Long Time No See

So it's been 41 days since I last posted-- over a month.  Trust me when I say that wasn't intended.  Moreover, being that the last post was a story about suicide, the insensitivity (and irony) of leaving a long silence doesn't escape me; sorry for that.

In any case, an explanation is in order.  My intent with this blog was not just to say, "I'm here, doing this.  A week ago I was in this other place, doing such and such," but instead to try to convey my thoughts and feelings.  Apparently that kinda petered out.  The thing is, after a certain amount of time, traveling becomes life.  The lack of routine, contantly meeting new people, engaging in new and unexpected experiences or troubles or frustrations-- they form a new kind of order.  The novelty becomes less novel.

I get the feeling that, were I traveling in a different culture or atmosphere, everything would start over again.  The game would be reset like an hourglass being turned over and I'd be left scrambling again to orient myself in a new world.  However, that hasn't been the case these last three months-- it's been Mexico from the get-go.  As a result, the grooves have been well-trodden and it's been rather easy to just flow with the current.

That's why I haven't written: things just haven't seemed that noteworthy.  I'm sure in a year I'll think back and remember it all as so exciting and exotic, but for the moment this has been life.  Still, I probably should be recounting that life, and so from here on out I'm gonna try to write more regularly and say what's going on, even if I don't feel like I can say it poetically or well.

With that in mind, here's a super-fast recap of the last month and a half, with apologies for the unfortunate length:

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I spent a week and a half in Guadalajara.  The city was large and cosmopolitan, though I can't say I really fell in love with it or anything.  The couchsurfers I stayed with were really cool, though, and for me at least that really can make or break a place.  While there I got to go mountainbiking for the first time in my life and it was a hell of an experience.  The bike that my host procured for me had 21 gears, all of which would consistently skip while you were trying to go uphill, jumping and jolting to the point that I pretty much had to run up every hill we got to, dragging the bike alongside me.  This added to the memorability of the experience-- shooting down gravel slopes, swerving or popping over big rocks, then quickly dismounting and running up the next slope to try to keep up with my host.  It was terrifying, exhausting, and a lot of fun.

 

The thing I remember most about Guadalajara though, is my host Claudia.  She made racing noises while driving, didn't know how to cook almost anything, and had such a unique was of talking it pretty much was guaranteed to make you smile, if not for her gesticulations then for the random, incomprehensible sounds she was prone to throwing in.  She was so vivacious and fun to be around, always bursting with excitement at everything new and novel.  I remember when I described her as "quirky" and, more than anything, remember the look she gave me when I made a terrible attempt at explaining what quirky means: "it's like if you were a painter but you only painted lemons and you had, like, twenty paintings of lemons in your house."  I spent a long time after that trying to assure her that I wasn't calling her insane....

After Guadalajara I went to Guanajuato, a city of steep, narrow streets and tight alleys.  It was my first time staying in a hostel alone and the best way to describe it would be terribly underwhelming: one Aussie dude snoring loudly all night and two Chinese girls that spoke not a word of English or Spanish.  It was kind of a lonely two days. 

After that came San Miguel de Allende, a beautiful artist town that's completely swamped by American and Canadian ex-pats.  It was there that I met Michael while staying in another hostel.  He was a 20-something Dane that was incredibly intelligent, logical, and who disagreed with me on everything.  Somehow, though, we got along great, and my four days and three nights in San Miguel were spent almost exclusively engaged in 5- or 8-hour debate marathons with Michael, discussing the value of science or medicine or conspiracies or morality or practically any other subject out there, the two of us firmly planted on opposite sides but, in time, each coming to see a bit of the other's perspective.  I honestly don't think I've ever learned as much talking with any one person as I did talking with Michael, and I can only hope he feels like he gained something talking with me as well.

From San Miguel I went to another of Mexico's "colonial jewels," Querétaro.  There I met a girl-- an American named Yael-- and wasted two days on her.  At the end of it I came to the realization that her pretty face didn't make up for her personality, and with that I was off to Mexico City.

