Around the World with Kav P.

It’s good to be back!

I never really thought that I’d end up in Buenos Aires, but here I am. I never thought I’d be a student again, but I’m here learning Spanish and contemplating taking on art school as well. What can I say? It’s been a strange few years.

I arrived in Buenos Aires to live in mid-April, 2014, and it’s been odd starting to live in a country where I don’t speak the language so well. The first time I lived in Japan, I already knew enough Japanese to get by without any problems, and the thing that most frustrated me wasn’t so much the language, but the brutal bureaucracy and occasionally the inadvertent racism I experienced and witnessed as a foreign resident. I have family in Fiji and have visited them many times growing up, but English is one of the national languages there and our relatives spoke Hindi, a language that I was already used to hearing at home. In short, I figure I’ve had it pretty easy in that regard!

When I first came to Buenos Aires in 2013 for a month, it was the first time I really felt like a fish out of water. I was so nervous about sounding like an idiot that I insisted that my Porteño (BA local) partner do all the talking for me! Now that I have some Spanish lessons under my belt that has finally started to change now, but at the time it was pretty jarring. I wanted to show that I was a linguist and was already fluent in a different language to English and not just another Australian tourist with no will to engage with local culture and language, but there was nothing more I could really do for that than to be quiet and hope people assumed that I was just an unnaturally silent local.

If I’d spoken in English, I’m pretty sure most people would have at least understood me, but for me it felt so alien to speak English to people who are not accustomed to speaking English. It used to frustrate me to see foreign residents in Japan who had lived there a number of years and were indifferent, even proud, regarding their lack of effort in learning the language. It seemed to me like an insult to the local people who would bend over backwards trying to communicate with them and help them. So, silent, stubborn Kav it was – in a way much worse than simply communicating in English!

It’s been taking me a while to let go of the pride of speaking a language fluently and resign myself to the slow process of making a wealth of mistakes and misunderstandings as I figure out how Spanish works (and how Buenos Aires works, at that!) but I have started to notice differences. Yesterday I bought a pair of slippers (please stand by for this anecdote – it has never been such a trial to purchase slippers before, and I’m not even talking about the language involved!) to keep my feet warm in the apartment, and thirty minutes later walking out of that shop I was glowing. I’m on my way back, and it feels good.