Hello everyone! I know it's been a while but things here have been crazy busy in the last week or two and they're not even close to calming down yet. I've been going through the process of trying to figure out which classes I need to take, trying to figure out where I'm living (I'm off to meet with prospective host family within the hour), and trying to get everything together for tomorrow, which is the final exam for our pre-semester Spanish course (I can't believe it's over!) This isn't going to be a long post, as I have to leave shortly to walk to what will possibly become my apartment here, but I wanted to drop in and give everyone some kind of explanation for my recent absence.

Unfortunately, this absence is going to continue for a while - directly after my exam tomorrow I am leaving for Mendoza (another city in Argentina, near the Andes) with my friends Peter and Lennart. We have a decent-sized break before classes start on March 10, and Peter and Lennart invited me along on their trip across the continent. We'll be going by bus to Mendoza, then to Santiago in Chile, then to Córdoba, then back to Buenos Aires. The whole trip is going to be 7 or 8 days and I won't have the time or resources to keep in touch while I'm away, but don't worry, you can all expect a huge post about my adventures after I return :) For everyone at Northeastern, I hope you have a fantastic spring break and I'll talk to you guys soon - miss you!

"That was really fun. Wait, is that the sun coming up?"

I never pegged myself for a going-out person. Sure, I like to have fun, but it's always been in a very chill, drinks-with-friends kind of way. I dismissed clubs (here called boliches) as being not really my thing. After last night, I can definitely see that changing over the course of the next five months.

The schedule doesn't bother me as much as I would have expected it to. We didn't even leave the residence until probably 12:30 or so. In a large group - 15 or so, mixed Argentine and international, all from the dorm, we hopped on the #64 bus to god knows where (I love the Argentines here in the dorm - they just take care of everything and shuffle you off from place to place and all you have to do is enjoy the ride), and ended up at this bar. I was really into this bar, although I can't remember the name. It was a big place, downstairs where you entered was crowded and trendy, upstairs was dark with pounding music and party lighting, and then there was a roof deck outside where you could just chill out and socialize. I liked that you could more or less just choose the environment that you wanted. The conversation and company were awesome - I think that we got really lucky as far as the group goes, everyone's just really nice and fun and interesting. And the Argentines in the dorm are by and large awesome as well - they're really interested in getting to know everyone and really want everyone to have a good time, which makes them completely awesome to be around.

We left the bar by 3, already having a great time, and walked en-masse to Amerika, the club of the night. We were told on the way (pretty long walk...had to be 20 blocks? couldn't say) that this was a gay-friendly club. This turned out to be a massive understatement. The place was absolutely crazy, there were practically naked dancers - both women and men, in balconies off the walls, people were making out everywhere, and making out might be putting it mildly. But the atmosphere was pretty cool and the drinks were all included in the 40 peso cover (maybe $12-13). The club was huge - multiple levels, with this huge glass structure on one of the upper levels that kind of looked like a space pod and that people danced in. Crazy place. I had a fantastic time. Everyone that went in (only about half the group from the bar continued on to Amerika) was cool with the kind of club it was, which was cool, although it was interesting to see the guys' level of comfort decrease rapidly as the night went on and they were exposed to the club's generally "help yourself" attitude towards groping. I thought this was pretty funny - as girls, unwanted touching is kind of a fact of life in clubs, so this wasn't anything new to us, but I don't think it's something that guys usually have to deal with and it was definitely amusing and interesting to see how they handled it.

I left with Shannon and Lennart around 5:30 or 6 and we grabbed a cab back to the dorm. Once I got into bed, I passed out instantly - I woke up a couple hours later when my roommate Emma got up and realized that I still had my contacts in and was pretty much fully clothed. It was already broad daylight at this point, so I changed into shorts and a t-shirt, took my contacts and went back to sleep til about 1. From what I've gathered, the rest of the group from the club didn't get back to the dorm until 8 or 8:30. I'm not really in that league yet as far as endurance goes, but check back with me in a month or so ;)

Saturday's Tour

The delay on this post is due to the fact that I didn't want to do it without pictures, and I was too lazy to get around to loading the pictures before right now.

