Last week I moved to Little Mexico. Or so it seems. I feel like a foreigner in my own country. Walking down the street with Kirk a few afternoons ago, we passed another 20-something guy wearing a U of I t-shirt.

I gaped, “Look, it’s a white guy.”

He laughed. I giggled. It was odd seeing another white person. Other than the briefcase-clutching 9-5ers who appear in droves near the Metra train station for their weekday downtown commute, our new neighborhood, Rogers Park, was very much Latino.

With the last name Schroeder, and a mother who spoke only German through her toddler years, as a high schooler, I studied Deutsch. I don’t know a lick of Spanish, besides maybe the numbers 1 – 10. At the restaurant where I’m a server, most of the kitchen employees habla Español. At the start of a shift, walking through the back door, I’m greeted with “¿Cómo estás?” or “¿Cómo te llamas?” and forgetting which is which, I usually reply, “Lauren good!”

Last night I mosied up to the corner food store, La Frescasita. On the prowl for taco dip ingredients, the destination was exceptionally appropriate. I needed refried beans. The entire left side of aisle 3 was a tin curtain of canned beans. I’d never seen so many beans in my life. Black beans, brown beans, green beens, beans with jalapenos, beans with chipotle, beans with green chiles, fat free beans, authentic beans, garbonzo beans, beans, beans, BEANS.

I stood there in aisle 3, for so long, that the word “bean” started to look ridiculous. After you’ve written a word, and you second-guess your spelling, and you stare at it, and the word no longer is a word, but more of an image, just a bunch of letters together, and it sounds funny in your mouth when you say it…

I needed to just pick a can.

At 9 pm, it was dark. As I left the store, I heard cheers and shouts on the busy street corner of Clark (the main drag) and Lunt (my street). Clusters of people waved Mexican flags and cars horns honked, passing through the intersection. A local shopkeeper stood in the doorway of his store, catching a glimpse of the commotion. I smiled. There was something to shout about. Some sort of Mexican holiday? I wondered. At home, I googled September 16th. Sure enough, “El Grito”, Mexican Independence Day.

I thought seeing the waving flags, so clearly not spangled with red, white and blue, would only increase my stranger-in-a-strange-land feeling. Actually, I felt enlivened. Vivacity was flowing from that street corner, and I picked it up. It was something of a humanistic bond; I wanted to go grab a flag and start yelling too.

Even if I don’t buy the “Rosetta Stone: Spanish” course, without a doubt the culture will seep its way right through the condo windows, and rub off onto me with my every jaunt down the street, making my place in Rogers Park soon feel like mi casa.