Learning a new language

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I had wanted to learn another language for a long time, and the idea of traveling through or moving to another country appealed to me. Since I had taken some Spanish in high school and was living just to the north of Mexico in Phoenix, Arizona, I thought Spanish was a good place to start. “Who knows, maybe one day I’ll have a reason to go to Mexico,” I pondered.

My years in high school Spanish weren’t much help. I had only retained a handful of words, a few basic rules, and some societal lessons about Spanish-speaking cultures.

After purchasing some Spanish audio courses, I practiced the lessons pretty diligently for a couple of months. However, then I’d forget to do them for a while or get lazy, restart the lessons, and have to repeat quite a few. One month on, 2 weeks off. Three weeks on, 2 weeks off. One month on, four months off. This cycle kept repeating, and I was continually set back on my progress.

It wasn’t until my girlfriend decided she’d start learning as well that I began to be consistent.

One lesson per day, every day. It sounds easy, but without accountability, it proved to be difficult.

Once my girlfriend began doing the lessons, we were accountable to each other; we’d consistently ask one another if they did their lesson that day. This accountability helped us to continually progress with few setbacks.

What if we traveled through and explored Mexico?

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We had both made tremendous progress in our Spanish-speaking abilities, and the possibility of exploring a Spanish-speaking country seemed increasingly plausible.

I was running a business that I hated, and which was giving me a constant stream of headaches. It was providing me with monotonous, laborious, and unsatisfying work.

My girlfriend was suffering from a long list of health problems that seemed to originate from environmental factors. As far as her job was concerned - well, let's just say it wasn't as fulfilling​ as it could have been.

When we thought about traveling through Mexico, we were able to come up with a long list of reasons why we wanted to do it. When it came to the cons - well, surprisingly, there weren’t many.

Traveling through an unfamiliar country can be a scary proposition

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Almost every single person I’ve told about our plans to travel through Mexico has lectured me about how dangerous it is, trying to convince us to stay.

People from my generation seem to lecture a little less and be more on the 'excited for us' side. But from my parent’s generation...believe it or not, Every. Single. One. of them is a travel safety expert for an entire gigantic country to which they haven’t been in twenty years.

I read a book by Jim Rogers, "Investment Biker." It’s a non-fiction story about him and his girlfriend literally traveling around the world on motorcycles. He says that every place he went, the people would always say It’s perfectly safe here, but you can’t go to (enter the neighboring country), it’s too dangerous! People from the US would say that about Mexico. Mexicans would say that about Guatemala. Guatemalans would say that about El Salvador, and so on. Apparently, it’s human nature to be scared of the unknown.

Unmasking the unknown

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As it turns out, Youtube is an excellent source of first-hand travel experience. My girlfriend and I began watching a lot of videos about US expats living in Mexico.

We found endless examples of people with personal experiences of traveling through, living in, or visiting Mexico, none of whom felt like they were in any danger. Following and watching videos of YouTubers​ who are a lot like us, has gotten us pretty excited to explore.

We came up with enough reasons on our own for why we wanted to travel, but ultimately, I think it was Youtube that pushed us over the edge. Seeing couples who were our age, doing what we wanted to be doing, and loving every minute of it. We wanted to be there!

If you want to follow along with our adventures as we drive through and explore Mexico, you can find us at @tangerinetravels.

Until next time, amigos!

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