In Between

It has been half a year since Lauren and I moved from San Francisco to Buenos Aires. In the months leading up to our departure, we were being asked a lot of the same questions: What will you be doing? For how long? Why Argentina? Now that we've been here for a while, the questions we're being asked are: What are you doing? For how much longer? Why Argentina? Six months and 6,464 miles apart, I still don't know how to fully answer any of them.

But I can tell a story, driven by these questions. The narrative is actually more cohesive than I would've expected—a benefit of retrospect, no doubt. Along the way, it will cover the things we've learned, the things we've seen, and the things we've missed. Here, in three roughly chronological parts, is the story so far.

Part I: Making a House a Home

My initial answer to Why Argentina?, before we moved, was that Buenos Aires was one of my favorite cities that I had visited. Upon landing at Ezeiza airport, having completed the final segment of our one-way ticket, that assertion was about to be thoroughly vetted. How would my impression of six days, seven years ago, hold up against at least six months of calling Buenos Aires home? Would I choose Argentina again?

I was a little surprised that it didn't "all come back to me" as soon as I stepped foot in the city. To be honest, I didn't recognize much. It felt overwhelmingly new, save a few landmarks.

I had remembered just enough to design a logo for this blog. #meta

But what had really stuck with me, the first time I visited, was that I could vividly imagine myself living in Buenos Aires. And that continued to stick with me as we made it a reality, settling into our new city. "Settling in" didn't mean just doing the survival stuff, like finding an apartment, but also the intangible stuff, like decorating that apartment. Even though it came furnished, and all we brought were a few suitcases and backpacks, it was worth the effort to make a home feel less temporary.

One of the things I loved about having lived in San Francisco for six years was how well I had grown to know it. I had reached a level of intimacy where I could look at an address and guess the cross streets based on the street number. That became a goal for Buenos Aires. We would be walking new streets, exploring new neighborhoods, figuring out new ways to get around, trying to absorb as much as we could. We had the privileged timing of arriving at the tail end of winter in a city that universally celebrates spring, posting ¡Feliz primavera! banners in every storefront.

I made fun of how much hype there was, but I have to admit it was justified.

So we went on exploring, trying all the restaurants, and cafes, and even the ice cream shops, and of course bakeries, and sampled the local fare of steaks, empanadas, choripan, medialunas, dulce de leche; basically, all the things. In that short time between meals, we acted like tourists and visited museums, churches, parks, bookstores, went to festivals, shows, concerts, horse races. Oh, and pasta shops, too.

We started building out a network, from zero. We met in person the people we had met by email before arriving. We went out for coffees, classes, and conversation clubs. It has not been easy. Making friends has been one of the great challenges of our existence here. A lot of the people we meet are travelers passing through. And we have yet to prove that we can hang with the locals. When we called it a night at 3:30 in the morning, we had to fight through a line to get in. When we made it until 5:30, we were still the only ones leaving.

Of course, the biggest barrier to making friends with locals is the language. It is our starkest reminder that we live in another country. Here, the world is our Spanish class, and it's up to us to learn the material. The city is a good teacher; there is no easier way to learn than to make lessons around real-life, everyday experiences.

Maybe not every day.

After two months, we could legitimately call Buenos Aires home. We had started putting down roots and had accelerated a hopefully lifelong pursuit of the Spanish language. And yet, we had only seen a tiny nook of this massive city. Even more, we had yet to leave the city to experience the expanse of this country, and to just get a sense of its place in this continent.

When you enter Argentina, you get a stamp in your passport that allows you to stay for up to 90 days. They call this the tourist visa, and it's difficult to get any other kind. What that means for us is that we have to leave the country every three months and come back with a new stamp. That sounded like a hassle at first, but as we quickly found out, an excuse to travel is always welcome.

Part II: All Modes of Travel

Approaching Santiago by air, you realize why the Andes are so important to the identities of the surrounding regions. Their ridges separate hot from cold, wet from dry. To be clear, the Andes are the longest mountain range in the world, and their "surrounding regions" span the entire length of South America. In other words: they're kind of a big deal.

In Santiago, you can always orient yourself by looking around until you see mountains, and then you'll know which way is east. In Valparaíso, that trick didn't work as well, since most directions you looked you would just see a steep hill. Though our stay was short, it was refreshing to be in Chile. We got to experience another culture, another cuisine, and another way of speaking the same language. It added context to our temporary home country.

Our tourist visas now renewed, we got on a bus and prepared ourselves for some high-altitude border crossing. Seeing the Andes from the sky is one thing, but it's another to experience the terrain one switchback at a time, in the shadow of Aconcagua, the continent's highest peak. The rewards for making the trek are the fertile vineyards of Mendoza and the desert landscapes (and dinosaur bones!) of San Juan.

