Fuera del hogar, ya estoy aquí (Away from home, I am already here)

There are no hummingbirds here, but an agile pigeon played the Sidewalk Sidestep with me today. He grumbled about the students coming back for the Michaelmas term. Then he went off to peck at some crisps crumbs underneath a park bench, and I ran on to class.

The Michaelmas term, Cambridgespeak for the fall quarter. Or fall quarter, the UChicago translation for the Michaelmas term.

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Two UK pints of whole milk is £1.20. A UK pint is 20oz. A pound is $1.25, give or take two pennies for market fluctuation. I do back-of-the-hand math in the Sainsbury’s refrigerated aisle, as the store worker next to me refills the student-ravaged shelves. It is 9:15 p.m. Wednesday. This milk means maybe two weeks worth of hot chocolate. How expensive does this make each cup? Crushed Ibarra tablets sit on my shelf in an empty, 10oz plastic container that used to house Parmesan. I don’t know how much the Ibarra weighs, how much of the 100lbs I stuffed between two suitcases was taken up by hot chocolate powder. Factor in my backpack and me, and I don’t know how much of the exorbitant United airfare here was spent on bringing Mexican hot chocolate to the UK. Whatever it was, it was more expensive than the milk. I get in the self-checkout queue.

The OED’s earliest known record of “queue,” in the sense of a sequence of people, is from 1837. The comparative sense for “line” is documented as early as 1557, when Robert Recorde, a Welsh academic, used it in his The whetstone of witte.

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Sandwiched between Boots and Superdry sits the restaurant Nanna Mexico. I stumble in from the rain, a fool for forgetting my umbrella. The tortillas look legit. The rice is white, not orange. The staff are kind, and they don’t comment on the puddle of a person I have become. I am back speed-walking home in the rain, a warm, foil-wrapped burrito clutched to my chest. When I’m home, I shed my soaked jacket and haphazardly tear the foil away. The burrito doesn’t taste like what I’d have back in Chicago or California. Quite frankly, I would have tacos back there. Still, a taste resembling the food back home is a prize worth savoring.

I FaceTime my grandpa after dinner. He is “grandpa” here, but “abuelito” back home. Abuelito, the diminutive for abuelo. Wiktionary claims abuelo is itself a descendant of Latin’s aviolo, a masculinization of another diminutive term. On and on this rabbit hole goes. One word, getting more affectionate over time. I decide to fact check this claim. (I’m avoiding an essay about first language attrition, but apparently, I cannot overcome the instinct to find Reliable Sources.) I check Cambridge’s library system for a Latin-English dictionary, and the first result is a 1757 publication by a Reverend William Young. “By the King’s Authority. Designed for the General Use of Schools and Private Gentlemen.” I laugh too long and forget what I was looking for in the first place.

Nanna is not the right word for a Mexican restaurant. Perhaps they meant nana? It is a colloquial version of abuelita, although I have never heard it used that way. Nanna looks like it comes from one of the Italian languages. That’s another rabbit hole for another day.

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I make it a mission to photograph every cat I see in the British Museum. An onyx ocelot mid-stretch. A Bastet masterpiece named for her collector. A Woodland period smoking pipe crouched down. A plump housecat crouched and covered in calligraphy.

My friend advised, “When the Museum defends how it keeps its stolen artifacts, it cites how many people visit it each year. Don’t add to that number.” She has a point. Still, I am one in 4.5 million, and this might be my one shot. So the great British Museum Cat Scavenger Hunt is on.

Yuri Knorozov, the Ukrainian-born linguist credited for deciphering the Mayan script, is also known for his beloved cat, Asya. He briefly wrote her in as a co-author in a paper manuscript. She sadly never received full credit for her research prowess.

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My last name is hyphenated. The hyphen’s not uncommon, but no computer system could ever get it right. UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) issued a student visa to a Ms. Sophia Rodriguezbell. I’m not her, but I receive her ID all the same. The post office worker handing me the ID smiles and scrawls something on a Post-it. “Here’s the website to go to submit a revision request. It’ll be done in a week or two.” Five days later, I get my ID. I cut Ms. Sophia Rodriguezbell’s in half, as per UKVI’s request.

