liz254's blog

On the Road AgainI still feel very far away from the end even though I know it’s right around the corner. I hope when I get there my feelings for Buenos Aires will be as positive as the final thoughts I’ve been reading from other people’s blogs, but I’m not sure if they will be. My feelings about Buenos Aires, Argentina, studying abroad in general, swing daily. It has been an experience of peaks and valleys, highs and lows, and it’s left me with a general feeling of uncertainty. I have a lot of people wrote about how much they have grown, and maybe I’m just too in the thick of it right now to notice, but I’m not sure if I’ve grown at all in any real, or noticeable way. I am honestly racking my brain right now to try and think of some concrete change I can write about… nothing is coming and it actually makes me sad. Now I’m wondering if I kept myself from changing somehow? Or if I did not come in with enough of an open mind? I’m worried about how I will look back on this experience, if in the end it’s just been an expensive and privileged waste of time.

I am grateful for are the friends I have made in the program, including one who will be my roommate in New York. I am excited to see how the connections I have made in Buenos Aires will change my experience of New York when I get back.

Now for what NYU can do to make NYU in Buenos Aires a better program; they can offer better classes! I have not met a single person in the program who does not have at least one class they absolutely hate, and many people have two or three. It is incredibly rare to hear someone raving about a class. It is even rare to hear someone honestly express that they will take much, if anything away from their classes here. I am perfectly satisfied with two of my classes, reasonably satisfied with one, and then there is my fourth class, the class that makes me miserable for an hour and a half every Monday and Wednesday. If you know someone who is studying abroad in Buenos Aires next semester, I urge you to direct them to someone who has done it already if only for a list of classes to avoid at all costs. It is hard to take, even a single class that feels like such an utter waste of time, when you are living in a city you may never have the chance to visit again.

Now that I have written the most negative post I could have created, I would like to say that I absolutely do not regret the experience, how could I? And writing “final thoughts” when you are still a month away from having them really means they are just present thoughts, and like I said they change everyday, and happen to be on a down swing right now. Understandably, I’ve been writing blogs posts all day long. Well, goodbye blog! You’ve caused me stress, pushed me to think, taught me to write really fast, and I’ll miss you!

Me and my Guia T, the Tourist's BFFI have written before, in a post or a comment, at some point in this blog about noticing how some people have an eye for urban exploration, but that I don’t. In his chapter On Habit, de Botton speaks to this exact phenomenon, but he calls it a traveling mind-set, and I still feel like I have never acquired it. I do not call myself a seasoned traveler, even after this study abroad experience. Traveling for me is still a self-conscious process. I find myself fighting the urge to admire things for their strangeness and difference in other countries because I am trying too hard to fit in rather than stand out. I don’t know why acting like a tourist, truly accepting and being ok with my foreignness, is so hard for me. I don’t think of myself as a self-conscious person, and I definitely would not say I am more self-conscious/less confident than the average 21-year old woman (we tend to be a nervous demographic) so I wonder why I hate the label tourist so much. I want to look and act like a local. Maybe it comes from growing up in a very touristy city: San Francisco. I grew up being able to spot tourist from a mile a way, and there were always so cute, lost, and usually in shorts and a fluffy new sweatshirt with San Francisco branded across the front (San Francisco is not warm in the summer, so leave your shorts at home!). I don’t hate them; in fact I love them! I love helping them out, pointing them in the right direction, but because I take pride in knowing the way, pride in my identity as a local, pride in defining myself as different from them. This chapter gave me hope to become a true traveler.

I found the chapter very inspiring, surprisingly. There seems to be something (I want to say magical so forgive me for being cheesy) magical about experiencing a space aesthetically, and removing all function from it. It is about seeing it as it functions, finding that beautiful, but somehow remaining completely separate from it because you don’t need it, or need to use it. I am not lying when I say I am inspired to use my last three weeks in Buenos Aires, being the biggest tourist I can be. I want to stop and admire the city, look like a foreigner, and maybe even get targeted by more twelve-year-old muggers and be ok with that. I have been missing out on the traveling mind-set; I’ve avoided it like the plague, and as a result my experience of Buenos Aires has been one of functionality. I have appreciated coming to understand the city as an active member of it, using it because I need to, but I have been missing so much of the traveler’s perspective. For the next three weeks I will find the courage to be what I am, the foolish foreigner.

