Photos: author So many things to miss about Mexico.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have just signed my first lease in the United States in six years.
Six years.
That includes seven months trekking across South America, eating empanadas from baskets on buses and contemplating – alone and ecstatic – those wild Patagonian ranges; a stint teaching on Reunion Island in times of chikungunya, walking past the banyan trees everyday and following up morning runs with plunges into the Indian Ocean; the School of International Training teaching course in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the subsequent encounter with my future husband (a chance meeting in café Nuevo Mundo, a weekend in the mountains, and here we are four years later); a long year in Beijing trying to teach Chinese students to argue (“your own point of view! Unique! Controversial! Different from the rest!”), biking the clogged, polluted, endlessly mystifying streets and stopping for tall 5 yuan Yanjings; and the last two years, writing, back in Oaxaca with occasional ventures into the Sierra Norte or even all the way out to London.