A pretty chill day in Toluca

Tuesday, October 15- Day 3

This was a pretty relaxing day!! Which was fine by me.

My father-in-law had to work, and others had a variety of little errands etc to do. Ivan was in and out with his mom/brother for part of the day and then he, his brother, Asher and Kalej all went to get haircuts.

We had a slow coffee/tea hour earlier on before that:

While people were gone, I enjoyed a quiet house, took a shower, and stretched out on my bed and read for a long while.

Ivan knows the constant family interaction can get draining for me, so when these situations arise, he’s always like, “Go relax!! Go read!! You always complain that you don’t have time to do those things at home!!”

Ethan joined me for a bit and worked on a little homework.

There was a lot of sort of hanging around, etc and my mother-in-law eventually made rice, beans and flank steak with corn tortillas and salsa.

Around 5 pm we headed out to go downtown. Ivan wanted to get his dress pants hemmed a little at a tailor, so we drove around a bit trying to find the place. This one section of downtown Toluca is like, wedding and quinceañera central!! In hindsight I should have just waited and bought a dress here. The streets are LINED with shop after shop full of gorgeous dresses and suits. Just from the window displays alone I saw probably 10 that I would have liked! Oh well.

He dropped the pants off and then we met back up with everyone else. His dad met us down there from work, too, and his sister and 3 girls as well.

His mom had mentioned that downtown is nice right now because they have the “portales” up for the Day of the Dead. These are dozens upon dozens of little stands selling trinkets, decorations, candies, chocolates, toys, etc all related to el Día de los Muertos.

There are also fun light up calaveras, or the skeleton heads, lining the streets!

There’s also a big “ofrenda” (you all know that Spanish term now, after you all watched Coco, right? 😜) in one of the plaza areas that was really nice. Lots of locals stopping to take family photos there, etc.

Downtown is lined with shops, plus the pop up portales, so we wandered around for quite a long time.

Down this one corridor there was a music group playing and it was packed with people dancing cumbias! So fun and very authentic. (Toluca is not a tourist hot spot in Mexico really… we usually never see a single other American while we’re there and our English is generally the only English you’ll hear!)

We took Kaly out to the main plaza to see the government buildings lit up and the cathedral.

This little trolley was decorated for Day of the Dead, too. 🙂 Cute!

I liked these banner type things that lined the buildings also- again, all Day of the Dead themed.

We decided to stop somewhere for coffee/frappes and found this cute place. “Cachi Bache Caffe”.

We headed back home by maybe 9.

Some of us, myself included, ended up staying up really late… my mother-in-law got cleaning the kitchen at like 10 pm (lol) and we were just sitting and talking and ended up making some quesadillas. Eventually his parents went to bed but Ivan, both of his brothers, and I were chatting a long while, and we also What’s App video chatted with Kaly’s parents back in the U.S.

All in all, a very nice, relaxing day, with a fun evening excursion to round it out. 🙂