Estar Acá

From top left: road to Iruya; Cerro de los Siete Colores, Purmamarca; Iguazú Falls; vineyard in Luján de Cuyo; Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires; estancia in San Antonio de Areco; Lago Perito Moreno, Bariloche; Glaciar Perito Moreno, El Calafate; Monte Fitz Roy, El Chaltén.

Man, we miss Argentina. It's been three months since we returned to the States; four since we flew out of Buenos Aires. That's plenty of time for nostalgia to seep in. It's also time for memories to seep out: What street was that on? What was the word for that? I'm dreading the day when we will be further from Argentina than the time we spent in it. What will we have lost?

That's the pessimistic view. The optimist asks, what will we have gained? As our repatriation to the United States continues, what new perspectives will distance afford us? It is useful and relieving that experience compounds. The more things we do, the more potential meaning we give to the things we've done.

I had been putting off writing summary posts about Argentina because that seemed to imply it was over. But I've accepted that it's more productive to do the opposite, because by documenting it, I can stop some memory seepage while still preserving the benefits of compound retrospection. That is the point of this blog, after all. Still—it hurts a little to write, and it's been harder since we've returned. There's a difference between writing about Argentina from Argentina and writing from an opposite hemisphere. It's the same reason why the Wikipedia page on glaciers can be a quick skim one day, the Rosetta Stone the next.

I found the name for that reason somewhere in Argentina, scribbled in the bottom-right corner of a painting: estar acá. "Be here." It may be ironic that I don't remember where I was when I saw that, but I am sure I was there. And that makes all the difference. All the reading about glaciers can't replace standing on one. So while I'm sure I'll forget the geological terminology to describe them, I will always remember how it felt to touch their icebergs with my own hands. As I write to you about Argentina, I'm not just trying to say "you had to be there"; I'm not even necessarily trying to convince you to visit. More than anything, I'm arguing my thesis for traveling: that it makes things irreversibly more interesting.

Street in Cafayate

Here are some facts: Argentina is the eighth largest country in the world. It covers a million square miles. Most of the country is sparse, as a third of the population lives in and around the capital. These things can be interesting on their own, but they didn't really register with me before we moved. The big deal at the time was that we'd be living in Buenos Aires, and I honestly didn't think that much about the rest of the country. I had seen photos of Patagonia, but didn't know which national park was what. I knew I wanted to visit the city of Salta, but had no idea what surrounded it. I figured we'd be traveling around a lot, but didn't expect that almost all of our travel would be within Argentina, and we wouldn't get tired of it after a year.

It was after we were there, looking at bus and plane tickets in Buenos Aires, that I realized the enormity of the country. Those facts from before got a lot more interesting when we started thinking about how to navigate. Before, the Andes were just a name on maps and thin mints. Now they would define a year of traveling.

Argentina covers a lot more latitude than longitude, which means its north looks dramatically different from its south. Its south already gets a lot of fame: Patagonia, for which I've already professed my love, deserves its status as destination number one in the Southern Cone. We were eager to be there and made it one of our first trips. But it may have been our last trip, to the Argentine Northwest, that exceeded expectations the most.

Quebrada de las Conchas

Where Patagonia has glacial valleys begging to be hiked, the Northwest offers the perfect road trip through quebradas—varyingly translated as ravines, gorges, canyons, or mountain streams. (Most literally, it means "broken", an appropriate descriptor for violent formations in a painted desert.) Patagonia blows sleet in your face; the Northwest blows sand. One is too cold to visit in winter, the other too hot in summer. Whatever their differences, they share the drama of their landscapes and the raw beauty of their extremes. I was consistently reminded of the other, and wondered if the Northwest is what Patagonia will look like in a few million years.

Glaciar Perito Moreno meets Cuesta del Obispo.

There is one irreconcilable difference: while Patagonia ambles at sea level, the Northwest is high-altitude terrain. Mountain passes reach 14,000 feet, and you feel it. It's here that I got the most shocking sense of how big the Andes are. Even from such heights, they tower up and look as if they're going to block out the sky. Improbably, towns are nestled right up to them, or even carved into them.

Plaza in Iruya

So are their burial sites, usually overlooking the living.

