So.  Whoa.  First few days in Argentina.  

First off: You all BETTER APPRECIATE how hard it is for me to write this in English.  It's not that I can't handle writing or speaking English.  It's that my world is now almost ALL Castellano (what the Argentines call their languages, spanish, whatever) and the spanish words come to my mind SO much quicker now.  It's hard to NOT write in Spanish.  Yeah.  That's what the spanish speaking world will do to you.  It's awesome.

So, I have pictures.  A good chunk.  Not as many as I wish I had taken, but then again I have 5 months here - I'll get a few more :P  Time to revisit some places I passed by and get good pics.  

Guess I've gotta recap the last couple days!  So, I woke up in Buenos Aires for the first time.  Talk about a weird realization.  Wake up, 6 hours of sleep later...feeling decent.  Look at surroundings...look out window...think for a moment.  BAM.  It hits you; you're over 5000 miles away from any familiar place.  Whoa.  

So I basically missed breakfast, and we all walked to the home base of our program, the FLACSO building (Facultad Latinoamericana de las ciencias sociales, I think, it's a school).  From 8:45-4:30 we had presentations and talks about how to get around the city, housing stuff (since we were headed for our host families that night), medical information...more about how to get around, since there's a lot to know and this city is MASSIVE.  It was extremely tiring to hear this much heavily accented, rapid Spanish.  it just takes a lot out of you, and I only understood maybe...60%.  When I was paying full attention.  Not much to say about this part..just full of STUFF.

So, that night I met some of my family and moved in.  I live in San Telmo, pretty much the oldest barrio in the city.  It's BEAUTIFUL and amazing and the apartment I'm in fits well.  My room is actually pretty big, I was very surprised.  I have a great closet and plenty of room for all of my stuff.  And there is WIFI, YES!  For a while I didn't have an adapter for my laptop, and when I ran out of battery in all of my electronics I couldn't do a thing...until today, finally.  A little more on that later.  

The next day was pretty much the same - waking up in a new place, headed to FLACSO.  This time I took the written portion of our spanish exam, having already taken the verbal part the day before.  It went pretty well.  It included all of the past subjunctive tense activity anybody could ever want.  A LOT came back to me, I was very very happy.  I found out today that I got into Post Advanced Spanish 1.  There are 4 levels you can be placed in.  The first two are "Advanced Spanish 1 and 2", and then Post Advanced Spanish 1 and 2.  The highest one, Post Advanced 2, isn't exactly a good choice for me.  You are limited to only one Spanish class in that case, and I think I might take two.  In any case, I'm very happy with how well that went.

After that we had a bunch of presentations like the day before.  This time they were based around the themes of "health and sanitation" and "the argentine education system."  It was all interesting, but after several hours of rapid spanish, I was super tired again.  When I got home, I just fell into bed and passed out for about 2 hours until 10.  Then when I woke, the family had two other families over for cena.  I joined and it was WONDERFUL.  Spanish everywhere, fun conversation, many people interested in me and in my home.  We were eating pasta - some with this special tomato sauce and this other cream sauce...some with pesto sauce and parmesan.  All I know is that it was AMAZING.  We talked for hours about everything from the appearance of Argentinian people to Eisenhower, the american president.  We talked a lot about American history, actually.  Those are some very educated and smart people.  They knew more than me in some cases, and it was a bit embarassing :P

After dinner I couldn't sleep until super late, unfortunately.  So in total I didn't sleep a lot.  Then I woke up today and went to mass at the cathedral in the center of the city.  It was INCREDIBLY IMPRESSIVE, and weird for me since I've never been to mass.  It was...scary.  I went alone.  Shouldn't have taken my bible, nobody takes a bible to mass. The inside of that Cathedral is amazing, I shall post pictures in the future.  It is unbelievably overwhelmingly beautiful.

After that, I eventually found my way to my group's tour.  We went through Palermo Viejo, starting at la plaza italia.  It was amazing, and I learned a HUGE amount about the history of the city.  Our tour guide was really interesting; he poke perfectly understandable castellano, NEARLY perfect English, and had no European blood whatesoever.  He was born in B.A., definitely, but he was totally middle-eastern.  Interesante.  In any case, he was really awesome, and he told us a ton.  Look on Facebook for all of my pictures.  Here are a few though.

Monumento a San Martin, or whatever it's called.

A random street that I loved.  Beautiful.

Add caption

That took a good 2 solid hours of walking, and at the end my legs and feet were DEAD.  So then we returned to la Plaza Serrano, where we found this random café.  It was a bit expensive, but also pretty nice and "hip."  And I loved the name of it.  "Como te extraño, Clara" and in small words below "Más de noche..."  I just thought it was kind of cool and poetic.  I ordered a soda (gaseosa, here) and a "Volcán de chocolate, con helado."  That would be a chocolate volcano with ice cream.  It wasn't actually that impressive, being pretty small, but the flavor was WONDERFUL.  I loved it, it was perfect to get my blood sugar up.  We sat there for a very long time, resting, but eventually we had to head out.  I went with a couple of people towards los Subtes (Subterraneos, Subways).  I had it all planned out, exactly how I'd get home.  I went with someone that I had just learned lives in the same barrio as me.  I soon felt really bad about it because when we got off, I took us the wrong direction down a really long street.  One direction would have taken us really close by our homes, but instead I took us like 11 blocks the wrong way.  But it was because the feria was underway, and there was a ton of fascinating stuff in the street.  There are countless street vendors with cool trinkets, mate mugs, etc etc.  I actually bought an electrical adapter, so I could FINALLY use my laptop here.  WORTH IT.  We even came across some one couple performing Tango in the street, and I took some video of it (Facebook).  Anyway, eventually we had to get home by taxi.

Quite the day.  Amazing day.  I topped it off by being up till 2:30 or something, the night before needing to get up at like 6:30.  Smart kid.  Next post will be about my family, food, and my monday.