Buenos Aires, A Balancing Act

We have 5 months here.

This was my thinking when I originally arrived in Buenos Aires. Five months is an incredibly long period of time.  A little less than a half a year. A little more than 150 days. More than enough time to explore South America, become a porteño, soak in the local culture, master Spanish and make tons of new friends.

What a tall order that was. At about the midpoint of stay here, I’ve started to feel a little conflicted in my desires and aspirations about my study abroad experience.

For instance, traveling to as many places as you can makes it hard to spend great amounts of time with your host family. Exploring BA completely is no easy feat. The city is enormous. From its ritzy touristy areas to its more indigenous culture barrios, there are innumerable activities to do. This holds especially true if you are bouncing around from place to place across the country and the continent. In the delicate balance between exploring South America and embracing BA, I have been searching for a precarious and somewhat elusive equilibrium. If only I had the skill of this particular Chilean street performer from the photo that I snapped in Viña del Mar.

This past weekend, I spent my time in the picturesque port town of Valparaiso, Chile (adjacent to Viña del Mar) where the sloping hills replete with fluorescently colored houses are the backdrop to an expansive shipping harbor and numerous beaches. The street art and graffiti which line the city arguably merit inclusion into the Louvre. Okay. Maybe an exaggeration. But, I can’t see why any of that pop art nonsense should bring about such a fuss when this art, so frequently overlooked, is pure and unbridled cultural expression at its finest.

The point here? I’m not quite sure, to be honest. Valpo is different from BA just as it is from Cordoba, Mendoza, Tilcara, or any of the other numerous places I’ve visited. In each city there are different customs, sights, foods and people which offer distinct perspectives on the greater culture of Latin America. This ambitious juggling act between traveling and staying in Bs. As. has been perhaps the greatest stressor I have dealt with here in Latin America. More than the language, more than the adjustments to living in a different country and more than classes. Hard life, I know.

In all seriousness, I am here and couldn’t be more thrilled to be here. Accordingly, I earnestly want to make the absolute most of my time here. While this little iterated reflection on the nature of my experience has failed to yield a perspicacious or miracle formula with which I can budget my time, it has slightly altered my mindset.

My new mentality is:

We only have 5 months here.

And at this point, we only have about 2 and a half months remaining. So I will continue to travel. But I will also try to sponge up all the things I can while I am in the city.

What I’m trying to say here is that I’m going to keep on seeking the delicate and perhaps unreachable perfect allowance of my time here- because this is what I want from my experience. I don’t want to miss out on a thing here. So I’m opting for the poo-poo platter of Latin America and all the while trying to take on the main entree that is Buenos Aires.

Or as rapper Nas so eloquently put it, “I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death.”