Saturday all of the people in the program who had arrived so far met up at a pizza place across the street from where most of our classes are - "La Continental". Sidenote: all of the pizza that I've seen here is made with like, 5 pounds of cheese. But anyway, as Anna and I had gotten here a day early and had thus not been driven from the airport by the program people, this was the first time I met Viviana, the main coordinator of the program. I also met most of the other people who are in the program - there were a few that trickled in later on due to rescheduled flights, etc, but this was definitely the majority of the group. I still don't have all the names straight.

After lunch we were shown where to meet for our Spanish classes which would meet Monday (today), and then we were put onto a small tour bus with our guide, a professor of Argentine history at the University of Buenos Aires. The bus took us first to the Plaza de Mayo, which I had seen before, then into San Telmo, which so far is probably my favorite neighborhood that I've seen. It's quiet and very old, with cobblestone streets and old, Mediterranean - style houses. After consulting my guidebook (as I could only understand about half of what the tour guide was saying) I learned that San Telmo used to be where the richer and more elite of the city lived. There's a strong Italian influence on the whole city, which can be seen especially in the San Telmo architecture. San Telmo, apparently, was Buenos Aires's richest neighborhood until disease struck in the early 20th century, and everyone who could afford to move out, did, leaving San Telmo to the poor. The big Mediterranean houses were converted into smaller apartments and shops, and eventually San Telmo turned into the place where lots of artists and musicians and general bohemians made their home. Basically it's awesome.

From San Telmo we drove to La Boca (passing the gigantic stadium that's home to Buenos Aires soccer team the Boca Juniors), which was the most touristy place I've seen yet. For example: instead of dancing in the streets, which is touristy enough, the only tango dancers that I saw in La Boca were posing for pictures for tourists. La Boca was cool, but the neighborhood is very poor and as a result you're advised to stick to pretty much just a two-block area, which is a huge tourist attraction and is thus heavily patrolled by police. The buildings are beautiful - old and really brightly colored. I'm not sure if this is true, but I think I read that the reason the buildings are colored the way they are is because the inhabitants of La Boca were too poor to afford to buy paint, so they used whatever colors were left over from the nearby port. Leaving La Boca, the bus took a back route, I think on specific instruction of our guide. I think he realized that from what we would probably see in our time here, we might see Buenos Aires only as a cool, cosmopolitan city - I think he wanted us to see the poverty too. It was tough to look at the conditions that the people were living in as we drove out of La Boca. Houses were basically lean-tos made out of tossed-aside boards and pieces of metal. I don't know - I find it difficult to describe.

From La Boca we drove through Puerto Madero and Microcentro, and our last stop was in Recoleta, where our tour guide actually left us. I can't imagine more contrast than that that existed between Recoleta and La Boca - Recoleta was beautiful, full of parks, clearly the wealthiest neighborhood that we had seen so far. The main site here was the Recoleta cemetery, which was like no cemetery I've seen before. Basically within this huge, walled in area, the richest families of Buenos Aires all had small mausoleums, where the dead would be entombed. These structures were amazing, with huge statues and stained glass - a lot of them appeared to be miniature Gothic cathedrals. The place was beautiful but very eerie - and the eeriness wasn't helped by the fact that there were tons of stray cats just wandering around the cemetery, lying on the entrances to the tombs and sleeping under the statues.

The whole trip was pretty cool. It was good to meet everyone and kind of get a chance to hang out together for a bit, exchange some phone numbers, etc. After touring the cemetery (sin tour guide) with a couple of the girls - Shannon, Jessi, and Emma, my roommate - we grabbed some helado and sat for a while, and then made the trek back to the residence - maybe half an hour's walk, or a little more.

