On Tuesday, May 30th, I took the fancy bus from Copán to Guatemala City. I spent the night in Casa San José--the same guest house where my group stayed for the first three days of the semester! It was wonderful to be staying in a familiar place after a stressful day, and gave a sense of closure to my experience, coming full circle to end my experience abroad in the same city and the same place as where it all began.
At 5:45 the next morning, I rode in a taxi through the rain-slicked, dark, and empty streets of Guatemala City to the airport, to catch my 8AM flight back to the U.S. I was sad to be leaving, but happy to be returning to a place where it's ok to flush toilet paper, you can drink out of the tap, there are toilet seats, smooth sheets, snow-capped mountains, all kind of food to choose from, and where the weather is cooler (most of the time). There were also a number of things I wasn't looking forward to about coming home, but as I wrote in my journal my first night back, "home always feels like more of home than I think it's going to," so I was pleasantly surprised to find myself happier about being back than I thought I would be.
The one big adjustment I hadn't been counting on was the bittersweet realization that I didn't have to figure out how to communicate in Spanish anymore--and that if I did, people would probably look at me strangely. Spanish wasn't the only thing I was having withdrawals from--my first two weeks back I walked around in long pants and a sweatshirt most of the day because I was so cold! I felt like I had returned to January, wearing the same clothes that I'd worn before I left, only they were on a much tanner person who was no longer quite the same person who'd worn those clothes four months earlier...
To echo my parting wish to Central America, "Good night, sleep well, and may you never cease to dream..." ...and may I somehow be a part of making that dream a reality...
