Mi vida en BsAs

I guess the logical place to start my tale would be from the beginning, which for me, took a lot longer than expected. My itinerary was to fly from Buffalo to JFK then from there to BsAs, but unfortunately the shortest leg of the trip ended up being the longest. About 45 minutes into the flight from Buffalo, the captain of the plane announced that an indicator light showed one of the reverse thrusters on the plane being deployed and we were going to have to emergency land in Syracuse. He said that it was more procedure than true emergency, but it was still a little unnerving. I had effectively ended up where I had begun, which was very disheartening. Luckily there was another student aboard the plane in my program, which made taking the provided bus trip from Syracuse to JFK, arriving circa 4am, a little more tolerable. Delta put us up in the Romada next to JFK for the night but since checkout was at 11am we had to leave and stay at the airport from 1130am-10pm, which was not fun at all especially since we had not been given secured seating on the plane, just seat requests. So we sat around exchanged small talk for about 10hrs until finally the gate clerks showed up. They then announced to the crowd that the plane had been overbooked by about 20 people and Delta was offering $4,000 plus first class tickets to BsAs the following day if anyone volunteered to give up their seats. Since we didn't even have seats to give up, this wasn't an option and we had to patiently wait to see if were to be cleared to fly that night. Luckily for us Delta knew of our troubles and rewarded us by giving Caroline and I first class tickets! Yes, we did fly first class for 11 hours straight to BsAs! So, my journey from Trumansburg to BsAs was frustrating at times but as Niccolo argues, "The end justifies the means".

Now to the fun part, my family, my city and my daily routine. I am living with a very nice grandmother, who cooks for me every night a ridiculously scrumptious meal, and another American girl about 25 years old. They are both very nice, but the mother does not speak English at all so I must speak Spanish at all times in the house. After only 5 days here I think my speech has improved 10 fold. The apartment is located on Avenida Belgrano just north of the neighborhood of San Telmo and about 15 blocks from Puerto Madero, which is where my school is located. Here is a picture of my school, it's newly constructed and directly on the canal...
Right now I am taking my "intensive" spanish class in this building until Feb 20th. My class is 4 hours long every day starting at 2 pm, which makes site seeing kind of difficult at the moment.

In Argentina dinner is not eaten until about 9-10pm and is very formal, which means sitting down and talking for at least an hour about each person's day. For me, this means one-on-one convos with the host-mom, improving my spanish with every conversation. I have already tackled all the political topics with her, such as Che, Fidel, Hugo, Obama and I think I understood about 3/4 of what she told me. And since dinner doesn't get over until about 1030-11pm each night, going out is pushed back a few hours. It is commonplace for students/youth to go out until 5-6 am which is not so different than college(?) but as of yet I have not gone out for that long since it's during the week. Here's a photo of myself plus a few classmates taken outside a local pub in Palermo.
Well, I hope my first post has quenched the thirsts of most of you and I will try to update my blog every week, probably Saturday or Friday night, starting next week.