After Sara left for school this morning I had an appointment with a local Acupuncturist. I have a small nagging pain in my neck, Yes I can just imagine some of your comments right now!!!!
I have had the problem for a few months and decided to try this method. It was an interesting visit, the Doctor was born in Columbia, spoke perfect English and was very thorough in his examination and explained it all to me. In his opinion I have some inflammation in between the layers of muscles in my neck and the energy could not flow through. His treatment was to stick about 10 needles into me and let them stay for 20 minutes and then he lit something that looked like a cigar and smelled like weed and held it against the top of the needles until I could not stand the heat.
I did have one visit with a local Acupuncturist before I left Nanaimo, which did not seem to help and cost me 65 dollars. I will have to wait and see how this treatment goes but the cost was 30 dollars.
I have rented a car for the last week of Sara’s stay and we picked it up this morning then we went to one of the two giant grocery stores, this one is called Bodega and is a subsidiary of Wal-Mart. I wanted to go to the girl’s home and take some treats.
The donuts and sweet buns were well received by the Madres and the cook.
Of course some of the girls were happy to see them too.
Bonus time we got to spend a few minutes with Paola and Daniela and we had brought them a small T shirt which they wanted to try on right away.
I did notice how well Sara and especially Paola had bonded together. Paola was very attached to Sara and when we talked about it later Sara reminded me that when we had the girls at the park on Monday we walked there hand in hand. Daniela was on one side of the street with me and Paola was with Sara on the other side of the street and perhaps that time alone was enough for them to form a bond, interesting thoughts.
We said goodbye to the girls and it is not possible for Sara to go two days without shopping so I took her to a pottery factory about 10 miles outside of town.
The pottery was indeed very colourful and beautiful
I had been to this store before and knew that in the back of the store was the small factory where all the pieces were made and I asked if we could go back for a few minutes and see the workers. We were granted permission and saw the huge kilns
and one of the workers hand painting a dish.
Really blows you away to think that all the pieces big and small out front have been individually hand painted here.
It was hard shopping I had to sit outside to relax!!!!
The next stop was the small town of Atotonilco which is the home of an 18th century church which is one of the World Heritage buildings.
Virtually every inch of the walls and ceiling of this church are covered with Mexican folk art.
There were massive restorations under way
but you could get a sense of how important this church is to the people from the village.
I like this photo even though you cannot see the kids are playing soccer with the church in the background.
In the streets outside the church many small stalls sell religious items.
The stories I bet this lovely old lady could tell!!
Tonight Sara wanted to eat “local” so we found this very clean and busy Taco stand on one of the side streets…
For less than 2 dollars Sara had this great meal plus a bottle of water
which she said she needed because the meal was “hot”. Suffice it to say this good old English boy declined to eat here!!!
This last part of the day is very hard for me to talk about because we played a game of regular scrabble which I pride myself on being fairly good at…….I should have known that it was going to be humiliating when Sara played first got a seven letter word and started with 76 points….to say it went down hill from here would be an understatement…. so another game in the lost column…good job my memory is not that great and I cannot remember all these defeats.
Good night…..the loser…..
