There’s an old joke I just made up that the only reason Lucas hasn’t come back to the U.S. is his dread of interrogation: what was it like? Do you feel different? DID YOU EAT A LOT OF STEAK?
In all sincerity, I love catching up after a long time away (though I suspect if you knew how much red meat I’ve eaten in the last 5 months you would feel more pity than envy). Still, I thought I’d thwack a dozen birds with one blog and do a little ~semester overview~.
What’s my day-to-day been like? Kind of like if you took a hippie van that ran its whole life on leftover vegetable oil, pumped it with military grade jet fuel, and then put it in the Indy 500.
Well, almost: to call the Argentinian diet diesel would rather overstate its flavor profile. Spice is nonexistent, sandwich shops always cut the crust off, and the city’s most famous dish is a flattened chicken nugget. It’s a wonder the menus don’t come with a Word Search and four waxy crayons. On the upside, a coffee-glazed croissant combo goes for $1, so I usually hit my Diabetes Quota by noon without issue.
Nor has this Indy lacked spectators. To my paralyzing surprise, when I sat down to my 20-minute oral Philosophy of Contemporary Politics final worth 100% of my grade and in which I was the only non-Argentinian, I was informed it would be taken in front of everyone else in the class.
While doing philosophy in Spanish is tough, the language barrier only really hit when I realized “bedtime” in the States roughly translates to “by the way, what are we doing for dinner?”-time here. If you were around me for the roughly six months before I came to Argentina, you will know I was very protective of my bedtime. It took about three days in Buenos Aires to realize the whole 8 hours thing was not going to click with having a social life.
I’ve also noticed a lot of perks in the little tasks I do throughout the day. I don’t have to worry about doing laundry, since the laundromats wash, dry, and fold your clothes for you. And since eating out is so convenient, I spent a lot less time doing dishes. But these improvements are accompanied by a sort of lateral step: wash-dry-fold your clothes becomes drop them off and pick them up from the laundromat, bike to point B is now sit on the bus to point B, and vegetables with lunch are sacrificed for flattened chicken nuggets because that’s what’s on the menu.
Of course, eating veggies at lunch is within my control as much as being a morning person. But so much of the joy of living in another country is changing your rhythm to fall in step with the people around you. Beach sunsets become rooftop sunsets, dusty IV band shows filled in by jazz bars, and 6am ocean jumps by… well, some things just can’t be replaced. But if asado on the weekends is the thing to do, I’ll steamroll my inner vegetarian in a heartbeat. And if meeting Argentinians means struggling to stay afloat in 3 hour philosophy lectures, at least I know I’m in the deep end. In that sense, my day-to-day has been a process of compromise: a bit of leftover vegetable oil here, some jet fuel there, and this hippie van just might cross the finish line.
In fact, this engine is gonna get a lot of mileage in the next 3 months. I just started summer break, and could not be happier to say I will be spending it backpacking, rock climbing, and trail running through Patagonia.
It’s on these same principles of not tethering myself to old places or habits that I’m not packing my laptop, which—hold your tears—means I won’t be blogging until I’m back. At no point in history has it been easier to travel with an ultralight writing tool with instant publishing capabilities, and no, I’m not bringing it. Suffice to say at no point has it been easier to store all your worldly stress in one bookmarks bar, and that’s dead weight I’d rather leave behind. If I happen upon an internet café teetering on a snowy ridge, I’ll be sure to send out an SOS short travel update. Until then, I’ll be storing up selfies, panos, and point-fives for the next edition.
I’ll share a final thought from my move 5 months ago: you can’t really predict what you’ll miss about a place until you leave it. There are certain things you can say, like, I’ll miss living on the beach in a house with my best friends, and so on. But our memory of people and places are never those people and places as they “really were.” Rather, the same memories take on different meanings as we move and change. When I lost all my pants on my first day in Argentina, I had an emotional reaction: I’m an airhead, I need to keep track of my stuff, and so on. As I moved through the semester, I kept coming back to the event. Sometimes I felt like the loss was foreshadowing something else, or it was a lesson about change, or it was a metaphor for another thing I learned later on. The memory itself was a blank canvas that I assigned meaning to, depending who and where I was on a given day. In a similar way, I didn’t bother to give green smoothies any extra appreciation in Santa Barbara because I never considered that blenders and leafy greens would be so hard to come by. I miss green smoothies, and that memory-feeling only arises because of who and where I am now. I don’t think there’s any more to that besides, hey, that’s kind of interesting, and I wonder what I’ll miss about Right Now that I am completely oblivious to Right Now. (We can say that what you’ll miss is structurally unknowable, and if you want to read what I wrote about someone else who wrote about stuff like this, I direct you towards my most recent post on lucas.thebriccas.com)
Thank you to everyone who read my blog this year! Consistently publishing writing is one of the most challenging and rewarding habits I’ve started this year. I also just like being able to keep people in the loop about my life! Happy holidays and enjoy these photos I took this semester.
