6 Months!

It is always pretty amazing at how quickly time flies, and I'll just suggest that time may actually travel at super-sonic speed in Buenos Aires... A year to the day, I remember where I was, and I'll only say that it was not pretty... Man, how a year really can change your life - and for the record, I could not be in a better place to be living my dream...

Simply amazing, and the life I am trying to 'start' (relatively speaking) seem to be spot on, and I always excited to wake up with a smile on my face - so far, I have woken up every day, so that's a huge plus!

I have been rather fortunate thus far in finding a great group of friends, both Argentines and ex-pats, a team to play soccer with on weekends, and a pick-up game during the week, and a few clients to work with, all of which have helped me feel even more comfortable in the parts, not to mention a supportive family that puts up with me living on a different continent (I think their recent visit probably helped the 'get over it' a bit). It has been interesting to be a part of what seems to have been a migration of sorts, but not with much permanence - rather, people have arrived in waves, traveled, maybe stayed put for a few weeks or a couple of months, and then returned to where they came from or continued further travels in the region or the world (one friend literally circumnavigated the globe and only recently returned to northern California).

These brief stints have been both positive and negative, the latter of which has brought a bit more perspective on the life that 'we' lead down here as ex-pats versus the transient nature of being the 'host' to travelers from abroad. As can be said in other parts of the world, making friends, close ones, is always something that takes time - caveat: when you click with someone, it often isn't a long process - and as tricky as it has been to break in to the 'local' community, for obvious reasons, investing much time with the array of ex-pats is equally tricky, as you never really know when someone may pick up and leave. The most common series of questions that I have received from ex=pats follow:

1. When did you get here?
2. What do you do here?
3. For how long are you staying?

It is almost a certainty that when meeting someone new, these questions will be the basis for a conversation that can then take on various forms. At this point, I have begun to tell the newer ex-pats to learn the answers in Castellano, so the responses are 'cleaner, and well-rehearsed - it has certainly worked for me to perfect the answers/topics of conversation in Castellano so I can increase my rate of speech, comprehension, surrounding intimately familiar themes. It has been a wild 6 months, and I am finally looking forward to feeling a bit more settled and getting myself more established in my new home...

As they say here, "me cayó bien"...