the ghetto life

little bed

The bigger the expectation, the bigger the letdown. Fact, but it is so hard not to daydream, to imagine and create the glorious world in which we want to escape to. Yet, is anything what we dream? Alain de Botton describes the element of anticipation and expectation in his book The Art of Travel. When de Botton recounts the gloomy story of Duc des Esseintes and his pessimistic outlook between imagination and reality, he strikes the most appropriate response for the situation. De Botton responds to des Esseintes opinion that reality is always disappointing stating, “It may be truer and more rewarding to suggest that it is primarily different” (pg. 11). Nothing is quite how we picture it. I tried my best not to let my dreams go wild and build a world of expectations before I came to Buenos Aires. But it was impossible not to think about the journey I was about to go on. Clearly, I pictured everything as perfect, especially my house. For some reason, I have a fixation on homes. I rarely thought about the city I was about to live in; to me a city is a city. But home is where the heart is. Based upon my host mother’s description via email, I pictured a beautiful building in a quaint West Village type neighborhood, a big garden, a nice bathroom connected to my big bedroom (with lots of bright colors of course to go along with the South American vibe), and a big homey apartment. Well, I was right when I pictured homey, and that’s about it. Every wall in the tiny apartment is white, half of the electronics are broken (it takes our bathroom light about 30 seconds to turn on after you flip the switch), and you have to dodge the stacks of books wherever you go. Our shower curtain rod falls just about every time I shower, I have to stand on a wobbly antique chair to semi look at myself in the mirror before going out, none of the outlets work in our room besides one, our AC is broken, our ice-cream is frozen in a giant ice-cube in the mini-freezer, and everything smells like mold. Oh yeah, and not to mention, I am seriously bigger than my bed (my feet hang off the end, and I couldn’t even begin to roll over, I’d fall off). And though, none of this fit into the images that I had created in my head before coming, I am not disappointed. It is all just different. And now that I have gotten used to my “semi-ghetto” lifestyle (as my roommate and I like to call it), I wouldn’t have it any other way. Expectations and reality kind of remind me of books and movies. When you read a book, you create the world in your head, from the clothes that one is wearing to the kitchen the characters are eating in. Then the movie comes out, much to your disappointment, because it is nothing how you imagined it. It is different, all of it. Harry Potter’s scar was supposed to be bigger, and Dumbledore looks completely wrong. Reality is just an alteration from our imaginations. But, who is to say that is a bad thing though? I am glad that my home isn’t as picturesque as I had imagined it; it is, in a sense, more real. Just as de Botton says, “The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present” (pg. 14-15). Life isn’t always cake, and neither is travel. 

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