The Five Senses: Querétaro, Mexico (LRW)

" New sounds, smells, language, tastes, sensations, and sights spark different synapses in the brain."
-Brent Crane, in the Atlantic article "For a More Creative Brain, Travel"

As a Neuroscience and International Studies double major, this sentence made me smile. First of all, I love reading articles that attempt to describe brain function to the general public. "Sparking synapses" makes forming new neural connections sound like lightning bugs mating, or the shock of a faulty transformer on any electric device. In reality, inter-synaptic communication is much more complicated than a simple spark, but I won't get into that description. It's a lot less firefly-ey, and a lot more chemistry.

A church in the countryside

The other part of this sentence that made me smile was that it's absolutely true. Why wouldn't exposure to a completely new environment cause people to become more creative? If you're introduced to a whole new world of thought, you have access to twice as a much information to create original ideas and combinations- and life in a completely different culture is the ultimate sensory exposure.

Living in Mexico has certainly introduced me to a whole gambit of new sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells. I've been here for almost twenty five days now, but I still remember having trouble falling asleep my first night here. Across the street, someone was playing salsa music, and the bells of the church down the block rang every hour. The whistle of the train near my colonia seemed to fill the darkness in my room, and I tried to drift off to the sound of the churning of it's wheels...

The cobblestone streets of San Miguel de Allende

Now, these sounds are just as normal as the crickets at my house in Pennsylvania in the summer, but the first week was an overwhelming barrage of discovering just how different life here could be. When I entered Dulles International Airport the morning of January 5th, it was less than ten degrees outside. Here, the coldest it ever gets is in the low 30s in the early morning or late evening, and around midday I can sit by the fountain in my school and do my work in the sunny 70s. I am still not entirely used to seeing palm trees everywhere, and I realized my first day here that I hadn't seen a cactus since my family visited friends in Arizona when I was about 8 or 9 years old.

My taxi drive from the airport showed me what my textbooks in Spanish class back at Allegheny called a "mixture of traditional and modern." Paved roads lead right off into dirt roads, and I passed houses with some walls made out of old doors and other recycled wood to enter shiny new complexes with fancy signs and high walls. There's uber here, but there's also old VW bugs that chug down the street right next to sleek

Audis.

My street in Colonia Hercules

I love all the brilliant colors and the street art, and seeing the flowers of the trees on my street bloom in January. There were definitely times my first week when I felt like I was walking through the "Mexico" exhibit at Epcot in Walt Disney World- everything here seemed too vivid to be real.

I am so glad that I am living with a host family here- the full immersion part of this experience was really important for me to learn both the language and the culture. Best of all, my host mom's cooking is amazing! "Mexican food" in American is not really what Mexican food is like- Americans are used to eating Tex-mex. Here I have eaten everything from cactus to mole sauce, an elaborate dish made with chili and chocolate.

The most delicious food

No matter what I experience, or smell, or hear, or taste, I am constantly realizing there is so much left to discover. I have been here in Mexico for twenty five days now, but I am looking forward to what the next four months will bring!