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 Vallarta Living | July 2006 
Viviendo en México - Adiós a mis Amigos
 Korah Winn - PVNN
| | Goodbye, Mexico. Thanks for being so good to me. Adios a todos. |
It almost feels too impossible for me to believe, but in less than four hours, I said goodbye to Guadalajara and returned to Chicago. I came home last week. It was almost anticlimactic.
After having lived my life in a foreign country for almost an entire year, it seemed ludicrous that I could just walk onto a plane and with the passage of only four hours; I could leave behind me a different language and a different pace of life.
I cannot even fly from one side of my country to the other in less time than that. It floors me how technology has made it just as convenient for me to drop in and see my friends in a different country as it is to see my grandmother in Arizona.
I am actually home! Now that I am back, I keep marveling over the spaciousness of where we live. I have been taking rides on the back of my dad's motorcycle and have been shouting at him over the wind to pay attention to how pretty the fields look with all their perfect stalks of corn. They just go on and on. We live in such a fertile part of the world.
When I used to travel a lot in the United States, I had friends from different states that would tease me about how flat Illinois is. When they would really lay it on thick, I would just let them run out of steam and then I would begin describing to them the richness of the soil where I live.
I would paint a word picture about a freshly plowed field with soil so brown it almost looked black. Sometimes when I see those fields, I get the urge to pull my car over and take off my shoes and dig my bare feet deep into the sun warmed soil just as beach goer would dig her toes into the sand.
I love the land and no matter how far away I keep going, I am realizing that my roots are here. After living in a city of over six million, it does my heart good to look out from country roads and see miles and miles of growth and life.
So my time in Mexico is officially over now. Any Spanish speaking I do here will be because I seek it out, not because it is a normal part of my everyday life. I went to church on Sunday and Mr. Delgado welcomed me home in Spanish. It was second nature to respond to him appropriately.
I am going to miss the language a lot. It was not easy learning it! I did not write to you much about the hard times, but those first four months were mentally exhausting.
I can now stand though on the opposite side of my year in Mexico and say that even though it was painful at times, it was beyond worth it for me. I wish I could communicate exactly how the time there caused me to value my family more and treasure Mexican people.
Being at home for me is straight up easier than living in Mexico. No language frustrations, no cultural confusion, just the comfort of what I grew up with. So with that said, I am going to enjoy these next two months before I set out on the next adventure.
I am going to take a break before heading overseas to start a new life in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I will not be speaking Spanish but the stories from there will hopefully be just as colorful.
Goodbye, Mexico. Thanks for being so good to me. Adios a todos. |
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