Some Helpful Hints

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.
Don’t rely on your American cell phone. I have an iphone, and an AT&T representative told me it would get service down here. Long story short, it didn’t, and I was frantically trying to figure out how to contact my family for the first week. There is little to no Internet in the dorm rooms, so skype and AIM is spotty most of the time, and it costs a lot to call the states from a local cell phone. I would suggest buying some “llamada directa” international phone cards from a kiosko and calling home from a payphone or landline. It’s also cheap to have someone from the states skype your local cell phone. Skype is really inexpensive, and incoming calls are free on cell phones.
Don’t wear flip-flops before October. I am the kind of person who will wear sandals pretty much anytime unless it is snowing. When I got here it wasn’t too cold and my flip-flops were the only shoes near the top of my luggage, so I just wore those every day for a while. This is another habit that makes you stand out as a tourist, because in 40 degree weather people down here are wearing mink coats and gloves. One day I was wearing my flip-flops and waiting to cross the street, and this old woman came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder. She looked me in the eye, then looked down at my feet, then back up at my face and said “you must be from somewhere really far north to be crazy enough to wear those shoes today.” I dug out my sneakers when I got home.
Pack your favorite non-perishable foods, and don’t count on finding a refill down here. Buenos Aires is a very sophisticated city, but when it comes to food they don’t have a lot of what we are used to. I would suggest bringing the following:
Peanut Butter
Granola bard
Cereal
Mac and cheese
Pancake mix
Condiments (the ONLY condiments I can find here are ketchup, mustard, mayo and olive oil)
Popcorn
Any other comfort food or specific brand of generic item that is important to you.
Plan trips early. I would get a travel book on Argentina and Buenos Aires before coming here and looking into some of the places you want to go before you arrive. I got so busy when I first go here that I didn’t leave the city for the first 8 weeks because I just kind of forgot to plan trips. Looking back, I wish I had gotten the ball rolling a little sooner.
Go out of the way to meet non-NYU people early. At first having such a close-knit community was awesome because it was kind of a safety net in a place where I didn’t speak the native language as well. while I don’t regret spending so much time with the people in our program, I do wish I had spend an equal amount of time trying to meet non-Americans. About a month ago I met a group of guys that live in my building who are from Costa Rica and i am now really close with them. I wish I had made more of an effort sooner because I cant stop thinking of all the people I didn’t meet while I was so comfortable only hanging out with NYU friends.
Take safety seriously. Orientations programs always have a section on safety, and until arriving in BA I usually ignore them for the most part. Especially after living in New York, people get very confident living in a big city because most of NYC is very safe. I have lived there for two years and no one I know has ever had an incident involving their safety in the city. That said, I think it is very important to pay attention and follow the safety guidelines that the school gives you down here. Many parts of this country are very poor, and they are looking for stupid tourists to rip off. Within the first half of the semester there were about 5 or 6 instances in which a student in our program was either attacked, robbed, or had their residence/room broken into.
Learn what NOT to say in Spanish. Like any language if you are unfamiliar with it, it is very easy to mean one thing, and end up saying something really offensive. My favorite example of this is when a girl in our program was talking to her host mother about her experience at the grocery store. She had just returned and made herself a ham and cheese sandwich, but was unhappy with the way the ham tasted. She attempted to describe this sensation to her host mother, intending to say ‘this ham tastes like preservatives,” using the sentence “este jamon sabor como preservativos.” Unfortunately for her, “preservativos” is the word for condoms, not preservatives, so this statement sent her conservative host mother into an uproar. The confusion was sorted out, but needless to say in am now very careful with vocab I am not certain about.