Lost in Translation

(AN: I wrote this several days ago but haven't had the chance to publish it until now...limited internet access)
31-01-09 (note: day comes first here)
19:17 (7:17 PM)
The balcony of my apartment

Wow, the last two days have been chock full with new experiences and interesting situations. After a ten hour red-eye flight (we landed 11:20 am Buenos Aires time, 9:20 am East Coast time) the fifteen of us were met by Coqui from ISA (she’s in charge of excursions) outside customs. I expected to be craning my neck at skyscrapers the moment I walked out the airport gates but it turns out we were surrounded by countryside since we were actually about 25 miles outside the city. We boarded a very comfortable bus (if only those seats had been on the plane) to reach the actual city of Buenos Aires and were dropped off outside the University of Belgrano (UB), where I will be taking classes for the next two months, There I met my host mother, Adriana, and we grabbed a taxi back to what I shall refer to as the “casa.”
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Virtual Tour of the “Casa”
I live in an apartment on the 5th floor, just a couple blocks off the main road, Avenida Cabildo. Of course, the apartment has a lot less square footage than I’m used to, but it’s very cozy. I live at the back of the apartment and I have my own room, bathroom, and even my own entrance! The bathroom is so compact that the shower head is on the wall and the whole bathroom converts into a shower stall (actually, it’s about that size anyway). Once I walk through the kitchen, there is the dining table/living room area and the hallway to the other bedrooms. Adriana is an artist and she has huge canvases of finished and unfinished pieces leaning against the walls, which is pretty cool. I also love the balcony, where I’m writing this now. One thing that I’ve noticed about Buenos Aires is that most of the apartment buildings have lots of balconies and the porteños (the people who live in the city of Buenos Aires) use them to create mini forests - complete with small potted trees - to add a splash of greenery to the sprawling megalopolis.

So, after an hour of unpacking (well, snoozing on my bed), I had to venture to the ISA office for an orientation meeting. I was lucky to have Adriana go with me because it was extremely disorienting and I definitely would have gotten lost (note: this is some not-so-subtle foreshadowing). We took the Subte (the underground, like the Subway in NYC) for two stops before arriving at the ISA office, which is in this cute old building (parquet floors and molded ceilings included) on Avenida Cabildo. I was so exhausted at this point from the red eye flight/being overwhelmed with so many new things at once that it was really hard to sit through the two hour lecture - not to mention that the safety portion made me feel like every person would be out to steal my purse (now I know I don’t need to be so paranoid, it’s really quite safe- yes, things occur, but where do they not?).

Adriana again came to pick me up (so wonderful of her), so we walked the half hour back to the casa with another ISA student. On the way, I stopped at a bank but the pins for my cards wouldn’t work so I couldn’t get any pesos out (the card gets eaten by the machine if you try three times and are wrong and I didn’t want to have that cultural experience).

Dinner Menu
*shredded carrot salad with boiled egg and a mayo-like dressing
* cold potatoes in a sauce that was sort of thin and tomatoe-y,
* cheeseburger- although the cut of meat was like no hamburger that I’ve ever eaten - a very different texture and taste than I’m used to (of course, the Argentineans do pride themselves o their carne, or beef, as being the best in the world)
* side dish that was like creamed corn and a small hard biscuit.
* for dessert, I tried dulce de leche with a banana (my host brother Sebastian compared dulce de leche to peanut butter but he must be referring to the way Argentineans spread it on a lot of pastries because its taste was more like an ultra sweet caramel dip).

Hmm maybe I need to work on my food descriptions. Most of it was pretty good, I don’t know how appetizing it sounds here.

Today…wow. So I hadn’t unpacked my alarm clock but Adriana said she’d wake me up early since I had to meet at the UB at 8:45 for a group excursion outside the city to the Rio de la Plata. I think she got me up at 8:20 and for some reason I was thinking we were meeting at 9:45 so I was just taking my sweet time until Adriana announced it was already 8:45 – and it takes a t least ½ hour to walk to the school! Most Argentineans follow the “fashionably late” policy and pay little attention to start times, so I guess Adriana didn’t realize that I needed to be there on time. So I dashed out after throwing various items into my bag (for those who are curious, my thirty second breakfast consisted of cereal with walk milk and two hard pastry cookies with jam) and Adriana led me to the Subte.