Cemetery in Maimará

More than anything, though, the defining feature of the Argentine Northwest is its culture. As much as metropolitan Buenos Aires oozes European heritage, the Northwest implies a distinct Argentine tradition, underscored by the country's largest indigenous population. There is simply a different feel. One of the more tangible products of that culture is Argentine folk music, whose reach is far wider than that of tango. It's traditionally sung impromptu at peñas, with booming emotion and aggressive guitar. You couldn't ask for a better soundtrack to the high desert.

No discussion of Argentine culture is complete without mentioning fútbol. For the sport that transcends all borders except the United States', an unforgiving mountainous terrain poses no exception. It just means there are soccer fields in some ridiculous settings.

Could be anywhere.

Argentines sometimes refer to the noroeste argentino by the hip initialism NOA. It's a popular winter destination for them, but remains relatively under the radar for other tourists. If it's any indication, the foreigners we met there tended to be on long-haul trips, sometimes of more than a year. Nobody batted an eye when we told them we were living in Buenos Aires—because of course we were. By contrast, travelers we met in Patagonia, Iguazú Falls, or Mendoza were usually just there for a couple weeks. To me, this implies that the NOA is highly underrated.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. The region is proud of its tourism and has put a lot of effort behind it. The locals seem to be in that precious balance of appreciating tourists and not yet getting sick of them. The Northwest calls back to me the most. Outside of Buenos Aires, I think I could spend the most amount of time there. That counts for a lot.

That's also not a negative on the more popular destinations. Iguazú Falls is phenomenal, but it's hard for anyone to argue that you should spend more than a few days there. At the same time, no one will argue that it's not worth the days spent. Who wouldn't want to be here?

By the way, it's pretty amazing that you can get from the arid Northwest to a subtropical jungle at the Brazilian border on just a two-hour flight due east. You're flying over a lot of stuff—the alternative twenty-four-hour bus ride gives you an idea of just how much—and at the end, you might be lucky enough to have a pilot willing to make a short detour.

To new perspectives.

This is even more of a plus when you consider that the Brazilian side offers helicopter rides over the falls for an exorbitant amount. It's actually really irritating to hear those things hovering around several times an hour. It scares animals away and definitely detracts from the experience. Argentina banned this practice because of its environmental unfriendliness; score one for their side.

"I approve."

I'm not a big animal person, but spending enough time exploring Argentina made it impossible not to notice some things. The easiest to spot, especially for Northern Hemisphere laypeople like myself, are the llama and its relatives—alpacas, vicuñas, and guanacos. Vicuñas are especially prevalent in the Northwest, where after seeing a sufficient sample, I concluded that they are in fact the cutest of the camelids.

"We approve."

Guanacos are hearty creatures and they teem in the South. We saw a lot on the side of the road in Patagonia, though probably more dead than alive. Skulls were strewn around; on one fence, there was a full skeleton of one that was apparently trying to climb over and failed horribly. Their conservation status is "least concern". Sounds about right.

And what about the classic, run-of-the-mill, working-class llama? They're all over, and they're cool. They're just not always the most graceful of animals.

Funny because it's true.

But no animal represents Argentina better than the mighty cow. The country may be human-sparse, but its vast fertile lands just outside Buenos Aires are a bovine paradise. There is a reason Argentine beef is famous, and it starts with the land. Argentines know this, and they pay respect yearly at the massive Exposición Rural, an 11-day extravaganza dedicated to all things agriculture. Above the grandstand, a banner reads Cultivar el suelo es servir la patria—"To cultivate the soil is to serve the motherland."

Every porteño we met told us that we must go to this event and warned us that one full day might not be enough. When we arrived, I don't think I had ever felt more like a city slicker, and I was in the middle of Buenos Aires. Gigantic farm machinery was on display; pickup trucks were showing off on obstacle courses; roosters, sheep, and pigs were being evaluated. But the biggest stage always belonged to the cattle.

Ahab's cow?

For vegetarians and carnivores alike, food cannot be divorced from the land. If my motto for traveling is estar acá, a close corollary would be comer acá—"eat here." Photos often don't do views justice; they are even worse at conveying taste and texture. Thus, it is our duty to go forth and eat.

