From Paradise to Earth
This is my second time being in Querétaro. I was here a bit more than a month ago for five days or so. During this second visit, I am staying for a longer period of time. What in the world made me leave Oaxaca, a paradise like a place to move over to what feels to me more like an average city? I believe my lucky stars somehow got in the right alignment during the month of October, and I got the opportunity to meet a fantastic woman through Tinder while I was still living in Oaxaca City. She happened to be on a trip to the region, and somehow the pre-matching algorithms of the dating application made this virtual encounter possible. Due to a poor internet connection, and time restraints, we never got to meet physically in Oaxaca.
From Virtual to Physical
After the application pre-matched us, I “super-liked” this gorgeous looking woman with my daily free “super-like” credit, and I was fortunate enough that she responded to me. If you are not familiar with Tinder because you probably have better things to do, or you just don’t need a dating app to meet fantastic people, Tinder matches people that have a mutual interest in each other. To the exception of the super-like feature, which acts as a silver bullet and allows you to let a person know that you like her, regardless of her having interest in you. You get one free super-like for free every 24 hours.
After getting a response, my super-like and I started to chat live through the platform. This is usually an activity that I despise to the extreme, but with her, chatting online happened to be surprisingly pleasant to me. We’ve naturally got into the habit of meeting online quasi-daily, which eventually led me to visit her here in Querétaro past November. My shorter visit allowed us to meet in the physical world. Things progressed naturally in a positive way. I went back to Oaxaca, we’ve kept chatting online and the relationship flourished naturally without any of us rushing things. The Sunday preceding the “Violent Monday”, I asked my super-like what would she think if the next destination of my trip would be the city she lived in. She seemed to be very happy with the idea, and she encouraged me to come to Querétaro with all my backpacks this time around. As I am writing this, it has almost been a month that I have left Oaxaca and I live here in Central Mexico.
My Impressions of the City
I really don’t enjoy Querétaro as a city as much as I was enjoying Oaxaca. Although all the people I’ve met here in person happened to be extremely nice to me so far, socially the city feels very cold. I find that strangers and people working in businesses here lack kindness and courtesy. The sidewalks are extremely narrow, and the streets can get quite busy at times with cars passing extremely close to pedestrians. People have the tendency of walking slowly. This results in a comical-frustrating situation when I am in the process of trying to go somewhere using my legs. As if the local people are behaving like tourists, and I am the one who is late for work. Since being nice to strangers does not seem to be a part of the culture here in Querétaro. One of my favorite activities which happen to be walking a lot and getting lost in cities while I am discovering has become here something that I don’t look forward to.
The prevalence of the colonial European culture isn’t all that exotic and refreshing from my own personal perspective. Querétaro could in my opinion easily be an average city in Italy, Spain or Portugal with the social warmness of the north of the continent. In general the food here is not very good. There seem to be more pizza and hotdog stands than taco ones. Even tacos aren’t appealing to me in this city. Overall the smell of food in Querétaro hasn’t been a motivating factor. I’ve been eating mostly raw fruits and vegetables at the market nearby which is 70% of my regular diet anyway so doing it at almost 100% is not a problem for me.
Can’t place it
This is the first time in my life that my brain can not get the vibe of a city. Even when touring across the US in the past, I’d be able to get the vibe of a city within the first 20 minutes or less, but here after two visits and over a month of actually living here, I still can’t get it. It looks and feels like a lot of elements around me here in Querétaro are familiar ones, but yet still can’t place the city in terms of vibe and social atmosphere. The major issue seems to me that there is a lack of passion here, and everything seems to be somehow just average. People seem to live their lives quite comfortably, but without being excited by what life has to offer. This is, of course, my observations from the outside, I am not in people’s head. Maybe people are extremely happy and passionate about life here in Querétaro and I am the one who’s missing a crucial element to decipher what’s going on here. All these very mild negative factors are forcing me to remind myself on a regular basis that I am still in Mexico and not in another country because almost nothing here corresponds to the personal image of Mexico I have been building for myself throughout the years. This kind of situations is actually what makes me grow as a person when traveling. To see with my own eyes that things are not always how I imagined them and that the reality sometimes takes time to
Despite the fact that probably I don’t fully get it, Querétaro is doing the trick form me
All that negatively charged observations aside, I have to admit that things have been going quite well for me here. Besides finding love, seducing and being seduced all in Spanish (which happened to my fourth learned language), I’ve been feeling great physically, my productivity and creativity have considerably increased, and internet is definitely faster than in Oaxaca. My current location is very central, which is allowing me to do more things in a shorter amount of time during the day. The major downside is that my cost of living has at the very least has doubled since I have left Oaxaca. I guess this is the price to pay to be in a safe, clean and well functioning European looking city in Mexico.
