ctd231's blog

Wakeboarding on my last day in Argentina
Towards the end of my time in Buenos Aires, I started getting excited to come home to all the familiar places, language, food etc. Now that I am finally home however, there is so much from Argentina that I miss. Argentina is an amazing country, and I am so happy that I chose to study there above all other places. The most rewarding aspect of the experience for me was meeting people from different places. I became very good friends with a group of guys from Costa Rica who were studying in Buenos Aires, and learned so much from them about the Spanish language. They lived in my building, so they taught me how to cook food from Costa Rica every once in a while, and I also became close with many of their other friends. Knowing locals was so crucial to my study abroad experience because, once I met them and started doing non-touristy things with people other than NYU students for once; I really started to feel like I was living there. They took us to clubs where they knew everyone and therefore got us in free, drove us to cool places outside the city that are difficult to get to without a car, and on my last day, took me wakeboarding I Tigre, a small water town outside the city. It was very ironic because before I met these guys, I went on the school day trip to Tigre in which we spent the day on a tour boat. Towards the end of the day we saw a small group of wake boarders. About two months later I was in the same river, but this time in the wakeboard boat complaining about the amount of space the tour boats take up in the narrow river. I no longer felt like the stupid American tourist, but I felt like I was a part of Buenos Aires society, and it felt much more like I belonged there.

I think this course is a great course to take while you are abroad. I like that it is online because, with all the other stuff we have going on all over the world, we can usually find an internet connection so it isn’t too hard to complete assignments while traveling. On the other hand, I wish we had received a syllabus at the beginning of the semester with every blog topic and due date so we could have time to plan out each post. I feel like a lot of times we didn’t get the assignment until Thursday or Friday for a post due on Monday, which made me feel very rushed in decided what to write about. So many of our assignments were based on observation and analysis, that I wish I could have had the time to write about something I really wanted to write about, instead of scrambling and writing about the first thing I saw. It was also difficult to get the assignments done on this short notice when there was a reading involved. For one I am a very slow reader and need more than a few days to read a novel, and for another, there were some instances where I received the assignment after I left the city at the end of the week and left the book in my apartment. Other than the syllabus issues however, I think this course was very valuable for my abroad experience. I think I learned a lot by examining certain aspects of Argentina that I would not have noticed without writing a post about them.

Dogwalkers: photo courtesy of my dad Phil. He could not get over the ratio of dogs to dogwalkerWhen I was reading the De Botton piece “On Habit” I was intrigued by his notion of the “traveling mindset.” His idea that, as travelers, we “carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting,” and “irritate locals because we stand in traffic islands and narrow streets and admire what they take to be unremarkable small details” (242). After reading this, I took a step back and reflected on my experiences here as well as other traveling I have done in the past. I can recall many times in the past when I have behaved like this: stopping on every corner in London to take a picture of something, sitting in the car while my father drove 15 mph under the speed limit in the Bahamas so he could look at everything we passed, running around San Miguel, Mexico and pointing and staring at the Corona bottling plant and every street sign or poster I was proud to understand in Spanish. As I reflect on my time in Buenos Aires however, I have trouble recalling too many instances where I was stopped in my tracks to examine some detail. The first time I noticed my lack of attention to these foreign things was when my parents came to visit me in October. Immediately after they arrived I decided to take them around the corner to a café for a bite to eat and then walk up to Soho to do some shopping. Within seconds of leaving the building (which actually took two tries because the first time we tried to leave, my mom shut the door behind her, leaving my father locked inside behind the front door. Not until we got to the corner did my mom and I realize that my dad was missing, and we had to double back and unlock him), my parents each had a camera out and stopped about every 3-5 steps to take a picture of anything from an old building, the sidewalk, or a couple making out against a taxi.

