Pretirement

hi, merry christmas! i hope yours was nice and you ate enough and got lots of presents. i spent mine in san diego on pacific beach. only intended to stay there two or three days but the hostel was full of people and there wasn’t going to be another decent place to spend christmas for…well i don’t know i’ve traveled a thousand miles or so since then and i’m glad i stayed.

my new austrian-bowling green friends shared a stocking with me, and the danes were next to us with a stocking made from a pair of long underwear they had left over from vancouver. the best present i got was a brazilian surfing lesson. the worst present was a piece of brazilian wax under my toenail. sneaky brazilian wax.

every sunset there was so good my heart would palpitate and i’d shout out what color everything was.

then we all left. i was shaking when we said goodbye on the bus. suddenly i didn’t want to be traveling alone.

i crossed the border at tijuana.

i slept in the hotel perla del oriente.

i bought a tourist card and a bus ticket to mazatlan.

the sunset in the sierra madres outside mexicali was as spectacular as on pacific beach, spilling out across a martian landscape, illuminating clusters of shacks here and there, only two miles from the border but so foreign i couldn’t imagine the two sights were being created by the same sun at exactly the same time. i said “pretty” to the woman sitting next to me and she nodded.

one long night, four dubbed american movies, strange mexican bus adventures, an uneventful day, a bewildering introduction to mazatlan and here i am.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 10:52 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.