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I enjoy traveling and have been to South America several times in the last year. I enjoy post cards and letters. On trips such as these I typically send a few of each. The activity of looking for good postcards, stamps, and post offices gives me a good framework to explore and interact in ways which I may not normally do. During these visits to South America I’ve spent a good bit of time trying to continue the habit with no success. Undeterred I’ve continued to press on, until last week. To my surprise I have found this seemingly universal activity most difficult on these trips. No one I would talk to in my broken traveller’s Spanish would seem to understand what I was trying to do, or really, why. I haven’t been able to ask or understand why till I had coffee with Juan.
Juan is a few decades older than I am and a native. He’s retired from his family business and now spends most of his time going amongst activities with friends and family. I met him at a wine and music event at a local restaurant quite by chance. He was there with some family to enjoy some traditional local music. I was the flaneur who stumbled in sitting out of the flow quietly enjoying the music, food, and wine. When the music completed Juan knew I spoke English from my interactions with the staff and my broken Spanish. I’ve found that broken Spanish, delivered with a hearty smile and a warmth is often enough to get by. That said, at times you want to know and understand more. As it turns out, people like Juan, sometimes too want to practice their English.
Juan introduced himself and sat down to enjoy a drink. He apologized, as is typical for those of us uncomfortably venturing into the deep ends of trying to bridge language divides across cultures. We struck a chord and for 15-20 minutes had a nice chat till his time to leave arrived. We exchanged contact information - made an indefinite plan to reconnect in the future and went our separate ways. A few days later, with a bit of time left before I was to leave, I reached out to set up a coffee somewhere in Juan’s neighborhood and we eventually got to sit down.
Believe it or not this specific topic was top of mind for me. When I asked Juan where a post office was he immediately laughed and said, there aren’t any, besides one downtown that is. There are no mailmen, no places to buy stamps, and as he addressed my follow-up questions on this summarily said, this all stopped with email, text, and WhatsApp. Mystery solved. In continuing my journeys I could now ask different questions and thus learned different perspectives on the digitization of their society. People as old as their forties have never received a card in the mail and have never written a check in their life. A few years younger and these people have never used a film camera. Cards may be exchanged personally at holidays and celebrations, photos may get printed but increasingly are sent to digital picture frames. The result of all this is that tangible memories, hard links back to our own histories and culture are increasingly becoming threatened notions, left to the fringes of eccentrics and sentimentalists willing to accept inconvenience or scarcity over digital abundance.
I have often expressed my concerns over such developments, a seemingly futile rebuke to mass-complicity. I’ve doubled-down on some of my more eccentric habits over the years and found a renewed joy for reading, writing, thought, and creativity. Occasionally a shooting star of hope, such as the black and silver Canon AE-1 with ISO 4000 film donned by a fellow traveler, will streak across my sky and remind me that all is not lost.