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.