Taking stock

Every now and again it can be prudent to take stock of your current situation. Reflect on what has happened and look ahead to what might be in store for you. 

We believe that second part isn’t as beneficial as the first as you never know with any certainty what life will throw at you next. That aside, we’ve been analysing the state of play for Wrong Way and associates in the last few weeks.

Who'd have thunk it? Wrong Way on-stage in Colombia.

We feel like it’s a good time to do so: The one-year mark has passed since we took the decision to leave a relatively steady yet limited job behind on the island of Ireland and take a semi-gamble to make what we’ve termed our ‘Second Coming’ to South America. 

So how has it been thus far? What, if anything, have we learned?

As opposed to the ‘First Coming’ to South America, which was solely travelling, this time around the aim was to see if we could source some work in order to settle for a longer term. Considering we’re still in the continent almost 13 months later, a few necessary departures apart, that first aim has gone relatively well. 

Aside from our initial, far from humanitarian, slave-like voluntary media gig in Santiago de Chile, any paid employment we’ve engaged in here in Colombia to date – from the standard hostel work and teaching English to the more unusual TV extras work (see: http://bit.ly/NrbPc3) – has been largely enjoyable and, at times, even profitable.

'In Ros Trust' - well, at least in the classroom.

If we were to pick a negative from the most profitable and reliable of those, the English teaching, it’s that our use of the Spanish language has decreased as our class hours have increased. But a lot of that is down to pure laziness on our part – we’ve plenty of time in between classes to be using and (hopefully) improving our Spanish. It comes down to desire and need in the end.

Like any place you stay in for a while and as regular readers of this blog will know, you begin to see the warts nestled among, at first glance, the more obvious beauty. 

We’ve touched on many of these ‘ugly spots’ before, from public transport manners (see http://bit.ly/N68gKL) and business dealings (see http://bit.ly/LVpK8p) to relationship attitudes (see http://bit.ly/NsJyB5) and friendships (see http://bit.ly/LbcE9V) to name but a few. 

On that latter one, outside of some notable mostly expat (although thankfully not exclusively) exceptions, the ability to build trustworthy friendships is disappointing. Once bitten, twice shy and all that.

Not much left to play with (above) - time to spice things up like below?

As negative, though, as all the above may seem, it’s appropriate at this stage to state we still like it here, for now anyway. Heck, if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here. 

We can leave at any stage – well, at least we think we can. Yes, there are times when we might get frustrated with certain things or even feel a little bored – but we’ve experienced enough to know that these are emotions that can happen anywhere at anytime. Life after all is as exciting or as dull as you want to make it.

Possibly one of the best things that our second stint in South America – and Colombia specifically – has further reinforced for us is the adage not to take yourself, or indeed life, too seriously. 

We’re trying not to sweat the small stuff. OK, now and again, the infamous Wrong Way temper goes off; a blow-out here and there is healthy, right? But on the whole we’re concentrating on remaining positive, working on the things we can control while trying not to worry about those we can’t. 

Weighing it all up, we have to be reasonably happy with the current state of play. 

Perhaps, though, we’ve just about rode out this particular wave. The time might be fast approaching to catch another, wherever it may take us.