One Week To Go!

one week from today I will be on a plane home! Since I have gotten so comfortable (ish) living here the time has gone by SO fast!!
sorry if this post is really scattered...Its just that I'm learning the South American way of life!! (which is scattered and tends to change plans at the last minute)


Qualms with Argentina:
1. People in stores get REALLY offended if you give them a 100 peso bill. Even if what you are buying costs 60 pesos. A lot of times they will pretend to not have the change so you will give them something else. I can understand being short on change sometimes, but the ATM gives $100s… what do they want me to do?? (And talking to people in banks is scary so if you were thinking that’s an option its not)
Which leads me to qualm #2:
2. People generally assume that they can take advantage of me. Taxi drivers take seemingly longer routes (you pay by the time and mileage here) which offends me in a serious way. Of all the people to take advantage of, don’t pick the one that keeps her nose in a map like a true tourist! I have to assume that they know secret routes that are faster… but that’s hard to do. However, the longest, worst, most windy (we crossed the same street FOUR times), most traffic-y taxi ride totaled 25 pesos. And that’s just over $8, between three people. Could be worse.
Which leads me to qualm #3:
3. Service-y people are AWFUL here. I know its not ALWAYS a being taken advantage of thing, but waiters are really inattentive and people in stores either ignore you (I was checking out at one store and the woman LITERALLY threw my bag at me and didn’t say anything near “Thank you and have a nice day”. I said “RUDE” and walked out. See “Secret Language”) or people follow you around like you have “I AM HERE TO STEAL FROM YOUR STORE” written on my face. Its awkward and annoying.
4. Argentinean forwardness. If I had a dollar for every time someone made a face or a noise or a honk or a whistle or a horse noise (yeah, that’s right) or a gesture at my friend and I on our morning walk, I would go ahead and buy my vacation house in Uruguay with change to spare. It is going to be some serious reverse culture shock (and a blow to my self esteem) when I walk down the street at home (as if I ever walk on streets at home, but still) and no one cares. Now, I know this whole people pay lots of attention to me thing may sound a little self-absorbed, but when I’m walking down the street, people are making most of these comments at my tall, blonde, beautiful, well-endowed walking buddy. When I get attention its generally about my lack of winter gear, and its MUCH less friendly. But people will STARE. People will lock their gaze on my friend when they are in font of us, and keep it there until we have past them. Its very obvious and getting really old. Sometimes its funny because these guys get these looks on their faces as if Jesus was walking down the street handing out tickets to Heaven (sometimes the girls too, but generally those have a little more contempt behind them…). It doesn’t help that we talk in English (hey, we have to get it all out before the 23232938470 hours of class). We also talk loud and walk fast and, after the recent discover of STARBUCKS (pause to respect the gravity of this– everyone better understand the SERIOUS greatness of this discovery, if not, see qualm #5) we walk with nice huge coffee cups that scream “I’M TOO GOOD FOR YOUR STUPID COFFEE” (at least that’s what I hope they are screaming). To top it all off, we are generally talking about either intense issues (hence louder tones), things that are annoying us (even louder tones), girly things and often like GIRL TALK so the English speakers stare too. Despite how much we may be asking for it sometimes, there are people who just SHAMELESSLY stare or make “Oh Baby” kind of comments. The icing on this qualm cake is that this is always at EIGHT THIRTY AM. Who’s cat calling that early in the morning? The Buenos Aireans, that’s who.
5. COFFEE. When I order coffee somewhere, I have certain expectations. I’m not even a coffee snob. But when I ask for coffee to go and get a Styrofoam cup smaller than something that a marathon water station would have, it just doesn’t fly for me. But it flies for ALL of Buenos Aires. This problem would be like one degree better if there were refills in restaurants (here we go again with restaurants, right?!), but there aren’t! And, besides the whole size problem, the coffee tastes FREAKY. Every time I bring a cup of coffee to my face to drink it, this odd smell of alcohol creeps into my nose and totally ruins the taste of the coffee. I don’t even like the taste of coffee that much… but this stuff gets so bad I can’t even bring myself to drink it.

