I have been in Buenos Aires for two weeks now and things are going pretty smoothly. I live with a host family which consists of a mother, Dory, father, Carlos, brother, Carlos(Carlitos), and grandson(well I guess technically he would be my nephew) Facundo. Facu is 25 and Carlos I believe is about 37 or something like that. They are cute family. We live in an apartment building relatively in the center of town, on a street called Juncal. When I first arrived at the apartment building I was just going to walk in, but this man stopped me from entering and asked me where I was going. A tad flustered, I just handed him my paper with my host mom's address and apartment number and he let me pass. I later found out that the man, Vincente, was my door man and I definately appreciate his stern ability to prevent random people from walking into our building! Our apartment is on the 2nd floor which is quite lovely, they have two elevators - they remind me of the elevators in Titanic, where you have to close the doors manually- but I usually walk up the stairs. The first day I got here I went to the wrong apartment door haha, when I knocked the person asked who it was and I responded, and proceeded to tell them I was looking for Dory and they kindly-without opening the door- let me know that Dory lived up one more floor. In Latin America, what we in America would call the first floor is called Piso Bajo- bottom floor- and what we would call the 2nd floor is the 1st.
I finally dragged my luggage up to the correct door and my host mom Dory greeted me with a warm smile and kiss on the cheek which is a common greeting in Buenos Aires among both men and women, you rarely see people shake each other's hand here. Dory gave me a tour of the house in a refreshing speed of Castellano-the type of spanish the speak here-. At the airport everyone spoke so fast and I was a bit overwhelmed, but Dory hosts exchange students all the time so I'm sure she understands that speaking slowly is the kindest welcome haha. My room is towards the back of the apartment, it's very spacious, I have a twin bed, dresser, t.v., closet, couch and a shelf/desk. I have a huge window in my room but I get no sunlight because I'm on the inside of the complex and our building has about 9 or 10 floors so I have a nice view of the concrete wall, but it's cool, no biggie.
My bathroom is right next to my room and it's a regular size bathroom with a shower/tub, toliet, sink, and a bidet(I've yet to try and figure out how to use it yet, & not sure how I feel about it either haha) The toliet is a little hard to flush and I was scared I was going to break the handle so I went and asked Carlos (my host dad) how to flush, and he just showed me I need to put a little more force when I flush the toliet. The shower heads here are different as well, the tubs are just like normal tubs, but in the states, our shower heads are usually at the end of the tub, but here they are in the middle of the tub which took a little getting used to because it didn't leave much space, without being from underneath the water-not sure if that makes sense, but yeah haha-.
After my tour of the house, I told Dory I was going to unpack my bags then take a nap. My nap was quite extended,I went to sleep around 11:30 I didn't wake up till about 4 pm. When I woke up I went to speak to Carlos and he told me someone had called and left me a message. I couldn't quite understand him when he said the name but when he showed me the paper it was my friend Ashanti. We had been messaging each other on Facebook for a month or two as we were getting ready for the trip and lo and behold, our hosts mom's are really good friends and live right across the street from each other! I called her back and we ended up meeting up to go cellphone/sim card shopping. Dory walked with us to the IES center to see where they would recommend us buy phones and then she went back home. She directed us to the nearest mall/shopping area and warned us to be careful because there are not many-and by many she meant almost none lol- black people in Buenos Aires and men will try and hit on us.(Ashanti is black as well)
I had already noticed that I was being stared at while I was in the airport, but when we were walking down the street it was 500x worse. I guess people honking is not that strange because idiots in Atlanta do that all the time, but here there are Taxi drivers honking, men whistling out of the car windows, or on the street, etc... Men, women, and children stare at us, but the men are usually mumbling things like " que lindas" "que bellezas" and things of that nature. When Ashanti and I made it to Florida ave- which is somewhat like their version of Canal street in NY- we were mistaken for Brazilian MULTIPLE times. Not sure how many of you all know that I tried to teach myself portuguese not too long ago, so I'm familiar with the basics, and people who were trying to sell us things were speaking to us in portuguese haha. We thought we really just couldn't understand their spanish-which a lot of times is the case- but I started really focusing on what they were saying and a lot of the times it was portuguese.
