As I have been planning for my mom and sister’s visit to Buenos Aires (they get here in 2 days!), I’ve been reminded a lot of little daily things can represent a lot about a place. We’re renting an apartment while they’re here, and since they speak Spanish and are comfortable city travelers, they’ll be living the way I do here. Here are a few things I noticed as I was walking around my neighborhood today.
Money is a big part of life, of course. Banks here are only open from 10 am to 3 pm, which is not a big deal as there are 24 hour ATMs but if you are stuck without coins (monedas) on a Sunday afternoon and trying to take a bus (which only takes coins) to meet your friends, you have to try to find open kiosks to sell you small items while carefully trying to maximize the change you get back. I have collected as many as I can to give them when they get here, so hopefully that won’t be stressful for them.
Transportation. Public transportation here isn’t too challenging once you get the hang of it, but I live by my battered, well-loved copy of the Guia T, which has maps of the city of Buenos Aires and the bus routes. I, and a number of other Americans, have gotten really excited when people stop to ask us for directions, only to have to take out our Guia T’s because we really have no idea where we are or where we’re going. It’s basically like taking out a purse-sized Thomas Guide in the middle of a busy sidewalk.
One thing I love is the stoplights here. This doesn’t really have much to do with life as a porteña except that it’s important to avoid getting hit by the crazy drivers here. Stoplights go from green to yellow to red, as in the United States. But then before they change to green again, the red light stays on and the yellow light comes on as well. Buses especially will start going through the intersection before the light turns green, and often before it even turns yellow. Basically, people reverse run red lights, by running them before they turn green, not right after they turn red. I am definitely going to miss the thrilling, life-flashing-before-your-eyes adventure of crossing streets when I’m back home, especially in Davidson.
One thing I’ve tried to do here is to look Argentine, but not too much so. Large groups of Americans wearing Uggs and speaking English on the subte definitely attract a bad kind of attention. But looking too much like an Argentine women gets you a lot of unwanted aggression from sleazy Argentine men on the street. The trick is to look fashionable enough but do one or two things wrong. Wearing a zip-up hoodie, for example. Not very Argentine. But paired with boots and jeans, you blend in enough so you don’t look out of place, nor do you look attractive. This has actually become a big part of my consciousness in terms of how I approach my daily life and how I feel walking around my neighborhood or around the city.
Even as I have to think a lot more about little things here than I do at home, there are bigger things that are much more relaxed here. When I went to Iguazú Falls with 5 other Americans, we made all of our travel and hostel reservations 2 days before we left. I feel like it’s so much harder to do things last minute like that in the States. People are also much more relaxed about time, which is also characteristic of all of South America. I’ve spent 3-4 hours sitting in a cafe with friends, I’ve had a professor show up an hour late to class, sometimes the subway just essentially stops running mid-route and I’m the only one nervously checking my watch.
That’s all I have time for now, but I anticipate that after this week with the fam I’ll have more tourist-y stories to tell, so I’ll put up some pictures of where I live and things like that. I’ll try to start doing some more normal blogging of what I do with my time and pretty things I’ve seen and all that.
Beso,
Elena
It has been a long time since I updated, over a month. I can’t believe how quickly the time is going by! I’ve been here for a little over a month and a half, and I have about 3 and a half months left. My mom and sister are coming to visit me next week, and I couldn’t be more excited. It will also be a good time to reflect on how much I’ve accomplished of the goals I set out for myself. That’s something I’ve been doing a lot of the past few days, as well as trying to get my life a little better organized (it’s always a challenge getting back into school mode).
So far, I feel pretty good about how I’ve spent my time here. Some of my preliminary goals, or rather, expectations, were that I would find certain favorite locations or things to do. I have, to some extent. There are a couple of cafes I love in my neighborhood, a bakery that I think sells the best Alfajores (a popular dessert/snack—2 cookies or wafers with dulce de leche in between) in Buenos Aires, a few expensive but wonderful boutiques, my favorite Chinese restaurant (to be honest, I’ve only tried this one because I am too loyal to try any other ones), and so on. At the same time, I feel like I still don’t have a routine here, in part because I only really cemented my class schedule 2 weeks ago.
As far as classes go, I still don’t feel like I’m in school 100%. Part of that is because I’m used to the barrage of activities that come with school starting. When Davidson starts, I go to classes 5 days a week, Delilahs rehearsal twice a week, and other various club meetings every week, as well as lectures, concerts, meetings with professors, games, and all the other usual college activities. Here, I have classes Tuesday-Thursday and don’t really have any other commitments besides going to class—which is a good thing for the time being because I’m still getting used to reading 100s of pages a week in Spanish.
Besides classes, my social time tends to be Thursday-Saturday nights. I eat breakfast alone, usually while reading an Argentine newspaper or watching the news, and dinner with my host mom. I either make myself lunch at home or I read and eat at a cafe near my house. It has been great living in an apartment with my host mom, but I miss coming home to Lucy and Nina and being able to walk over to the Union and easily find a lot of different people to hang out with. As Lucy well knows, I get lonely when I don’t spend my days surrounded by people, and I think that’s why I’m just starting to get homesick this week. During orientation and even the first couple of weeks of classes, I was always with a bunch of other people, usually Americans, so I didn’t have any time to be lonely or to miss people. It’s probably a good thing, though, as it will force me to meet people and to find new ways to occupy my time. I’ve noticed that in my life the most growth has come out of the times when I allow myself time and space to reflect on what I want and how I want to live my life. That said, I am still really happy to be here, so I feel like I just need to figure out what I want to do and I’ll be happy doing it. I feel very hopeful about the next few months, and I’ll feel even more that way when I am better organized and have settled into more of a routine.