Early on, I complained about a lack of diversity in Argentine cuisine. After several more months of meticulous research, I determined that in general, the food is better outside of Buenos Aires. For example, dining in Mendoza was consistently excellent. We had gourmet empanadas stuffed with gruyere and pancetta, which were so good it didn't seem fair to compare them to regular empanadas. We were even able to find spicy (!) Peruvian food. And it wasn't all gourmet eats: at one hole-in-the-wall, we had a simple, impossibly juicy chicken thigh. We asked what kind of sauce they cooked it in; they said mayonnaise. So sometimes it's better not to know.

Patagonia kept it simple. A lamb, split open and cooked on an open flame until its skin is crispy, speaks for itself (though fresh chimichurri as accompaniment doesn't hurt). That was not only one of the best lambs, but the best meats I've ever had.

The stuff of dreams.

In Bariloche and the Lake District, we sampled every ice cream flavor we had never heard of: calafate, sauco, rosa mosqueta. We also tried some that were more familiar, like fig or ristretto, for good measure. In the Northwest, perfectly doughed empanadas were brought to life with picante sauce, which was only spicy by Argentine standards. For a region where every menu had the same stuff—stews like locro, humitas, tamales, empanadas, and not much else—they managed to keep it interesting with consistent quality. Also, we were able to find good vegetables in the arid Northwest. Buenos Aires has no excuse.

Argentina is a big country, but there's one place that to me best captures its trinity of land, animal, and food: the estancia. It's one of the most distinctly Argentine institutions, and they are dotted all around the country, even within an hour of Buenos Aires. Estancias are essentially ranches, but it's hard to imagine them in the United States. For one, it would be exorbitant to stay there. In Argentina, you can get a full day of horseback riding plus full room and board for a steal. They can be touristy—at one of them, a gaucho performed a horse-taming show that was borderline erotic.

This is before it got weird.

However, estancias withstand their touristiness by remaining unmistakably about the animals. To add to the reasons they couldn't exist in the States, horseback riding at an estancia is done without helmets, lessons, or any instructions whatsoever. You just trust the animal and your instincts. And that they have properly tamed their horses.

Estancias are a reason to travel unto themselves. The landscape is always pretty, but not so different that you can tell where you are just by looking at it. The people are calm, respectful, and deferential to the land. The food is always excellent, and you have a heightened sense of where it came from. You can sit there all day, on the surface doing nothing, and not feel bored, but restored. You're just there.

Clarity in Return

We're back in San Francisco. Since I last wrote, we've explored Northern Argentina, said our final goodbyes to Buenos Aires, and traveled through Colombia and Mexico. I will write about all those later. For now, we are contemplating being back home. How does it feel?

It feels weird. In a way, it reminds me of when we landed in Buenos Aires. We had abruptly changed environments. We had no permanent home. It took us a while to be able to process what we were experiencing. All that is true again, but it feels even weirder.

Our move to Argentina was akin to immigration. We arrived in a new country where we didn't really speak the language and didn't really know anyone. We gradually got used to the way of life there, adjusting to differences that can be collectively summarized as culture shock.

Now we are going through reverse immigration. We are returning to where we came from, and where our family and friends and stuff are. Except our stuff is in bags and boxes all over the place. And we're all over the place too, bouncing from house to house, couchsurfing in neighborhoods we used to call our own.

With reverse immigration comes reverse culture shock: after significant time in a different culture, it can be jarring to readjust to the primary one. I had read about this phenomenon while we were still in Argentina, so I might have been bracing for it when we returned. But I don't think that helped much. The effect is involuntary. When we landed in the U.S. and approached the customs agent, it took all our effort not to say buenas tardes. It had been over a year since we addressed a stranger in English. Or, for that matter, ordered food in English, or not said perdón after bumping into someone. In our first days back, we kept on accidentally saying gracias. It's not like we hadn't been speaking English; that was still what we predominantly spoke when we were alone. But talking to strangers is a different scenario, and our involuntary linguistic urges were an indication of our immersion in the Spanish language. Our surprise at feeling those urges was an indication that we had underestimated our immersion.

To be fair, I often get this feeling when I return from a foreign country, even if the trip was only for a week. It feels new to walk familiar ground, to show a driver's license instead of a passport, to handle domestic currency. The feeling fades in a day or two. But we've been away for 408 days (not that I was counting. Actually my laptop was counting for me—I did a backup to a hard drive the day before we left, and throughout our stay I got periodic updates of how many days it had been since my last backup. Since you cared). That feeling of old being new amplifies and lasts longer. And it also goes deeper than surface interactions.

