July 25th, 2008- 10:30 pm
-$15 USD telechip Telsel (came with $7.5 in minutes)
- $10 tarjeta de llamadas prepaga
-$3 USD fresh squeezed juice for Jess and I (mine was orange and papaya)
-$5 three tacos and huge horchata
-$4 metro tickets for Jess and I
-$250 one months rent
-$8 taxi from Jess’ to here
I have a new home. I am ecstatic as only travel going perfectly can make me. It is a delightful yellow room with adobe tiled floors, up a tiny stairway and through a very old wooden door. I am renting from a french couple, Virginie and Erik, who have two children. It is costing me $2,500 pesos, or about $250 USD a month, which is by my standards and I guess by anyone’s standards here, really reasonable. All they needed was a copy of my passport and first month’s rent. I came over by taxi a bit ago, and they even gave me dinner- a very french a delicious pasta with bacon and sausage thrown in for good measure. This room is the prettiest place I’ve ever lived, completely furnished, and the bathroom in my room even has the most artistic toilet with ceramic lizards. I moved in in about ten minutes flat- my stuff barely fills the dresser, but it is mine. I am grinning alone by myself in my huge new bed. I’m their first tenant and they are installing a tiny kitchen on the roof that should be up by Thurs. The roof is all for us, and they’re going to put a table and chairs up there. I can’t imagine anything better than eating breakfast or reading a paper up there in the morning. It’s a ten minute walk to the subway, and from there only a handful of stops to the Centro Historico, the Condesa (ritzy neighborhood Jessica and all the internationals live), and a 45 minute walk from the US embassy, post office I’m going to get a PO Box at, etc. etc.
Today Jess and I walked all over this Delegacion, Cuahtemoc. My apartment is in Santa Maria de la Ribera, which in the early 1920s was The Place to be. Guess it fell upon hard times for awhile but has been making a come back since 2000 and now is pretty safe. When Jess and I took the metro back to her place to get my stuff we got drenched in a torrential down pour. It amazes me how rain is so different everywhere; though I am from Oregon, was constantly busing around Panama last year in their monsoons, and got caught in storms in Quito, everywhere it is different, and everywhere I love it. We saw a woman carrying her tiny scruffy, disgusting dog in a plastic bag in her arms, and it was one of those details that made me so happy. I just went up on the roof and couldn’t see any stars, but also don’t think I could possibly be happier in this moment.
I know it won’t all go this easily, but perhaps even because of that, I am holding onto these moments with grateful joy. When I e-mailed the “Watson guardian angels” as I feel oh so clever calling them, they said good luck, that these first few days can be very hard. I feel oh so smug knowing that for me, so far they couldn’t have been better. Now I get to go to sleep in what will be my bed for the next month or two, and I can sleep naked if I want, sleep in as late as I want, explore any part of the city I want tomorrow. I realize this is all about me, and yet feel decadently self absorbed and oh so lucky.
I pinned three photos onto my pink and teal sarong that I draped over the dresser. It feels like me. One is of Dawn, Lin, me, and Elliot just after graduation. We look so happy, so chummy, so young. I am so proud of my beautiful roomates- showed Virginie and Erick, and they probably didn’t care too much, but it makes those parts of my life feel more real. I talk a lot about my friends, I realize, and feel so blessed by them. Also I bobby pinned a photograph of the babes at our summer reunion camping trip. Some of us are balanced on one log, some another, some leaning, and it is so damn beautifully green, and my girls are so different and nuanced that again I feel a swelling of happiness. The third is of my mom and I. It’s a beautiful photo that her oldest friend Pat took, and gave to her for her 60th birthday. I look for similarities in our faces, but end up picking them apart so much I lose all objectivity. What is most mother-daughter is my hand clasped around her neck and our open expressions and colors. I’m wearing the shell necklace that Aunt Sue gave her with tiny photos of her and my mom, on the same chain as the charm I bought the other directors and producers of the Vagina Monologues this last year at Willamette. Its fitting to have both, and I love how the chain falls between my breasts. I feel charged, and déjà vu, remembering how it was just two days ago when my mom and I were walking away from the beach, we crested the dunes, and one step down the other side the sound of the ocean faded, and was gone. Sometimes that is what change feels like, a hill you suddenly crest, an ocean fading into silence, and a new horizon ahead. To sleep.
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