Would You Like Cheese On That?

I just finished reading Chris's lovely blog post about the start of college in India. When I first heard he was attending college, I will freely admit I was a little jealous. After all, one of the things I miss most here is attending classes at Parkland. Undoubtedly, if you time-traveled back to the end of last semester and told Past Me I would be here in the future in Mexico missing school, I would probably have either smacked you full in the mouth or broken down crying -two things I'm known to do during test taking time. After reading his post, however, I felt much better. His situation really isn't that different from mine! I've missed more than a couple days of class due to miss-communication, "no one showed up" syndrome, or most recently, minor flooding. And I too always seem to find out what happened through Facebook, or my classmates next-door neighbors nieces best friend who lives across the road from the substitute Mundo Contemporaneo maestro or whatever. I am still a little jealous that it seems like some of the locals in Chris's area speak English, but it's more of a 'good for you! I wish I had that' kind of jealousy. I'm more than pleased he's doing so well. India can undoubtably take some getting used too! I desperately want to go there some day (as some of you may know), and Chris has given me a unique perspective into life from an American point of view, for which I thank him.
Actually, we also share a similar concern as well. He wonders about everything he's reading which says that right about now is supposed to be this deadly, downward spiral that sucks you into some dark pit of homesickness which some people don't really emerge from for months (obviously, I'm being a little more dramatic, but we'll just say that's for originality's sake). I was planning to post about this soon as well. Ever little bit of paper I have says the year should go something like this:
July/August = Honeymoon Phase (the part were everything is new and exotic and shiny and you love it all like you're on vacation)
September = End of Honeymoon/Start of Adaptation (this is where it gets confusing. Everything says this is where you start to compare everything and you think your 'real home' is better and you don't like it here and yadda yadda).
And so on down the line.
Except, for me it wouldn't be late July/August since I got here in August. By my approximation, I should be hitting the end of the Honeymoon any day now, and it's freaking me out! Doesn't it sound ominous? End of the Honeymoon? Doesn't it sound like the title of one of those horrible, underfunded slasher flicks I used to have such a hard time alphabetizing at That's Rentertainment? But I don't feel like it says I should. I felt like that about 2 weeks ago, when just thinking about a Steak'n'Shake hamburger could make me collapse into quite tears. Sure, I still get frustrated when I can't understand something as simple as "How was the jamica there?" (really, really frustrated), but that's a language problem, and it will eventually fade. I still compare things to America constantly, because America is all I know, but it's not a bad sort of comparison. Honestly, I think all that equal thinking stuff from my Intro to Anthropology course saved me on that one (thank god for Mrs. Reilly!). My teacher could not STAND people comparing customs negatively, and her reasoning was very persuasive. I still miss my family and friends terribly. I miss random streets I used to drive down every day, and shops I've only ever been into once, but it's not a bad missing, it's just the sort that I hope I can conjure up again in a year when I have to go home. That's one thing I really fear. Right now, I miss all these random things from home. Would that I could save up all that missing and pull it back out when I go back, and take the Mexico-missing I will definitely have then and use it now. Would that I could live my year backwards-forward. But again, I don't feel like I'm falling down a big, dark hole (except maybe in terms of lingual knowledge. I'll tell ya, you do not appreciate the English language until you're in a place where it's useless). I didn't really realize how much I've come to like Mexico, and especially my home in Mina until I realized that I have 3 days left on my 30 day visa, and the office still hasn't agreed to extend it. The thought of being sent back home now is...horrible. I'll get to see everything and everyone I love and miss, but the idea that I could lose all this...not that I really love it, not yet, but I can feel the potential for so much more. I think I finally begin to understand all those odd people in the movies who choose to give up their lives or ambitions or whatever to follow someone they don't really love yet. It's difficult, and I can't really think more than a week in advance because 12 (now 11) whole months is just to much time for me to accurately fathom, but there's just so much to look forward too. How could I be depressed now?
On the whole, exasperating visa front, don't panic. The only reason I'm not is because A) no one else is, and I like to assume they know more about this than me, and, B)I now know for a fact that there are several dozen students from all over the world (although mostly Germany and Brasil for some reason) all up and down the length of Veracruz (and what a lot of length that is), who are also sitting despondently in their bedrooms every night, wondering why their new adopted country is so reluctant to let them stay. And as far as I know, not one of them has been issued a year-long visa yet. This was made all the more funny (and not funny ha-ha) by a frustrated Petrona telling me that they had issued her daughter Karina a Japanese student visa that technically could allow her it stay in horrendously over-crowded Japan for 3 years. The exchange-student population of Mexico breaths a sigh of longing.