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.

X marks the spot

Tomorrow kicks off a month of trips, which will culminate in my move to Xalapa, Veracruz at the end of February. Goodbye estarbucks, WiFi and puffy-sleeved blazer; hello mountains, dubbed Harrison Ford bus movies, and greatest invention on earth. My February stops include, but are not limited to, Taxco, Oaxaca, and Tuxtla, (and I'm crossing fingers for vacancy at the Hotel Xibalba at Palenque).... so I invite you to insert joke about x-rated or x-cellent adventures here. 

Although I'm happy as a clam (for they too can live with little oxygen) in the capital, I'm pretty stoked to see more of this country. But in order to do this, I will have to first get over my feelings about wearing a T-shirt two days in a row, hand sanitizer, and jam band festivals. Yes, it is time to broaden my horizons.

That's sprawl, folks

To celebrate the culmination of my first project in Mexico, and to clear my mind before before diving into the Chicago winter, I decided to take a day trip yesterday.

When I left the apartment, carrying a purse containing a camera, bottle of water, and post-it with some scribbled directions to the bus station, I realized that I am 23 years old and have never taken a trip abroad by myself. I pondered this while stepping over a stray dog and someone's half-eaten quesadilla on the way to the subway, and decided I could blame this on the fact that I've only been to places where females are discouraged from traveling alone.

But then I realized that hasn't stopped many of my girlfriends from boarding buses, boats, and burros by themselves, or lending me their Lonely Planet guidebooks (which I've hardly opened) marked up with highlighters and asterisks and, most intimidating of all, check-marks.

And so, sweating in the unventilated subway car, I was forced to face a fact about my personality that I've sensed for several years now (starting four years ago when I flew all the way to Hamburg to visit one of my best friends, only to suggest upon arrival that we skip the museums and watch the entire Der Herr Der Ringe trilogy on DVD instead).

I am extremely unskilled in planning and motivating myself to travel. Exactly once every four years since high school, I have been satisfied, exhilaration-wise, with neatly folding my sweaters in foreign closets. Until yesterday, every side trip I've taken while abroad was a piggyback on someone else's itinerary. Any badass travel photos of me that might suggest otherwise were, more often than not, were taken by the person who singlehandedly got us there.

Yesterday's destination of Tepozotlan, a "magical town" to the north of Mexico City, was of course not my idea, but rather a suggestion from one intrepid female traveler (and excellent storyteller of a) friend. The town is known for it's Museum of the Virreinato (the Spanish viceregal period), which meant there would be lots of fabric, jewels, bibles, and Virgin statues—in other words, everything necessary to jack myself up on Christmas spirit.

I am not going to bore you, or myself again, with the details of why my trip was a bust. Let's just say that I made a series of bad public transportation choices, opting for a cheap city bus instead of a swanky direct one (that's what intrepid travelers do, right?), which resulted in a long, slow slog out of an endless Mexico City. Having to pee, I eventually gave up and and asked to be dropped off on the side of the highway, a decision which I immediately regretted.

Two buses and hours later I finally arrived to Tepozotlan, a colonial fairyland shielded by monasteries from a highway choked with Wal-Marts and junkyards. I decided to grab lunch before visiting the museum. It was 1 p.m. (3 hours after leaving my home, which I sensed was only about 15 miles away), so I had plenty of time to make it to the museum before closing time. 

I sat down in a little cantina tucked behind a tortilleria and a primary school, where my fellow diners were an elderly woman and a sixth-grader in his uniform. While watching Cartoon Network en español, together we plowed through our bowls of consomé de pollo, rice and lima beans, washing it down with several glasses of fresh tamarind juice. ("Caray, this juice is good," observed the señora. This constituted our entire lunchtime conversation.)

I thanked the owner and put down my 35 pesos before heading out the door. I was finally starting to relax after my loud and rickety journey down one of the world's smoggiest highways. The Museum, housed in a 16th-century Jesuit monastery, stretched out before me in the sunlit central plaza. The sight seemed all the more beautiful when compared to the castle-like oil refinery that I had passed a few hours before.

I closed my eyes and tried to erase the image of fresh-brewed smog spewing out of the refinery's smokestacks and hovering over the nearby Sam's Club. I replaced it with one in which the harmonious voices of Indian children, singing devotions to Mary, wafted out of the monastery walls and mingled with the crisp mountain air. Meanwhile their plump Jesuit teachers painted prayers in squiggly Latin and glued gold leaf onto shrines, topping them religious relics. All of this I would behold 400 years later and at a student discount.

"Museum Closed This Afternoon for Annual Employee Christmas Party," read the sign at the ticket counter. My gasp echoed, nun-style, through the arched hallway.

Hearing my distress, a round man with a mustache peeked out from behind the coat check. "Please come back another day," he said, returning to something I could not see but assumed with some anger was a christmas present. I stood planted on the cobblestone floor, in what probably came off as stubbornness but was actually sheer dread of going back to the highway.

"Señorita," he said with an exasperated sigh, as if he'd dealt with my kind before. (Could he be mistaking me for an intrepid female traveler?)

"I came from D.F.," I squeaked, my eyes brimming with what I assured myself was a just natural reaction to highway dust. "...alone."

After a pause, the man conceded a sympathetic nod. "You have 15 minutes. I recommend you head directly to the chapel."

Inside the chapel, now emptied of visitors, I craned my neck while oohing and aahing over the intricate carvings, the gold leaf, and the saints. In keeping with the day's theme, my camera promptly died after taking my first picture. But this freed me to do nothing but savor the chapel's splendor, a 15-minute sanctuary sandwiched between six total hours of smog and sprawl. Before I knew it, a guard kindly escorted me to the exit, just as children carrying piñatas made their way in.