Living Abroad Is Mostly Just Livin´

Lately I´ve been pondering this business of living abroad. I think people (myself included) expect daily revelations and jarring cultural encounters at every turn, but I´ve come to realize that my life here is generally more routine and "normal" than it was before I came. Obviously certain things are a little harder and I learn new things every day. After a while though, things like buying groceries in the open-air markets, boarding minibuses as they slow to a crawl, and organizing customer receipts to the liking of the government just sort of become routine. I guess in a way it´s satisfying to see the things that initially inspired excitement fade into background noise. That was part of the goal of living abroad for me, to become comfortable living in a different culture.

That said there are some differences of life here that are hard to overlook. For one, emotional peaks and valleys are higher and lower respectively than they normally are in the US. The simplest things, such as a successful bartering session, making a kid laugh on the bus, or exchanging phone numbers with a new friend make me not only happy, but ecstatic. In the evenings after days with these simple successes I walk home with a literal skip in my step. On the other end of the spectrum an unpleasant encounter with a customer or not being able to find a product I want have a disproportionate impact on worsening my day. Granted, I have yet to feel very lonely or homesick but these small things can really put me in a funk. It still surprises me that not being to find real soy sauce can have an effect on my mood but I think since most things are just a little harder than to what I´m accustomed, triumphs and defeats create a correspondingly strengthened response.

One other difference which is difficult to ignore and I hope always will be is the striking disparity between rich and poor. As in any city, here I walk past extreme wealth and poverty every day but I think a few factors in La Paz make these small interactions unique. Maybe because in many ways La Paz is a big city in miniature, socioeconomic differences are visibly noticeable on every level. With the social make-up of La Paz pretty easy to see on both macro and micro levels, I notice the differences that much more. Standing on El Prado, the main artery of central La Paz, demonstrates the macro view in which looking south you can see the shift from poor to wealthy in the types of buildings and quality of landscaping. On a smaller scale I can dodge a shiny black Lexus to land on the sidewalk in front of an old woman begging for change. I don´t know if at a certain point brushing off kids selling gum settles into the same routine as the traffic and bartering over rice prices, but I´m hoping these issues maintain the foreground they deserve.