One Month

I've been here for one month today. Wow. It's kind of hard to believe.

I feel like things are just beginning for me and am glad I still have four more months to go.

My conversation partner search continues, but I do have one partner, Raul, who I will probably meet regularly on Wednesdays. He's a great exchange partner for me because he is also an English teacher. Our exchanges feel equal and also we have something to talk about. He has questions about English and I have questions about Spanish. It took me a while to set these exchanges up and some have worked out better than others. If I had less time, I wouldn't be able to really take advantage of them and develop relationships that I hope will be able to continue when I return next year and go beyond my stay in Argentina.

Last week I went to my first tango classes at the Escuela Argentina de Tango. It took me a while to get up the nerve to do it, and after my horrible first experience, to find the courage to continue looking for the right classes. I'm feeling better after the classes yesterday which were at my level and also very helpful. Again, with less time, I would not be able to benefit from them.

After a slow start that involved figuring out things like the supermarket (and still struggling to figure out what I can cook at home), all of the pieces of my plan are beginning to fall into place. Conversation exchange partners, tango classes, private Spanish lessons, Italian and Arabic, and a continuing friendship with Hernan - everything is adding up to a very varied and rich experience which is helping me with my fluency in Spanish, and also helping me to feel comfortable here, and most importantly to feel connected.

My friend Sonja just got back from spending the summer in Russia. She e-mailed me that she missed her friends there. She said in the US everyone is so busy. It's true. There is something very impersonal about living in a city in the US. People work a lot and then go home and sit in front of their TVs, close themselves off from the world. Maybe this is not true for everyone, but it is my experience. I go months without seeing or hearing from some friends.

Here I feel very connected to people, even though I have only been here a month and don't know that many people. Customs like visiting friends to share a mate seem designed to keep people from becoming too isolated. There isn't a big time requirement, but a visit is intended just to keep people connected. It reminds me of how our old neighbor (who has since died) Jean, used to come over to our house and sit with my mom on the porch for a coffee and a cigarette. I am probably going to have a hard time adjusting to my life in San Francisco where I will work during the week and only see co-workers (and we'll all be so busy preparing for our classes that we'll hardly have time to talk), and where weekends will be spent watching cooking shows and maybe getting together with one or two friends. Maybe I need to take the initiative and start visiting friends for coffee. Short visits, nothing imposing, but just stopping by to say hello, to continue the connection, to fulfill a basic human need for contact.

I feel in a lot of ways that this trip is life changing for me. You'd think that 6 years in Japan would have been life changing, but Japan was really about continuing to be isolated, silent, unseen and unheard. Japan was very much in tune with my default settings. Polite, unobtrusive, isolated, avoiding conflict... Argentina is something very different, something I've always wanted. It is about expressing emotions (if only through dance), about being connected (again tango does that really well, but it is not only the tango), about being expressive, animated, passionate. I feel like I connects with some very deep parts of my self here that I have repressed for many years. When I see people talking with their hands flying all over the place it is like I am remembering a language I long ago forgot.

Here the concern is not about making as much money as you possibly can, but making enough to survive, and I think that is an important difference. Hernan, the playwrite who doesn't write plays, the director who doesn't direct, finds ways to make enough money for him to be able to eat and buy cigarettes, so he has a lot of time for connecting. He's not a total extrovert either. I know he spends a lot of time alone, playing with his computer, listening to music or reading, but it seems natural for him to call his friends and say, "I'm coming over for a mate".

Well, I don't know how much sense all of this makes. Reflecting on what I am learning and analyzing it is a little more difficult to do in this stream of consciousness blogging style than just writing about what I did today. But I think today, my 1 month anniversary of being in Buenos Aires, is a good time to think about how I am changing as a result of being here, and also to think about which of these changes I'd like to be a permanent part of my life.