Where do I want to live?

Depends.

Since you ask me now, when I am sitting in front of my computer after a nice meal, dressed warmly against the surprisingly chilly weather (it feels wussy to switch on the heater in a Florida October evening), listening to a beautiful Spanish song, looking at pictures of my neighborhood Durga Puja in Kolkata, and contemplating another trip to Central America, I will say : somewhere far away, some place different from all the ones I've lived in before. A country where they speak a language which I understand only in bits and pieces. A city with bright murals and cobbled streets where people meet in cafes to talk in an alien tongue about art and politics. And perfect strangers sit so closely huddled together over bottles of wine that you'd think they were a warm family.  For you see, when I am in a place like this, trying to speak a language I barely know, to beautiful women, and remote men, I find in myself a native innocence,  I shed my habitual cynicism and am inclined to think that life is a lovely adventure after all.

Tomorrow of course I will laugh at all this, and insist that it is more practical to stay in a place where you speak the language, know the customs, and above all, make a living and have a good life with a decent apartment, central air-conditioning, convenient groceries, good roads and many acquaintances (and maybe one or two friends) who speak your native language. And how bad can a place which has all of this, and where you can drive to the beach whenever you feel like, be?