everything

It just feels sort of normal to be here. It doesn’t feel very dramatic. It doesn’t feel like a sharp break from my life in the USA. Maybe this is because I’ve been to latin america 10 or so times, for vacation, in the past. Maybe also because I’ve watched so many youtube videos about Mexico in the past year. But it is different here, for sure.

I wondered if I would feel some sense of panic being away from friends, family and my house. Like maybe I would get here and realize I had made a big mistake, and a difficult one to reverse. Nope, not at all.

Friends are everywhere. I was walking along a road earlier today and a guy walking along the same road asked me if I spoke spanish. And then we had a brief conversation. He had lived in Arizona for 23 years at one point, he said. His english wasn’t very good. I asked how long he had been in Ensenada. Eight months. I asked him if he thought it was a dangerous city. He was a little surprised by the question and answered vehemently, “No, it’s a good city.”

My host wants to make me soup. She’s concerned about my nutrition. I told her of course she can make me soup.

And there’s a cat that’s talked to me a couple times.

Weirdly, the television mounted on the wall in this furnished apartment is exactly the same brand, model and size as the one I owned in DC. I sold it around 10 days ago for $30. I watched some American football Sunday. The Mexican broadcast flipped back and forth from game to game much more often than is customary in the USA, and made frequent use of a split screen to show two games.

The first night I was here, last Wednesday, I was depressed and had a bit of a WTF-am-I-doing-here feeling, but that was literally the day I flew here, so I discounted it. The next day, and ever since, I’ve been OK. Finding a good place to buy underwear was an early psychological turning point — I’m not kidding.

I had a kind of foggy rice cake feeling in my brain since arrival, and it seemed like the kind of feeling that coffee would dispel, so I kept trying to address it with coffee, but that didn’t work at all. Then today I had some very, very spicy sauce with my fish tacos, and the foggy rice cake feeling is gone.

I’ve only eaten out twice, including today.

Magic realism is a bitch sometimes. I left the apartment to go to a lavanderia one block from here, and I had to walk about 20 blocks to find it, even though the signage was perfectly clear. Worse, by the time I got there I had wings and a tail.

I’ve done some revenge sleeping, and eaten some revenge muffins. I learned yesterday I have a renter for the house in DC, which came as a great surprise somehow. It’s a couple — a lawyer and a consultant.