The idea came about on a perfectly lovely August evening while biking home from work – what if we just left it all and moved away? Where we moved to was the least of my concerns, it was the idea of leaving all that I knew for something else that really grabbed me. As I am not one to make flippant decisions of such life changing magnitude while riding a 10-speed bike on a dusty road home it came with a bit of surprise that this particular daydream became a reality. Not just any reality but my reality.
That night I brought it up with my boyfriend, ‘V – you are, very conveniently for us, Mexican. Let’s leave it all and move to Mexico.’
V’s first reaction was to ignore me. He is very rational and understood that I had a good job, lovely friends and a strong connection with my family. Instead of exclaiming with excitement (in both English and Spanish) he calmly continued to chop vegetables for our dinner. The next day he emailed me, ‘I’m calling your bluff baby. I'm not convinced you could actually go through with it.’
This thought had also crossed my mind but as the days went by I could not shake the idea of moving to another country, especially one where I didn’t speak the language and the culture was foreign to me. I had long felt that everyone at some time in their lives should leave their hometown in search of adventure. At 28 I still lived in the city I had been raised in, having moved after university not across the country but across a bridge. Not only that, horrors upon horrors, I only spoke one language. Knowing only English had long been an embarrassment for me. How amazing would it be to respond, ‘My other language is Spanish.’ The fact that I live in Canada where our two national languages are English and French was of little importance to me. Mexico had become my target, my daydream refuge, my brand new life.
And so I quit my job, packed up my apartment and we bought a car for the drive down. Just for good measure I rented some documentaries on the great Mayan pyramids, the Conquistadors bloody successes and the political turmoil that has befallen Mexico ever since.
This I figured was enough to prepare me for my brand new life.
