Caves and Camping

Imagine yourself in the depths of the earth sitting on the hold, hard, metal seats of a little boat. There are fourteen people on the boat with and most of them don't know how to shut their mouth for more than a few seconds at a time. However, we stop in front of "Gibraltar Rock" and the tour guide turns off the lights and for a few seconds we get to experience total darkness. The blackness feels tangible, it's so thick. And then the lights come back on and I just want to close my eyes because the darkness was so beautiful. And then... then the tour guide pulls out a Native American flute and starts to play, and for once everyone is silent and the music echoes of the cave walls and it sounds so amazing.

Definitely one of the highlights of my week long camping trip. There's just something about caves... I know they're supposed to at least be a little bit scary, but somehow the silence and darkness felt more relaxing than anything. It was also pretty amazing when my aunt and I detoured away from the trail and explored a little cave on our own. We couldn't make it very far inside before it was all water, but it was so neat to watch the walls sparkled and find a cave salamander and some crickets and lots of frogs.

Speaking of frogs... I also watched one of the other girls on the camping trip chase a frog straight into a snake's waiting mouth. So traumatizing to watch the snake gulp down the poor little frog that wouldn't have died if I hadn't seen it and pointed it out to the other girl...

Oh, and I cannot forget the biggest adventure of hitting a deer on the way down. I was in the passengers seat and got to sit and watch as my windshield suddenly turned brown for a second. Lots of damage to the driver's car, but neither of us were hurt which was definitely a blessing.

Beautiful hikes, indescribable devotions in the sunlight every morning, and breath taking stars. I even got to see a lunar eclipse. All in all a very good camping trip, even with the disappointment that came right before, when my brother wasn't allowed to fly alone from Mexico to come and spend the week with me. I really miss my family, and it's been so long since I've seen any of them. It was so hard to hear that my brother wasn't coming after weeks of looking forward to seeing him.

Unfortunately, while I did write several pages worth of words, nothing worth showing anyone. I still have all of these ideas for the upcoming Equity Blue, but something is still holding me back from writing it. Maybe it's all the uncertainties and changing aspects of my life. It's hard to write when I'll be in a different state every week for the next few weeks.

Which brings me to wonderful news- I'm going to Chicago!!! I get to spend a week up in Chicago with my boyfriend and his family and some other families that used to go to my school in Mexico. I cannot wait to see some familiar faces from Mexico and spend some time with friends. And, of course, I am excited beyond words to see my boyfriend again after months of rare Skype calls and some emails and lots of Facebook messages passed back and forth as I moved from country to country. Five more days until I get to see him in person!! I cannot wait!

So not much happening in the pages for me right now, but a lot of adventure outside of them.

Smile, You're In...

I should have taken a picture of the sign: Smile, you're in :D usseldorf! I did smile, as I have been quite a bit lately. I was really hoping that I would have more time to blog, but it turns out when I'm traveling around Europe blogging takes a backseat in my brain.

So in order to try and avoid a blog post too long to read I'll stick to two stories and hope I can get some more details in later on.

First off, taking a train in a foreign country would probably be a bit scary no matter what. I mean, it was Germany, and I don't speak German, and I'd never been to Europe before. But then my flight was delayed four hours and I missed my trains.
So I had to learn how to buy new tickets and probably paid way too much that the delayed airline really should have paid. If I was someone else I would have hunted them down and made them. But of course I just paid whatever without even trying to figure out how much. I even splurged on a Sundae from Burger King to try and make myself feel better.
Then came the adventure of trying to find a way to connect the family that was going to meet me at midnight to tell them that I wouldn't get on a train until 1:30, though of course the train was delayed until almost 2:30.
So I wandered into the internet Hot Spot room with possibly homeless people possibly waiting to steal all of my belongings. But I went in anyway and locked myself into a room with all of these strangers (okay, I wasn't locked in and I sat right by the window, but still...) and eventually I asked someone to help my connect, and while my computer never did connect to the internet the man who thankfully spoke English let me use his cellphone. Sorry, his mobile phone.
So then I sat in the Hot Spot room for a while and then left to explore until a creepy man started following me around the empty train station after midnight trying to talk to me. So I followed around the few people still there until I met the nice lady with a bike headed to Paris who happened to be sharing my train and helped me figure out that step. And then the man with the license plate helped me through the next two trains, where I helped the English speaking guy with the turban and accidentally sat in first class until the ticket checker kicked me out and I eventually made it to my final destination of the day.

Wow.  That was longer than I meant. Oh well, you don't have to keep reading.

So fast forward to Konstanz and I'm with my friend looking at the locks on the side of a bridge and this guy comes up trying to talk to us and get us to fall for him or something. And then this other guy came up to ask why the locks were there, and he got really upset that they couldn't be opened again. "But the lock is like a covenant, so what if there is a breakage in the relationship? My question is, how do you get the key to open the lock?"
He kept repeating that over and over again, and our "you don't get the key back" didn't seem to be a satisfactory answer. So then he told us his sob story about the girl who ran off to the United States and came back pregnant and how he would never be able to trust another woman again.
Eventually we managed to get away without giving out our names and phone numbers and without going to "sit and talk". So while the first guy sat and felt sorry for himself that we both had boyfriends already the second guy repeated his story several times and wondered repeatedly why anyone would be so stupid as to eternally lock their love onto the bridge. I guess my friend and I are silly for thinking the locks are romantic, even though they definitely are.

A Traumatizing Night

I know you've all been there. Enough things pile up that you just end up traumatized.

I started the evening by finishing reading John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. I wish I could say that I did not cry, but that would be a lie. (Heje, see, I rhymed? I'm a poet and I didn't even know it.)
And no, that was not a spoiler. The book is about kids with cancer, what did I expect? I knew it would be sad, and that made it even worse.

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It's like The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, where the entire story is narrated by Death, and he tells you right from the start that everyone is going to die.



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Still, somehow the foreshadowing just makes the tragedy seem more real. Plus, instead of getting caught of guard and crying at the end- I was waiting for it the entire time I read. It's like this anticipation of "who's going to die first?" And it's awful.

(Disclaimer: I am not saying the book was awful. I loved the book, but hated it at the same time because it was so sad and I was so attached to the characters that I did not want them to die. It was a good book, if you don't mind reading the page through a film of tears.)

So, anyway, I finished this sad book and went to go watch a movie, hoping that my dad had gotten some cheery feel good movie. Nope. He rented the Call, which is terrifying. I won't go into any details, but I sure know that I will never ever ever ever be a nine-one-one dispatcher.

As if those two things weren't enough, later that night I turn on my light to go get a drink of water, and there's this spider. His back was like- poky looking or something. So I call for my mom, because she happened to be in the kitchen, and she comes in to kill it for me.

Is that not the most awful thing ever?

And my mom hits this thing with a shoe, and it explodes into a thousand little baby spiders.

I had no idea that kind of thing happened. I thought spiders built nests and laid eggs. Apparently not, or at least not this particular kind of spider.
By the way, I did my research, and this is a wolf spider- and it carries its babies around on its back. Well, future wolf spiders- carry your babies FAR AWAY from my room.

So yeah, traumatizing night.
Be very, very careful before killing a spider, and never assume that it won't multiply under your shoe.