yah us good for 5 more years!
We have noticed changes over the 5 years in our adopted city. The prices go up as they do everywhere, more people are speaking English, more people are leaving their homes wearing more casual clothing, eg: shorts, more people from NOB are venturing into Guaymas; although very few actually live right in the city. The city is trying to clean up the garbage more and is looking nicer. Lots of ascetic work has been done in the downtown area probably because of the cruise ships starting to come in. Despite the changes the city continues to be a working port city and we continue to love it.
We discussed what the 1 thing is out of the last 5 years that we will never forget and both agreed that it was when we first drove into town and recognized things in the area from the photos that we had been looking at over the previous 10 months of online researching. An unforgettable sight to us.
I raise my glass of ice cold Coca Cola to this great city, state and country. May the next 5 years be as good as the last 5 have been.
