First Week
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