Also, it will be so nice to have my mom and Gina visit me and to get to show them what I love about being here. I miss them a lot but skype has allowed us to stay in close contact, and I’m really grateful for that.
I’ll start posting more soon, and definitely will talk more about the interesting things I’ve been doing and less about sentimental crap.
Beso,
Elena
What. a. week.
A great one, but at times so frustrating. If there’s one thing I can suggest to my friends who are about to leave to spend 6 months-a year in a foreign country, it’s that patience will get you through a lot of weird, uncomfortable experiences.
The girl who lived with my host mom last semester told me that she tried to stay sane by remembering that she would do and say at least one stupid thing every day, and that’s part of being a foreigner. In that sense, it’s really important to have patience with yourself—especially if you’re trying to communicate in your second or third language.
It also takes patience to become accustomed to the way people interact. I definitely continue to remind myself when I take the bus that Argentines just like to stare at everyone.
Last night, I was trying to meet some friends at a bar in Palermo, the neighborhood next to mine, to hear some jazz. I busted out my Guia T (the book of maps for Buenos Aires buses) and found one that would take me within walking distance of the club. I walked several blocks down the major Avenida near my house not finding the bus stop, trying to take the subte (subway) only to find that the last train left 2 minutes prior, and eventually flagging down the next 161 that passed me. When I got on the bus, the bus driver asked my destination. Technically, I think you’re supposed to give the intersection or street where you are going to exit the bus, but I just gave him the maximum fare amount knowing that would cover my distance. He asked again what my destination was (which was not far—within 20 blocks) and when I told him he more or less yelled at me to get off his bus and take another one. I don’t think my spanish was failing me either, I just think he was a jerk. The next bus sailed past me, and I eventually hailed a taxi and paid approximately US$2 to get to the bar. I missed the jazz but it was still a fun night.
Moral of the story: sometimes other people do and say stupid things. Patience goes a long way in dealing with that.
A couple of days ago, I had a fiasco involving getting locked out of my apartment and having to wait until my host mom woke up after sunrise to get in. I was less than patient with the situation, but was glad that I wasn’t the one messing up (rare). I guess the other thing besides patience that has really kept me from being homesick or frustrated with my experience here is the nice people I’ve met. My amazing friend stayed up with me until 8 am so I wouldn’t have to be alone at a cafe in the middle of the night. Besides locking me out of our apartment, my host mom has also taken such good care of me that it’s hard for me to feel lonely or very confused about anything here.
One more piece of advice to friends studying abroad: trust in yourself. You may forget the word for cookies and accidentally tell your host mom several times that you want to prepare chocolate-chip chickens for her (gallina and galleta are similar words!), but when it comes to using common sense and safely getting around a big city or knowing how to interact with a family in a small village, these skills are inherent. Todo bien que termina bien, no?
Besos,
Elena
My first week here has been really interesting. I arrived Monday morning and moved in with my host mom, an incredibly warm, welcoming, sweet woman named Elena. I have a small room in her apartment, but I haven’t spent too much time here besides when sleeping and eating dinner. Orientation started Tuesday and it was raining gatos y perros all day long. Elena escorted me to the place in a nice neighborhood called Recoleta where we have our orientation. She also lent me her scarf and umbrella (have I mentioned yet how much I love her?). This past week has been filled with lots of somewhat useful but invariably boring orientation activities, with the exception of the small tour we took around Recoleta one morning which was not useful and horribly windy and cold.
A couple of days last week I walked around Belgrano, which is the neighborhood I live in, after I got back from orientation. I’m really happy that I live here. I guess it’s considered an outer barrio because it’s fairly far north compared to the city center, but it has beautiful old mansions and cobblestone streets, so I’m definitely not complaining. There are a number of other students who live in this barrio so it’s not like I’m in the boonies.
I’ve tried to live the Argentine lifestyle a little bit, but it’s hard. On weekends (and often on weeknights as well), people have dinner after 10, start drinking in bars around midnight, and go out to the boliches (clubs) and dance from 2 am till they close at 6 am. Thursday night a bunch of the kids on my program went on a pub crawl that ended in a boliche that played hip-hop, so I enjoyed that. Friday night I tried to stay out late and ended up in a cafe in Belgrano feeling so tired and awful—I think I’m going to avoid doing that again. Saturday I just went out to dinner then went to bed, which was much nicer.
Today I walked around Belgrano again looking for an internet cafe but got excited by all the new things I was seeing and just walked for half an hour. Then I met up with 2 girls from my program to take pictures for a project for our spanish class. We went to a neighborhood called San Telmo, which on Sunday has a big antique market. On the streets near the market people were playing jazz and what sounded like klezmer? random. And selling food and art and jewelry—standard stuff, but it was really fun.
All in all, I’ve really enjoyed my week here but I’m exhausted. I feel like I’m always walking somewhere. The city as a whole feels really accessible—it’s not hard to jump on a collectivo (bus) or the subte (subway) to get somewhere and it’s cheap. There’s a loooot more I want to see soon, and I want to travel asap, but our orientation schedule is pretty limiting. I’m just glad I have 5 months here.
Con Amor,
Elena