It’s not every day we decide to pack up our things and move to a country where we are completely unknown – and also completely unknowing of what awaits us.  In August of 2005, heeding the advice of a close friend, who now happens to be a US Ambassador in Ecuador, I decided to test my resolve and go live in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Since Spanish was my Major, the language was not really a problem, except for the first few months when I realized the Argentine dialect was VERY different from the Spanish I had learned in school.  Below is an excerpt from the Wikipedia page dedicated to Argentina:

“A phonetic study conducted by the Laboratory for Sensory Investigations of CONICET and the University of Toronto showed that the accent of the inhabitants of Buenos Aires (known as porteños) is closer to the Neapolitan dialect of Italian than any other spoken language. Italian immigration and other European immigrations influenced Lunfardo, the slang spoken in the Río de la Plata region, permeating the vernacular vocabulary of other regions as well.”

How did I tackle the dialect issue?  Well, meeting my future wife during the first two weeks of my stay didn’t hurt.  We met at a birthday party and the rest is history.  More about that in a future post.