First day at USAL

Hey guys, I hope you'll excuse my lack of originality, but I took most of this post from an email I sent to my mom today. It wasn't necessarily what I had planned for the next post, but after describing my first day to my mom I figured that this is close to the kind of thing that Northeastern likes to see here. So here goes:

Today I had my first day at Universidad del Salvador - it wasn't classes yet, just a basic orientation and then all of us had to go into a room individually with a team of 2 of the coordinators and they evaluated our speech. It was a little intimidating going into it but then once it actually got started it was actually kind of fun. I didn't even realize I was being evaluated at first - the guy came in to get me out of the room that everyone was in and took me into another room and I sat down opposite him and another woman and it was just a bunch of small talk at first - where are you from, when did you get here, where are you living, how do you like the weather here, how does it compare to the weather back home, how long have you been studying Spanish, how long are you here for, etc etc. We talked for a minute or two before I realized that as we were having the conversation the woman was making a bunch of check marks on a piece of paper. But it was very low-pressure, they were really nice.

The second part of the test was interesting, after all the small talk the guy chose a photo from a stack that he had and put it in front of me and asked me to describe what was going on. The photo was of a man lying on a couch in a psychologist's office and the psychologist sitting next to him listening. After I described the obvious, they asked me to basically create a story to go along with it - how is the patient feeling, how is the psychologist feeling, etc. When I thought about it afterwards I thought it was really clever the way they were framing their questions in order to basically force me into using specific grammatical structures. For example (if you're interested):

"Que son las edades de los hombres? Son mismos?" (What are the ages of the men? Are they the same?)

"No, el psicologo es mas viejo que el paciente" (No, the psycologist is older than the patient)

By asking me if the ages were the same, I was forced to compare the two using "mas" and "que" rather than just stating the two ages separately, which would have been simpler to do grammatically.

Then after I had described the picture to their satisfaction the guy told me that I was to pretend like I was a patient calling him, a psychologist, to cancel an appointment. I had no idea what he said when he said this (Professor Sadow - my Spanish professor last semester - told me that there was a study done once and it showed that Spanish speaker delivered considerably more syllables per minute than did English speakers, so it's not just our imagination or Spanish inadequacies that makes it seem like they're speaking lightning-fast). But when I apologized for not understanding, he repeated it slower and I understood. We ran through this exercise fairly quickly, which was fun, I managed to make them laugh a couple times at least. I'll find out what level they place me in when I get there tomorrow, but I think it went fairly well. One of the things that I've noticed is that when I'm having a conversation with someone, they start off slow, and then their speed increases based on how comfortable I seem with the Spanish. If it's a bad day for me Spanish-wise or early in the morning, I've noticed they either speak really slow or just try whatever English they know. So basically I've concluded that if someone suddenly starts speaking quickly and with complicated tenses/vocabulary thrown in, it's because I'd been doing pretty well....up until that point.

The building where all of the Spanish classes will be - and possibly several of my semester classes - is about a half hour's walk from the residence, which in 90+ degree heat and full sun, is pretty damn far. So far though, I've enjoyed the walk somewhat - it feels like exercise, and thus makes me feel productive. Granted, I've only gone there and back twice so far, it might get old fast. After walking so much, I'm beginning to think that it will be nice once it starts cooling down a bit for autumn - the heat makes everything just feel kind of dirty - even the air tastes dusty.

We got the standard "You're in an urban environment and thus in constant danger" lecture at orientation today. Girls were told to mind their bags carefully, guys were told to keep their wallets in the front pockets and not to wear cargo pants. There have been constant warnings about acting touristy, speaking English loudly in public, etc - all things that usually come with just being careful in the city. In my experience so far - and we're not in a particularly rich or touristy part of town - is that the city is nice, and the people are generally friendly and helpful.

I'm going to try and put up some more photos from our tour of the city on Saturday, either later tonight or tomorrow. Stay tuned guys! :)

Estoy aqui.

