Argentine Death March

I'm starting to feel like I know where I'm going when I walk down the street. Until yesterday, I hadn't been out of my neighborhood (Palermo) much, but after orientation I went on a death march around Buenos Aires through Abasto to Parque Centenario, at left. I was starting to think everywhere looked the same, but it turns out that Palermo just looks like Palermo.

Abasto's main claim to fame is being the home of the largest shopping mall in Buenos Aires. It has no fewer that three McDonald's, including the only kosher McDonald's outside of Israel. It also has eight billion stores, none of which I've ever heard of, six million restaurants, including a fondue stand, an amusement park, and an exhibition area that's showing the Bodies exhibit with people that don't have skin. This picture doesn't even begin to do it justice.

By the time we got on the subte (the BA metro) it was almost nine. I thought I was going to go to bed after dinner, which isn't as early as it sounds — I usually leave the dining room at about 11. But I was distracted from my mission, first by super flan gelato and then by a cute Chilean boy who couldn't pronounce Connecticut. I finally went to bed sometime after two.

Today orientation was finally not useless, which helped me stay awake. We learned about the classes we can take at UBA, the Argentine national university. It basically involved the CIEE program leaders — who are mostly also students there — telling us that it's impossible to pass classes, that the bathrooms are disgusting, and that the professors are paid so badly they have second and even third jobs.

And somehow I still want to take most of my classes there. It's far and away the best university in Buenos Aires, the students there are supposed to be the smartest and the most interesting, and the classes sound like my favorite classes I've taken at Yale, with a combination of theory and literature. And my grades at Yale don't transfer except as passes or fails, which is going to come in handy. A 5 on a scale of 10 is pretty much average, I think, and it translates to a low C. (It's making me miss Yale humanities classes, where everybody is above average!)

Also, Mom: in answer to your questions: 1) My roommate is a chemical engineer, and she couldn't get work in Cordoba. She's not going to be my roommate anymore, though — she's switching rooms. I'm not sure why. I think my feelings might be hurt, but I'm not sure. 2) I eat mostly sandwiches, fruit, salad, chicken, beef, and lots of candy and gelato. The Argentine diet is made up mostly of really healthy meals and really unhealthy desserts. Which is my idea of heaven. 3) It's hot and humid as fuck.

Plaid and Party Hats

This city is so big! I heard it a million times before I got here, but there's no way to really process it until you get here. I live in the Palermo neighborhood, at the corner of Avenida Colonel Diaz and Avenida Paraguay. This is a map of the area around the residencia, but it's only about half of Palermo, and a tiny corner of the city.

Today there was a ton of downtime during orientation at FLACSO (the poli sci graduate school that the exchange program where the exchange program is based). I walked a couple of blocks away from the building and somehow ended up in a district that was pretty much entirely fabric stores. Just giant bolts of every kind of cloth imaginable. A couple of blocks beyond that, it turned into the party hat district. Literally blocks of stores that sold ridiculous foam hats, little plastic whistles and creepy little cherubs that I think were supposed to be table ornaments.

Tomorrow we get assigned to our language levels and start choosing classes. Right now I feel a fifteen-year old at day camp, so I'm looking forward to actually enrolling in real school. Although in a few weeks, when that means work, I'm probably going to change my mind.

And I know all my posts end on this note, but I'm so fucking tired. I'm going to have to get a mate. Argentines don't eat and they don't sleep, but they're still somehow always cheerful and up for anything. It has to be the tea.

Moving In

Yesterday I moved into the student residencia where I'm going to be living for the next five months. Unpacking was terrifying. Seeing the room turn into something I recognized made all of this feel so much more real.

I like it here, though, even if there are some things that are going to take some adjustment. For one thing, as far as I can tell people don't really eat, other than dinner at 10 or later. Otherwise, they seem to survive on yerba mate and sheer enthusiasm for life. They also don't sleep. Last night I got back from having drinks with some other people in the group at 3:30. This morning, my roommate mentioned to me that I got back really early.

My roommate isn't what I expected. She's 30, from Cordoba, Argentina, and a chemical engineer. She couldn't get a job in Corboda, so she had to move here, but she's dying to go back. Her family lives in Cordoba, along with her boyfriend. She doesn't really go out much, but she said she works a lot during the week. We talked for a while this morning after we woke up. I don't remember her name.

I feel like I'm only absorbing some 30% of what's happening. It's time for a nap.