In Querétaro, I have the feeling that there is an invisible force that is pushing me forward. I’m not sure if it is because the city is located in attitude (about 1900 meters/6233 feet), or because maybe geographically it’s closer to San Diego, a city I lived in for over 11 years, and my lucky stars were often aligned with that particular part of the globe. All that to say; Querétaro should not be underestimated after a first impression. It is in my opinion, not a place to visit, unless you’ve found love on Tinder or have job here, but if you end up coming to Querétaro anyway, I think that there is definitely an interesting and not so obvious energy to be captured that can boost our desire to move forward with projects and get inspired. In addition, if you are not as familiar and tired of the European culture as much as I am, that whole colonial architecture and overall Southern-Euro vibe could maybe generate some interest to you more than it does it for me.
Chinese Guitar
Once again living without creating music had become unbearable for me, so I decided to invest in a relatively cheap electro-acoustic guitar made in China. I’ve been playing it intensely since our paths have crossed several weeks ago. I think that the actual guitar sounds pretty bad, but I really don’t care at this point. For the price, it actually sounds and stays in tune OK. This new Chinese guitar is allowing me to play on the road and come up with new ideas. When I went to try out the guitar for the first time, the guitar shop was empty of customers. I don’t know if this was a marketing strategy of the store owners, but they sit me by the door on a stool, to the point where I was almost playing outside like a street musician. As I started to jam on my own, the store started to fill up. People passing by would actually stop and give it a listen to what I was playing. Probably for the very first time in my life I did not feel pressured by the sale people to make a decision to purchase the instrument I was holding in my hands. I was able to play and try out different guitars for over an hour with my rusty fingers lacking of practice since I have left Buenos Aires in August 2018.
Music always tends to find its way
For 80 Mexican pesos, I was able to purchase a mini tripod for my phone from the same market where I buy my fruits and vegetables, so I could record my new musical ideas. The months preceding my departure from Switzerland in late 2016, I had to sell my entire recording studio, including all my instruments except for my bass guitar and some cables. It was an extremely depressing moment for me. Back then it felt like I wasn’t going to be able to produce any music for a long time. Well, even without having access to a legit home studio, and a steady place to stay, I was able to release Found Acoustics 08, Biten Dün, Baharlarda, Uruguay, Günün Sonunda, and Büyük Lüks since my departure from Europe. A year and a half later when I decided to leave Buenos Aires and go on this potentially endless trip with only a couple of backpacks, I also thought that music production would be on hold. Once again I have to admit that I was wrong on this since the Chinese acoustic guitar and my phone are allowing me to move forward with the creative process. I love the way how music always forces its way through my body, even if the conditions are not ideal. It almost feels like the worst the conditions are getting for music production, the more I play, and parts for songs tend to emerge on their own naturally.
Discovering Who I am
More and more my intuition is telling me that Black Sea Storm is slowly but surely placing itself as the centrepiece of this Latin American adventure. As if my longtime recording and my relatively recent traveling projects are merging together. Since I am on the road, it could seem like the main goal of this journey is to discover new places and cultures. It sure is to a certain degree, but I believe the real goal for me is to discover myself. Creating original songs and travelling are in opinion the perfect tools to reach that purpose.
Although I am physically traveling the world, I perceive this adventure as an internal trip. It can sound a bit strange that a dude with my age is still searching who he really is. For me I think that actual journey of finding who I really am will only end the day I die. Of course I know by now what I really want to do in life, but with an adventure like this, I am able to discover myself in deeper ways. Or maybe the journey is allowing me to add new layers to my personality as I am being challenged and stimulated by events occurring along the way. In any case, all I know is that there is an enjoyable sense of progress that I can observe since I have left stability in Europe, and jumped into what was for me the unknown.
I don’t know how things are going to play themselves out in the near future. The only thing I know, is that I want to do what I want to do more than ever. “Violent Monday” in that regard, has been extremely beneficial for me. Not only I see it as a personal renaissance, but It actually has been acting as a filter in my decision making. As if, it is taking all the crap out, and reminding me what is really important for me to do during my short existence down here.
Love in the Life of a Nomad
Since I started this post on the subject of love, maybe I should also finish it on that note as well. Finding love on the road rose new questions, and made me discover aspects of the nomadic lifestyle I had not given much thought before. Although it was probably the last thing I had in mind on this journey, I was able to find love while traveling. Having the lifestyle I have does not seem to allow any future in the long run for a love relationship. At the same time, if I didn’t enjoy the flexibility my current lifestyle is offering me, the love story I feel extremely lucky to be a part of at the current moment, would have never existed. I would even argue that if I was a sedentary man meeting the same sedentary woman, maybe the relationship would have not evolved that fast in a positive way, and most likely it wouldn’t have the same intensity if the time factor wasn’t so present constantly contextualizing the relationship.
Knowing the inevitable fate of our relationship, with my love partner, we took the decision to live every moment we have together to the fullest without any fear, and without projecting ourselves into the future. We were able to create something worthwhile and strong out of almost nothing (a Tinder match), a bit like a simple riff or arpeggio that leads a song to write itself. In that regard, my current relationship reminds me a lot the songwriting process when nothing becomes something that I value immensely and gives me a lot of joy in the process of coming to existence.
Querétaro