Mom and Dad liked the idea of a surname showing the union of two families. That’s the metaphorical meaning. I prefer it to the literal one: Son-of-Rodrigo, instrument-that-rings.

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UChicago’s Scav rushes me down to London. 36b: a photo of a Scavvie on your team with Atom Piece. Two points each. I am maybe the only Scavving person this year able to do this. It’s the only thing I can do, really, but anything for Snitchcock.

I reach Atom Piece, and it is shockingly small. I admittedly spent far more time ignoring its sister piece, Nuclear Energy, while running to class than I did actually looking at it. Still, I remember an imposing sculpture equally ashamed and in awe of its subject. This one looks conflicted but even more confused. I examine its scratches, Henry Moore’s etched signature, and the smooth underside of the mushroom cloud–shaped skull. When no one is looking, I take a series of bad selfies and text them to the Scav Discord.

In my variety of English, as is the case in many American varieties, we pronounce intervocalic /t/ as an [ɾ]. In linguistics, we call this “tapping” or “flapping.” Try pronouncing “atom” and “a tom(cat).” Aside from the stress shift, you will notice the /t/ sounds different. To speakers of other English varieties, this [ɾ] can register as a /d/ and not a /t/. This is why the security guard who so kindly helped me find Atom Piece first thought I was looking for A Dumb Piece.

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In the Tate Britain, across from paintings of crammed-in, Victorian London commuters and a less claustrophobic Derby Day, Henry Perronet Briggs’ 1827 The First Interview between the Spaniards and the Peruvians befuddles me. That’s the title, yes, the caption insists, but that is at odds with the subject matter. The two central Incan figures are as white as the Spaniards. I try not to grin too comically, lest the volunteer nearby looks at me funny. I do not know what the Inca wore in their day; we didn’t cover that in Latin American Civ. It wasn’t leopard print wrapped haphazardly around the torso, held up by reddish-orange straps reminiscent of 1960s Star Trek’s questionable costumes for female aliens. (And yes, that is leopard print, not jaguar fur. Google tells me jaguars have spots in their rosettes, something Briggs omitted.) Whatever the case, I take a photo and text it to a friend back home with a laughing-crying emoji.

I return to the caption and land on the phrase “anti-imperial theme.” That’s not what the Incan figures said to me, but that phrase does not reference them. Its focus is the conquistadors. I was so beset by the pale Inca, looking more English than Incan, that I forgot to look at the Spanish. No, the caption talks about Francisco Pizarro on the painting’s far left, face shadowed and gun ready.

Francisco Pizarro. A name indexed in the annals with Hernán Cortés, Pedro de Alvarado, and Juan de Oñate. Names of storybook villains and under-the-bed monsters, passed down in my cultural mythos. Their names taste of monstrosity on my tongue, but visually I remember only dignified paintings of heroes, explorers, and trailblazers. This is not that. Briggs’ Pizarro is no hero. He is a figure sidelined, face shadowed, gun ready. He is devious, plotting, betrayal itself. It is Atahualpa who Briggs graces with all the fixings of European glory: contrapposto, skin pale and glowing, and a gentleman’s mustache. I dislike how Brigg glorifies Atahualpa by making him white, yet the favorable portrayal of an Indigenous figure must have been a rarity in 1827. (The caption verifies this assumption.)

I stay staring at Briggs’ Spaniards and Peruvians until a museum-wide announcement informs us closing is in fifteen minutes. I head home and watch the countryside go by, mind stuck thousands of miles away and hundreds of years ago.

In first language acquisition, a word’s extension refers to the entities encompassed by a word. No word refers to a singular thing, and this flexibility allows phrases like “I went home” to describe a myriad of things. I returned to Berkeley, California, where I was raised. I climbed up the Snitchcock stairs, flashcards bulking up my pockets. Here, it means I moseyed on back to my Trinity accommodation, next to a Sainsbury’s loading dock, above a street musician’s Sunday spot, and exactly 17 minutes door-to-door from my favorite library chair. I just went home.

—Sophia Rodriguez-Bell, Class of 2024, studied abroad for the 2023–24 academic year at Trinity College Cambridge, through the University of Chicago College direct enrollment program.