Bridging Continents

Today marks the end of my twelfth week in Argentina and I can’t believe how quickly it has gone by or how much longer my study abroad program is than most others. I still have seven more weeks here and am FINALLY beginnign to enjoy it. I was so bitter for the first three months I was here. I hated Buenos Aires, and unfortunately the rest of Argentina was guilty by association. To be frank, Buenos Aires is not my most favorite city in the world and I tried really hard to like it. Be it the circumstances I found myself in or the crappy winter weather, I was so dissapointed in Buenos Aires. For me, it wasn’t the raging, excitng metropolsis that I thought it would be. It didn’t seem to have anything unique or special about it, partly because it is a slice of an attempted Europe in South America, and I found that very unfortunate. Apparrently my expectations were too high or just completely off because never in my life had I been so dissapointed. I thought that something was wrong with me; everybody else was loving Buenos Aires. Everyday I would see Facebook statuses along the tune of “Estoy enemarado en Buenos Aires” and “Queiro ser portena” (a female resident of Buenos Aires). To avoid emiting such a negative sentiment from my Facebok profile, I consciously refrainded from posting my actual status, which would have been “Kyle things Buenos Aires is lame and regrets choosing to study abroad here.” Even as I write this, I am aking myself, “was it really that bad, Kyle?” I think something really was wrong with me. I could not find anything that I liked about Buenos Aires and I was horribly pessamistic. I hated the people; I found them cold and rude. I resented the lack of culture; I felt like I was living in a particularly bad year in the 70’s. I hated my classes; I was sure Pitzer would have been a better destination to study abroad. I detested the food; it was so boring and bland. Most of  all, I resented the fact that I had choose to spend the entire semester here, a city that didn’t have anything remarkably ‘different’ to offer.  I was upset and conflicted. I should have just gone to the real Europe. Or to any other city on this continent. To be fair, there were some positive aspects to being in Buenos Aires this semester: I had some awesome friends here, South America has some spectacular destinations to travel around, I had the opporunity to improve my Spanish and thats all I could come up with. Unfortunately, I was able to come up with a lot more reasons why I should NOT have come to Buenos Aires—thanks in part to the new-found abundant free time I found myself with. Instead of relishing in the fact that I was in, what most people would call, ‘The Paris of the South,’ I was relishing in the fact that I was stuck here for five more months and trying to count down the days, which proved too overwhelming. Of all the cities in the world I have visted, Buenos Aires found itself near the bottom, just above Tel Aviv (however, Tel Aviv has nice beaches and better food…). After the initial dissapointment set in, I entered a phase in which I tried to find ways to spend as little time in Buenso Aires as possible. After some brief research, I realized there was nothing of legitimate interest within at least a 13 hour bus ride from Buenos Aires, and it wasn’t exactly cheap to travel around. This included all of the mountains, jungles, glaciers, and other places that I had envisioned Argentna to be full of. I knew there was no way I would be able to spend every weekend outside of Buenos Aires so once again, another wave of dissapontment set in. This semester was not going to be what I had expected it to be. [Please excuse my awkard use of tenses. I wrote this today even though it is about the first few weeks...Sorry!] However, I can assure you that things did improve…if I ever get to writing about it.

Despite the fact this this is my first blog entry, it is by no means the first time I have written down my thoughts since I have been abroad. In fact, this has been the first time in my life when I have kept a semi-regular journal. To my surprise, it has really helped me make sense of what is occurring around me and process the events of each day into manageable and coherent thoughts. So many times when I am abroad, the emotions, excitement, and sheer thrill of being somewhere new seem to wax and wane so many times that I lose track of where I have been and where I am going; I seem to get lost on the emotional roller coaster that is life abroad and that is not a good place to find oneself. To this end, writing my about my thoughts, feelings, anticipations, and concerns makes me not only aware of them in an objective sense, but I can interpret after-the-fact how these thoughts and emotions originated and how they effected me. 

So, to life abroad. To say the least, it has been the most thrilling and difficult five months of my life. Today marks the two month anniversary of my arrival in Argentina and reflecting back on just the past two months seems overwhelming, let alone the past five. After traveling to Israel, Egypt, Dubai, Burma, Macau and Hong Kong I was severely exhausted. I sat on the beach for weeks to recover not only my energy but my health. I remember at one point absolutely dreading coming to Buenos Aires. I know I didn’t want to be in a huge city and I was dreading the inevitable process of being stuck with a lot of American students for the first few weeks that I, sadly, was probably not going to get along with very well (and I was right). I had to force myself to change my attitude because there was no way I was going to survive an entire semester thinking like that. By the time I arrived in Buenos Aires I had a much more positive attitude and was much more open-minded about this experience. However, the group flight did not set a good precedent because the other students on it were the ones that I had expected (sorry to generalize!).  It was pretty apparent right away that many, but not all, of the other students had very different objectives for their study abroad experience than I did. I did not come with the objective to completely slack off the entire semester and party every night. In fact, I was looking forward to learning things about South America’s history, politics, economy, and culture because I honestly  knew very little about these things. 