Things I am DYING to do:
1. Drive myself somewhere. I listened to some Billy Joel on someone’s iPod (contraband) yesterday and would have seriously considered giving up some toes to drive my car and listen to Billy Joel. Change engine light and everything.
2. DRINK FREE WATER. The tap water here is fine to drink (though I think paranoia has been giving me slight indigestion) but in restaurants everyone orders water. We finally learned the word for “faucet” so now we ask for tap water in restaurants, but they are realllllllly slow on the refill (see qualm #3).
3. Be on the Internet everywhere all the time. When I made the leap to an iPhone I was afraid one day I would become that person who is obsessed with having constant access to the World Wide Web, e-mail, games, never ending entertainment. Well, it happened and I am totally not ashamed. Since I don’t have Internet in my house and I just am generally doing ok without it (though then I come back to 15 or so e-mail at a time), it’s when I want to Google people or song lyrics that I have trouble.
4. Eat ketchup that doesn’t taste super funky.

Secret Language: We keep talking in English behind people’s backs in front of their faces (mostly in taxis) and then when we get to an insulting word or a critique of the direction we are going (see qualm #2), we say that one word in Spanish. We came to the realization the other day that the one word that the Spanish speaker can understand is the worst one for them to hear. Then there are the lovely surprises of the taxi drivers who speak English. Generally though, we know off the bat that they speak English because they assume that we can’t speak Spanish and talk to us in English.

Worst moment of the trip so far: On about half of our weekdays, we will have a class session with the professor who is here from Rhodes with us, take a small excursion, and then have class in the afternoon (FOUR HOURS). One of our small excursions last week was to a museum that was next to/ a part of a famous theatre. (Remember these things are all told to me in Spanish… my attention span is low… don’t quote me on these facts) But it was a small room with some REALLY old costumes (like 1890s old) and a TON of pictures on the walls of actors and actresses. This wasn’t cool though, it was just like someone threw all these pictures up and called it a museum. One of my greatest critiques of the trip is that they don’t TELL us where we are going before we go. So we walk into this stupid room and some guy talks at us in Spanish for two hours. It was AWFUL. Also, we had been out until 2AM the night before dancing the salsa at the lessons we accidentally found… and my professor knew this because we had talked about it in our morning session. I wasn’t even that tired until I sat down to listen to this little old man (who was totally precious and endearing until he started speaking). My professor never does that good of a job explaining that we are studying Spanish but we don’t know ALL SPANISH, so the people that talk at us literally lose me in the first sentence. This guy understood that we were students, but his attempts to be helpful were totally shot by his roundabout stories and explanations (so said my professor… I couldn’t understand a word he was saying so I didn’t even realize he was a little cukoo cukoo with his lecture). His attempts to speak slowly and clearly ended up being like this. “Ennnnnnn ellllllllllll annnnnnooooooo ;alskdfj;alksjdg;aehuwrg;ofiakwlejf;alkhg;oaiklsdjfa;lkshg’apiwkosgjha’ldkhsf;alksdjg;alksbdf;lakjsdmfg;lkans;dfkjas;ldfgkna;soiedfjas;lkdmcfa;lkwrhg;aoidjkf;laksjdg;lajnrglaksjdf;aklsjdfaksf chica” I would catch the first word or two because he would say them reallllllyyyyy slowwwlllyyy and then barf Spanish for a minute and then, if I was lucky, I would catch the next word. Because I’m an enthusiastic person, I sat in the front. He was literally two feet from my face and sometimes, in these bouts of Spanish barf he would ask me a question. I would only understand that he was talking to me because he would stare right at me and open his eyes really wide. He asked me over and over if I understood. I would say yes. I can REALLY understand the question “Do you understand?” because I hear it ALL THE TIME. Generally I’m honest and say I don’t because I’m afraid people will then ask me questions that I won’t be able to answer because I don’t ACTUALLY understand… its really a tough call whether or not to be honest. The first time he asked me I said “more or less” which was silly because then he asked “What don’t you understand?” and I couldn’t say “everything!!… including the reason we are here,” so I just said it was OK and he continued. The next million times he would pause his Spanish slurs to ask me questions (generally catching me nodding off or clearly thinking about something else) I would just say yes that I understood. It was so bad that sometimes I would be looking somewhere and I would only realize that he had asked me a question because I would realize that I didn’t hear him talking anymore. Then once I was like “Si Si” when he was talking to me and he looked straight to my professor and started speaking EXTRA fast and my professor was saying something along the lines of “No no its ok” and I figured that the guy had felt like I didn’t really understand and he was worried that he was talking to fast. It took my professor at least three whole minutes to convince him to continue, during which I gathered that he said something about the theatre being his “passion”. It wasn’t until like five minutes later that someone leaned to me and told me that the question had not been “Do you understand?” like I had assumed. It was “Are you bored?” and I had said and emphatic, unrestricted “yes, yes”. And he just kept going ONNNN and ONNNN about how the things he was talking about were interesting to him and he is sad that no one appreciates the history or Argentinean Theatre. IT WAS SO BAD. I left there ASAP.

