What's the Difference?

I'll tell you.

I was taking a leisurely afternoon stroll, you know, to clear my head. "I've almost been here a year; crazy!" I quipped to my business partner, Raoul.
"Imagine how much different it would have been if you were in an English speaking country." He retorted.

I imagined it.

Things would be a lot different. I like to think that overcoming adversity confers some sort of benefit over the longer-term. I'll somehow magically be better for struggling to get by. Maybe that is delusional self-rationalization. Either way, I have less friends than I would otherwise and despite my GPS-like knowledge of local streets and back-alleys, when shit hits the fan, if I don't have a native Slovak speaker around I find myself in shit-creek, again, obviously devoid of any object that might be used to propel me out of such said open sewer.