After many promises to my Italian friend who relocated to Vienna a couple of years ago, I finally booked my flight to go visit him there for a few days. So Vienna shall be visited the upcoming weekend. It’s interesting, I have a really good group of friends from my banking days analyst program. They all moved around – the Spainiards to Germany, the Italian to Austria, the Argentine to Spain and then Germany, the German to Singapore and the Turkish girl back from London to Turkey. I wonder though at what point do we stop moving and settle down? For me, I think that this point won’t be anytime soon so it feels good to not be alone in this situation.
I spent the last 24 hours in Tel Aviv. It definitely felt much closer to civilization than other parts of Israel I am used to. International crowd, many coffee shops, bars, restaurants, designer stores, etc. But still to me it feel artificial, like I’m trying to create Manhattan in my mind, but it’s really not quite it. I suppose I could live there, but it would be so strange to do be in this bubble at such a close proximity to the place where I grew up, which stands at such strong contrast to this bubble. At least in NYC, I can pretend that the other parts don’t exist, because I do not belong to those parts and they hold nothing of my childhood.
The best part of this visit was that I got to spend time with some wonderful old friends, have many intelligent conversations and attend the last meeting with the Israeli MBA crowd from my graduating year. It was also surprising to see the abundance of non-kosher restaurants, selling seafood and pork all over the place. There were times when this was unthinkable off in Israel and those times were not THAT long ago. Secularization is making very strong heads.
Update on my move to Brazil: There is no update but I managed to listen to 18 podcasts already. So far, learned that grammar is very similar to Spanish which helps a lot, that both grandma and grandpa are “Avo” which are pronounced differently in a way that I cannot comprehend and finally I learned that my memory really sucks and nothing really stays..
Portuguese sentence of the day: “Qual é o sua telphone?”
Grobetrotter 