15 blocks in 2 hours

Dogwalkers: photo courtesy of my dad Phil. He could not get over the ratio of dogs to dogwalkerWhen I was reading the De Botton piece “On Habit” I was intrigued by his notion of the “traveling mindset.” His idea that, as travelers, we “carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting,” and “irritate locals because we stand in traffic islands and narrow streets and admire what they take to be unremarkable small details” (242). After reading this, I took a step back and reflected on my experiences here as well as other traveling I have done in the past. I can recall many times in the past when I have behaved like this: stopping on every corner in London to take a picture of something, sitting in the car while my father drove 15 mph under the speed limit in the Bahamas so he could look at everything we passed, running around San Miguel, Mexico and pointing and staring at the Corona bottling plant and every street sign or poster I was proud to understand in Spanish. As I reflect on my time in Buenos Aires however, I have trouble recalling too many instances where I was stopped in my tracks to examine some detail. The first time I noticed my lack of attention to these foreign things was when my parents came to visit me in October. Immediately after they arrived I decided to take them around the corner to a café for a bite to eat and then walk up to Soho to do some shopping. Within seconds of leaving the building (which actually took two tries because the first time we tried to leave, my mom shut the door behind her, leaving my father locked inside behind the front door. Not until we got to the corner did my mom and I realize that my dad was missing, and we had to double back and unlock him), my parents each had a camera out and stopped about every 3-5 steps to take a picture of anything from an old building, the sidewalk, or a couple making out against a taxi. Why they were so interested in other people’s public displays of affection is beyond me. Throughout the two hours I tried to rush them along the short fifteen blocks to Soho, I began to realize that, as annoying it was to be stuck with Mr. and Mrs. American Tourist, how many details of this city I had been missing out on. While I always walk with my head up and take in many of the city’s wonders, I have never been quite as captured as these two were by every little thing that was different than what they are used to in the states. After thinking about it for a while, I came to the conclusion that it is because I have been in the mindset of living in Buenos Aires, and not in that of traveling through the city. As Botton describes later in his piece, I think this lack of awe is due to the notion that “we feel assured that we have discovered everything interesting about our neighborhood, primarily by virtue of our having lived there” (242). Even though I have only been living in the city for four months, the fact that I have been living here, going to school, and becoming part of a routine has made me more wary of minute intrigues that, under different circumstances I would probably be entranced by.