It's not that different.
You might call it reciprocity—though the word has a monetary meaning to travelers from the United States who have to pay the $160 reciprocity fee to get in to Argentina, the equivalent amount that Argentines must pay to enter the U.S. (You actually need to have this paid with printed receipt before boarding your flight, which we realized with 12 hours to spare. Frantic searches for Kinko's [do they still exist?] followed.)
A better term might be global constants. "Global", keeping in mind my urban, more specifically San Francisco, perspective as applied to Buenos Aires. In this globe the internet is the great leveler. Gmail still works. My Facebook feed looks the same (except for the location-based ads). In cafes, ¿Cuál es la clave del Wi-Fi? is more important than ¿Dónde está el baño? There is even a giant internet provider that nobody likes but has no choice but to use, and that merged with a giant television provider amid cries of antitrust. It just happens to be called Fibertel/Cablevisión instead of NBC Comcast.
Here, too, there is a gentrified neighborhood next to one that is gentrifying. One has more cafes and boutiques; the other has more restaurants and nightlife. One is more hip, the other is more hipster.
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| Which one is this? |
Everywhere, considerate restaurants and grocery stores offer options libre de gluten. There are weekend organic/vegan food festivals where the only thing that gives away their geography is their spelling of artesenal. Just now, a guy walked by wearing an Android Ice Cream Sandwich shirt. A few minutes after him, a shirt that said "My Other T Is a Rex".
So it's not that different in the way that a sunny day fills all parks no matter where you are. But it is different because the parks here tend to be filled with people speaking Spanish. They are located on streets named after Jorge Luis Borges and Latin American countries. The curbs have a lot fewer storm drains and the sidewalks have a lot more holes. The dogs being walked are huge, and so are their... lingering presences, left on the sidewalks.
Those are the first cues that you are somewhere else. And it only takes until dinner time (i.e. 9pm-1am) to notice a few things that are distinctly Argentinian.
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| Some stereotypes are true. |
An important illustration about dulce de leche. It's not enough to say it is everywhere. (I don't know how I don't have a photo of it saved, by sheer probability it should at least be in the background of every other photo.) Wow, a chocolate covered churro, that looks overindulgent. Surprise, it's also filled with dulce de leche! The server has delivered a pie with dulce de leche drizzled on top. Oh he's back, he forgot the heaping spoonful of additional dulce de leche as accompaniment. Mmm that looks like a delicious tart with whole strawberries covered in chocolate. Nope, dulce de leche land mines!
So I've only gotten as far as desserts and dog poop in the Differences column. I'd say that's pretty observant for just under three weeks here. I should probably pace myself.
Finally
It's not that different because normal life exists everywhere, and living here means living day-to-day life. It means buying groceries, refilling subway cards, going to ten apartment showings to find one. We'll still need to eat when we're hungry. We'll still miss our friends and family in moments of solitude. We'll do all the normal things, just here, not there, for now.
The normalcy makes it feel like growing up again. We have to learn to talk again, which means we start out sounding like cavemen ("Have this? How much cost? Thank you bye"), eventually taking a wild guess at how to say "ground beef" and being validated by a butcher who confirms that it really is carne picada. We have to relearn how electricity works so that we don't supply our U.S. devices with too many volts or too few watts. We learn the streets and when someone asks for directions, sometimes we can help.
These are all new things but they feel so similar because we have learned it before somewhere else. And learning them here is anything but redundant. It's not a different life and it's not an escape. This is a series of additive experiences, each building up to the next.