I got in okay to Buenos Aires and met my host mother, María. She's very friendly, and her house is very awesome. It´s urban, so it´s 4 floors high, about 20 feet wide and super long. My room is on the top floor.
I only have ten minutes until dinner, but here´s a list of awesome things I saw/did:
1. The cemetary (I´m way too tired to remember the proper name of it), that has basically everyone important from Argentina buried there, and is laid out like a city with all the mausoleums as buildings. By far the coolest thing I saw today.
2. La Boca, which was the original port town or something
3. A street vending fair about five blocks long, I need to take my mom there
4. A very neat church
5. La Casa Rosada (The pink house, their equivalent of the White House)
6. Puerto madero, which is the posh part of town
7. various plazas
8. the safe neighborhoods around belgrano
9. I had my first empanada, and it was delicious but very greasy and fried.
And, I´m proud to say that I understood literally every single thing the tour guide said. But, she knew we were foreigners and talked pretty slowly.
The dog is hilarious, I need to interact with him more, but his name is Murdock. :D
also, I met the other girls who live right down the street, and we´re meeting for empanadas tomorrow morning. Or, at least, outside the empanada place.
Funny story: María took me on the subte (subway), and I figured I would take it on the way back, but then they closed it because one of their soccer teams didn´t make it to the next level of competition, and the subways were afraid of people rioting and breaking stuff. Also, we went to a restaurant, and it had the equivalent of CNN on the TV, and all they were showing were clips of people running through the streets, and being carried away in ambulances, and police sirens. Speaking of which, something cool about here: they have different colored lights. In America, the lights that businesses have outside are either white or yellow if they´re old, but in Argentina they have blue, red and green lights (I like those the best). Also, the ambulance lights are greenish-blue, rather than the red and blue of America. Yup, I go to South America and I notice the lights. xD
Also, the other major thing I noticed (aside from the driving) was that they have the billboards like in the US, only they´re oriented vertically (they´re higher than they are wide). Also, there are all sorts of signs and billboards on various buildings. The thing I dislike the most so far is that the street signs are often very difficult to find because they are attached to buildings, are far back from the road, kind of small, and not every street corner has one (and when they do, they only have the name of one of the streets, usually the one I already knew).
But other than that, I was surprised how much it looked like Chicago. Same sort of buildings, similar looking houses, ... I can´t think what else, and the more I think of the excepts, it makes it seem a lot less like Chicago. Because one thing I noticed is that there were a lot more factories mixed in with residential areas, and you can´t tell the ¨good areas¨ from the bad ones because there´s graffitti everywhere. The best was that someone had graffitti´d a statue in Plaza Congresa (?), right outside the government building. Funniest I saw said ¨Wanda soliciitado¨, basically the equivalent of ¨Wanda´s a whore¨. Also, there was a website with some guy´s name, and underneath it said ¨Free sex!!!!!!¨ Also, on a different topic, the trees here don´t all lose their leaves. There are palm trees (huh what?) and lots of ficus(?) trees, and not too many conifers or pine trees. But, I saw a glimpse of the botanical garden, and they had those awesome trees from the rainforest that have the super huge buttress roots. I´ll have pictures eventually, when I go there again. In Buenos Aires, there are a fair number of stray dogs (but not as many as in other countries, and most of the dogs were pets on leashes), and in the cemetary there are tons of stray cats. Go figure, of course the cats would hang out with the dead bodies. They´re all pretty tame, and some of the kids pet this dog in La Boca, but I didn´t in case of fleas or specific dog-diseases that Murdock might catch. My prediction of him was right, by the way: he doesn´t care about me. xD In Plaza Congresa there were literally hundreds of pigeons, and the tour guides gave us this Argentinian chocolate treat with dulce de leche, and kids were feeding them to the pigeons, who would fly up and land on your hand to eat. Locals were doing that too. I have never seen more spoiled pigeons in my life, they´ll just fly right at your face and zoom up at the last second.
I wish I took my camera today, but everyone pointed out that we´ll be going back there again, so expect awesome pictures. Also, expect pictures of María, her house, Murdock, and other cool stuff. There´s no way I can blog about everything, I´m realizing now. But, those are the highlights that I remembered from today.
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