La Vida de Jessica

"Travel early and travel often. Live abroad, if you can. Understand cultures other than your own. As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially." -Tom Freston This quote is an ode to my love for travel, as well as my love for friends that also yearn for travel in a similar way.  Elyssa, Jessie, and I originally met because we were all living in Spain at the same time. We landed there on different journeys: mine was a four-month student teaching stint that lasted almost five years, Jessie's was a master's program, and Elyssa's was employment in tourism. Each means of arriving was different, while our reasons for staying were the same. We were enamored with living outside of the familiar, fascinated by expressing ourselves in a language other than that which we were born into, new possibilities that awoke us every day, and a yearning to understand ourselves better by understanding t...

 The Belizean people are some of the friendliest I've met in my journeys. They speak four languages which contribute to their ability to converse so easily. Although they were originally settled by the Mayan people around 15,000 BCE, their official language is English because the British colonized them in the 1600's.  They became a colony of British Honduras until they finally became independent from Britain in 1981, with English remaining as their primary language. Spanish is prevalent, as is Creole and Garifuna. Almost all Belizeans speak Creole, which is essentially a shortened version of English. Creole originated because they didn't want the British soldiers to understand what they said. Today, while driving around in the primary form of transportation (the golf cart), you hear the townspeople greeting each other and exchanging news in a hodgepodge of English and Creole.  The Garifuna presence is important around Belize, with music and dance an important element of t...

"First sanitize your hands, and then you can sanitize your insides." Upon arriving at the Belize airport, Jessie and I entered the airport store with free rum samples. Covid restrictions are strict here, so they required us to sanitize our hands upon entering the store. Once our hands were ready, the store worker invited us to sanitize our insides. I thought about this phrase the following morning as I saw the village of San Pedro, Belize for the first time. Elyssa, Jessie, and I rode bicycles from our abode on the water to the opposite side of the island. Our destination was Secret Beach, and the journey was about one and a half hours each way. While biking, I thought about travel as is a necessity to me. I cannot go too long without it because I begin to feel stifled. Traveling, venturing even slightly outside that which is comfortable, sanitizes my insides of complacency. Biking through the town, all of my senses were heightened. By all means, San Pedro is not a large city...