Day 1: May 30th Arrival

It is 9:45 PM El Paso time and I am exhausted. Been up since 3 am and have kept going. For the first time, I traveled on a plane all by myself with nothing but my heavy ass luggage to keep me company. Sitting here on this wannabe rocking chair my legs feel the tiredness that’s been building up all day.

As a claimed my luggage (the kind of bag my parents would take to India- heavy duty stuff), I got on a cab to take me to UTEP, my home for the next two months. As we were on the highway, me along with my other two roommates could not help but to hope and pray that the driver was not a kidnapper, especially when signs of Ciudad Juarez appeared. Once the exit for that city passed, all was well with the world once again. We were still alive, we were still in the cab, we were still driving towards UTEP, a safe environment.

I met my lovely two roommates and exchanged flight stories and the similar fear of being kidnapped with the snap of a finger. We wasted no time. As I unpacked Laura and Sarah began the vegan grocery list. I could not help but smile as the excitement Sarah has towards creating special recipes such as eggless milkless peanut butter cookies or Laura’s expertise on spinach puree used for pasta as a vegan dinner plate. The more recipes we thought of, the greater the shopping list became. Before we knew it, we were on our way to the Albertsons grocery store, which is a mere 10- 15 minute walk from our suite. However, add the bright sun and scarce wind and that walk seems a lot longer.

We shopped. We walked past every aisle once, twice, three times searching for the cheapest of all goods. For pasta sauce, we considered Prego or Ragu? Well the real question was which gave you more for your buck? That was the question for every grocery item on our list. We continued to pile items into our shopping cart as if we were on a shopping spree and we just couldn’t stop. There reached a point where I refused to let anyone put anything else in the cart for it was time to pay and time to take a step back and wonder about how we would take nearly 10-15 bags full of heavy grocery back to campus.

Then we fought with a talking machine. Who invented these self- check out things anyway? It’s meant to simplify lives, but in reality they just take up more time and you end up giving into a machine that is wrong. It took us nearly 15 minutes to check out groceries! I mean, come on, three grown ass ladies checking out grocery. It was a stressful experience, I must say. But like all battles that will be won in this city, we won and the machine gave us our long receipt in return and we kept it moving.