So fresh and so clean

After several days of doing very little, I woke up this morning and felt peppy again. I decided to capitalize on this in several ways. First I hand-washed my bath towel on the roof, suddenly causing it to weigh about 75 lbs, which only made me feel even more invincible when I hung it up to dry. Then I came downstairs and made my favorite oatmeal breakfast, this time with a real vanilla bean since today was going to be spectacular.

While breakfasting I stumbled on this gem of an entry on Macheesemo, one of my favorite cooking blogs. I couldn't hold back my comment, which I typed over the chipper sounds of the Nuñez Sisters' 1960s accordion polka compilation CD. In the time that it took me to wash my entire collection of four dishes, Mr. Macheesmo had replied, leading me to feel that this awesome day now had my online cooking hero's blessing.

I suddenly realized that my visitors (f.b. friends from Guadalajara and Querétaro) are arriving in only two days. This got me even more excited. I decided to buy food for them to diffuse my enthusiasm. I put on flip-flops and a T-shirt, since I now live in a casual college town instead of a major world capital, and left my apartment to hit the cobblestones. I was immediately engulfed in a new sensation - heat. Hot hot heat. Mexico's version of winter (awesome to begin with) is over!

The route to the supermarket led me through the historic heart of downtown Xalapa. The marimba players were out and cha-cha-cha-ing under the portico. I also saw lots of couples making out on park benches. Spring really IS here! 

As I hiked up the tall cobblestone hill to the supermarket, I realized that there was no point in buying any produce until Friday, when I can simply swing by the outdoor market in my neighborhood an hour before my guests arrive. The same goes for bread, eggs, milk, cheese, tortillas, and chocolates—all of these things are available for crazy cheap at mom-and-pop stores within spitting distance of my apartment. I chuckled upon realizing this, threw some Jose Cuervo and a box of Splenda into my shopping cart, and headed to the cash register.

If my Great-Grandma Paulina had a blog....

I hope this is what she would say. The following is an excerpt from her emailed response (heck yeah my great-grandma sends emails!) to my mom, who had let her know that she and my dad were about to come down here for a visit:

Have fun in Mexico City. We did when we visited there in the motor home. We had the tour of the city, visited the pyramids and the famous cathedral there. We travelled with a caravan of some 25 rigs, camped outside the city and were bussed in. We also went to a Mexican Festivale and that was special. Your parents were here Saturday and we ate at the Chunese buffet. Mary Alice and family will come Friday night to go to Ponderosa. That seems to be the motto in this family anymore "Take Grandma out and feed her". Today I have a dental app't. This world is full of fun!

Bloggles

Urrgh, the dreaded first entry back after being away for too long. In the last three or six weeks, I can't remember, I have been tossing around the same geographic circuit in a perpetual, lone gym sock-like motion. This means I had lots of fun and did occasional backflips, but mostly craved the moment when the ride would be over. Now it's high time to cool off, and more importantly, to have someone smell me.

February was mostly composed of trips to new lands,  such as Chiapas, Valle de Bravo, Oaxaca, and Michoacan. These are already starting to congeal into one big, blurry super-trip memory in my head, thanks to my awesomely disciplined blogging on the road (note lack of link to further reading). But let it be recorded now that you had much fun, Ms. TwoShoes, even though two of those trips were failed butterfly expeditions.

Late February and March consisted of return visits and retraced steps. Our Fulbright midyear meetup brought me back to the same hotel where we'd landed, clueless, in August, only this time I felt much more at home with my hoop earrings and knock-off designer purse. I had so much fun catching up with the far-flung f.b. gang that I wound up delaying my move to Xalapa another day, so that I could tour the south side canals of Xochimilco with them for a second (totally sweet) time.

My move to the quaint, Alpiney-fresh mountain community of Xalapa took place the next day on a bus, and given my love for The Sound of Music the romance of this was almost unbearable. Fortunately I was bogged down with 6 months' worth of steadily accumulated Mexican crap, such as my collection of knock-off designer purses, making the Fraulein Maria dance to my new apartment pretty much impossible.

I spent 72 lovely hours in my new home, which you can tour thanks to a video by its rad former inhabitants. I spent most of that time inside, working, lounging, and sewing buttons on several sweaters which, again, was suddenly the neatest thing ever in my country surroundings. I did manage to get out to the supermarket, where I realized that setting up a Mexican kitchen from scratch is a tricky but totally exhilarating task. Vanilla extract, for example, comes in only one size: half-liter. Since I didn't have a shopping list, I just conjured up one of those Flemish still lifes in my head and worked from that instead.

But before I knew it, my country life was interrupted and I lugged a suitcase back onto a bus bound for Mexico City, in order to fly back to Chicago for the weekend. Over the course of three days, the weather morphed before me like the colors of a mood ring. What started out green and peaceful suddenly flared up red and hot in the hazy Wednesday evening sunset at the Mexico City TAPO terminal. This was followed by the blue, cold drizzle of Chicago, where I stayed for three days, got interviewed by a parade of professors for a grad program, and turned twenty-four.

In one of my interviews, I snuck a sleep-deprived yawn while my interviewer looked through my file. Noticing that I keep a blog, he commented that blogs often make him feel guilty when he slacks off on their upkeep. I told him I could not understand this better, since I had spent weeks away from my own blogs. But, I had to ask, since I was practically in slumber-party gossip mode, hadn't he ever experienced the feeling of bloggles?

What is bloggles, he asked, inviting me to proceed to ruin whatever academic potential he'd seen in my file.

Holding back another yawn, I suddenly found myself speaking openly for the first time all day. It's the way you start to see the world when you're consistently and actively blogging, I said. It makes you look for themes, and try to frame moments with good composition, like if you were taking a picture. It's good for your imagination, and helps you (er, should help you) to be concise.