Regiomontanos, as the people of Monterrey are called, are night owls. That’s probably because the heat and humidity make it so miserable to do anything during the day. But I’ve noticed that the evening rush hour peaks around 8pm and doesn’t really subside until 9pm or later. So it should not have surprised me that we were asked to come sign our lease at 9:30pm last night. What with the social pleasantries and all the dotting of i's and crossing of t’s on the rental agreement we didn’t get home until after 11pm, at which point Robin and I were dead beat. Enid was not at all sleepy of course.

The owners of our apartment live on a big family estate up on the side of a mountain in a colonia called Pedregal Del Valle. It’s the kind of super-wealthy enclave that I expected Del Valle to be from all the talk. But Del Valle is a slum compared to Pedregal Del Valle. Now I know where all the rich families really live: up above the smog. Stands to reason I guess.

We moved all of our stuff over to the apartment this afternoon. The owners said they were going to have it cleaned this morning, but we saw no evidence of it having been cleaned. In fact it’s pretty dirty, which was depressing, but nothing a little hard work won’t fix. The owners may still be planning to have someone come out and clean it for all I know. But it will be more difficult now that all of our stuff is in there. I guess that was the drawback of moving in on such short notice.

The apartment is not only dirty, it’s also kind of dumpy. Some of the furniture is decent, but much of it is junk. There are tears in the window screens, water damage on the bottom of the bathroom door, stuff like that. But the location and price are good enough that Robin and I figure we can live with dumpy furniture and torn screens for a year.

We didn’t get out stuff out of the hotel by checkout time so we ended up paying for another day. Therefore we are staying in the hotel tonight. Since we’ve already paid for it we figured we’d sleep here where the air conditioning and hot water won’t cost us a penny and someone else will make the beds tomorrow.