A Different Person

I am now a different person than when I first arrived in Argentina.  I have been here now seven months and I see the world differently.  The people of Argentina have transformed my world view dramatically in how to live life, respect life, and basically just have fun and not take things too seriously.

I have lived in the same house in the same barrio the whole time I have been in Buenos Aires.   The people of the barrio are kind, gentle and sweet people.  They know me now.  I am the foreigner guy who lives in their hood.

I have been accepted with open arms and kindness.

People who know me know that I love to ride the busses.  I have wandered and traveled all over Buenos Aires.  I know the city now almost like the back of my hand.  Funny, if you read my earlier posts you will see my struggling with my book of maps of the city, wondering where I was, because the city is not an easy one to meander as it has a pie shape that is kind of bizarre.

The key to knowing your way around Buenos Aires as you walk kilometers and kilometers are the trains.  The trains in BA are the waterways in Holland.  They guide you from point A to point B and if you know what side of the train line you are on, you know where you are in the city.  Clearly, I no longer need my map.

The language is beautiful, challenging and a life long process.  I am now able to write in Spanish, with the help of my calculator friend called Google translate.  It is my guide to writing, and a template for the words that go on the page.  I still can not write quickly in Spanish, but the words do now flow a bit better, and the spoken word tambien.

I am a changed person.  I like who I am better now.  I like seeing the world through different purple colored glasses, instead of rose colored glasses.  As I have continued to write in my blog, the one theme has been appreciation for the opportunity to come to South America and really live here.  To get to know the people.  But most importantly for me, it has been satisfying the burning desire I have had in my heart for many years to come down here.  It was a long time in coming, but once you finally do the thing in your life that you always wanted to do, a peace sets in like no other.

It does not matter what that thing is, for all people on the planet that thing is something different.  For me, it was coming to South America and living.  And I thank the universe for giving me the opportunity to do just that.

My Second Home

The perspective of time is very interesting in your life especially when you are living in a foreign country.  We were in Ecuador for three months and now I have been in Argentina now for almost seven months.  It takes many lifetimes to truly understand, but in this life I am beginning to understand how making a commitment for a certain amount of time to a particular thing really matters.  I have been here now long enough in Argentina to understand what life is about here and how I can officially in my mind now call this place my second home.

I have been taken care of by everyone who I have met.  From my friends at the place I hang out during the day, to the shop keepers in my little barrio, and especially my family in my home that I have been living in now since the day I arrived.

It is funny how life works out sometimes.  You get lucky a lot of tiimes in life, and surely you make your luck as well.  But those days back in New Mexico before coming down to Argentina who would have thought that the place I found to live initially would be the place I stayed the whole time I was in Argentina.

Seven months is a good amount of time.  There are thresholds in life about time, amounts of time where once you pass the mark, you can say it it was ten years or ten months.  Enough time to know.

One of the things that I have been extremely satisfied with in Buenos Aires is the climate.  It is a lovely climate.  I guess you can call it Mediterranean.  Having lived in California twice for over six years, four years in the Bay Area and two years in LA, I can honestly say that the climate in Buenos Aires is similar to California.  And it makes sense.  California is around 35 degrees north and Buenos Aires is around 35 degrees south.  This climate is very different from Ecuador.  In Ecuador during the months of January, February and March it rained almost every day.  Here in Buenos Aires during the spring, summer, and beginning of autumn the hot sticky days in December and January follow into February and March with more rain and cooler days.  This is of course a function of the moisture as well, as the autumn approaches the amount of rain falling from the sky slightly increases.

But during the hot summer months the occasional rains are a blessing in cooling off the big city.  Recenlty I have done some interesting things.  I am venturing out a bit more from BA into the country side and on to some smaller towns in the surrounding areas.  Last week I went to La Plata with some nice friends who showed me around the smaller city.  La Plata is about one and one half hours on the train from BA.  If you are eating ice cream on the ride, it seems a lot quicker, especially in the company of friends who make you laugh a lot.

