Xpat LifeStyle by Mariana Belisario-Blaksley
When my dear friend Liana Neal was bold enough to grant me a regular column on her site, a part of this grand project of hers named Xpat Life, I was honoured.
She has read my stuff before and she knows I’m… let’s call it peculiar when it comes to writing. Nevertheless she wants me in and I must say an expat’s community is something close to my heart.
Even while I was living in my own country "Venezuela" I tried to hang with all the foreigners I was able to find, as I have always loved multi-cultural environments.
Then I moved to England and my anglophile craving led to a love affair with all that is Brit, I’m sure it’ll last forever. And finally there’s Buenos Aires, my mother’s hometown, my favourite city on earth, where I (intensely) live now.
This vibrant metropolis, a bunch of fun, life loving expats to share impressions with, a growing Argentine gang who are curious about all this mix of nationalities and who are so generous when it comes to pouring their savvy advise, time and friendship.
And for us ladies, endless chamuyos handsome, unshaved porteños regale our ears with, which usually start with the omnipresent line ¿de dónde sos? There’s one community now to blend us all together, the more the merrier. My modest participation in all this excitement is this column. Welcome to Xpat LifeStyle.
Ernest Hemingway, one of the best writers there is, the expatriate par excellence and one of my personal favourite drunks, has a handful of quotes that come in handy when you write about the expat experience. Here’s the first one: “You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.” Despite the rawness of this excerpt_Hemingway’s nothing if not brutally honest_ we all expatriates identify ourselves with at least one of these sentences. We expats hang around whatever is new and interesting. We have been away from home long enough to know the ropes. We want to make the most out of each experience, to learn as much as we are able to of each new country. We look goofy sometimes when we try to insert local slang into chats just because it makes us feel we belong. We make friends easily and soon enough they become our family. We get homesick at times even though we aren’t completely comfortable in our own countries anymore, as we have slowly become citizens of the world. We drink a lot, we enjoy ourselves, we get precious and most of us some of us do obsess about sex. In case anyone was wondering yes, it is good to be expats.
Hemingway wrote about Paris: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Buenos Aires is a movable feast that sticks with you as well. It has a way of making you feel more alive. If you live in this town you regret the time you spend sleeping, as you know for a fact there is something incredibly fun going on and you are missing it, trading it, for something as pedestrian as a good night’s sleep. If you love or have loved an Argentine you feel as if you had never experienced anything like it before and you are certain you won´t love like that again. And if you leave Buenos Aires you’d find yourself desperately making up excuses to come back, as you cannot stand how much you miss it.
For the very lucky of us who happen to be here right now, there’s Xpat Life, the club to gathering, networking, partying and hanging around cafes. Its official launch party on September 28th is just the beginning. Liana Neal knows what it is like to be an expat and what’s more, how to seize it in style. My job from now on shall be to convey the experience in its fullness, or how our genius expatriate friend would put it: “There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.” I wouldn’t dare to consider myself a writer but I’ll certainly do my best whilst I’m chronicling our adventures.
My closing paragraph for this first post, the one previous to the launching event, features one last Hemingway’s quote: “Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.” Well many thanks mate, that explains a lot. Who knew?
