Back in School

Well, my trip was long and quite nice, although I would certainly not go so far as to call it relaxing. I spent a significant amount of time in transit and will try not include so much movement/time in the future.
A quick itinerary:
Fri Dec 7: Fly PDX-Phoenix
- It rained in AZ for four days straight
Tue Dec 11: Night bus to El Paso (7 hr)
Wed Dec 12: Arrive in El Paso, walk across the border to Ciudad Juarez (5th largest Mexican city, who knew?), argue with Mexican immigration over passport stampage.
Spend a few hours with a CSer, Jenny, seeing the city and eating delicious food. I learned that, contrary to urban legend, burritos are not an American fake Mexican creation. Nor are chalupas.
Catch bus to Chihuahua (5 hr) and meet CSer, Jorge
Thu Dec 13: Walk around city, sadly seeing no wild packs of rabid chihuahua dogs.
Play guitar hero for first time (No longer uninformed hater of the game)
Interestingly, drivers here stop for pedestrians as proactively as they do here in Portland. I have not seen such anywhere else and was certainly not expecting it in a redneck city in Mexico.
Fri Dec 14: Catch early 5 hr bus to Creel, a touristy town in the mountains with a hostel that costs $7, including dinner and breakfast, sweeet.
Sat Dec 15: Morning hike to a mirador (scenic overlook) where you can see all the wood smoke from heating enveloping the town
Catch train to Divisadero where there is an amazing canyon, almost as beautiful as Grand Canyon, although I will consider this further when I go to the Grand Canyon this summer
Spend a couple hours here before catching next train to El Fuerte (approx. total train time = 8 hr)
Arrive OUTSIDE El Fuerte late in the evening to find that the town is actually several kilometers away so that I have to box ride in the cold to avoid a seemingly expensive taxi ride, which upon later consideration was not that expensive.
Get picked up by random guy who drives me to the hostel, which is closed and then drops me at another cheap motel ($8/night, no food). I give him a couple bucks for his help... he is unemployed.
The guys at the cheap place tell me that when they travel, they go to nice places, why do I go to cheap crappy places? This place is definitely crappy. The room is bare concrete with a broken chair and a lone industrial looking fan in the corner. It reminds me of the hostel room in The Beach. There is one toilet, with no door or seat. No showers appear to be available. My guess is that this place is frequented by hookers.
Sun Dec 16: Walk around the very nice town of El Fuerte. Remember that this is the desert, so it is decently warm and there are palm trees. The center square is quite nice as is the mirador. I also walk around the grounds of the two nicest hotels in the town, one of which is absolutely fabulous. For $100 a night, it would be an extremely nice place to go with a lover.
Catch extremely cheap bus to Los Mochis (3hrs). This is a minibus, which seems to act as a local transit service, almost more than an intracity service. What can we learn here?
Eat excellent tacos while waiting for bus to Empalme. The bus, which should take 5 hrs. takes 7 b/c of huge back ups at the military checkpoints. An orange is confiscated from me. I was insanely hungry, those bastards.
I meet a CSer here, Dianela, who puts me in a motel b/c her mother has not met me and is reluctant.
Mon Dec 17: Spend most of the day helping Dianela with her special olympics event by taking photos. After the event we head over to her grandparents' ranch, which is on the edge of town and is unbelievably serene. A short hike up the hill behind the house gives a wide view of the desert plain. At the extents of the view is a rim of mountains, with a bay of the Sea of Cortez poking through. To the east, a single track of rail cuts across the plain and, with the late afternoon sun casting an orange pall across the rocky expanse, a train blows its whistle in the distance. This calm view reminds me of a scene one might find on a decorative plate adorning the wall of a grandmother's den.
In the evening we go to a posada, or town party, where there is old Mexican music for the few who choose to dance, lots of food and cheap beer. I meet the mayor, and our table seems to have the luck as an uneven distribution of the night's raffle prizes go to us, including the two largest, a television and a stove.
Dianela's mother decides that I am not a weirdo, which is apparently what most of her friends are, and I am allowed to crash on their couch.
Tue Dec 18: We spend most of the day just hanging out around the house. Dianela's job seems to have that coveted quality where one can simply decide not to go. In the afternoon we drive down to San Carlos, which is a beautiful touristy area on the coast of the Sea of Cortez. The shore is spectacular with the mountains meeting the sea, interspersed with wonderful sand beaches. She convinced me that it was too cold to go swimming, but I was mighty disappointed that I brought neither swimming trunks nor towel once I realized that the temperatures rivaled Lake Superior in the summer.
I caught a night bus this evening back to Phoenix. The lazy Mexican immigration workers were not working the border when we crossed, so I still did not get the coveted passport stamp that had given me the trouble earlier, despite the fact that I paid their bullshit fine.
