Or home away from home, I really should say. But still, close enough!
I'm sorry it's been so long since I've last written!
In the last week, so many things have happened! I have a working Blackberry with an Argentina phone number, I've been going for walks with one or two of my friends around our barrio during the day and at night so we pretty much know where all the important stuff is, I also learned that some of my friends actually do live nearby, I've gone through two subte passes, I've ridden the colectivo, I've made purchases in stores in Spanish by myself, and I even made my first Argentine fashion purchase!
All and all, I'd say it'll be no time at all before I'm head over heels for this place.
So now for a recap:
As far as orientation goes, it's been pretty mindless. They split us into groups alphabetically, then gave us 2 evaluation Spanish tests, then reorganized us into two new random groups. We've sat through the same presentations twice, so that's obviously been beyond boring. We've finally started getting course lists though and Dr. Fox FINALLY emailed me that my course approvals went through...which is great except for just like I predicted hardly any of those are actually being offered this semester. SJU really needs to learn how to act when it comes to this paperwork kind of stuff but oh well. I'm not worried about it since I know my professors will be understanding and help me get new things approved even if it's a giant pain in the rear Dr. Fox and I don't always see eye-to-eye. Tomorrow we have our first university visit, and it's to the school that specializes in economics and happens to be in my barrio so that'll be cool I think. Registration here is a lot different than at home. First we're going on a tour to each of the four schools we can take classes at. Then, we get to pick between 3 and 5 classes at each school that we think we might want to take, and we have time to go sit in on them, read over the syllabuses, and decide if we actually think we can handle and enjoy the class. It's called the shopping period, and I know it's going to be stressful but it'll be really worth it and I'm sure I'll get some great classes out of it! I'm very excited for classes to start too, even though that's not for at least another two weeks. I just want to start making some Argentine friends!
A side note about Argentines: 99% of them are tall, skinny, and gorgeous. Ay dios mio.
Anyway, my home stay has been good so far! Cristina is an awesome cook. I've been introduced to so many new favorite foods...tortas, empenadas, chicken and mushrooms in a cream sauce over rice...y todo es delicioso! I could literally live off of just emepenadas for the rest of my life. No joke. They come in every flavor imaginable: vegetable, tomato/basil/cheese, tuna, chicken, ham/cheese, beef, pumpkin...and the list goes on. I turned my bed which was essentially me sleeping on top of just the mattress springs into a plush oasis by putting the mattress from the trundle bed on top of my other mattress. Score!
I'm still working out the kinks on finding somewhere to play tennis. Cristina's son, Santiago, played until he hurt his foot, so I'm going to give him a call to see what's up. Sometimes you have to join a club, sometimes you can just go play. Depends on where you go I guess. And it's possible that once I'm a student if any of the schools have courts that they use for their teams, I can have access to those too! We've been told we're allowed to join a sports team here, but depending on how much of a commitment it is I'll think about it. I don't want to devote all of my free time to playing tennis. I want to stay in shape but I also want to be able to travel and go sightseeing too on the weekends.
Wednesday night three of us decided to wander around our barrio to look for a place to hang out. After about a 20 minute walk that we were pretty sure was going to be unsuccessful, we found this tiny crack in the wall upstairs bar called Aldonza. It turned out to be a chill little place so we had a few glasses of Quilmes, the local light beer brewed in Argentina, while we sat and talked.
Thursday night I decided I was too tired from only getting 5 hours of sleep from the night before and still adjusting to everything new, but apparently I missed quite a sight. A friend of mine lived in BA for awhile in high school so she knows a local club promoter and got on his list at this place called Club 69. Club 69, for anyone who's never been to Buenos Aires before can pretty much can't really be described, but from what everyone said it's this crazy mecca filled with cross-dressers who dance provocatively on stage all night long. And by all night long I mean until 6am.
Welcome to night life in Argentina; no one sleeps here. EVER.
Friday night I manned up and went out again. We had a glass of wine at a place near us called Manhattan Club when we all first met up. Two things about Manhattan Club. First, it's not actually a club at all. It's essentially a glorified diner. Second, it embodies all that Argentine's think about how the US looks and is like, which is more than a little off-base. Manhattan Club's architecture includes a mini-replica of the Empire State Building on the roof and diner-style seating inside. That's it. Nothing on the menu is particularly Americanized. There's a few records and memorabilia hanging on the walls inside, but all and all it makes America look like a total drag.
After that, we decided to go to this half indoor, half outdoor club called Congo that was recommended in one of the guidebooks or on Lonely Planet or something. It was a cool place, but the crowd was mostly older. After that we moved on to Groove, our last stop for the night. This was my first real BA club experience and I have to say I don't know what I expected, but I'm pretty sure this wasn't it. They let the "American girls" cut the line but we still had to pay full entrance fee (which is bizarre since girls don't pay to get in anywhere here...ever). When we got inside, it was this two story kind of cramped space that was absolutely FILLED with people wall-to-wall. Some band was playing and everyone from Argentina was going wild over them, especially the guys. Everyone except us knew every word to every song. Admittedly, the band wasn't half bad. But once we made our way up to the stage we got stampeded by this group of guys rushing the stage. Ouch. And then some bitty spilled her drink all over my new shirt/the first fashion purchase I made in Argentina. And all over my hair, my jeans, my shoes...well I think you get the idea. I was a little less than thrilled. But we had our fun and decided to leave shortly thereafter at 4:30am which is very early to call it a night in Buenos Aires time.
