041905 - ABQ II
Incidentally, I love the legal term "Acts of God". Not only does it effectively convey Man's utter ineffectiveness at controlling particular Forces of Nature or Happenstances of Fate, but it also slips in the point that this all happened because Somebody Upstairs doesn't like you.
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We're still getting used to New Mexico.
The lady and I have been surprised by how spread out New Mexico is. Just hearing the numbers, it's hard to conceptualize what the population density is really like until you see it. Indiana has about six million residents, with roughly a third of those living in and around Indianapolis. New Mexico is about three times the size of Indiana, has about two million residents, with roughly 750,000 of those living in and around Albuquerque. It's like there's nobody here. People complain about housing developments sucking up farmland in Indiana. In New Mexico, they have nothing but land. Building placement seems almost arbitrary.
We're still getting used to the demographics, too. Indiana is about 4% hispanic, 8.5% black. New Mexico is 42% hispanic, about 2% black. Whenever you see an "ll", pronounce it as a y. (And Albuquerque still has a road named after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It's adorable.)
Speaking of demographics, the entire non-Latin population of New Mexico appears to have done time in the Midwest. Everybody we've spoken to has been from Iowa, or Illinois, or Ohio. At the bank today, after we informed the bank manager of where we were from, a young asian woman popped around a corner and said, "Omigod! I lived in Carmel!"
And Santa Fe is super tiny. For real. It's slightly larger than Terre Haute. Never heard of Terre Haute? Yeah - that gives you an idea of Santa Fe's size.
On the plus side, we don't really have an accent to speak of here. In Atlanta, we would have been speaking waaaay too fast; in Pittsburgh, we would have to warsh our cars, eat kraht, and shop at Gynt Igl.
(We're very conscious of this - again, from our time in Europe. In Ireland, we were traveling around the time of the American election, and there was a lot of anti-American sentiment floating around. So we tried to draw as little attention as possible. We didn't talk a lot in public; our accents were a dead giveaway.
(In Malta, accent wasn't a big deal - we were lucky to find anyone who spoke English at all, and the locals hadn't seen an American in so long that they thought we were British.)
It's also really cool to walk out the door every morning and see a big ass mountain staring you in the face. We don't have that in Indiana.
And it turns out that the mercurial weather here is very overblown by the local newspeople. We've degenerated from "Swirling Tornado of Death" to "High Wind Watch". I'm waiting for the "Sharp Gravel Alert" or "Chance of Excessive Tanning."
It's a bit of a change. But I think we'll dig it. We better - I've already sent in the acceptance letter.