Una semana y se siente como un mes!

I am so excited right now! I just spoke with my family in Buenos Aires (they are my third or possibly fourth cousins) and we made plans to meet this afternoon!!! :)

So now It has now officially been a week since I’ve landed here and of course if feels as though I’ve been here for a month. Luckily though it is the weekend and I finally have time to catch up on my blogging. I really don’t want to forget any detail from my time here so I will have to get better at making some room in my weekly schedule.

Again, picking up where I left off-
Saturday night we ended up coming back at the peak of the night, for the Argentines at least, which was 4am because we were continuing orientation early the next morning and then meeting our host families. My host mother turned out to be an older woman, maybe in her late 50’s, early 60’s and she has a 26 year old son who lives at home who is away in New York for the week. (just fyi- it is very typical here for children even in their 20’s to live at home with their families until they get married). We got to the apartment and she made me lunch and we sat and chatted for some time. She’s a very nice and proper woman, religious catholic, goes to church almost everyday. So far its going alright with her. She doesn’t feed me the best food but thats one thing that I guess I knew was a risk with living at a homestay. We also eat so late here! Around 9:30 every night, and Argentine breakfast is typically only toast with butter and coffee.

The next day (monday) we had our placement tests for our Spanish Intensive month. I landed in one of the intermediate classes. I guess my Spanish isn’t that bad after all, even though its still so hard for me to speak. Oh by the way at the university there are probably 250 other international students mostly from the U.S. just with different study abroad programs. Class started on Tuesday and so far its been really good. Its 5 hours a day 10-3 but is very interactive so it goes by pretty quickly. In the afternoons after class me and my friends have been exploring the streets around where we live, doing some shopping and going to cafes. We’re probably going to start exploring other places next week but this city is just so big and there’s so much to see. On Wednesday after class I met up with Eliana because we realized our schools are a 5 minute walk from one another other. It was so great to see a familiar face in an unfamiliar city. We only had an hour because she had her tango lesson at 4, so we decided to also meet up the next day after class for that hour. Thursday night we had our next API program. We were going to Gaby’s house for a history of Tango lesson and then out to a Tango club! Again it was one of those things that I had no idea what to expect. The club was in the basement of what seemed like a community center in the middle of the city. It was a restaurant with tables and chairs all around the sides of the room and big dance floor in the middle. The floor was split up into 2. Half for experienced tango-ers and half for the beginners. Between each course of our again, absolutely delicious meal, we would get up and learn some dance moves and then actually get to dance. There were probably 70 people in the class of all ages. It was cool we got to dance with different people and have conversations with everyone whom we danced with. I danced with a few people from my program and then 2 argentine men maybe in their mid 20’s and one guy who was probably 50...kinda weird, but its all about new experiences right?

I have a great friday night to tell about as well which will be coming soon!