Fast forward to 2022. We moved to a new place outside Austin, Texas. And we love it. It's a place of our own, in a very nice and quiet neighborhood. It gets some time to get used to life in suburban America: lack of public transportation and/or sidewalks, almost no pedestrians anywhere, everything is so quiet, heavy dependence on personal vehicles for almost any kind of errand you need to run, and long commutes even to the closest Walmart/Target. 
I love it though. Coming from a small town in a third world country, I'm not used to live in big cities. I did live in Caracas, Venezuela's capital, for a couple of years until my daughter was born in 2013, and then we decided it was time to move somewhere else. Few years back in the countryside, then migrating to Costa Rica, and now Texas.  Quite a change, if you ask me.
Having this suburban lifestyle is interesting: most of the social interactions revolve around very specific places: either at the community pool, church, school or any major retailer (grocery stores, home improvement stores, wholesale retailers, etc). Since I'm not a religious person, I end up running into acquaintances , my kids' friends/parents and co-workers in places like HEB or Target. But most interestingly is the lack of dependence of being in (or near) a "big city" for doing anything, with some minor exceptions.
Culturally speaking, the farther you live form a city, the less diverse places actually are, so for some specific things I end up traveling to Austin at least 2 or 3 times per year. It's like updating this blog, lol.
 Whether it's a concert, or have some fancy dinner with the missus, Austin still got it and its suburbs can't keep up, for now. I went to 2 concerts in 2022: Japanese Breakfast and Sigur Rós, and I enjoyed them greatly. I also traveled to downtown Austin and San Antonio with my best friend who was in town for a few days, but that's another post for another day. It's fun, but it wears me out quickly, so it's time to go back to my small town, where pools are a blessing during summertime and parking lots can actually be fun places to hang out.
As always, a camera is with us, and due to its ease of use, kids usually take pictures of themselves until we have run out of film, which has become greatly expensive to shoot. Bummer.
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