UNO: Study Abroad in Writing

From New Orleans, we leave at a somewhat reasonable hour, for a quick flight to Houston, Texas. We have very little layover time, so quickly make our way to our gate. There are only two airlines that fly into our destination airport, Leon, Mexico; Delta, and Continental. We’re on the jazzier of the two, Continental. If any US airline can be considered jazzy anymore. At least, on the slightly more than 2 hr flight to Guanajuato/Leon, they feed us. To my surprise we’re handed a tray with about half a sandwich on very white bread, piled with turkey. There’s a bag of Fritos, a mini Milky Way Bar, and a tiny packet of mustard which is supposed to help get all the white bread down I guess. Vegetarians are out of luck, here, it seems, so DEFINITELY advise the airline before you go of special dietary concerns…. Still, I was pleased to get ANYTHING to eat on the flight.

Outside the window the changing terrain fascinated me. We flew over mountains so big they seemed big to US, several thousand feel over them. We flew over pitted valleys, and snaking rivers, and watched the colors of the terrain change from green to brown, and trees fade away to be replaced by sparse spots of dark underbrush and cacti. I guess something in me was reluctant to think of Mexico as all that foreign. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know its another country with another language and a huge set of problems, but somehow, it was so close to ‘home’ that I kind of appropriated it as, if not my own, a cousin. Watching the drastic changes in the terrain was not only beautiful, it was a visual key that this trip might not be quite what I expected.

And landing at the airport is certainly NOT what anyone who has suffered through trans-Atlantic flights would expect. Of course, our airplane was not all that large. But when we landed on the tarmac, we exited the plane on the tarmac. No jetways for us! Along with the other cramped passengers we ducked out of the plane onto the asphalt and were pointed into the ‘arrivals hall.’ No spending an hour here trying to get through passport control! even though their computers kept repeatedly crashing, we were out of the passport control in less than ten minutes. And while we had been standing there we watched our luggage be placed on the belt. It was waiting for us by the time we got out of passport control, so in less than fifteen minutes we had hit the ATM, met our driver, and were off.

Driving to San Miguel takes about an hour and a half, and I have to say I was sleepier than I should have been. Going out till all hours of the night before a trip of any kind is never a good idea, which is something I seem to have to remind myself on every trip…. However, I was also too excited to fall asleep, as my eyes kept roving across the Mexican terrain. We are riding in an SUV, and the guy who is driving is young, college age, and quiet. He speaks when spoken to, and we ask a few questions as we speed along to San Miguel. Mostly, we are quiet though. We pass several fruit and vegetable stands. The first one we passed was a splash of red color. It had HUGE, deep scarlet strawberries for sale, and right next to it was a man selling all sorts of colorful windmills. Right next to that was a man bouncing a dead crow on a stick. The black bird was, I suppose, intended to be someone’s dinner (?), but the image was so strange it lingered as we slid quickly past. Directly after that we passed an Applebee’s. Talk about a mood killer! A Weight Watchers restaurant in the middle of the desert in Mexico? It seemed so incongruous with its bouncing dead crow neighbor….

There seem to be many incongruous images though - two men in pretty rugged clothing and Stetson hats on horseback. Bright bougainvillea, pale green cacti, and the brown hills as far as the eye an see. Chunky mountains in the distance. Something about this feels familiar, though, and I think that Mexico might be more of an image in our minds than we realize. San Miguel, however, was not an image I expected.

Tags: San Miguel //