II. Orientation in PILAR
It was a nasty surprise getting off the plane at Buenos Aires, considering we had come from Miami weather -90º hot and heavy. It was a balmy 40 something degree day, overcast and drizzling, and just plain shitty... But i cant say it wasnt fun trooping through the airport with everyone watching us ;) The bus that we took to Pilar (where we would be staying for the next orientation) was a nice change because your seats would actually LEAN ALL THE WAY BACK! Unlike on the plane where it teases you by leaning about an inch backwards into possibly a more uncomfortable position. The ride was ugly. We got to Pilar and there were a bunch of exchange students from different countries in Europe all over the place, and as 60 of us or so walked down the brick "aisle" outside, they all stood by the wall and greeted us, it was awesome.
What It Was Like: So this place turns out to be possibly the coolest thing i´ve ever seen... it was like a giant youth hostile with clusters of beds- - two wool blankets!!! - - in large rooms and giant shared bathrooms (toilets where you cant flush the toilet paper.... thats the trend here in ARG) and of course NO HEATING AT ALL. But the place was so awesome... it had such an interesting atmosphere and it was really pretty because it was all made of stone and brick and had these becautiful twisting tree skeletons (its winter... and some of them had brilliant purple flowers on them. Yes this place is seasonally confused). There are two rooms with a kitchen inbetween them where we ate breakfast lunch and dinner all together.
FOOD: Our first meal was dinner the day we got there.. it was some type of breaded beef (ergh not my favorite but its very popular here) and mashed potatos and this HI -C type fruity orange drink that wasnt so bad. Now that i think about it, its a typical meal except a typical meal prepared in a youth hostil so it kind of sucks. The orange drink that I have every day in my house is a mixture (MEZCLA!) of concentrated orange solution and GASIFICADA (gasified!?¿ haha....) water... so its like orange soda. Its delicious! At breakfast we always had coffee and crusty hard bread with butter and jam and thats it. This is also typical, i only eat coffee and bread for breakfast everyday, but the bread in my house is better ;) One day we had this delicious chicken ooohhh maaaann... they basically put a billion entire plucked chicken corpses (ew yeah) on this ginormous grill outside that was built into the ground and let them roast, oh it was so good.
The Foreigners!: Alright, I could try to name all the countries that were there at Pilar with students going on foreign exchange (to be INTERCAMBIOS in Argentina) but I lost my list of contacts and stuff so Im waiting for my friend Liz to photocopy it for me, she's also with AFS here in my city Paraná but we´re the only ones. But they were all over the place in (mostly) Europe and Asia. By the end of our stay Liz and I made friends with some guys from Germany and Austria... can I tell you that they´re beautiful? They´re beautiful. And I also learned some valuable german words and phrases like schlampe (bitch) dane muta est hesslisch (your mom is ugly) du bist ein baum (you are a tree) du bist ein goseph fogel (you are a very large bird) and a few others that i can´t remember. But it was really exciting getting to meet all of these foriegn people because we had so many things to share and talk about with each other, and close to all of them knew english so communication was really easy. They also all smoked... but im used to the smoke now since all of my friends do it here too! Its terrible. I will contact Max and Sam to see if i can get some photos from Pilar so that I can post them... keep your eyes out. OH AND THERE WAS THIS GERMAN BOY THAT LOOKED LIKE MY DAD. JUST LIKE HIM OH GOD IT WAS WEIRD.
TRIPPING INTO BUENOS AIRES!
We took a day trip to buenos aires the second day of orientation in pilar and we didnt really get to see much because it was sort of a bus tour (megh) and when we did get off the bus we got to explore a couple blocks into BOCA, the section of Buenos Aires where every building is painted a different color... its really beautiful. On the way back to the bus the germans and liz and i spotted a couple people "necking" on these steps and we wanted to take a picture just for fun but the germans laughed and asked us if we´d ever seen people kissing each other. Apparently they undress each other in public in Germany... (straight from their mouth) ... is mouthes a word?...
Cositas de Idiomas:
Haha funny story (you wont think its funny but i want to remember it so i will write it) when we were in our hostile room one of the AFS volunteers came in and told us that we had to wake up at 4:45 the next morning because we were leaving, and then a german girl blurts out "CRAZY ARGENTINIAN BASTARDS!" it was really funny because it was a completely innappropriate thing to say at the time. I noticed that the other intercambios at pilar loved to use american swear words (fluently) and so do the argentines in paraná. My little six year old sister likes to flick people off and use words like fuck and shit. Haha...