France, and Mendoza

A few people commented on my France, you suck! post and I really appreciate, well frankly just the dialogue. Im wondering if anyone knows whether the PACS is good enough or if marriage is the only way?

It's hard to compare to the beauty of Europe, and for the most part when anyone asks where my favorite travel destination has been, my mind skips right over Africa, Asia, and North and South America and goes straight to deciding whether food can factor in tipping the scale between the UK and France. It's a tough call but I think Europe itself can take the prize because it's small enough that travel time from one destination to another is hardly crossing a state line in much of America.

Yet a weekend in Mendoza was just what the doctor ordered, the only pictures I took were of the 1979 Fiat that picked us up for the bikes and wine ride, and then promptly died- we were excited for the adventure, and sought to capture the moment... even if later when we dropped the bikes off and planned to pick up the wine I had purchased and no one was at the "home office" to receive us our consumer satisfaction dropped to a new low.

But even as a neighbor of Chile, the Andes seem to represent a significant shift in orientation. Argentina, from what we experienced was "more European" than "Incan". While Valparaiso is right up my artistic alley, there is something about being stuck between a rock and a sea that makes you feel, or at least me feel cut off from the rest of the world. Maybe it's that literally you can go up or down, north or south, when we travel it's never east or west.

And Argentina is cheap, cheap in the way Chile seems it should be. Argentina has the infrastructure from former high times and has a middle class- which Valparaiso seems to lack, so the high prices in Chile don't seem to compute. I've been studying Spanish here and in Chile I've felt like I've made very little progress but in Mendoza I realized that I had- the Chilean's are known for their garbled accent, but in Mendoza I could understand Spanish just fine, which gave me the confidence to speak Spanish.

Mendoza is not as beautiful as Valparaiso, it's not ugly either, but after months in Chile it offers a refreshing change, and an important one I think. I've always enjoyed living abroad because of how it changes and informs your perspective on how you see your home country, or at least your original orientation- I know myself and my country better because I left it- it gives you a healthy perspective. Visiting Argentina offered a perspective on Chile that then became cultural relativism. In London it was easy to adjust the internal compass according to what I knew as an American, but you can't really locate yourself from what you know as an American and apply it to Chile. Argentina, however, could.