This constitutes my first entry in what will hopefully fulfill the Northeastern University journal requirement for students studying abroad.

I arrived in Buenos Aires yesterday around 10:30 AM local time (Buenos Aires is 2 hours ahead of the U.S. East coast), with Anna, the only other Northeastern student participating in the program this semester. After passing through customs, grabbing our bags, changing some currency, and going through exit security, we grabbed a cab together from the airport to the dorm (Proyecto Alfa 2000). The drive into the city was nice, the airport is a bit further out into the countryside so we passed a lot of green areas and even a couple farms before we started to see the development of the city. First cultural observation: the drivers here are crazy. If there are such things as speed limits or even traffic laws in general, they have yet to become apparent to me here. Cars pretty much stay within the marked lanes, but seem to go as fast as they can and don't think twice about cutting across 2+ lanes of traffic without warning to make any turns that they need to. In addition, there are countless people on motorcycles and motorbikes that ignore the lanes completely and just weave in and out of traffic as needed, especially in traffic jams or at stoplights.

The city is beautiful, but hot and loud. I'm not entirely certain what I expected, but they way Buenos Aires appears isn't quite what I expected. Coming into the city from the outside, it doesn't right away occur to you that you're entering a city of 3-4 million people...the streets are narrow and the traffic is light and the sky isn't being blocked out by buildings. Then the cab driver will take just one turn and instantly you'll be plummeted into the urban reality of traffic jams, noise, and pollution - not nearly as bad as it could be, but still obvious, especially with this kind of heat (mid- to high 80's since I've been here).

Today (after waking up around 11:30) Anna, Anna's roommate Isabella (from Quebec), and I decided it might be good to walk around and explore a bit. We decided to visit the Plaza de Mayo - the block that houses the Casa Rosada (home of the president) as well as some other government buildings. We grabbed a quick lunch of empanadas at a small neighborhood place where the people were really friendly (I definitely plan on going back). When we were finished, we grabbed the #29 bus from Viamonte (the avenue where my dorm is) to the Plaza, and then from there walked down Calle Florida (an entirely pedestrian street that was packed with people and every kind of shopping you can imagine). Florida is a pretty long street (maybe 10 blocks) that goes north from Plaza de Mayo and connects it with the Plaza San Martin, which might be my favorite place I've seen so far - pictures to come. It's a large park with lots of trees and shade but also huge sunny grassy areas that seem to just stretch out into the city. There are benches everywhere and walking paths criss-cross the whole thing, with small statues tucked away in the trees, a playground or two, etc. It was these parts of the city that most reminded me of Barcelona, which is the only European city I've seen - but the Plazas are surrounded by huge buildings with gorgeous architecture, and that feel seeps through to the surrounding areas, as well. Those are called Puerto Madero and Microcentro - basically, downtown. The dorm where I'm living is in Palermo - a short ride by subway (subte) but a pretty long walk - we did it today and my feet are pretty sore. The dorm is probably 15-20 blocks more or less to the west of San Martin. From what I hear, all of the Buenos Aires neighborhoods (barrios) have very distinct personalities - I'm definitely looking forward to exploring San Telmo and Recoleta in particular.

More people from the program arrived today - I have a roommate Emma who is from Australia, and Anna got another roommate Malin from Sweden. There are also 2 more girls, one from Georgia and one from Tennessee. The seven of us went out to dinner tonight at a nice restaurant a couple blocks away - it was fun to kind of get to know everyone, it was a good time, with really good conversation. Everyone seems really nice and interesting. I also had my first experience where it's completely natural to drink half a bottle of wine with dinner - lovely.

That's all for my first entry. To my friends: keep checking back! Northeastern requires that I write at least once per week, so this is basically where you'll hear of any adventures to come and so on. I miss you guys and you should all know that as much fun as I have here, all of this would be exponentially better if you guys were here to enjoy it with me. Keep those emails coming!