Mexico City was nothing like I'd imagined.  Big, sprawling, incomprehensible in size?  Yes, yes, yes.  But dirty and polluted and overrun with traffic?  Well, not really.  In fact, it was a heck of a lot nicer in all those aspects than most of the places I'd already been (granted I was almost exclusively in the downtown area of Mexico City so i can't speak about the more peripheral regions, but I'm also comparing that against mostly downtowns in other cities as well).  I stayed in hostels again, thinking this would be a good place to meet fellow travelers.  The first place I went to had great reviews on the internet, being lauded repeatedly as a very "social" hostel.  I soon came to understand that "social" meant "beer, drinking, and bars."  In fact, the hostel had a bar on the roof and that's pretty much where everyone remained from 3 pm until 3 am. 

I tried to socialize, to hang out and meet people, but I discovered that in a bar, a man without a beer in his hand is a social outcast.  The only real conversation I had was with a German whose name was Zach as well.  I asked him where he'd been to already and where he was going.  He'd spent some time in Cuba.  "Oh yeah?  What'd you see in Cuba?" I asked.  "All of it," he said. "All of it?" I repeated, increduously.  "Yeah, it's not that big."  I let that conversation die and just went down to bed. 

The next day I found a different hostel and five days later left Mexico City.  Before I left though, I had a chance to go rock climbing with two couchsurfers, going about an hour and a half outside of Mexico City to a forest with large, rock spires shooting out above the canopy.  I didn't have my own shoes with me, though, and had to borrow shoes from my hosts.  They were really small and incredibly painful, making that experience particularly memorable but enjoyable nonetheless.

From Mexico City I went to Oaxaca, arriving April 6th.  I ended up spending three weeks there.  The time I was there, the people I met, and the things I did probably deserve their own post, but I'm on a roll.  I didn't intend to spend so much time in Oaxaca-- in truth it was my shoes that made me stay.  I'd finally decided that I wanted to make rock climbing a big part of my travels, so I'd asked my parents to send my climbing shoes and harness down from the US.  The USPS said it'd take 6-10 days to arrive, but I found out from several Mexicans that it sometimes can take up to a month.  With that in mind, I hunkered down and tried to find something to do.  The first CSer I stayed with works for an NGO and said they could use database help.  I said I had some theoretical knowledge of it and would be willing to give it a shot but that you get what you pay for (they weren't paying me), so I did that for a bit. 

I also saw what is reputed to be the widest tree in the world in terms of trunk girth (El Tule tree) and saw some cool ruins (Monte Albán).  Mostly I hung out with the hosts I ended up staying with for almost the entire three weeks-- Magali, Susano, and Pavel.  When they'd get back from school we'd talk about music, watch lucha libre (wrestling) or a soccer match on TV, chat about life, or whatever.  I even got a chance to go to a quinceañera and see Pavel's band play, being of course the only white person and spending most of the time being stared at (we were on the outskirts of a little village an hour from Oaxaca).

Near the end of April I had the chance to go with Pavel to see Juquila, a small town tucked in the mountains of southern Mexico.  Pavel, Magali, and Susano were all born there and, when Pavel and I went, Magali and Susano were there as well, staying with their parents in the house across the street from Pavel's.  The town is one of the holiest in Mexico, with many Mexicans making a pilgrimage to it at least once in their lives in order to see the Virgin of Juquila.  I spent most of my three days there vomiting and listening to every crazy theory out there as to why I was sick-- it was the mole I ate or the fact that I ate it with water instead of juice or that I ate a piece of cake in the evening or it was the altitude or the change in weather or this or that or another thing.  I ended up carrying the sickness with me back to Oaxaca, continuing my early-morning vomits for 5 or 6 days total, though in truth I felt fine except for the mornings. 

And then on May 3rd I finally left Oaxaca.  And now I'm in Puebla, staying with a 27-year-old that absolutely loves to bike.  She leads spinning classes and so I've had a chance to try that (more enjoyable than I expected!) and we also got a chance to go climbing which, added to the one time in Mexico City and the three times in Oaxaca, makes five times in Mexico so far. 

The plan at the moment is to leave on Saturday and return to Mexico City, staying there till my flight on the 12th to Los Angeles.  I'll be in LA for six days and then, on the 18th, leave for Singapore (unexpected, I know).  I'm hoping to wander up through Southeast Asia and then either head towards India or China, with the intent being to learn either Hindi or Chinese, the choice probably ultimately coming down to whim and fancy, I guess.

So with that, things are caught up.  Apologies for the length of this post and, once again, apologies for not keeping this updated.  Hopefully I'll do a better job of this in the future, though at this point it's probably better if I don't promise anything....