Playing set in the park and thinking of blog anecdotes. Yes, I have a scarf on my head....This class really worked for me in ways I didn’t expect it to. Initially I felt very self-conscious about posting. I have never written anything so public before and it created a lot of writer’s block for me in the beginning. I am really proud of how my confidence evolved over the course of the semester, especially lately as I have had to boldly pump out blog posts the last few days, and there’s been no time to worry. This class also helped me experience Buenos Aires in ways I would not have without the class. I found myself seeing the world around me in of blog posts. This sounds like a way to disconnect, and observe the city passively, but for me, it actually forced me to think critically about the culture I was experiencing. I would have some funny run in with a taxi driver, or a hostile twelve year old, and I would find myself thinking: this will be a great anecdote for my blog! I think without the class, all the inconveniences of being foreign would have just frustrated me, but through this class, I was able to appreciate these moments as unavoidable aspects of travel, which in a way is what I asked for choosing to study abroad. I also got some exposure to and practice with travel writing, a style I had never explored before. But I do have a few, tiny, really insignificant complaints… I thought the class was a little too big. I read in other people’s posts that they appreciated connecting with students at other study abroad sites, and sharing common experiences. I was only partly able to do this successfully. I would have liked it better if it had been a small group and I felt like I was keeping up with everyone, or almost everyone’s blogs. Rather when it came time to post a comment I would just randomly pick a post to comment on, with or without having kept up with all of the rest of their blog posts. As a result, I felt like I was getting a disjointed view of other people’s experiences abroad, which made it hard for me to connect to the other students. The only blogs I truly followed were the blogs of the other students in Buenos Aires, and I only followed their blogs because I know them personally, and often times the things they are posting about are things that directly affected me too, which kind of feels like cheating. I also wished the dates on the syllabus had been shifted for the Buenos Aires kids. I ended up completely ignoring, to the point of almost forgetting the suggested dates to post by, got totally off schedule and I screwed myself over in the end (if you haven’t noticed I’ve posted seven times in the past week, which is not what I initially intended to do). Other than those small complaints, I loved the class, and found it amazingly complimentary to my study abroad experience. 

The desk I wish I hadThis is a hard post for me to write, because I am still trying to assess how much I took advantage of my study abroad opportunity, what I have learned, what I regret, what I really have to say about Buenos Aires. It was a very big adjustment for me. I guess one thing I would say is identify needs that are not being met and make sure they are met, if that’s not vague enough for you. For me it was my home stay… like I described in a recent post, my home stay mother did not really abide by the contract in a few ways. One thing I never made a stink about and regret now is I never had a desk in my room. It is in my contract that I am guaranteed my own room with a bed, closet, and desk. As a result of my lack of desk, I tried to study in my bed, and it put me to sleep, and I tried to study in cafes, but I was always uncomfortable and distracted. It took me half the semester to find suitable study spaces for me, and it made the first half of the semester a bigger adjustment than it needed to be.

Also, Buenos Aires is shockingly and purposefully different from South America. I have read this post on other people’s blogs and I have noticed that many people say do not go away too much, stay where you are and get to know your abroad site. I only half agree with this advice when it comes to Buenos Aires. If you stay in Buenos Aires all semester you will not have a true South American experience. The stark contrast between Buenos Aires and the rest of Argentina is shocking and worth experiencing. I recommend staying in South America when the semester is done if you can manage it, because Buenos Aires is truly atypical for South America, for the better and for the worse as a South American study abroad site.

Finally, I would say leave Recoleta and Palermo! See other parts of the city. This is probably the thing I regret most. It is daunting, I know. Most parts of Buenos Aires feel utterly inaccessible to foreigners, but attack them in accessible ways. And learn to read the Guia T as soon as you get it. It will absolutely revolutionize your experience of the city, and your ability to grasp it as a whole. There is a lot to find here, too much, if you have your eyes open; sometimes it is too much to take.

