(This post was written a few days ago. Now we’re a few days into our trip, which has been amazing! Blog post will come after the trip).
Hello! I’m sitting in a hip vegan restaurant with exposed brick walls, eccentric lighting, and servers who speak English. In other words, I’m definitely not in Valle anymore.
I just arrived in Mexico City to begin my weeklong spring break trip with one of my Fulbright friends, Rita. We’re meeting in Mexico City later today and catching a flight early tomorrow morning. We’ll spend a few days in Chiapas before making our way to Oaxaca and spending some more time there.
Mexico City is absolutely beautiful right now, all cool spring winds and floating dresses in shop windows and purple wisteria blooming in the Alameda. I walked the twenty-five minutes from the hostel to the museum and found a restaurant nearby. There was so much going on in the streets, vendors selling huaraches and sopes (which we don’t really have in Valle), a billion people walking around, and street performers with everything from guitars to LEGO costumes. I’m going to eat lunch and then spend some time wandering around el museo de arte popular, the museum of Mexican folk art. We had a tour there during orientation but I want to go back to slowly wander through the exhibits again.
Walking on these streets, I kept thinking back to my first week here in Mexico. We stayed in this same area, and I walked down the same street I walked down with a group of Fulbrighters our first night here as we ventured into the city to find dinner. I remember being stunned by the huge amount of people – it’s not that I’d never seen big streets before, but I’d never before seen such a homogeneity of Mexicans in one place. My first night in Valle, when I was completely along in an apartment in a town where literally I knew literally one person, in a place 2,222 miles from my home, in a new and foreign country, I remember being petrified and stiff in my bed. With every noise outside, the blare of music, car engines backfiring, people shouting indiscernibley, I curled a little more into myself and wondered what I had gotten myself into.
And today, I got up, threw out my trash, greeted the gas man as he told me “Hola mija,” stopped by the bakery to pick up some snacks, hopped on a bus, and came to Mexico City. So many simple things that I had to learn upon coming here.
Yesterday, me and Bere had a mini freak out where we realized that coming back from spring break, we’ll have less than two months left in Valle. It’s this indescribable sadness upon realizing the end is so near. There is so much that I wanted to see before I left, but I’ve already accepted I’m not going to get to everywhere on my list!
More than the traveling though, I’ll miss my ordinary extraordinary life here. My friends, my routine, my tranquil life. Because I know I’ll be able to come back to Valle one day, I’ll be able to return to this place, but I’ll never be able to return to this time and this place. In the future, stores will close down and move. The children I love right now will grow up. Distance will grow between the relationships I have here. It’s not a sadness, but just a simple inevitability that comes with the movement of time.
I learned this on my second trip to Granada last summer, the first time I had been back since I studied abroad. Studying abroad was such an important four months of my life. My first time really living alone and abroad, I grew so much, saw so much, and learned so much in this time. Granada, for me, is representative of a period of my life where I learned to use my voice, to go from shy and self-conscious to a stronger, bolder self. My memories there are of joy, growth, love, and self-awareness. But going back just wasn’t the same. I had forgotten the streets I used to know by heart. Locations of shops had changed slightly. The food didn’t taste as good as it did in my memories. When meeting my host family for lunch, my heart was soothed a little, because the place I had called home had barely changed – but I had. I could not longer understand my host mother’s accent perfectly, and my Spanish was rusty as I tried to tell how just how much I missed her.
Going back to Granada, funnily enough, reminded me of my own mortality. That inevitable passage of the thing we call time. I could go back to the place I called home, but I couldn’t, I will never, return to both that time and that place. And that same concept applies here. Keeping this in mind has helped me to enjoy each and every one of my simple days here immensely.
And more than this, that same concept applies to all of the places I will find myself in my life. As I enter medical school, I want, I will strive, to remember this as best as I can. Even with the work and the stress, I want to enjoy medical school as it happens and not let it take my joy from me.
Mexico, I will miss you immensely. Thank you for letting me into your beautiful heart and your beautiful home. And thank you, thank you, for teaching me to love my life in the moment.
La Coreana Americana 