I discovered my passion for languages very early on. Growing up in Argentina, far away from the rest of the world – and before the internet even existed – sparked my curiosity about other cultures. Before I could even dream to travel abroad, I never missed a chance to meet foreigners living and working in Argentina. As a teenager, I enrolled in as many language courses as I could: English, of course, but also French, Portuguese, German, and, even Arabic for a couple of years. Becoming one of the first interpreters in Argentina with a University degree was a great accomplishment, and it felt like the official launch of my language and culture journey, which would soon become an international adventure. Although I was on a tight budget, I managed to see quite a lot of the US and Europe in a few years. The more I traveled, the more I wanted to explore other destinations, not just as an average tourist adding one more trophy to the list of destinations and having great fun, but trying to understand why things were different from what I knew.
Not surprisingly, I ended up living abroad. I moved to The Netherlands in 1996, where I started the fascinating experience of finding out how deeply culture can be rooted in a country and its people, and how imperceptible differences can fool us every day if we are not aware of them. I continued navigating that path both in real life and – in the meantime also online – to find out why the cultural context could sometimes look so similar and sometimes so different in my second motherland. This cultural immersion process not only meant understanding the Dutch, but also bringing my new perspective and knowledge back to Latin America. With each business trip, new doors were opened in the countries where I worked – Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina – where things never stood still.