Empanadas: one of the only foods I can still eat in this countryFrom the very get go, it was comforting to find a restaurant with good food, open when I need it to be, with friendly people, and to go there a lot. Two cafes have stuck with me throughout the semester, so I am going to write about both of them (I also can’t think of enough to say about either of them to make four hundred words).

The first is Il Migliori, the restaurant across the street from the center, and basically a practicing cafeteria for us NYU in Buenos Aires kids. Mondays and Wednesdays give me just enough time between Grammar and Composition and Cultura Popular de Argentina to run across the street, shovel in three empanadas, always one of cebolla y queso, one of jamón y queso, and one wild card, chug a cafe chicito, throw down eight pesos and run out again. It is the only place I have found in Buenos Aires that can be fast if need be. It is so fast, the servers deliver coffee to shops nearby on rollerblades. It seats about 30 people at small wooden tables with small wooden chairs at paper place settings that read in English “It’s Time to Party!” And it’s cheap. Empanadas are $2.80 each (pesos mind you… which is about 75 cents) and a small coffee is $4, ideal for visiting habitually. The second is a café called Bricco in Recoleta, the neighborhood I live in. It is a hole in the wall with a couple of plastic tables outside with the word Quilmes plastered across them. I stumbled in with a friend one morning because it was around the corner, and we where ambling home at 8am on a Saturday morning, and we were lazy and still a little buzzed. I had had a medialuna before, they are hard to avoid if you wanted to, and I understood the concept, a sweet croissant, and I wasn’t very impressed by it. These were different. They make them on site and brought them out warm. Sugary, buttery, flaky croissants, so fresh they are still warm and doughy on the inside. We were awestruck. Now we sit outside in those tacky plastic chairs that support your weight and advertise for beer simultaneously at least three times a week. The server, Karina, asks if we want ‘the usual’. I have never had a ‘usual’ in New York or San Francisco, but it makes me feel like I’m home. Sometimes I feel guilty for having two places I go to several times a week; I wonder if I am exploring enough, if I am really taking advantage of this abroad experience. But the true abroad experience, I think, is finally becoming comfortable in a place that is uncomfortable. I get a little bit of that as a regular. 

My home stay mother, Isabel, is an interesting character. I have lived with her for three months now and I know surprisingly little about her. We are ships passing in the night. I am going to write this from a fair, observatory distance because at this point I’m embarrassed to ask her about herself. In fact, generally, I’d say I am slightly intimidated by her. I come home after class and she usually isn’t home. There is some pasta left in the microwave for me, or a pizza in the freezer and the table is set. My roommate and I, another girl from NYU, heat up the meal left for us, consume it, wash our dishes and go back to our rooms. I occasionally see my host-mother in the kitchen as I am on my way out but not always, and I occasionally see her when I come home, but not always. But she is a friendly woman. I appreciate the space she gives me; I know others in the program who have to say where they are going and when they will be back to their home stay families, whereas I never the next time I will see her.

I didn't have a picture of my home stay mama, so here's a frozen pizzaI was not in Buenos Aires for very long before I started making the joke that everyone in this city is a hustler in one way or another. My home stay mother is a perfect example of that. She does not house exchange students because she wants to experience another culture, or because she wants to share her culture with others. Rather she has a constant, year round circulation of students and travelers housed in the three spare rooms in her apartment. She does not seem to have, or at least I have no been able to deduce that she has any other form of income. In the three months the other girl from NYU and I have been living in her apartment we have had four other roommates in the other bedroom for various amounts of time. There was a girl from Boston College living here for a month before she found her own apartment, a girl from Holland doing a month long Spanish emersion and two travelers who have stayed for two weeks each. The last time someone new came she did not tell me before hand and on my way to my room from the bathroom I ran into a 45-year-old man in the hallway with no idea why he was there. Now that bedroom is open and I have been woken up in the morning twice this week to foreign Spanish voices in the hall outside my door as Isabel shows the room and apartment to potential renters. She’s not breaking the law, but she’s certainly working the exchange student system. It has made for an interesting home stay experience.

