Tuesday, February 3, 2009

The curious case of a movie in La Paz

I watched "The curious case of Benjamin Button".At the end of the movie I got up and stretched the mandatory post movie stretch. Then I realised, "Fuck I'm in Bolivia". It was a dichotomous feeling, it was at once exciting and slightly lonely. Watching a movie in English in a cinema was so reminiscent of being home that for a while I stopped feeling like I was in a foreign country. The experience underlines the way I feel right now, glad to be traveling but missing allot of home. Simple things like understanding most people when they talk and having a friend I have known for longer than a week. And then immediately after that I thought about this girl I had been traveling with. She had been living in Chile for a year and spoke Spanish. When I was traveling with her she kept on complaining about how she didn't like backpacking cause it was this really superficial experience of the different cultures and you didn't really get the traveling experience we romanticize about. I thought about that cause I was really thinking about the response I should have given. It's a game I invented in my head, its called imagine you're in Bolivia and you have a month to do what ever you want. Its a game that isn't so hard to enjoy. The travel mindset is not always easy to maintain. It can be easy to get tired, the effort required to interact the world often seems overwhelming. But then with a little effort there is so much to see and enjoy, and even the most mundane tasks can be exotic and interesting, everything offers the chance of adventure.

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