Things are busy right up to the end. I have clients until the last day as people book sessions with me before I leave. I continue to encounter interesting challenges with clients right up to the end and learn important things. I'm surprised how easy it has become to know what is going on with different people and explain it to them. At the bus station I'm surprised to see a client who I worked with earlier in the week, a wonderful Mexican man who asks me about some of the things that are happening to him. I explain it to him the best I can. Earlier another client had emailed me and asked about what was happening to her. I realize I should put up a web site to support clients but I have such a block against creating web sites these days. All in good time I suppose.
Socially everything comes to a wonderful close. I visit my first landlords Jim and Therese and catch up with them. They seem different now from many of the others I've now met in town, even more peaceful and at home in a world of their own. I'm amazed at my good fortune of having had them as my first contacts in Mexico. I have my last session with my tutor on a sunny balcony. My friend David from university, who went to Guanajuato with me and who had invited me to the class party, takes me out for my first and only steak dinner at an Argentinian restaurant. I tell David that I wonder if I'd have done so many things in such a short time if my time here hadn't been limited to six months? And after doing some important clearing I attend my final conversation group at the library and who should decide to come but my favorite woman who I was seeing and had a fight with and we end up having a great few days together.
As the bus pulls out of the station I take a last look at some of the familiar landmarks: the town's only traffic light on the road to the train station, the curving highway where I lost my first cell phone, the turnoff to Queretero where we went on the tour with Ceasar and drove through the hail storm, and the now sleeping tiny stadium where we went to the rodeo. The friends who I went to the rodeo with are long gone, having departed for Guatemala last Monday. I suppose that's one thing that is making it easier to let go, having made friends and lost them so easily so many times.
I'm on a first-class Mexican bus, the cadillac of buses. The seats are wider and there are only three across, there is an incredible amount of leg room with a pull-out stool to rest your feet on, and there are movies just like on an ariplane. It will be hard to sqeeze into those tiny Canadian buses with all those depressing people again! They show one of my favorite old movies from the 90s, "Entrapment", in Spanish of course. To my surprise I find I can pick out many more Spanish words than before. I even catch myself thinking in Spanish at times now.
We pull into a huge bus station in Mexico city that seems more like an airport. I'm herded to a wicket to buy a taxi ticket into town. A porter takes me to a narrow Europen-style cab and throws my bags in the trunk. The driver races into traffic and drives stock car style which reminds me of Vancouver, although it is still more civilized here. When he drops me off I realize that the total cost of the bus and taxi trip together, although it seems a lot to me now, is less than that of a cab ride to Pearson airport in Toronto. It will be an adjustment going home. I'm not even used to having traffic lights.
I check in to a low-end hotel for $24 and hop next door to an American-style greasy spoon. At least the decor is American--the food is a little unusual, the kind of Mexican food you might would expect from a greasy spoon in Detroit. But they do serve up a good cup of coffee. I chat with the waitress who is an Aretha Franklin lookalike and she beams when I tell her who Aretha Franklin is and that the name of her most famous song is Respecto. Then I walk around the area and realize that I don´t have a great first impression of Mexico City as it seems like just another American city, with similar buildings and newsstands that display Cosmopolitan and entertainment magazines. The people seem less healthy and much darker in spirit than in San Miguel and are not as beautiful. My energy is so much lighter than theirs and they all feel heavy and I feel like I stand out. No one except the waitress and the hotel clerk understand my Spanish here, and it becomes apparent that what people say in San Miguel is true, that they are used to American accents there. I settle into a cafe to write this blog which I will copy to my SanDisk and post from the internet cafe next door, as it's hard to find wireless internet around here.
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