It’s quite funny looking at the proclamations I made when I was younger of what I said I would and wouldn’t do. Many things I said I would never, under any conditions, do. Predictably, I have now done all of these things I declared I wouldn’t do. Some at quite a frequency! God definitely has a sense of humour. Here are some of the things.
1. I said I’d never go outside of Europe. If you know me well, you may know I have a bit of a thing about vaccines and blood. Noly says he thinks I have a phobia which I initially instantly refused to believe but now (begrudgingly) I’m wondering if he might be right. I hate getting vaccines (which was my reason for not wanting to go further afield) and I cannae watch them happening in films or TVs. Even just thinking about them now is making me a bit twitchy.
2. Along similar lines (in terms of travel), I said I’d never go on an aeroplane on my own. By now I must have done at least 18 flights on my own (individual ones I’m talking about since I’ve come to Arg at least 6 times on my own (I think more times but I cant be bothered to work it out) over the last 5 years and there’s always three planes involved in these journeys).
This one really is funny looking back. When I was younger I could not comprehend what was going on at airports. They seemed completely baffling to me. How on earth did the adults know where we were going, what we needed to do and when and how on earth did we suddenly end up on a plane going to a foreign country? There seemed to be no rush for ages and then all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, we were inexplicably rushing somewhere to do something.
I think me being the baby of the family never helped since I never had to work it out myself and just blindly followed. I remember being completely bewildered when team arg (woop, shout out team Argentina 2k15) were navigating the airport’s that some of them seemed to actually know what they were doing.
Now I can see that it’s super easy and I’m not sure why I was so baffled 😂
3. Living alone. I never explicitly said I wouldn’t do this but I just never imagined I would. I always assumed I’d live with friends.
4. Similarly, living abroad! I could never have guessed that I would live, for any period of time, abroad in a different culture and language. When I first came to Arg on my gap year with Latin link, in the lead up to coming out here I had such itchy feet. I just really felt that I wanted to get out of my hometime Binfield for a while. Just didn’t know it would then lead to me spending the next 5 years (thus far!) living between the two countries!
5. Learning and speaking Spanish. Again, never said I wouldn’t but after learning French at GCSE I didn’t particularly have a yearning to learn another language and didn’t feel that I was especially gifted at languages (though I was in the gifted and talented scheme for French supposedly 😏). Now that I can communicate and get by, I really enjoy trying to speak Spanish. I enjoy the mistakes and what I most enjoy is trying to learn slang to slip into conversation, though it takes bravery to try and attempt to use it 😂
Those are all of mine but one from Nolz. He remembers, clearly, going to a Christian camp and they were talking about love and relationships etc. He said the speaker said “and then you know, you might find love with someone from a different country than yours”, to which he was inwardly like, pfft, what rubbish. Yet here we are!
So yeah! Those are all the things I said I would never do and since have ended up doing. Needless to say, now I’m rather careful with the things I proclaim I’m not gonna do..!
p.s. if you haven’t noticed me banging on about it, I recently wrote a guidebook for Salta! In fact it’s more than a guidebook (if I do say so myself), as well as having suggestions of places to go and food to eat whilst in Salta, there’s also tips on the culture here and various other nuggets of useful information. I find cultural differences endlessly fascinating! So even if you’re not intending to come to Salta any time soon, you might still find it interesting. Anyhows, if you’re interested you can buy it through amazon. Unfortunately I don’t get royalties from it but I do get a percentage of sales if you click on the following links to buy it so I shall put them here in case anyone is interested:
Nadia's Adventures 