It’s the eve of the presidential elections in Buenos Aires. This means that the whole city shuts down early. If you were wondering about the nightlife here, all you need to know is that the bars are legally required to shut down on the nights before elections. Even gubernatorial ones. But not all bars comply with the law, naturally.
It’s as though the government is afraid that people will party too hard and be too hungover to fulfill their civic duties efficiently. With the intensity of the night scene here, the government is probably right. Getting back from going out at 7 am isn’t exactly conducive to waking up early to vote.
I’m now three months into the experience. With two more months to go. And with some time for reflection. It’s obscene how quickly time slips away from you. I still remember my first night in the city and my first encounter with my host family. I use the word family loosely as I am living with a 29 year-old young urban professional who works in the theatre business. In my house are also two of his friends who have been living here for about 2 years. A Colombian student, a Mexican artist, and a recent addition, his Uruguayan girlfriend of nearly two years. Lots of different accents, perspectives, and encounters. I love it.
My first night – it was fraught with miscommunications and timid Spanish. Sentences were uttered two or even three times in order to fully grasp their meaning. Never four. My ego couldn’t take that. If things remained unclear after a couple repetitions, I’d just articulate a profound-sounding “Sí…” and feign comprehension. Apparently not everyone talks as slowly or as grammatically consciously as my Spanish professors do at Georgetown. There’s even a lot of slang used on a day-to-day basis. Go figure.
But with each day in the city, I became more comfortable. With my Spanish, with my home, with my family, and with my experience here on the whole. Although I have not been the most faithful blogger, I have been a diligent journalist. Each day that I have been here, I have recorded my day’s wanderings in a journal so that not a single day passes by unaccounted.
I do this because being abroad, being here, is an incredible experience and I don’t want to want to permit it to become just “ordinary.” I feel like I speak for many when I say that life has a habit of becoming too normal, or too mechanical, no matter what it is that we are doing. It is easy to fall into habits, to submit to the passing of time, and to allow each day to pass exactly like the last one, or the next one.
If I asked you, for example, to tell me what you did each day of the last week, do you think you could give me a detailed recollection? If you can, hats off to you. You’re damn lucky. You either have a phenomenal memory or a phenomenal life. I know that before I started documenting my days, I would have had considerable difficulty producing a coherent narrative of my weeks without resorting to overly broad generalizations or retelling a couple prominent anecdotes.
Last week, however, is a bit of an exception to that general rule. I could tell you exactly what I did last weekend because, essentially, I did nothing. After a lovely experience with dysentery brought on by food poisoning, I spent 4 days in my house, writhing around in my bed, cursing at Argentina and hating my life. Finally, after my trip to the hospital for what was suspected to be an internal bleed in my stomach, I received some antibiotics which mercifully kicked in to help fight off the massive stomach infection.
After two and a half days of not being able to eat or drink, I began to drink anew. A day later, I was able to eat again. Kind of. For another 3 days after that my diet consisted of only the blandest foods imaginable. Although, I will say, you have no idea how good even the shittiest food is until you haven’t had it in days. Never have I ever enjoyed a slice of toast as much as I did the first day when I was able to eat again. Not even the most severely anorexic person would have been jealous of my diet. Well, actually, maybe they would have. But it sucked.
Even this little episode though, was an experience. I’ve never had dysentery before. And I sure as hell don’t want to have it again. Nor had I been to an Argentine hospital as a patient. I’ll chalk it up to a cultural experience with the medical system here. Check that one off the list. A week later, I’ve found value in this gastrointestinal fiasco.
Perhaps one of the greatest pleasures of being abroad is being able to cultivate a heightened sense of wonder of the world. There is just a general sense of intrigue in living your life in a new place. And in my case, this place, Buenos Aires, is so drastically different from the environment in which I grew up.
But after 3 months of being here, I think I can finally say I have become accustomed to the city, to life in South America and in Buenos Aires. This is both good and bad. It’s satisfying from a personal and academic level to have developed my Spanish to a new level of comfort both in terms of speaking and comprehension. It’s incredible to feel at home in a city that just 2 months ago felt unfamiliar and strange. But it’s also dangerous to feel so acclimated here because I risk losing my perspective on the experience.
Being abroad is an invigorating experience because of its novelty. The unknown or the as-yet-unexplored always beckons and offers the tantalizing reward of excitement, amusement, and knowledge obtained. I still have so many places yet to see: Iguazu Falls, Brazil, Uruguay, Machu Picchu, and Patagonia. Odds are I won’t get to see them all. But we’ll see. I’ll continue to jot down my activities day after day, regardless of how trivial they may seem. Because after all, 1 month prior to this, these minor activities: interesting conversations, strange encounters, daily routines may have seemed wildly infeasible.
For this reason, I refuse to read what I have written about in prior days. I want to wait to reread everything I have written until after my experience is over. To see how/if my perspective has changed at all. I’m gonna take a fairly-educated guess and say that it has. What I’m trying to say is: “Yep. Look at me. I’m so worldly; look how much I have grown here.”
To some extent, I believe that is true. But I’ll save the hard-core analysis of my experience here until after I have reread my journal, once I’m back home in the states (shudder). Just kidding, I miss home. But I’m not ready to come back yet. For now, I have better things to do.