La Plata is on the river as well.  It is just further south from BA.  The train ride starts in BA and ends in La Plata, so you literally take the whole line in, and go from beginning to end.  La Plata is home to one of the largest catolica cathedrals in South America.  Its consruction began in 1884 and over one hundred years later it was finally coming to completion.  Building big churches today is no easy feat, and one hundred years, mas o menos is a good amount of time for working on a project.  We had the opportunity to go up in the towers of the cathedral and take in the magnificent views of the surrounding area.  We were high above the pampa, or flat land that surrounds Buenos Aires.  La Plata is the capital of the province of Buenos Aires and Capital Federal which is the heart of the city of Buenos Aires is the capital of Argentina.

La Plata is known as the city of diagonals.  There are diagonal streets all over the town and the names of the streets are numbers and now real names.  So La Plata is unique in several different ways.

I also took a train ride out of town another day to a smaller village of Pilar.   It is also on another train line and the line begins at Retiro, the main train station in BA and ends in the small town of Pilar.  I was fortunate enough to ride the train all the way in both directions.  I was surprised however to learn after arriving in Pilar and spending the afternoon there that upon returning to the train station that the train had broken down.  So in my mind there was no way to return to Buenos Aires, and I did not know the other busses and where they went.  Depending on one means of transportation to get you somewhere is not always a great idea, especially when you decided to hardly take any money with you.  So, if I did decide to spend the night there it would have been possibly kind of chilly.  Luckily eventually the return train showed up, and whisked me back home to Buenos Aires.  We passed by plenty of stations on the way home without stopping as I suppose the driver wanted to get back home, so he could keep the trains running on time.  As far as the people that had to get off at all of the stops we passed by, I guess they get back on the train and go in the other direction, or decide to take a bus back home.
 

The Magical Six Month Mark

People have told me for years that after you live for six months in a foreign country where you are not a native speaker that your language skills in the particular language you are learning in the particular country you are living in start to kick in and you notice an improvement.  I am happy to report that this is happening to me as well.  It is not like now I am a native speaker, that will take me several more years at least to get to a point where I feel really comfortable, but in the past couple of weeks I have noticed a marked change in my ability to understand people better, and also have more of a cadence once I start talking a bit.  It is still pretty basic Spanish, and I am not able to carry on a really deep conversation and express myself the way I would like to, but it is basic enough to get to know some one who you have never met before and have a nice talk.



There is one important ingredient though that has to be there, and this is something that is not obvious to a lot of people. The person you are speaking with must understand where you are coming from and understand what it takes for you to understand them.  If they do not get that point then I still am not able to be successful in conversation.  The person has to really understand to slow down their speech dramatically in order for you to understand.  When that happens, then the conversation is able to blossom into a nice flower.

As the time goes on here, I am liking living here more and more.  It is a beautiful country with beautiful people.  I can pretty much say that of all the places I have visited in Latin America and all of the people I meet here.  I am starting to get to know people from all over South America.  

I am starting to understand better the different peoples from different lands and know their idiosyncracies of their culture and who they are.  This is why I came down here, to get to know better, what this place is all about.  With that said, as we all know in life, the more we get to learn and understand something, the more we get to know how much we do not know.

That is truly the case in understanding the country of Argentina.  As I spend more time here, I am starting to learn more about what it is like to live here, and what the problemas are as well.  And there are many problems both in Argentina, and Latin America as a whole.  BUT this piece is not about that, it is just worth noting that this information is out there for my consumption and processing.

Yesterday, I got to go to a families home once again who lives here in Argentina and witness first hand what it is like to be with a family down here.  This is my second chance at doing this, and what I get to see is truly fascinating.  The thing I continue to witness down here in Latin America is the close knitness of the family.  The family UNIT is very important, it is essential to life in Latin America and probably in most parts of the world.  Clearly this is both good and bad, and the ramifications of this cultural effect has many social and political dissertations at its feet, but suffice it to say that this component of a society is very interesting in how it ties the social fabric of a nation together and what it means to be part of a bigger picture.

Clearly, in Estados Unidos, this is not the case.  There are pockets where this is true, and many families in the United States maintain this bond that I witness down here, but clearly it is not as normal as it is down here.  For me personally, I am lucky to still be relatively close with my parents and immediate siblings, but the distance I have traveled in my life, and not living close to home my whole entire life, I have not experienced the close knittedness overall that you see not only with your immediate family members but also the extended family members as well.  Yet, another component of life in Latin America.

I will close for now on this topic and this post, but I look forward to exploring other areas of life in Latin America and what it means for a country and a society as a whole as the experience expands even further and wider and deeper.