Just under two weeks to go. First ‘real’ day off work and it feels like it’s been a week – have been churning through the to do list. Think I’ll be very glad to be going, by the time it’s time to be going! Particularly as it feels, in lots of ways, that I’m already en route.
Said goodbye to the girls on Saturday night – feel like a soldier going off to war, what with all the final farewells and occasional implications of permanent goodbye – surprised how many seem to think I’m going to like it so much I won’t come back. Will be interesting to see how things turn out.
Presently so absorbed by frantic efforts to learn Spanish that I find it almost surprising to hear people talking to me in English. Very frustrating, to have to come back mentally to things like peeling carrots when I’m absorbed by irregular Spanish verb forms.
Asked my mum and sister today for their ideas on things to do with the kids – surprising how difficult it got to think of things which can be done across a language barrier; and as Mum pointed out, so many other possible barriers I could be facing as well which, with no knowledge of the culture, I can’t really predict and therefore plan for.
Called the hotel in LA today to check they could hold my baggage etc – very exciting to be making first real (ie, direct person-to-person) contact with my new world for the next few months.
Surprised by how calm I feel about it all – and how positive. The thought of possible material privations I find pleasurable, in a comfortable, relaxing kind of way. After all, haven’t I been camping these last few years, anyway? And hopefully this idealised simplicity will go hand-in-hand with a release from the Frankenstein-ishly exaggerated protectionism of our society (think undercover rangers policing school zones, an item I read in today's paper) which I find breathlessly constrictive and ultimately depressing.
I know that I’ll probably be up against horrors I’ve never come up against before – real poverty, corruption, threat of violence – but, not having come up against them before, I can’t imagine them, and so my vision of the place I’m going to is an Arcadian one of rest and playing with babies, yet with challenge enough in it in the sense of confronting those horrors I can’t imagine to prevent me from getting bored! I cannot wait…
I figure this trip will do one of two things – make me grateful for the claustrophobic protectionism I presently find so repulsive, or open a doorway to a new world and a new life that fit the character I’ve been given.