Hey, Argentina! Como estas?

So as the title of this post may or may not suggest, I'M IN ARGENTINA!! After an hour-long delay due to a thunderstorm in Miami, the group flight arrived safely on Monday morning. We had a bit of trouble getting taxis (the program took care of it for us, though) because it was raining, but I made it to my host family's house and promptly took a nap, then unpacked and started getting used to living here.

My Argentine family is wonderful. The first day my host grandmother, Jolie (this is how you pronounce it, at least, but I think it's short for Yolanda?) let me in and took care of me until Silvia, my host mom, came home from running errands. I was late getting in because of the taxi situation, but it was all alright. With Silvia came Gala, one of her six (I think?) grandchildren, who is in second grade and entertained me for much of the day. Silvia and her husband, Eduardo, have four children, two of whom live with them-- Ignacio, the youngest, who is 22, and Federico, who sort of lives here. Sometimes. He's been here for two of the nights that I have so far. Monday night I also met Agostin, Gala's dad, and then we went out for dinner and a movie with Paula, Silvia and Eduardo's daughter. Eduardo is especially wonderful-- we had a super great chat last night but it means I didn't get to bed until 2.00! Haha. They have all been super patient with my broken and nasty Spanish and I love them for it.

I've had orientation for the past three days and will for the next month, but mostly I've been getting used to the city. Some things that are weird about Buenos Aires:

• There are no shower curtains. Every morning when I shower I wet the entire floor but it's completely unavoidable! There is a drain between the toilet and the bidet, though, and so to fix the whole wet tile thing you take this gigantic squeegee and push all the water into the drain on the other side of the room. 

Notice that there is no shower curtain...

So I have to use this squeegee so as to not flood the bathroom!

• You have to hail buses like you hail taxis. There are stops, sure, but busses don't stop at every bus stop, so you have to hope you see them when they're coming and let them know you want to get on. You also have to let them know when you want to get off by pressing a little button near your stop. Buses also don't have a schedule-- they kind of come whenever-- so you better hope they're running in a timely manner or you'll be late to wherever you're going!

• The equivalent of Crystal Light here is called "Clight," which makes me a bit uncomfortable.
• People speak in vos, which is the same as the tu form but a completely different conjugation. I'm getting used to it.
• Keys are crazy old-fashioned! They're these big metal affairs and you could probably pick the locks with a toothbrush and a bobby pin, but they are so cool.

The key to get into my building. Well, the inner door-- that scary looking black one is the key to the outer door they close at night.

My room is also really nice. It's quite large, and I have a GIGANTIC desk as well as a large closet.

We like books.

Silvia is also an artist (and artistry runs in the family), so the entire closet is covered in newspaper clippings and drawings! Even the inside is doodled up.

They really like the Rolling Stones and Bob Marley.

The inside of a door. This is only half of my closet... the other door is even more doodled up but I couldn't get a good picture of it.

My host family has also had quite a few students before me, which is awesome because it means I didn't have to buy maps of the city or even plug converters. Which is GREAT.

Basically, I'm getting used to living here but I'm enjoying myself a lot. I've never lived in a city before so it's a totally different experience-- Buenos Aires is the seventh largest city in the world!!-- but it's one I'm liking so far.

Midwestern Grocery Stores vs Argentina: A Comparison

Alright, since I drafted that post yesterday and didn't post it only because I forgot, I'm calling it yesterday's post and writing another one for today.

Today's post is dedicated to travelling. This is not only because I leave for Argentina in a little over a week and am completely freaking out about it; we went to visit my grandparents earlier in the summer and I found some photos I'd forgotten about, so I figured today was a good a day as any to lump everything together under one heading.

So, to get this over with: Things I Like (warning, it's a little picture-heavy today)
 
3. Midwestern Grocery Stores
Yeah, I know, it seems like a pretty strange thing to find on this list. Really, we didn't do a huge amount of grocery shopping so I'm talking about one in particular: Woodman's. I can tell what you are thinking. You're calling up all sorts of stereotypes about the kind of people who live in the Midwest, the types of food they eat, and the kind of things they might have (and not have) in their grocery stores. I can tell this because I was the very same way until actually experiencing one of these behemoths.

I can honestly say that I was so astonished by the Woodman's we went to that I just had to add it to the list. This grocery store must have been the size of a small castle. You could probably jog around the place and call it more than a mile; this place was GIGANTIC.

They even had crazy things like okra pickles!

And they had everything in there! Their selection of hot sauces alone was larger than any I'd ever seen outside a hot sauce specialty shop. They also had huge containers of things, like jars of pickles and olives bigger than my head.

Hell, this store was so large they had to organize the aisles with numbers AND letters!

Madman and I got separated from our parents at one point... and were afraid we would never find them again. Don't lose your kids in here.

It was great. I'm sure you could find just about anything in that store (except, strangely enough, plastic serving platters). It was AWESOME. I maybe even for a second considered moving to the Midwest... but only for a second.


Moving to Argentina, however, is a completely different story. I really like travelling but I think it's the whole idea of going somewhere for five months that's freaking me out. And I am really, supremely, and completely freaking out about going to Argentina. I've mostly just avoided thinking about it; I only started thinking about packing yesterday which is bad, considering I leave in a little over a week. Whoops.

I don't know. I guess what's getting to me the most is the fact that I'm going to be away from everyone I love for half a year. More than the thought of being in a completely foreign environment, more than the idea of getting used to another language, even more than the idea of having to pick up tons of strange customs and live with a family is the stress of being away from everyone. If I were going on a summer program it would be completely different. I don't see a lot of my friends during the summer to begin with; while some of them do live close to me a lot of them live on the other side of the country or places where it's just not convenient or practical to visit. I do get to visit people some, but my parents are really big on spending time with me (I am NOT complaining about this, but it's hard to balance family time and friend time, for sure).

Mostly I think it's the thought that the semester will still go on without me that is making me hesitate so much. People will still take classes, have parties, and get to know each other without me. Life as usual will go on without me. And I'm going to miss everyone so, so much, but I can't do anything about it. And I think that's what's killing me a bit inside. Is that normal?

Things I Like (and then some)

First of all, I just found this lovely new song from Mumford and Sons called Lover's Eyes and gosh, it is wonderful.





Second of all, I found a lot of unloved pictures on my phone that, oddly enough, represent things I think are awesome. So I've decided to showcase them in a list of things I like and do not like. To start it off...

Things I like:
1.  Boxes as tall as my mom
This one doesn't include a picture for the sole reason that she would kill me if it ever saw the light of day, so, to make up for it, number two on the list...

2. Pancakes the size of Texas

Yeah, that's right. That pancake is just shy of a foot in diameter, covered in sugary, baked apple-y, wonderful goodness. The one in the background, in front of Miss Roomie, is a Dutch Oven pancake filled with strawberries and powdered sugar and was also scrumptious! I stayed over at Miss Roomie's house for her birthday and we went out for pancakes that morning, and gosh, were those pancakes worth the 20 minute wait. Mine was a baked pancake-- they cooked the apples, lined a pan with them, poured an eggy batter over it all and baked it-- and I don't even like egg but I thought it was delicious. IHOP has nothing on these pancakes. We only ate about half of them but they were so, so good.