Back on the up and up after being food poised I had some work to catch up on but thankfully not a great deal. I headed over to Valentina in the morning for breakfast and worked there for several hours. It’s a really nice little cafe that wasn’t crowded and featured reliable wifi. After a while I started to make my way back to my place but I was listening to The Economist on my headphones and got engrossed in an article so I ended up just sitting at the Monumento a la Independencia and listening to that for a while. As I was about home I got distracted by this place right across the street from my apartment called The Beer Box. It’s a little tiny place that sells craft beers, plays classic rock and has what looks to be (I haven’t tried them yet) really good wings. I stopped in there for a bit and wrapped up work before heading home.
In the evening my roommate and I had a little roommates dinner at The Capital Grille which is right near our place. That’s the interesting thing about this experience. I came into it thinking that 75 people (and now less) was a pretty manageable size for a group but here we are in our seventh month and there are still people that I really don’t know at all. The fact that this is actually one of the neat things about our arrangement first occurred to me in the Sahara Desert. I ended up out there with three people who I hadn’t really spent much time with and who I probably wouldn’t have ever made an effort to spend much time with. It was a total blast, we ended up having a ton of fun and it will probably be one of the more memorable experience of this whole year.
There have certainly been times when I have wavered about sticking things out until the end. As amazing as all this traveling is it’s also exhausting. But really it’s those experiences that keep me sticking around. You never know when something as simple and as random as a roommate assignment can lead to great evenings and friendships. Already I can say that had a quit at any point there would be people that I would have really missed out on getting to know. And I’m sure that will be the case right up until our last day.