Color! shape! light! ok it might just be me with this picture, but I like it

And I hope I get to go back before another thirteen years have passed. But on to the bloggy bit.

I’ve been thinking about language. English is most definitely my first and sadly the only language I can claim any fluency in. And I have always always wanted to speak another language. I am ridiculously jealous of my four and half year old niece who speaks Mandarin and English perfectly and with wild swirling kid speed. Right now her conversations are mostly about mermaids and Wonderpets, but I’m pretty sure ten years from now she’ll be taking over the world. But that’s another post for another day

So I’m in Mexico and I don’t speak Spanish. I like to think I do, you know, at least un poquito. I can say hello, find the bano, ask “how much is this fish?,” but I can not actually speak Spanish and it makes me irrationally irritated — irrationally, because I never actually learned Spanish, so why on earth should I be able to speak it!? I took Spanish 1 for nine months in eighth grade, then a summer of German, three years of high school French, a semester of college German, but no more Spanish.

So why am I irritated that I can’t speak a language I have spent the least time studying? Maybe it’s because growing up in the US you hear so much Spanish that you think it might just sink in. (and wouldn’t it be awesome if it did!) My friend’s grandmother decided I must speak it fluently because I once responded when she said something within my Spanish 1 level of understanding and thereafter only spoke to me only in Spanish. But still, frustratingly, I do not.

And it annoys me that only one fully functioning language resides in my brain space. There are bits and pieces of three other languages floating about in there, and the way my brain sees it, one foreign language is as good as the next, so when I find myself digging around trying to have an actual conversation what comes out is a fantastically useless mixture of all three (with maybe some English thrown in as well). Since very few people speak Frenspanichishman, my personal blend of French, Spanish and German, that doesn’t do me much good.

Still I find that if you really want to communicate, and you and the person you are trying to talk to are really dedicated you can totally have a conversation, maybe not fleshing out the intricacies of socialized health care, but a little who are you, where are you from, what do we now have in common discussion – totally. I found this out at dinner one night in San Carlos.

My father and step-mother have been traveling to San Carlos and Magdalena Bay to see gray whales during their northern migration for the last sixteen years, and this year I got to tag along . Each year they book Enrique Soto, who has long since become a friend, to take them out into the bay.

Enrique Soto

Enrique has been taking tourists adventurous enough to come to San Carlos (which is definitely off the beaten path) on whale watching trips for the last twenty years. He has a truly unique relationship with these gigantic creatures. They flock to him. And if you’re lucky enough to be on his boat, they flock to you. I got to pet gray whales like they were friendly neighborhood poodles. It was unreal. But more on that soon.

The last night of our stay in San Carlos, Enrique invited us over his house for dinner. His beautiful wife Veronica made this shrimp soup (below) which hardly illustrates it’s awesomeness.

Then we had homemade tamales. Oh yummy yum yum. It was a fantastic meal .

Enrique and his sons all speak English but Veronica doesn’t. She speaks about as much English as I speak Spanish. Still we managed to have a conversation, mostly around photographs. I told her I live in San Francisco and showed her some photos on my phone. She ran to the other room and came back with a box of photos of their trip to SF. She started pulling out family photos, photos of herself as a girl, photos of her sons, of her parents… I showed her pictures of my cat, my mother, me dying my hair purple, everything I had on my phone. And somehow we managed to come up with the words for what we wanted to say with these pictures. When my parents and I left at the end of the night I gave Veronica a hug and told her how much I loved “talking” with her. She told me something (that I think meant the same in spanish of course) and her sons, laughing at our goofy exchange said the last time they had English speaking guests over Veronica had waved them a fond farewell and said “Mouse to meet you!” Ok so I’m guessing she must have said “mice” to meet you, which is only one letter off “nice” to meet you, so it’s not really that bad. But we all found it completely hysterical and teetered back to our hotel giggling the whole way.

I loved this trip to Mexico. It was totally different to my first experience there and I can’t wait to get my photos up and share more. Thanks so much to my parents and the Soto’s, truly “mouse to meet you!”

P.S. Oh! and I have decided to really try to learn to speak Spanish. Podcasts have been downloaded and the roommates will have to get used to the vocab post-its I’m sticking all over the house. I have been dreaming of going to Argentina for about a year now and when I get there I’m going to be speaking Spanish (even if it’s accompanied by wild hand gestures and bits of French and English). So there brain!

Thirteen years later and I’ve had lots of far off journeys since then, but that trip to Mexico still ranks up there with the best of the best. I mention it because I’m going back to Mexico soon — for the first time since then, and it feels like poor Mexico has already outdone itself for me. I wonder how can it possibly live up to that first trip.

I’ve felt this way about places before, when a holiday turns into an experience that practically changes your life, and it’s almost frightening to go back. Will it be as amazing as you remember or like the oatmeal pies you loved so much as a kid and are really a bit of a disappointment now. You end up wondering why you loved them so much in the first place. And I don’t want any kind of re-visiting disappointment to color my memories of Mexico. Not that I think I’m going to be disappointed. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a whole different kind of awesome. No trip is the same. And this one is nowhere near a re-creation. Besides being 13 years older (ack!) and allowed to travel by myself these days, I’m headed to a totally different part of the country (the Baja) to visit the whales and have a little family vacation with my father and step-mother, rather than a group of photo and Spanish students all eager to escape their chaperones.

Actually I’m still amazed at how well our guardians did at keeping us all out of trouble. We flew from *lovely* Newark, NJ through Texas to Mexico City. Mexico City, in 1997, with no cell phones, and a group of maybe twenty, shall we say, “spirited” teenagers. I think about it now and those teachers must have been a little out of their minds. Although I know Mrs. H (Eileen Hohmuth-Lemonick, my most beloved favorite photo teacher) has since taken some unbelievably lucky kids from PDS to India and all over the planet since then, but she’s twelve kinds of awesome — and I hope she won’t mind me saying, has balls of steel.

I’m sorry, I’ve just realized I’ve used the word “awesome” three times already in this post. Either the west coast is really rubbing off on me, I need a better thesaurus, or all of the things are AWESOME! Oh well, at least I haven’t said “dude” yet.

Anyway, we shot Mexico City, Oaxaca, pyramids, zocalos, villages, Frida’s La Casa Azul, and Easter celebrations, and every single one was *awesome* I shot 30 rolls of Tri-x 400 (my fav black and white 35 mm film) on that trip and I finally scanned each and every one last year. So rather than jabber on about how awesome it all was, I’m going to put my celluloid memories where my mouth is. Hope you enjoy these at least a fraction of how much I enjoyed taking them. And if you’d like to see the larger collection on flickr, look here.

Just looking through them again now I keep thinking THE LIGHT, THE LIGHT! there’s just incredible light in Mexico. i mean maybe it’s just that latitude, but, dude, THE LIGHT!

watching the Easter parade

boy with palm fronds

tailgating

I don't think "fussy" can come close to describing this expression

it's amazing how generously people will bare bits of their souls to you in photos

And that’s the part that will always stand out for me when I look through these, how incredibly generous the people we photographed were to let us truly see them. Thank you beautiful people. Thank you Mrs. H. Thank you my most awesome mother.