…and you may ask yourself, “well, how did I get here?”

It’s 5am and I’ve just boarded a plane to Dallas. I’ve been at O’hare airport since arong 11:30pm, but the bag-check people didn’t arrive until 2:30am so I was stuck waiting by the entrance. No sleep tonight. In about three hours, I’ll take a second plane from Dallas to Mexico City, where I’ll have a four-hour layover, before boarding a third plane to Tuxtla Gutierrez followed by a thirty-minute drive to Chiapa de Corzo, where I’ll be teaching English and studying Spanish for the next six months. It’s a long day ahead. 

***

I made it through Dallas just fine (though I did have to start running when they called my name on the loudspeaker) but the Mexico City airport (where I have a four-hour layover) is a different beast. You know how most airports are laid out so that as long as you walk straight and follow all the signs, you’ll pass through all the necessary check-in points, even if you can barely read? Someone in Mexico City said “fuck that shit, make it open-concept so they gotta walk all back-and-forth through the same area like fourteen times asking for directions and accumulating paperwork” and everyone around them agreed. It took about two and a half hours to get from my arrival gate to the gate of the next departure. Along the way, I tried a gross free candy (I think it was gummy dulce de leche) and went to a pizza restaurant and ordered a pizza, only to find out that the one word on the menu I hadn’t recognized (hongos) meant mushrooms (sad). At least I learned a word, I guess. 

***

I’m in my new bedroom at the house of my new host family. It’s a pretty large building, with at least four residents, two dogs, and a beautiful view of the Grijalva river. None of the host family speak English, and my Spanish is pretty rusty, but I know where the kitchen and the bathroom are, so we’ve got the essentials down. They all wear shoes throughout the house, which felt viscerally wrong, but it’s not my house so so be it. My host mother’s name is Marina, and the host father’s name is something like Carlos but with an extra syllable or two. I was brought here by Gina (my contact at the school where I’ll be working) and her boyfriend (whose name also escapes me, but I recall it sounded kinda similar to a woman’s name [I gotta get better at names…]) who picked me up at the airport. After dropping my stuff off, the three of us went to the school, where I met one woman and three cats (apparently only two of the cats were supposed to be there and the third was just some vagrant who had shown up earlier that week, but they were all pretty chill). Upon returning, I went to my room to type out this update, and I’m about to fall asleep. 

***

Some questions you might have:

Q: Does the school have a name?

A: Yes.

Q: What is the school’s name?

A: The Delmas Institute

Q: Can you speak Spanish?

A: Sort of. I studied it for seven years, but stopped after my freshman year of college because it was too hard to study Arabic and Spanish at once. I still get the words from the two languages mixed up in my head when speaking. Hopefully it will come back soon though. I’ll be receiving lessons as well. I think they start tomorrow; I still have to talk with Gina about that.

Q: Have you had any tasty Mexican food yet?

A: Nope, just airport pizza.

Q: It’s been three years since your last blog post. What have you been doing? And why did you choose to go to Chiapas?

A: That’s a longish one and I’m trying to go to bed, so I’ll answer it later.

Q: How are you already covered in bug bites if you haven’t even seen a bug yet?

A: Ghost bugs maybe? I wish I knew.

I typed out a few extra words here just to get the count up to an even 1000. Disregard.