My first impressions of Buenos Aires were not that great. The day we arrived it was really rainy, cold and dark and the city was so hideous. To add to that, the drive from the airport to my host family took a huge detour because there was an accident on the highway so the taxi driver took an alternate route through some very rough neighborhoods. I had heard that Buenos Aires was this cosmopolitan megapolis yet I wasn’t seeing any evidence of this. It appeared very run down and grimy. I didn’t think much of it because I was sure that this was a working class neighborhood like every city has but the center of the city would be very different and have that “cosmopolitan” feel. The the taxi stopped and the driver got out. I was home. It was not what I expected at all. All of my preconceived notions disappeared and I immediately had to re-envision my idea of Buenos Aires. Once I got into my host families’ apartment my host mother coldly greeted me and showed me where my room was. It was tiny. Miniscule. Windowless. There was not enough floor space to fit my one suitcase. Already I was feeling claustrophobic and wanting to leave. Not a great start to my five months in Argentina. After I hurdled my suitcase onto my also miniscule bad my host mother, Maria Celina, started blabbing and I wasn’t really sure what she was saying. I caught bits of “nutrionrionista…divorcada…hambre…feo” among other things. I guess that was my orientation to her home, too bad I didn’t understand any of it. I had somehow forgot that they spoke another language here and was not mentally prepared to listen to it. There was too much going on all at once to try and make sense of it all. I just wanted to feel comfortable and at home for once, yet I was pretty sure this was not going to happen in this house. Maria Celina sat me down in the kitchen and pulled out four huge hamburger patties from the oven and plopped them on my plate with a knife and fork. She stood over me and barked “comas!” Yes ma’am. Then she walked over to the window immediately next to the door to my room and lit a cigarette and took a long, stress-relieving draw from a fresh Marlboro. I thought about apologizing for vexing her, but then I realized I wasn’t sure how to communicate that to her so instead I inhaled the four hamburgers that awaited my consumption. 

Thus far, the four hours I had spent in Argentina (1 hour waiting for luggage, 1 hour waiting for a taxi, 1 hour driving to my host families’ apartment, and 1 hour listening to my “orientation” and eating lunch) were not very exciting, especially not as exciting as I had imagined arriving in my study abroad destination would be. To be honest, I was already disappointed. The apartment I was in resembled my grandparents winter cottage—about 30 years outdated and musty smelling. I didn’t feel like I was in another country. Instead, I felt like I was in some sort of sick twilight zone episode in which I was sent to live in the 70’s with cold-hearted people in a cold-hearted city. The rest of the day I was free to do whatever I pleased, which at that moment was spend as little time in that apartment. Without unpacking, I grabbed an umbrella, told Maria Celina that I was going for a walk and went outside to explore this city that I was to call home for the next five months. I had no idea where I was. No map. No phone. And no idea what I was doing. The first day seemed so long and I found myself already anticipating going back to the United States, a desire that upset me because I was so excited to come to Buenos Aires, but after spending only a few hours I had had enough. I told myself that I was exhausted from the flight, stressed from adjusting to living in a new place, and these were probably all typical feelings for one’s first day studying abroad. However, the next two weeks were just as exhausting, stressful and awkward and did not set a good precedent for the remainder of the semester. 

The orientation program began the next day and was a complete blur. Maria Celina took me on the colectivo (bus) to the orientation site, a beautiful European building in a really scenic neighborhood. This is what I imagined Buenos Aires to look like. My spirits lifted and as I began to meet all of the other students that were arriving with their host mothers  I felt like it was the first day of Kindergarden. I found the other CMC students in my program and it was such a relief to see familiar faces. The rest of the day was a bunch of “Welcome to Argentina…we do this this way and not this way….you will make a fool of yourself if you wear sandals…last year three Scrippsies were hit by buses because they weren’t paying attention while crossing the street…” It was very jam-packed and too much to take in—so I probably listened to a quarter of it. Also, it was conducted entirely in Spanish, which means of the quarter of the things I listened to, only one quarter of that made sense. At the end of it all I recalled only one fact: that three Scrippsies had been hit by buses last year. I called it a productive day.