Diary readings

It's a rainy day, and I'm curled up in my chair reading old diary entries. Specifically, I'm reading diary entries from my months in Argentina. A long lunchtime chat with a French intern at office today made me nostalgic, so I decided to go back.

Reading those long-ago entries is weird. I'm struck by how much I wrote about people and feelings, how little I wrote about places. Given that I was in my first experience of a truly foreign land, you'd think that I would spend a large part of my diary time documenting the place I was in and the new experiences I was having. But I hardly see any of that; my entires record the mundane; they talk about friends there just as I now talk about friends here, they talk about many of the same feelings as I talk about now... really, it would be easy not to even notice I was in a different world.

In some ways, I regret that because I feel I haven't recorded Buenos Aires enough. I want to go back and revisit those places in my head but i can't. Kind of like how, in my last weeks there, I woke up to the fact that I had almost no photos of the place and was then clicking like crazy. I still regret not having a photo of the Bus No. 152, which carried me everywhere. That bus is actually a huge part of my memories of Argentina.

In other ways, I feel it's ok because I recorded my experience of Buenos Aires. I may never have done all the requisite sightseeing, and if I did, I may not have written about it; I wrote mostly about things that could have happened anywhere else. I recorded my arguments with people and my frustration at being in the doctor's clinic and needing to communicate my medical history in Spanish. I recorded the ways friendships were formed, the ways they grew and changed. I recorded my struggles at university and the joy of turning in complete research papers in Spanish. And occasionally, I recorded a super-cute cafe, the world cup madness around me, or the time my host mother prepared me a killingly spicy meal because she felt so terrible watching me munch green chillies with bland food!

Well, then, I think. So what if all this (well, minus the world cup madness!) could have happened anywhere else in the world? It happened to me in Argentina. And it is the most important part of my Argentine experience, the part that shaped me and changed me, the part I carry in my heart.

I'm hoping to start working on a series of essays about "home" and about my many homes. I'm hoping to draw more on photographs and document more of the wonderful places I was lucky enough to live in. But even as I do so, I will now always know that somewhere in my diary, there is a very private definition of home for each of those places... a definition I couldn't possibly share or expect anyone else to understand, but it's what makes that place home.