I have my own blog bookmarked, ostensibly so that I can click on it and add posts to it. It seems this does not happen very often. I am up to my ears in my thesis, which I have been writing all summer long. I decided to compose it in a single Word document. This means that it loads very slowly. On the positive side, every day the word count goes up, and the page count goes up, and then I realize that only happened because some formatting weirdness created another blank page.
We go back to school on Monday to start our last semester. Paco is also in the final stretch. Soon, we will be Masters of our respective fields. Ha!
We moved here at the end of August 2009, so it’s been almost two years now that we’ve lived in Guadalajara. The more time goes by, the less I have to say about living in Mexico: it’s just living, after all. I feel adjusted to life here.
Yesterday, something unusual happened. Paco and I were heading to the mall on the city bus. Paco noticed that there were two men speaking Italian, and I remarked that I almost never heard anyone speaking a foreign language on the bus. We got off the bus to take the second one. Someone said, “Disculpa,” which means “sorry” or “excuse me” in Spanish. I turned around. “Do you speak English?” the woman asked me, in English. I said yes. She and her friend, both Americans, asked me what I was doing here, etc. I had to get off the bus, so it was a short conversation.
Apparently, yesterday was THE day to encounter foreigners on the buses. Also, it’s a good thing I don’t care anymore about being obviously foreign, because those women only had to look at me to guess (correctly) that I speak English. I had fun talking to them, though. I also marvelled at how outgoing they were to just ask me if I spoke English! I’ve heard people speak English in public places and never once dared to strike up a conversation.
At the mall, Paco bought some new sneakers, and we got Starbucks, ate Cinnabons, and watched Captain America at the mall movie theater, so that was a pretty intensely American day.
Well, it’s 5 pm, and I haven’t added a single word to my thesis today, so maybe I will try to add a few.
I love seeing foreigners on the train as I go to and from work. I love hearing different languages – I’m always so fascinated with them. Last week I got onto the train and there was a huge family of Mexicans on there. My friend referred to them as Spaniards but I corrected her and said they were Mexicans – So proud of myself that I could already distinguish between the accents and the different words they use.
Now I just wonder what it’s going to be like in November when *I* end up as that foreigner on the bus/train with the strange accent.
It sounds like you’re doing well on your thesis, hun. Good luck with it.
That’s so very American, too, of those ladies to just go up to you and talk to you. I remember when I had been in Sweden a couple months already and I was traveling with friends, and an American man in the London airport just started talking to us, and we all freaked out and thought he was super creepy until we realized that we were just looking at the situation like Swedes – Swedes would NEVER go up to someone speaking Swedish and be like “OMG you speak Swedish where are you from why are you here.” We Americans can be very eager to find each other when we are in foreign places…I recall that some Americans tried to chat to my host family when they visited India because they just assumed that they were American since they were white, and I remember my host family recounting this story to me in great horror.