Have you ever seen this color on thanksgiving before?Ever since I can remember eating I have always looked forward to Thanksgiving. For reasons I have never really been able to explain I have always been drawn to the massive amounts of seasonal foods, hoards of disgruntled family members, and the fact that on this one day it is perfectly acceptable to do absolutely nothing. I have always held this holiday in very high regards, but I never really realized why I find it such a crucial part of the holiday season until I wasn’t at home to experience it.
In an effort to make us feel more at home on the holiday in Buenos Aires, the NYU staff decided to organize a big Thanksgiving dinner party at the academic center. Even though they asked us for specific advice about recipes, organized caterers to cook for us and decorated the center with the traditional autumn hues (which was actually the most impressive part, considering it is summer right now), it still did not feel much like thanksgiving. Granted I was in a foreign country without family and it was about 50 degrees hotter than any thanksgiving I have ever been a part of, there was something else the day way missing.

What Not To Wear: This is Pato. He is Argentine and in the middle of nowhere so he can get away with this little ensemble, but as a foreigner to Argentina i wouldn't go prancing around the city in this getup.

Some helpful hints for the South American Traveler:

Do not be fooled into buying the converters that are supposedly designed for South America. These to not fit into 90% of the outlets. Your best bet is to buy the ones designated for Australia. These are the ones with either 2 slanted prongs, or two round prongs. I would get one of each because some plugs do not accommodate both.
Exchange ALL your cash at the airport. I only exchanged a little bit when I arrived, and it is a real pain to go to the “casa de cambia” (exchange house) because that means you have to remember your passport and then walk around with it all day (which scares me, because I would hate to loose that).
Pack light and appropriately. I packed in August, assuming the weather would be just a little chillier than it was at home. I packed one light jacket and a few sweatshirts thinking I would rarely need them. Little did I know when I arrived that it was full-fledged winter down here, and wearing my college sweatshirt outside pegged me as a tourist. I had to resort to my one blazer for about a month and a half, under which I wore a t-shirt every day because I forgot to pack winter tops.

Plaza San Martin, No one's in a rush

If there were one aspect of the Buenos Aires culture or lifestyle that struck me as most different from the states, it would be their organization of time. In New York one rarely has class before noon and nothing is even open until 10:30am. You have class mostly during the day; maybe take a light nap in the early afternoon (3-4pm or so), and sleep and night.
In Buenos Aires, things are a little different. While I appreciate that everyone is up and stores are open by 9:00am every day (I might be the only college student who is a morning person), I cannot get used to how late everything else happens. For starters, Argentines are not big breakfast eaters. In fact, they don’t seem to be very big lunch eaters either. If one does decide to grab a bite in the morning, the only thing available is some kind of sugary desert pastry. Lunch is not stressed as a core meal, but drinking an afternoon “mate” or tea (usually accompanied by another sugar infused pastry) is a must. “Afternoon” in Buenos Aires, however, does not pertain to those hours immediately following 12pm, but pertains more to the hours between 5pm and 9pm. I recently encountered someone who told me he was going to play soccer with his friends “this afternoon.” When I asked him for details, he told me they would be meeting at the futbol club at 11pm to start the game. A majority of the population also takes a “siesta” every day anywhere from 3pm to 8pm. During any point during these hours any store could be closed for an unspecified amount of time. Dinner is served no later than 9:30pm. Bars are empty until at least midnight or 1am, and no one hits the clubs before 3am. It is not uncommon for me to encounter exhausted and haggard looking youths staggering home from the club at 8am while I am on the way to class.

Getting Salty in Salta: these are the salt flats that we finally reached after a 10 hour bus ride through the mountains on an unpaved road. 
The Motorcycle Diaries is a memoir that catalogues the adventures of Ernesto “Che” Guevara and his friend Alberto on their journey across Latin America. In addition to being an adventurer and a doctor, Guevara is most widely known for his controversial role in many guerrilla expeditions throughout Latin America in the 1950’s and 1960’s. He spent much of the later part of his life instigating government rebellions, and was eventually killed on one such mission in Bolivia by Bolivian soldiers acting on orders from Washington in 1967.
Ernesto Guevara was given the nickname “Che” throughout his travels because of his Argentine roots (“Che” is a popular term used almost exclusively in Argentina to mean “cool” etc). The memoir follows Che and his good friend Ernesto as they journey from Buenos Aires, Argentina westward to Argentine Patagonia, into Chile, and north through Peru, Colombia and Venezuela on a beat up old motorcycle. They begin their travels with very little money in their pockets and therefore spend much of their time fixing the bike on the side of the road, going to bed hungry in a small tent, and occasionally meeting generous people who provide them a place to sleep and a few good meals.

