Vroom vroom

Yesterday, my friend was trying to teach me how to roll my r's properly when speaking Spanish. I've never really been able to manage to do it right, so he was trying to teach me. And in the process, I discovered that we say our r's really weird in English. 

My friend kept saying, "Say run." And after some back and forth, I realized that r's are very different in English and Spanish*. When he says "run", its a postalveolar sound--the tongue hits kind of between the hard palate and the alveolar** (the area above the back of the teeth).

In English, we make a palatal r sound--our tongues are back farther in our mouth, and the sound is made in the area of our palate. Which was a revelation to my friend (and to me) and also made him want to puke a little. Not sure I blame him. When he made his r's the way we do in English, the difference between the two pronunciations became really obvious. 

It was a very entertaining conversation with lots of laughter (mostly at my horrible attempts to not vomit r's) and I don't know that it's necessarily blog worthy, but I share it because 1) I just love that it's a conversation I got to have in the middle of a Walmart and it makes me happy that I have friends around the world, and 2) I finally know how to actually learn to roll my r's and get better at Spanish. So it brought me joy, and we all need more of that. 

*I may have noticed this twenty years ago when I studied linguistics, but if so I had completely forgotten.
**Again, it's been 20 years, so I may be a little off on this, but that is how he was saying it. 

Teotihuacan

 

Mexico City

Since college, if you had asked me where I wanted to go in Mexico, my answer would have been Mexico City. And finally, after 20 years, I made it.

Why Mexico City? It's a city on a city on a lake!!! Why would you NOT want to see that? A city built by Aztecs about 700 years ago, on a lake. And then, 200 years later, the Spaniards come, and decide to build their city on top of Tenochtitlan. And it's still there!!! On top of the city on the lake!!! And it's kind of sinking in places (yeah. I did mention it's on a lake, right?) but it's STILL THERE!!! How amazing is that?!  

Anyway, one thing off the bucket list. 

Basilica de Guadalupe

Meat cooking

Templo Mayor

Metropolitan Cathedral

Palacio de Bellas Artes

Museo Nacional de Antropología

El Caballito

 

Who knew?

It turns out that I hate unpacking.

At least, I assume that's the case based on the fact that for all of the trips I've taken in the last 6 months, on only one occasion did I unpack within 24 hours of arriving home. I got back from my most recent trip on Wednesday and still haven't unpacked everything. And the record? I think it was something like 2 weeks to fully finish unpacking.

It may not be fair to say I hate unpacking. I think it's more a lack of interest. I'm ambivalent, and there are other interesting things to do, so I don't get around to it. Which could have some sort of deeper meaning about the state of my life or something, but who has time to worry about that.*

Also, in my defense after this latest trip, I was coming off of a week of averaging 4.5 hours of sleep per night, going into essentially a 5-day weekend**, and coming out of COVID (very mild case, and only 1 out of 3 tests confirmed it was COVID, but I feel like it was the confirming test that counted). Clearly, other factors were at play.

All of which means I still haven't unpacked completely. But tomorrow, if I break my general pattern of non-working day shenanigans, it will get done.

This is fine. 

*Okay, you got me. I do. Or at least, the couple weeks prior to my departure I seemed to, because I spent a lot of time laying in bed not falling asleep overanalyzing life. So, time? Yes. Desire? NO.

**That ended up really being a 3.5 day weekend. The first day went as planned: worked half a day and took half a day sick-day. The second day was supposed to be a comp day, for working the weekend before, but then there was a project our team in Mexico had to have done by the end of the day and of our team of 7 people stateside, only one was planning on working. And it's not like I could go anywhere (COVID. I probably could have gone somewhere, but it seemed like a really bad idea). So, I kind of worked 5 or 6 hours. Maybe 4. Whatever. It was fine. We got the project done, and I wasn't bored out of my mind all day. I also didn't unpack, but tradeoffs.