Cycle of Friends

I met my first new friend yesterday through my Spanish school. He is a nice young fella from England, travelling around South America and perfecting his Spanish. This is the thing being in a foreign country. All English-speaking extranjeros (foreigners) you meet will instinctly become your friends because we don´t have anyone else except each other, especially for those that are travelling solo, and there are TONS of them.

At the moment, Buenos Aires is still in its low season and it´s very obvious that there aren`t a lot of visitors from far far away. Last year in their summertime, I made 6 new friends in a matter of days and we would go out to drink, to dine, to dance, to hang out, to discuss each others’ countries, and our different lifestyles or similar daily issues (boyfriends/girlfriends is definitely an universal one). It was really a wonderful time and I learned a lot from all these people. They all love life, they are all brave and adventurous, and they made me feel that I´m not all alone.

Whether they´ll become true friends or not, time will tell, but one thing is certain is that they all come and go, as we are all travellers. We may have the best times of our lives together but we may never see each other again either. Such as many things in life. From that, I really learn to grasp onto the present and not worry about what´s next because you have no control over it. I’m lucky to say that I´m still in touch with a few of those people I´ve met last year, we´d say hi once in a while on MSN or Facebook (gotta love technology eh, as opposed to writing snail mail letters when I first moved to Toronto!). While life goes on, I know if one day we were going to visit each others´countries, we´d welcome each other with open arms.

Picture: Meeting new friends while travelling is like adding information antennas to your little world. My new England friend found out from a local that there was this open gallery night on this street, so we went to look at some classic and contemporary arts, and most importantly, we scored free champaigns! And yes it´s legal to drink on the streets too!