Mexico!

My first realization that I'd departed the US of A came with a behemoth of a bus' appearance. The vehicle was missing its windshield and jacked twenty feet in the air alongside my plane. With the passengers squeezed shoulder to shoulder, or in my case face to suitcase, the bus lurched downward and we drove to the terminal.

Never in my life have I been the minority. It was kind of like a real life version of Where's Waldo. Only in Where's Whitey you don't get a snazzy striped jumper, just a predisposition to skin cancer. Looking every bit as perplexed as pale worked to my advantage in the end when an elderly commuter adopted me and guided me through declaration forms at customs.

When I heard Kimpson squealing my name , I swear it was accompanied by Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. We hadn't seen each other since graduation, but literally nothing had changed. Except everything. Meaning, she's blossomed into an official expatriate with a job, responsibilities, a van, etc. etc. etc. She remains, despite her dabbling in adulthood, incredibly fun , creative and spontaneous.

I stood, or sat rather as we were perched in a minivan flanked by gargantuan jugs of potable water, amazed as she rattled off espanol as if she'd lived in Mexico for decades instead of months. As we lugged my bags into her picturesque apartment (courtyard, tropical plants, tile, iron gates, the works--really, I'd imagined mi amiga roughing it, but she has a fantastic setup complete with wireless Internet and American TV........and a Starbucks down the road) it really sunk in that I had really left Cherokee and entered a country where I knew virtually no one and could barely order that cup of coffee if I remembered how to find Starbucks in the first place.

I have since been pleasantly surprised at how much espanol I understand......speaking it on the other hand, is a whole new box of Popsicle sticks. Seriously. No hablo espanol. I can usually understand the basic premise of what's said. Yet after a twenty second pause and scrambling to string together a halfway decent sentence in reply, I just stammer something incoherent or resort to miming. No es bueno.

I have managed to ask, quite successfully I might add, where the bathroom is originally from. Of course this did me little good in locating the loo, but I still consider it a verbal triumph. In Spanish you're never sleepy, you have sleepiness or tengo sueno. Trying to convey my famished state, I informed my new found friends not that I had much, much hunger but that I had had many, many men. Hambre, Hombre.......tomatoe, tomatoe right? Wrong.