My computer knows where I am, but not who I am

My computer doesn't get me.

It knows where I am and all my most visited sites, but for some reason, where I am is more important to it than who I am.

It's annoying enough when the love of my life changes my settings to be in Spanish, but now the computer is in on it too.   

I get it, the computer is trying to anticipate my needs, but "no, I don't want google.com.ar, I just want google in English."  In my head, I know that the computer just gets my IP address and responds accordingly.  "Oh, you're in Argentina? Surely, you want Wikipedia in Espanol."  

My heart (and general lack of knowing how to fix the problem), however, longs for the computer to just intuitively know that I haven't stopped being the same person just because I'm on the road and took the laptop with me.  

For the past six weeks, we've been on the road as a part of our gap year - the year we decided to leave our jobs and home and travel around the world.  Since landing in Lima, six weeks ago, we have travelled to the end of the world and have found ourselves in Buenos Aires, tired and a few pounds lighter but (mostly) unscathed.   

I haven't quite figured out how to get the computer to understand that I still want all my sites in English, but this has gotten me to thinking about who we are and how that might be defined by where we are.  Certainly, I didn't suddenly gain the ability to speak and read Spanish simply by flying a few thousand miles away, but does something about you intrinsically change once you cross borders?  Or when you travel? Or when you simply move on?  Would that something be drastically different if you had stayed on your side of the line?  

Before we left, a lot of our friends, coworkers, and family asked us mostly the same questions or made the same comments.  Other than money, everyone seemed to think we were 1) looking for ourselves (I didn't even know we'd been missing) or 2) planning to document the "inevitable" changes, observations and experiences we would have (no, we aren't planning on writing a book, though for enough money...).  One friend asked if we had any goals for the trip.  My response was that my goal was to avoid "exotic" intestinal ailments, but our friend pressed the question, "don't you have personal goals?" he asked. TJ and I had both shrugged.  We didn't really have anything we were trying to achieve, no personal growth, no overarching purpose, we just wanted to travel.

I suppose, like many people, he assumed that we were on a somewhat literal journey of self-discovery.  

Maybe you do have to leave the distractions of every day life to get peace and quiet, time to think, time to explore how you feel about things and this is how you "know" who you are - as if who you are is a static, unchanging thing to be known.  Yet, it's interesting in a world that is increasingly flat and connected by technology that this idea, that you have to get away to discover who you really are, persists. 

Perhaps my computer understands this as well.  Perhaps we really are different people now that we have been to "el fin del mundo" and are on our way back.  Of course, we never will know the ways in which we might have changed if we'd never left and we don't know what we'll see in the next 46 weeks.  Maybe this trip will change us in unexpected ways that will make our lives better, richer, fuller, in ways that it wouldn't if we had been at home this entire time.

Of course, I still don't speak Spanish very well.