Friends and family warned me that learn­ing a new lan­guage at age 29 would be dif­fi­cult. If only you hadn’t wasted all those lan­guage cred­its on German, they said. If only you hadn’t spent so much time in writing-​focused jobs bela­bor­ing over pre­cise word choice and think­ing that lan­guage was a medium to express­ing your­self rather than a tool to communicate.

My response was always the same. I am ready to strug­gle with Span­ish. I like chal­lenges, which is to say, I like think­ing I like chal­lenges. And even before my wife and I moved from Chicago to small town of El Burgo de Osma six months ago, I knew that my strug­gle would be height­ened by social iso­la­tion, because as every­body knows, Nobody Speaks Eng­lish in Spain.

Photo credit: Justin Glow

Kevin Berger at Salon gives us a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with pasty-​white travel whiz Rick Steves, whose PBS shows are silly, staged tele­vi­sion Baedek­ers that have become the essence of what people think of as stereo­typ­i­cal public tele­vi­sion. He’s cheery and geeky and always describes his envi­rons in sets of three (“San Marino takes you back to the age of city-​states, an era of pageantry, pride and fierce independence!”). As you’d guess, his travel guides, sold in all major book­store chains, are more of the same.

With this in mind, his frank­ness on polit­i­cal and social mat­ters in Berger’s inter­view is a bit of a wel­come shock to the system. For exam­ple, I was aware of his recent travel spe­cial on Iran, but wasn’t cog­nizant of his heated resis­tance toward Amer­i­can con­cep­tions of ter­ror­ism, pri­mar­ily since his show focuses on the Euro­pean tour, a deca­dent bour­geois cul­tural prac­tice if there ever was one:

We shot from the bushes at the red­coats when we were fight­ing our war against an empire. Now they shoot from the bushes at us. It shouldn’t sur­prise us. I’m not saying it’s nice. But I try to remind Amer­i­cans that Nathan Hales and Patrick Henrys and Ethan Allens are a dime a dozen on this planet. Ours were great. But there’s lots of people who wish they had more than one life to give for their coun­try. We dimin­ish them by saying, “Oh, they’re ter­ror­ists and life is cheap for them.” They’re pas­sion­ate for their way of life. And they will give their life for what is impor­tant to their families.

I vis­ited Sucre and Potosì over the week­end and brought back a few photos. I hope to post the more excit­ing Potosì set later this week, once I have a chance to type up a little com­men­tary, but for now here’s a short set from Sucre. Click on the thumb­nails after the jump for single images or click here for a full-​screen slideshow.

I don’t usu­ally write about my per­sonal life on this blog. When I started it, in fact, I swore I wouldn’t; plenty of people were talk­ing about their lives on the inter­net and they were doing just fine with­out me. But today I’m making an excep­tion, because today I’m moving out of Chicago. Even­tu­ally I’ll end up in Seat­tle, but first I’m going back to Bolivia and then prob­a­bly to Vir­ginia and then…well, it gets com­pli­cated from there. Anyway, a node of latent melan­cho­lia has found its way to the sur­face and made me prolix, so con­sider your­self warned.

I came to Chicago in 2001, a week before 9/11.