We'll be sitting in a restaurant and get an uneasy feeling when we overhear conversations about workplace drama. It also feels weird to be able to understand overheard conversations so easily. And when the waiter puts the check on the table while we're still eating...

So, since we've been back, I've been hyper-aware about not starting too many sentences with "In Argentina..." I didn't want to be that guy. But to hell with that. Especially right now, where the whole point is to write about Argentina. In Argentina, work does not dominate conversations, and "What do you do?" is not the first or second question you ask a stranger. In Argentina, they speak Spanish, and it's wonderful, and it's sometimes also nice to be able to not understand what people are saying. In Argentina, they don't give you the check without you asking for it, because you leave when you're ready, and the two hours of conversation after the meal are more important than the meal itself.

Pingüinos and doodling are also important.

So that's how it feels when we're in restaurants.

It's not dissatisfaction; it's difference. Because it's also true that in Argentina, a salad this good could not exist, and neither could a sushi roll without cream cheese. In Argentina, we could not eat as well as we do in San Francisco. The negatives just happen to be more jarring because it's easier to remember the positives when we're away, so it's not as much of a shock when we experience the positives again. When nostalgia is on one side, the other side is left blind.

I'm a sucker for metaphors and our flight to the U.S. gave me a good one. The movie options were awful so I ended up in the "Classics" section, which for some reason included Inception. For those who aren't familiar, the movie is about mercenaries who can enter dreams to steal or implant (incept) information. Leo DiCaprio's character and his wife go so deep into dream space that she ends up thinking it's real life, and Leo has to incept the idea that she's dreaming in order to get her to wake up. Except when she's awake, she remains in a funk because she still thinks she's dreaming, and the consequences are disastrous (spoilers). How is this a metaphor? Because in the movie, there's a scene where a plane lands, and that's exactly when we landed in real life!

The dream is over and the dream continues. We are home, and we are finding out what that means.

An End

Tomorrow we leave for the north. We will be traveling through the mountain deserts of Valles Calchaquíes, Andean altitudes of Salta and Jujuy, and finally Iguazú Falls. After that, we'll have a week or so in Buenos Aires to pack up our apartment, say our goodbyes, and leave again, this time for good.

We'll have more travel ahead of us. We just bought tickets to Colombia, where we will spend a couple weeks before continuing on to Mexico. We still don't have our tickets back to San Francisco—but it won't be another year. Sometime in October (2015), we will be home.

So even though we're at least a couple months away from home, our time living abroad is essentially over. What's coming up for us is a lot of motion, new environments, and different cultures. We're about to enter full-on travel mode, and as I attempted to explain earlier, there's a big difference between traveling and living.

It feels a lot of things to be at an end. It's bittersweet, it's exciting, it's reflective. I don't yet know what exactly this is the end of. I don't feel that different, but I'm not the same person; I haven't had epiphany, but I know this has been a life-defining experience. Clarity will come later, around the time that forgetfulness fades out the memories that don't pertain to the lessons we take away.

For now, I know the things that I am immediately proud of. I can name the things I hope I will take with me, think about the things I wish I did better, and guess about the things I'll miss.

My Spanish is a lot better now. I'm getting good enough that I finally realize that Spanish speakers, like speakers of all other languages, don't always speak with perfect grammar. When you're first learning a language, you tend to assume that all native speakers are expert linguists and their manner of speaking is correct like gospel. Now, when I pick up an error, I feel confident that it was in fact an error, proud that I was able to catch it, and then foolish when I think about English and all the offenses its speakers can afflict on it. Of course perfect grammar isn't practiced. But at least I can notice that now in Spanish.

I'm good enough that I can get puns, and if you know me, you know that brings me joy. I'm not good enough to make a lot of puns on my own, but I'll try, to Lauren's chagrin. We have a lot of opportunities to try here. I will miss the daily progress we can feel by learning Spanish in a Spanish-speaking country.

