Monterey is a Memory

Before leaving to study abroad in Argentina, I started a blog to keep my family posted on my doings. While I may not be leaving the country, this move to Chicago feels like another study abroad. There are some similarities to be had after all. I'm moving to a big city, I am going to study Hispanic literature, and my mom desperately does not want me to leave. This time however, I will be driving to my destination, no long flights ahead of me fortunately. We've got eight-ish days to arrive in Chicago and have much to see along the way. Our itinerary includes sights such as: Hoover Dam, Grand Canyon, Four Corners, Arches, Denver, and Rocky Mt. National Park. After Colorado we'll be heading straight to Chicago; not much to see in Nebraska or Iowa. I look forward to taking you on the journey with me!

But first, a farewell to the place I've called home for the last four years with a quote from the man who saw it so poetically:

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen" and he would have meant the same thing.” 
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

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