In this essay, Jan Vincent Meertens takes the reader to García Márquez’s Macondo and explores whether the Dutch, the Western reader, can manage to get into the state of mind of the locals. What cultural boundaries must we explore and even cross in order to truly understand the meaning of Macondo and its people? Meertens discusses cross-cultural communication and what cultural assumptions influence our interpretation, how the translator translates García Márquez’s words. Jan Vincent Meertens (1959). Born in the Netherlands, Meertens attended school and university in the Netherlands, Colombia, the United Kingdom and the United States. He has lived in Colombia, Guatemala and the United States and is currently based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Meertens has developed and led public-private partnerships around the world. He published Do we have a deal? (Haystack) and The Girl from Tota (Arbeiderspers).