The Evolution of the Expat Mind

Besides the most obvious mental growth that's gone on during my first months in Argentina--the ability to think in phrases not words, in sentences not phrases (sometimes), the confidence that what needs to be expressed will somehow, no matter how imperfectly, eventually erupt from my tongue--what's struck me most is the inexorable, seemingly voracious spread of the aura of normalcy. During the first few weeks in a foreign place, I (and, I presume, others) experience the repetitious beat of discovery, the kind of discovery exemplified by the phrase "The discovery of the New World." Columbus obviously didn't discover the Americas; they'd existed here for millenia, populated by animals, people and plants. But, it felt, to him and to anyone who didn't know about them, as if they'd been discovered.

At some basic level, every expat goes through this sense of false discovery, replete with the wild generalizations and stereotypes this implies. I am certainly not immune from this tendency, as the reams of blanket observations in the previous posts imply. I felt, and still do regularly feel, that I'm discovering something about Argentina when in fact I'm discovering differences between Argentina and the United States. "No one obeys stop signs," for example. True, yes. And odd to an American. But not on the observational level of discovering a heretofore unknown quark, for example. The same with, "No one cleans up after their dogs," or, "No one respects the public institutions" (which explains, in part, the first two observations).

There is something wonderfully childlike about this steep early slope of the learning curve, a sense of wonder. And it is something I wish to never lose, and to feel again in the U.S. when I return. But what is interesting now, in the evolutionary sense, is the oozing spread of normalcy. These petty oddities, like yellow cabs ("Why not orange, or acid green?" I now ask) and health costs in New York, now seem almost normal. These frippery honks that seems to distract one from all else at the beginning of expatdom seems to be fadding into ignorable background noise, amusing and notable but not overwhelming, and the true differences, the emotional core of here vs. there, seem to be showing themselves in bas relief. As I've been interviewing expats for a story about New Yorkers in B.A., some more eternal truths (celebrations and, yes, complaints), about the Argentine pace of life and pleasure, the myopic nature of local commerce, the role of inequalities in education and real estate in Argentina's murky future, all seem to be laid closer to bare. More on those later--I've babbled to much here--but suffice it to say we've moved in from the skin and closer to the heart.