Holes and Nests

By the end of August I'll probably be able to drag myself through security at DIA in my sleep, and have the A terminal memorized. At least the portion around A47.

My flight made it in on schedule and with no more than the usual turbulence. And my luggage came on time as well (and underweight! yay!) which is always the greater accomplishment. After those three days in Africa when I had nothing but a set of scrubs and a toothbrush to my name I've developed a healthy appreciation for good baggage handlers.
I am in the same hotel TPR put me in last week, though two floors up, and with an excellent view of the medical school where I teach one of my sessions. Being right next to a university teaching hospital, there are always interesting people staying, and not just the legion of army medics that were here last week. Patients range from the interesting to the incredibly sad and I have to keep reminding myself not to :
1) stare
2) ask for case history
While learning experiences may abound left and right here I have always sworn that whatever I am, I will not be tacky (I'm not always sure how well that's working out.)
My hotel is in central Miami, in a neighborhood that would be considered quite if it weren't for the roaring hospital across the street. When my supervisor dropped me off she made it quite clear that while going out alone at night was probably a poor decision in any part of Miami, this was a part that did not deal kindly to poor decisions. Consequently, if I am out after dark it is only to float in the hotel pool and watch the Boeings knifing their way through the clouds. I don't really have much to do out of the hotel other than walk to the medical school and grocery store. About 10 minutes away is a little Winn-Dixie where I go for mangoes and guava pastries. The walk takes me along a few old apartment buildings, under broad-leafed nut trees, and over a small drainage for the Miami-Dade county sewer department. The bank is always studded with crabs; lopsided fiddlers, and one big monster who lives in a hole under the sidewalk. I've never seen all of him, but I think he's about as big as my hand. There are signs all along the drainage prohibiting fishing, but nobody has said anything about crab trapping.

The store is always crowded, and always swarming with languages that wash over me like so much water when I enter. I've taking to repeating any and every Spanish phrase I hear, and then picking at it until I find the bones that look so much like my own French. As much as I love the language, and as much fun as I had learning it, it does seem a little silly sometimes. Like someone down in Uruguay deciding to study Icelandic.

It is awfully nice to be able to come back to the same hotel when little else bears semblance to its former self. I left a house empty of almost all remains of former roommates, and soon to be empty of me, too. There is something to be said for having a room with a couch and tables and chairs, for knowing someone else is in the room next door, even if it is a complete stranger. They seem kind of funny, my two strange little half-lives coming together to make something entirely different from both of them, but somehow they work perfectly just now. And who am I to ask otherwise?