Buenos Aires: Day 1

In Buenos Aires after a 16-hour plane journey. It was very un-epic, despite a tight connection in Houston. Leg cramps and soggy chicken. I missed a lunar eclipse that was apparently taking place outside. Not much else to report.

Until today, the plane trip was as far in the future as I could process. I was able to bring myself to pack largely because it didn’t make sense to take an overnight plane trip without luggage. But I wasn’t really thinking about what was going to happen once I got off the plane, except in the most abstract sense. Now that I’m here, it’s starting to sink in that maybe I’m going to be living in Argentina for the next five months.

The plane landed at a time that was either 12 or one in the afternoon. (The time change is confusing. During the Northern summer, there’s only an hour time difference between here and Connecticut, but during the Southern summer, which it is now, there’s three hours difference because of daylight savings time.) It didn’t take that long to go through Immigration and Customs, but then we met the group and waited for like, two hours for someone who had already left for the hotel. I spent most of the time talking to a Literature major from Williams.

I got to my room at around 3:30. I was too tired to find something to eat, so my lunch was an alfajor from a goody bag the program leaders gave us at check-in. (Caramel sandwiched between three cookies and then covered in chocolate.) My nap wasn’t long enough.

Dinner is at 8:30, so everyone in my room is just sitting around and killing time until then. I might take another nap.

Packing List

I started packing yesterday, and continued today. By "started packing" I mean that yesterday, I threw some clothes on the floor. By "continued" I mean that today I picked them up and threw them in a suitcase.

I hate packing. I've hated it since the summer before I went to college, when I packed up my house in DC to move to San Francisco, and then two weeks later packed up my room in San Francisco to go to school. Also, I'm stressing out because I don't know what people wear in Buenos Aires. I know it's summer there, but does that mean jeans or skirts? Is it moody, sweating-to-shivering-in-ten-minutes-flat San Francisco summer, or is it dump-an-ice-bucket-on-my-head DC summer? And I've heard that people there are incredibly cool, which I'm just not.

To keep from forgetting something really obvious, like underwear, I'm keeping a list of what I've packed. So far, the only thing it's really doing is making me feel stupid for the number of shoes I own. it looks something like this:

PACKED:
1 bathing suit
7 cardigans: Okay, this might be kind of a lot of cardigans. Especially since I'm heading into the equivalent of August. But what if they over air-condition everything like they do in DC? And they're all different colors, so it's not like I'm bringing the same thing five times.
4 dresses: At first there were 5 dresses. Then I decided to be sensible. I might reconsider, though.
4 skirts: Three of these skirts are so short I don't like to walk up stairs in them. I'm not sure if I can wear them in Argentina without getting totally harassed. But they don't take up that much room, so it's worth the risk.
4 pairs of jeans
2 pairs of flats: I need to make sure I have enough shoes. The odds that I'm going to find a cute pair of shoes in Argentina in a size 12 are so small I'm just going to round them off to zero. I'm using this as an excuse to bring 10 pairs of shoes. And yes, they're all absolutely necessary.
1 pair of flip-flops
1 pair of boots: These are the most beautiful boots I have ever seen. They're slouchy brown suede, and they come up almost to my knee. They're flat, taper a little at the toes and don't make me look like Ronald McDonald dressed up for a night on the town. They also may be a tiny bit too small, but it's a small price to pay for finally finding boots I don't hate..
8 pairs of underwear: I totally need more underwear than this. It's a laundry limiting factor. Speaking of which, I don't have enough right now because I haven't done my laundry yet this week. Damn.
280 pills: In order for the insurance company to agree to cover the medicine I need, they basically needed the President to file a personal recommendation on my behalf confirming that I am, in fact, going abroad for the next six months. I was pissed. I still am, but it makes a little more sense now that I know the bottle of pills I ended up paying $20 for is worth between two and three times my entire cardigan collection.
1 box of Earl Grey tea: My mom convinced me to bring this. I pointed out to her that they have tea in Argentina, but she argued that the only kind of Earl Grey tea that's worth drinking is Twinings, and what's if they don't have that particular tea in Argentina? I take my tea seriously.
3 going-out tops

Clearly, I still have a lot of work to do. Like, I've packed no fewer than 7 sweaters but no tank tops, t-shirts or bras.

I'm all set if I'm invited to a tea party, though. I can even bring the tea.