Things seem to be coming together. Yesterday Robin discovered a very nice furnished apartment on Río San Lorenzo in Del Valle advertised online for only 8000 pesos a month. It was an incredibly lucky find. We jumped on it immediately and the owner emailed me the lease this morning. It looks pretty much like a lease in the U.S.A., but in Spanish of course. We should be able to pay the deposit and first month’s rent today or tomorrow and move in this weekend. That will be a big load off our minds. The apartment is very close to one of the schools we liked a lot, and there are also a couple of other promising looking schools nearby that we haven’t visited yet. There is a great little play-park with a duck pond around the corner, and lots of shopping and restaurants within walking distance. My work is not far as the crow flies, but because of the layout of the connecting roads I probably won’t be able to walk or ride a bike. One option might be to buy a little motor scooter like the one I had in Hawaii.

The only real drawback of the apartment’s location is the air quality, which would have been better on the south side of the city. The air over Del Valle usually looks awful, with the kind of poor visibility you’d see on a bad day in Los Angeles. However when I check the readings from the monitoring stations on-line the readings are usually in the safe range even when the air looks terrible. So I keep wondering if maybe a lot of what I’m seeing in the air is just water vapor. The humidity here is always very high, so it’s possible that all the moisture reduces the clarity of the air. I sure hope that’s it.

Regarding the weather since we arrived, it has been ridiculously consistent. It reminds me a little of Hawaii where the forecast rarely varies from conditions roughly approximated by the word “perfect”. Except here instead of consistent perfection we get consistent misery. Well, not that bad I guess, but not particularly comfortable. Basically the weather since we’ve been here has been, almost without variation, partly cloudy with a high of 36°C, a low of 24°C and humidity around 80% (for the metric-challenged that’s 97°F and 75°F respectively). I actually don’t mind the heat very much if I’m in the shade, but out in the sun it’s pretty intense. So that seems to be the summer weather picture. It’ll be interesting to see what the other seasons are like.