So, I’ve been in Buenos Aires for four days and haven’t written anything about the city yet. This is mostly because I’ve been too busy/exhausted to do so. This city is absolutely amazing. I don’t know where to start besides that it feels like I’m in Europe, but looks like I’m in the 1920s. The architecture of the buildings surrounding my hotel and in most of the Centro is old and seems artisan in some ways. My hotel is a fine example, the ground floor is only the front desk and a stairwell which spirals up around an elevator. The staircase is marble and beautiful. The rooms are small and the furniture is as antique as the buildings - but worn and used to the point where I’m sure it’s not part of a gimmick but actually has been here longer than I’ve been alive.
The café culture is amazing here too. In a country where the middle class seems to have been decimated in an economic crisis, the city’s center and upscale districts still feel otherworldly in their food service. The dress and actions of waiters here is reminiscent of that which I’ve only seen in black and white movies.
Oh yeah, one small problem: I don’t speak Spanish! Even the “survival Spanish” class offered with my program is taught completely in Spanish, and the instructor only speaks Spanish and Portuguese. (The music and culture course is taught by Pablo and in English). Susanna and I are the only ones in the program who have never taken Spanish before. We’re treading water when it comes to the class but out on the streets we’re having a blast. Though I am slowly learning the language - very slowly - the majority of interaction I have with the portenos is me recognizing the prices they quote and doling out cash. There’s plenty of non-verbal communication too, and it seems they’re used to American idiots like myself expecting them to deal with me without speaking their language. I sometimes feel really stupid, and apologetic, but most of the time it’s exciting at the least.
One of the native Spanish speakers in the program had a pen pal in Buenos Aires growing up and she looked him up about six months ago. Esteban has been showing us around the city like a mother hen followed by 12 little chicks. This guy is awesome. I got to sit across from him at dinner and had a conversation that was all Spanish on his end and all English on mine, and it worked out just fine, we both ended up understanding each other (once we slowed our speech patterns down a bit). The places he’s taken us to were in the Recoleta, (our hotel is in the Centro) and the subway was closed last night (on strike). The distances I’ve been walking around the city remind me of the “Walking distances” cited in John Green’s Gatorade and Gasoline essay.
The strikes have something to do with the government trying to tax soy products coming out of the hinterlands. Apparently la presidente is trying to redistribute wealth amongst the country by means of an export tax on soy products and there’s a huge permanent demonstration on the plaza de Congresso between a pro and con camp (they had a futbol match a while a go and it drew quite a crowd. Our walk downtown last night ran parallel to a huge march in demonstration from the plaza de Mayo to the Congresso.
We’re studying at UADE, el Universidad Argentina de la Empressa, a private university smack dab in the middle of town. It’s on Avenida Neuve de Julio, about nine blocks from the hotel. The place is pretty nifty, it’s a vertical campus. They have 5 or six buildings all that go deep into the ground (3 floors or so) and about 9 floors up. It’s a bit of a contrast to Davis where everything is so spread out.
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