Dan's deep thoughts - March

Dan: One of the things I didn’t really picture over the past ten years or so, when I was dreaming about living in another land, was that the majority of people I’d meet and get to know very well in that foreign land would be other travelers. Through Spanish classes, teaching English and just running into fellow English speakers in public places, we’ve met a few extranjeros. They’ve all pretty much been from the States and Europe. But what we all have had in common was being in a place where we don’t know many people, and are still, to varying degrees, still learning the ropes.

A friend in Minnesota who came from out of state once commented on how by a certain age after high school or college, Minnesotans don’t really seem to want to make new friends. They’ve already got enough friends, no room for more. Whereas in a college town, or places like Colorado or San Francisco, where everybody seems to be from somewhere else, it’s relatively easy to find new people to hang out with. That may be the case here too, compounded of course with the obvious problem of a sizeable language barrier. So we’ve spent a good deal of time speaking English and bad Spanish with other travelers. Some of the people we’ve hung out with have traveled extensively, from tip to toe of South America, or around the world
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_McCormick ), while we’ve hardly left the Mendoza city limits. At times when I’m feeling that maybe things aren’t really working out here, I get antsy and start thinking about all the other places there are to see, and how maybe we could move to a country with more street food, one that recognizes the edibility of the chili pepper.

So those are some of the things going on in the brain of Dan these days. Hearing about what others are doing has, on the positive side, exposed us to other ideas of what we can do down here and made me more flexible on my vision this year.