Here’s where the adventure begins: forgot the Subte card at the casa, so I had to buy a pass with the four pesos that I had left over from the 10 pesos I borrowed yesterday from Adriana; took the Subte the wrong direction, but since the next stop was the end of the line, I had to wait a while for it to head back the other way. Once I got off at the right stop, I walked about 8 blocks to the UB building, but there wasn’t a soul there when I arrived (it was probably 9:20 at this point so I was very late). So after walking around the block to see if I was in the wrong spot and heading to the ISA office (it’s closed on weekends), I wandered aimlessly while trying to figure out what to do.

I had less than US$1 worth of pesos in a city I’d never been in and didn’t know where my group had gone; however, I was very lucky that Adriana had lent me an old cell phone, even though it didn’t have any credit on it. In the end, I headed to the bank again and successfully withdrew pesos this time (fyi, the exchange rate is about $3.5 pesos per US$1. After asking around at a corner store (very prevalent) and pharmacy (also prevalent), I was directed to a little telefoníca, where you can use calling booths and purchase calling cards. It took a little while to successfully add my credit to the phone, but I was able to call the ISA director to find out the group had left about 10 minutes before I had arrived.

So, I headed back to the casa, only to have the adventure continue. I still don’t understand what happened - I got in my building and elevator fine (all private buildings like apartment complexes require a key to get in the lobby area) but when I got off the elevator, I couldn’t find the light switch and accidently pressed the door buzzer (no one came anyway). I felt around for the keyhole and tried to unlock the door but even after I turned it two times like Adriana showed me, the door wouldn’t budge. This was followed by half an hour of stumbling up and down the dark stairs since I couldn’t locate light switch (too afraid to press more buttons), getting stuck in two different elevators (for some reason it would no longer open for me on the 5th floor), trying the key process a couple more times, having a thirty second panic attack thinking I lost my keys (they only fell off the key chain- we were told during orientation that if we lost them we would have to pay for every apartment in the building to replace the keys), calling the house phone (no one answered), and finally giving up.

In retrospect, Adriana was sleeping, and I was supposed to hold the key in for a quarter-turn more to open the door. Still can’t explain the elevator thing - Adriana doesn’t speak English so it was a little challenging to fully explain what happened. She said I just needed to use more force (trust me, I did) but I am still pretty sure it locked me out for some reason because I had no problem opening the doors for the other floors. So, in the end, I decided to explore el barrio Belgrano ( the neighborhood in Buenos Aires where I live) on foot since I had no where else to go.

And now it’s time for…

TIP OF THE DAY!
If you even have to use the bathroom so bad to the point that you can’t think and you are wandering around the street for an hour in search of one, you don’t need to spend that hour philosophizing about what porteños do when they need to use the restroom- just head to Avenida Cabildo and find your nearest friendly Burger King for a clean, accessible baño! And, if you are exhausted and stressed, the stall is a great place for a mini siesta without having to worry about watching your belongings. Plus, they can have great second-story window/walls that are great for people-watching and recuperating.

So, for the next five hours, I wandered the streets to familiarize myself to the Belgrano area, and I feel a lot more oriented now, which is a great stress-reducer. I did a lot of window shopping along Cabildo looking at the stores, going in the galerias (sort of like mini malls that extend far into the building complexes), and exploring the supermarkets on the side streets of Cabildo. They don’t have a lot of premade foods like in the US but for almuerzo (lunch), I grabbed a yogurt of unknown flavor (peach, maybe?) and a package of mini muffins. The supermarkets here are pretty compact (and without bathrooms), and many have fresh meat butchers. Often there are separate stores for fresh veggies and fruits. One interesting thing I saw was that things like ketchup and mayo come in large packets, not jars.

I came back to the casa around 15:15 (3:15, they use the 24 hour clock here) after the ISA director called to tell me that Adriana was home (I had left her cell number back in the casa). I had an empanada (flaky pastry filled with meat or cheese, or in my case, carne y cebolla –onion) that Adriana had made for a snack and took a much needed siesta. Well, it’s probably about 9 so Adriana is making an early dinner (by the way, it’s still dusk out, the sun hasn’t set). Tomorrow is a city tour and trust me, I will be there early this time (I have my alarm clock fixed with the right time and everything)

Chau,
Nicole