Me at the Salt FlatsI transferred to NYU; I missed out on orientation, welcome week, whatever other get to know you type activities held for freshman to ease the socializing process. When I saw how hard it was going to be to make friends in my classes, or in my dorm I checked out, stopped trying, found a community for myself somewhere else. Studying abroad in Buenos Aires through NYU has, by far, been the most time I have spent around such a concentrated group of NYU students ever... in my life. In a lot of ways it feels like high school again. I don't know how big the other study abroad sites are, but here in Buenos Aires there are about 90 of us, and at this point we all know each other by name and face, and it's likely we have hung out or conversed at some point with only a few exceptions. It's become a bit incestuous at this point. It's always eventful.

The social experiment culminated this weekend when we went on NYU sponsored trips. Half of the program went to Paraguay, the other half went to Salta, and I went to Salta, a northern province of Argentina. We bused around, went to another estancia, saw a lot more gaucho shows, an Incan mummy, the salt mines; it was a lot of moving around. Traveling in a group of 50 is always exhausting. Make them all 21, generally incredibly ambitious, usually trendy, and New Yorkers and imagine how exhausting it is. But we all made it back ok with a hangover and an alpaca sweater to show for it.

This trip has taught me that people never change. 90 people thrown in a room with a dire need to socialize seems to produce the same results whether they are fourteen or 40. People who look the same flock together. At NYU that usually means people who dress the same, or are from similar economic backgrounds. Surprisingly or not, disappointingly or not, this trip down south has been a lot about watching social situations unravel. Who's dating who now? Who has stopped hanging out with who? It's dramatic, there seems to be news everyday, and it's interesting to watch. It's eerie how much it feels like high school again. I went to a small high school and it was incestuous too.

Some weeks back the NYU in Buenos Aires program sponsored a trip to an estancia, a typical Argentine ranch a few hours outside of the city. We rode horses, rode bikes, took a tour of the castle, ate steak, and watched authentic Gaucho dances. On paper it sounds the most cultural (it certainly qualifies as a cultural activity) but it was actually one of the most touristy things I have done in Argentina. I can't recall another time I was in a space completely designed for tourists, except for the NYU academic center. The presentations were in English, the other visitors were also tourists, and the day was fun, but it was completely fabricated. The asado, Argentine barbeque, felt like the most authentic part if only because they offered us delicious and exotic things like blood sausage. Gaucho culture, in many ways, is fabricated for tourism. A lot of the classes I am taking here speak to the same topics and one that has come up a lot has been the existence, and then extinguishment of the Gauchos. At one point in history, gauchos roamed the campo, lived as nomads, and work on ranches like the one we visited, but they were systematically eliminated. In the late 1800’s they were considered a harsh stamp of Argentina’s barbarism and lawlessness. As a result, their culture was slowly illegalized. With the institution of public education, and residency laws, authentic gaucho culture finally disappeared. A few years later theDan at the Estancia gaucho reemerged, as a tourist attraction and a cultural symbol.

Other components of the daily life here feel much more like cultural experiences. Though I will probably skirt the line of what is and is not appropriate for the second time a more fascinating cultural experience was a trip to a telo. The existence of telos, especially on the scale they exist in this city, is a cultural phenomenon. We discovered a telo directly across the street from our academic center from the program director during orientation. A telo is a hotel that rents rooms by the hour. They exist to such a degree because, like many European cultures, young Argentines tend to live at home for considerably longer than young Americans. It is not considered shameful or embarrassing to frequent a telo, rather, it was described to me as expected. When I've probed the locals about them they are genuinely surprised that there isn't an American equivalent to the same degree. I respond with: “why would I go to a telo when I have my own apartment?” A location built for the soul purpose of sex has condoms on the table, mirrors on every surface, including the ceiling, a Jacuzzi, a small bathroom taped off with read tape that reads desinfectado, and a bed. You can have champagne and sex toys delivered to the room by way of a cabinet in the wall, maintaining complete anonymity. There is a TV, but it only plays porn. To the young people in this country their neighborhood telo is like a second home, to us Americans it is a truly surreal experience.

