Promising Days Ahead

The year has flown by while this blog has stagnated.  My bike was stolen.  We moved twice.  I gained jobs.  Other jobs ended.  It got cold (very occasionally, from our perspective) and rained sometimes.  Artichokes came in season and I feasted.  Oh how I feasted.  The town exploded (quite literally) in large and small ways during Fallas.  Asparagus came into season and I feasted. The orange trees blossomed, wafting a scent that stopped us in our tracks and led us, hound-dog style to the nearest tree.  Yes, we were the foreigners sniffing the trees in the otherwise-respectable plazas.  Friends have come to visit, and we have shown off "our city" nearly bursting with pride and felt connected in a way that distance makes all the more remarkable.  These are the people with whom you can share a comfortable silence as equally as a belly laugh, with whom you can discuss politics, music and life (even when you disagree), and people who are generally on your wavelength.  It reinforces my main goal for the future ** make Spanish friends **  Yes, we have them and yes, we are always trying to take it to 'the next level' in an entirely platonic way.  It's easy, however, to give up.  To let the silences and laughs become "awkward" and to stumble over tenses.  Something tells me, however, that all around me, all the time are these amazing potential friends and I just have to push through the little 'awkwardness' (which, as far as I know is something you can't even say in Spanish) of communication and it will all be worth it.  Beyond worth it, in fact... this is, after all, why we're here!

So, here is an entirely gratuitous picture of me and my younger sister in the plaza outside our house.  She left on Tuesday.  We had an amazing week together, even better with the visit of one of my best friends from way back.  

This visit was something special.  We caught up, really caught up and I felt so close to this wonderful, poised girl and generally proud of her.  It also seems strangely like the years are bringing us together... and by that, I mean literally making us look and act more alike.  For a while I thought Jack was going to go crazy with us echoing the same things constantly.  So many people also told us that we looked alike and that is something that we have never, ever gotten. Usually there's obnoxious jokes about the milkman and suspicious looks... but not this time.  People actually thought we were sisters and it felt so good.  I'm so looking forward to our next reunion, but in the meantime... I'm going to live each and every moment in this beautiful city up.