(Image: Silhouette of a toucan from below)
I absolutely promise we will get back to “The Day the Universe Stood Iffy,” but I’ve definitely missed our chats and now that I’m feeling so much better, in fact, entirely human, I can’t help myself.
It’s a little gray, warmer than it was when I came back, which felt freezing after super hot, humid days. Chicago is much as I left it; the world is much as I left it with all the good and bad that entails.
It’s always good to see another part of the world, to learn the way other people live, check out the grocery stores, the structure of the houses, to see gardens planted with care in all circumstances. To try new foods, though sometimes that last one can backfire.
Although I don’t think it was anything new that did it, per se.
I stared at mountains through the window of a bus which are still standing down there, this week with someone else’s gaze upon them. I sat next to a father and son at the counter of a restaurant in a market, the little boy’s eyes huge as he asked me, in Spanish, how to say “gris” in English.
“Gray,” I told him.
He didn’t believe me.
Overall I watched little pockets of lives I would not come across again, people existing in ways that are different and exactly the same. Like the woman who worked at the hotel deep in the rain forest, accessible only by boat.
She laughed as she saw my dad and my faces turned upward, scanning the trees.
“Yes,” I said, “but if you were in Chicago?” I pointed and nothing and feigned excitement. “Squirrel!”
She laughed at that too and tried to show us a secret area usually packed with animals, but there were none that day.
Travel is more than being somewhere else, it’s tasting life somewhere else, knowing that people are people every single place on this planet.
And with that, I wish you a wonderful Tuesday.
A Bit to Read 