Why Argentina and BA?

This was one of the hardest decisions.  We knew we wanted to learn Spanish and did not want to live in Europe (we’ve done that previously). I’m a researcher at heart and this was one long research project with many conversations with friends, friends of friends, web searches and so on. Beach or city? Small cute town or a big metropolis? Central or South America? Over time we honed in on a few criteria that became more significant as we began to envision our year. We started eliminating locations that didn’t make much sense for what we wanted to accomplish. Although a year on a beach seemed idyllic initially (in my dreams I envisioned becoming an amazing surfer with daily yoga while listening to ocean waves), we worried about the heat, the humidity, the thousands of tourists, and potentially questionable or non-existent schools that could get old after the first few weeks.  We also realized that we wanted to travel extensively even while based in one place – which eliminated smaller cities with smaller airports. Big cities were also tough to fall in love with – traffic, poor air quality, expensive expat international schools, and everything else that is associated with millions of people cramming into small spaces. Why not move and work in one? What would it be like to live but not work in a large city? Shouldn’t we be somewhere in the mountains where life is slower?  But then, how touristy were those very cute, quaint, mountain towns? Would we forever be stuck in the sea of globetrotters every time we ventured down the street? Questions mounted as we quickly realized that surprisingly a perfect spot for our adventure did not exist – all options had many attributes we loved about but also several shortcomings.

Deep down though we had missed living in a city; we love the craziness and the mess that large urban areas provide and are willing to overlook many of the negatives. Although our children were born in London, after years in the suburbs they are not city kids which terrifies us. Once we decided to live in a large metropolitan area, Buenos Aires was a natural choice (especially when South Americans who are not from Argentina urged us to move there).