Tuesday, January 1, 2008

P.S. Happy New Year!

Mr.RipeMango were riding the free airport shuttle to the long-term parking lot when the clock struck twelve. It was rather romantic, I know you're jealous. We expected to be home with our dogs (we desperately missed them) by midnight but unfortunately our flight ran 20 minutes late. We got home at 12:15. Le sigh.

Visiting the Motherland

I'm back from Mexico. I was not prepared to experience so many mixed emotions upon visiting. I visited a different town (though same State) than where I grew up. This wasn't really meant to be a "coming home" journey, but it also couldn't be a mindless tourist visit.

There is too much beauty and gritty ugliness to be seen in Mexico. It is a horrible thing to witness a once charming little pueblo being improved and destroyed simultaneously by tourism. Puerto Vallarta will be gone soon. Its historic center has already suffered too much, it's expanded far beyond what that little bay can handle. The beautiful brand new boardwalk in the hotel zone made me sick to my stomach. And yet, I am perfectly aware that at this point if the tourists and their money went away this little town would collapse on itself having no other sustainable industries at this point.

We took our awesome new digital slr camera with us, and you know I couldn't bring myself to take pictures? It felt like an intrusion. I have pictures of my little romps through Rome, Firenze, Paris, Sydney, but I literally couldn't do this in Mexico.

We did manage to get away, and into a little hillside pueblo- I felt better but I also realized that the ghost still aches too much- the poverty, the memories of poverty are too overwhelming. The guilt and feeling of relief, and the questions of what life might've been had I stayed in Mexico are all too much to consider.