As far as the color thing goes, it has taken awhile for me to get 'accustomed' to it, and by accustomed, I mean, not get offended by people staring at me. I had to think about it from my own life experiences. At Spelman, which is a historically black college, when we see a group of non-black people on campus it's somewhat strange because we are used to seeing black people for the most part. Clearly it's a different extreme but in the U.S. it's hard to say that you haven't seen a type of person before, and probably about 97% of the black people the Argentines see here are from Brazil so it's no biggie. But I still see no explanation for these raunchy men who feel that it is acceptable to honk, whistle, holler, etc... at us when we walk by, I don't like it in the states and Argentina is no exception.
By the way, it's winter time here. I'm cold:(. But it's really not too bad for it to be the dead of winter. The coldest it has gotten has probably been low 40s. Cold is still cold though, and if you know me well, you know I'm complaining about it haha. I have a space heater in my room and I crank it up every night faithfully! Spring should be here in a few weeks though so I'm trying to stick it out. The best thing about coming to another country towards the end of a season is the end of season markdowns! The dollar is super strong here! It's 3 Argentine pesos to $1. That basically translates to AMAZING! What is even more amazing is that Argentina has an excessive(not the best word but it works for my usage) amount of vacas(cows)! And that my friends means that leather is in abundance here because these people LOVEEEE beef. You would never be able to tell though because everyone here for the most part is super skinny. I've seen only about 5 obese people, and I read an article the other day that Argentina has the 2nd highest percentage rate of anorexia & bulimia, interesting don't you think? But anyways, back to the leather. I bought two pair of shoes the other day. One was a pair of leather boots and the other were a pair of funky wedge tennis shoe looking things lol, sounds strange but they're really cute. The leather boots were 270 pesos($90 us) and the other pair were like 120 pesos($40 us), along with the end of season markdowns there was a buy one get the other 40% off, ANNNNDDDD(can you tell how excited I was about this haha) Argentina charges like 41% sales tax but if you get this tax rebate form from the store and mail it in when you return to the states you get more money back! So not including the sales tax rebate, I paid about $114 us for 2 pairs of shoes, one being leather boots! If that doesn't sound like a great deal to you, you might be foolish lol jk.
Now switching back to the food here. The food is delicious! I might be worried about gaining a million pounds here if I didn't have to walk everywhere(I'll explain that ordeal a little later). Back in the states I tried not to eat beef and red meat because it's not that healthy for you, etc...but here, 1. they only eat beef and 2. it's delicious so I don't really have any other options haha. Empanadas are great! I've heard that they are native to Argentina but I don't know if that's people just being overly proud of their nation or not haha. Empanadas have different fillings:beef, chicken, humita(a mixture of veggies but mostly corn), ham & cheese, or cheese & onion. The first night here I was soooo hungry, and here they eat meals really late so I had to wait till 9 o clock to eat, which would be 10 in Atl, and 11 in Houston. Dory fixed a salad, but she told me she knew it was customary for us in the states to eat salad before our meals, I ate it the first day out of courtesy but I told her I don't really eat salads before my meal so it was fine if she didn't fix it but I'm not sure if she understood me because she made a salad everyday that week, but she stopped making them now so that's good. She asked me what food I don't like so she wouldn't make them, I told her I despised whipped cream and I didn't like peas, I didn't know the word for peas so it took us awhile to figure it out lol but we got it. Our host families provide us with breakfast and dinner on the weekdays and only breakfast on the weekends so we've been finding some good/bad places to eat around the city. As of now I have fallen in love with Hamburgers w/ boiled eggs. It sounds strange but it's quite delicious. Also they have this company called Ser which makes healthy drinks and health bars, well they have these ceral bars(kind of like Chewy bars except with fruit) that are ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! They come in peach, apple, strawberry, chocolate and almond. Wine is very cheap here, one day at lunch I tried to order a glass and accidently ordered a half bottle hahah, but it was only 7 pesos.
This has been a very long post and there's still so much more to say but I will spare your poor eyes and post some other time:)
!Ciao!
4 votes 
