Hi /r/travel, I'm a current university student looking for some advice on a gap year before I start work. I finish in October/November this year and plan on heading to the UK for a banking graduate job in September 2015. I'll be working for December/January/February to earn some money to travel, and I'd like to add a third language to my repertoire. I have a decent amount of savings, and live reasonably frugally, so money isn't a huge issue.
So far I was thinking about learning Spanish - heading to Buenos Aires at the end of February and spending 3 months there, at a University or language school, before heading north to experience the rest of South America and avoid winter. My rationale was that I'd like to travel in SA, I can volunteer, and learning Spanish will help me in my career.
However, I have been thinking for a long time that learning Russian may prove to be more useful, and I find the 'stans (mainly Kazakhstan/Kyrgyzstan/Uzbekistan) to be fascinating and perhaps a very different experience. Obviously this would be a lot more difficult - Russian is no easy language (and I may even have to learn some local langs...), and there could be some risks in terms of being in a country that is insanely foreign to me. But I feel inexplicably linked to the region...
Does anyone have any advice for me? I.e. language learners and perhaps people that have been to either or both regions? I guess what I'm looking for is some outside perspective. Any comments will be mucho appreciado
edit: Also - if anyone knows of travel blogs / journals of people who have lived in the Stans and have learned Russian/ local languages, I'd really appreciate it. Google search has turned up few useful results. Cheers.
Might add in a travel itinerary to make this post a bit less shit:
SA = Buenos Aires (2-3mo)-->Peru/Bolivia (1mo)-->Equador, Colombia+Central America volunteer (1-2mo)
Stans= Urumqi --> Alamty (3mo) --> Biskek --> Tashkent --> Samarkand --> Leave from Ashgabat