This week I was in two rooms. Peru was in one and Uruguay was in the other one, and both were teams of people selling their country to Argentine buyers.
And I happened to be on the buyer’s side, which I had never been in this format.
I lived in seven countries, and now I move groups of people for a living. So I sat there and I took it in, and somewhere in the middle of it I ended up in a strange position, because the person who knows the place best is the person who’s least able to describe it properly.
When I lived in Germany, people would ask me about Argentina and I had two answers. Football, and the economy. That was my whole country, and one of those two is a complaint.
And everyone does this. Ask anyone to describe where they’re from in one sentence and you’ll get the same three facts that everyone from that city repeats.
The first time somebody asked me to describe what a normal Tuesday in Buenos Aires looks like, I didn’t have an answer. I’ve lived a few thousand Tuesdays here. I had never once looked at one.
You cannot sell a country until you’ve left it.
That sentence sounds like something an insufferable person says at a party, and I don’t want to be that person. I’m not saying leaving makes you better. People who move abroad get unbearable about exactly this.
Because leaving has a bill, and most of the content you see about moving abroad is all arrival and no bill.
You lose the shortcuts. You lose the jokes.
You come back and your friends have a history you’re not part of.
There’s a version of me that stayed, and that version has something I traded away and can’t buy back.
So it isn’t an upgrade. It’s a trade.
You lose the inside, and you get the frame. And a frame is only worth something if you’re pointing it at somewhere specific.
Peru did not open with Machu Picchu. Everyone in that room has seen Machu Picchu.
They opened with how long the transfers take, and what altitude does to forty people who flew overnight, so very unglamorous and practical things, and I think that’s exactly why it worked on me, because you stop seeing the normal tourist package.
Halfway through I understood they weren’t selling me a country at all.
They were selling me the absence of problems, which is a completely different product.
There’s something I didn’t know existed before this job, and it might be the whole thing. It’s the fifty metres between the hotel and the bus.
Not the room. Not the dinner. Everyone talks about those. That little walk when you’re moving from one place to the next.
Because that’s where the guests decide, without anyone saying it out loud, whether they’re somewhere that works. Maybe they don’t decide it. They just feel it. If that walk is confusing, or loud in the wrong way, the whole trip is uphill from minute one and nobody can tell you why.
So the question stops being is my country beautiful and becomes what will a stranger feel standing in it at eight at night. A local never asks that. A local just sees the sidewalk.
I’d sell that dinner starts at ten. Not as a fun fact, because I actually hate it, I’m known to love an early dinner. As logistics: it means your afternoon can run late and, if you’re running a programme, nothing breaks. In most cities that ruins the day. Here it’s a normal Tuesday.
I’d sell that you can walk at night in the middle of the city and it’s completely ordinary. I lived in places where that was true and places where it isn’t, and you cannot know which one you’re in until you’ve been in both.
A local doesn’t sell you those, because a local cannot see it that way, and they’re not features to them, they’re just what life is.
Peru sold me Peru. Uruguay sold me Uruguay. And I sat there wanting to sell the whole continent, and not only my corner of it.
I don’t know how you do that yet. I’m six months in.
And I only have my version of this, and mine is pretty specific: I left for six years, two countries, jobs I fell into. Even in the Peru event I met a girl that did the same thing. She left for Europe and she’s now in her family business, and she lived for six years there in Spain. It’s crazy how many of us think we had a crazy lifetime, but we have a lot of shared experience with random strangers.
So I actually want to hear yours as well. If you left somewhere and went back, what did you see when you got home that you couldn’t see before you left? Not whether you agree with me, because I know I say some things that are agreeable and some things that are weird, but what you saw.
The person who knows the place best is the person who’s least able to describe it properly. I’ve lived a few thousand Tuesdays here.
Ivan
P.D. the full episode is seven minutes: