la fuerza de gravedad

Distance: Watching the earth roll out from under the tracks of a train or the wheels of a bus, travelling at the speed of gravity, is a good way to learn distance. Airplanes, phone calls and emails can make distance seem obsolete, but as we travelled for an entire day just through Texas, the land stretched out like a drying hide, I could appreciate travel and communication in new ways. Even after arriving to Mexico, I feel much further from Michigan than I have before. 35 hours by Amtrak to San Antonio.

San Antonio: It shocked me in a way to come across the Alamo while meandering through the downtown of the city of San Antonio. In my mind, the Alamo was always crumbling and dusty, sitting out in the desert, surrounded only by even more dusty land. But, no. Instead it sits pretty, surrounded by green gardens, well-lit at night, and directly across from Ripley´s Believe it or Not, a Haegen-Daaz ice cream shop, and a robotic Davy Crockett amusement ride. And instead of desert, office buildings, busy streets and department stores surround this building that sticks mythologically in the American psyche, when in real life, to me, it amounts to a Disney World attraction, in both its false construction and its atmosphere. We found the River Walk to be a lovlier part of San Antonio and we walked it both at night, tranquil and quiet, and in the morning, greener and tourist-ridden. In the morning we took our breakfast tacos (something all the Texans in New York told me they missed most about Texas) and tequila down to the river and made a nice breakfast out of it before hopping on a greyhound, headed across the border.

La Frontera: Crossing into Mexico by land was considerably less a hassle than what I remember from the airport. The bus stops, U.S. citizens get off the bus, run large parcels through the scanner and pay 23 dollars for the visas (and an automatic 6 months, no less) and back on the bus. Making things even easier, the Greyhound tooks us right to Nuevo Laredo´s main bus terminal and within 7 minutes we were on another bus bound for Monterrey. Things move swiftly moving south.