My weekend plans are going swimmingly so far. I did run the Turkey Trot, I did stuff myself with food yesterday at Jo’s, I’m currently at work for at least a few hours, am making plans for lunch, and have already seen one of the movies on my list. Woohoo!
I had a very strange dream last night where I was exploring some ancient ruins with Buzz, Carter, and Adam Duritz. And Adam Duritz and I were newlyweds. Very weird. But the ruins were cool, and required lots of scrambling around on rocks, which was very fun.
Jo’s mother fixed a fabulous assortment of food yesterday for Thanksgiving lunch. Despite the plans not coming together until the last minute, there was a nice small group of us still around to share Thanksgiving — Jo and her parents, Josh, Melanie and Carlos, Nick, and me. Oh my god, it was so good. Mrs. Aiken really went all out, fixing just about every Thanksgiving dish you can think of because she wanted everyone to have something that they usually have at home. It was so sweet of her. Afterward we sat around in our turkey comas, chatted, and watched Elf. I was sent home with not one but two plates of leftovers, so dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow are taken care of. Yummy.
On Wednesday night I went to River Oaks with Cari and Ignacio for a showing of Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries). It’s a Spanish-language movie based on the diaries of Alberto Granado and Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (later known as Che Guevara, of Cuban Revolution fame) written during a cross-continent road trip they took in the early 1950s. They began in Argentina, drove through Patagonia into Chile, up the continent into Peru, worked at a leper colony (Che was a medical student; Alberto a biochemist), and finished the trip in Venezuela.
I’d been wanting to see the movie for weeks, and I wasn’t disappointed. It was well-written, well-acted, and generally fantastic. Highly recommended.
I know the United States is a big melting pot, and that’s not a bad thing. Yet at the same time I feel like Americans have no strong, identifiable cultural traits precisely because we are a country of so many different backgrounds, ethnicities, and traditions. I’ve been thinking a lot about different parts of the world lately, and seeing that movie on Wednesday only deepened my newfound interest in Latin America. I can’t explain it, but Mexico, Central, and South America are so much more intriguing to me than any other part of the globe. Since going to Peru, I’ve been constantly thinking of all the places there I want to go visit. I want to see more of Peru, and Argentina, and Chile, and Mexico. I want to learn enough Spanish to be at least conversational with people when I go there. The culture and traditions are fascinating.