More things I have realized/observations:
1. Being fluent in a language is near impossible. Am I motivated by this realization? Nope. It just gives me more self-justification is focusing on my “cultural” experiences here and not the boring classroom stuff.
2. Being able to speak other languages is REALLY helpful in traveling. Though there are the rude-ies, most people in restuarants and stores get this Christmas morning look on their faces when we say “Hola” instead of “Hello” when they greet us, and attempting to speak the language gets us street cred in most toursity places like museums.
3. I’m not really a “follow the rules” kind of person at home, so there’s no need to pretend like I’m going to follow the rules here. Though there is obviously an important thing to be learned in adapting to the culture and norms here, totally changing my behavior to mirror that of Buenos Airians (har har) would be like changing my behavior to be like what college guide books say about Rhodes students.
4. About 90% of the money I spend here is going to taxis (I’m pretty pro-taxi at night) and food. Just an observation, and I can’t say it’s going to change.
5. I have never TRULY been in a city that never (and I mean NEVER) sleeps. I go to sleep every night to the sweet sounds of busses, angry cab drivers, and motorcycles every night and hear the same sounds at 3 AM, 4 AM, 5 AM… until I’m finally deciding to get out of bed. We went to a dance club last weekend and afterwards went to a restaurant to get some empanadas (a BA favvvvvoriteee). It was oh, 5:30 AM and the restaurant looked like it was in full swing for lunch or dinner. And it wasn’t that it was the crazies that were the only one still up and out getting empanadas. There were SERIOUSLY normal people there. And it wasn’t that it was a late night food place. It was well lit and our waiter had an apron tied around his waist! LEGIT, people here get their sleep on the bus.
More things we have been doing:
1. Uruguay! Sunday we took the ferry over to Uruguay and spent the day in Colonia. We were gathered at the school* at 7:30AM and weren’t back until just about 11:00. People were cranky. Trying to speak in Spanish all day (even when you only speak about 50% Spanish) makes you tired ten times as fast. But Colonia was beauuuutiful (despite the less than perfect weather) and we say lots of interesting people and SUPER interesting nautical things in the museums. We met a woman the made jewelry (set up a blanket on the side walk kind of person) and talked to her for a long time. Her name was Kelly and she was from Brazil. As we were talking with her, she made us rings from her silver wire and explained all the symbolism in her jewelry. Now surely everyone can understand how the museum tours in Spanish seem like a waste of time.
2. Barbie Store! Hahah WOOO! You know that I am TOTALLY deprived of the United States when the thought of going to the Barbie Store gets me through the long day of class, and I’m still actually excited about it when I get there. The store, which was the first in the world, exudes so much pink the cars and people on the street outside look pink in its glow. It has a Barbie beauty salon, a Barbie Café, and BARBIE’S HOUSE! You can walk into Barbie’s house for a mere 20 pesos (30 if you are over 60 inches HA) and see her kitchen, closet and fun play area! This is mostly for birthday parties, but they let us go in after hours for free just to take some pictures! WEEEWWWW!
3. World Cup stuff! Though I didn’t ACTUALLY see much of the Argentina-Nigeria game this weekend, I was on the street when the game ended (Argentina won) and I truly thought the apocalypse was upon me. People were all out on their balconies (pretty much all residences are apartments) with sparklers and really annoying sound makers honking their way though some Vamos Argentina song. The thing was that I could hear all this wild and crazy noise but it would take forever to actually find the person who was making it because of all the trees and the multitude of balconies. The worse were the popper things that sounded too much like gunshots. Later I did get to see the US-England game, but there was no where near the same enthusiasm for that game.
4. Being shamelessly tourist-y! Going along with the whole not following the rules thing, I have gotten better about just embracing the excitement that I have for EVERYTHING here (minus the stares on the street, the pollution, and the poor sizing in stores) and just hoping that people embrace it as well. We have gotten up the courage to stop and pet dogs on our way to school. This is a BIG DEAL. People are serious about their dogs. For every ten dogs we see, seven are wearing outfits. This weekend a lot of dog outfits were Argentina World Cup jerseys for dogs, but they are no joke.


*When I say school, I mean outside of the 13 story building where IES Abroad occupies the 12th and 13th floors and where we spend MINIMUM five hours a day trapped in rooms with no windows with only the sounds of traffic outside to remind us that we are in Buenos Aires, not an episode of Blue’s Clues (the walls are really bare and here and there they are randomly painted blue or yellow or red…just seems like Steve’s interior decorating work).