On July 9th we returned to the US for the first time in six months. We had always intended a quick return trip to Denver to visit with friends and to enjoy the String Cheese Incident run at Dillon and Red Rocks.
The facts
We were in town for only two weeks, and we spent most of the first week attending concerts where we got to hangout with a lot of friends. The shows were fantastic! While we have seen a lot of great live music in San Marcos it’s hard to compare those experiences with our favorite band at Red Rocks. For one thing, the capacity at Dillon Amphitheater is about 3500 people, which is just shy of the entire population of San Marcos, and Red Rocks has a capacity of closer to 9500 people. So, we went pretty directly from a tiny town to a set of shows that represented several small towns around the lake in volume of people who were all there to enjoy a band we love. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.
The next week of our return trip we spent running around and trying to catch up with friends, and visiting a couple of our favorite locations in the city. I was particularly pleased that we managed to visit Hogshead, my favorite brewery in Denver.
Really though, the time was all about connecting with our friends and community. Farrah has lived in Denver for over a decade, and I’ve been there for nearly two decades, so it would be safe to say that we’ve developed some very important relationships, and a lot of community there. Leaving all of that community behind was probably the hardest part of taking this trip, and it felt really good to see that we were able to pick up exactly where we left off with so many of the people who are so important to us. Love, and miss, you friends!
The experience
This bit is tough. The experience of being back in the United States was kind of… weird. Probably, this was because we had just come from a tiny village in the Guatemalan highlands, and Denver is anything but small. Or maybe it was because we were so busy with shows and seeing friends while we were back that the entire time we were there felt like a blur, after a relatively quiet couple of months. I really don’t know what it was, but the experience struck me as kind of surreal.
I can say that I’ve been thinking for nearly a month about how to write this part of the post, and the only conclusion I was able to come to was that I had to just sit down and write.
The United States is so obviously wealthy when compared to the countries we have visited that I think part of the sense of surrealism was the newness and cleanliness of everything. In Latin America, it’s really common to see old cars and motorcycles that you rarely see on the streets anymore in the US. Sure there are people in Latin America driving new BMWs, and Mercedes, etc. It’s just not that common. In Denver, every other car was shiny, new, and likely far more expensive than it needed to be to meet the owners needs. There is also SO much more corporate advertising. There are ads in Latin America, but they just aren’t as pervasive, and they tend to be more for local businesses. You don’t see ads for McDonald’s, banks, or luxury vehicles, every ten feet, despite those things being available. You also see way more flags in the US. There are American flags on everything. In Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Colombia there are flags, but you really have to be on the lookout to spot them. In the US, every other car has an American flag on it, and it seems like damn near every business has a flagpole. It’s kind of weird. Are we concerned that people will forget what the flag looks like, or do we think having a flag will somehow make us more American?
The other thing I noticed was that people are all in a huge rush in Denver. I don’t know where they are all going, or why they are in such a hurry to get there. In Latin America, people seemed to simply be in less of a hurry. Getting to the next place is somehow less pressing, which is really pleasant. The constant rush in Denver was really unpleasantly jarring. People also just seem more concerned. It felt to me like there was a low-level of residual stress just floating in the air. The future seemed like a constant concern to many people including our friends. In Guatemala, in particular people seemed more interested in what was happening today, than in what might be happening next week, or next year, and it’s an election year there, which is normally a time when Americans (myself included) tend to be very preoccupied with the future. Speaking of which, the news is a major conversational topic in the US. In Latin America, that has seemed to be less the case. Granted my Spanish is not really up for serious conversations about current affairs, so I could have just been blissfully unaware that everyone around me was talking about the news, but I don’t think that was the case.
I don’t really have any conclusions about what these differences mean, other than that they are differences. I can’t even say that I think one is fundamentally better or worse than the other, but it has made me think a lot about my home country in ways that I might otherwise not have.
I can say that I don’t miss the sense of rush and the constant bombardment with ads and current affairs that we get in the US, but I did really enjoy having good air conditioning, showers that maintained temperature and pressure, and I especially appreciated being able to drink the water and flush my toilet paper again. So, as all things in life I suppose you take the good with the bad.
If you’ve been waiting for a new post, I apologize for the delay. You can expect another about our time in Colombia coming soon.