After 10 years and many countries connected with my family.

A lifetime away from this table.
I knew this was going to be a different trip from the ones I had taken in the past, but you cannot possibly be prepared for such intensity that comes from journeys that dig deep into your character. Its late August 2012, you can feel the cold weather coming; we are around one table in a open space surrounded by the never ending intense forest that stands as a fortress around us, this place is called Russia. We are in a small village called Bobkovo near Nizhni Novgorod. The Dachas stood tilted, as if they drank and danced like everyone here. Around the table sits my family from Mexico and Russia. It’s a typical Russian landscape, but this gathering is far from typical, the toasts are sometimes with vodka and other times with tequila.
It felt chaotic and intense, but it felt like everything about me it made sense now, but I just had to stop and ask how did I end up here?
In 1969, my father, who is from a small village of the north of Mexico through a series of unlikely circumstances ended up attending university in the Soviet Union where he met my mother, and later moved back to Mexico; a lot had changed since the last time he was in Russia. Nizhni Novgorod was a military city closed to foreigners, now we laughed with the story my uncle shared, remembering he told my father back then; that he worked in a chocolate factory, factory indeed it was but it did not make chocolate but military submarines; 40 years had passed and here my father sat across the table next to a babushka, both sharing stories from another time, who both experienced in a very different way. This trip was one of many stops. My family was coming from very different corners of the globe, Japan, NY and Mexico; who would think that after 10 years we would meet in the parking lot of a hostel in Denmark, it was bizarre but perfect. Who would imagine that a few weeks before I was running around in NYC, and finally I had decided to leave everything and get a fresh start, in the place where everything began, Russia.The next three months traveling with my family was a festival for all senses, after many plane, train and bus rides. It was like when I was seven and discovering the world for the first time, fighting with my sisters about who for the window seat my father taking us to an adventures without asking for our opinion, my mother was not with us anymore, but she was in each one of us who gathered around this table we where a family once again.