Also guanacos, the dinosaurs' furry successors.

Mendoza is well equipped for vacationing. As a wine region, it's rougher around the edges than Napa or Sonoma, but that just means it's possible to feel a bit more down-to-earth while saying things like assemblage and terroir with maximum throatiness. Not that we said those things, or in that way. Besides, we rid ourselves of any lingering pretentiousness by getting drenched white water rafting and dangling upside down while ziplining. We then proceeded to regain any pretentiousness we had shed by spending a day at a spa in the mountains, hot springs and mud baths and all.

To be fair, it was my birthday.

And so we returned, rested and renewed, to Buenos Aires, where we would remain for all of three weeks before setting off again. It wasn't entirely on whim that we left again so soon. We were starting to get visitors now, and if that meant having to meet them in Patagonia, well... there are worse things. It's not every year that you get to spend a birthday at Andean hot springs, Christmas in Chilean Patagonia, and New Year's at the base of Mount Fitz Roy toasting champagne that was chilled in a glacial creek, moments before a puma stalks by your campsite!

In a span of two months, we took two trips that were drastically different: one was about deserts and wines, the other, glaciers and trails. Their common thread was the spine of South America. All we did was cross the Southern Andes—twice in the north and twice in the south—and we got to see it all.

Latitude matters.

The traveling ended in January as we returned to a quiet city. Our visitors headed back home, too, and we found ourselves in a gap, with plenty of time to think about those questions that have always been there. We're back in Buenos Aires—but for how much longer?

I can't tell you the answer now, but I can tell you we renewed our lease (negotiating in Spanish!) for another six months. So that takes us until September at least. After that? Don't know. Right now, it's still a one-way ticket.

Part III: Reorientation

This feels like an inflection point. By now, we have our local butcher, fruit stand, and pasta shop, who recognize us and call us amigos. We've been to enough cafes that our phones will pick up stray WiFi signals from the sidewalk. We're watching movies and reading novels in Spanish.

I'm proud of these things and consider them genuine indications that we are on the right path. But they are balanced by an occasional and slowly growing homesickness. It presents itself in the form of nudges and glimpses, and I save the glimpses when I can.

Ephemeral messages last longer with distance.

In our time here, we have missed babies being born, new jobs being gotten, weddings, engagements, and approximately half our friends' and families' birthdays. We miss dim sum, burritos, spicy food in general, good salads, ramen, Acme baguettes. We missed the reunion-type gatherings that come with holidays back home. Thanksgiving was especially tricky, since it's very much a North American event. It's also impossible to find whole turkey here, and our oven was broken anyway. But we did have family visiting at the time, so it ended up being our best-celebrated holiday of the year. We improvised a delicious, albeit nontraditional, Thanksgiving feast.

And following tradition, leftovers for a week.

There was one thing I started to miss that I never thought I would. It hit me at the tail end of our Patagonia trip. I missed working. It feels strange to say that, so let me clarify: that didn't mean I wasn't enjoying having free time. But free time is a canvas, and the bigger it gets, the more weight it has. When you can do anything, where do you start? I know how lucky I am to be able to ask that question. Answering it was one of our main goals in coming here; to figure out how to best spend our free time, so we can spend it more efficiently when we have less.

That I missed working meant that I felt the urge to do more. Not more things, but more focus on certain things. So what would those things be? What am I doing?

An opportunity arose. The network-building from Part I resulted in a job offer that I immediately accepted. I am now working with the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires, a private engineering university, helping them design and teach courses on entrepreneurship and investing. I'm back in college, but in a totally different role.

Literally a new perspective.

This is exactly what I was looking for. Before deciding to move to Buenos Aires, I was considering teaching as a next job, but wasn't sure how to approach it. Now, it's like I got to choose both. I'm two classes in and the experience is thrilling.

A big contributor to that thrill is my realization that this is one of the hardest things I've had to do. For one, I'm learning to teach without formal teaching experience. Dwarfing that is the fact that three of the four classes I'm teaching are in Spanish. For each lesson plan I prepare, I have to translate and practice it in Spanish. I have to be ready enough so that when students ask questions, I can understand what they're saying, and be able to respond well enough that they'll understand me too. Six straight hours of this is exhausting. But if I ever had a chance to master Spanish, this is it.

This is what I'm doing now. It's not just teaching, because I still have plenty of free time. It remains my task to continue making better use of it, to ask myself how I am spending my time, and is it worth it?

I spend a ton of time writing these posts and have never regretted it. It takes time to group weeks into months and months into themes in order to condense the past half year of whatever this is, and the past full year of thinking about whatever this is, into a story about why we are here. I write the story because by giving it structure, I give structure to our time here. It reminds me of why we came, what we have learned, and that we're still in the middle of it.