August 6, 2004

 

Oaxaca was amazing!  I ended up staying for six days and wishing I could stay longer.  I could relax all day and talk with interesting people from all over the world.  I feel like I´ve probably made friends for life with a couple of people from England and Israel.  One thing is for sure.  I´m finding a way to lear Hebrew when I get home.  While I was there, I got to know the area well enough to start serving as a tour guide.  That´s how I met a lot of pepole.  I offered to take them to the grocery store or museum.  But I ended up not eating a lot of times and pushing miles and miles every day.  I can´t wait to weigh myself when I get home because I´m sure I´ve lost a ton of weight.  And my birthday is one week away from today.  That´s also the day I´m supposed to see Natalie again.  She´s bringing her boyfriend, Ivan, along, though.  From what she´s told me, he´s a jealous, mid-thirties, recent divorcee, so I´m assuming we will have no fun together (Natalie and I) and he´ll make the whole thing awkward.  Maybe I´ll be wrong and everything will be fine, but I´m not getting my hopes up.  As for today, I´m supposed to be doing something with Cara and Juan Carlos, but maybe not, because we always stay up so late that we can´t seem to up before noon.  Such a hard life, I know.  Oh yeah, I also got a haircut last night and now I look like I have an extremely short mullet.  *Sigh*...

 

 

 

August 14, 2004

 

Yesterday was my twenty-third birthday.  It passed rather uneventfully except for dinner at Tony Roma´s, which was divine.  I wanted to go out dancing or something, but Cara was exhausted from the trip here to Puebla and my friend Kike couldn´t go out because he had to get up early this morning to leave for his football game in Veracruz.  But man, I was lucky to even have a place to stay.  Apparently Kike is the suite mate I have left still living at the UDLA (my study abroad university).  Tonio got kicked out of the dorms after he got caught with a girl in his room after hours... and he was a moderator!  Marma, of course, died last December in the car accident.  Henri and French graduated.  Diego apparently dropped out, but I was never that close with him.  I don´t know what happened with Luis.  A couple of people told me that he didn´t come back this semester, but just a few weeks ago I talked to him and he told me that I could stay with him here at the school.  Who knows!  It´s ironic, though, that out of all of my suite mates from before, I knew Kike the least, and now he´s the one who has given me a place to stay.  The dorm still smells the same, but that´s about where the familiarities end.  There are new renovations everywhere, new furniture, the bathroom has been redone, and there´s someone named Hefer sleeping in my old bed!  I couldn´t sleep this morning, so I got up early and went for a stroll around the whole campus just to walk down memory lane a little.  But it was scary.  I felt like a ghost.  The place where Natalie and I spent so much time talking and singing songs has been landscaped beyond recognition.  The only thing I could find was the tree we used to sit under together, but even the ground around it is so different that it´s completely unrecognizable unless you are really trying hard to find it.  I was going along and wondering if I really was a ghost... How would I know?  I´ve only run into a couple of people I remember from before, and it was awkward to see them.  I guess it really is true that you can never go back.  I really have no place here anymore.  It´s really scary and quite upsetting both at the same time.  But classes start here in two more days, and I´m going to go by the old chorus class and see any friends that might still be here.  Natalie wrote and said that she wouldn´t be into Puebla until Sunday night.  I don´t even know if I care anymore.  I just feel like everything I ever had or felt here is gone forever.  But people have been so nice.  All of Kike´s new suite mates have just been wonderful to me, and this morning the guy that cleans the kitchen area welcomed me and said he was glad I was here, even if it was for a visit.  The people in reception said it was a ¨miracle¨to see me again, and were so glad that I had come back to study, until I explained that I had graduated over a year ago and was just visiting.  And what´s the weirdest of all is that I know that within a week I would fit right in if I could stay here and study, but I know that´s not a possibility and I´m heading back to my old life in four more days.  It´s so bizarre to have just gotten here and be leaving again so soon.  Every other time I´ve come to the school, I´ve stayed for about four months.  Now I´m staying four days, and in all likelihood, will never come back here again.  It´s sad.  But I guess life goes on.  We can´t cling to the past forever and this is one of those times where I really have to learn the lesson well.