Fluency is a tough definition and I don't know if I could assign a word or percentage to my level of proficiency. I speak with an obvious accent. Group conversations are still insanely hard to join. For that alone, I wouldn't say I'm fluent. But am I proud of where I am? One hundred percent. And I can at least say this: I'm fluent enough to lead a class in Spanish.

I really like teaching. Before I started, I wondered what kind of teacher I would be. I still wonder that because my sample size is so small, but at least I have some indicators. I like to give tricky exam questions, especially when I'm restricted to multiple choice. I much prefer the whiteboard and just talking to PowerPoint presentations. I don't believe in uploading my notes online; I do believe that attendance is essential and if you miss a class, you should get the notes from a classmate.

All of the above are things that students despise. I'm kind of surprised I didn't get paper-airplaned out of the classroom. On the contrary, student feedback was generally positive. They especially liked the readings I assigned and the material I covered. Few complained about my exam questions. There were only four out of about a hundred who said something about my Spanish (one who wrote, "Let Derrick speak English!"). I thought there would be way more. I consider 96% "no complaint"s a victory in learning a language. It's also room for improvement.

As a teacher, I've found that I'm passionate about what I teach. I love knowing as much as I can about the topic I'm teaching. I like getting questions and I like being able to answer them. I love getting questions I don't know the answer to. I like that, when I go into the classroom and say "Buenas tardes," the class responds in unison, "Buenas." Who wouldn't like that?

I don't know what I'll be doing when I'm back in San Francisco. I'm pretty sure I won't have another opportunity to teach like I did here. But I hope that, whatever I do end up doing, it has elements of the things I loved most while teaching.

I'm proud of this blog. In fact, I'd say it's the easiest thing for me to be proud of from our time here. It's easy because it's tangible—as tangible as something that lives on the cloud can be. I'm proud because it's creation. I've never produced as much content out of solely my own volition. I've never felt like something was more mine.

I now have a better appreciation for professional content producers. That includes journalists, comedians, cartoonists, anyone who creates for a living (or part of a living). I think writing might be the most demanding form of communication because it can be so open to interpretation. I noticed this most when I was teaching: I could impart meaning using tone, timing, gestures, and real-time feedback. I could go in there with the basic idea and wing the delivery (in the most professional of ways, of course). That's not possible in writing.

This blog has been an important tool for me. For one, it's a way to keep my friends and family and whoever is interested updated on what we're up to. And in the process of writing and selecting photos, I'm forced to synthesize my thoughts and observations into cohesive stories. There couldn't be the writer without the reader. You give me support, but more importantly, you give me accountability. I spend a lot of time trying to make my writing precise because my greatest fear is misrepresenting something by writing inconsiderately. I make myself more aware when I write to an audience. Taking that perspective invariably makes me respect the topic more after writing about it. So thank you for reading.

My goal when starting this blog was to write a post every week. I averaged about half that. But I feel okay—as documentation of our experience living in Buenos Aires, I've covered food, language, money, transportation, movies, bureaucracy, summer, and the city. I've tried to describe what it was like when we first got here, after half a year, and now. I hope that in giving each aspect individual depth, I've provided a more complete portrayal of our experience. What is this blog about? It's not really travel writing. It's about getting used to being in a place. That's not going to end when we leave Argentina, and neither will my writing.

There are other things I'm proud of, but speaking, teaching, and writing are the ones I can most readily articulate. There will be more, and I'm sure some will surprise us. I recently realized that I'm actually more proud to be Chinese here than in the Bay Area. Obviously, there are way more Asians around San Francisco; here, the only time you'd see one on a typical day is when you walk into a small grocery store (which are so typically run by Chinese that people call them chinos). When I go in, they'll speak to me in Mandarin, give me free plastic bags, and say hi when they see me on the street. It's a positive aspect of being a minority that I wouldn't be able to experience at home.

I'm also proud that in all our time here, not once did we step in dog poop. That may not sound like an achievement, but you'd be impressed if you saw the sidewalks here. There are at least a couple land mines on every block. I thought hitting one was inevitable and am amazed that we have avoided them all this time. Knock on wood; we're not out of here yet.

I'm proud we did this. We decided to move here for a year and we did it. But more strongly than pride, and more importantly, I'm grateful we were able to do it. Whatever it is we take away from this experience, we will never forget that we were lucky to have the chance.