ArgentinaThroughout my time in South America so far I have had many interesting encounters with different kinds of maps. Whether they were tourist maps, maps directed everywhere but north, or maps written in Spanish and Portuguese, deciphering each has been an adventure in itself. As the “Representations and Identities in Tourism Map Spaces” discusses, there is a significant difference in the indications of these maps and the reality of the world they depict. When we visited Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, every tourist map concentrated on tourist sites like the lighthouse, Penguin Island, and many tourist company locations. When I cross-examined it with a normal map of the city and surrounding area and began exploring, I found that there were a lot of interesting spectacles within the everyday life of the town that were not mentioned in the tourist map. On every street there were walls of intriguing graffiti depicting both modern artistic expressions and historical contexts. Ushuaia is also a big hub for the sailing world, and when I ventured across the channel to the Ushuaia Yacht basin, I was able to sample a bit of authentic local sailing culture while strolling along the uneven dock and passing dozens of yacht dwelling locals.
Places I have been/am going:
1. BUENOS AIRES- the first and foremost Argentine city I have experienced is of course, Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina and one of the largest cities in South America. The city is a melting pot of cultures and has a very rich and exciting local culture. While Buenos Aires is very urban and sophisticated, the people have a very casual and upbeat attitude, and every street is lined with big blooming trees.

Cheers from Patagonia
Last week was our fall (spring in Argentina) break, which I spent traveling through Patagonia with my parents and Crissy, where I was able to spend a lot of time enjoying the peace and quiet of the rural lifestyles in these small towns. During my time spent away from Buenos Aires I began to realize how much of the natural world we take for granted as we shuffle around in the crazed beat of city life.
On our third day in El Calafate we chose to go on a glacier trek in which you take a two hour bus ride to a marina, take a small boat across the frigid river to a small base cabin and hike twenty minutes through the woods. Upon exiting the woods, you arrive at a small station where the Perito Moreno Glacier meets the smooth pebble beach that resided below it for thousands of years. Here the experienced trekking guides give you a set of crampons, which are like metal snowshoes with spikes on the bottom to allow you to climb/walk on the ice.
Once you had your “crampons” securely in place, we began hiking the base of the glacier in groups of twenty with two guides. Getting used to them took a little practice (I’ll admit there were probably about ten to fifteen instances where I almost tripped over my own two feet and barely avoided falling headfirst into a bottomless pit of prehistoric ice), but by the end of the day I was practically running around the ice with enthusiasm.

EmpanadasThe beauty of eating in Buenos Aires is that restaurants are affordable enough (gotta love the exchange rate) that we, poor college students, can eat out on a semi-regular basis. This is a huge improvement from the ramen and $2.00 pizza slice diet I have become accustomed to in NYC. On the other hand, deciphering the menu may take longer than the meal itself. Even when you manage to decode the “carta,” often times what arrives on the plate in front of you is a far cry from its equivalent in the states. I have been here for a month and a half now, and have finally managed to memorize the names of most cuts of meat (more out of fear of ordering cow intestines that actually wanting to increase my Spanish vocabulary). I have also come to the saddening realization that NO salads in this country are embellished with any dressing besides oil and vinegar.
My basic diet here in Argentina consists of steak (or some other kind of red meat) when I go out for dinner, empenadas or a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch from the café across the street from the academic center, and coffee from a place down the street in between my classes. The coffee servings here are nothing compared to Starbucks (a large size here slightly resembles the espresso size in New York), but the taste and strength of these petite servings puts many American brand name beans to shame.