Right now, I’m more tired than I think I have ever been in my entire life. It feels like the past 72 hours have just been one long (read: loooooooooooong) day. I’m in bed after my third day in Buenos Aires (at a respectable 12:30am) and its just now sinking in that I am finally actually here.
Journey to a new land…
My 14 hours of travel passed without any serious incidents, which is really rare for me. Aside from almost missing my flight from Chicago to Atlanta because Delta has a pretty unnecessarily complex check-in procedure.
It is always interesting to fly internationally, because everyone speaks different languages, and people are both visiting new lands and traveling home. My seat-partner was the latter, and this was the point in my trip where it had yet to sink in that my Spanish better be good enough to have a conversation with someone, or else how am I going to live here in a totally different culture.
First impressions of my new home…
8am is not a happy time for me no matter where I am. Unless I am asleep with the intent to remain in REM for at least 3 more hours. Mom, am I right? Anyway, that was the time I hauled my suitcases (which seemed to both expand in size and weight during the flight) onto a shuttle bus with one of the program directors and two other totally dazed Georgetown students. I was not ready to throw myself into the Spanish-speaking world. I was not ready to throw myself into the English-speaking world, or any world that required my eyes be open and my brain functioning. My first memory of Buenos Aires (since I don’t count the airport) is driving into the city in the shuttle, and hearing “Funkytown on the radio. If you’ve been to any major city, you know that the view from the expressway is probably not going to be the best, and Argentina was really no exception. It didn’t look like a magical place, more like just a big city that could be anywhere, save for the waving blue and white (national colors) flags everywhere.
When we arrived in front of my new home, I saw that it was an apartment building in the middle of a residential area of the city named Recoleta. Despite the fact that I pored over maps and google-satellite images in order to understand where I was going to live, being on the ground in a foreign country where street signage is about as easy to locate as Carmen Sandiego is a sobering experience. There is a lot of gray area when it comes to finding your way. Many streets are marked with good signs on the corner, but some just have placards on buildings, and plenty of others have no markings whatsoever. My host mom doesn’t agree with this, but trust me, I look hard and sometimes I honestly cannot locate a single street sign!
I am living with a wonderful family consisting of a professor at the university and her husband and their 12-year old daughter. My family has been working with exchange (intercambio) programs for many years, and they know exactly how to organize life in the house so everyone’s different schedules can work. There are three other female students living here, too. We each have our own rooms and share a central bathroom, and the other students are from the United States like me. They all attend different universities and different programs here in B.A., but it is comforting that we are all in the same boat (a phrase which DOES NOT translate to Spanish. Trust me, I looked like an idiot trying to explain myself after saying something horrific like “todos nosotros son en el mismo barco” which is probably what some second-rate translation site would have you believe makes sense to say.) One girl is finishing a semester here, and she will leave in 3 weeks. The other two arrived the same morning I did and are staying until December. I am a little jealous they will get to spend so much time in this amazing city, but hey, I had to pay $140 at customs to come in and its good for 10 years-worth of visits… so I plan on coming back, if only to get my money’s worth.
Before I even met the other people in my group, who I knew at least a little bit from the two orientation meetings we had, the girls in my apartment were my first friends here, and I really like that I have the opportunity to hang out with and learn from the experiences of my friends who are doing other programs.
Nos Reunimos a la casa de Manuel…
There was no time for me to get bored or think about how tired I really was (and have yet to really recover from…) because I spent the rest of the day with my Georgetown group. My host mom gave me a map and showed me how to walk to the home of my program director, where I finally reunited with my group and got my program syllabus. After looking it over, I am very happy with the structure of the trip, or at least what it looks like it is going to be. We will be taking classes 5 days a week for at least 3 hours per day, and sometimes we will have guest lectures on interesting and relevant topics. The classes are, for the most part, from 10am to 1pm, which means that I have to catch the bus a few blocks from my house and ride for about 10 minutes down to the university building. After classes, I think I will probably go eat with friends from class and explore the city a little, and then home for a nap/homework before dinner. We have two planned trips to Mendoza and Salta, and for both we are leaving on a Thursday and returning after a few days for classes to resume on the following Monday.
After the meeting, we all went to Alto Palermo, a nearby shopping center, to buy local cellphones and cheap calling plans, and then an astoundingly early dinner. At 8pm, we were almost the only people in the restaurant, and it didn’t really fill up until about 10pm. My stomach still doesn’t understand what’s going on with these bizarre mealtimes.
Dinner ended at 11, a nice long meal where we really got to know each other and just relax… but, alas, Buenos Aires wants to kill me, because it was still waaaaay too early to go out. People here apparently go out at 1 or 2 in the morning and stay out until 6am. Yeah, okay. That’s going to take a lot of effort on my part, seeing as my energy begins to wane around 8pm as it is…
We went to see a movie to pass the time until it would be socially acceptable to go to a “bar” (the nightlife scene in Buenos Aires is very different from the States, and most restaurants are called bars, even though you are seated at a table with a waiter and full menu), and hilariously enough, the only thing that was playing was “New York, I Love You” in English with Spanish subtitles. I barely watched it, and instead used it as naptime. At 1am we met up with some other Georgetown students at a really cool place called Milion in our neighborhood Recoleta, and stayed there until 3:30 in the morning talking and people-watching. We felt very Argentine, but I know that we still stick out as foreigners.
I walked most of the way home with another Georgetown student who lives near me, but once she got to her house, I did have to go about 7 blocks on my own. I couldn’t see street signs and after everything I had heard about the vulnerability of extranjeras (tourists/foreigners) I stubbornly refused to pull out my map. After at least 20 minutes of walking all around the streets near, but not quite where I live, I came upon my corner and almost sprinted to my front door. The next evening I related the story to my host mother, and after telling me she wished I had taken a taxi (HIGHLY RECOMMEND. There is no reason for any person, male or female, to walk alone at that time of night, and it is a very stupid thing to do) she shrugged and said, in Spanish, “Well, if you can find the place at 4am, in the middle of the cold night, you will always be able to find it!” So, there you go. My first night out in Buenos Aires.
In the posts to follow I will take on the task of relating my city tours (professionally guided and otherwise), the experience of catching World Cup Fútbol Fever (a beautiful disease- a beautiful game), and all the other aspects of day-to-day life in B.A. They will also be much shorter. For both our sakes.