Yesterday, we spent our first weekend tanning in La Plaza de Los Naciones Unidos. It was sunny without a cloud in the sky and 85 degrees! ¡Que lindo! The park was perfect, with a beautiful solar-powered metal flower to look at. After about 6 hours and getting some significant color, we headed to an outdoor market in Recoleta. They literally had EVERYTHING there from purses to clothes to shoes to jewelry to kids toys to food to entertainment and even more! It was a great little place and everything was locally made. I got an awesome hand carved leather bag for 60 pesos, orange juice from oranges that are only grown in argentina that honestly tasted like candy and didn't have any sugar in it-literally just hand squeezed orange juice-for 15 pesos, and candy coated figs (with candy coating like on candy apples) dipped in caramel corn for 10 pesos. Three great purchases, and all for less than $25 USD. The peso is about 4:1 on average, so it makes shopping here quite tempting. Also, obviously I'm shipping a crate of those oranges home at the end of my trip. I don't think I can live without them. The guy at the stand gave us each a piece of orange to eat before we bought the juice, and it was so good it was like I was in produce heaven. They're a very concentrated color of orange, so the juice is a lot darker than orange juice in the USA. But my hands were literally coated with all natural sugar courtesy of mother nature, I just couldn't get enough of it!
There were so many great things at the fair from local artisans, it's definitely a place I want to go back to before I come home to pick up things to bring back. I also get the feeling there are quite a few places like this, so we'll see what they have to offer too. But they had things there I would love to have at home like beautiful hand made jewelry, tea cups made in the local style for the tea they drink here called matee, beautiful mini paintings of local landmarks, cute toy gifts for little cousins, and this really neat thing one woman made called the "Tree of Life" which was very fragile mini tree sculptures made out of gold or silver wire with different colored itty bitty stained glass petals, each tree being a different color and representing a different virtue. They were so cool looking and the little prophecy thing that went with it is cute, they're just super delicate so it's probably going to take me the next 5 months to figure out how to pack that one.
After the market, we came home. We made 10:30 dinner reservations at a place rated very highly for it's beef since on the weekends our host mom's don't feed us, we have to fend for ourselves. I'm sure most of the time I'll be cooking at home since Cristina offered that I can use the kitchen whenever I'd like, especially on the weekends. But it being our first week here, we were craving some authentic Argentine beef. Since we were going out after dinner, we were more than a little over dressed for the restaurant we went to since it was a local beef gem, but we were in a group of 7 so it wasn't so embarrassing. The menu for this place was literally 15 pages long. They could make your every culinary wish come true. The 7 of us split a couple of bottles of red wine, two salads, the biggest platter of calamari I've ever seen, an order of eggplant, and then 6 of us ordered steaks and one of my friends ordered veal. It was one of the most savory meals I've ever eaten. My steak was so tender and cooked to perfection. I asked our mozo to cook my meat a little more well done since here, you have to order meat medium to have it come out medium well, and the norm is to order it medium-rojo or medium-rare. I essentially got two giant steaks out of the deal because of the way the cook butterflied the steak to cook it. Incredible. And the most mind-blowing part of dinner is that with tip it was 110 pesos a person. That's just about $30 a person for wine, calamari, salad, a side dish, and a WHOLE STEAK. I'm really starting to love Argentina :)
After we were sufficiently stuffed we went to a party hosted by kids that go to school with one of my friends, but are studying here in a different program. It was a weird feeling being at a party with all Americans in Argentina...I wasn't really a fan. But we weren't there too long and then we all went to go check out this club mecca known as Las Terazzas. It's 15 clubs that are all connected and it has everything from gay clubs to clubs that spray foam at you. Apparently it's something you have to see once in your life, and the thing to to is to stay there until the sun rises because it's right on the river and beautiful.
Unfortunately, my once in a lifetime experience was not last night because some of our guy friends, like all of us Americans, didn't know ahead of time that the club had a dress code. The girls were all fine, obviously, but guys aren't allowed to wear shorts out here so they wouldn't let two of the boys in. This was one of those situations where people's true colors really show, because half of our friends just said see ya and went into the club to enjoy themselves, while the rest of us knew how bummed we would feel if we got turned down and sent away so we went to join the boys and just went to hang out downtown in Palermo where there's a bunch of bars and music played in the street and whatnot. It worked out well because we were able to meet up with the rest of our friends who were in Palermo and we just picked a bar and sat there and talked for a few hours. It was fun, and we still got home pretty late, but not late enough to see a sunrise. But there's always next time!
Tomorrow, a few people from the program are going to this thing at a café after orientation called a Spanglish Exchange. It's like speed dating for languages. They pair up extranjeros learning Spanish and Argentines learning English and you talk to each other, 5 minutes in Spanish, 5 minutes in English about anything you want! And then you move onto the next person, and repeat. It's like an hour and a half long I think and you get a free drink at the café (my options are quite limited since I don't drink coffee) which is nice too, and it's only 30 pesos so that's about $8 USD. Nice, cheap fun! And hopefully a great way to meet some local twenty-somethings, too.
Now it's homework time. Yes, that's no typo. I have homework from orientation and I'm not even in class yet. But it's just to force us to get to know our neighborhoods and become comfortable asking for things in stores and what not. The assignment is just to go with our partner around our neighborhood and take creative pictures that fit into 10 categories that we were given. Then we have to find a store that sells CDs and save them on there. All and all a pretty fun homework assignment and something that's super easy, too!
I'm going to try and not wait so long before my next blog post so that it's not so long and no one has to frantically BBM and Facebook message me to make sure I'm alive ;)
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