And the toilet paper goes BACK in the toilet...

Well, I made it safely to Argentina, thank goodness. No problems along the way really, except I found out I got completely and totally ripped off by the taxi company and paid about FOUR times what the cost should have been to get from the airport to my host family’s house. Oh well. I paid 120 pesos and it should have been 31 pesos. I guess those are the joys of being a foreigner. My first ride into Buenos Aires was incredible though. I looked out the taxi window to see a city so completely different from Sao Paulo that it was amazing. The streets, architecture, history, and people were all completely and totally different. It was a huge surprise. AND… I discovered I’m back to throwing the toilet paper INTO the toilet. So confusing! Hahaha.

I arrived on Saturday, January 2 and met my host mother and host sister. My host mother, Ivonne, is very cool. She is an artist whose children moved to Spain so she wanted company in the house and started taking students in to live with her. Her daughter, Gabriela, is home visiting from Spain for the holidays. My apartment is about a 20 min. walk to my program headquarters and a 20 min. walk to my university… so not bad at all! And thank goodness, unlike where I live in Brazil, there are no huge hills to climb. I think I got to my classes looking like a wet dog every day because I had to climb huge hills in the heat and couldn’t stop sweating in Brazil. Gross. This is much better. I posted a picture of my university here for you to see.



Yesterday I met everyone on the program. It’s a totally different type of group from the Americans I’ve met in Brazil. Brazil, I think, attracts more “unusual” people who are awesome, but there is definitely something unique about them (hahaha… probably why I’m studying there) and Argentina attracts more of the blonde haired, blue-eyed sorority-girl, fraternity-boy type person. Should be an interesting next few weeks.

Yesterday my program had a long orientation. And when I say long, I mean looooooooong. AGH. I feel like I’m a pretty patient person, but four hours of them telling me different ways students in the past have been robbed and why I should always pay attention is trying, even for me. Afterward, though, we shared some delicious empanadas (I posted a picture for you) for lunch. As most of the empanadas have meat, I ate one with corn and cheese. Finally, we took a tour around the city. I saw the major shopping centers, governor’s house, Boca soccer stadium (whoo hoo!) and more. Around the Boca soccer stadium is a neighborhood that is painted all different colors. The people are poor there and painted the houses with every color they could find that was used for boat paint. For this reason, they call the neighborhood “The Bombonera (chocolate box)” because it looks like a lot of candies. I posted a picture for you just because I thought it was so interesting.



I finished out the day with a girl from the program, Clarissa, and I wandering around the streets at night. We originally meant to meet each other at a street corner and somehow missed each other walking on different sides of the street. Fortunately, we linked up and ended up going to a place downtown called the “Plaza Italia” to eat with the other Americans, but when we got there we couldn’t find the restaurant. We had used the metro (called the Subte) to get to the plaza and hurried to get back on because it stops running at about 22:00 on Sundays… so early!

Fortunately, because it was so late and the ticketeers were already balancing their cash registers, we got a free ride both ways. We headed back to our neighborhood, Belgrano, so that we could find somewhere else to eat and picked an Italian restaurant nearby, ate, and ended up home around midnight. We both wanted a good night’s sleep because today is our Spanish placement test! We’ll see how I do!

P.S. I miss Sao Paulo a lot. I’ve only been gone 3 weeks now between here and Germany, and it seems like forever.