Thoughts on Arrivals

We’re final­ly in Mexico after an overnight delay caused by not hav­ing a flight attendant. 

So I have to ask — is this real­ly vis­it­ing a for­eign coun­try? When the first thing that you do after the inevitable post-flight-hangover nap is walk down the block to the gro­cery store to buy pro­vi­sions? When you can find every­thing you want at the gro­cery store? And none of the prod­ucts is so amaz­ing­ly strange that you’re going to think of them for days after­ward won­der­ing just what they might be? 

On the oth­er hand I’m com­plete­ly cut off lin­guis­ti­cal­ly. My Spanish goes not fur­ther than order­ing beer and get­ting a cab to take me to a lim­it­ed num­ber of des­ti­na­tions. (No impro­vi­sa­tion­al side trips, please.) 

The first day is always a lit­tle odd. Soul lag I think some­one explained it as. Actually that was an expla­na­tion for jet lag. That the soul can’t fly as fast as the body in a jet and so it gets left behind and you feel all fun­ny and out of sorts while you’re wait­ing for it to catch up with you. The first day in Mexico feels a lit­tle like that. You have a list of things you have to take care of. Like the gro­cery store and the going to the bank to get mon­ey, but you’re too tired and the alti­tude is too much (we’re above Denver here) to make run­ning right out and _doing_ things a good idea. So you sit around with a lit­tle beer and a bag of peanuts and your lap­top and talk to your part­ner about who the oth­er guests are and secret­ly won­der if you’ll like any of them and debate where to go for din­ner. Should we go to one of the places you’ve been look­ing for­ward to revis­it­ing, or is it waste to do that the first night because, well it’s the first night and my soul is still stuck in a pat­tern some­where over Houston try­ing to fig­ure out how to make it the rest of the way south to join me in the sunshine. 

Today the temp is get­ting to be close to 90. 

We have beer. Bohemia oscuro. Which is vague­ly bet­ter than no beer. But not by much. Good beer is some­thing that you have to go to town to get. Or dif­fer­ent gro­cery store. 

And then a bird took a crap on my com­put­er. Right on the caps lock key. I’m sure that sig­ni­fies something.