Parque Las HerasIs there a back region to a city, and is it possible to find it in four months?

Reading Staged Authenticity, by Dean MacCannell, I found myself thinking a lot about these people we keep running into at different clubs and parties we tend to show up to, who I alluded to in my last post. We’ve stumbled upon a certain community within the nightlife. I described specific people because they are the ones we connected to, but really at each of these events, there have been a lot of overlapping people, overlapping authentic Argentines. As a fringe participant of a legitimate community of Argentine young people, have I stumbled upon an authentic experience? Honestly, this question is hard for me to answer because my friends and I tend to show up at these places when we hear about them, I am beginning to suspect, because they are similar to what we are used to in New York. I understand the concept of a back region in a restaurant. I understand that taking a tour of the hostess factory, looking down on the floor from a balcony and behind a glass window, is a fabricated experience that is meant to be authentic, or a stage five back region in MacCannell’s terms. But cities are experienced by everyone differently. I don’t know if the identity of tourist immediately places someone in the superficial, inauthentic space of the front region, or if being a resident automatically gives privilege to the back region, when we are talking about experiences of a city. We are all walking down the same street in the end.

This weekend denying any grasp of the Spanish language came in handy. Two friends and I spent most of the day in Parque Las Heras, several green rolling hills off the Avenida Las Heras, and a popular spot for a gourd of mate and people watching. The sun set before we left, and two young boys, probably about twelve years old, squatted down next to us. One asked if we had money; I assumed they were just asking for monedas, a common occurrence, and feigned incomprehension. He asked where we were from, and again we all continued to pretend not to understand. Two more young boys walked over from the street and squatted down on the other side of us. Then the boy who had been making conversation before said in Spanish, “give us all your money, you’re being robbed.” Again, I said I didn’t understand. Then he said, calmly, “We are going to kill you, give us your money.” I asked my friends if we should go and they agreed so we got up to leave and the boys just ran off. I don’t know if there was a better way to handle this situation, but I was thankful that they didn’t think we were ignoring them, just oblivious to what was happening. If you’re too young to shave, you’re too young to mug me. 

The Argentina ReaderThe Argentina Reader by Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo has literally saved my life this semester. It is a collection of essays and primary texts about every important era in Argentine history with interesting analyses of each text written by the editors; it basically has everything you need to know about Argentina, from perspectives even Argentines don’t know about. I have been assigned to read many of the texts for various classes this semester, did not understand a word because I do not know what I was thinking taking all my classes in Spanish after only studying the language for a year, and went to The Argentina Reader, and the text in English. It was the only book I brought with me, the only book I needed, for three hours on a plane and 31 hours on buses through Patagonia this spring break. I give all the credit of my pleasantly surprising Historia midterm results to Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo. Anything mildly informational about Argentine history I have thrown in to any other post was knowledge I gained from this book.

Monday night three friends from the program and I were invited to dinner at an Argentine’s apartment. We met him a few weeks ago at a boliche (club) we go to when we can’t think of something more creative to do. We were standing outside and he and some friends stumble (literally) out of a cab and immediately start telling us they were just robbed by a transvestite prostitute. I didn’t believe a word, but later found out it was true. We talked to them for a while longer, a few of us exchanged numbers with little intention of actually seeing each other again, and then we left. We ran into this funny group again at a party we happened upon at the Palermo Golf Club, and they actually helped us get in for free and with relatively no wait. Finally we ran into them again at a random bar last Friday and we decided it was our fate to be friends. All of this relates back to The Argentina Reader because at this dinner, I notice one has a different accent from the other two. I ask him if he’s from Buenos Aires also and his friend, a bit drunk by now, jumps in and says, “no he is not from Buenos Aires, he is from the provincia. We are showing you the civilization and the barbarism of Argentina,” (this is also an example of the porteño ego). “Wait a second,” I say, “are you referencing Sarmiento (the first president of Argentina, and author of the book Civilización y Barbarie - Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga)?” They were stunned by my knowledge of Argentine history. Little did they know I had read excerpts of Civilización y Barbarie. Thanks, Argentina Reader!