Wed Dec 19: I arrived in Phoenix near downtown pretty early in the morning (8 hr). So as not to trouble Jon or Keri, I decided to take public transit. Wow, it takes over an hour and a half to cross half the city.
Thu Dec 20: I worked on grad school applications and other random things. My red eye flight left at 11 PM to Minneapolis.
Fri Dec 21: I arrive in MSP at 3:30 AM and have to wait until 7:50 to catch a van to Eau Claire, which takes about an hour. Jen picks me up and we spend the day together. Her boyfriend is a huge baby and still doesn't want to meet me. He even makes her come outside to his car to get her Christmas present because she will be going home the next day.
Sat Dec 22: With a snowstorm looming, we depart around noon. On her way to Madison, Jen is going to drop me off at a gas station near the Taylor exit (45 min), where Simon is supposed to pick me up after visiting with family. Of course his cell phone has no service and all my calls to him are failures. We wait at the station for a little while before the attendant has the idea that we should look in the phone book. What a novel thought for us technology dependent youngsters. Luckily I am able to find his family and he picks me up a little while later and we proceed to Wausau (3 hr).
Sun Dec 23: The snow holds off until today, when it dumps over a foot. Woohoo!!! It is beautiful and doesn't even wreck any plans, although it postpones my last-minute shopping until Xmas Eve. I have been missing snow so much and haven't been able to be in a storm like this in a few years.
I play poker with the cousins, which is always fun.
Mon Dec 24: I finish my shopping and do the Xmas thing over at Keri's.
Tue Dec 25: Same as every Xmas, but with a nice new layer of snow. The family football game is fun and my team demolishes, as usual. There is plenty of grumbling that the teams have grown uneven over the years and must be adjusted in the future. Whatever, I make 3 of 4 touchdowns, one of them a spectacular run, although I give Ben the MVP for catching 4 interceptions and throwing two touchdowns.
Wed Dec 26: I go to Sheboygan with Mom (3 hr), defeat her at Scrabble.
Thu Dec 27: I am dismayed to find out that I have to catch the early bus, and then that it is delayed and I have conflicting directions about where the hell it picks up. The dispatcher tells me it will be delayed 1.25 hrs, but when I show up 45 later, I am lucky enough to see the bus pulling away. We end up chasing it down the streets of Sheboygan and I catch up to it at a red light and the guy is cool enough to let me on, telling me that the dispatcher has no idea what the hell he's talking about. You think?
The bus takes me to Milwaukee (1 hr), where I am to meet Brandy, who is flying in from VA. We meet at the Badger Bus terminal, which is inconveniently still in its old location, a several block walk from the new multi-modal station, where the other bus drops me off. We take the bus to Madison (1.25 hr), where we are happy to find out that they will drop us off at the capitol loop, many blocks closer to our destination than the Union, where it would normally go.
We spend 3 days in Madison, during which we get another half a foot of snow (Yes!!), and I get to see a ton of friends, including Araby, who is in town from NC; Jesse, in town from Phoenix; and Laura, who has now moved to Austin. We also went to a Badger hockey game, which was fun.
Sun Dec 30: We take the Van Galder to Chicago (3 hr), where we meet Eric just as he is flying in, and Liz. At the airport, I happened to notice Eric before he did me and ran straight at him in an attack pattern, he noticed when I was only a couple feet away and, with eyes the size of dinner plates, deflected me to the ground. Laughs were had by all.
Mon Dec 31: We went to Red No. 5, a club in Chicago that was having a NYE bash. The music was cool, but they totally lost lots of customers by making us wait for like an hour outside in the cold, thereby depriving us of an hour of free drinks, as the freebies ended at midnight.
When we left, not a cab was in sight and we spent like 20 minutes trying to flag one down. Finally, some other girls flagged one down, but it stopped in front of us and we got in. They were not happy, but we had been waiting forever and they had just arrived.
Wed Jan 2: Eric, Brandy and I all flew out, they to New York, and I to Oakland. I arrived in Oakland and then had to take the Air BART, which cost $3, cash only, no change (bastards), and then the Amtrak to Sacramento (1.5 hr). It was nice to be on a train again.
I spent the remainder of my trip hanging out with my uncles and cousins, including taking a trip up to Chico to meet for the first time four of my cousins.
Sun Jan 6: I flew back to PDX and was delayed enough to miss my last MAX. I was lucky enough to be offered a ride by some girl going to Sellwood.

In other news, I just sent out my hard requirements for my grad school applications and will submit the electronic requirements by tomorrow, except for PSU, which isn't due until the 1st of Feb.
Yesterday was unseasonably beautiful, being sunny the whole day, and I spent it walking all over the city and then playing ultimate for 3 hrs. I discovered that the SW is incredible for urban hiking, with nice neighborhoods, views, and tons of cool staircases all over the hills.
I will play in a winter ultimate tournament this weekend in Eugene and am pretty pumped since I haven't played a tournament since Halloween.