What I Wonder When I Wander: Can you ever really go back?

Last Updated on April 29, 2021

On Friday morning here in Santiago, Dani and I were both being yanked along by our dogs chasing after some smell or another when I asked her if she missed Buenos Aires.

Her reply is what sparked this week’s musing.

She said that she couldn’t believe that we’d already been gone over a week, but that no, she didn’t miss Buenos Aires because she knew we would definitely be back someday.

Amazingly, I don’t miss it either, but began wondering if part of the reason I feel no pangs for the place we fell head over heels in love with is because we are in the middle of a perfectly happy rebound romance with our housesit here in Chile. In the end however, I realize I feel the same as Dani about the fact that we will always be able to return to Buenos Aires and live comfortably for a few months at a time.

Buenos Aires, Argentina

The question is whether Buenos Aires will be the same.

The ornate Parisian buildings of Recoleta and the cobblestone streets of antique San Telmo, the culture, the pizza, the Tango, the wine – these things will all be there as they have been for centuries. And barring complete political upheaval or demise of the airline industry, we will be able to buy plane tickets and fly back to Buenos Aires. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you can go back to the city you remember.

I don’t relate this to the way humans tend to glorify the past, shining a golden hue over our memories to create something that never was, like the way Instagram annoyingly makes yesterday’s dinner look as though you ate it in the 1950s.

What I mean is that when you travel, the places you experience are not just points on a map, but rather an intersection of place, time in your life, time in history and the people you meet when you are there.

What if returning to certain places we love feels for us the way a college sophomore might feel stepping back into their old high school, surrounded by the same teachers and traditions, but all those years wiser (please read some sarcasm into that) s/he is aware that this experience is entirely different to the one he or she had within these same walls.

Buenos Aires was not our first flirtation with semi-permanence. Our spontaneous three-week stint in Lisbon locked in the first place on our travels I thought we could return to live in. Portugal’s capital city seemed the perfect balance of grit and stylish flare, old world Europe with a millennium of sea-faring world exploration creating a mix of African, Middle Eastern, European, Indian and Asian cultures making up a relatively small population of 500,000 placed along miles and miles of sunny coastline.

Lisbon, Portugal

We felt so free in Lisbon, with its cheap, delicious seaside restaurants, even cheaper strong coffee, modest, breezy fashions and a language we could just about grab onto and understand. But until we return, I’ll never know if part of the reason we loved Lisbon was, in part, because of the sense of whimsical serendipity in the way we just happened to end up in Lisbon by chance before flying to our housesit in Canada.

After all, not everyone loves Lisbon. Some people call it too gritty. After living in Central America (and East London for that matter) maybe we are both just attracted to gritty?

Of course, part of the charm of Buenos Aires, too, is that crumbling European grandeur, and we accordingly spent the first few days comparing the city to Lisbon (and half of Western Europe). However, as Buenos Aires revealed itself over those six weeks, this unique city seeped into our bones as a place to which, like Lisbon, we could always return for three months or so.

When I take a closer look at Buenos Aires, however, I realize that it was that intersection of time and place and people that created what we have taken with us as ‘our’ Buenos Aires.

While living in our BA apartment, we finished the two-month Insanity workout program we started in Costa Rica, and were (and still are) in the best physical shape since leaving travel. We were also pushing hard toward the goal of finishing our housesitting book, so that sense of accomplishment was a huge boost for us professionally, too. These successes must have had an effect on our mindset and the lens through which we viewed the city.

Not only were we fit physically and professionally, but socially, our calendar hasn’t been that full since we left to travel. Buenos Aires is filled with like-minded people and we formed great friendships while in town. Suddenly we were squeezing in coffee at 6 with one friend before dinner at 9 with another, and declaring to each other privately on the way home that we had to take tomorrow night off or we’d be out every single night of the week. Everyone we met, both Argentine or foreign, had been an expat or a traveler and was filled with ideas and creativity and was bringing one project or another to life.

I don’t talk about this often, but I am pretty obsessed with the idea of 1920s Paris, when Ernest Hemingway moved to the City of Lights from Chicago with his first wife. There he went from a budding beat journalist to world-class fiction writer. His literary accomplishments (and fascinating real life) were due in part to the inspiration and passion reverberating between him and the dozens of incredible artists and writers who had made Paris theirs during this time. Now, realistically, we were only in Buenos Aires for a little over a month, and I am fairly sure we didn’t lunch with the next Picasso, but there was a magic of great people coming together and us being at the top of our game which were then amplified by the release of happy hormones created by the Dolce Vita trifecta of pizza, empanadas and gelato.

Gelato, Pizza Napolitana and a variety of empanadas, Buenos Aires

Will Buenos Aires ever be that Buenos Aires again?

Will I be as enamored with Lisbon now that I expect to be?

Or is it just as much about the moment as the place? Can we ever really go back?

There are obviously places you return to that haven’t changed one bit, a fact you’re either relieved at or disappointed by, depending on how you feel about it.

But I always feel this anxiety when I have found somewhere that makes my heart swell, somewhere that clicks with my soul and I know I can pull up and park it here for a while.

The first time I ever had this ‘click’ was on a trip to Antigua, Guatemala while living in Costa Rica in 2000. My best friend and I got off the bus, looked around, and promised we would spend our last year at university making arrangements to move to Antigua in 2001. Which we did, and I lived there until 2003.

Much of my identity was wrapped up those first two years of my ‘adulthood’ spent in that adorable colonial city under the shadow of volcanoes and far from anything remotely similar to the Chicago suburbs where I grew up.

When Dani and I returned in 2010, it was really important to me to show Dani around, have her walk along those cobblestone streets and have breakfast in my favorite restaurants and see the house I had lived in. Even though we visited seven years later, I thought that in order for her to really know me, experiencing Antigua was as important as visiting my hometown or meeting my family.

Antigua, Guatemala

Except for a lot more traffic, everything I cherished about the city was essentially the same and we did all the things I had always told her about. Much like that trip back to high school, however, the moment had passed, the people who made it special weren’t there. Instead, together Dani and I experienced the city in a new way. We discovered sophisticated bars and restaurants I could have never afforded as a 21 year old kid. We spent an afternoon in the gorgeous San Lázaro cemetery. I had lived just down the street from it back then, but couldn’t have cared less since it didn’t sell late-night pizzas or cold Coca-Cola to cure the hangover from the great party the night before. Instead, Dani and I made Antigua ours, and Antigua became real again, not just a golden memory.

As a pair of wandering souls, part of this epic quest is to find places fit for settling down. We have now wrapped up Buenos Aires and Lisbon and placed them in a treasure chest to be cracked open whenever we get tired of being nomads.

I just hope that what we have all wrapped up is tangible, that we are able to go back and love these cities, not for what they were at the time, but for what they become for us when we land there again…

Related posts:

What I Wonder When I Wander: Have we lost our travel mojo? What I Wonder When I Wander: Is anywhere new anymore? What I Wonder When I Wander: How close are we to dying on a night bus, really? (Part 2) What I Wonder When I Wander: Can I Get Healthy on the Road – The Answer is YES!